by Lisa Carey
She calls the dog Rua, which she remembers means red-haired. She says it over and over when they’re walking, until the dog learns to bend her ears to the sound.
After ten days, the women still won’t speak to her, beyond a murmured God bless, or a Soft day, a phrase that apparently means “it’s raining, again.” Most merely nod and look away before she can speak. Their children come closer but then giggle and run away if she tries to talk to them, or look blankly as if she is speaking a language they have never heard. They run back to their mothers and Brigid feels the familiar remorse, the stab that occurs whenever she witnesses the thoughtless gestures that occur between mother and child. The swift easy lift of a toddler onto a hip, the blind swipe to clean a nose or cheek, even the yank of an arm to warn of danger or disobedience. A mother’s hands are not careful, they don’t need to be. They are efficient, harried, solid, quick and tender extensions of the bodies that are poised to react, with their strong arms, thick middles, full breasts. Mothers’ bodies are not their own. The happiest ones seem to have forgotten what it is like to want themselves back at all.
The patient anticipation she came with has surrendered to a frantic anxiety. She barely sleeps, she walks the island until her legs are on fire, until the sky darkens with charcoal and the rain soaks through every layer of clothing and claims her skin. She turns over boulders, rips at bracken and heather and, during one violent hailstorm, crawls into a strange, child-sized hut of stone to weep and fall asleep, holding the warm consolation prize of a mongrel dog. The dog whines as if she knows exactly what Brigid is grieving, and presses her body right into her middle, as if she can fill the void for her. Brigid wails a visceral, unself-conscious keen, enormous inside the hive of stone, while a part of her waits to cry herself out, hoping that no one but the dog can hear her above the cliff wind.
She cannot find it on her own.
If she keeps this up, she will go mad. She has ripped her arms bloody on nettles, her pants have worn down at the knees. She hasn’t bathed in too long and when she squats looking for water the smell between her legs assaults her. She has tended to women who let themselves go like this, who smelled like they were rotting from somewhere inside, because to freshen up was to start over and they couldn’t bear that.
She needs to calm down. She won’t find it this way. It’s hidden, it’s a secret they don’t want to share. She is acting like a child, she could ruin the last chance she has by exposing such blatant need. She must behave like the mature woman she is, deliberate, methodical yet gracious, not some teenager who grasps at chances because she still has some vague hope that adulthood will be so much easier than being a child ever was.
She hasn’t laid eyes on her mother in almost thirty years, but now she hears her accent daily in the words of the islanders. When she dares to remember herself that young she is now reminded of Emer, needy, barely grown girl who is an adult already whether she wants it or not.
When she goes to sleep that night, she dreams of Matthew, of his long, slender, feminine hands on her body, caressing her belly as it swelled and emptied over and over again. Her darling, guilt-ridden Matthew. She was a child when he fell in love with her, and he tried to make up for this crime for the rest of his life. He died after failing again and again to give her the only thing she wanted. If she does not find this well, she will have let him die for no reason at all.
She wakes early the next morning and takes her tea outside to watch the mountains. She is almost forty years old, but she is no longer racing against time. It is not her body she must rely on, her only hope is a miracle, or a curse. She doesn’t care which one. She wanted to do this alone, she imagined that being here would be similar to her childhood, where there was no one but herself to rely on. A place so quiet she could have conversations with the rocks, the trees, the sea, and no one would hear them. But this place has no trees, and they won’t let her find it alone. She will go back to her original, less attractive plan, to the exhausting bright conversation, to flirting, to pretending she has come to be a part of this place instead of merely taking from it.
She looks at the cottage, derelict, the weeds grown high as the miniature windows, yellow lichen eating its way through the stone. The roof leaks so furiously when it rains, she has to move her bed to an odd angle in the center of the room to avoid it. She will ask Austin and Malachy about their offer to repair the thatch. The next time Emer comes by with bread or milk, though she is exactly the sort of desperate girl Brigid has vowed to stay away from, she will invite her inside. She has seduced what she wants out of people before, though she no longer has the same enthusiasm for it.
Instead of searching for the well, she spends the morning heating buckets of ordinary water, for herself, for dishes, for her underwear and the filmy sheets. In between batches, she tidies the place up; she has neglected the inside of the house as much as herself. She squats in the lukewarm tub and lets the water slough off the layers of her first weeks here. In her mind, she makes a list of the things she will need to turn this abandoned nest into something resembling a home.
Neither of them is in any condition to welcome a baby.
Chapter 3
Changeling
Saturdays have always been bath days. On Sundays, if the weather allows, the islanders all go over to Inis Muruch for Mass, so Saturday is the chance to wash the week away. Even if the weather looks fierce, and Mass unlikely, children are washed of their sins regardless.
The Saturday after the Yank arrives, Emer heats bathwater for Niall, then herself. Her husband is still “on the tear,” which is both a relief and an embarrassment; when he does arrive he will need three times the bathwater to wash it away.
Niall has never whined or resisted baths, but sits happily playing with the soap while she scrubs and rinses his body with a gentle touch no islander would suspect of her. She knows every inch of him and cannot imagine a day when she won’t, so though he is old enough to bathe himself, she has never suggested he try. Niall has never felt anything but love come out of Emer’s hands.
Emer’s own ablutions are rough, quick, she doesn’t like to linger over her body, which is like a girl’s, strong but too thin, without the curves men admire on Rose. Even after pregnancy, she shrunk immediately to her former bony self. Aside from breast-feeding, Emer’s body hasn’t participated in much pleasure, nor been the object of any desire. Sometimes Niall will peek around the curtain she fashions over twine to ask her a question (the notion of privacy still baffles him), and gaze at her small breasts as if trying to figure something out. Then the fiery ring in his eyes will grow and she’ll have to bark at him to leave her be. She worries, when she sees that ring in his eyes, that he is remembering something far more dangerous than suckling milk.
Once they are both bathed and dressed, they walk up the road to Rose’s house, Niall’s pig trotting alongside him, so Emer can help bathe their mother. Rose’s oldest girls, Fiona and Eve, are outside feeding the hens. They call Niall over to them. Emer doesn’t like to let him out of her sight for long, but Fiona has a head on her shoulders, and can be trusted to yank him back if he starts to drift away. The other girls are too young to be of use, and Eve seems to have nothing but wool between her ears.
Rose bears her children in litters of two, all girls with her red-gold hair and the names of saints. She is currently working on her fourth pair of twins in eight years, during which she has always been pregnant or nursing or both. That many pregnancies without a break makes other women look knackered, but Rose looks better with each one, as if the babies are adding something to her body instead of taking it away. “More’s the pity,” they say on the island, “that her sister has only the one.” There is a rumor that Emer is barren, that something went wrong during Niall’s birth in the hospital on the mainland. Emer started this rumor.
Rose has just finished up with the toddlers, Clare and Cecelia. She sends them outside with Teresa and Bernadette, who are six, and instructions to comb their hair.
&
nbsp; “Emer, pet,” Rose says brightly. “The day’s fine enough, is it not?”
“It’s lashing over on the mainland,” Emer reports. “It’ll come our way if the wind changes.”
“Where have you been?” their mother slurs. “You went missing and Rose had to come collect me.” Rose pours the contents of the kettle into the metal tub, then adds a bucket of tepid water.
“Is Patch home, Emer?” Rose deflects.
“Not yet.”
“Useless bastard,” their mother mutters.
“Language, Mammy,” Rose chides, but she winks at Emer.
“Austin says you wasted a whole day settling that Yank,” her mother says. “He had to milk your cow, you could hear her keening from the field.”
“Austin wasn’t bothered, Mammy,” Rose says.
Emer moves over to her mother’s chair and begins to take her hair out of its pins, too quickly to be gentle, and her mother bats at her ineffectually with her better arm.
“What’s she like, so?” Rose asks. She lifts their mother under the arms and supports her standing, so Emer can pull down the woman’s skirt and remove her stockings and bloomers. Her mother’s thighs are like strangers to each other, one heavy and pocked with cellulite, the other loose skin swimming around bone. Her pubic hair has shed away in the last few years, and what is left is as sparse and colorless as the hair on her head. Rose removes her top and woolen undershirt. Clodagh stopped wearing a bra a long time ago.
“She’s like most Yanks,” Emer replies. “Bold.”
Together they help their mother shuffle the few steps to the bath, guiding her useless leg over the metal lip and lowering her slowly into the murky water. Emer takes charge of her hair, while Rose starts soaping her limbs with a scrap of flannel.
“If she’s at all like her mother she’ll put your heart crosswise,” Clodagh slurs.
“Oh, hush,” Rose chides, pouring water over her hunched, soapy back. “You didn’t know any of them besides Desmond.”
“I know the stories. Changelings and whores and good men twisted to evil.”
“Leave the stories, so. I want to know about the actual woman.”
“She’s here for the well,” Emer says. Their mother makes a noise like she’s amused. Emer pours the rinse water too sloppily over her head and her mother ends up sputtering and cursing her, wiping at her good eye.
“Poor thing,” Rose says. “Did you tell her, Emer?”
“I didn’t.”
“I don’t see why we keep it secret,” Rose says.
“We can’t be giving away our miracles,” Emer imitates the thick accent of an older island woman.
“Nonsense. As if Saint Brigid herself would be so stingy!” Rose says. She accompanies this with a quick sign of the cross that inspires an eye roll from her sister. “It’s not as if you believe in it. And you’re not the loyal one. Why not tell?”
Emer shrugs. She didn’t keep the well from Brigid out of loyalty to the island or belief in the legends or anything so grand. The longer Brigid looks for it, the longer she will be there. Emer already wants her to stay.
“She’ll bring us nothing but sorrow, sure,” their mother says. “She’ll want to change things. Yanks always do.”
“There’s no panic,” Rose quips. “We’re able to stand a bit of change. Isn’t that so, Emer?”
“Will you not get me out of this tub,” their mother says. “I’m after freezin’ me arse off.”
They lift her to a standing position and Emer holds her steady while Rose swipes her dry with a ragged towel. They get her dressed again, pushing the useless half of her into sleeves and leg openings while her working side pushes itself, knocking into them without apology. Even Rose, viciously bright minded, looks knackered after wrestling their crippled mother into clothing. They’ve been caring for her most of their lives, physically since her stroke the year they were twelve, and though she grows weaker each year, her temperament hasn’t eased at all. A woman almost as angry at life as she is at her inability to leave it. Emer is often tempted to use her hands, to press all the anger she has at this woman into her ruined body, but it would only create more that she and her sister would be required to tend to. They plop her clumsily back in the rocking chair and empty the tub in the ditch.
“I should call in to her,” Rose says, visibly relieved to be finished with this chore. “I’ve a fresh batch of scones.”
“Don’t bother,” Emer says, trying to sound nonchalant. “She won’t invite you in. She’s as batty as Desmond was.”
Niall and Fiona come inside, announcing that they’ve seen Brigid with the dog, walking up over their Uncle Aidan’s back field.
“Can I go say hello to her, Mammy?” Niall asks.
“No,” Emer and Rose say together. Rose will say that Emer fusses over her only child too much, but even she knows there are places on their island that Niall should not be let to go alone. Their uncle Aidan’s back field is one of them.
“Stay with your cousins in sight of the house,” Emer says, and Fiona takes Niall’s hand and leads him, dejected, outside. Rose looks out the open top half of the divided back door.
“Poor woman,” she mutters. “What do you suppose she’s after?”
“I didn’t ask her,” Emer says.
“Do you not think it’s a baby?” Rose asks.
“You think every woman wants a baby,” Emer scoffs. “And she brought no man with her, so I’d love to see her manage that.”
Rose smiles, caressing her own belly, just beginning to swell with the latest pair.
Austin comes in then, and Emer blushes. He looks so hard and handsome in the small house usually full of women and children. He drops a bloody lamb leg on the table.
“Did I miss your bath, ladies?” he jokes, and Rose grins, and before he can steal a kiss, and send their mother into complaints of impropriety and Emer into a hot rush just being close to it, Emer walks out on the lot of them.
She shades her eyes from the fierce sun and watches the Yank trudging up a steep green hill. Emer has watched her every day, on the road, on the cliffs, across the bog. Every stone Brigid turns over has a memory attached to it, every place she looks is already lodged beneath Emer’s uncomfortable skin.
Their mother wasn’t always like this. She was once as young as they were, a dark beauty their father would grab in the middle of the kitchen, sending the children out of doors for an hour. She doted on her husband, and on their older brother, Dónal, her first child and her only boy. Boys were the only true children on the island. Girls were just small women, expected to behave before they could even speak. If their mother wasn’t glaring at five-year-old Emer and Rose in disapproval, she was nodding at them with a sort of solemn recognition. The girls were there to help her; her son was there to please her. Until he died.
Her husband and son were taken by the sea in a storm that claimed twelve, half the island’s able men. Island women were rowed to the mainland to identify the bodies, laid out on pallets like fish at a market. The boy’s body was never found. His coffin was laid empty in the graveyard.
For a month their mother refused to leave her darkened bedroom, where she ripened daily in the bedclothes, the vinegar smell of her an onslaught when her daughters opened the door to bring her tea. Then she rose one evening, put on her scarf, and brought them to the cliff.
Emer knew something was wrong while strapped to her mother’s back, wrapped too tightly in a damp flannel shawl—she was five and far too big to be carried this way. Rose was made to walk beside them, cheerily enough, until it began to rain and she asked their mother where they were going.
“There’s none of our sheep this way,” Rose said. They were following an old narrow sheep path, barely the width of one of her mother’s calloused brown feet, up over the hills of grass and gorse and heather and dead wild flowers. There was nothing in this direction but the cliffs, where the wind was so strong the birds dove and rose without needing to flap their wings, wind that got
in your ears and bruised your brain. No island child was meant to go there alone.
Their mother didn’t answer, just changed hands, pulling Rose behind her like part of a set dance. Rose met Emer’s eyes, and looked daggers at her. Emer turned her head. She didn’t often help her sister. She preferred to slip away, or put a face on as if she didn’t fully understand what was being asked of her. This was why the islanders said that one twin got more than her share of brains in the womb. They said this in front of them, as if Emer was not even bright enough to understand the language. She obliged them by blinking at such comments. Not scowling, but not smiling either. She didn’t smile the way her sister did. She got less of that inclination in the womb as well.
Emer, her ear pressed against damp wool, could hear her mother’s heart beating, quick and rushing, not from the walk—their mother walked up hills all day—but from some excitement. Her heart was hammering with this thrill and every few minutes it skipped, and Emer recognized this as something she had felt before in herself, this skip that was like a little interruption of dread.
They crested the last hill and the ocean appeared in the distance; she couldn’t see how close it was because of the sheer drop that was the cliffs.
She meant for them to go over it. Emer knew this. Heard it like a short, brutal sentence through her mother’s back, though it was not said aloud.
Rose struggled to get her hand free. “Let me go, Mammy,” she said, but all Emer could hear was the tone of it, words blurred by wind. Her mother’s voice, booming inside her chest, was clear.
“We’re almost there.”
Rose had given up walking and was trying to pull her mother back. Their mother leaned over to lift her, but Rose was writhing, slippery, impossible to catch, like a fish leaping about on a boat. They moved closer and closer to the ground in this struggle and finally their mother lay right down on top of her, upending Emer, pinning Rose down under bosom and belly. Rose began to cry.