Would you ever come down and give us a hand digging the grave?’

‘I don’t know that this’ll be any place for you but I can’t leave you here,’ the woman says, later that same day. ‘So get ready and we’ll go, in the name of God.’

I go upstairs and change into the new dress, the ankle socks and shoes.

‘Don’t you look nice,’ she says, when I come down. ‘John’s not always easy but he’s hardly ever wrong.’"

"Walking down the road, there’s a taste of something darker in the air, of something that might come and fall and change things. We pass houses whose doors and windows are wide open, long, flapping clotheslines, gravelled entrances to other lanes. At the bend, a bay pony is leaning up against a gate, but when I reach out to stroke his nose, he whinnies and canters off. Outside a cottage, a black dog with curls all down his back comes out and barks at us, hotly, through the bars of a gate. At the first crossroads, we meet a heifer who panics and finally races past us, lost. All through the walk, the wind blows hard and soft and hard again through the tall, flowering hedges, the high trees. In the fields, the combines are out cutting the wheat, the barley and oats, saving the corn, leaving behind long rows of straw. We meet men on tractors, going in different directions, pulling balers to the fields, and trailers full of grain to the co-op. Birds swoop down, brazen, eating the fallen seed off the middle of the road. Further along, we meet two barechested men, their eyes so white in faces so tanned and dusty.

The woman stops to greet them and tells them where we are going.

‘God rest him. Didn’t he go quick in the end?’ one man says.

‘Aye,’ says the other. ‘But didn’t he reach his three score and ten? What more can any of us hope for?’

We keep on walking, standing in tight to the hedges, the ditches, letting things pass.

‘Have you been to a wake before?’ the woman asks.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Well, I might as well tell you: there will be a dead man here in a coffin and lots of people and some of them might have a little too much taken.’

‘What will they be taking?’

‘Drink,’ she says.

When we come to the house, several men are leaning against a low wall, smoking. There’s a black ribbon on the door and hardly a light shining from the house but when we go in, the kitchen is bright, and packed with people who are talking. The woman who asked Kinsella to dig the grave is there, making sandwiches. There are big bottles of red and white lemonade, stout, and in the middle of all this, a big wooden box with an old dead man lying inside of it. His hands are joined as though he had died praying, a string of rosary beads around his fingers. Some of the men are sitting around the coffin, using the part that’s closed as a counter on which to rest their glasses. One of these is Kinsella.

‘There she is,’ he says. ‘Long Legs. Come over here.’

He pulls me onto his lap, and gives me a sip from his glass.

‘Do you like the taste of that?’

‘No.’

He laughs. ‘Good girl. Don’t ever get a taste for it. If you start, you might never stop and then you’d wind up like the rest of us.’

He pours red lemonade into a cup for me. I sit on his lap drinking it and eating the queen cakes out of the biscuit tin and looking at the dead man, hoping his eyes will open.

The people come and go, drifting in and out, shaking hands, drinking and eating and looking at the dead man, saying what a lovely corpse he is, and doesn’t he look happy now that his end has come, and who was it that laid him out? They talk of the forecast and the moisture content of corn, of milk quotas and the next general election. I feel myself getting heavy on Kinsella’s lap.

‘Am I getting heavy?’

‘Heavy?’ he says. ‘You’re like a feather, Child. Stay where you are.’

I put my head against him but I’m bored and wish there were things to do, other children who would play.

‘The girl’s getting uneasy,’ I hear the woman say.

‘What’s ailing her?’ says another.

‘Ah, it’s no place for the child, really,’ she says. ‘It’s just I didn’t like not to come, and I wouldn’t leave her behind.’

‘Sure I’ll take her home with me, Edna. I’m going now. Can’t you call in and collect her on your way?’

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I don’t know should I.’

‘Mine’d be a bit of company for her. Can’t they play away out the back? And that man there won’t budge as long as he has her on his knee.’

Mrs Kinsella laughs. I’ve never heard her laugh like this.

‘Sure maybe, if you don’t mind, you would, Mildred,’ she says. ‘What harm is in it? And you know we’ll not be long after you.’

‘Not a bother,’ the woman says.

When we are out on the road, and the goodbyes are said, Mildred strides on into a pace I can just about keep, and as soon as she rounds the bend, the questions start.