by Lisa Carey
In the meantime she does what little she can. She uses a cherished blue cloth and cold water to give him an instant of relief, before it boils up in him again.
“I’ll leave you alone,” Emer is bargaining. Brigid hushes her, but Emer can’t hear anything but herself.
“You can have Rose. I’ll leave the island. I’ll never bother you again. I’ll not ask for anything else. I’ll tell them to stop the evacuation. Please. Don’t let this go on. Pull it out of him. Bring him back.”
“Emer,” Brigid says. “I’m doing all I can. The fire will work. They’ll send a doctor.”
“You can do it. I know you can. Why won’t you try?”
And though Brigid gestures to Rose to take Emer away, to give her a cup of tea, to give her a break from the begging and pleading, she shudders at Emer’s words.
She is the boy’s only hope. Something won’t let her save him. She is not entirely sure it isn’t herself.
Don’t, the voice in her head is her mother’s now, her mother’s voice that she hears so often these days, coming out of her own mouth. Don’t be a fool.
Brigid watches the fire from Emer’s window. It is as big as the midsummer bonfire, big enough to push against the wind and swallow the rain before it can be doused. It is a signal, and they will keep it burning all night long. She thinks of her father winding the clockworks in the light, feeding the oil, polishing the lenses and the brass work, telling her that each lighthouse has its own particular sequence, its own voice, foghorns as distinct as dialects calling to blinded ships.
She wishes the island itself could make a noise, scream like a corncrake, drone like bees, call out with the desolate keening that comes from every mother who has lost a child. That the magic left in its ground and water, both holy and blasphemous, could rise together in a great cacophonous howl. A noise strong enough to carry Niall on its back across the sea.
She thinks of her mother, lying with their heads on the same pillow, whispering her worst choices as if they are only a fairy tale.
A woman lies on the edge of a cliff,
holding the hands of two children
as they dangle beneath her.
One is her own, the other a changeling.
She cannot tell between them.
She needs both hands to save only one.
Which hand does she let go?
Chapter 23
Bargain
The women pile broken furniture, wreckage collected from the shore, an old currach that their husbands never repaired. All the rubbish that has collected since the summer goes into the pile. They douse the thing with paraffin to get it to light in the lashing rain. The wind is so strong the fire leans sideways, reaching out in a desperate plea. Oisin, who since the drowning has gone from a boy to a man before he is ready, minds the fire all night, while the women and children search desperately, going from house to house, shed to shed, looking for something, anything, to burn. By morning they are breaking apart their beds with axes, emptying cupboards and wardrobes and lopping the legs off tables brought to the island for their weddings. They burn the last of the great planks that were washed ashore from the submarine bombed during the war, the roof beams of cottages that were abandoned for America. They burn it all, as though, if they give up every precious last bit of wood they own, if they build the fire high enough, feed it until it sets alight and burns the sky, it might be answered by a miracle.
Though Rose tries to ply her with tea and empty reassurances, Emer crawls into bed with Niall and holds on to him, imagining she can draw the fever into her own body, wishing that she had the same ability to pull badness out as she does to put it in. She prays to every good and evil being she can imagine. She does not care where the salvation comes from.
She lowers herself to her knees by his bedside and begs for forgiveness from a god she barely believes in. She wants to cut her own veins, burn sods of penance into her arms. She wants to turn her body inside out and let every bit of ugliness pour away until there is nothing left.
She would put him back inside her. Cleave in two and grow herself back together in a carapace. Never let him come out, eyes wide, hair dark as ink, thick as a man’s, glossy and standing like a shock out of his head. The day he was born, he looked at everyone who entered that room as if he had something vital to tell them.
She knows now that all her searching was stupid and pointless, that she inserted pain into people while looking for something she’d had all along. The yearning for Brigid that still consumed her is gone now, as insubstantial as ash lying dead in the fire. Everything she ever wanted was given to her with this child and she never should have tried to have anything else.
They bring holy water, the women do, from Saint Brigid’s well. She bathes him in it, pours it over him without thought to what dribbles down, sloshes it in desperate clumsy spurts, and gestures, without looking up because she cannot bear the resigned pity in their eyes, for them to bring more.
She calls to the same fairies she has scorned and blamed. They can even have him, she promises, if it means he will not die.
She remembers a tale where a woman gave birth to an unearthly beautiful girl. A fairy came to her when the baby was still in the cradle, and told her the child had been chosen to be the bride of a fairy prince. “Take the glowing log out of the fire and bury it in the garden and your child will live as long as it continues to burn in the ground.” So the mother did as she was told and her daughter lived for seven hundred years, married seven fairy kings, until a priest overheard the story, dug up the log and doused it, and she fell away to dust.
Emer holds on to her boy, hot as a glowing log himself, and addresses the darkest seeds left inside her. She will take back every cruel and selfish and hopeful thing she has ever done. Every kiss she gave to Brigid, the invitation she gave to Austin, the turning of the cursing stone that failed to put right her mistakes.
Tell me what to bury, what to burn, what to drown. Tell me what to do and I will do it. I will do anything.
Then she listens, desperate for a whispered musical answer under the screaming disagreement of the wind.
“Mammy,” Niall says. “Tell them to stop that music.”
Emer leaves Rose and Brigid tending Niall’s fever and goes out into the storm. She climbs up the cliffs, almost crawling at times when the wind pushes against her, and down into the cave of Brigid’s well. Niall has already been bathed in this water, and encouraged to drink it through the same small pitcher she once used to feed him breast milk. It made no difference, but she has come here anyway, to beg.
No fire, no moon, no sun, shall burn me,
No lake, no water, no sea shall drown me,
No arrow of fairy nor dart of fury shall wound me.
Blessed Brigid, have mercy on me,
Blessed Brigid, wrap me in your mantle,
Blessed Brigid, mend my bones and save my soul.
At each repetition the wind grows louder, the rain lashes cold icy bullets into the sanctuary, and Emer continues to pray. To saints and virgin mothers and forgiving sons, pressing the beads of her childhood rosary so tightly she thinks they might pop and turn to dust in her hands. When she can’t feel her fingers anymore, she lies on the soft ground and lets herself have a moment of shelter from wind and ice and terror. She almost falls asleep there, until she hears Niall’s voice, as clear as if he is lying on her pillow.
“Mammy?” he says softly, and then again, shocked, fearful. “Mammy, get out of there!” She runs home, dropping the futile rosary on the way. She is fooling herself. The only power she has is the cruel kind. God and the women who obey him are of no use to her.
Niall has taken a turn for the worse; any of them can see that. They’ve burned half the island and no one has come. It is only an hour or so before dawn, but the sky shows no signs of letting up. When Emer returns, Brigid isn’t even there, Rose kneels in the bedroom with Niall, thumbing her rosary and praying like a madwoman. The women who are now the island’s men stand
in the main room, shifting awkwardly in their wellies, their shoulders still wet from the storm.
“Where is Brigid?” Emer demands.
“She’s gone back to her house, Emer. She needed the rest.”
“Wrecked from all that she’s brought upon us, is she?”
“What are you on about?” says Kathleen.
“Only she’s a changeling, is all,” Emer says. “She has you all under her spell, otherwise you’d know it. She’s put a stroke on my boy. The fairy stroke. Sure the same as her family did years ago.”
“She’s done nothing but good for us, Emer,” Margaret says.
“Because it suits her. She has the healing in her hands, did you know? What else do you think she can do, if she’s a mind to? Do you not remember the family she comes from?”
Emer’s mother, quiet in the corner until now, raps her cane on the floor so they will look at her.
“That was a bad family, sure it was,” she says. “Her mother was born of a bargain with the fairies. She was a whore, she lay down with any man who asked. She killed a newborn child, she did, strangled the poor thing as it was coming out of its mother.”
The women stare at Clodagh as if she has just risen from the dead in the corner. “No one asked me,” she quips, answering the question in their eyes. “You were all so taken with her.”
Who knew, Emer thinks, that her mother could be so helpful?
“Do you know where Brigid got that baby?” Emer continues. Her heart is thudding with every word she utters, with the power of them, she can feel their minds pausing, looking back, tripping up, doubting their better instincts.
“Sure it’s from that Australian,” says Kathleen.
“Are you certain of that?” Emer spits. “Certain it wasn’t Austin, or one of your husbands? She came here wanting a baby. She was pregnant long before she met that Australian. She told me herself.”
The women shift uneasily at this, and Rose glares at them. Kathleen has gone white, thinking of how much time Malachy wasted bringing trifles to Brigid. Of the jokes the men made whenever they saw her, and the way his face flared up in response.
“Why do you think she drowned the lads?” Emer says.
“Jesus, Mary and Brigid.” Margaret crosses herself.
“Didn’t I see her,” Emer says, “see her go to the cursing stone, turning and turning, and then there was that storm.”
“That’s quite the accusation, Emer.” Kathleen steps forward. “Why would she do such a thing?”
“Ask her yourself,” Emer says. “Ask her why she got rid of Rose’s husband where she’s so happily taken his place now. It’s not natural. She may have been married, but she has relations with women. She could help Niall if she wanted to. She has the healing in her hands. I’ve seen it. She could pull it out of him. But she won’t and it’s because she put that badness into him. Because I wouldn’t let her do sinful things to me. That is the truth.”
“Saints alive,” her mother mutters, crossing herself. Her paralyzed mouth is twisted into a version of a smile.
She doesn’t even need her hands. She sets in into the air, the darkness that seeps into their minds, that threatens to drown them, that is so familiar they do not realize it comes from Emer at all. They believe it is something that came from them, and not something Emer inserted like a blade. They can’t see it, every loss or rejection or fear Emer has ever felt, gushing out of her in a torrent. She has let it all out at once, all that hatred and misery, as huge as a fabric that expands to capture what it needs.
They take it from her and carry it along. They are buzzing with it, whispering, spitting accusations out like flames. They are enchanted by the same darkness that drives Emer to destroy things. Their eyes grow shadowed, like storm clouds swallowing the sky.
Her grandfather lay down with a fairy woman and Nuala was their child.
They tried to see was she a witch.
They burned her, they drowned her. But she wouldn’t die.
They say she swam all the way to the mainland.
We never should have let her child back here.
She bewitched the men first, isn’t that always the way?
The women gather themselves in a knot. This is how Emer knows it is serious. It used to be the men who dealt with such things. Men and priests. But they no longer have either.
Who’s to say that women can’t be as violent and merciless as men? Or fairies. Or God himself.
Chapter 24
Fairy Tale
Brigid needs to leave. Since she can’t go anywhere until the storm recedes—she is as much a prisoner as the rest of them—she concentrates on packing. She regrets bringing so many things to begin with. She has worn the same three pieces of clothing over and over again because it’s all that fits over her growing belly. All the items the islanders brought back to her, the copper teapot, the fuchsia pottery hand-sponged by nuns in Connemara, and the things she had the men bring over from the mainland, the sheets and towels, the bright bottles of ink and thick ragged-edged paper, the bees, all of it she will leave behind. She will run away with the turf still glowing in the fire. Emer would say that islanders will steal it all, but Brigid likes to imagine it folding in on itself, walls and pictures and furniture and the skin she has shed into dust for the last eight months, swallowed whole into the earth, the way the bog swallows a tree and then petrifies it. Perhaps it will end up that her house is flipped to the other side, an underworld, where another kind of being altogether will sift through her things with delight.
She packs only clean knickers, her drawing journal, one bottle of ink, the few wee things she has knitted for the baby. A picture of Matthew, the address book with the numbers of people back in America she had thought she would never see again. Her passport, warped from damp that seeped into the drawer she’d stashed it in. Rua lies by the door, curled up, watching her every move, ready to follow.
She can see now how precarious it was, everything she built here, how it could all come to nothing in one violent winter storm. All that matters is saving what grows inside her. The sight of Niall’s feverish, doomed face and that useless, continuously fed fire makes her know why this place is Emer’s prison. Those summer days that barely got dark, where sea air and sunshine were as nutritious as her daily meals, seem very far away. For months she thought the child within her lived off this island. Now she is afraid it will die if she stays. As sure as she is that the pathetic fire in the graveyard will save no one.
She can’t save Niall. And if she doesn’t, Emer will never allow her to leave.
Emer bangs open the door without knocking, and Rua skitters away from it. For a moment, seeing her there with wet hair plastered over a purplish, desperate face, Brigid thinks Niall is already gone. But then Emer looks behind her, closes the door and paces around in a frenetic way, which means she’s still in the throes of hoping she can turn it all around.
“They’re coming now,” she says. “I’m only a moment or two ahead of them.”
For a second Brigid thinks she means the doctor, the rescue they are hoping for from the mainland. But she wouldn’t be here if it was that.
Rua barks at her. She doesn’t stop after one or two, but keeps on, relentless, barks over and over until Brigid must lead her into the bedroom and close the door. In there she stops barking, but whimpers, paces and scratches at the bottom of the door instead.
“Who’s coming?” Brigid says.
“Your women,” Emer sneers.
“Come to see if I’m a witch?” Emer avoids her eyes.
“My mother said some things to them.”
“I imagine she did.”
“If you heal Niall they’ll not harm you. I’ll convince them to let you go.”
“I can’t, Emer. He needs a surgeon.”
“You’re lying about not being able for it and I don’t know why. I know you hate me but you love him. Why won’t you pull it out?”
“I don’t hate you, Emer. I’ve tried. I can’t heal
him.”
“You’re afraid it’ll kill the baby.”
Brigid says nothing.
“That’s how you lost the others, isn’t it?” Emer says. “I won’t allow you to give up Niall for yours.”
“I can’t do it, Emer. I can’t. You wouldn’t, either.”
“Well you’ll try. Or you’ll regret it, so. I can’t stop them now. You don’t know what they can be like. You would if you’d seen what they did to your mother.”
“I know,” Brigid says. A flash then, a girl moving across the room, in between them, like a frightened animal. She is only a vision, but to Brigid she seems as real as this girl who threatens her.
“You don’t know all of it,” Emer says. “Unless you help, they’ll do the same to you. I can make them.”
Brigid remembers meeting Emer for the first time, how she had tried to put this into her from the start, and Brigid had deflected it, but Emer is just coming back with a bigger hand now.
“What did they do to you, Emer, that ever made you so cruel?”
“Am I more cruel than you? You who’d let a child die.”
They stand against each other, neither of them blinks, neither of them gives. They are Brigid and Darla, saint and changeling, lovers and enemies. Neither one will ever back down. This is about more than their hands, or themselves. It’s about their children.
A polite knock at the door. No harder than the rain. As if they’ve only come for tea.
“Don’t do this, Emer,” Brigid begs. “I loved you.”
“You used me,” Emer says, her voice wavering.
“Just let me go.”
“I can’t,” Emer says. “I have no choices left.”
They file in, a dripping mass of them, too many for such a small room. Kathleen, Margaret, Nelly, Geraldine, young Maeve. They look like men, massive in their husbands’ wellies and the oilskins Brigid had ordered from Dublin, and reeking of fire and the sea. The skin on their faces has grown so coarse from working outdoors it looks like it wouldn’t bleed if you sliced it. And their hands: hands that were never pretty, after a lifetime of housework, hands that held their own knives and cut with them until the blades were worn slim as needles. Their hands are monstrous now.