by Lisa Carey
Emer backs away, her lack of peripheral vision causing her to knock down one of the kitchen chairs. Her head sings with unbearable noise. She does not belong here. Not with these women, her sister, her lover, not in this house. Not in this world. She should be with Niall. She was distracted by the thought that someone else could save him. She is the only one who knows how. She never should have let go of her life’s only vigilance for the time it took to wonder if it was enough.
Emer pulls herself out the door and hurries toward the place where they have already stolen her child.
Chapter 25
Ceili
Niall is on an island.
It isn’t his island, or Brigid’s or Rose’s or his mother’s island, though it is similar. It is a place where every road has two lanes, one trampled by people and sheep and cattle and children, and the other by something else. It is raining here, but at the same time it is sunny, you can feel the warmth dry the drops on your face even as they fall. There is always a rainbow. It doesn’t look like something you would want to wish upon.
He thinks there is no one here, but then he sees they are all gathered together, having a ceili around a bonfire. They have lit it on the promontory over the port, the place known as the children’s graveyard. As if the celebration itself is an emergency.
Everyone he knows is there, even the men who went on ahead of them into the storm. Austin is playing music and he looks terrible, he hasn’t shaved and his eyes are rimmed with red and he can barely get a breath in between all the blowing. He tries to take the whistle away and say something, but nothing comes out. He goes back to the instrument. He has no voice. He looks, Niall thinks, like something else is making him play that whistle. The party has been going on too long.
His cousins are dancing. The little ones cry out about how their feet hurt, but Fiona and Eve cannot stop to help. Niall’s dead father comes up to him, soaked to the skin, his trousers dripping puddles into the squelchy ground. “The arms are hanging off me after that row,” he says. “Would you put a pint on for your father?”
“I would, of course,” Niall says, but he’s not sure how to do this. Everyone seems to be drinking, but the source of it is not clear. When he turns back to ask his father, he sees the man fumbling with his sleeve. He’s having trouble with his arm. It seems to be falling off. Niall turns away.
Brigid is there. She is holding his newest cousins, the babies, the fat one and the little elf, and they are nursing from her, latched tight to her breasts. He stares too long at the enormous, dark curve over her nipples and feels his face growing hot with shame. It seems like he’s remembering something and looking forward to something at the same time. She lets go of the babies, using both of her hands to receive an overflowing drink from someone. The babies stay put, hanging on by their mouths.
Rose is dancing, spinning, laughing, her hair loose and lifting into the air like something trying to fly away. She has a knife in her hand. She is slicing some enormous fruit, he can’t tell what, and feeding it straight into people’s lips. She twirls over to her husband and straddles him, laughing and riding him like a child playing at horses. Austin cannot stop whistling long enough to receive the dripping piece she offers.
The good people are everywhere, but they are not the strangers he expected. They are his neighbors, his cousins, his auntie and his grandmother. There are no small fairies leading them maniacally around by a leash. There is no one here, except for Brigid, whom he has not known for his entire life.
He cannot find his mother. There was a time when he truly believed that they were one person, tethered by an invisible but unbreakable twine, a band that led from her neck, that pulled him back if he wandered even an inch too far. If her head ached, he knew it, if her neck tightened, he pulled at his own collar. If she took someone’s hand and poisoned them he felt as if he had just emptied himself. When that thing that looked like Austin was on top of her, he knew it was inside her as well. He had felt it, it punctured between his legs and pried, splitting them both in two.
But now he cannot find her, and it is worse than what has been happening lately, where he turns and sees her and she looks like someone he can’t remember, not the woman whose love he has always been sure of, but someone he is wary of approaching at all.
The fire is massive; they are burning the whole island in it. Furniture, clothing, doors, cradles, carts, the plow, anything that might ignite has been thrown into the pyre. The islanders are ripping the clothing off their backs and cheering when it is caught up and consumed.
He sees the women who row the boat carrying lighted torches and climbing down the pathway to the slip. They untie the currachs and touch fire to them, launching them to burn on top of the sea. Saint Brigid did that, long ago, once she was settled there, sent all the boats away, set them on fire so no one would ever be able to leave. He will tell his mother this, when he finds her. She will not be amused.
He moves through the spinning bodies of islanders and every once in a while they catch his arm and turn him around, cheering when he gives in to the instinctive tap and shuffle of his feet. He doesn’t want to dance, or swallow the dripping fruit that is being passed around, or kiss in the way they all seem to be, opening their mouths like they are feeding on each other. All he wants is to find his mother; he won’t accept a morsel until she tells him he can have it. He wants to be small enough to fit in her lap again, and drink from the very heart of her, milk that, if he closes his eyes and remembers, he can still taste. Warmer and sweeter than the tea that replaced it.
He spins through the crowd and something starts to change, the sky grows dark, the fire climbs, the faces around him seep with shadows that look like spilled ink. Their features warp and twist from familiar to vicious and unrecognizable. Their voices are all wrong, high pitched, frantic, like impatient birds. The women are naked and have babies, half-formed and horrible, growing out of them, a head between two breasts, a foot protruding from an abdomen, a tiny, wizened hand reaching out of someone’s neck. He tries to scream, break free of the whirling crowd, but he has no voice. It’s because he can’t find his mother, she is holding his voice hostage, it’s why she always puts her hand there, to her throat, as if she is checking on something she has swallowed and is not about to let it come back up. His mother has stolen his voice, his heart, his feet. He cannot join in anything until she gives it all back.
Then he sees her, she is on the other side of the fire. She looks so miserable, so lonely, so much like she has always looked, no matter how hard he tries to pull it away. He knows, he has known for a while now, that no matter how many times he kisses or hugs her or pulls a palm across the screwed-up skin of her forehead, it will never be enough. She’s too vigilant, she always has been, she will never let go of the fear of losing him long enough to actually take him in her arms.
He fights his way through the mob of dancing creatures, trying not to look as they grow more and more deformed. Brigid moves in front of him. She no longer has Rose’s babies attached, she is moaning, she grabs his arm, lowers herself to a squat. Her colossal belly is transparent, and inside, coiled and writhing, is an atrocious pig.
Niall pulls his arm away and stumbles backward, right through the corner of the fire. He gets within the range of his mother’s limited vision, coming upon her from the right so she will be able to see him with her only eye.
She spots him and for an instant she looks delighted, he has never seen her look so overjoyed, and he reaches out a hand to clasp the one she is raising to pull him in. She is holding something in front of her.
She is offering him something to drink.
Chapter 26
Stones
When Emer gets there, his breath has just gone.
The doctor leans over him, listening at his mouth, pounding his chest, then putting his loose, foul lips over the sweet mouth of her child and blowing so hard his chest rises.
She tries to go to him, to knock the doctor back, the doctor who appears to be devou
ring her son’s face, but someone stops her with a clawed hand on her arm.
“’Tis the breath of life, sure,” her mother reassures her. Emer remembers that doctor’s breath, so sharp it’s like he’s breathing petrol.
“Why are you doing that?” Emer says. “Aren’t you taking him to hospital?” The doctor doesn’t even look at her but puts his cheek down, gentle as a mother, onto the warm pillow of Niall’s chest. Listening. Emer and Niall do this in her bed, taking turns, she listening for Niall’s heart, he listening for hers. Mo chroí, they whisper, my heart. It is one of their games.
The house is filled with people, island women, men from Muruch and the mainland, every one of them has at one time felt the bitterness that rises up from Emer’s heart and pools like sweat in the palms of her hands. Everyone goes still, hushes, as if their silence will create the sound the doctor is hoping for. Not a breath comes to them for one beat, two beats, three. The doctor’s head rises, lowers, pauses, and then gives up and lifts again. He shakes his head. A collective island gasp and click of the palate, a sound that means surprise, anger, remorse and disapproval all in one. They all gasp and Emer begins to scream.
She tries it herself, before they pull her away. Puts her hands on him, her cruel hands that have only ever touched him with love, presses his heart, kisses his mouth, keens into the warm dirty hollow of his ear. She puts a hand under his nightshirt, to feel the familiar warmth of his back. Only his back is not warm. Not cold exactly, but no temperature at all. She is shaking his body, insisting he answer her, and then she is pulled away, her grip pried off, familiar voices speaking nonsense about collecting herself. The priest comes in with his vial of oil to administer the last rites.
“He’s not in there,” she says to them, lashing out with the hands they cower away from even as they try to hold her down.
“That’s not my son. They’ve taken him.”
Later, after a tablet and the pit of sleep where she can hear everything but say nothing, Rose is with her again, looking as if nothing has happened.
“Where’s Niall?” Emer says, and Rose winces.
“Where’s Brigid, then?”
“She’s with the doctor.”
“She has to come for Niall. Put her hands on him.”
“She did, Emer.”
“She didn’t. I’ve been waiting.”
“I watched her do it myself. It didn’t do any good.”
“Where is my boy?” she asks again, and this time Rose answers her.
“He’s laid out on the table, Emer.”
“We’ll sit up tonight, Rose. We’ll wait for him to come in and we’ll snatch him back. He knows better than to eat with them. They won’t be able to hold on. We’ll wait here and he’ll come. He will.”
“Emer, love,” Rose says. She has to look away from Rose’s face. There is too much in there, she wants to slash at it. But she needs her sister to wait with her.
“You’ll stay and watch over him with me?” Emer says.
Rose gives her another tablet, and Emer takes it because sleep seems more welcome than life ever has to her.
“You’ll wake me with the moon, won’t you, Rose?”
“I will, Emer. Hush now.”
“Don’t leave him alone. We don’t want them stealing the body as well.”
“I won’t, Emer. I won’t leave you alone.”
In the middle of the night, Emer gets up and sits by the table where they have laid out the small, still body of her son. His face has been leached of color, like someone has made a mold of him and left the outer layer unpainted. In the candlelight she can deceive herself into seeing rosy cheeks and a red mouth still moist with breathing and she can almost imagine she is waiting for him to wake up. That she is stealing the few, sweet moments she gets watching him sleep. How still he is in sleep, often it is a relief to her, after a long wet day alone in the house, to feel the moment he switches, from a twitchy, talkative boy to a gently breathing pile upon the bedclothes. She regrets that now. That wanting of stillness. She would slash herself to the bone for the chance to never watch him sleep again.
Rose sits with her for a while, the older girls left with the babies, but she keeps leaking milk and fussing around and asking if Emer needs anything and finally Emer sends her away. She prefers to be alone in the moment he comes back through the door.
The story that is going around in her head is this:
A woman died in childbirth, but a fairy told her husband she was only snatched, and if he waited up by her body in the moonlight he could take her back. So he waited, his wife’s body laid out on one side of him, the cradle with the newborn baby and a set of tongs across the rim on the other. In the night, her spirit came in the door, and moved to peek in the cradle. When she did, he threw some holy water at her and grabbed her by the wrists and held on and wouldn’t let go, the baby shrieking like a storm the whole time. She fell back into her body then, the spell broken, and sat up to soothe the baby at her leaking breasts.
Emer waits for her son to come through the door, so she can grab onto him so tight she can squeeze away death, and never, for the rest of her days, let go of him again.
“Emer, come to bed.”
“I’m waiting, Rose.”
“You’re asleep on your feet, pet.”
“I’ll wait for him to come back to me.”
“Emer, you’ll be waiting a lifetime. He’s gone, love.”
“I’ll wait regardless.”
Nothing the first night. During the day the islanders file in to weep and speak in low tones and kiss him until she wants to chase them all out with the broom. A second night of waiting. Her body has never done anything so precisely determined in her life. She waits with every cell and fiber of her flesh. She waits, burning up with it, slowly consumed by every moment he doesn’t come, like a sod of turf eaten by fire. By the end there is nothing left of her. You could blow at her and she’d scatter, like the ash of a fire let to go out.
On the third morning there is a row over whether to bury him. The priest has come over for it, bringing a small coffin from the mainland, and Emer bars the door with a cupboard. The men have to break through, knocking over the press she pinned against the door, all the delph crashing into shards on the stone floor. They grab on to her, screaming and writhing and electrified with pure sorrow. A few of the men who take turns holding her end up getting sick outside. No man or woman who touches Emer that day will ever forget the vileness that emerges, wave after wave of it, like a hive of evil broken open and raging with revenge.
In the end, the doctor has to give her a shot and she is not there when they bury her child.
Rose cannot watch as they say their prayers and begin to shovel wet earth onto the absurdly small coffin. She turns and walks away to soothe Wee Emer, who is squawking in her arms. This is the fussiest child she has ever had; she wants to be held twenty-four hours a day. The baby’s cries and the wind almost drown out the vicious sound of wet earth on wood. The graveyard stands just above the quay, on the jutting circle of land where they burn their signal bonfires. Mostly it’s children who are here, jagged purplish stone marking the graves of babies and toddlers from a time when women had so many and lost most of them. They say children never died when Saint Brigid was here, but when she was gone, the families that were left lost them, one after the other, to typhoid, tetanus, smallpox. Siblings who never met nestled together under rough gray stone. Children don’t die as often nowadays. Rose can’t imagine that even when it was common, it was any less of a blasphemy. The first thing you see when you row a boat to this island is all the children who have already gone.
Chapter 27
Currach
Brigid sits very still, holding the mound of her belly as the doctor listens to it with a stethoscope.
“What’s all this talk now, of burning and witches?”
“Just Emer panicking. She was out of her senses with the boy ill.” Dying, she corrects herself, he was dying. She mustn’t think
of it. She must keep this from splitting her apart at the seams. The only way she can help Niall now is to leave.
“I heard the women called up to you.”
“Not at all.”
The doctor raises a weedy eyebrow and looks around. The floor is still a wreck of muddy treads, and the place reeks of something burned, meat that has gone off but is cooked nonetheless.
Brigid’s back has healed. It smoothed itself as soon as Emer turned away. Emer is too grief-stricken to hurt her anymore. But she is going anyway.
“They burned your mother, they say. They’re a superstitious lot.”
“I’d like to go back to the mainland,” Brigid says. “I’ll get a lift to Galway from there.”
“We can call in to the guards. Have charges brought against them. There’s a smell of burned flesh in here that would sicken you.”
“They did nothing. I want to have my baby in the hospital, is all. I’m afraid of what might happen out here.”
“And you the midwife. Didn’t you insist I wasn’t needed?”
“I’ve changed my mind.”
“After all your talk of staying you’ll go as soon as it suits you.”
“I didn’t know,” Brigid says.
“Didn’t know that a boy could die with nothing but a fire calling for help? It’s pathetic.”
“What’s pathetic,” Brigid says, “is that they weren’t given a telephone. Or a radio.”
“So they could send a distress signal and still wait for the sea to swallow their boats? Don’t be daft, woman. They should take the land being offered to them and be done with this rock. The government isn’t to blame. The sea will do what it likes. It always has. At least they’ve a choice. Not like some.”