by Lisa Carey
Not one of them, though each of them has laughed with her, let her hand bleed comfort into their shoulder, looks Brigid in the eye.
“Will you leave us, Emer,” Kathleen says.
There is hesitation in Emer now, as if she sees something she hadn’t expected. She who expects the worst.
“Sure this is about my own child,” Emer says.
Kathleen sighs, turning to Brigid. “Can you help the lad?”
“I can’t,” Brigid says. “He needs surgery.”
“Emer says it’s you what put it in him.”
“Emer’s upset,” Brigid says calmly. “And not a little confused.”
“There’s been talk,” Margaret says.
“About?”
“The baby, for one. Who really put it in you?”
“The baby is mine alone,” Brigid says boldly. They mutter angrily to one another. Maeve looks her rudely up and down, as if disappointed by the news that she has no man to blame.
“Did you take our men? Was it you brought that storm?”
“I’d ask Emer about that.”
“Emer,” Kathleen sneers. “She’s dodgy enough but she’d not drown her own husband.”
“What reason would I have?”
“Maybe you wanted Austin gone. Wanted Rose to yourself,” Kathleen says. “That’s the other talk we’ve heard.”
Brigid rolls her eyes at that, but Emer can see how frightened she is. Her normally proud shoulders are bent, curved in like the arms that hold on to her belly.
“What are you, some sort of lesbian?” Maeve asks. Two or three gasps from behind, at the concept or merely Maeve’s knowledge of such a word, Emer can’t be sure.
Brigid doesn’t say anything at first, just looks right at Maeve, who flushes. Emer sees it again. How similar they are, the moments before violence and sex. How easily one could be mistaken for another.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Brigid says then, bold as anything. She looks at Kathleen’s hands. She is holding iron fireplace tongs by her side. Kathleen steps forward.
“Stop,” Emer says. No one is more surprised than herself. They hold their breath, waiting for dispensation.
“I’ll do it,” she says. Kathleen gives her the tongs and walks back to the huddle of women.
Emer puts the tip into the depth of the fire, grasping a nugget of turf, an orange as deep and fierce as the only color left in her son’s eyes. Brigid looks at her, curious, cold, with just a trace of how she once looked at her flickering at the edges of her mouth.
“I won’t hurt you,” Emer whispers into her ear, the fiery whorls of hair tickling her face. Amazing that in the middle of such terror she can feel that quiver, that weakening, of lust. “Just go to Niall now and I won’t let them hurt you either.”
“Emer,” Brigid sighs, and Emer thinks of the ways Brigid has said her name, with breathless excitement, with humor, with tenderness. With love. Now, her name, two rigid syllables, is said with the same sickened resignation she has heard from everyone else.
“You can’t hurt me,” she adds quietly. But still, her hand reaches into her apron pocket to grip the island woman’s knife.
That’s when Emer puts the fire against her, the very same fire that has burned on that island for centuries, not to insert pain, but to give her something else. A story she was told over and over again, but never really heard.
They’re coming up the road, her brother says.
What will they do? Will they make me leave?
I don’t know, Nuala.
Don’t let them hurt me, Desi.
What happened? Why couldn’t you save the baby?
I tried. The baby was already dead.
Desi looks at Nuala’s hard, round belly and then turns back to the window.
Jesus, Desi says. There’s a lot of them.
The girl, Nuala, never knew her mothers, fairy or human, or her father, or her orphaned siblings. All she ever had was her brother, Desmond, a boy who was also a man, because he needed to be, for her. They said he was simple. He couldn’t read or write, had avoided school altogether, though he could do sums in his head that wool buyers double-checked on paper in disbelief. He loved the island, his dogs, the sea. He suffered people only when he had to, and then, when he was required to be around them, he looked like he was in physical pain. Women, especially, left him twitchy and mute. He couldn’t look them in the eye. Men were willing to communicate in minimal grunts and grumbles over weather or the stubborn nature of sheep. He could stand in a field of men all day and never have to say a word. Women asked questions, demanded answers. Only his sister could talk to him, chatter on about whatever came into her head, because she didn’t expect him to respond. Her voice was not the same violating noise in his ears. She belonged in his head, just like the wind and the sea.
When she was a baby he had carried her everywhere, strapped to his chest in an old flannel shawl of their mother’s. She could remember snatches of this, how the weather, the rain and damp air and wind, couldn’t penetrate. She could press her face against the fragrant wool at his chest and none of it could touch her. She was safer than she would ever be again in her life.
Go into the bedroom, her brother says.
Don’t answer it, Nuala says, stupidly. As if there is any way to bar an entrance with no lock.
They pound on the door, thuds that sound more like boots than fists. He shoves her toward the bedroom and she goes in without a lamp or candle, and stands within the rectangle of firelight that shines around the edges of the doorframe.
When no one answers their knock, the men throw the front door open and heave into the room, massive in their layers of wool, clumsy, like seals flopping themselves across the threshold.
Where’s the girl, Des?
Leave her be. She’s none of your concern.
I’d say she’s my concern. That’s my grandchild what she killed tonight.
She killed no one. She’s only a girl herself.
She’s a changeling is what she is.
You didn’t mind who she was when it suited you so, says Desi, sounding like a man who talks back to bullies every day, instead of the brother who is afraid to ask for sugar in the shop.
Hold him, lads.
Desi’s dog starts snarling then, and there is a scuffle and a canine yelp of pain and a man swearing and then the door is shut and Nuala knows the dog is outside, throwing itself against the door, with nothing to sink his teeth into. The baby flips inside her, painfully, as if it’s trying to send a message. Go, it kicks, before it is too late.
Healing them had been the way she could make them not afraid of her. Her brother never understood why she bothered, the islanders had been suspicious of them since their mother’s death and he was happy to leave it that way. He didn’t have the same need as his sister; she needed their love. So she gave them her hands.
She’d always been able to heal her own childish scrapes and bruises, the broken limb of a dog, the burns on her brother from careless splatters of hot pitch while tarring the currach. When she started doing it for the other children, and then for the mothers in labor, she thought she could get love out of them. She felt it, whenever she pulled pain or fever away, along with it, like a gift, their love, clutching her for a moment before it released with the pain into the air. Her brother wanted no part of their neighbors’ emotions, their anger and bitter gossip, their romances and feuds, their loyalty and love. Nuala wanted all of it. She gathered it like spilled sweets into the pockets of herself. She touched people not only to heal them but to feel for a moment all that life pulsing through them, love, hate, fear, regret, bliss.
She touched boys, then men. In the hay fields, at the shore, in the empty clocháns. She put her hands right where their want and anger and misery and hope gathered together and begged to be released. She pulled everything they had ever felt out of them, often thought she might shatter from the intensity of it gushing through her. With the men it required more, she had to lie down and
let them push themselves inside her as deep as they could get, until they reached a place where she forgot everything except inviting them deeper. It wasn’t forced or cruel or ugly, not to her, but what they wanted from her and what she was intending to give were two different things. The men knew it was wrong, even as she didn’t. They had not been raised to believe that a girl should invite, or enjoy, such violation. They hated themselves, they confessed through a dark wood lattice to the priest, but went back to her willing hands again and again.
When she told her brother she was expecting a child, Desi didn’t ask who it was from, which was a relief. It could have been any one of them, or all of them. He only asked if she’d been forced. When she said no, blushing, he asked nothing else. He got the family cradle out from the shed, the cradle that was said to have come from Saint Brigid herself, hand carved from the last of the island’s oak, to soothe the babies of the women who ran to her, shamed, violated and alone. He polished it up and replaced the missing limpet shells, and she knew he would accept the baby with the same simple devotion he had shown to her. She couldn’t wait to hold it. She felt as though she had fashioned it herself, this child, made it out of all the times her hands had grasped at love.
Nuala! Desi screams when they have their hands on him.
She has a notion to climb out the tiny window, but is fumbling at the latch and thinking there is no way she will fit through it, when one of them enters the bedroom and pulls her roughly out by the arm.
Put your man in there. Keep him quiet.
How am I to do that?
You there, lad, go with him.
Two men drag her struggling brother into the bedroom and kick the door closed.
The men have taken over in the small room; the combined breath of them is making the air thick, fogging the windows. Men of every age, men she has lain down with and others who would never consider it. Boys, expected to be men even though their bodies and hearts have not caught up yet. Some of them can’t look at her, others are looking at her way too hard.
What did you do to that baby?
It wasn’t my doing, she says. Her voice is shaking, it sounds, even to her, like a desperate lie. The child came out already dead. There was nothing I could heal. This was only partly true. She hadn’t tried. The child inside her had seized with such terror that she only pretended to use her hands. She couldn’t sacrifice her own child.
Your woman says otherwise, the man says. She looks at him. She has seen this man’s face warp in a way no one else but his wife has.
I wouldn’t let a baby die.
We don’t know what you are.
I’m no different than any of ye.
One of them is stirring the fire, breaking up the gray and orange logs, sinking the fire iron deep inside it to heat up. This fire never goes out, they bury it and revive it each morning, and have for as long as the house has been standing. Even their mother, the possessed, impostor mother, had never dared to douse the saint’s fire.
Hold the iron against her.
If she heals it, she’s the changeling and lying about the baby.
If she can’t, she’s nothing but a whore.
Neither of these options sounds reasonable or even bearable. There is a pause then, where she thinks perhaps one of them will laugh heartily and dismiss the entire business. She can hear the men in the bedroom with her brother, the sound it makes every time they knock his body back to the floor.
The first one to hold her down is a boy she once tugged at with her hands in a cave by the water until he cried relief into her hair. Now he cannot look her in the eyes. She pulls her mother’s knife out of her pocket and slashes at him with it, but he grips and twists her wrist until she cries out and lets it go. He holds her arms behind her, driving his knees into the backs of hers to get her to drop to the floor. She can feel his terror, a slim hard threat pushed against her thigh.
Please, she says. Please don’t hurt my baby.
Another man kneels down hard on her hair, jerking her neck back to stop that plea. They hold her on her side, her belly too big for her to lie on, and use her knife to rip at her dress back, splitting it easily down the seam. She can feel the fire coming off the hearth and off them for a whole lifetime before they actually bring the heated iron to her skin.
The first few times they burn her, Nuala can’t stop herself from healing it. The men watch the skin rise up and knit itself back together, the welt of angry burn sinking into her back as if slipping into cool water. Once they see the wounds heal themselves, the fear of it is enough to make them want to burn her more. The boy continues to hold her down, and the way he holds her feels both like an embrace and an affront. Once he brushes a callused, nail-bitten hand across her breast and Nuala lets out a sob and calls to her brother and two men have to look away. It is more intimate, this scene of torture, than any act of lust or abandon they’ve participated in.
Desi howls through it all, held prisoner in the bedroom, sounding not much older than a child himself, crying her name and the name of their saint to have mercy on them.
The burning is meant to tell them something. But no one is clear about what to do with the answer so they just keep doing it, over and over again, until the burns no longer heal and her skin begins to act like it should.
You can’t hurt me, Nuala says. You can’t hurt me, you can’t hurt me. Not a one of you can hurt me.
She stops healing herself. She turns inward, encasing her child with all the magic she has left, and lets them do it, lets them sear her with all the fear and doubt and misplaced lust they’ve ever had. This confuses them, they stop, there is a discussion about what to do. Keep going until they kill her? Apparently they’ve lost the stomach for that. They will wait instead, for the priest to advise them, an authority who can punish or banish her with the blessings of God himself. By the time they skulk away she is unconscious and her back is burned so deeply that in some places the bone shines through the blackened flesh. The last of them leaves with the morning, they do not have the courage to stay around and see if she will really die.
Nuala. It’s all right, love. They’ve gone now.
They didn’t hurt me, Desi. They couldn’t.
Jesus, Nuala. Your back.
It doesn’t matter. The baby is safe.
Her brother holds on to her as she closes the last of their wounds.
The next day Nuala is gone. Her brother never reveals how she got away, no boats had come or gone on the island, she disappeared during a day when the sea raged them into seclusion. Though there is talk of sending Desmond off as well, in the end they leave him alone. He has none of the power they fear and he keeps to himself. Some say Nuala threw herself over the cliff, others that she went back under the ground to where the fairy impostor came from.
She is never seen, or heard from, on the island again.
Brigid doubles over with the weight of this story, this fairy tale that Emer inserts with fire under her skin. The very same fire.
You were here before, it whispers. Your mother was born in the doorway between two worlds. You began here, you belong to us. We will not allow you to get away.
The air in the cottage is filled with the odor of what she has seen, the smell of fear and turf and blistered skin. It takes her a moment to realize that it is the wound on her back, where Emer has held the nugget of turf, that smells. It doesn’t hurt yet. The women have not moved toward Brigid. They are muttering to one another in Irish.
We should have known. She’s her mother all over again.
Hold the fire against her. ’Tis the only way to know.
Let Emer do it.
If Emer were any use, she’d have it finished by now.
Emer’s right. She stole that child. Stole our men. She’d let the boy die.
Brigid knows what to do. It’s an effort to fight it, to refuse to heal herself, but Emer, by giving her that story, has just shown her how to protect the baby. She had the ability all along. She takes what is in her hands an
d turns it inward, folds it like blessed fabric around her child. She does not keep any of it for herself.
“You can’t hurt me,” Brigid says to them all, without thinking, in Irish. This doesn’t help her. They look angry at the very cheek of it, this impostor using their language. They move in, swarming her, pulling at her apron, her hair, their hands are pleas and punishment, raking her for answers. Maeve, who has imagined more than once a woman’s hands beneath her clothes, is the first to reach for the tongs from Emer, intending to press fire into her back. She uses them to knock the knife out of Brigid’s hand.
None of them has noticed the brightening.
When Rose bursts into the cottage to tell them the sky has lifted and they are no longer prisoners, they reel away from their tight circle. Maeve drops her hold on Brigid like a guilty boy with a stone. Brigid is left lying like a child by the hearth.
“What have you done?” Rose hisses. They don’t know themselves.
“The boats are here,” Rose says. “They’ve come to take Niall to hospital.” All the women but Emer slip away out the door, her grip on their minds gone now, looking as horrified by the appearance of dawn light as they are at what they were about to do. Rose looks at Emer then, as if she might be able to explain it. Emer looks back at her sister, wide-eyed and pleading as a child, for another answer.
“Rose?” Emer says. “Why did you leave him alone?”
“Shame on you,” Rose says cruelly. And she pushes Emer, who is left with the cooling fire iron, out of the way.
Rose kneels on the floor and gathers Brigid into her arms. She rocks her back and forth and whispers that she need not be afraid as Brigid sobs.
The dog has keened through it all, locked in the bedroom, she howls like a newborn left wet and alone. A cry that is relentless and piercing, with no intention of letting up until it is given what it wants.