The Stolen Child

by Lisa Carey

  None of them is quite sure afterward what turns it, that little mistake of the councilman, or Brigid’s Yankee confidence, or just the raw grief and weariness of the thought of packing it all up and abandoning their lives. Leaving the sea, which holds within it the bodies of their men that were never found. Somehow it is agreed that nothing will change just yet, they will press on, that they will see another winter of storm and isolation and abandonment through, see how it goes, as if without the men, it will not go a lot worse than it has in other years. They’ll leave it so, and talk it over again in the springtime. Men will come over from Muruch to help them finish the harvest, store the hay, slaughter the pigs. They have the money from the sheep, the sale of cattle, the charity of the neighboring island.

  “I can lift a boat as well as any man,” Brigid says at one point, and a couple of women smile at that, including Rose, as if they think they might be able to as well. The councilman shakes his head to show he thinks them ridiculous.

  Brigid requests a distress radio, normally reserved for islands with a lighthouse. And, after a whisper from Jimmy Moran, an iron winch to assist them in pulling the boats up. The man says he will see what he can do.

  “Lip service,” Jimmy says, loud enough for him to hear.

  After the meeting, Brigid watches them file out of the school. Rua has been waiting outside and watches with her, her warm torso pressing encouragement into Brigid’s knee. The women’s faces are bruised under their eyes from weeks of mourning, the children look like startled rabbits, something inside them is frozen, waiting for the next threat to appear. Rose looks at Brigid with such gratitude, she is momentarily guilty. She is not sure this is the right thing for them. It is what she wants, and she cannot do it alone.

  Emer looks as if she wants to spit at all of them, to spit and scream at the mild optimism on their faces, and at her sister, smiling as if this is some sort of victory. Brigid knows her well enough to feel what she is thinking. She thinks that these women are naive, so easily persuaded they have forgotten, because of a sunny day and an optimistic Yankee, that living here is like being slowly drowned, held down on a rock and left for the tide to come in.

  She won’t commiserate with Emer. She can’t risk the feeling she has now. She has the energy of three women, flashes of pure, expectant joy she has to hide in deference to the newly widowed. She imagines the baby’s life coursing in her veins, and knows that she could do anything, that she could run this island like an abbess, embrace a commune of devout women dedicated to their children and to each other, spread the cloak of her healing to include the sea. She wants to stay here, raise her baby amid these women she has come to admire, on this island she now loves.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispers in her mind, whenever Emer looks at her with that one eye, anger and fear and yearning jostling to be first, but Brigid turns away before she allows her remorse to be seen. She won’t let Emer’s desire to destroy herself get in the way. No matter how guilty she feels.

  She has little doubt that this baby will make it. It has carved out a spot and wedged itself in there and will keep it tight and solid as a beehive stone hut until the very end. It will hold on through heavy lifting and work and the small amounts of fire she lets out of her hands to heal. For so many years it was her womb that failed her. Now her womb is out of the equation. This child shrouds itself. It warns her of danger long before she can fall into it. She has already decided that she doesn’t care, doesn’t care in the slightest, where it came from.

  Chapter 17

  Knife Box

  October, November 1959

  At the evacuation meeting, Emer barely hears anything, as if she is half-deaf as well as half-blind. She is permeated by liquid fear; it has risen past her neck and filled her ears, wavered into her remaining eye. Everything people say is muffled, like she is under the water and they are still calling from the surface. She is accosted by the realization of what she has done in the eyes of every single person who dares to look at her.

  She is still bleeding, the remains of that night with Austin continue to fall from her womb. It is not the relief she expected. She started something by twisting that stone and now it is too late to turn it backward.

  Brigid moves in and out of her periphery, Emer sees her laying her hands on the women, on the children, and the jealousy that seizes Emer is enough to make her forget to reign in her own. She is so careless one morning, helping braid her niece’s hair, that she makes Teresa throw up. Fiona, fearless as Brigid, yanks the brush from her hand.

  Emer hopes that, at least, the tragedy will bring on the evacuation. But by some dangerous concoction of magic and determination, Brigid convinces them all to stay. Only a month before, Emer would have been thrilled at the thought of Brigid hanging around this long, and watching her embarrass the men at the school meeting would have made her proud. Now she wants to wring the necks of all the women who praise her.

  They will build the houses anyway, the priest assures Emer after the meeting. For when they change their minds. No one expects them to last. Emer is too paralyzed by the weight of what she has done to respond to this. She is being offered what she always wanted, but she can’t drag her mind away from the casualties she accrued by asking for it.

  “I wasn’t a good wife to him,” Rose says one evening, late, when the other women have gone home, but Brigid and Emer remain. All the children are asleep, snoring through noses clogged by weeping.

  “Don’t do this to yourself, Rose,” Brigid says. She puts an arm around Rose’s shoulders.

  “I haven’t shown him the bright side of my face in a while. This pregnancy . . . well, I haven’t been in good form. He’s been acting queer lately, giving out to the girls, barely taking the time to look at me, never mind kiss me. That was never a problem for us, you know. We’ve always been mad for each other.”

  Brigid tries to shush her, but Rose won’t stop now.

  “We had a row. An ugly one. He said things and I, I’m ashamed to repeat them. There was a time he got like that with drink, angry and cruel as his father before him. But he never, sure not since we were at school, did he ever let that get the better of him. He frightened the girls, this time, he grabbed my arm, I thought he was going to strike me.

  “He said he wanted a better life. He said that to me. Austin. Can you imagine it?

  “That was the night before he went off with the lads for a drink, and I wouldn’t even meet his eye for the time between. I’ll not know what he thought of me then. It will never be over, that row, it will stay in my mind the rest of my days. I will never stop wondering what he thought of his life when the water pulled him under the last time.”

  Brigid holds Rose’s hands through this entire speech, patting, stroking, not shushing, just waiting for her to let all of it out. Emer stands away from them, still as death, keeping her mouth shut tight for fear she will spew out everything.

  “Perhaps we should have left like you wanted, Emer,” Rose blubbers. “If we had done, they’d be alive now. I never imagined living anywhere else. But that was selfish, I see that, because now we’re cursed to live here without them.”

  She runs her hands over her massive belly, cupping the underside of it. “He’d have liked a boy.” Emer almost gags, but she swallows it just in time.

  “Do you think he was happy, Emer?” Rose asks, her face streaming and raw, and Brigid shoots a look of warning at her. Don’t you dare, Emer can hear her as if she’d said it out loud. Something grows hot in her then, seeing the fierce look in Brigid’s eyes, as if even she, like the rest of them, will do anything to protect Rose.

  “Go away out of that,” Emer says. “Wasn’t he as happy as the next fool?”

  And though Brigid squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head, Rose lets out a brief, bitter laugh.

  “Leave it to Emer,” she says, swabbing the stream of tears and snot from her face. “You’ll not let us wallow, now, will you, love?”

  There’s no school on the island for wee
ks, because every hand is needed for the work of getting ready for winter. The children have their jobs—the hens, the eggs, feeding calves and pigs, and, on Saturdays, bathing themselves and the wee ones, and knife sharpening.

  This has always been the job of children, the sharpening of knives and polishing of cutlery, and Emer can remember that Rose started it very young, at the age of five, when the knives needed to be kept away from their mother. Niall and Fiona show this to Brigid proudly, taking the knife box, a long wooden board with a cubby of sand, down from its spot by the hearth. They drag their mother’s knives against a layer of grit, and their grandmother’s, worn thinner than the rest. They offer to do Brigid’s and she praises them too much.

  “They’ll have their own sooner than I’d like,” Rose murmurs and no one insults this with an argument.

  When Niall isn’t working, he stays close to Fiona and Eve. They were forced together even more than usual when Emer sent him to school, and then during the long keening days after the wake and funerals when she hid in Rose’s bedroom, getting up only to change the rags of clotted blood between her legs. Emer was grateful for the distraction then, but now Niall’s interest in the girls offends her. Rather than that look of pure relief he usually has when she comes to rescue him from mandatory time with his cousins, Niall looks annoyed when she suggests that it is time to go home.

  “I don’t want to go,” he whines, stomping his foot and scowling. He has never behaved this way. Rose’s girls have tantrums, tearful rages that subside quickly because their mother refuses to pay attention until they calm down. Niall, Rose likes to say, is a perfect angel compared to her girls. Emer has defined him from this phrase, and herself, often enough.

  “Why can’t we live here?” Niall says one day. “You can sleep with Rose and I’ll sleep with the girls.”

  He is not the first to suggest it. It makes perfect sense—bonding together in the ruins, widowed sisters have done it before. Rose seemed surprised after the first week that Emer went home at all.

  Emer hustles him outside, angry, embarrassed, avoiding Rose’s eyes that follow after them. On the walk Niall grows meek again, apologetic, taking her hand.

  “What are you lot playing all the time?” she says, trying to sound neutral, but it comes out like an accusation.

  “We play house,” Niall says. “I’m the father as I’m the only boy.”

  “What does the father do?” Emer remembers, vaguely, playing something similar with Rose. With dolls and wildflowers and broken crockery. She was always the one forced to be the man.

  “I eat breakfast,” Niall says. “Then I go off so I can die. After I die they wash me and put me in a box and cry and we start all over again.”

  Emer grows cold with it, the thought of them playing at their own lives.

  “Sometimes one of them murders me,” Niall says. “That’s the fun part. Then we get to have a hanging.”

  It takes Emer a minute to remember to inhale.

  “I don’t want to move to the mainland,” Niall says as if this is a natural segue in conversation.

  “Why not?” Emer says huskily. Her throat burns.

  “If we stay here, I’ll marry Eve. If we move, she’ll have lots of lads to choose from at school. I don’t want to go to school, and Eve doesn’t either. We want to stay here forever, like you and Auntie Rose.”

  “Brilliant,” Emer says.

  The work they have, now that the men are gone, is the backbreaking sort, and it never ends. In addition to everything they already do all day long, in and around the house, now they have the fields, the sheep, the sea. The teenagers come home from school on the mainland to assist their mothers, and the teachers give them lessons to do at night, which they fall asleep over next to the paraffin lamp. Only one of these is a boy, Oisin, as slight and sensitive and fragile-looking as Matthew.

  Brigid organizes them. Like some aged, kindly nun, she finds out what needs to be done and rallies them all into doing it. They dig the turf in one frenzied week, the sun still shining like it’s summertime, but dipping sooner in the sky. Women and children slicing, tossing, arranging it in rows to dry. There is Reeking Day, which takes three days instead of one, where they exhaust the poor donkey moving all the hay the men cut in August and storing it in sheds or in fields under oilskin tarps. Every last potato, cabbage and turnip are ripped from the ground. The weather holds, warm and mild, as if giving them a chance to figure it all out before it imprisons them again.

  “Who will pull the pots?” Rose asks, and Brigid smiles.

  “I’m from Maine,” she says. “I know what to do with lobster traps.”

  On calm days the fishermen from Muruch give them rowing lessons, their faces twisted in disapproval. Brigid’s arms are as long and muscular as a man’s. She learns quickly which women are the best candidates: Kathleen, Malachy’s widow, with broad shoulders and a willingness to push through pain, Margaret, small but wiry, toughened by years of lugging around the overly large baby boys she had by Michael Joe, and Maeve, Kathleen’s seventeen-year-old daughter, tall and awkward and thick-necked as an adolescent boy. Oisin, Brigid can tell, is relieved when she doesn’t ask him to sign on for his manly responsibility. Within a month, the four women can get a small currach in and out of the water, timing it with the waves, and pull the heavy oars in harmony the mile to Muruch and back again. Brigid decides they will practice this distance and try the mainland, nine miles away, in the spring. Until then, the men from Muruch will bring them whatever supplies they can. They also sell the lobsters for them, after Brigid teaches the women how to bait and set as many traps as they can manage.

  All the island women are aching, callused, sunburned, muscles and eyes on fire, sweat-soaked and ripe as their husbands once were. Brigid, while beside them, pulling and slicing and rowing and digging, puts her hand out every once in a while to ease the aches. Just enough to make them think they can go on a while longer. She needs to take care with Maeve, who responds to Brigid’s touch with such a vicious surge of lust, it often leaves her too confused and ashamed to get anything done.

  In November, the time comes to slaughter the pigs. Of the six that came in the springtime, only Niall’s is left, one slaughtered in October by Austin, the others traded to the mainland for necessities. Normally, the pigs are killed and shared among the families, one at a time. Niall’s pig will be enough for all of them.

  Emer does not want them to do it. Cabbage, though not as eager to play, or able, as he was in the summertime, still follows her son on the road.

  “Why didn’t you sell that one, then, when you negotiated for the others?” Emer argues with Rose.

  “Sure, didn’t we hand over the pigs we could find,” Rose says. She is irritable most of the time now, with a mug that rivals her sister’s, their mother says. “That creature runs wild.”

  “You can’t slaughter the thing in front of him,” Emer says to Brigid. Brigid opens her mouth, looking like she’s about to agree.

  “Are you wanting to protect him from the sorrows of the world, so?” their mother says. “It’s a bit late for that.”

  “She’s right,” Rose says.

  Brigid and Emer look at her, as if an impostor dressed up like Rose has spoken instead.

  “I don’t mind,” Niall says. They turn to see him peering over the lip of the half-door. “I knew he would have to go. I want to be there when you do it.”

  Brigid looks at him hard, and she can see he is trying to stand tall, and not flinch. She nods.

  A man from Muruch explains how to stun it with a hammer, but Brigid merely smiles and ignores his instructions. She has Niall help her instead. He calms the animals, he always has, with his hands.

  Rose is too enormously pregnant to be useful. Emer is there, grudgingly, and Kathleen and Margaret. Niall leads Cabbage into the barn, whispering, scratching behind his ears, the pig stumbling with pleasure and trust. Niall gets it to lie down in the earth and put his enormous head in his lap. He strokes the thing
until it falls into a sort of coma, dropping heavily away from Niall’s hands. He looks up at Brigid and her knife with tears in his eyes.

  “All right?” she says.

  “Go on,” he says, moving aside, pretending to be brave.

  Brigid drives her knife in at the top of the breastbone, then cuts up to the middle of the neck and twists the way the man showed her. Three women hold the head up so the blood can rush, steaming and thin into a metal tub. They will use this for the blood pudding. Emer holds the tub steady, looking like she might be sick and ruin it all. Brigid is feeling queasy herself, the stench is overpowering, but she breathes through her mouth and shakes it off. She resists the urge to place her hand over the wound she has just made, and reverse the waterfall of life pouring out.

  It takes them all day to bleed, scald, scrape and gut the pig, another day to cut away at joints and pack pound after pound of salt into its flesh. They throw the useless bits to the dogs, except Rua, who paces outside and growls her disapproval. The pig’s head is shoved into a canvas bag, just like the one the piglets arrived in, and boiled for days in an enormous pot outside. The whole island has fresh pork for a week; they hang the salted meat in Emer’s shed, a gruesome reminder of his pet swinging at Niall’s head every time he enters.

  Brigid comes to Sunday dinner at Rose’s house after the slaughter. She watches Niall pause before he takes his first bite of pork. He closes his eyes, shoves it in, and chews. In that moment he seems more like a child than he usually does. Though still not a typical one.

  Emer eats quickly and without small talk. Clodagh’s table manners are similar, though her bad arm keeps her from eating quickly. The pork is overcooked, tough, both strong and bland. It tastes like the blood smelled. Brigid feels suddenly close and nauseated in this kitchen, full of turf smoke and pig fat so thick it has settled onto every surface, including their skin. She holds a hand to her lower belly, the swelling of which she is still hiding under oversized shirts, and breathes through her mouth.