by Lisa Carey
“Mammy,” Niall scolds. “You broke it.” Austin whistles, mocking his boldness.
The accusation catches her throat and she wants to scream something at him. She picks up the pieces while Niall leans into his uncle and learns a hitch knot.
She cannot tell how much her son remembers about last night or even if he understands it. She wants to ask him, and when Austin goes out to milk the cows she says “Niall?” Her voice comes out strange and angrier than she means it to and he pretends not to hear her. She doesn’t have the energy to say it twice.
She makes breakfast for the three of them, then dinner, then evening tea, Austin showing no sign of leaving, like the weather that refuses to lift. It is as though he remembers nothing from the night before, or he has turned it into something else, and believes she actually wants him here. It’s like they are pretending that she and Niall belong to him now. She is too afraid of him, of herself, of what still lurks around them in the house, to say otherwise.
She thinks of her sister over on Muruch, past the excitement of staying now, anxious to get her children home, to be crowded in her own house rather than someone else’s. Missing her husband. She wonders if they’ll pull at each other’s clothes as soon as they can, hungry for each other the way that has never seemed to wane, and if she will smell something different on him, some guilt, some remnant of her sister’s wet fear.
She wonders also if Brigid will smell it on her, the next time she puts her face between her legs. Whether there will be evidence of betrayal, of that invited assault.
They spend another night alone, sitting at the fire like an old married couple while Niall falls asleep in her arms. There is no more drink, between them they finished the jug the night before. Austin smokes a pipe and minds the turf fire and cleans up the dishes from their tea. Niall’s breathing is clear now, his chest has lost the wheeze it had yesterday, his nose crusted rather than runny. She holds him against her, asleep he seems not much heavier than when he was a toddler. No words pass between them for a long time.
For an instant, she thinks Austin is chuckling over some thought in his head, but realizes, horrified, that his shoulders are shaking and the broken, eruptive noise is him weeping. He is crying and trying not to. She looks at him, narrowing her eyes.
“What are you on about,” she hisses, angry and bitter and fully herself again.
“What have we done?” he says. “This will break her heart.”
Emer almost can’t speak over what rises in her throat. “Neither of us will be telling Rose,” she whispers. “Have you gone mad?”
“I don’t know,” Austin blubbers. “It won’t happen again,” he promises.
Emer looks away. She is not sure what combination of man and changeling was in her bed last night, but Austin is himself again. He is no longer attractive to her, and she is newly afraid of him, but still, there is a stab of disappointment that he will give her up that easily, with relief really, and that perhaps none of it had been about any desire for her at all. And this, after all, almost seems the worst of it. The way she fooled herself.
“There’s something vile in you,” he says in that deep, bruising voice. In a moment he will go away, out into the rain and wind, leaving her alone with the echo of what they have done.
“It wasn’t me did that all by myself,” she retorts. But she is no longer sure.
In the morning they all come back, the men worse for two days of drink and dancing, the women smiling and full of news and tea and packages wrapped from the shop. Austin pulls Rose out of the currach onto the slip, after she hands him the two toddlers that he turns and passes to Emer. He swings her around in a hug, hiding the look on his face in her neck, and she laughs and pounds his arm, embarrassed but delighted. Really, she’s delighted by anything and everything he does and always has been, Emer can see this now. She wouldn’t believe anything dark in him, even if it were her own sister who swore it. Brigid, though she hasn’t seen Emer in days, slips away in the commotion and by the time Emer looks for her she is halfway up the road with the dog. No hello, no handshake, no hint that later she will make this better, make the last two days go away as easily as a bee sting. Emer is left to follow her family home.
Niall tells Patch, at teatime that evening while Patch is telling her how much he got for the sheep.
“Mammy was taken,” he says suddenly, and Emer stops chewing, the potato growing cold on her tongue.
“What’s that?” Patch says distractedly, annoyed at the interruption.
“Mammy was taken. She broke the mug. Austin showed me the hitch. And we made up the eels.”
“Are you ill?” he says to Emer. She shakes her head. Mumbles something about turning her ankle and dropping the mug.
“Show me the eels, so,” he says to Niall. Niall reveals the wilted, reeking pile behind the curtain. Patch promises they will fish with them in the morning.
When she puts Niall to bed that night, he asks her to lie down with him, and he curls with his back to her belly so they fit together like wooden spoons.
“Did he steal you?” he whispers. Emer shakes her head against his hair.
“I’m all right,” she says. “You mustn’t speak of it. I’ll be angry if you do.” This is the biggest threat she can think of. He hates for her to be angry, and will do anything if there is the slightest chance of it.
“I won’t,” he says. “Don’t use the angry voice, Mammy. Use your other voice.”
“All right, a chuisle,” she says. She sings to him softly, he smiles and wiggles around contentedly. He never stops moving, not even in bed, some part of him is always twitching, wiggling, reaching out. She holds him so tight for a moment he complains and she loosens her grip.
“Settle down,” she murmurs. He tries. His wiggling slows to a minimum. He’s almost gone.
“Was that even Austin on you, Mammy?” he asks, just before he falls asleep.
Faces rush at her, first Patch then Brigid, one looking like he wants to die, the other aroused, inviting, but still, underneath it, a well of regret. She thinks of Austin’s eyes, lit from behind by a consuming fire that was all too familiar. She sees now that there is little difference between the times she has lain with Patch, the secret sessions with Brigid, and this, this violation that isn’t one, this cruelty that she asked for, that she invited to penetrate her as surely as she asked for the abuse of those bees.
The fairies came in. She let them in, with the drinking, the music, the flirtation, she left the door wide open. It must have been fairies, or her own cruel hands. It couldn’t be Austin, the boy Rose married, who had done such a thing. Could it?
In sleep her son is perfectly, frighteningly still, like his spirited self is gone and left a husk in its place. Niall falls away before she can say she isn’t at all sure who it was—a cruel man or a changeling. Or which of them—Austin or herself—was to blame.
PART TWO
The Stolen Child
The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving, our eyes are agleam,
Our arms are waving, our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing band,
We come between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the hope of his heart.
The host is rushing ’twixt night and day,
And where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
“The Hosting of the Sidhe,” William Butler Yeats
Chapter 14
Corncrake
October 1959
Even before Emer tells her about Austin, on the days where their o
nly opportunities to touch are snatched, breathless moments, Brigid spends the nights afraid of what she has risked. She imagines Emer remembering the Catholic girl she is and confessing to her husband or her sister. Brigid was a fool to gamble this way, on an island where they can take the hope from her in the blink of an eye. She can hear her mother’s voice warning her not to underestimate them. The islanders called her a saint when she could help and a devil when she couldn’t.
She will avoid Emer then, engaging Niall, tending the hives, gathering honey or sketching together, so that he won’t leave them alone. She watches Emer move from annoyed, to frightened, to dejected, her eye welling up at the possibility that what she came for will not be offered again. Longing rises off her—Brigid feels it because the same thing is rising out of herself—as furious and lustful as a swarm of ravenous bees.
Her desire for Emer surprises her. She hasn’t felt like this in a long time. This willing to lose herself, to feel like you have no choice but to surrender to their hands. No matter how hard she tries to keep Emer at a distance, Brigid always gives in, and makes love to her with a violent abandon that frightens her afterward. As though despite Emer’s inexperience, her deep, almost childish need, Brigid is actually the young one, so desperate and manic in love that she is unable to see past the next encounter.
Brigid can see what happened on Emer’s throat even before Emer gathers the courage to tell her. Not a bruise exactly, or a wound, but the suggestion of one, a memory, cowering at the hollow in her neck. Something with a mind of its own that waits, deliberating its next move. It has been there since the day they came back from Muruch, after three days trapped on the wrong island, where Brigid was queasy and claustrophobic and yearning for her small cottage, her loyal dog. Regretting what she started with this girl who is a snarled and twisted bramble of longing and bitterness, who can still drag love across Brigid’s body in spite of herself.
“While you were away something happened. I did . . .” Emer changes course. “Austin took . . . em, we had relations. Austin and myself.”
Brigid’s limbs are filling with a heaviness that seems more than physical, and she wants to lie down, go outside and sink into a rough cushion of heather and fall asleep in the sun. But she forces herself to look at Emer instead. There is a long beat where she has no idea what she will say next. She has a cruel instinct to get angry with her. To use it as an excuse to end this affair that has become too much for the both of them.
“What happened?” Brigid says. It all comes out of Emer in a jumbled rush, she skips from end to beginning, from shame to accusation and back again, a story where the motivation, and the instigation, is never fully clear. The truth escapes her, just as she thinks she has grabbed hold of it.
“I didn’t intend it,” Emer says. She is fighting tears, her face red from holding her breath, her one eye widened, expanding the socket as if by doing so she can keep the tears from falling out. The first tear will be like a plug, a stone at the mouth of a well, and she will not be able to stanch the flow once it begins.
“It’s not always intention that ignites these things,” Brigid says. Emer shakes her head.
“That’s not what I mean. I’ve fancied it for as long as I can remember. But something else happened. I was willing enough. I intended to kiss him. But then something turned and I tried to stop but it was too late.”
“Tried to stop him?”
“Tried to stop . . .” Emer can’t decide which pronoun to insert. The story will continue to warp and change in her mind, as she inserts variations, myself, it, them, us. It will go round and round in her, and she will not be able to halt it by blurting out only one.
“Emer,” Brigid says carefully, because Emer is trapped inside something that requires care. It’s like coming slowly upon an injured animal and trying to help it before it bolts. “What do you mean?”
“I told him not to do it. I told him we should stop. I told him to think of Rose.”
“You told him no?” She sees Emer searching her mind, shaking it, trying to find the clean memory through the thick fog of recollection.
“I did. More than once.”
“He forced you.”
“Not exactly,” she says. Emer sits forward, she wants to shorten the space between them so her words won’t blow away, so her explanation can be caught and understood. “Something came over him. Like a fairy stroke. I might have been the one to put it in there.”
“I doubt that,” Brigid bites. “It’s called rape. What a bastard.” But she stops when she sees Emer’s shoulders drop even more, and the shaking of the hand she raises to her neck.
How many girls has she seen like this, bent over themselves, as if they can fold in half like a cloth spotted with blood, fold away all the horror and shame and tuck into a drawer within their minds this thing their bodies will never forget. How many times has she tried to have men punished, only to see the girl they violated penalized even more? She is not a fool, she will not suggest that Emer tell anyone, not Rose, or the priest, or the guards, a nine-mile row and a twelve-mile car ride away. She would need Patch, or Austin, or one of his cousins, to row her there in the first place.
Sometimes there were men, men with souls like Matthew but minds and bodies hardened into a carapace that could summon violence, who took care of these things. Who enforced a justice that did nothing to erase the crime. It had its own purpose, this revenge, it gave a grim satisfaction. But Brigid is an outsider here, and does not know the men well enough to even imagine whom she would ask of such a thing.
Emer is pulling at her collar, warping the wool of her jumper away from the invisible weight at her neck.
“I’m sorry, Emer,” Brigid says. She can see that her angry thoughts will only increase the pressure. Emer’s throat is perched on the edge, all it will take is a word, a breath, a thin sliver of skin to bring the weight of a lifetime down to crush it.
“I’m so sorry,” because there is nothing else to say. All the other words will have to be thrown into the fire and forgotten.
It is not until she touches her, until she slides from her chair and kneels by Emer’s, and takes the girl’s clenched, furious face between her hands, and kisses her eyelid, closed so tight against what she no longer wants to see, that Emer is able to cry. Ugly, thundering sobs that wrack her body like a series of blows, crying that is too violent to completely succumb to.
“What have I done?” Emer says, when the sobbing subsides, and Brigid shushes her.
“Stop that, Emer. It was done to you.”
“It couldn’t have been him alone,” Emer says.
“Why not?”
“It’s Austin. He’s married to my sister.”
“It happens all the time,” Brigid says. “It’s not your fault.”
“There’s something ugly in me,” Emer says. Her head is resting on Brigid’s shoulder. Brigid puts her hand to Emer’s hair and strokes it, pulling it between her fingers, like separating sections to braid the hair of a child.
“Why can’t I stop from calling it up?” Emer says, her voice hushed with terror, as if to even ask such a thing aloud is to set something unstoppable, like a flame touched to an island bonfire, used to burn a mountain of discarded life.
“I don’t know,” Brigid says. This is not the right answer. She feels Emer stiffen, the angry coiled center of her getting ready to spring out again. Emer sits up, kisses her, tries to reach beneath Brigid’s blouse with her angry, desperate hands. Deep inside Brigid an ache blossoms that feels so like lust, she opens her mouth, and leads Emer to the bedroom. In an attempt to heal, or at least overwrite the memories of Austin, she brings the girl to a whimpering conclusion, but when Emer tries to do the same, Brigid realizes that the feeling is not desire, but revulsion, like something deep inside the place where she longs to be sated is screaming at her to stop.
“Shhh,” Brigid says to Emer, gently deflecting her hands. “We’re both tired. Just let me hold you, and we’ll rest.”
&nb
sp; The unmasking of Austin does not surprise Brigid. There was a moment with him that told her, that lifted the curtain away and showed what skulked underneath.
It was after the Lughnasa bonfire, the festival on the first of August that marked the end of the summer and the onset of the harvest, Rose sent Austin to walk Brigid home. He’d lunged at her drunkenly by her front door, trying for a kiss, and she had pushed him firmly away.
He covered his sneer of anger quite deftly with a smile.
“Would you rather one of the women walked you home, then?” he said.
She did not let her gaze drop from the ugly implication in this.
“Good evening, so,” he muttered, after a beat, when he realized that she had no intention of answering.
Before he left he spat, a purposeful, ridiculous gesture, meant to stand, she supposed, for some sort of dismissal, or warning.
Men, she thinks, can be as foolish as boys; too bad they have the power to twist that foolishness into danger, as easily as the turning of a rock in the sand. It doesn’t help that these women encourage it, that grown men on this island are treated with the same dismissive, devoted impatience they bestow on unruly boys. It’s humiliating, Brigid thinks, for the lot of them.
She does not think much more about it until Emer tells her story. She doesn’t think a fairy possessed Austin. But she can imagine what Emer’s hands might do to a man already poised for violence. She has seen it, saw what Austin was capable of in the gleam and shadows that were created when he turned his head away and spat into the dark ground.
She puts a hand to Emer’s neck that day, and pulls just enough of the damage away for Emer to breathe, to hold her head up, to forge ahead, as grumpy and unpleasant and as normally as she can. There is a minimum, Brigid has learned, to what she can heal without getting ill herself. A psychological salve, as long as she doesn’t go too long, is safe enough. It will make her tired, but nothing else. She couldn’t grab hold of every wound in Emer even if she wanted to. She cannot twist herself so deeply in the coils of Emer and Austin and the fire they have started. She has something much more fragile to hold on to.