by Lisa Carey
“Will you go to New York too?” Brigid asks Eve politely, who looks at her blankly for a moment, then blushes and shrugs.
“She just wants to get married,” Fiona scoffs.
As if that’s not the only option available, to the both of them, Emer thinks.
“Are you married?” Fiona says, bold again.
“Not anymore,” Brigid says. But she gets up and puts more water on before Fiona can ask what that means. Fiona looks so enthralled by this she nudges her sister, who glares at her, still angry at her slag.
“I might not get married,” she whines. “I may take the vow.”
“You’re only saying that so Mammy will swoon over you,” Fiona whispers. Eve tries to kick her, but Fiona dodges this at the same time she darts her hand out and pinches her sister hard.
“Girls,” Emer warns.
Fiona catches Emer’s one eye and looks quickly away.
Brigid comes back over with a fresh pot of tea.
“Tell your mother I look forward to meeting her,” she says. Emer clenches her hands into fists. The girls leave as quickly as they can, they start giggling as soon as they are far enough down the green road to believe they are free to do so. They are carrying Brigid’s message, and with it Emer’s dashed hopes, as heavy and easy to give away as that plate full of scones.
Rose married Austin when she was fifteen, with a three-day-long party on Inis Muruch, and they moved into his mother’s house until he could build them their own. Emer was left alone again with their mother. After their honeymoon to Dublin, Rose blushed whenever her new husband was nearby. It wasn’t embarrassment; the blush was connected to some hot expectation. Emer could tell Rose was always wanting to get him alone, and he her. They rarely managed it. They lived with his mother and his three sisters all in the one little house. Emer had seen the old women cluck and shake their heads at the way they eyed one another, even in church.
“Will you mind the way you look at him,” Emer said to her once after Mass when they did it again in full view of the priest. “You’re making a holy show of yourself.” Rose laughed at her.
“It’s no sin to admire your own husband,” she said.
Emer learned one day what these looks were all about. She was walking to the cliffs to check the sheep and heard something coming from the clochán. Someone was breathing quick, as if they’d been running and were trying to catch it, but also broken, as if they were afraid. For a moment, Emer though it was the fairy woman. But then she heard another breath, deeper, with a rhythm, like an animal that knew how to sing a song. She recognized Austin’s admired voice even when it wasn’t using words. Emer knew that she should turn around and go back down the hill. These were not noises that she knew, but she knew that they were private. Even as this thought formed, she was crouching by the clochán, going right for the small hole in the stone that she knew was there. She peeked in, needing to see what it was that had so changed her sister’s expression.
Emer watched them for a long time, until she had to slow her own heartbeat and breath, lest they should hear her through the stone, then she crawled away through the bracken, wet from the damp ground and the slick well she hadn’t known was inside her.
Emer had never imagined that the chores of marriage, and of making babies (she knew the basics of it but hadn’t realized there were such options), could be anything like what she witnessed that day. That you could be taken away by someone, snatched and filled up and adored, stolen by someone else’s hands and mouth, without once losing yourself.
Emer married Austin’s older, less attractive brother the summer Patch came home from Dublin to help Austin fix up a ruined cottage into their new house, and Rose was swollen with her first set of twins. They were thrown together, Austin having written him at his sister’s request, after Rose suggested how fitting it would be that they marry brothers and their children be closer than cousins. Patch was studying for the lighthouse service and about to get his first posting. It could mean, Rose assured Emer, living all over Ireland. Often wives and children were set up with houses in the nearest town, so the men didn’t have to travel far on their weeks off.
Emer and Patch barely had to participate in a courtship before they were engaged. It happened around them, like weather, the swirling wind and rain of opinion, the insistence of others that they fall in love causing them to feel dizzily aroused.
“You’re not as senseless as some girls,” he said once, as though trying to convince them both. He only resembled his brother when he smiled, which wasn’t very often. In that way he and Emer were a perfect match.
By the time she wondered at the wisdom of it, it was done already. There was no trip to Dublin, no weekend on Muruch, just a simple ceremony in the small island church that had no pews; women brought their milking stools, men stood around the edges. The priest hurried off immediately for fear of the weather turning. Their mother stayed the night with Rose to give them a honeymoon. Rose had done Emer’s hair and makeup, taught her to shave her legs and armpits, lent her a nightgown. Even Emer had been surprised at how well she looked in the glass.
Patch barely glanced at her, blowing out the candle before quickly stripping his clothes off and climbing into the bed. He smelled strongly of soap, and she had a brief image of his mother scrubbing him clean in a kitchen tub for the occasion. There was the same grunting, and heavy breath, and a pain she hadn’t expected, but that passed quickly. She waited to feel something like what she’d witnessed in her sister. There was nothing. Only a friction that quickly became unbearable, then a grunt from Patch and it was over. He was almost asleep when she spoke up.
“Would you not put your hands on me? Or your mouth?” She knew it was a mistake the moment she said it. The whole bed stiffened along with him.
“Are you hurt?” he said. She said that she wasn’t. “Then what are you on about?” He looked as if he regretted the whole thing. She had been careful to keep her hands to herself, but still he looked a bit like someone who had just clasped her palm, and been pulled down into despair. He turned away from her and was soon asleep.
The first few times she tried to move underneath him, to think of Austin’s voice and her sister’s catching breath, but there was nothing, only that crowding friction, then wetness from him, then the feeling that she’d been emptied, and would never be full of what her sister had. And the look on Patch’s face, as if it were something like revulsion that propelled his groaning release.
Then he left for his first appointment, Fastnet Rock, a lighthouse so desolate and remote there was no possibility of her going along. She was left alone with her harpy of a mother, calling out criticisms with grating persistence. It was as if she had never been married at all.
The first time Patch didn’t come home when he was due, Austin had to travel to the mainland, drag him out of the pub and row him home. It wasn’t the first time, it turned out, just the first time since their marriage. He’d lived away from the island so long, no one had known but Austin.
“You’d think Austin might have warned us,” Rose said angrily when they were back. They stood in Emer’s doorway watching Austin half carry him up the road. Rose had two babies strapped to her chest in a way that allowed her to nurse them and do the chores at the same time.
Emer went wordlessly inside. She was pregnant, the goal of marital fumbling successfully attained, and had already given up on the fantasy that she might feel anything more for her husband than she felt for anyone else.
Patch wanted to name the baby Padraig, after himself and his father. Emer named him Niall, and allowed her husband to choose his second name, though grudgingly. The boy was born on the first of May at the hospital on the mainland, small and big-eyed and silent, with wrinkles like a worried old man lining his forehead. He wasn’t able to eat. The first time she put her nipple in his mouth, it flopped right out, as if he hadn’t the strength, or the interest really, to keep it in there. Her milk came in, her breasts swelled and burned, and though he rarely cr
ied, he shrieked when she tried to feed him. He fought it, balling his little fists and twisting his neck, and her milk leaked like tears down his cheeks. The nurses tried to show her how to do it properly but each of them gave up when, after touching Emer, a rush of hopelessness overwhelmed them. The doctor was consulted, but he just seemed embarrassed by the whole thing. He suggested tins of baby formula, which was thick and beige and vile-smelling; Niall swallowed it only once before being sick and never opening his lips for it again.
There was a nurse who only came at night, an old woman with Connemara in her accent, who watched and waited through all the fuss. She came to Emer’s room on the third night and, whispering in Irish, showed Emer how to pinch and knead just behind the nipple to get her milk out into a jar, then dribble it slowly into Niall’s mouth. Once he’d tasted it, he started gulping, as if it had taken him three days to realize that he’d been hungry all along.
“My own mother was the midwife on Inishturk,” the nurse said. “Don’t be telling the doctor what I show you. They think the old ways are no better than witchcraft.”
She pointed underneath Niall’s tongue, where a little cord of glistening tendon held him so tight that even when he cried, it could not extend out of his mouth. She took a small scalpel from her white pocket and before Emer could say anything, she thrust it into his mouth and flicked, once, with a sound that made Emer lose her urine into the already bloody clothes on the bed. She hated herself in the next moment, for not even thinking to move her son away from a madwoman with a blade. But Niall didn’t cry, just looked at them both and yawned, a small swirl of blood collecting in his mouth and staining his drool pink.
“That’ll sort him,” the nurse said, and Emer just held him closer, grateful that he didn’t seem hurt, angry that it was no thanks to her. The next time she put him to her nipple he didn’t scream. He didn’t suck, but kept it in his mouth, and she kneaded like the nurse had shown her and he swallowed a few times, sweet, loud swallows that let rush a joy through her like nothing she’d ever felt. A lot of it ran off down his cheeks and into his neck. He grew tired and let his face fall away. She worked the rest of her milk into a bottle the nurse had placed close by, and poured the formula they thought she was giving him down the sink.
She brought him home to the island, fed the tins of formula to the calves, continued to express her own milk into a tiny porcelain jug with a fuchsia blossom painted on the side. Their best jug, the only delicate thing they owned. She fed him from the lip of this jug, decanting sips into his eager little mouth. He was like a man with a pint of stout, deep swallows with pauses for sighing.
At the end of his first week, during a night feeding, he turned his head away from the jar. Her breast was exposed from expressing the milk and he latched onto it with such force and precision she jumped a little at the shock, but he held on. He was suckling. She could tell the moment it happened that he had never done it properly before, the tug that went all the way up her breast and beyond, as if he were intent on swallowing her whole self, body and soul, into the gaping hole of his mouth and throat. She began to cry, heaving sobs that she tried to control because she was afraid it would distract him and he would forget what he was doing. Patch woke up because her crying shook the bed, rolled over and looked at her, puzzled and a little wary. He’d never once seen her cry, and she had never taken well to direct questions.
“Are you well, then?” he risked.
“The baby’s eating,” she said.
“That’s grand so,” he murmured, confused. Patch hadn’t watched any of it, he’d looked away when any fuss around her breasts seemed to be going on, so he couldn’t imagine why a baby eating would suddenly make her cry.
Emer spent the next week in bed, Niall nursing almost constantly night and day. Rose came by with toddlers trailing by her side, the next set of twins heavy and round beneath her apron. She baked them bread, milked Emer’s cows, tidied the house, churned butter, swept the hearth and kept the fire up, left a plate for Patch for his tea and brought another plate to Emer’s bed. Emer did nothing but watch the baby drink, as if he’d never get enough, and for once she was grateful for her sister, who asked nothing but seemed as proud of the sight as Emer did herself.
“Isn’t he a dote,” her sister would murmur, and Emer would hold the baby up to nuzzle his neck, hiding the flush of love that flamed over her face.
When Rose’s second set of twins was born, when Niall was six months old, Emer went to see her in the hospital. She asked for the nurse who had helped her, whose name was Bridie, because she wanted to show her what a strong mouth he had now. None of the nurses knew whom she meant. She asked every staff person who came into Rose’s room, until Rose told her to stop. She was exhausted by the birth and had no energy for Emer’s prodding anxiety. The secretary at the front desk looked through the books and told her there was no nurse named Bridie from Inishturk and there never had been.
Emer went home to the island with Niall tied tightly to her bosom, her neck swollen with dread. There were stories about babies who couldn’t eat, whom fairies fed with their own milk and thus laid claim on them. “Some children the fairies save,” her mother had said when she saw Emer expressing her milk. “But you’re only let to have them seven years. Your brother was one. That’s why he was took into the sea. His time was up.”
“Ridiculous,” Rose said later. “The old fool.” Despite everything she’d seen, Rose seemed to maintain a naive, optimistic attitude toward anything that smacked of an underworld. As if it could be tidied away where it would no longer bother them. Most islanders pretended the same. It would never do to say you believed in such things out loud. It was asking for interference. Instead they gripped their rosary beads and called on saints and parceled out holy water and fire, as if this were any less foolish.
Emer had been too drugged by this new ecstasy, this swoon that happened every time Niall pulled milk from her, to care what her mother said. None of the fairy world had come near her since the age of ten. But six months later, thinking of the imaginary nurse and Niall’s strange eyes—they had developed a ring that looked like burning turf in the middle of the stormy sea blue—Emer’s old desire to be taken was replaced by a fear that part of her, the only part of her that had ever been lovely, had already been claimed.
Emer told Patch she would not have any more babies. She told him something had gone wrong during Niall’s birth, something inside her would never heal (he looked away at that, the thought of anything inside her too much for him) and that if he came to her again and got her with child it would kill her. If it occurred to him not to believe her, he didn’t say so. She thought he might be relieved. Emer knew what sex with her was like for him. Once she realized there would be no pleasure involved, she had stopped holding her hands back. When he entered her, and she pressed her palms lightly to his back, Patch was seized with a feeling that was similar to when he passed from happily drunk to miserably so. A weight bore down on him, a weight of misery he couldn’t hope to escape, misery he could not stop from thrusting into until his release. The way he kept drinking past the point where it felt good anymore. Once she’d known she was with child he had willingly backed away. When his young wife sat him down and told him they would never again have relations, he agreed with a nod and went out to the fields. If she didn’t know him she might have wondered if he had even heard her. He found what he needed elsewhere, off the island on his tears, she knew this. They never spoke of it.
This was how Emer assured that no other babies would force her to take her eyes off this first one. She couldn’t afford to be distracted. She’d seen how divided Rose was with multiple children. How early they wandered away from her, and Rose was often soothing the accident of a toddler while trying to nurse an infant. Emer couldn’t risk this. Constant vigilance was required to hold on to Niall.
She never left the baby alone. If she was forced to go out to the cows or the well she tied him within her shawl or left the fire iron across his cr
adle like a prison bar. Until he was three, she dressed him like a girl and never cut his long dark curls, a tradition the islanders had abandoned, not remembering that the fairies preferred boy babies. She kept all the superstitions she once scoffed at or purposely broke during the time she wanted to be stolen herself. She buried a piece of burning turf in the ground in the hope that he would live, like the stories told, for seven hundred years. She brought him to Saint Brigid’s well, the holy well that was kept secret by the islanders, said to cure illness and infertility and protect babies’ souls. She didn’t believe in the power of this well—if it were true she would have two eyes—but she did it anyway, just in case. She avoided the raths, didn’t walk down the green road past Desmond’s house but went around by the field instead, squirted the first release of the cows’ udders into the dirt to appease the creatures under the ground. She crossed herself and glared blame at anyone who dared to admire him aloud. “Don’t overlook a child,” it was said on the island, for the compliment would render it vulnerable to snatching. Any time Niall was ill she didn’t sleep, but sat up beside him drenched in her own terrified sweat, her neck pulled so tight she had to lean forward to manage each breath.
She let Rose put a woven Saint Brigid’s cross over his cradle, and finger a trinity of holy water on his forehead. But Emer didn’t trust Saint Brigid any more than she trusted the fairies. Her stories were so odd and warped with pagan magic and prediction—a druid prophesied that she would be born neither in the house nor out of it, and would bathe and suckle on the milk of a red-eared fairy cow—she almost seemed worse.
The fairies wanted Niall, she was sure of it. They had left something in her, she was tethered to them, like a debt, and Niall was the payment. His fiery eyes, the way he could hear things no one else could, he seemed half gone with the good people already. The memory of that fairy nurse, sliding her knife into his mouth and kneading Emer’s milk, was enough to make her heart go crosswise. They could come after you in the most unlikely places.