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A Morning for Milk
- Indiana University Press
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SEAMUS BOSHELL [210] A Morning for Milk SEAMUS BOSHELL Twelve years old, I bolted up into the dark of a cold June morning, my sheets in my hands, dark lumps at the end of my bed—my feet! my feet! I realized just before I screamed. I was awake. I wanted to jump out of bed, a juvenile energy already at my heart, but I didn’t know why, and it was cold enough that I wanted reasons. My brother, Michael, in his new bed beside me, was asleep, the dark shape of his head nudged in against the far wall. The curtains on our one window were up, but there was no light, only the endless infiltrations of more and more darkness. Our door was closed. What time was it? I suddenly had to know, just as suddenly as I remembered that it was Saturday morning, and that Da had already tried to wake me. Or had I been dreaming? I checked on my brother—okay, okay, I pinched his nose. He didn’t stir, so it must have been early. But we got up early, me and my Da—James and James Senior—to deliver milk. He worked for Premier Dairies, delivering milk, cream, butter, and lately yogurt. What was next? he would complain. Apple tarts! His round comprised three hundred houses, mostly semi detached, situated on the affluent side of East Finglas—good, well-bred customers who could be quite fussy about the timely arrival of their milk. A MORNING FOR MILK [211] I creaked open the door. It required a bit of effort because Ma had painted it the previous day on one of her decorative tantrums. The paint, lathered rather than glossed, was her slapdash way of arguing with Da. He hated the smell, hated the garish white and in private moments, out on the milk round, liked to refer to it as “Mary’s house of hard licks.” Ma had painted two coats on both sides of the door, so it was fairly serious, whatever was going on. But it wasn’t just Ma. Where she was active, Da was inactive, malingering into a recalcitrant inertia, refusing or forgetting to fix items around the house. In truth, both of them had the habit of letting their arguments slide into metaphor. I left the door open and stepped outside, pausing, allowing my breath to accustom itself to the colder air, my eyes to the brighter shade of darkness. We had a small house, three bedrooms that looked inward to the smallest landing imaginable—a tiny square penned in by the banisters. Ma and Da had the front bedroom, the biggest of course, but also the noisiest as it looked onto our street, Westwood Road, the first street in a relatively new housing estate, pullulated with kids, dogs and cats. My sisters, all four of them, Deirdre, Michelle, Linda and Mary, had the next room, again quite big, quite pink, and quite helpless in the face of their decorating binges—every other week they had something new and fluffy swanning out of the ceiling. My parents’ door was open. Never a good sign. I stood to standing the collar of my blue-striped pajamas, cotton comfy, and listened for any movement downstairs. Da could be down there, drinking his tea, eating his two slices of toast, allowing me the reprieve of a last few winks of sleep. I really hoped so. I’d missed him the last two mornings, victim of a recursive drowsiness that really was a rare enough occurrence. I wasn’t exactly a morning child, but when I woke I usually stayed awake. I’d felt awful about missing him and hadn’t been able to tolerate breakfast, neither the usual choppy cereal nor the more exotic temptations of Ma’s egg and rasher sandwiches, and even the in- [18.232.185.167] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:35 GMT) SEAMUS BOSHELL [212] ducement of painting class at the Summer Project failed to cheer me. I refused all monies and all food, and retreated to my room for multiple afternoons of prayer. I prayed to Sister Mother Concepta, the rubicund and steatopygous head of our school, an icon more potent than Jesus or any scrum of saints. She would understand my guilt. It was shameful enough sleeping it out, but at that time Da was nursing a dodgy knee, or a banjaxed knee as he called it, the cynical and...