Read Annie Dunne for Free Online Page A

like a well-fed man. He smells of dry straw and moist dung and his own strange smell, of his hair and of his hide. There is something of the lion about him. He has more style than Shep, anyhow. But that he looks like he wants to kill you, you could admire him.

    Out onto the green road then, the two excited children facing each other on the benches behind me, the fields and woods about us rising and falling slightly. And Billy’s hooves throwing up little plates of mud. It is the sound I make between teeth and tongue that makes him really go. We stream down the green river of grass, the children gripping the seats under them.
    I give a brief wave to Mrs Kitty Doyle in her yard. She is bringing an apronful of rough food to her pigs. I can hear them squealing like doors in their stone pen. In one of her barns lurks an abandoned trap, I can just make it out as we rattle by, its high shape left in with the bales of straw. It moulders there, the shine slipping slowly from the lamps. They are another lot that have purchased a motor car in these last years.
    But the Hennigans’ wheat is doing well, I notice, a beautiful crochet of fierce shoots thrown over an expanse of dark earth.

    To the crossroads we come, where our mountain road gives way to the new tarmacadam. I have to put a damper on Billy’s prancing. He has a nervous way about him here always, being heated up by the excitement of pouring down the hill.
    I can see the distant back of Billy Kerr, traipsing the last few yards to the cow barns at the side of my cousins’ house. Their farm lies in there behind the scraggling hedges. The house looks odd in its field of cow-created mud. The walls are brushed by damp and rain.
    All the same, primroses and the green fountains of foxgloves crowd the mossy ditches. Gorse has just finished with its yellow fire along the hill behind. But Billy the pony does not wait for such miracles, on he lurches across the road, the wheels taking a new tune from the harder surface, our cheeks rattling from the shaking.
    ‘Oh, come up, you wild mad pony, you,’ I say, trying to put a break on him. I know in my heart he would like to canter now, to gallop, to carry all, himself and the unsatisfactory humans in the trap, away at a mad pace along the scattering pebbles, and throw the world into a gear of danger and terror. This I cannot let him do, so I am leaning back, standing in the trap, hauling him down into a flighty walk.
    ‘Walk on, you tramp, you,’ I say, deviously working the bit from side to side with the reins. But he is acting up worse than his usual wicked self, he is backing up on me now. The whole arrangement of trap and pony begins to bend in the middle, and I am suddenly afraid that we might be set into the ditch. The children behind me gasp with the irregular lurching and groaning of the shafts, striking about now like a huge tuning fork.
    ‘Walk on, walk on,’ I say, and I would curse at him but for the education of the children, the responsibility of that. And now Billy goes forth, and comes back in the next stride. He is intent on working some awful mischief on me. I could whip him now if I didn’t dread the effect of the lash on him in this mood. I am crazy now in the head myself with worry and anger, banging about in the wooden seat.
    ‘Stand, stand, you devil,’ I say. ‘Stand! Children, open the little gate and jump down from the metal steps. I do not think I can hold him.’
    And the little girl in her greater wisdom takes charge of the boy and opens the little flap of plywood, and slides herself and the smaller one down, a considerable height for a child. But, thank the good Lord, in a trice both are standing bewildered on the grassy margin. The great engine, it must seem like to them, of the trap, with myself atop, buckles and bangs again.
    ‘Children, stand there quietly,’ I say. ‘Oh, my heavens!’
    Billy has worked the bit in between his teeth and clamped down hard and he has me now.
    It is the