288
PAUL SMITH
ing purple. But the windows of the shops she passed on her way
to and from the Army hospital where he was were filled with Easter.
And sHver- and gold-papered eggs and fluffy grinning ghost-chickens.
They grinned and winked as she passed. Dug with their claws their
little feathered selves right down into the hollow darkness of her
heart. And laughed outright as she shrank from them and from
Andy Prince's screams. For five days Andy Prince screamed, and
his eyeballs walled up in a corner were stuck and blind. Inside the
room with the windows open, he lay there finally on that high
narrow white bed, his face turned from her, his fair head drawn
back in a buckled way. He lay on that bed, Andy Prince did. Power–
less now even to scream. He died on Easter morning. The loveliest of
mornings. In the street, children passing carried colored straw baskets
stuffed with the glitter of eggs bouquet'd with pink and blue and
bold red ribbons. His brother the farmer came mumbling prayers
from Limerick to take him back to the family grave. But even then
she didn't believe he was dead, not till she saw the coffin. Then
she knew. After that he came to her in dreams, Andy Prince did. He
came the night his son was born dead. And for a while in Grange–
gorman the madhouse, till she was shifted from the open ward to
the cell on her own. After that Andy Prince stopped coming.
She was in that cell for eleven long months. On a mattress on
the floor. Like an animal. When she did stir she crawled on all
fours. Knocked out they kept her, so that most of the time she saw
nothing and heard nothing. When she did see again, the first thing
she saw was frost. February frost crusting puddles in the yard like
milk curdling round a baby's mouth. One morning a nurse with
eyes that could shiver glass lifted her to her feet and took her out
onto the landing where the windows were. There were no windows
in her cell. And one morning they gave her clothes. Somebody
else's. They lived a life of their own, those clothes did. She used to
go where they took her.
Till a man told her she could go. But he didn't say where. "I
guess he never thought he had to," Ellen Simms said, and sat remote
as stone and her mouth finished was sad and quiet. Annie had been
rocking slightly in her chair, tilting it back, then letting the front
legs hit the floor with little taps, her hands holding the table edge
for balance. She stopped rocking when Ellen Simms stopped speak–
ing and sat now with her hands round her throat, as if unknown
words were there or inside strange feelings were flowering.
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