The Celtic Knot

Celtic Knots

The night before the feis, Polly finally finishes the last stitches on Kathleen’s costume. She sits back to admire her work and tells Kathleen to get herself inside of it, quick march. Kathleen gathers up the dress, grinning already. Its wool is thick and soft, and she can hear a quiet crinkling sound as she smooths down the skirt. Polly has inserted a piece of stiff lining at the waist, to give it a bit of body, and she sends Kathleen off to the bedroom to try it on.

Kathleen comes back out a minute later to model it. Polly riffles her hair and tells her, again, that green is her color. She should always wear it. Madge, Lily, and Patsy all gather around and pat Kathleen down, and even baby Eddy points at her and manages to say Kat. Kathleen wriggles a bit inside the dress, getting used to the feel of it. Polly remarks it is a little plain. A small shamrock or something would have been nice, but sure, they can’t have everything. Kathleen is too happy to mind going without a shamrock.

Polly picks up the brat next, which she has lined with a piece of saffron silk cut from the casing of Mam’s best wedding-present eiderdown. At Mam’s urging, Polly cut a large square out of the eiderdown’s underside and patched the hole with a scrap of cotton sheeting. Mam assures her nobody would ever know, as long as no one turns the eiderdown upside down. It looks a bit peculiar underneath, all the same, but nobody cares.

Especially Lily, whose favorite color is yellow. She strokes the slippery lining of the brat and declares that she likes it best of everything. She asks Polly whether she might have a brat of her own someday, and Polly tells her when she is big.

Kathleen has a better idea in the meantime: she has a tiny rag doll with no clothes of its own, and if Lily asks nicely enough, perhaps Polly could run up a little frock for it out of the scraps of yellow material. Polly nods her agreement, and Lily does a little skip of excitement.

Kathleen fetches the two Tara pins Mrs. Maguire gave her, and she and Polly pin the brat to the shoulders of the dress, easing the pins through the thick wool so they won’t show. Polly folds back a slip of the lining so the glorious saffron yellow shows, just like the doll’s frock will be. Kathleen does a little skip of excitement herself, then grabs Lily’s hands, and the two of them jig up and down the kitchen together, Kathleen getting used to the way the dress falls against her knees while Madge and Patsy clap along. Patsy sings out the dance count as they go, AON, dó, trí, is a hAON, dó, trí. Polly declares that all Kathleen needs now is a touch of geranium lipstick to be the belle of the ball. Kathleen yelps that Irish dancers don’t wear lipstick at all, that it isn’t the cha-cha she is doing, and that Mrs. Maguire would have her guts for garters.

Kathleen goes in to show Mam, who is sitting up with her pillow tucked in behind her for support. Kathleen has not seen her sitting up since the day she first got sick. She does a little twirl, and Mam declares her a vision. The costume is lovely, and Polly has worked a miracle with those curtains and that bit of eiderdown. Kathleen is a walking haberdashery department, Mam teases, and no one would ever guess it.

Polly comes in with a grin and remarks to Mam that she is a lot better, all of a sudden. Mam agrees. She has turned a corner, and feels as if she could do heaps and kill dead things. Polly warns her not to try that, now, and promises she will take it easy, but there is one little job she still has to do for this daughter of hers.

Mystified, Kathleen asks what she means, and Mam tells her to bring her workbasket. Kathleen goes back to the kitchen and pulls the large wicker workbasket out from under the dresser, where it is always kept. Mam explains, opening the basket, that while she had been waiting for a length of blue material at the shop to be marked down to a remnant, she had started gathering colored embroidery threads, and she has some nice little Celtic knot patterns traced out of a library book. She pulls out a fistful of colors, purple, yellow, red, and white, like a rainbow, and spreads them across the bedspread, then reaches back into the basket for a piece of greaseproof paper penciled with two simple but beautiful designs of interlocking loops.

Mam says her eyes are too tired for threading needles, but if Polly and Kathleen do that, she will have no trouble with the embroidery itself. She sends Kathleen for a few pins and a little French chalk, and tells her to get out of that good dress first, so it doesn’t end up pricked or marked.

Da appears in the doorway just then, answering as automatically as a fork answers a knife, and warns whichever child is standing closest to look sharp, unless she wants to be embroidered into the pattern herself. Then, more seriously, he protests that Mam is surely not going to sit up all night stitching a child’s dress when she is only just back from death’s door.

Mam tells him no, she isn’t. It will take her an hour at the most. It will tire her, but it won’t kill her, and if it wasn’t to be of some use to her children, why would God have spared her? She sends him down to the pump in the yard for water, and tells him to put the kettle on to keep them all going once he is back. He can make himself useful.

It ends up taking more than an hour, even with Polly and Kathleen taking turns threading needles and handing Mam whichever color she calls for next, and Da shuttling in and out with cups of tea to keep everyone going, just as he was told. Mam looks drained by the time she finishes, but the green dress, made from the very curtains Polly unpicked and resewed, has been transformed from something quite nice but rather ordinary into exactly what it is meant to be, an Irish dancing costume. The Celtic knot glowing in purple, yellow, red, and white on the bodice brings the dull green fabric to life. It is a costume fit for a dancing champion, topped off with Polly’s green beret, with the feather from Mam’s best hat stuck on the side.

Da predicts she will dance a merry dance in that. Kathleen agrees. She knew she would. Mam says simply that she will do her best, as she always does.

Kathleen glows with pleasure. Maybe God wasn’t cross with her after all. Mother Rosario always maintains their prayers are often answered in unexpected ways, and there is no doubt about it, you can’t be up to God. A person never knows what He is going to do next.