The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  “It’s beautiful,” Brigid says, but she doesn’t mean it. Emer sees it in her face, in the set of her shoulders. Looking at the sea brings her something other than peace.

  “What was my uncle Desmond like?”

  “A bit touched,” Emer says. Brigid doesn’t need to ask what this means, like most Americans would.

  “Did any of them come back?” she asks Emer. “Of my mother’s family? Anyone before me?”

  “No one comes back here once they’ve gotten away.”

  “Why not?”

  “Can you imagine a more desolate place?” Emer scoffs. Brigid raises her eyebrows.

  “We’re to be evacuated,” Emer blurts. “The priest on Inis Muruch is trying to get the county to give us land in town. We’ll have new houses, council houses.” She almost pulls out the planning sketch the priest gave her, which she keeps in her apron pocket, of the council houses, painted in cheery pastels, concrete paving around them. But she decides against it when she sees Brigid’s face.

  “Sounds like you want to leave,” Brigid says. Emer shrugs.

  “We’ll be gone by the time Niall is seven, please God,” she says.

  “What’s happening when I’m seven?” Niall says, coming around the side of the house, piglet in tow.

  “Whisht, you,” Emer says.

  Brigid shakes her head, as if she can shake Emer and her pessimism right off her like she does her curls.

  “Well, I’ve come to stay,” she says. Emer says nothing. Let’s see how long you last, she thinks, with no phone, no electricity, no doctor or priest, no newspaper unless the weather permits it, and weeks on end with no contact whatsoever from anyone but the same people you’ve seen every day of your life.

  “Mammy!” Niall calls. Both the Yank and Emer turn to where he is pointing.

  A dog is crouching in the weeds to the side of the house, a low growl in its throat, the skinny red body arched as if to run or attack.

  “Mind that dog,” Emer says to the Yank. “It won’t take to anyone since Desmond died.”

  “I’m supposed to mind it?”

  “That means be careful of it. The lads drowned her litter before you came. Couldn’t catch herself, though. Too clever for death, sure.”

  “How cruel,” Brigid says.

  “You won’t say so after she’s bitten you,” Emer says. Just like a Yank, she is thinking. Fussing over dogs as if they are children.

  “Sure, she’s only a mongrel who couldn’t feed her pups,” Emer adds, for Niall’s sake. Despite what he says about slaughtering the pig, he is on the touchy side about animals as well.

  Brigid goes inside and comes out with a plate and two of the precious store-bought rashers. She puts it just below the stone wall. The pig squeals. The dog looks at the pig, then the plate, and growls low in her throat.

  “That’s a waste of good rashers, that is,” Emer says. Niall laughs and jumps up and down, clapping his hands.

  “You’re like Saint Brigid,” he says. “Giving bacon to the dogs.”

  “She’s not taming lions, for pity’s sake,” Emer scolds.

  “Thanks for all your help,” Brigid says. She has learned to direct her smiles to Niall already. He’s the one who returns them.

  “See you tomorrow,” Niall chirps. Emer takes his hand. She has to pull to get him to turn away from Brigid and start walking home.

  The pig trots beside them, stumbling every once in a while on the uneven ground. Niall’s hand is in hers. She squeezes it lightly and rubs, milking the comfort. He leans briefly against her, and she allows herself a quick brush of her lips against his glossy ink hair. She mutters an endearment in Irish: A chuisle mo chroí, and he whispers it back. She never lets others see this sort of thing, but there’s no one watching now but the pig.

  They walk the long way round the field to check on the sheep. Niall sings softly, as he often does while walking, to himself or to something else, Emer is never sure. The pig seems to join in, squealing and grunting the same rhythm.

  The wind is gusting when they round the cliffs, and the pig stumbles. Niall picks him up, buttoning his sweater around it once more.

  “I like the way she talks,” Niall says. Everything he says to Emer is a thread from one long, uninterrupted conversation.

  “Do you now,” Emer mutters.

  “Is Brigid our cousin, Mammy?” he asks.

  “She’s not. Desmond was no relation to us.”

  “Is she our friend, then?” he says hopefully. Niall hasn’t started school yet. When he does, he will be related to every child in his classroom. The concept of friends is as foreign as the Yank herself.

  “Would you like her to be?”

  “I would,” Niall says. “She’s lovely.”

  Emer bristles, though she has been thinking the same thing. Thinking how ruined she must look in comparison.

  “I’d say she’s fond enough of you,” Emer says.

  “Her smiles have frowns in them,” Niall says.

  “And what do you mean by that?” Emer says, but she already knows. It was in Brigid’s hand as well. Emer couldn’t put anything bad into it, there was so much pain already there. Still, a charge comes off her, as lively and invading as the copper glint of her hair. Emer finds herself thinking ahead to tomorrow, and the next day, of the moments between chores that they might find a way to see her again. Chance a greeting from that fiery hand.

  “Will you not tell her about the well?” Niall says.

  “I won’t. And don’t you go blabbing it either.”

  “Auntie Rose says it gives you babies.”

  “Your Auntie Rose could do with fewer herself.”

  The wind turns and assaults her with a whiff of the pig at her son’s neck.

  “That thing is ripe,” she scolds halfheartedly. “And now you will be as well.”

  “Sorry!” he laughs, letting go of her hand and running ahead to chase the sea birds. When he runs to the left, toward the cliff, he vanishes from her limited vision. Her neck grows tight and she yells for him to mind himself. She misses the days when she still carried him everywhere, bound to her chest with a woolen shawl, and she didn’t have to rely on her faulty vision for vigilance.

  “Mammy, can I bring the pig in the house?” Niall says. “So he can sleep by the fire?” Emer grunts but knows she will let him. Her mother has gone to Rose’s house, and there is no sign of Patch returning. No one is there to remind either of them not to get too fond of something that will only be taken away.

  Inside Emer’s mind, she still sees with both eyes. The image of Brigid’s bright new face burns there now. With the wind from the cliffs screaming memories into her ears, Emer can’t decide what she is feeling. There is a striking similarity between anticipation and dread.

  Chapter 2

  Mongrel

  It takes three days, all the rashers and half a chicken before Brigid gets the dog to come in. Most of the dogs on the island look like some mix of sheepdog—long dirty fur, black or brown patches on white, chunks missing from their ears and tails. Brigid’s mutt is an auburn shorthair, with the long face and droopy, apologetic eyes of a hunting dog. She moves the plates of raw meat closer to the back door each day and on the third day it is sitting there, haunches tucked in tight, trying to make itself as small as possible. She holds the door wide and moves aside. The tail wags once, then it looks at her again, eyes as auburn as its fur.

  “Well, come on,” she says and the dog half trots, half wriggles inside, excitement almost bending it in two.

  She leans down to run her hand over the sleek head. The smell almost gags her.

  “Boy do you stink,” she says. The dog wags its whole body in agreement.

  She takes down the metal dish tub and pours water from the enormous black kettle, warm on its hook by the hearth, and adds a squirt of dish liquid. She has to lift the dog into the tub, but it freezes and lets her. The dog stands, tail between its legs, eyes rolled so far sideways the whites are shiny with panic
, while she pours the water over its back and shoulders, soaps and pours again. She knows how to do this. She has bathed grief-stricken women and tense newborns, coiled into themselves, unwilling to let go and return to or enter the world. This dog requires the same firm consolation of her hands. One leg is crusted with dried clots of blood. The stomach is a slack pouch, nipples extended, raw and empty. The memory of puppies still in her skin. Brigid croons and speaks softly to it while she massages away dirt and blood, and the dog doesn’t take its eyes off her. When she rinses it a third time and the water at its sinewy ankles is brackish and foul, she uses the one bath towel she has to dry it off, then folds it into a little mat in front of the fire. The dog turns around six times in a tight circle, then lies down, curled up as small as she can get, her chin touching the base of her tail.

  “I don’t believe you’ve bitten anyone,” Brigid says, pulling each of the ears through her hands like she’s smoothing the pigtails of a child. “No one who didn’t deserve it.” She dumps the water outside into the drainage ditch that lines the road and by the time she returns the dog is deeply asleep, not even stirring when she pulls the rocker up so she can share the heat of the fire. She makes more tea—the amount of tea she drinks here has quickly climbed to the unfathomable, she drinks it like she once drank water—and eats some brown bread with butter and marmalade. She cannot be bothered to figure out how to cook on the open turf fire, so she spreads things on the bread Emer brought her and calls it a meal. Soda bread, butter and jam, brown bread, butter and smoked fish, brown bread, butter and a soft egg. She is afraid to eat the unrefrigerated meat and used it all to seduce the dog. She swallows enormous vitamins with glasses of lukewarm milk from Emer’s cow.

  She rinses her mug, plate and knife with the last of the water. She pokes at the turf fire—slow burning clods of earth that often, if the wind is wrong, fill the house with smoke—and buries the red nuggets with ash. In the morning, they will still be there. Fire seems to last longer here, like the sun. The sun doesn’t fully fade until midnight, the twilight stretching on for hours, and comes blaring up again at 4 a.m. Her sleep has been riled by all this daylight. Though she covers the windows with sacking, she still senses the light, and there is a part of her, a child she remembers from a long time ago, that seems like it is sitting up in bed all night, eyes wide open, hair tingling with fear, listening for the moment it is safe to get up again.

  She goes into the bedroom, changes into her chilled, slightly damp nightdress, laying her clothes on the trunk for the morning. She gets into the low bed and burrows under three blankets and the eiderdown bedspread she auspiciously purchased in Dublin. After a minute she hears the dog get up, stretch and click its toenails along the floor, pausing at the door to the bedroom. She folds the covers back in a triangle of welcome and it climbs in, turning once and flopping down so Brigid is spooning its back. She covers it up with the blankets and smiles at the thought of Emer, with her lyrical voice that is punctuated with disapproving noises, telling the islanders that the Yank sleeps with her dog.

  She came here planning to keep her hands to herself. She wants to be finished with touching, and everything that gets smothered and resurrected between fingers. The dog is a nice compromise. It warms the bed; she can stroke it because it expects nothing more from her hands.

  The first time Brigid shakes Emer’s hand, she knows the girl is trying to put something inside her. Brigid can feel it, something stronger than the grip of her palm, which is weak really, passive, the sort of handshake she despises, someone presenting their hand but unwilling to contribute any pressure to the exchange. The jolt is not what Emer is trying to insert as much as the resistance Brigid is able to muster, as if whatever Emer is handing out, a dark uneasy germ, has met its match in the calluses on Brigid’s palm. It cannot penetrate her, and Emer, who doesn’t meet eyes easily, widens her one eye in surprise.

  “You won’t try that again, will you?” Brigid wants to say. But she doesn’t need to. Emer takes her hand and its intentions and buries them away in the pocket of her apron. Her fist bulges in there, balled up in anger at the defeat.

  They’re not unfamiliar to Brigid, hands that do damage. Her own parents had them, and used them frequently enough.

  The men on the boat won’t even admit the well exists, let alone tell her where it is. They speak Irish on the row over, hard guttural and lilting, her mother’s secret language in the mouths of these rough, thin-lipped men. She knows it wouldn’t be wise to let on that she understands them. She lets them speak about her and around her, not catching it all because though they called it a calm day, the wind is still there, relentless and mournful, right at the entrance to her ears.

  “She’ll not be long if she’s looking for a miracle,” one man says.

  “She’s quare enough,” the other man says. “Like all the Darcys.”

  “She’d better be hard as them as well,” the man replies.

  Her stomach drops a bit, as the currach rises high on a wave. This is where it began for her mother, the hardening, the carapace, the shell she had needed to escape and then survive. Brigid hasn’t come here for that. She’s been so many places already that required her to be hard. She wants this one to crack her wide open.

  Once she is settled, the men on the island are helpful and friendly and wink a lot, until she mentions the well, and then they evade her eyes, drop their voices even lower than usual, mouths barely moving, dismissive mumbles lost in their beards or the wind. Some of them blush, as though she has asked something improper, or feminine, like where she might purchase sanitary napkins. Others smile, cock their heads and look delighted, as if she is a child and keeping this secret from her is an enjoyable game. This is infuriating, but she can’t afford to anger or insult them. She is not sure how this magic will work, but she may need one of these men in the end. She sizes them up with this in mind. Austin: handsome, seems intelligent, but she is suspicious of him. He held her hand too long, and left a film of oily sweat she had to wipe on her trousers. Malachy: sweet, dim, solicitous, he might fall in love with her if she is not careful. Festy, the mainland man who runs the mail boat, who told her without preamble, as if they’d known each other for years, to send word when she was ready to leave, seems the least complicated. Imagining having to decide between these options leaves her anxious and slightly repulsed. She did not come here for a man.

  She searches for the well every day, walking the island in the mornings after breakfast, at midday, which stretches on for longer than it should, no shelter from the merciless sun, and in the bright evenings, up around the west road past the cliffs and down again by the east end. The dog accompanies her, taking the lead, bounding in front along the green road. Half the houses are abandoned, thatched roofs long since decayed, spiky weeds and wildflowers growing as high as the walls inside. Occasionally she sees women in the occupied houses, if they catch her eye they will nod and cock their heads, but then look away, not inviting her to talk. They are nothing like the Irish women she met on the mainland, who called her “Pet” and were eager for conversation. Here the women keep to themselves, or at least keep themselves from her. She catches the names they use for her, which she knows from her mother mean “blow-in” and possibly “madwoman,” she can’t be sure. The men call happily as she goes by, often stop and talk to her for longer than she would like. They wear the same woolen coats in the fields and on the water and marvel over the Grundens oiled canvas jacket and overalls she brought from Maine. She is not sure why she is accepted by one gender and snubbed by the other, but since she came here to escape the complications of women, she is not complaining. Though she does wonder, do they avoid her because she is a blow-in, or because her mother was not?

  She climbs narrow paths made by sheep to the highest point of the island, where circular stone buildings sit abandoned by a sheer drop to the sea, listening for the trickle of fresh water beneath the earth. She turns over stones, squats down to smell the ground, plunges her fingers into bogg
y soil that leaves a stain she can never fully remove from beneath her fingernails. Everything is wet here, even on dry days the very earth is soaked to the core. She has found seven wells so far, not man-dug holes but natural crevices in the earth, marked with circles of purple rock, one so deep it has slate steps leading into it and a tin dipper held by a chain nailed into the earth above. She drinks from every one of them, trying not to think of land runoff and primitive latrines and disease. She gulps the cold liquid, clear or bog-stained, and waits to feel something, but they are just wells. None of this water can come close to addressing her thirst.

  Though she is not overly fond of nuns, she prays to the saint as she trudges the steep hills, where slivers of slate layer with dirt that crumbles if you step on it at the wrong angle. She whispers to her as she investigates small coves, pocketing cowrie shells while following the rivulets in sand, the veins where freshwater runs to meet the sea. She recites the fireside chant of her mother, the prayers she once muttered in obligation as a girl. She calls her own name over and over as she lies on swathes of moss so varied and intricate they look woven by tiny beings. Saint Brigid, hear me. Saint Brigid, have mercy on me. Saint Brigid, save me.

  She doesn’t really know what she is doing. She is not familiar with the magic she is looking for, and isn’t sure if it is a saint she is calling to or something older and darker, the sort of spirit that makes islanders cross themselves in fear. She didn’t even know where this island was, or that it shared her name, until she received that letter from the solicitor. All her mother ever told her of this place were stories she didn’t intend to be taken as true. Stories of fairies and changelings and enchanted water and the superhuman strength of threatened children. Brigid wasn’t even certain the well from the stories was real, until she saw the reactions it caused in the shifting fishermen and awkward, bitter Emer. They don’t want her to find it, and this fact more than anything lets her know that it is her answer. Being so close fills her with an almost unbearable anticipation, she wants to scratch the eyes out of every local who mutters and looks away and pretends not to know what she is asking for.