by Lisa Carey
But she does go, slamming the door behind her, trudging through pellets of hail that mix with the rain, and in the five minutes it takes to walk to her house, she is soaked through and shivering and completely, cruelly alone, all the way down to her bones.
When she gets inside it is all she can do to remove her wet things and crawl into bed. As soon as her head touches the pillow, a dam lets loose the pain and she screams.
She knows what it is people feel when she takes their hand. Their insides cleave, not just for a moment, but all the way through the future of their lives, as if with one touch she can steal away every joy they once dared to promise themselves.
Niall comes for her, sneaking in quietly sometime the next afternoon to convince her to come for the lamb dinner. She stays in her bed, where she has lain since she left, up only to change the rags of clotted blood between her legs. She doesn’t budge, doesn’t turn to him, doesn’t even open her eyes when he puts a sweet, loyal, frightened hand on her forehead. If he speaks, she thinks to herself, if she hears his voice she will be able to open her eyes, and rise out of the darkness and smile and love him again. But he gives up just a beat too soon, and later she wonders if he knows this, that his voice will wake her, and if he withholds it, because he is finding out that things are a bit easier all around without her there. He says nothing, and she pretends she is asleep, and they both let their lies be believed. He leaves to go back to Rose’s house, and she stays alone, letting it all pass by without her, with no ability to break the ugliness she has begun, and not enough courage to ask someone, her son, her sister, her lover, to help pull her out from underneath the terrible weight of herself.
She has been so afraid of this day for so long, the day her child turns away from her, that she is surprised at how easy it is to release her grip, and let him go.
Chapter 21
Brigid’s Day
January, February 1960
In January the storms return. Days turn into weeks turn into a month where no one leaves the island and nothing comes to them. They are drowned and forgotten in the middle of an angry sea. They were never given the distress radio Brigid asked for. (They were given the winch, an old, rusty wheel that broke the first time they tried to haul a boat up with it.) If Emer were still speaking to her, Brigid knows she would say: Do you see now? But Brigid doesn’t mind the isolation in Rose’s house. Her belly grows bigger as Rose’s babies fatten up and stay awake for longer stretches, turning their heads to follow the movement of the other children. The older girls and Niall play endless games of domestic imagination, twittering like birds in their laughter, distracting them all from the leaden weather. The sun still abandons them every day before five o’clock.
Emer has taken to her bed. For all of January she lies in the feathered box and Rose is the only one who tends to her.
“I don’t know what is wrong with her, poor pet,” Rose confides in Brigid. “Perhaps it’s the grief catching up to her? She can’t even bear for me to open the curtains. Says the light hurts.”
Brigid says little in response to this, but she offers to take up all the chores except the ones that lead to bringing food over to Emer’s and coaxing her to eat. She leaves that to Rose, who she can see will never abandon her sister, even while a part of her would like to be free.
Niall still spends nights with Emer, crawling into the ripened bedclothes. He comes to Rose’s every morning, looking like something in him has been snuffed out, needing the laughter and lightness of his cousins to pull him out of the misery of his mother.
“Why won’t she speak to me?” Brigid hears him ask Rose. Rose pulls him in for an embrace and whispers encouragement into his ear. “You must be brave for her,” she says. “She will come back to you.”
“I wish you could help,” Rose laments to Brigid.
“I will if you like,” Brigid concedes. But Rose gasps and shakes her head.
“She’s adamant. Doesn’t want to see you. I don’t know what she’s on about but we’d best not cross her now.”
And Brigid lets her breath out as quietly as she can, and says yes, that would be the wisest thing, all around.
On the eve of St. Brigid’s Day, the weather lifts a bit, not enough for a boat, but enough so the girls can have their parade without the threat of being blown into the sea. They have made a Brídeog, a life-size doll version of the saint, and carry it in front of them like a masthead, skipping the road and giggling, Niall blowing on a dissonant horn. Rose and Brigid walk behind them, infants tied tightly to each of their bosoms.
At each house, the girls knock at the doors and call out together: “Brigid is coming!” They must call this out three times before the woman opens the door and says, “She is welcome, she is welcome.” They are let inside to dance a bit, Eve playing her father’s tin whistle, the scarecrow saint propped by the hearth as a witness. The widows give them sweets.
Rose tries to steer them clear of Emer’s house, but Niall is insistent. They knock, they call out, once, twice, three times.
“Go on your knees and open your eyes and let Blessed Brigid enter.” But no one comes to the door. There is no lamp lit inside, no candle left in the window, no flutter of curtain to indicate that Emer even cares they are there. It is as quiet as one of the abandoned houses they marched by on their way up the road.
“Come along, children,” Rose claps, “there is pudding waiting at my house.”
She puts an arm around the dejected Niall. “You’re grand, ladeen. She’s resting, is all.”
“It’s horrible luck not to let the Brídeog in,” Niall says.
Rose has told Brigid that the tradition started as a way of guarding the house against misfortune, particularly death, in the coming year. But now she reassures her nephew.
“Sure, Niall, you’re old enough to know, it’s only a game meant to entertain children.”
When they return to Rose’s house, the children stay up late teaching Brigid how to weave the saint’s cross from green rushes. They bend the stiff stalks and weave them into a knot at the center, then out into four arms and tie off the ends. They make a small one for Brigid’s baby, to hang over the cradle, and another for her door. One for each of their beds, and the front door of Rose’s house. In the morning they will hang them, tossing last year’s version, thick with spiderwebs and all that has happened since Brigid arrived, into the fire.
The next morning is the first of February, Brigid’s fortieth birthday and the feast day of the saint, and the weather releases its grip on them. The women who man the boat walk to the quay, put the currach in and head off to meet the anchored trawler, to collect their post, flour, sugar and tea. Brigid sits beside Rose on a chair outside in the sunshine, enormous now with her miracle child.
They gather together at midmorning and file into the church, carrying their milking stools, greeted by the priest who hasn’t made it over from Muruch since October. The priest says the Mass quickly, blesses the wafers and places them on tongues, occasionally glancing at the windows to check the weather. He is not keen on being stuck here again. He has brought a box of white tapers for Candlemas, which he blesses and gives to each family to bring home, for protection against storms and evil in the coming year. After Mass he hands out treats to the children, crisps and chocolate from the shop, and they spend a good deal of time trading and trying bites of each other’s treasures.
Emer is there, out of bed for the first time in a month, her dress hanging off her shoulders like there is nothing inside of it, a face on her that makes even the priest take a wide berth.
“How’re you keeping, Emer?” the women mutter, but don’t stop or meet her eye. They move on to talk to Rose and Brigid, one showing off her babies, the other glowing in pregnancy. Emer watches while women reach out and press palms to Brigid’s belly, uninvited, and Brigid lets them, these same women who were so cold to her when she arrived, she allows them to coo and praise and molest her as if she is related to them. It is a disgusting display, Emer think
s, watching Brigid reveal her huge white teeth and call each of them by name, pronouncing them correctly now. She seems quite pleased with herself. She has no idea how quickly these people could turn against her. They barely need a reason; one slip and they’ll turn their backs all over again.
Niall was happy when she emerged and walked to the church holding her hand, but now he is running around and screeching with Rose’s girls and has forgotten her again. The priest tries to slide past Emer with a nod, but she snags him.
“How are they above, Father?” she says, and he looks none too happy to stop.
“Well, Emer, well enough. Isn’t it lovely to see the sun,” he mutters.
“It’ll be lashing again by evening,” Emer says.
“Sure, we’ll enjoy it while we’re able.”
“At least you’re able to leave,” Emer says.
“How is the Yank getting along?” the priest deflects. “It’s good of your sister to take her in. Widows helping each other.”
“Is that what they told you, Father?”
“Poor woman, losing her husband while with child.”
“Her husband died five years ago,” Emer says. “You do the sums and see what sort of woman she is.”
The priest crosses himself quickly and mutters some excuse to get away.
“What did you say to the poor man, Emer?” Rose says, coming up behind her.
“Nothing I’ll regret,” Emer says, and walks away from her sister, looking for Niall, pleased to see the sky darkening ominously in the distance. She’d like the day to be ruined for everyone. She has forgotten her candles, but doesn’t bother going back for them.
She finds Niall sitting by himself, white as a sheet in the green field.
“What ails you?” she says. He opens his mouth to answer but instead he is sick, spewing crisps and chocolate and Cidona onto her shoes.
“Brilliant,” she mutters, but still she wipes his tears away and holds his hand all the way home. Just as they get there the wind and rain return, knocking the door on its hinges and drowning out the sound of Niall, retching again in the ditch by their gate.
How kind and good Emer becomes when her child is ill. How gently she is able to smooth his brow and know just where to press the cloth, to cluck and sing and shush him. Her hands are a balm, her voice is comforting, not a shrill invasion to the head, a songbird rather than a corncrake.
“It’s all right, a chuisle,” she croons. She almost welcomes it, the feeling of a fever on his brow, because now she remembers who she can be. She can realize how silly she has been, and get over her temper, and think again of them moving to the mainland, starting all over in a house where they can both forget all that has happened and who she has been.
She lies vigilant by his side, watches him flip around like a snagged fish, in the bed she washed and made up freshly when she decided to rise from bed and seek her revenge.
He is sick every half an hour until there’s nothing left but foul froth. Every time, the pause between the heaving, where his face flames and he cannot breathe or make any sound, and the release seems to last a little longer. Each time she holds her breath, rigid with terror, waiting for the moment it releases him and he comes back to her. Afraid it will be the last, that he will be seized and his body will not be able to purge it again. He will be stolen away just at the point where he cannot even call out for help.
When Emer was sick as a child, it was Rose who tended to her. Her mother was useless when they were ill, she only got angry, as if the sickness were some personal affront. Emer can see this in herself now. By 4 a.m. she wants to hold him upside down and shake him, to slap him in the face and demand that he stop. She sees now, how much sense it makes to be angry with your child. Angry with them for making you so powerless.
By dawn, so much has come out of him he can’t even manage tears anymore. The storm has descended fully and she can barely tell when the sun rises, the black fading to a gray so pathetic it seems a waste. His head is so hot to the touch it shocks her, he is writhing with what he calls a fire in his side. When he opens his mouth to moan or be sick she can almost hear the angry venomous thrum of those long-resentful bees. When Rose comes in, Emer throws herself, grateful and desperate, into her sister’s arms.
“Get Brigid,” she says. “They’re trying to take him.”
There is an old island story that Emer has told Niall, about a mother who was taken away by the fairies, leaving behind her young son. One night, years later, he woke up and saw that she was back, looking like his mother but not quite the same, sitting by a table full of food and drink, a fire dancing in the hearth. She invited him to eat from it. But the boy had been raised to recognize fairy tricks so he refused, and his mother, or what was left of her, went away again.
When Niall first heard this story, he was puzzled. He knows that if fairies offer him food to steal him away, he should refuse.
But what if his mother is the fairy? Shouldn’t he gorge himself then? Shouldn’t he do whatever is necessary to keep her beside him, even if it is the one thing she has told him all his life never to do?
Chapter 22
Fairy Stroke
“It’s only the virus that’s been going around,” Brigid says when Rose rushes into the house, her hair uncovered and shining with rain.
“It’s more,” Rose whispers and her face makes Brigid go for her waterproof.
One look at Niall, white and writhing in the bedclothes, and Brigid moves quickly to him, pressing one hand to his head and the other low on his abdomen. She looks up to Rose and Emer.
“Has the priest gone?” she asks.
“He went yesterday.”
“What about that trawler?”
“Have you looked at the sea?”
“Tell Maeve to get the boat out. He needs a hospital.”
Rose is growing colder and calmer the more Emer paces beside her. She speaks slowly.
“With those swells the boats will smash them to death before they can leave the quay.”
“How do you get the doctor here in an emergency?” Brigid says. “How do you call him?”
“We don’t,” Rose says.
“What do you mean, you don’t?”
“Have you not been living here all this time?” Emer shrieks. “We told you. In this weather we’re trapped.”
“What do you do, Rose?” Brigid repeats. “When it’s a real emergency? A life-or-death emergency?” Rose widens her eyes and shakes her head in a subtle but unambiguous movement.
“Could you not just put your hands on him?” Rose whispers.
So, she does know, Brigid thinks. Emer is breathing fast and loud, as though the air in the house is leaking away.
“I can’t fix this.” It’s too much, she thinks, and something dark yanks at the walls of her womb, as if the baby itself is clenching with fear. “It’s appendicitis. He needs surgery.”
“Saints alive,” Rose says. “Austin’s uncle had the appendicitis. Two winters ago.”
“What did you do then?”
“We lit a fire,” Rose says. “On the hill above the port. Next to the children’s graveyard.”
Brigid looks between them, narrowing her brow in anger. She turns away. They wait ages for her to speak. “Well light one, then,” she says. “Light a big one.”
Rose goes out the door quickly, the wind screaming inside for the moment it is open, then muffled with a slap when it closes again.
Brigid leans over Niall, lifts his shirt to press her hands gently to his side. He moans and curls in on himself like a snail shrinking into its shell. She dips the cloth in the pail of water by the bed and wipes his neck, his forehead, his bright, burning cheeks.
“It will be all right, Emer,” she says kindly, and she reaches a hand out to pull her down to kneel by the bed. She knows Emer has been waiting for a kind gesture from her for a while, but she hasn’t dared. Even now, she does it with difficulty, without looking her in the eye.
“They didn’t come,�
� Emer says, her voice barely audible in the whistle of wind against stone.
“What’s that?” Brigid says, dipping the hot cloth back into cool water. She turns toward Niall again.
“When we lit the fire for Austin’s uncle,” Emer says. Her voice is a hot whisper of dread at Brigid’s neck. “They didn’t come.”
Brigid presses Niall’s head again with the cloth, hoping that Emer does not see the tremor of her hand.
“Whisht,” she says, like an island mother. “They’ll come this time.”
She can’t heal this. Just being near him makes the child inside her writhe and dig painfully, as if clawing its way somewhere deeper inside her.
Don’t, that voice whispers to her. You can’t save him. If you try, they’ll take me too.
She remembers stories of the fairy stroke, illness that couldn’t be cured by magic because it was driven by magic itself. She remembers Matthew’s tumor, how at the core of it was a dark well she could never reach. Niall feels like this now, as if he is being held away from them all, under deep water, and if she tries to reach him, she will drown.
She shakes off these thoughts, like a buzzing insect. He has an infection, that is all. She will wait for the fire, for the boats, for a doctor. Every once in a while, it was Matthew who had the answer, not her hands.