by Lisa Carey
Emer glares a warning at him, then flicks her gaze back toward Brigid. Brigid is holding her breath.
“We may have to visit that one soon enough,” Emer mumbles and lets, as she does often now, a smile creep into her one eye, burning blue and relentless, like the summer sky.
Three days later Emer volunteers Niall to help his uncle and father mend a currach, and asks Brigid if she wants to go on a walk. She’s pulling at the collar of her blouse, a nervous gesture Brigid has noticed—Emer hates to have fabric touching the hollow of her throat. Brigid excuses herself quickly and goes into her bedroom to fetch the pouch she keeps under the mattress, just in case.
They walk up the green road, a road that was formed by the tedious work of nuns, with a wall of piled slate on one side, ditches to divert flood, and a dense, level carpet of mossy grass. The road is littered with pellets of sheep dung, some glistening black, most faded to the color of hard dust. They walk all the way around to the cliffs, which are quiet today, the normal scream of wind tamed by the heat to a breeze.
Emer gets far too close to the edge. Brigid reaches for her arm, thinking Emer’s faulty peripheral vision is to blame. But Emer boldly links her fingers into Brigid’s and pulls her along.
A hidden path, no wider than a sheep’s hooves, steps down into the abyss of the cliff. For an instant it seems they will step off into the gliding sea birds, but then Brigid sees it, how it winds around and down into a hidden cave, a small room carved into the side of the sheer cliff. After a balancing act that leaves her dizzy and wobbling over the drop, they are inside a sanctuary almost half the size of her living room. Carpeted in moss, a natural hearth in the stone-layered earth, at its center a stream of water pours into a deep well. It is damp in here, cooler than the weather has been in weeks; the sun hasn’t passed its peak and fallen west, so the room has been in shadow since yesterday. The sound of fresh water seems louder than the salt waves crashing below. Emer settles herself onto mossy ground and reaches for the tin mug left in a natural shelf in the wall of the cliff. She dips it into darkness and lifts it again, taking a long drink and turning to offer it to Brigid. Lust, which seems to grow stronger every time they are together, rises off Emer like steam. She isn’t bothering to hide it now, she lets her hand linger a bit too long when handing over the mug. Brigid sees that Emer brought her here because she hopes that this will be the place they can finally grab hold of one another, far from anyone who might stop them. She takes the cup offered to her and tips it to her lips. The water is delicious, so cold it hurts her teeth. She empties the cup. It is the kind of water that makes you realize just how thirsty you have always been.
She kneels down, waiting for a sign, waiting for the warmth in her middle that tells her it has worked. But there is nothing. Only more thirst and the burden of what Emer expects next.
“You’ve heard the stories, then,” Emer says.
“Some of them.”
“Saint Brigid left it. They say the water never ceases to flow, same as her fire. The nuns were meant to watch over it, but once they left, the islanders didn’t see many miracles. They used it to bless babies, and soak the blue cloth that is said to be from her cloak, that sort of thing.
“In my grandmother’s time, they say a woman came all the way from America with her blind son. Saint Brigid was known for blind cures, you know, because of the time she plucked her own eye out to avoid getting married.
“She laid the boy down and let the water run over his face. They say he sat up, rubbed his eyes and said, ‘Mammy, look at the sea.’”
Brigid is quiet for a while. “That’s not the story my mother told me,” she says.
Emer shrugs. “There are others. Every family has one. Barren wombs filled up, dying children saved, curses of fairies reversed. They say the islanders got worried because every time they let some blow-in use the well it failed them for a while. Some thought we weren’t meant to share it. That Brigid herself wanted it only for those committed to staying here. We keep it hidden now. Took the cross away.”
“Why did you bring me?”
Emer shrugs and looks down. “It hasn’t worked in donkey’s years. I don’t see the harm.”
“Emer,” Brigid says quietly. She is sitting as far away as she can, the font of water between them, but Emer twitches, as if Brigid has just grabbed her.
“Isn’t this what you want?” Emer says.
“Yes,” she says.
“I want to give it to you.” Emer is trying to hide her hands beneath her thighs to stop them shaking.
“Thank you,” Brigid says, carefully. “I’m grateful to you, Emer.”
Emer shrugs, but she is blushing.
“What do you want it for?” she says. The silence is long, all Brigid can hear is water, beckoning, and Emer attempting to regulate her breath.
“I want to have a baby.”
Emer snorts. “Did no one let on you need a man for that?”
“I need a miracle first. I don’t have a womb.”
Emer makes that quick, dismissive noise in her throat. “That’s a tall order,” she says. She gestures to the water, and says, softer now, “Go on and see, then.”
Brigid takes the pouch from the pocket of her sweater, pulls the stained handkerchief out from within it, and opens the precious package on the smooth slate ledge that surrounds the pool of water. In all her years of midwifery, it wasn’t until the end that she delivered a child born with the caul, which promises, depending on who you ask, good fortune, second sight, a lifetime’s safety from drowning. The mother had no interest in such superstition, and had let Brigid keep it. Brigid herself, her mother once told her, had been born this way, entirely encased in a membrane that she had to puncture and peel off to pull Brigid, blue and tightly curled, into the world.
The caul is webbed and delicate, so old and dry that when she picks it up and lowers her palm beneath the water, it fills up for an instant, grows and stretches like the memory of a small skull, then breaks up and is absorbed so quickly it is as if it was never there at all. She barely has time to whisper her wish, swallow what she can, and feels suddenly foolish, heavy, burdened by hope she should have let wash away long ago.
“Were you born beneath the veil?” Emer says. For a moment, Brigid is confused, and thinks of the nuns of her girlhood, black curtains of cloth instead of hair. Then she realizes that Emer means the caul. She nods.
“Niall was as well,” Emer says. “Patch and Austin keep it in the currach. It’s meant to protect them at sea.”
“It isn’t mine,” Brigid says.
“It’s in your family, though. Your mother had it. Was she the one who told you to bring it here?” Brigid wants Emer to stop talking. As if her voice, like her hands, might drive away the promise swirling in the water.
“Don’t be thinking the caul comes from the saints. It’s the work of the good people. It’s like asking a priest the way to the brothel.”
A laugh bursts out of Brigid, loud and out of place in the still room. “I’m not fussy,” she says, “about where my miracles come from.”
“Some good it did me,” Emer sneers, as awkward and cruel as she gets. “My sister tried to heal me with this water after my eye went. Miracles don’t work for some of us.”
Emer looks miserable, so caught between her two selves, the one who hurts and the one who gets hurt, that Brigid flares at the sight of it. There is something about this cursed, awkward girl that her hands throb to fix. Like a wound gushing blood that she must stop before she thinks of what will happen afterward. She is suddenly, furiously, aroused. And so her wariness and secrets drowned out, she crawls her way across the moss, and kneels in front of Emer. She kisses her, straight on the mouth, gently until Emer’s lips open up, then relentlessly, pushing the grateful girl onto her back and pressing her into the soft ground. Her abandon is instantaneous, the clenched, furious, terrified Emer is gone, and every inch of her is reaching out like hungry flames, begging for the salve of Brigid’s hands.
After a while, Brigid reaches up to flick open the leather patch above her eye and Emer freezes. Brigid feels her switch from helpless to dangerous in an instant. Feels the surge of wretchedness that tries to draw her in. She deflects it with her own hand, threading their fingers and pulling Emer’s palm, trapping it between their breasts.
“It’s all right,” she whispers. The skin beneath the patch is bumpy and purple, a keloid scar raised up and obliterating what were once eyelids, which the doctors in town ignorantly sewed shut. In a better hospital, they would have fitted her for a glass eye. Brigid kisses the horrible spot gently, like a mother pretending to ease the wound of a child. Emer pulls her hand free and reaches for her, arching her hips and pulling her face down and kissing her hard, with teeth, with anger, with everything she tries to blame on everyone else.
Brigid gives her what she wants. She does everything that Emer has been imagining with slow, thorough reverence. She takes breaks to fill her mouth with the painfully cold well water and then let it flow from her lips into every place where Emer thirsts. They make furious love by the ancient drip of water, and Emer surprises her by turning it around, without asking for permission, as so many women have before. She dips her hand in the same water, and reaches inside Brigid, who grabs on, trapping Emer’s wrist in her hands so she will not pull away. She watches Emer’s face as the pleasure moves through her for so long it is almost painful, like water so cold you can barely swallow it, watches Emer’s eye widen in recognition as Brigid’s insides seize upon her hand.
Later she will tell herself she felt it, felt the instant life flared inside her, but really she is too lost in what she has started to notice what the water begins.
Chapter 12
Anam Cara
September 1959
“Where are you off to now?” Emer’s mother chides. “Not to that Yank’s again.”
“She needs help with the sheep,” Emer replies.
“Would you not have a mind to help your own sister?”
“Rose doesn’t need my help.” Her mother huffs at this.
“That woman’s turned you cross-eyed. You’ve no sense at all.”
“I don’t know what you’re on about.”
“Don’t you, now?”
“Would you not leave me be?” Emer mutters. She wants to scream it, to rage like a child pushed to her limit, but it would give her mother too much satisfaction.
She wishes they would all leave her alone. Rose, Austin, Patch, even Niall, or the fretting over him anyway. She misses the days when she could put the fire iron across his cradle, or wind him to her front with a long strip of flannel. When he is out of her sight, with his father, or at Rose’s house with the girls, Emer’s neck tightens with anxiety, fear rising and swarming in her throat like the memory of those bees. The moment she lays eyes on him, it breaks away. The possibility of it returning is always there, it crouches, ready to flare again when he runs outside of her limited vision.
Now she wants him to go somewhere else. Just for an afternoon, for a guaranteed hour instead of the few minutes that stretch into one, to wander off and know exactly how long he will be gone, so she can have this possibility, this promise of Brigid’s hands reaching for her again.
She hadn’t dared imagined that all the time she had wanted her, Brigid had felt the same. The thrill of it, that moment when Brigid moved into the pained space that separated them. It was like being handed the option to become someone else altogether.
When Rose and Emer were eleven, there was a young teacher in the island school who taught them about the druid Brigid alongside the traditional lessons about the saint. The druids believed that souls radiated around bodies, and when a person found their anam cara, soul friend, it meant that both their spirits began to flow together, like two streams meeting to fill a well. The teacher used this metaphor to partner the children up for studying their sums and spelling. Having a soul friend challenged you, she explained, awakened you to yourself so you could accomplish things you wouldn’t have been able to do on your own. They could remove what was weighing you down, like the peeling off of drenched clothes. Saint Brigid had Darla, and her postulants paired off together, because Brigid was not only a Christian saint. She carried with her stories that were more ancient than Jesus.
The girls in the school fell in love with this idea. During their dinner break they gathered behind the stone wall and reenacted the druid ceremony of friendship. Girls paired off, wound their shawls high around their necks, clasped hands and recited, with the utmost solemnity, “I honor your path, I drink from your well, I bring an unprotected heart to our meeting place.” They took water from the school’s well and sprinkled it on each other’s hair and pressed their lips together with the fervor they imagined they would one day kiss boys. Everyone wanted to be Rose’s anam cara, but since no one wanted to be Emer’s—they wouldn’t dare hold her hand and they shuddered at the thought of her chapped, angry mouth—Rose always chose her sister out of loyalty. They didn’t kiss or bring much enthusiasm when it was their turn, but there were only eight girls in the school, and Rose couldn’t afford to insult any of them by not playing along. The lads, who were the ones they were practicing for, played football in the field and paid them little mind.
The priest, who only got over to St. Brigid’s once a month if the weather allowed, sent that teacher packing when word of her irreverent lessons reached him. He was used to island superstition, and thought it harmless; he was Irish, after all. But it was one thing to hold on to whispered, fireside references to the good people, it was quite another to have a schoolteacher confusing the Christian saint with a pagan goddess.
Rose and Emer were both relieved when he put a stop to it. Rose because the whole business had seemed a bit sinful all along, and Emer because watching her classmates tilt toward each other’s lips made heat rise so furiously in her throat she imagined that, if anyone dared to kiss her, she would spew fire into their mouths. She despised the lot of them, and she resented that none of them wanted to be her partner; they all wanted Rose, and they blamed her even more for keeping Rose away from them.
She thinks of this the first time Brigid kisses her, pushing her back onto the ground beside the well and letting the holy water pass into her mouth. She had wanted one of those girls to kiss her, hard enough that it would push away the clog left inside her throat by the fairies. Later, when she watched Rose in the clochán with Austin, when she saw what followed kissing, she wanted that as well.
Now she wonders if Saint Brigid and her nuns were devout at all. She imagines them in the clocháns, not only praying and transcribing but also lifting off their habits and pressing against each other, letting themselves drop away into another woman’s mouth.
Worship has an entirely different meaning now.
Rose invites Brigid over for the Saturday evening meal. The weather is still hot and cloudless, the drought has left the islanders sunburned and with an unquenchable thirst they are not accustomed to. Such merciless sun usually bothers Emer’s eye, but it now seems fitting. The island is as ablaze and longing for release as she is.
Brigid has been to everyone’s house now, for tea or a meal or both, she knows every islander’s name and can’t walk the road without stopping to talk to a dozen people on the way. They all know she was a midwife and have started coming to her with small ailments. She stitches up Malachy’s hand after he slices it gutting fish, she sits and listens to women who have unexplained pain, or abnormally heavy bleeding, or urine infections. It seems just having tea with her makes most of the women feel better immediately.
“Are you healing them too, now?” Emer asks, but Brigid denies it.
“Sometimes just listening is enough.”
When Rose complains of a line of fiery pain shooting from her buttock to her calf, Brigid gives her a bottle of fragrant oil and tells her to have Austin massage a spot on her lower back.
“It will be fun for the both of you,” she says, and Rose, thoug
h she blushes, smiles knowingly in that way that used to make Emer furious. Now Emer finds herself, at odd moments, thinking of Brigid and smiling the same way.
The only one who won’t take help from her is Emer’s mother. Brigid suggests that daily exercise, shuffling around with her cane, would do a lot for her aches and, possibly, her mood.
“We’re the same age,” Brigid says. “We have a lot of life left.” Clodagh scorns this.
“Mind your business,” she spits. “No one invited you into mine.”
Instead of showing offense, Brigid treats Clodagh with extra veneration, and whenever she is over, she repeats Clodagh’s caustic comments as if they are useful and she’s dying to hear more. Their mother eventually goes silent, as she doesn’t enjoy hearing herself repeated.
Dinner that evening lingers on, normal bedtimes blurred by the two bottles of red wine Brigid brings as a gift. Emer is grateful that her husband is getting drunk on the mainland instead of here—he would drink more than the rest of them, more than the two glasses that make her edges go soft. She can’t imagine him managing to say a word to Brigid. Austin slags Brigid a bit about the usual things, but is mostly quiet while she and Rose jabber on about Saint Brigid.
“There wasn’t a man on the island then. Brigid wouldn’t allow it. Only the boys that were born to those unwed mothers. They say she wasn’t too fond of them, either. But once they were here, well, it wasn’t easy to go.”
“Why not?” Brigid asks.
“She burned all the currachs,” Rose says. “The original boats she came with, she and Darla set them alight in the cove so they wouldn’t be able to leave. They had to wait for a boat to come to them.”
“That’s either serious devotion,” Brigid says, “or madness.”
“It’s a lovely spot to be marooned, I’ve always said,” Rose says.
“I agree.” Brigid smiles.
“That’s not what you say in a storm,” Emer quips, but neither woman seems to hear her. Only Clodagh looks her over with that permanent scowl.