The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  For years Emer held out hope that Patch would take them off the island. Take them to another part of Ireland where there was a lighthouse and a town and the land held no memory of what she owed it. But Patch made a bollocks out of all that. Drank on duty and let the light snuff out, causing a fatal collision of vessel and rock.

  It’s the evacuation Emer has pinned all her hopes on now. Perhaps, if they all leave and give the island back, the fairies will let her go. Instead of using the land and the sea to reach out like a long arm and drag her back every time she almost gets away.

  They’ve been preparing for the bonfire for weeks, all the island rubbish collected from where it has lain in their gardens for the last year and moved to the field next to the small church. Furniture broken or rotted with damp, cardboard and paper, plastic containers, building materials, fence posts, weeds and old fishing nets, an old rotted door with a ship’s window at the center. Once, the fire was used as a religious ceremony for burning broken rosary beads and old scapulars, but in later years it has become the easiest way to rid themselves of modern rubbish.

  Emer puts Niall down for a rest after tea and wakes him again at eleven. It is still dusk, gray-blue sky clinging to light that lasts for all but a few hours this time of year. They walk up the road and stop in to collect Brigid. When they pass Desmond’s hay field, a piercing croaky cry rises out of the night silence. Brigid is startled.

  “It’s the corncrake!” Niall says, and starts calling back to it, imitating the repetitive raspy calls.

  “I’ve been wondering what that was,” Brigid says. Niall tells her, as if he’s conducting a schoolroom, that it’s a bird that only comes to the island in the summer, and croaks until it convinces a female to settle down underneath the nettles . . .

  “It’ll keep you up all night if it decides to nest there,” Emer says. “We had one in our field last summer and I nearly went mad from the racket.”

  “It does sound like an alarm clock you can’t shut off,” Brigid says. “But I’ve always slept through mine.”

  “What’s an alarm clock?” Niall asks. Brigid laughs and explains.

  Emer can’t stand the corncrakes. They cry all night, rhythmic sirens that pierce her brain, and she can still hear the echo long after dawn when it finally rests.

  “Nana says they’re the voices of fairies that have failed in their mischief,” Niall says brightly. Brigid chuckles, but Emer crosses herself.

  The men are coming across the fields with torches; Emer can see the fire moving at the level of their heads. The torchbearers, who have brought the fire from their own hearths, converge on the pile and light it all together, their individual fires rushing toward each other’s with a whoosh of paraffin oil. The men gather around the barrel of porter they rowed over that morning from the mainland. They have brought their own pint glasses from home. They call out friendly greetings to Brigid, who smiles easily at them.

  Brigid seems to make a decision then, looking at the women gathered together, handing out sandwiches by the fire. She walks over before asking Emer and sticks her big hand out to Rose, bold and Yank as she can be.

  “Thank you for the scones,” she says, and Rose beams as if they’ve been friends for ages.

  “Brigid and Mary be with you,” Rose says to Brigid, and then their mother is offering her working hand, and Kathleen and Nelly and Margaret and Geraldine, and their aunties and cousins and grandmothers, and the next thing Emer knows they are all smiling and laughing. They ask if she is sorted in the house, as if they haven’t ignored her and begrudged the time their husbands have given her for the last seven weeks. Emer stands back from it all. The children are lighting sticks and throwing them into the air. The teenagers are gathered in a clump, devising plans to pinch drink when the men aren’t watching. She could have told Brigid weeks ago that this reception was only a matter of time, that as soon as it was clear that she wouldn’t give up after a week, all she needed to do was approach them in their own territory. Mass would have done. They were harder to reach than the men, and kept to themselves more, but they were polite enough once you knew them. She can see the look of approval flitting between the wives. Brigid is sound enough. Not a hint of the mad family she came from. They can put aside the stories and stop wondering if she means any harm. She will never become one of them, she will never be far from suspicion, but they will let her believe she is.

  Emer had wanted Brigid to herself. With one handshake, she belongs to all of them, and Emer finds herself on the perimeter again, dropping there naturally, like a coal spat aside and burning apart from the fire.

  Halfway through the first barrel of porter, Malachy takes out his fiddle, Seamus the squeezebox and Michael Joe the bodhran and the music starts up, jigs and reels and hornpipes, women and children dancing in the flickering light of the fire.

  Then they start hooting and demanding that Austin sing. Emer backs away, sitting down on a wall away from the heat of the flames. She can’t stand too close when Austin sings. He has a low, powerful voice that every generation of men in his family is known for. Emer hates her sister the most when she thinks of the moments Rose has that voice to herself, late at night in the darkness of their bed.

  Patch’s voice, when he chooses to use it, is high and grating, often so unbearable in the house that she fakes one of her headaches to get him to stop talking. He is happily drunk like the rest of them, but he will be the one to keep drinking when the others are done, keep drinking as long as he can still swallow. He will sleep outside, by the withering bonfire. He always does.

  After twelve verses lamenting the Irish emigration to America, Austin asks Brigid to give them a song, and instead of blushing and waving them away, as Emer expects her to, she obliges.

  A stór mo chroí, when you’re far away

  From the home you will soon be leaving

  ’Tis many a time by night and by day

  Your heart will be sorely grieving

  The stranger’s land may be bright and fair

  And rich in its treasures golden

  You’ll pine, I know, for the land long ago

  And the love that is never olden.

  This leaves Austin hooting and smiling as though he’s poured her out of the keg himself. The women fall all over her again, praising her voice, which is tuneful, if rough. Ah, go on, you’re a great woman, altogether.

  A stór mo chroí. Treasure of my heart. One of the many endearments Emer shares with Niall that are meant for lovers. She wonders if Brigid even knows what it means.

  The jigs and reels start up again, and the islanders take turns leaping over the edges of the fire. Brigid has a go, using her long legs to clear the flames with power. Emer has never jumped through, not even for luck before her wedding. Islanders say you can tell a couple’s future by the way the flames leap. Austin and Rose made the thing blaze after them like a roar of approval before they were married. Emer imagines had she and Patch gone through it, the fire would have sputtered out in disappointment, or worse, lit her up like a dry stick, as the dolt of her fiancé stood by and watched her eaten up into the summer night’s air.

  Emer is so preoccupied with watching Rose and Austin and Brigid, she forgets about watching Niall. She sees the other children first, giggling and pointing at something on the other side of the fire.

  Niall is walking toward the bonfire. Not to light a stick or jump over the edge, but as if he means to enter straight into the heart of it. His eyes are flashing, the same color as the flames that reach to fold him in. Emer is too far away to grab him herself, so she screams.

  Everyone stops what they are doing and looks at her, when she meant for them to look at Niall. Only Brigid seems to know why she screamed. She steps up quickly to Niall and, knowing better than to touch him, just puts herself between his determined eyes and the fire and says his name softly. To Emer’s surprise he stops, looks at her, his pupils pulsing as he tries to focus on something other than what he was seeing in the fire.

 
; “May I have this dance?” Brigid says and Niall blushes, mumbles a no thank you and hurries to Emer’s side. Now they are all looking at both of them, women tsking and men shaking their heads, and Niall presses his face into his mother’s middle, trying to hide.

  “I’m sorry, Mammy,” he says. She squeezes him tight, not trusting her voice to sound kind. Emer would like to put her hands on everyone, to grip them all until they can feel what she feels, until they are pulled into the dread that rises to choke her every day. But she has to keep her hands soft to stroke the hair of her son.

  As soon as Niall learned to talk, Emer quizzed him mercilessly, asking him if he heard the fairies, heard the music, saw the lights. He was so eager to please her that he often said yes, he could hear music. When she appeared alarmed he said he hadn’t heard a thing, and they would wind each other into a frenzy with Emer barking questions and Niall trying to answer what she wanted to hear. He’d end up in tears and Emer would feel like she was being choked by the grip of her fear.

  She would have to stop herself then, from lashing out, from shaking him silly, so afraid he would be stolen from her that she was almost willing to hurt him if it made him understand.

  Now that he is six, he knows the correct answers, or at least the ones that make her eyes stop spinning in her head. He knows the rules. Never take the food they offer. Don’t be tempted to dance to fairy music, but run away, run as fast as you can in the other direction. Run to your mother.

  “I will never go with them,” he has said, so many times, a small hand placed into the tension of his mother’s forehead. All he needs to do is put his hand there and the headaches that once plagued her for whole days vanish in an instant. Only he can make her smile, wiping the look of pure terror away from his mother’s face. But he can’t take away the fear she has every day, that it will be her last day with him.

  After a time the ceili resumes. Austin, a bit worse for drink now, is dancing slowly and shamelessly with Rose, who smiles as she closes her eyes and rocks against him. The older women say a few prayers for the crops and drop in a headless statue of Brigid and a plastic rosary that burns blue. The men will spread the ash over the fields in the morning, and will sober up in time to do it, albeit without moving their heads too quickly. Except Patch, of course. He won’t recover for days.

  Brigid comes over to stand next to Emer and Niall.

  “So, what do the women have to say for themselves?” Emer asks. Brigid’s jaw tightens.

  “I’ve been invited for tea,” she sighs. They dodged her questions about the well, so.

  As a consolation, and because she feels grateful for her quick reflexes with Niall, Emer tells Brigid to take some of the embers for her fire.

  “When you move in or build a new house, you light the fire from a neighbor’s or with the midsummer embers. Every fire on the island is said to come from Saint Brigid herself. We never let them go out. It brings luck to the house.” Emer pauses, then adds dismissively, “So they say.”

  “Is it the superstition that bothers you, or the optimism?” Brigid says, but so quietly to Emer that it is like a secret between them, rather than ridicule.

  Brigid takes a tin mug from one of the women. Emer sees what happens next, and though everyone else is standing there, she seems to be the only one who notices. Brigid scoops a serving of glowing embers out of the fire. She fumbles a bit with the mug, drops some coals and picks them up with her bare hand and puts them back in. Not quickly, like someone avoiding a burn. She grips her palm around bright orange coals and holds them like they are nothing. Then she starts, and looks up, as if she has forgotten herself and is worried someone has seen. She looks straight at Emer and freezes for a moment, waiting, to see if Emer will react.

  Normally, at the hint of anything so otherworldly, Emer would snatch her child and run in the other direction. But the fear that usually grips her neck is not there. Instead there is a little thrill that blooms larger when she sees Brigid wipe her fingers on her skirt, and the fingers come away clean, rough from house and farm work but not even slightly burned.

  They walk back together, a mug of glowing midsummer between them, Niall half-asleep and stumbling, resting his face against her hip. When they say good-bye, Emer, in an unaccustomed gesture, can’t stand the suspense, so she reaches away from Niall to squeeze a good-bye into Brigid’s free hand. It is the same temperature as her own, the fingers bony, the skin a bit looser from age, calluses on the edges and softness at the center, a hand just as disappointing as any other she has touched in her life.

  Her neck tightens at the thought that she has been seeing things, inventing magic where it doesn’t exist. That she and her son are alone in this, after all.

  Then Brigid squeezes her fingers, and winks at her.

  Chapter 7

  Beehive

  July 1959

  Once the house is sorted, Brigid builds the hives. She asks Malachy in June, but by the time the timber and wire and tools arrive, July is half gone. She builds the hive herself, impressing the men with her easy wielding of hammer and saw. She’s done this before. She sands and paints the outside, carves inverted handles into the sides. She takes a lot of care, the men say to her, building a useless box. She smiles and ignores them, and assembles frames around squares of wire netting. Ten of them fit snugly together into the box, sliding in on perfectly spaced, painstakingly sanded grooves.

  She makes a special trip off the island to collect the bees. She doesn’t trust the invisible handoff that brings her everything else, from tools to towels to soap to books, to ferry something so precious and alive. She imagines it being left on the pub counter for two weeks, which happened once to her bag of apples. It costs her a small fortune to be driven to an apiary outside Galway and spend the night in a hotel. The next day, she holds the buzzing cage wrapped in brown paper and string on her lap for the lift back and the currach over. Malachy and Michael Joe row her the entire nine miles back to the island. The dark waves out at sea toss them so high in the air that when they finally fall it is as if Brigid has lost half her body in the process, the middle of her hooked by the sky as the rest drops back down to the plank seat. She hugs the cage with one hand and the seat with the other, trying not to dwell on the image of it flying overboard, dark water gulping down her precious box of life.

  When she walks to her house, the newly-painted yellow door beckoning all the way uphill, Brigid is not surprised to find Emer and Niall waiting for her. They come almost every day the weather allows it, so much that she often welcomes the torrential days where she can hear herself think again in her own house. It doesn’t seem to occur to Emer that Brigid might crave solitude. Now that she has been to almost everyone’s house for tea, Brigid knows there is no one on the entire island besides her who lives alone. People live with their children, their parents, their grandparents, their widowed sisters. Beds are flattened and full, siblings grow up sleeping to the rhythm of the others’ breath. She has already deduced from Niall’s comments that he and Emer sleep together, Patch banished to the hearth bed, a cushioned corner made up in every island house, for extra children and in-laws, right beside the fire.

  Brigid still sleeps every night with the dog. Emer discovered this once while tidying the bedclothes.

  “Ach, the dog’s been in this,” she said and Brigid made a crack about doing what she needed to keep warm. The look on Emer’s face was as bad as if she’d said she was having sex with Rua. Niall was delighted and tried to sneak the pig into their bed the same night, which Emer tossed back outside with a squeal.

  He has a way with animals, Niall does. The pig, which he has named Cabbage, half the size of the dog already, follows him everywhere. He can milk the most resentful cow, hypnotize sheep into submission when his father needs to shear them. While Brigid gets pecked gathering her breakfast each morning, her hens allow Niall to pick them up, and they nest in the crook of his arm, cooing softly while he strokes the retracted feathery mound of their necks. He pockets their
small, warm eggs as if they are jewels. Fur-matted cats hopping with fleas follow hopefully behind him on the road. And Rua, who still distrusts every other islander, especially Emer whose disapproving eye sends her tail curling between her legs, will actually play with Niall, play with the clumsy abandon of a puppy who has not yet been kicked.

  This affinity for animals goes along with Brigid’s general impression of Niall, that he is otherworldly, not fully with them, one ear halfheartedly listening to people while the other is attending to a world no one else can see. He is more than dreamy and self-absorbed. For much of the time, Brigid feels coldness around him, an empty pocket of air, as if he is not there at all. As if the life inside him has gone somewhere, and what is left is only pretending to be a boy.

  She wonders if Emer knows the cause of this, but hasn’t yet tried to ask. It is clear that something about him distresses her. She is always calling Niall back to her side, as if too many minutes away from her risk him not returning at all. Niall hasn’t reached the age yet where this will bother him; he is still happy to reassure her.

  Brigid is already too fond of Niall, but Emer is more difficult to relax around. Though she is used to Emer’s one-eyed scowl of disapproval, her greeting today borders on hostile.

  “We didn’t know you were going over,” Emer says.

  “I didn’t know I needed to report my every move to you,” Brigid says. She keeps her voice light and winks at the boy. Niall has knelt down to kiss the face of Rua, who met her at the quay, wiggling herself into a frenzy, but now looks beaten down by Emer’s tone. Niall tries very hard to make up for his mother.

  “You might give a person a bit of warning,” Emer says. “That dog of yours followed Niall home and howled at the door to be let in.”