From “The Tinker’s Bairn”
by Ellen Grehan

         When the strangers came, asking their questions, we told them we never knew her name. To us she’d just been the tinker’s bairn, a hoop-spined, rickets-racked child whose eyes, one green one blue, told us she’d the gift of second sight and the power of casting spells.

         She was one of a small tribe of tramps and hawkers who crept through our village in the pale hours of a Sunday morning and camped for almost a week that summer at the river where it’s spanned by the old Roman bridge.

         The first time we saw her she was scuttling through the weed-choked allotments where, before the village lost its heart, men who worked underground farming crops of coal spent their Sundays coaxing vegetables out of the grudging earth.

         We heard her sing, her head thrown back, her eyes outstaring the sun. Mouth music, it was, the nonsense-sounding wordless songs women sang to their babies as they dandled them on their knees.

         We watched her crawl through a break in the fence, her hands clutching a withered bouquet of the ferny tops of stillborn carrots, the leaves of a mouldy cabbage worn as a hat.

         And we followed her along the cracked stretch of Unthank Road to where it meets Main Street at Mossdyke Cross with its pub at all four corners.

         It was there that the tinker’s bairn stopped and turned to face us, each one as raggedy as herself with her torn skirt bound to her waist with a length of rope, her feet in tacketty workboots, too big, too heavy for her crooked limbs.

         Just a few feet away from Derry’s Walls where Protestants did their drinking she began to dance, and for all her poor, bent legs and the weight of those boots, she moved so lightly she didn’t seem earthbound.

         She danced a Strathspey, her hands delicately reaching out to touch her invisible partner and as she twirled there was a blissful smile on her face. Och, but we could tell that she saw herself right then in a finer place than in front of the soot-covered stones of Derry’s Walls.

         Folk going to and from the pubs began to gather, the drunker among them howling “Heuch” as encouragement. Then the bairn began to gasp. She stopped dancing and, her face contorted, strained at the air desperate to breathe.

         When she fell no one went to help her. They laughed because in her fall she’d bared her knickerless bum, the sight of which caused Brother Meikle, on his way to a meeting at the Band of Hope, to start speaking in tongues. And him not even Pentecostal.

         We who’d followed her watched as she dragged herself up from the dirt. Then one of us, was it Maggie Shaw?, knelt at her feet and tied the bootlaces that had come undone during the dance.

         In silence our raggle-taggle band, not one of us older and few much younger than her, followed the bairn to the foot of Bog’s Brae, a short distance from the tinkers’ camp with its fankle of carts and caravans, yowling children and barking dogs.

         Without a word she made it clear that she didn’t want us to walk any further and we were happy to do her bidding. Our folk had warned us about what happened to children who got too close to the tinkers: they were never seen again....

Ontario Review #63