by Lisa Carey
All these years after her trip beneath the world, darkness still rises up in Emer like water filling to the top of a well. It swells up from deep inside her, forming a thick, immovable plug that settles in the hollow of skin below her throat. Every time she looks in the mirror she expects to see it there, an ancient, gnarled fist waiting for the chosen moment to unfurl. People’s faces make it rise, and bright sunshine, a bee snarling inside the cup of a flower, that unbearable millisecond between when she calls her son’s name and he answers her. Life threatens daily to close her throat.
She puts it into people. She folds their hands inside her own and presses and something bites into their souls. Her hand can reach into them, find where there is a doubt or a guilt or a fear, a small hole in their fabric, and catch it, pull and widen it, until someone who was feeling just fine about their day or their life or their choices will be almost doubled over with a hopelessness, a yawning weight that makes them question their former happiness. It only lasts a few minutes, but afterward, for days, or weeks, they will shudder at the memory of that place underneath who they believe they are. Women who have birthed children liken it to labor, a contraction of pain in the mind that is only bearable in retrospect, when it is all over. People like Emer’s mother find the feeling familiar, and assume it comes from their own grief-laden hearts. Emer drags them under the water and pulls them back up just when they’ve forgotten how to breathe. It doesn’t make her feel any better, but it does, while she grips them, make her feel less alone.
It doesn’t work on Rose. Emer tried for years, when their bodies developed, (Rose’s prettily and Emer’s in an embarrassing, odorous, hairy way) when Rose was praised in school, or noticed by a boy, or laughed with other girls in a way that made Emer suspect it was at her expense.
Emer despises her sister. She hates Rose for loving her. “She’s not as bad as all that,” Rose will say, when others criticize her. Emer can see that Rose will never really see her, will never believe the worst, will stand beside her whether she feeds her stolen honey or tries to strike at her with the fire of her hands. Emer knows this is some sort of blessing, unless of course it is a curse, that this person who will always love her is the one who knows her least of all.
Niall is the only true antidote. Only with her child are her hands able to soothe rather than repel. The fairies she once invited terrify her now. She has gone from a girl begging to be stolen by something dark and exciting to a mother who must guard her child. All she has wanted for years is to leave the island and the good people far behind.
But then the Yank resisted her hands. Unlike Rose, who just can’t be penetrated, or Niall, who diffuses it, something came back from Brigid’s hand, a response that burned Emer’s darkness away like dried moss tossed on a turf fire. There was strength in there, alongside the need. Brigid is damaged, but not easily harmed.
The Yank, true to her mother’s gloomy predictions, has already changed things. Now Emer is thinking less about fairies and evacuations than she is about what might happen if Brigid’s hand touches her again.
Chapter 4
Nesting
May 1959
It’s not until Brigid decides to fix the house up that she notices how much is missing. She has been drinking tea out of the same cracked mug, eating off her only plate—thick pottery with a sponged pattern of red, bell-shaped flowers. She often licks the one fork and knife clean instead of bothering to wash them. The sheet on her bed is worn thin and stained with a man-sized yellow sweat blotch; she has been using her rolled-up fisherman’s sweater as a pillow. At first she assumed this was the austerity of her bachelor uncle, but then she wonders. According to Malachy, this house has raised generations stretching back centuries. It must have sheltered women and children and all the necessary accessories that go along with them. What happened to it all?
In the narrow, catch-all drawer of the kitchen press, she finds various treasures: a bankbook, a Mass card with the names of what she assumes are her grandparents, various handwritten receipts for the purchase and sale of sheep and wool, a fountain pen and a bottle of clotted ink. A brown envelope with a neat stack of birth certificates, school reports, confirmation and communion cards. A white envelope with an American stamp on it, a short letter written in careful schoolgirl’s cursive.
Dear Desi,
I made it to America. I live in Maine now, in the northeast, where it snows in the winter and some trees lose their leaves and others don’t and are like dark green giants that walk over the land. My village is by the ocean and the men here trap lobsters and catch herring just like they do at home. When I first arrived I lived in a boardinghouse for girls, but now I have a husband. He is a lightkeeper and we will be moving to his first posting this spring.
I miss the fuchsia and the mountains, the sheep, even the corncrake. It makes me sad to think I will never see them, or you, again. To think of you alone in that house now, all of us gone. I wish you would consider emigrating, yourself.
I won’t be able to post much from the lighthouse, as it’s very remote, but I will write you often and send them all together in large parcels when I can. I hope you can find someone to read them to you.
I have a baby girl. I named her Brigid. She looks how I imagine Mam must have looked, with furious ginger hair. She is a great comfort to me.
Your loving sister,
Nuala
After reading this letter, Brigid looks all over the house for more, but that is all. She goes back to bed in the middle of the day, the worried dog pressed to her aching middle, and cries for her mother with a freedom that seems childlike, except she never allowed herself to cry that way as a child.
“Most of it was stolen, I suspect,” Emer says when Brigid invites her in for tea and asks about the lack of necessities. She opens Brigid’s press and finds it bare of anything but long, spindly-legged spiders and their cotton candy webs. “People help themselves when a house is abandoned.” Brigid has a brief image of shawl-laden women flapping down on the place like vultures. “I can ask around, bring some of it back.”
“That’s all right,” Brigid says. She should have guessed. Her mother told her about stealing from the neighbors. Running around the island in the dark, ransacking abandoned houses for tea leaves and sugar. They were that poor.
“Your mother was the youngest?” Emer asks.
“I don’t know,” Brigid says.
“The one who went to America on her own?”
“Yes,” Brigid says. Though her mother didn’t tell her directly, she believes something ugly and unforgivable occurred here. Something that should have made Brigid wary of crossing that water at all.
“Did she tell you what it was like?” Emer asks. Brigid cannot meet Emer’s eye.
“She told me fairy stories.”
Emer makes a gasping sound in her throat and for an instant, Brigid is in a dark, dirty kitchen with her mother. It is the same noise, the noise she thought was her mother’s own: a gasp of surprise and agreement but also despair, humor superimposed onto dread. Emer’s phrasing, her accent, the hard glint of her eyes, all of it brings her mother back like a slap to the face.
“You’d have to look long to find love in this house,” Emer says. “Ten children, and their father drank, and hit them more than was prudent. The mother died in childbirth. The children were sent to the orphanage on the mainland, all of them caught fever and never left. Desmond was the eldest, he stayed to care for the old man and the baby, your mother. She was the only one to get away.”
She wonders if that is all that Emer really knows. It’s a hard story, but it’s only the surface. Nothing about what her mother could do. Brigid had worried that people would know, and she would be driven away. But apparently it has just become a simple story of poverty, and the failings of the human world.
Brigid looks at Emer now, who shifts a bit in her chair.
“Have I shocked you? It was a hard place. Still is. It’s not the saint’s paradise they write about. She left
us to our own defenses a long time ago.”
“No, I’m not shocked.”
“Desmond was the last of them. There’s none of yours left here.”
No family, no crockery, the furniture pulled apart and the place ransacked. Barely a chair left behind. The memories of whatever happened here smothered like the fires they bury at night.
“Everyone’s wanting to know why you’ve come,” Niall says to Brigid. Emer looks daggers at him.
“You’re not the only ones who can keep secrets,” Brigid says, winking. He beams, but Emer narrows her one eye in warning.
Emer returns something to her every day. Plates, bowls and mugs in the same spongeware pattern, three caned chairs and a bedside table, thick cotton sheets bleached white by the sun, mismatched cutlery, a washboard, cast-iron pans. Delicate, cracked lace doilies far fussier than Brigid would ever use. An apron like all the island women wear, a smock she must pull over her head and fasten at both sides of her waist. Emer always carries a small knife in the front pocket of this apron. Brigid finds a similar knife in the deep back of Desmond’s drawer, the wooden handle worn to the soft curves of another woman’s hand, the blade narrow from generations of sharpening. She finds it useful to keep in her pocket, for cutting the wildflowers she collects on her walks, or clearing away nettles looking for the origin of a bubbling spring. She still looks for the well, but with less furious desperation. She is waiting for the right time to ask again.
She hopes the answer will be given to her, the way Niall brings her a canvas sack filled with stolen belongings, as if they are gifts.
Another week passes before she finds out about her cows. Emer has been bringing her fresh milk, and one day Austin is there, stopped on the road talking to Brigid in her doorway. Emer comes up quietly, behind him, as if she hopes she can slip by without being seen.
“Howaya keeping, Emer,” Austin says, nodding. “Niall.” A little wink for the child, but his eyes avoid Emer.
“Austin,” Emer says, with more disdain than should be able to fit into one word. He is a handsome man, but Emer doesn’t seem impressed. Niall hands Brigid the jug of milk he’s been sloshing up the whole road.
“Thank you,” Brigid says. “I just drank the last of it.”
“What are you getting milk delivered for, when you’ve a cow up in that field?” Austin says. Brigid is confused, but Emer shakes her head, and glares pointedly with her one eye.
“I suspected as much,” she murmurs when Austin has gone.
She walks Brigid up over the field and they speak to Michael Joe, who behaves as though she’s known all along that she has cows and he’s been waiting for her to collect them. She is apparently the owner of two brown cows and a calf, and Emer and Niall help her move them over to the field directly behind her house. Emer tells her to leave one cow separate for milking. Brigid hasn’t milked a cow in years and finds she enjoys it, resting her forehead against the cow’s thick side and pulling down the warm teats. The cow always seems grateful, she lets out a sigh when she empties her. Other than that they are blank, boring animals who seem forever to be chewing. They look at her as she approaches them, every time, as if they’ve never seen her before in their lives. They remind her of the island women, who still will not give her much beyond a nod, an occasional, grudging inquiry into her comfort that is not meant to be answered.
A week later she is told about her sheep. A dozen of them, grazing in the neighbor’s field, mentioned casually again, by Malachy as she chats with him at the salt house where she buys fish. Again, presented to her as if they’ve just been babysitting until she got around to collecting them. Then there are the hens and a rooster brought up a few at a time by the men who have been minding them since her uncle died the autumn before. She vaguely remembers the solicitor mentioning livestock, but after packing up and settling her life in Portland and making the journey she had forgotten it all.
“They’d have kept them for themselves,” Emer explains. “Like anything else left behind. Only they’re fond of you.”
And so all the things that have supposedly been stolen from her are being handed back in spades. She takes it as a good omen.
Emer brings over a churn and teaches her to make butter the consistency of ice cream that she eats with a spoon. The eggs from her hens are exquisite. The bright orange yolks cling to the brown bread like golden gravy. She rediscovers the steel-cut porridge of her childhood after a delivery from the mainland, and simmers it overnight on the fire, dolloping it with the ice cream butter and shaking a brown sugar crust on top. She loves eating by herself, no one to answer in between each delicious mouthful. On foggy days—her favorite weather because of the shroud of stillness and mystery—she cannot see the sea or the other houses and she imagines she is the only one on the island. She chews and swallows in pure silence, listening to the old, familiar longing gurgling deep inside the well of her soul. The yearning to have someone growing inside her again, so she is no longer alone.
Most of the time, she is not alone, though she does not invite the company. She is called in on every day by grinning men offering to help rebuild her house or tend to her growing herd of livestock, and the strange fosters of Emer and her little boy. Emer is both grumpy and eager, a girl desperate for a friend who pretends she can’t be bothered. She looks like a twelve-year-old tomboy: tall as a woman but thin and underdeveloped. Her face is at times pinched and angled as a furious fairy, but when she thinks only Niall is watching, it softens. She is so uncomfortable in her body it’s almost painful to watch her: she will yank at her clothing and scratch as if the material, or her very skin, is a constant torture. Brigid has already seen that no one touches this girl, no one but her son. The men, who already squeeze Brigid hard enough to pinch around her waist when she says something that amuses them, never put a hand on Emer. Her one eye is a sharp, angry blue, startling, gorgeous and lonely next to its shrouded mate. Her lips are so full and dark they look bee-stung and she gnaws at them, hungry for something she’s never had.
Brigid remembers girls like this, so lonely, so miserably self-conscious they can’t see that they’re not as hideous as they imagine. She always had a weakness for those girls.
Emer finds a way to see Brigid daily, bringing her stolen goods or following her on a walk, her manner slightly put out, as though Brigid needs her company and she will oblige, when really, Brigid can tell, it is Emer who needs someone. The boy is lovely, an antidote to his mother’s shadowed disposition, flitting about her like a firefly in the darkness. But he lives in another world. She’s heard him talking to it. It is not necessary for him to seek out company. He could take or leave all of them, she gets the impression, aside from his mother. He is always coming back to her, to touch her hand, her skirt, to press his face to her side. Like he gains some comfort, some grounding from the contact. They whisper in Irish to each other, thinking Brigid won’t understand them. A chuisle mo chroí. You are the pulse of my heart. It is an endearment, Brigid remembers with a chill, meant for lovers.
One day as she walks the cliffs she meets Emer and Niall and asks them about the stone huts, ten of them in varying stages of decay, the intact ones shaped like beehives, that sit empty and resolute, facing the onslaught of the open sea.
“Saint Brigid built them,” Emer says in her quick, unfriendly voice. “For her postulants. She was the only woman ever ordained a bishop, because she rattled the priest by making fire come out of her hair. Usually it was only men who were given monasteries.”
Niall, no longer afraid of the dog, is leaping around her, trying to get Rua to run with him and his pig. Rua, clearly unused to such play, sits next to Brigid, leaning against her leg, waiting for their walk to resume.
Emer tells Brigid about the abbey, how each clochán housed two women, each nun had an anam cara, a soul friend, who was their partner in everything. They copied the Gospels over and over in Latin and Irish, then illustrated them like the Book of Kells. They worked the land together, tended the anima
ls, prayed together, slept on one pallet to absorb each other’s heat. The women chose their partners and had a ceremony to celebrate the commitment. They were meant to spend their entire lives together.
“Like a marriage,” Brigid mutters.
“Like all nuns, they were meant to be brides of Christ. But he wasn’t much help with the cattle.”
Brigid wonders if Emer even knows she can be funny.
“Pretty racy,” Brigid says. “For nuns.”
Emer blushes, glancing over at Niall.
“A lot of them came here for cures,” Emer says. “Brigid was said to have healing in her hands.”
“So I’ve heard,” Brigid says. Emer blushes, hard.
“Sure it’s all nonsense,” Emer scoffs. “People still come here, like yourself, looking for holy remnants, looking for miracles. There’s no miracles on this island that I’ve ever seen. Not Christian ones, anyway.”
She’s not a very good liar, Emer. She can’t look at Brigid as she says this, and her voice is much more animated than she ever allows. Plus her son’s open mouth is a dead giveaway.
“People believe a lot of things if they need to,” Brigid says. Emer shrugs, opens her mouth to say more, then decides against it.
Instead she announces that it’s time she and Niall were after the sheep, and they leave Brigid and her dog alone by the cliff’s edge.
Brigid runs her hand over the low crown of a beehive hut. The clocháns are meticulously round, the stones angled gradually to form the roof, no mortar visible to hold them together. No windows, just a small arch to crawl inside. When Emer and Niall have disappeared down the hill, she sits inside the one still fully intact, which is thick-walled and perfect shelter from the abusive wind of the west side of the island. Rua crawls in after her, leaning warmth into her side. She isn’t crying as much anymore, and her nightmares have eased. She tries not to beg, she tries very hard to be serene, to sit in the silence after a question waiting for an answer. The sea and wind sound far away and harmless inside this mound. Little caves of inspiration. Wombs of penance. She imagines small women inside, with only quills and pots of ink and piles of vellum, ripe and naked under brown cloaks, sure of their love and wanting for nothing.