by Lisa Carey
“Did you let him?” Brigid looks at Niall. He grins. Emer grunts disgust. But she is deflating now, getting hold of herself. She backs off when she thinks she has gone too far. It’s these moments that affect Brigid the most—watching this caustic girl try to make herself more likable.
Brigid goes inside and puts her precious parcel on the table. Emer comes next, then Niall behind her. Brigid notices again how the two of them are like Irish weather in a room, ominous clouds followed by unexpected sunshine.
The fire and the kettle are already on. No one knocks here, they just call and poke their heads in if the top half of the door is left open for air. If Brigid’s not home, Emer will let herself in anyway.
Emer sets about making tea. The parcel on the table begins to vibrate and buzz, and Emer’s face grows white and pinched, her one pupil swelling with fear.
“What in the name of Saint Brigid is that?” she says hoarsely.
“Bees,” Brigid says, pouring fresh milk into her tea with a satisfying plop. “For my hive.”
“That’s what you went to town for? Were there not enough creepy crawlies here for you already?”
Emer is not letting the package out of her limited sight.
“I haven’t seen any honeybees,” Brigid says.
“There used to be,” Niall says. He has been encouraging the dog to jump up and put her paws on his shoulders, so they can dance. Emer snaps her head around and glares at him.
“Who told you that?”
“Auntie Rose.”
Emer makes the island gasp and silences herself with a large swallow of tea.
“Will you have honey, then?” Niall asks Brigid.
“That’s why I got them,” Brigid says. “Honey is the great cure-all. It’ll save us from the winter colds.”
“Doesn’t seem worth the work,” Emer says.
“Well, I have to keep busy, don’t I?” Emer looks away. She has remained stubborn about the well, but Brigid still pushes, even when she isn’t asking directly.
“May I help?” Niall says.
“You won’t go anywhere near those bees,” Emer says suddenly. “If you do, I’ll tell Himself to take the belt to ye.”
There is silence after this. Clearly this is not a threat she uses often by the betrayed look on Niall’s face. Brigid is a little disoriented, hearing Emer refer to her husband with the same mocking, disrespectful title Brigid’s mother once used for her father.
“It’s safe enough,” Brigid assures her. “There are ways of hypnotizing them, with smoke. I’ve never been stung and I’ve been doing it for years.”
Emer stands suddenly, scraping her chair back. Brigid is sure she is going to leave, to storm away in a rage that will remain unexplained, dragging her disappointed but loyal son behind her. Good riddance, Brigid thinks. After a few days off she is wondering why she puts up with this snarled-up fist of a woman at all. As if she is fighting an invisible set of arms, Emer lurches forward, knocking into the table, then plops back down in her chair. Though she is clearly furious or, Brigid thinks, terrified, something inside her cannot leave. She reaches for her tea and drinks it down, one long swallow, for strength. Brigid and Niall stare at her, as if waiting to see what some invisible puppeteer will make her do next.
Brigid feels a pull of guilt, as if her own arms are yanking the strings. She came here intending to escape this sort of thing, this confluence that she doesn’t invite but grows like a weed in the space that reaches between herself and other women. Emer needs something from her, something that Brigid is no longer willing or even able to provide. Not to another adult. She wants a baby, but instead she has these two misfits, hanging around and not telling her how to get it.
Niall comes over and puts his hand on Emer’s forehead, swiping the palm across like he’s wiping moisture from her brow. Then he leans in close, touching his forehead to hers. For the first time Brigid sees her smile. It fades quickly, it is not something meant for anyone else to see. But it is gorgeous, it transforms her, she looks more like her son than anything like herself. Something tugs on Brigid, low in her belly, and she has to look away to stop it from pulling her any more.
She pours more tea, and Emer nods slightly at the consolation.
After tea, Brigid heads out to her handmade hive to release the bees. Niall, at the instruction of his mother, climbs up on the stone wall, so he can see what she’s doing without getting too close. Emer keeps an eye on him from even farther away, leaning inside the back door, the bottom half of it shut tight.
Brigid sets the cage down on the ground. She has taken the paper wrapping off and can see the bees now, clustered in the corners of two mesh windows. She lifts the outer and inner cover off her hive. She takes three frames out to create a gap and lifts the travel cage, thrumming with what feels like fire, and begins to pry out with her knife the sugar can that plugs the opening. It moves up with difficulty, anchored by sticky wax. When she finally lifts the can, bees spill out the edges of the hole calmly, as if they can’t even fly. She reaches her hand inside the writhing hole and pulls out the small wooden box, no bigger than a tin of tobacco, covered in a thick coating of bees, like it has been dipped in them.
“These are the queen’s attendants,” Brigid calls up to Niall, shaking them gently off into the hive. Now she can see the mesh circle and the queen bee inside. “Right here is a plug of candy that the bees will slowly eat through to let her out.” She removes the wax on one end of the cage with her knife and uses it to secure the queen’s box to the side of one of the frames. The bees are starting to wake up now, to fly and buzz and swarm around her. The majority of them are still clustered together, intimately swarmed, crawling all over each other in massive clumps of what has always looked to Brigid like love.
She turns the cage over and gives it a few sharp shakes, and bees shower in as cleanly as flour into a bowl. She hears Niall draw his breath in wonder. A few vertical turns and thumps to empty the inner corners, then she replaces the frames, swipes the edges free of stragglers before putting the inner cover on, then upends the sugar can on top of the escape hole. She explains to Niall that this will feed the bees until they have built their combs, until they are settled and the queen is laying eggs and the workers are divided and given their duties.
“There are three types of bee,” she says to Niall. “The queen, the female workers and the male drones. The drones are only for fertilizing the queen. They don’t do anything else. They can’t even sting. It’s the women who rule the bee world.”
Niall nods, but it seems like he is not really listening to her. His eyes are unfocused, like he’s turned them off. He is listening to the bees. She sets another wooden box on top of the sugar can, and then the outer cover, the top of which she has covered with shiny metal, to pull the sun. She walks away to let them settle in, a small cloud of anxious guards circling the box, painted in the same deep yellow she used to transform her door. Most of the bees have stayed inside, snuggling down into their new home. She thinks of one of her first nights on the island, curling up with the heavy cotton sheet and pillowcases that Emer returned. She had hung them on Brigid’s clothesline, so that although they were slightly damp, they were infused with fresh sea air and sunshine.
One little rebel tries to sting her as she walks away. But it changes its mind because as it lands on her neck, it is overwhelmed by a feeling of dopey peace and forgets its intended attack. She brushes it gently away and it flies back to the hive. She wasn’t completely honest with Emer, she still gets stung. But she has grown immune to it. It is a pinch, nothing more, the swelling and pain that follow for others hasn’t happened to her since she was a girl.
While she explains to Niall how she will harvest the honey, Emer makes fresh bread at the table, with such violent arm movements the dog retreats outside to avoid her. She looks as if she’s trying to calm herself down after witnessing some violation. Brigid watches Niall go over and put a hand on her arm, which helps her to calm her jerky movements and
take a breath and let whatever is trapped inside her—anger and misery and fear—move to the edges, like the outer ring of disturbed bees, so that her core can get on with its work.
Over the next week, Niall finds ways to come alone to see the bees. It is not easy for him to get away from his mother, Brigid knows, she is the nervous, hovering type. He convinces her to let him bring his father and uncle their midday meal—bottles of tea wrapped in woolen socks, scones and thickly buttered brown bread, boiled eggs wrapped tightly together in a cloth parcel. There is too much work now, at the height of the summer, for the men to come home for lunch. He promises to sit and eat with them, but instead leaves the food and walks the wrong way to Brigid’s house, while his mother is occupied with Rose and all his girl cousins. Brigid always has candy for him, and a lovely concoction of warmed milk and honey, so sweet it leaves a pleasant ache in his mouth.
She brings him to the hives and pulls out the frames, showing him how quickly the workers have established their hexagonal wax city, where they separate the jobs of tending to young from producing and storing food. Niall’s effect on the bees is similar to her own—he soothes them into sleepiness. Neither of them needs smoke to hypnotize the bees into submission, even while taking honey. Brigid knew this already about Niall, that he would be safe and useful, and that Emer had no need to worry. Still, he makes her promise not to tell his mother. She does this easily. She has been accused before, because she is not a mother, of taking children too seriously. Of keeping their secrets, as though she were a child herself. It is not childishness, but longing that compels her. She can pretend they are hers, for as long as it takes to tell a secret. Just as she is distracting herself with this exercise in life—helping bees make a home so they can make more bees and flowers—Niall is a distraction from the urge she has to go back to crawling across the wet ground howling with need. Niall is a great help to her, another pair of hands for the tricky pulling apart and putting together of the intricate puzzle of the hive, and he calms her down. His mother, Brigid thinks, worries too much.
They have the hive open when Emer catches them. She runs all the way there, after Fiona reports that Niall is not where he is supposed to be. In fairness, Rua tries to warn them, but they don’t stop to notice her slinking, whining performance, too entranced by the humming, sweetly fragrant bees. Amid them, it is impossible to hear the back door or the squelch of Emer’s bare feet across the damp grass. Brigid notices the bees’ reaction before she even sees Emer there.
They start to swarm. Lifting out of the hive in massive sheets, forming, by some complex communication of pheromones, a single-minded cloud. It hovers above them for a moment, awaiting instructions. Brigid thinks they are leaving, because the only time she ever sees this behavior is when the hive gets crowded and the older bees decide to move on to let the younger bees flourish. Niall looks up at the cloud with a distracted smile on his face, cocking his head as if trying to decipher something beneath what Brigid realizes, too late, is an angry thrum. The dog barks. Emer shrieks her son’s name.
Then he is gone, swallowed whole by the swarm, which has morphed to resemble the shape of a boy. Emer is running to him.
For a beat, Brigid thinks he will be all right. She thinks they have covered him with the same sleepy silence that they sometimes cover her hands. Then Niall begins to scream.
Emer is trying to wipe the bees off him, like sluicing water from hair after a swim. Any part of him she uncovers is quickly swallowed up again. Brigid, knocking her aside, ducks and pushes her shoulder into his hips, bending him in half and lifting him off the ground. The bees are stinging her now. She runs for the well, a thick stream of water that runs over rocks and collects in a stone pool, before falling off a small cliff to the ocean. Not the well she’s been hoping to find, but large enough to submerge a bee-covered boy. She lays him down in it and holds him under the flow by lying down on top of him, the icy water seeping through her shirt to assault her breasts and stomach. The bees rise again, what is left of them, making their way back to the hive. The rest, dead, a thousand of them, float in the water and cling to Niall’s clothing like black and yellow moss.
When she pulls Niall from the water, he is already swollen, his neck huge, his lips deformed, his breath an inefficient desperate wheeze. Brigid lays him on dry rock, opens his mouth and clears it of the bees that have made their way inside.
“What’s happening?” Emer says. The sound coming from Niall’s throat is horrible.
“He’s allergic,” Brigid says and she shakes her head at her own stupidity. “Did you know he was allergic?”
Emer is beyond answering her, she is reaching for him and Brigid loses patience, knocking her away for the second time. Brigid spreads her large hands over Niall’s throat.
It is painfully familiar, the pull that ransacks her, the distinctly sensual rupture she had sworn she would leave behind.
Then she is being sick quietly onto a cluster of bright yellow lichen, and Emer is holding Niall, wet and shaking with fear, his lips and throat and face back to a reasonable size. Niall holds his bare arm out and brushes stingers, which gather like wet stubble into clumps he flicks onto the grass.
“You said you wouldn’t let any harm come to him,” Emer says, when Brigid has stopped retching.
“I’m sorry,” Brigid says. She looks up expecting daggers, but the way Emer is looking at her is not what she expected. Another thing she’d thought she’d left behind.
“Some touch,” Niall says, smiling and pulling Brigid’s gaze away from his mother’s, inserting himself between them, clean as a knife.
The three of them sit for a while, until the bees that are left settle down, until Niall and Brigid begin to shiver from the wet weight of their clothing and Emer, no longer in a frenzy of buzzing fear she arrived with, suggests tartly that it is time they go inside.
Back at the house, they won’t leave. Brigid is spent, irritable, she wants to be alone. But they hover around her, Emer makes her a plate of smoked fish and brown bread and heats water for more tea. Niall rolls around on the floor with the dog. Brigid wishes briefly that the bees had attacked Emer—the one who angered them, she is sure of it—instead. And that she hadn’t interfered.
Emer sits down across from her, watching her eat. She is deciding whether to say something. Brigid silently encourages her not to.
“They took my eye,” she says.
“Who did?” Brigid doesn’t want to know this, but she can’t back away now.
“The bees,” Niall says.
“No,” Emer says. “The fairies.”
“I’m sorry.” Brigid doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say. She is not hungry now and she is suddenly so exhausted she wants to push her tea aside and put her head right down on the table.
With a quick, whispery argument, Emer sends Niall out to fetch water, reminding him to stay away from the bees. She watches him from the small window.
“That’s what I have,” Emer says. “What those bees tried to do. It’s in my hands.” Brigid doesn’t want to talk about Emer’s hands. She doesn’t even want to look at them.
“It can’t touch you,” Emer says. “Same as with Niall.”
Brigid feels hot, like something is rising out of her, it’s all she can do to keep herself in her chair. Part of her wants to stand up and knock this girl over, the other part wants to clench her vicious hand and lead her into the other room, press her down on the bed. She never should have let them in.
“They say your grandmother was taken.” Brigid refuses to look up, but she is listening. “By the fairies, like. Your mother was the child of that changeling. Her own father tried to drown her and she washed back up again, good as new. They called her a witch. The islanders said it, there was some test they had, and she passed. Or failed, depends on how you look at it. She left the island as a girl, got away from them and nobody saw how.”
Brigid can’t swallow anymore. There is something, large as life, lodged in her throat.
/> “They say she couldn’t die,” Emer says. “That’s the story about her. That she was touched by the fairies and was immortal because of it.” Brigid flinches thinking of the bruises and cuts on the flawless flesh of her mother. A lifetime of attempts that were healed, one by one.
“Oh, she died all right,” Brigid says. “Eventually.”
Emer comes back from the window, sitting down across from Brigid. She puts her hands on the table between them. They both look at them. Work roughened, red and peeling, but still, underneath that, they are as young as a girl’s. They don’t have the loose skin of Brigid’s, youth starting to let go its tight grip on bone. Brigid puts her hands in her lap, pressing her fists, an old habit, to the lowest, emptiest part of her belly.
“If you’ve the healing in your hands,” Emer says. “What do you want Saint Brigid’s well for?”
But Niall comes in and stops them from sharing any more.
Brigid has a recurring dream. In the dream she stands in front of a mirror and sees in her reflection something she never sees while awake. An absence, a mildness, which smoothes her features and makes her young, younger than she’s ever been because even as a child her face was burdened. In the dream her face has no fear, no regret, no desire. Absence and peace. Despite the warnings of her mother, and now Emer, Brigid believes that this island is where she will find her dream face, a peace that has eluded her for her whole life. That with enough tea and turf and walking in wind that screams in her ears, her face might settle into the one from her dream, where she is no longer torn apart by feelings of others, free from desire and all its disappointments. Where the slack failure of her belly might smooth away and leave her, where the memories of what she took for years, from countless women who trusted her and laid back while she pulled them inside out, will fade into the mild, blameless blue of ocean and sky. Where what she has been can disappear so the thing she wants has room to become. She crawls into the stone huts of nuns and thinks of their sacrifice, their letting go, those who lived with nothing and cherished it. She’d like to be empty. She’d like to be emptied of it all and feel as if she is full. She’d like to make room for what she wants to come next.