by Lisa Carey
Chapter 6
Bonfire
June 1959
On June 21, the longest day of the year, the older children come home from secondary school for the summer and the whole island gathers to meet them at the quay. Five teenagers looking taller, filled out, and more interested in each other than they were the year before.
There are only eight families left on St. Brigid’s Island. Someone is always leaving, uncles, cousins, classmates waving from the mail boat in their good coats, mothers keening after them as if at a funeral. They leave for jobs and wars, for marriage and school. For life. Only six men are capable of lifting the heavy boats and working the hard land of the island, and Rose and Emer are married to two of them. The rest are women or children under the age of twelve. When children turn twelve, they leave. They go to the mainland to attend secondary school and they only come home during the summer. By their first summer home, they are already different, already gone.
Rose and Emer are standing on the grass hill that looks down on the quay. Emer can’t help fidgeting, she is eager to get up to Brigid’s, where she spends most days, with the excuse of helping her fix up the house—but Rose and Emer never miss this.
“Seems like it was only last summer that was us,” Rose whispers to Emer, squeezing her arm affectionately.
You mean you, Emer thinks, trying to pull away, but Rose is used to this and ignores it, threading her arm through Emer’s elbow and holding tight. The side of her belly against Emer’s arm feels obscene. Her bump has grown quicker than ever this time, and the men have been slagging Austin, saying it’s probably quadruplets. Emer would find this mortifying, but Rose has never been embarrassed at her own body.
The teenagers, like the Yank, have to be handed down from the big boat into a currach; Austin and Patch row out to them. Emer can see Austin greeting the only boy with a shoulder slap and a whispered comment that flames his ears. The girls he hands down sweetly, with a wink, like they are his own. Patch keeps the boat steady, avoiding the greetings, he is known for fierce shyness around women and children. They angle the currach into the cove, timing between waves that could upend them, and at the slip they lift children up to where their mothers have been waiting months to get their hands on them.
“Look at the face on Oisin,” Rose says to Emer.
Oisin is the pimple-faced son of Malachy and Kathleen. He is getting on so well that there is talk of him having the points to study medicine.
“What are you on about?” Emer says.
“Himself and Deirdre are trying so hard not to look at each other they’re practically falling off the quay. Those two have been busy this winter.”
“Don’t be crass,” Emer says, shifting uneasily as she does at any mention of romance or sex.
“I’m only observing.” Rose smiles.
“Oisin can do better than Deirdre,” Emer says. “She won’t last long in the city.”
“He’ll come back here, so he will,” Rose says. “To be the island doctor.”
“And who will pay him for that?” Emer says.
The island isn’t funded for a doctor, or a priest, a lighthouse or a new harbor, not even for electricity or a community telephone. The government would rather give them a new start. They want people off the islands, so instead of Inis Muruch, where they have relatives, they are offering a cul-de-sac of eight brand-new houses on the mainland. For reasons she cannot wrap her mind around, no one wants to go but Emer. You’d think the government was trying to burgle them rather than give them new houses when you hear Rose voice her opinion on it.
Rose makes her way to the quay, to hug and fuss over these children as if they are her own. Austin reaches out and pinches her rear, she laughs and slaps him away, delighted. He grabs her for a kiss. Emer looks away. Their public displays of affection have always sickened her.
“Howaya, Emer,” a few of the teenagers say as they walk past, avoiding her eyes. She nods at them. Her husband walks up the road to their house without a glance at her.
Niall is already up at Brigid’s house. He has no time for the return of the prodigals. He doesn’t care about these teenagers any more than Emer does. But neither does he have her desire to feed off the feeling they bring home with them, the broad, fresh faces that are a little unfocused, a little absent, as if half of them has been left in another, better world. It fills Emer with jealous rage, but she can’t help coming to see life rise off them like smoke, just the same.
Emer and Rose grew up assuming they would leave, leave the island, leave Ireland, because that is what children did. Old women crossed themselves any time they passed the quay, remembering all the children the island had lost to the world. Emer looked forward to the day she would leave for secondary school the way she had once anticipated being stolen by fairies. It was the only hope she had of escaping the treeless three-mile stretch of bog and rock. Of escaping herself.
The summer before they were due to leave for secondary school, their mother had a stroke. She collapsed in the kitchen and when she woke, she couldn’t move or speak, so the doctor was rowed over. Auntie Orla explained it to the girls when the doctor said she would need to go to the hospital. Rose broke down in the loud, dominating sobs that always required attention. Emer raised her voice above the noise to ask if it was a “fairy stroke,” the illness said to affect those who were being stolen, still halfway between this world and the underground. She asked with such a gleam in her eyes that her auntie Orla crossed herself. “Stolen child,” she muttered as she turned away. Emer didn’t flinch. She’d been called this before. She still wished it were true.
Their mother came home with one half of her face frozen, a useless arm curled like a broken wing to her breast, and a deadened leg that seemed to weigh as much as the rest of her, the foot turned permanently inward. The way the paralysis pulled her mouth made it look like it was half-open and ready to scream.
This was one month before Emer and Rose were due to leave for school. There was no discussion. Their mother could not be left. Everyone on the island could barely feed their own families. There was no one to take them on the mainland, or in America, where some other widowed families went. Their mother’s three brothers had all been killed fighting for England in the war. Even if they’d had a place to go, their mother declared, she would never leave the island. Not with her baby boy still in that water.
Rose and Emer were already used to the chores. They milked the cows, fed the calves, did the laundry and the cooking, and dug, alongside the other orphaned children, endless rows of potatoes in September. As girls they had ridden side by side on the donkey creels full of turf, now they led the donkeys themselves. They carried knives in their aprons, knit circular scarves to protect their heads when they went out to tend the animals. But after their mother’s stroke, it was as if they became women, as hard and old as their mother in a few months. Emer, at least. Rose maintained some callow girlishness. She continued to go to the island school whenever she could. Emer announced loudly, whenever she set off, that she was wasting her time.
It wasn’t long after this that Emer started her monthly bleeding. Her cramps were like water breaking onto rock, constant, unbearable. So much dark, clotted blood fell out of her that nothing could stanch it, not the thick flannel folded between her legs or the modern sanitary napkins, coveted and few from the mainland, that had to be tossed, like most rubbish, into the fire. Emer bled through them all. After one humiliating accident in the church pew, during a Christmas when the boys her age were home from school, she stayed near the house for the first week of every month. She had headaches that felt like bees swarming in her head, that made her vision vibrate and sunlight unbearable. She added these to the growing list of things that locked her away and let her sister get on without her.
Rose’s blood, when it started the next year, was dainty and spare, a pink stain on a cloth that could be rinsed clean and forgotten, or thrown on a fire without threatening to smother it.
“Mind yoursel
ves,” their mother slurred. “A man can put a baby in ye now.”
“Wouldn’t that be the straw,” Emer scoffed. But Rose smiled and winked at her.
Two years after their mother’s stroke, the island teacher convinced Rose to go away to school after all. She never thought to make such a suggestion to Emer, who had stopped showing up altogether. One of them would have to stay on the island with their mother, and Emer was the obvious choice. When Rose tried to ask Emer what she thought about this, Emer acted so uninterested that Rose was hurt.
“I’ll stay if you want,” Rose said.
“Sure you will. Don’t you always do what you’re told?” Emer said.
Emer refused to speak to her for the rest of the summer, but Rose left anyway.
It was the longest winter of Emer’s life. There was storm after storm where they couldn’t leave the island for weeks at a time, and Rose couldn’t come over to see them. She didn’t even make it for Christmas, celebrating the holiday with the family she boarded with in town. Emer and her mother sat silently in front of the tough goose whose neck Emer had wrung with a pleasure that startled her. The few times that Rose was able to get over, that autumn and again in the springtime, Emer was barely civil to her, cruel, distant, angry to the point where she often imagined slapping her sister’s face hard enough to leave an ugly mark and a betrayed expression. She had never wanted her hands to suck happiness out of someone as much as she wished they would out of Rose.
At Easter, when they were working in the kitchen together, peeling potatoes and making bread, Rose tried to reach across the floury table and grasp Emer’s hand.
“I know how difficult it must be,” she whispered, so their mother couldn’t hear. Emer dropped her knife in her apron pocket, put her shawl and headscarf on and walked out into the fields, leaving her sister, who somehow managed to both be self-effacing and get everything she wanted, alone with the dinner half-prepared.
Rose only lasted that one year. Her first summer home from school, the weather so fine that the bleak winter seemed like someone else’s memory, she told Emer she wasn’t going back. She’d fallen in love with Austin Keane, eighteen years old and finished with school in Galway. For years everyone assumed he would get the points to study medicine, but he refused to take the exams. He was moving back in with his mother and younger sisters, to fish and work the land like his father, who had drowned at the same time as theirs, before him. He and Rose both believed that staying on the island with their families was more important than any academic or worldly ambition.
“Got into your knickers then, did he?” Emer said when Rose told her this. Rose ignored that.
“You can go now, Emer,” Rose said, her eyes so bright with possibility Emer found herself wanting to poke them. “Go to school on the mainland, if you want. Mammy can live with us.”
Emer acted as though the suggestion were ludicrous. Rose was confused and spent a good deal of time trying to convince her. Telling her about Galway, and how much there was to do there and the bookshops and the train to Dublin. Emer lost her temper eventually, snapping at her sister’s pretty face.
“Sure you’re only disappointed for yourself,” she said. “I won’t go gallivanting about to make you feel better, or be made to pay for it later when you’ve ten children and no hope of getting away.”
Rose went cold then. She would go cold, if Emer pushed her enough, she wasn’t all sweetness and warmth, even if Emer was the only one who knew it.
“I’m sorry Austin prefers me, Emer.” And just with one sentence, that was how Rose would do it. Emer could rage and insult her and whinge, but Rose, eventually, would cut her down with one retort. Because she knew, and had known all along, how Emer felt about Austin.
He had held her hand once. The summer she was thirteen, at the St. John’s bonfire. Austin, just home for the summer from school, had fumbled in the dark for Rose’s hand, but got Emer’s instead. She was so shocked and delighted by this she forgot about what her hand did to everyone by then. Austin yelped, pulled his hand away and swore to himself in the darkness. Rose, standing to the side of Emer, giggled at the swearing, and that was when Austin realized his mistake. Emer felt him shudder to himself, shake it off and guzzle stout he’d nicked from the keg, as if he needed fortification against the cold dread that had seeped from her hand.
But for the breath-holding second before she ruined it, Emer lost herself. She let go in the wet darkness, buoyed by the flattering pressure of Austin’s hand. In that instant it wasn’t like watching Rose, it was like being Rose. As if she had stolen from her sister the assurance, dense and impenetrable, that she was wanted.
Emer didn’t go. The subject of school on the mainland never came up again. She told herself she was staying to spite her sister. She remained out of a vague hope that was more like fear. Fear that, were she to leave, without her sister beside her, she would be as ugly and cruel and paralyzed as the mother who obliged them to stay behind. And that no one would dare to reach out for her hand ever again.
In the field behind Brigid’s house, Niall is running circles with the pig and dog, whom he has taught to play keep away with a sun-bleached sheep femur he found in the garden.
“Seems like a big morning,” Brigid says, gesturing to the quay. She is sitting outside her door on a kitchen chair, like an old island woman already. She looks tired, Emer thinks, and it occurs to her that Brigid’s energy isn’t as deep as it appears. It can run dry.
“It’s just the children coming home,” Emer says. “It puts them all in a tizzy.”
“I can imagine.”
“There’ll be a ceili tonight at the bonfire,” Niall says. He has run over panting, the pig standing to attention nearby, bone in his snout, grinning with victory. “For St. John’s Eve. Will you come, Brigid?”
Brigid grows still. “Should I bother?” she says casually, but it sounds breathless.
The island men have checked on Brigid daily, but the women have barely spoken to her. They will be friendly tonight, Emer knows, forgiving, with the children home and the two barrels of porter they came with. It would be the right moment to be introduced, when they are feeling loose and grateful enough to give strangers their time. They won’t give her the well, any more than Emer, even though Brigid seems to think the longer she stays the closer she gets to being told. The eager desperation Brigid barely holds in check rattles Emer, as if it is she, not what she knows, that Brigid is so taken with.
Emer shrugs and pretends the question barely interests her.
“If you care for that kind of thing,” she says, turning her blind side to Brigid’s questioning eyes.
Niall comes in when they’re making bread to announce that Fiona and Eve are coming up the road. Emer’s hands freeze in the mound of flour.
“Who are Fiona and Eve?” Brigid asks.
“My nieces,” Emer says.
Brigid walks outside to meet the girls, who have had their Saturday baths and their red gold hair plaited and are wearing their best clothes for the bonfire. Fiona is carrying a plate of freshly baked scones.
“My mother wanted to welcome you and say she hopes to have a chat at the ceili tonight,” Fiona says. “She couldn’t get away as she’s bathing the babies. The plate is yours as well.” Fiona looks to Emer like she might jump out of her hair ribbons, she’s so keen.
Emer hadn’t asked Rose if she had any of the fuchsia pottery from Brigid’s house, but the other women who begrudgingly handed over their pieces must have told her.
“Thank you,” Brigid says. “Won’t you come in, girls?”
She makes tea and puts out the plate of pink and blue sweeties she keeps ordering from town because they are Niall’s favorites. Fiona looks around the cottage with such probing interest it borders on rudeness. She sits straight in her chair and accepts one of each color sweet and nibbles daintily at them. Eve, just as pretty but on the shy side and as a result, fiercely boring, takes a whole handful and gobbles them greedily the same way Niall
always does. Then she looks like she regrets eating them so quickly, because she has nothing to do while her sister leads the conversation.
“Are you from New York?” Fiona asks Brigid.
“I’m afraid not,” Brigid says. The men asked her this as well. Everyone, she has said to Emer, wants me to be from New York. “I’m from Maine.”
“Oh,” Fiona says, with no attempt to hide her disappointment. “I’m going to New York someday. I want to be an actress.”
Emer gasps in amused disapproval. Fiona flicks a glare in her direction, and continues.
“I saw a film once at the cinema in Galway with your woman, Marilyn Monroe. She’s brilliant. I do the recitations at the Christmas concert on Muruch and my teacher says I’m the best in the class.”
Rose would be mortified. Though she is proud of Fiona, who has top marks, she wouldn’t allow her to be so boastful, so bold. And she certainly wouldn’t encourage any nonsense about New York. She’s hoping Fiona will be the island teacher. For the most part, Fiona pretends to like her role as her mother’s right hand, she cares for her siblings and takes on the endless chores without complaint. Only Emer noticed, when Rose announced the new twins at Easter, Fiona go pale and still, like she had just been told she was pregnant herself. She is the only one of Rose’s children who has no fear of Emer. Emer suspects if she tried her hands on the girl, she would flick her right off like she does everything else.
“But, Fee, no one comes back to visit from New York,” Niall says.
“You could come with me,” Fiona dares, and Niall backs away from the table. He moves to stand next to Emer and puts his small hand in hers. Emer grasps it tightly and tries not to smile.
This is one thing she has that Rose does not. None of her girls is as devoted as Niall. They can’t be. As soon as they are old enough to walk away from her they do it, without turning back to check if she is watching. There isn’t enough of her for any of them to cling to.