by Lisa Carey
“Will you not leave the island with us?” Emer says, in a breathless flash of boldness. “We’ll go somewhere, to America even, say we are widowed sisters, raise the babies together.”
Brigid looks at her with such compassion, Emer imagines for an instant that she will smile, relieved, and say yes.
Instead she says this: “I want to stay here. I need to take care of myself now, Emer. And so do you.”
Emer feels like the very floor has dropped beneath her feet. She is overcome with vertigo, and holds her breath until the urge to be sick passes.
“I can’t have it. I can’t.”
‘”All right, Emer,” Brigid says. “If that’s how you feel, if you don’t want another baby, I think we both know who can do something about it.”
Brigid stands and walks to the table, picks up her knife and begins to peel a small, dirty potato. Emer can see she is angry with her. Emer wonders why she isn’t angry with Austin, or Rose, or this wretched island that imprisons them.
Why is Brigid the one who’s angry? she thinks. Isn’t she the one who offered Emer something else, then snatched it away?
I thought we’d take care of each other, Emer wants to say. But she doesn’t want to hear the answer to that.
“I can’t hurt myself,” Emer says. “It doesn’t work that way.”
“It’s not you, though,” Brigid says. “Is it?”
She leaves Brigid’s pulling at the collar of her blouse until she hears a few stitches rip. The sun is setting in her field of vision like a fire she can’t look at. She stumbles blindly up the hill. She wants the screaming in her head to be swallowed in the wind of the cliffs.
She thinks of Austin’s cocky grin, and Rose’s graceful beauty, and Brigid’s lustful confidence, and the girls she went to school with, with their talents and their plans and their pretty skin or hair or figures and how they knew what was lovely about themselves and made the best of it. She thinks of the ones who got away, who can’t afford, or perhaps can’t be bothered, to come home again. She thinks of the women who stayed, and how they keep having children, all of them, one after another because they can’t stop it, nor do they seem to want to. Their lives appear to make them as happy as Emer’s drags her down. She thinks of her mother and how cold and finished she was by the time Emer was old enough to recognize her, finished even while she had children she needed to stay alive for. She thinks of when she still wanted the fairies to rescue her, before she became afraid of them robbing her of what she loves the most. She thinks of the few times she went to Galway, before Niall was born and she was still a girl, when she stood still on the busy street and let person after person pass her by, with their clothes and their looks and their plans and their senses of humor, and a destination, all of them, and how she always thought, if I stand here, stand here very still, something or someone will scoop me up and steal me away and surprise me with a life. And no one ever had. The only one who had come close was Brigid. But she didn’t give her a life. She gave her a dirty secret, even more useless and repulsive than what Emer had alone.
She thinks lastly of Niall, who before this barely saw her hate, who, with those eyes fogged by visions, refused to look past her adoration of him. He saw her splayed beneath Austin, saw the ugly rutting, and someday he will know what it means. This baby will be like a nail in the coffin of all that. It will put Niall at a distance, it will make him see something, something of what is really her, and eventually he will either avoid her or glide past her like the rest of them. Even if the fairies never take him back, he will be stolen away from her. He will be like all the teenage boys who leave the island for school or work, he will come home wearing the closed face and distant eyes of an Irish man. He will be able to see, after he learns about the world, the way she is, the way she makes people feel when she cradles their hand. She pulls their happiness away. It is really the only remarkable thing she has ever been able to do.
She passes the nuns’ clocháns and stumbles along the cliff edge and climbs down to Saint Brigid’s well. On one wall, she heaves aside a large slab of slate, revealing an opening that has been worried into the cliff wall, and inside this a basin, which holds one heavy round rock. An clocha breacha. The cursing stone. Some islanders say the fairies put it here, as a dark objection to Saint Brigid’s healing. Others say it was left by Brigid herself, who had a dark side, a temper, a tendency to hurt and humiliate if she was pushed. Like the poor man she sent stumbling away by ripping out her eye. Or the leper she cured and then infected again when she saw he wasn’t worthy. Most islanders don’t believe in it anymore, but still tell their children never to touch it. The curse can be turned back on you, they say, if it is not just.
Emer has never used it before. She’s not even sure how the thing works. But now she wants something big, something that can break open and release what’s inside her, so she turns the stone, iridescent with moss, clockwise in its shallow rock bowl, pulling apart the lichen that has grown to hold it there, like roots that when they rip release a foul, stagnant smell. All the faces of the people who are happier than she is, the faces that look up at her with drained patience because they find her such a burden to be around, revolve over and over in her mind and it is not until she has turned the stone three times and stopped that she remembers what she wanted to do in the first place.
Later she will know what she has done. She will remember how she turned an ancient, evil stone to ask it to clear her womb, and what she asks for instead, and is granted, is the power to destroy everything.
Chapter 16
Coffins
October 1959
Islanders call them storms that are born in the sea. No warning from the sky, no darkness or wind shift to make the men pull up their gear and head for home. The sky is bright blue and favorable for as far as they can see, and then it is upon them, the wind and the rain and the chaos seem to rise up from the ocean, just like the swells. In storms like this one, in the past, men have told of clinging to their boats and seeing, when they look up, the other side of the maelstrom: beyond the cluster that swallows them the sky remains as clear and uninvolved as the divide between two worlds.
This time, there is no one left alive to describe it.
Brigid watches it from her field. Watches the fog descend and the sea rise, in one spot, like the great watery hand of some creature reaching from beneath. They are so close, six men in a single currach, coming home from a few pints on Muruch. She feels like she could walk out herself and pull them in. Rua keeps running forward and back, barking at her to do something. Then the rain and fog hit them and she doesn’t see anymore. They must be all right: They were not very far from shore, and Niall doesn’t come to tell her otherwise. Rua whimpers and paces in the house all night, though there is no thunder to disturb her.
It isn’t until the morning, when the weather clears and she sees all the boats anchored out from the quay, that she knows how bad it was. She has never seen so many people come to the island at once.
It is a stranger, a man from the other island she has never met before, who tells her the sea took it all, the boat, the bodies, the heads of families, the last six young men on the island that needs young men to keep it alive. Like the sea itself knew what to take and chose to swallow what would leave the most damage. Patch and Austin Keane, twenty-nine and twenty-seven years of age; their cousins, Seamus and Peter O’Halloran, twenty-four and twenty-one; Michael Joe Cullen, thirty-two, their lifelong friend; and owner of the vessel, Malachy Moran, thirty-nine. Six wives, twenty-eight children left behind.
“Stole any hope of remaining here, so it did,” the man mutters.
Brigid walks away from him in the middle of this prediction, up the road to the women who need her.
They start talk of the evacuation almost at once. During the search for any buriable and comforting piece of them, through the suffocating cloud of grief and despair that grips the whole island, as thick and untenable as fog, they begin to mumble about it, just one more
inevitable thing that will be thrust upon them.
They’ll not let us remain now.
Sure, how will we, with no men?
Are you not inclined to pack it in altogether?
’Tis better for the children to be raised on solid ground.
They talk of it at the wakes, in six tiny houses, where off-island men set their glasses on the lids of empty caskets.
Will they not take them on Muruch?
Sure they barely have room for themselves.
The shame will be in leaving this land. The land on the other side is all rock.
The sea is hard here, all the same.
Only one body is recovered, Malachy’s, to put inside the pine. The priest suggests carefully to the widows that they find something, anything, to put inside the caskets. Preferably something light, something that will not roll or knock inappropriately around. Since they all died in the thick jumpers knitted with patterns to identify them, the widows have to find other pieces of clothing, a cap, a nice jacket worn only to Mass, a photograph of the children, a figure carved out of soapstone wrapped in a woolen scarf.
Niall offers to be the thing inside his father’s casket. He says it aloud, at Rose’s house, amid a group of women, islanders and visitors from away, who are all so aggrieved they are having trouble remembering whom to comfort.
“I’ll be very still,” he says, looking around at them eagerly, a little excited to have thought up such a creative solution. Emer, who has been tending the kettle, puts it down and walks quickly across the room, scooping him up in her arms, holding him tight as if she can smother what everyone has heard.
What is he on about?
He’s a queer one, is he not?
Niall looks around at them, Brigid sees him realize that what he said was terribly wrong. He starts to cry and Emer has to take him outside, past the women she looks at like she might burn them to a crisp.
Children shouldn’t be mollycoddled, they end up quare as their mothers before them.
His mother was touched, as a girl, I remember well the stories.
God knows how they made it this long.
’Tis a grave, this place, a watery grave.
The funeral procession is attended by Muruch men, who carry the almost weightless coffins from home to church to the graveyard that sits above the quay. During the walk the women wail together, a rhythmic incantation somewhere between a scream and a song.
“What are they singing?” Brigid whispers to the Muruch man next to her.
“Keening,” he says. “Legend says the druid Brigit was the first to do it, when her son was killed in a battle. It a horrible sound.” He shudders.
“Yes,” Brigid agrees. “But beautiful too.”
Mostly it is familiar. When her father died, her babies, Matthew, every time a baby was ripped from a mother’s arms. It was the sound she heard in her heart.
They say things about Brigid in the Irish they believe she will not understand.
The Yank is a comfort, sure.
She’s no stranger to grief, you can see that.
Brigid takes it all in stride, she moves among them with the confidence of someone who has been faced with senseless death before. No hesitation, no simpering questions, no “Is there anything I can do?” As if people in the grips of sudden death can ever take the time to think of what others might be able to do.
She cleans their houses, keeps their fires up, washes the faces and does up the buttons of their children. Brings their eggs in, their milk, their washing forgotten on the line. She brings them enormous jars of dark, thick honey, like something you might spread on a wound. She says very little, as if knowing that her accent might be too sharp, an insult in a cocoon of grief that only someone from this island can understand. She moves through their houses, sweeping and pressing and wiping, and every once in a while, when a contraction of vivid pain rises up in a wife at the thought of her husband or a mother at the thought of her boy, Brigid will put her wide, calloused hand on their back or their shoulder and clear a little space in the midst of the pain, just enough for them to inhale past it. She can do this much without harming herself or the baby. She doesn’t take the pain away, she merely shifts it, just at those moments when it seems too enormous to bear. Coaxes it away from its relentless clenching of their hearts.
She doesn’t touch Emer, as much as she wants to. She would like to ease her grief, to apologize for how she ended things, but when she goes to see her, something has changed. Emer spends the days after the funeral in Rose’s bed. The children are told to let her be, and move through the house in hushed, tearstained pairs.
“She lost the baby, poor pet,” Rose confides in Brigid. “First the lads, now this. She’s wrecked with grief.”
“Emer?” Brigid whispers when she goes into the darkened bedroom. Emer, lying in the bed, turns her head as if it weighs more than the rest of her. Her face is so pale it looks skeletal, her one eye blazing with what looks like a fever, or derangement.
“Was it my fault?” she whispers hoarsely.
Poor Emer, Brigid thinks. The girl is grieving, only not in the way her sister believes.
“Of course not,” Brigid says, and she moves toward her, with the intention of sitting by her side.
But her belly seizes up, the baby lashes so violently she feels like it could bruise her from the inside. Don’t is the word that comes into her head. Don’t. As if her own child is wailing, but no one else can hear it.
“You’ll be all right,” she says uselessly, and she hurries out of the room, out of the house to breathe the air and calm the maelstrom inside her. Instead, she ends up vomiting violently by the stone wall. The baby has given her messages before, of when to stop using her hands, just like her sickness used to, sickness that varied depending on the wound.
But she has never felt anything like the fear that grips her at the thought of touching Emer. Just a few days ago she could still touch her, though sex was out of the question. Now, the baby won’t stand for it. The darkness in Emer’s hands, the power that never affected Brigid, which Brigid could once transform into pleasure, is stronger now, or she has lost her ability to deflect it.
The children can’t get enough of her. They follow her around, dirty hands in her skirts, and if she manages to sit down they swarm onto her lap, squeezing to make room for their siblings and cousins. She does not need to hold back for them. She places her large palms on the crowns of their heads and washes the whole of it away, silencing the keening of their mothers, which they hear like an echo that will never fade.
Niall takes to sitting in Brigid’s lap, or holding her hand as she walks across the field to gather forgotten cows. Being with Brigid makes his crying subside, where the arms of his mother make it swell up all over again. He is frightened of what losing the men means for his mother, Auntie Rose, his cousins. Niall doesn’t want to leave the island, but he has never told his mother this.
“Mammy is ill,” Niall says to Brigid. “It’s like she’s gone away.”
“She’ll come back,” Brigid says.
“Ah, I know. She wouldn’t ever leave me.”
“Of course not,” Brigid says quietly, not wanting to give a turn to the guileless faith of this child.
They have the meeting in the school, and old Jimmy Moran, the one man left, stands at the back, out of tradition, though he is so wobbly Brigid makes him sit down at one of the small desks. The only other island men are boys, all under the age of twelve, trying to stand taller than they are. The priest from Inis Muruch is here, and a small, tidy, nervous man from the Galway County Council. He passes around the same picture Emer has of the bungalows on the mainland. Mortared walls, bedrooms on either end. Water taps in the kitchen. Toilets and proper bathtubs. Electric lights, gas cookers, radios. All on a lovely stretch of beach that looks out over the island on a clear day. To remind them, Brigid thinks, of what they have given up. Confirmation of their failure topped off with a water view. They are naming the new village Coi
s Cuain, which means safe haven.
The children, excited by the promise of dances at the hall and a real football pitch, want to go. So do the old women, who are tired and afraid of dying without a priest there to give them last rites. Jimmy Moran calls out that he will die in the house where he was born, and the women roll their eyes and shush him. Emer sits perched upon her little chair as if someone is about to hand her the keys any minute. Though Brigid has helped them, eased them through grief with her capable hands, she feels some of them cringe a bit when she speaks up, as if silently saying that she has very little right to do so.
“Why can’t we have those things here? The other island has a telephone.”
“Muruch has three hundred and fifty residents,” the councilman says. “The county won’t allow a phone on an island with less than one hundred.”
“What do you do here, then,” Brigid asks, “in an emergency? In a storm, or if someone is ill.”
“We build a fire,” Rose answers her. “A bonfire, on the hill. And hope that someone sees it and sends help.”
“That’s pathetic,” Brigid says, glaring at the blushing man from the Council.
“Aye,” an old woman says behind her. “That it is.”
“What about a harbor?” Brigid continues. The council official, who had expected this to be tied up quickly, is starting to sweat, and wipes at his fogged glasses with his handkerchief.
“Wouldn’t a proper harbor solve this? A place for larger boats to dock, emergency boats, in a storm, the way they do everywhere else?”
“It’s not the government’s problem that this island has no harbor. It would cost far more to build a harbor than it would to build these people a whole new village where they will be safe from the whim of the sea.”
There are a few island gasps at this, then uncomfortable silence. Of course, most of them know this fact, have discussed it among themselves. Nonetheless they are surprised, insulted and a little inspired by the rudeness of saying it out loud. By the cheek of it, speaking about them as if they are livestock.