The Crow of Connemara

by Stephen Leigh

  “Carl . . .” Tommy said again, warningly. He set down his whiskey with a crash on the table beside his chair. Golden liquid sloshed over the rim. “This isn’t the time or the place. I don’t care what you’ve been hired to do. We’re not going to turn Dad’s death into a political circus.”

  He already has, Colin wanted to say. And now you can’t avoid it. That also explained why Harris seemed to be attached to Tommy’s hip: he was the Heir Apparent. Colin wondered how much that tempered any doubt his older brother might have had regarding whether or not to pull the plug on their father.

  The lines of his mother’s face had hardened a bit. “Tommy,” she said, “why didn’t I know this?”

  “I didn’t know myself until yesterday,” he said, “when we met with Dad’s campaign staff. You know Dad always said I should move into politics earlier than he did. I was going to tell you after you made the decision—” that with a glare at Harris, “—but I thought you’d be pleased that I was following Dad’s path.”

  Her face relaxed slightly. “I don’t know. I have to think some more . . .”

  “Well, we’re not going to decide right now,” Jen commented, rising from her chair, “so I’m going to take care of the dishes. Colin, would you mind helping?”

  “No, not at all,” he said. He finished his whiskey in one swallow, letting the heat settle into his stomach. He rose and followed Jen to the door.

  Both of them said very little on the drive back to her apartment until Jen reached I-90/I-94 East off of North Paulina, heading back to her apartment near DePaul. “Y’know,” Colin mused as Jen made the turn, “it’s strange how one moment I can feel furious with Mom, and the next I’m thinking that I’m just an asshole who should be much nicer to her.”

  “That’s family,” Jen said. She flicked on her turn signal as she merged with the traffic, then nudged it back off. “They’re the people we love to hate. She can be a total dragon. But her intentions are always good—she only wants what’s best for us, and she’ll fight like hell against anything she thinks might be a threat to any of us.”

  “Even if it’s not what we want.” Colin laid his head on the window, staring at the traffic. His glasses clicked against the curve of the window and pressed uncomfortably against his nose; he shifted position.

  “I guess it’s hard to stop thinking of your children as kids who don’t know enough to make a good decision—even after they’ve grown up.”

  “I felt like I should have stayed with her tonight. That bit about cleaning my room and all . . .”

  “Aunt Patty’s staying with her. She’s not going to be alone, and the two of you would probably just have ended up getting into an argument.”

  “I know, but . . .” He took a long breath. “I’m her son, and she made the offer. It was pretty obvious she expected me to stay.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jen said nothing. He glanced over to her; her eyes were focused on the road though there wasn’t—at least by Chicago standards—a great deal of traffic. He could see a muscle clench in her jaw. Colin decided to mention at least one of the herd of elephants in the back seat.

  “Dad’s already gone,” he said. “If he’s brain dead, then he’s dead. Period.”

  “I know. It still doesn’t make the decision any easier, not when I go into his room and see his chest rising and falling and see his pulse on the monitor. Not when I can lay my head on his chest and still hear his heart beating.” The muscle along her jawline relaxed, then bunched again.

  “Are you thinking maybe we should give him more time, the way Father Frank suggests?”

  “No,” she said quickly, then shook her head, glaring at the cars ahead of them. “I don’t know, Colin. I just don’t know. Not really, I guess. I’ll stick by what I said after dinner. But it seems like Tommy, or Harris anyway, doesn’t want to waste any time. Tommy’s already planning to be Dad, at least in the electorate’s minds. And somehow I don’t think you want to wait, either—the sooner this is done, the sooner you . . .” She stopped. “Well, what is it that you’re going to do? Somehow I don’t think it involves going back to Seattle.”

  Colin didn’t answer; he didn’t see any need to do so. They both knew the answer. They listened to the sound of the engine as Jen changed lanes. In the back seat, another of the elephants shifted position.

  “You’ve been reading my mind,” Colin ventured.

  “I always could, even when you were a kid,” Jen answered. He saw her gaze flick over once to him, then back to the road. “What are you not telling me?” she asked him. “Because I think there’s a lot.” Another elephant. It’s amazing that the car’s suspension isn’t dragging on the pavement.

  He shrugged although she wasn’t looking at him. “I don’t know. It’s just . . .” He let out a breath, then released the words he’d been holding back since he’d come to Chicago. “I’ve left school, Jen. As of a week ago. I told my committee that I was taking at least a semester off and wouldn’t be starting my dissertation. Every time I play music, Jen, I feel like that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. Not the research, not the dissertation, not the teaching. Playing music. It’s what feels right. And lately, it seems like the audience feels it, too.”

  “And when exactly were you planning to tell anyone this?”

  The elephants stirred in the back seat, guiltily. “I was planning to come back here after I got an Irish visa in hand, and tell Dad . . .” The word made him stop, his voice choking. Visions of his father rose up like apparitions around him. “ . . . Dad and Mom, and you and Tommy then. Sometime before the end of the semester, when I’d had time to get everything together. Then all this crap happened, and there wasn’t a good time or place to say anything at all.”

  “So it’s the Ireland thing again? What you and Dad were fighting about before you went to grad school?”

  He let that sit for a bit, watching the lights of the city slide by. Finally, he let out a nasal breath. “Maybe. Jen, over there, where the music I like best came from, well, it’s easy to think that there’s something more behind or underneath the tunes. At least that’s what some of the musicians I knew who are from there tell me. I’ve wanted to go over for so long. There are old bones in the earth there, a sense of the presence of all that history and all those old gods. There isn’t that sharp separation between the natural and the supernatural there; the boundaries sometimes are all blurred. Over here . . . well, it’s different.”

  “You’re just romanticizing the place, Colin. That’s all.”

  “Maybe, but then again, I won’t know until I actually get there, will I?” he answered, then stopped as she switched lanes again to exit at East Jackson. Jen wiped at her cheek, almost angrily, and he realized that she was crying. He put a hand on her shoulder. She sniffed and tried to smile at him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You never quite managed to get along with either Mom or Dad. I’ve had my issues with Mom, too, but I was always close to Dad. I’m going to miss him so much, and the thought that he’s going to die, that we’re going to let him die . . .” She choked back a sob. “I wasn’t ready for this. Any of it.”

  “We never are,” he told her, his own eyes tearing up in sympathy. “We think they’re going to be there forever . . .”

  Things can be forever. ’Tis possible. The voice that spoke was a woman’s, a rich alto with a strong, lilting Irish accent, though it seemed that he heard other voices, both male and female, echoing the words—resonating inside his head. We need you. The statement sounded so clearly and so strongly that he gasped.

  Jen mistook the sound. Her right hand left the steering wheel and found his. “We’ll get through this,” she told him. “We’ll manage it together, little brother. I’m glad you’re here. I really am.” Her hand left his as she wiped at her eyes again. “Even if you are still a hopeless romantic.”

  He knew she tried to say it as a joke, but it sou
nded more like an accusation.

  7

  ’Tis a Pity to See

  AS MAEVE WALKED DOWN Market Street in Ballemór toward the grocery on Bridge Street, she halted, causing Keara, Niall, and Aiden to stop as well. “There,” she said, pointing just ahead to the intersection, where the gargoyle-laden spire of St. Joseph’s Church strained to reach the gray clouds overhead. A gleaming black hearse was just pulling up to the front of the church, followed by a short line of cars, as a small group of mourners waited on the steps. “That’s Darcy Fitzgerald’s body in the box,” she said. The undertakers had opened the rear of the hearse, and six men shuffled forward to lift the coffin onto their shoulders and carry it into the church.

  An older woman in mourning tweed stepped from the sedan just behind the hearse. She watched as the coffin was raised, but then her gaze snagged on Maeve, across the street. Her eyes widened, then narrowed; the stare was long and assessing, as if the woman were trying to remember where she’d seen Maeve before. Maeve favored her with a smile.

  The old woman crossed herself, then spat on the ground toward the group. With a nearly audible huff, the woman deliberately turned away. She followed the coffin into the church, as the priest and his servers opened the doors for the funeral Mass.

  “Well, that was nice,” Niall said. “The old hag. Yeh should’nah been so accommodating to her when yeh went to gather the man’s soul, Maeve.”

  “It’s not entirely her fault. The leamh have mostly forgotten the old ways,” Maeve said. “There’s too few left to teach them anymore.”

  “Aye,” Aiden agreed. His arm was around Keara’s waist. “They do’nah even stop the clocks, turn the mirrors, or open a window when one of their own passes, or if they do, it’s for the show of it. They send the body to the undertaker immediately rather than have it properly washed and prepared and left at home for the wake. They use their damned vehicles to carry the body instead of carrying it themselves.”

  “Piss on the feckin’ leamh,” Niall grunted. “Just like they piss on us.”

  “Niall . . .” Keara began, but Niall scowled at her, slicing through her reply with a hand through the air.

  “Nah,” he said. “Yeh need nah say a t’ing. The Old Ones were right to abandon this world an’ go through to Talamh an Ghlas when they did. I only wish my ancestor woulda had the sense then to follow ’em.” Maeve saw his glance go accusingly toward her.

  “We’ll follow soon enough,” she told them. Niall started to protest, but Aiden nudged him in the side with an elbow, shaking his head.

  “Let’s get what we need done here and get back to the island,” Aiden said.

  “Agreed,” Maeve answered. “I’ll leave the three of yeh to get the supplies we need; I’ll go talk to the garda about their little letter. Keara, please make sure everyone else stays out of trouble.”

  Across the street, the mourners had filed in behind the casket and the doors to the church had closed behind them. Faintly, they could hear an organ’s asthmatic wheeze and warbling voices plodding through a song. “G’wan,” Maeve said. “I’ll meet yeh all back at the boat in an hour or two.”

  The garda station was on Galway Road. Maeve walked across Bridge Street and onto Low Road, then followed the curve until it met Galway Road—the station was down to the right, another ten-minute walk away: an unimposing, brick-faced edifice with an array of silver cars emblazoned with fluorescent blue and yellow parked in front and a placard proclaiming An Garda Síochána in front. A pair of uniformed gardai held the door open for Maeve, then walked out toward the cruisers as Maeve went to the sergeant at the front desk. “I’m here to see Superintendent Dunn.”

  The sergeant glanced up from the papers in front of him. A finger the size of a sausage tapped the paper as if the sheets were likely to escape if ignored. His florid, heavy gaze traveled from her face, down her body, and back again. He smiled with his mouth, but the folds around his eyes were untouched. “Yeh are now, are yeh? Well, who should I tell him has come calling?”

  “Maeve Gallagher, from Inishcorr. I’ve come about the notice that was delivered to us two days ago.”

  Thick eyebrows raised slightly. He picked up a phone handset from his desk and pressed a button on it while still looking at Maeve. “Superintendent, I have one of the Oileánach here who wants to see yeh. Maeve Gallagher.” Maeve could hear the faint scratch of a reply from the phone, and the sergeant nodded. “I’ll send her in, then.” He replaced the phone on its cradle and pointed to a hallway to his left. “Down there, missus. Third door on yer left.”

  Maeve nodded to him and followed where he’d pointed. Superintendent Cedric Dunn was painted in black letters on the frosted glass of the third door in plain block letters. She knocked on the glass once, and a voice boomed, “Come in” from the room beyond. Maeve twisted the door handle and pushed the door open.

  Cedric Dunn had the build of a former athlete who had seen the inside of a gym only infrequently in the last decade. He rose from his chair as Maeve entered the office. His suit had been tailored for a body twenty pounds lighter; his pants fit tightly under a small shelf of stomach. But the torso was still muscular and retained the general v-shape it had evidently once had. He gestured toward a chair in front of his desk, where a laptop sat surrounded by small hillocks of files and paper, then ran the hand through short, graying hair. He didn’t smile, but his blue-gray eyes seemed sympathetic enough as he sat down on his own creaking office chair. Some of the anger she’d brought with her dissipated, seeing him. She’d expected someone harder and harsher, a bureaucrat composed of nothing but laws and regulations, and that didn’t seem to match Dunn.

  “So, Miss Gallagher,” he said, and his voice was a warm baritone. “Are you the person designated to speak for the Oileánach?”

  “I can speak for the islanders, aye,” she told him. “I led them to Inishcorr.”

  He nodded. He ignored the laptop sitting on his desk, and instead opened a drawer and took out a notebook. He flipped it open, found a pencil amid the clutter on his desk, and scratched a few notes on the paper. Maeve found that she liked that. “Were you aware that you had no right to establish residence there?”

  “The island’s been abandoned since the ’30s, Superintendent.”

  “That may be, but the NPWS took title to the island in the 1990s.”

  Maeve shrugged. “’Tis nah a park, and none were living there when we came. We’ve been there for over five years now, and we’ve cleaned up all the tumbledown houses there and made it a better place. No NPWS person ever seemed to take an interest or visit the island a’tall until now.” She paused and gave him a tight-lipped frown. “Nah until some a’the superstitious and frightened people in Ballemór decided to complain about us.”

  Dunn’s lips twitched in what might have been an attempt at a smile. “That may be, but it doesn’t change the legalities, I’m afraid. The NPWS says they want you off the island; I’m obligated to carry out that request.” He put the pencil down on the notebook and leaned forward on his elbows. “Miss Gallagher, I went out there meself to serve that notice, and I’m not unsympathetic to what yeh’ve said. I saw the village and yer people, and yeh’ve taken a wrecked and wretched place and made it habitable again. I can appreciate that. But m’hands, as they say, are tied here.”

  He spread out his hands, palm up, as if to show her.

  “I see no ties, Superintendent, only a piece of meaningless paper.” She reached into her pocket and put the notice on his desk, unfolding it in front of him. He didn’t look at it, but at her as she rose from her chair. “Inishcorr is our home,” she told. “It’s where we need to be. I came to tell yeh that we will nah be leaving.”

  He blinked once. “They’ve given yeh thirty days,” he told her. “Look, it’s not for me to tell yeh this, but yeh can probably stretch that out some if yeh take this to court. Find yerselves a friendly barrister and see what he c
an do. He could probably buy you another few months. Maybe longer if he’s good at it.”

  Maeve was already shaking her head. “We’re not leaving, Superintendent. ’Tis where we need to be, as I told yeh. We care nah for yer laws and regulations and such. We’ll be staying, no matter what papers yeh show us.”

  “Miss Gallagher, I have my duties and responsibilities. If yeh won’t leave, I’ll be forced . . .”

  She held up a hand to stop him. “Yeh can do whatever yeh need do,” she told him. She pointed at the notice on his desk. “That may mean something to yeh, but it means nothing a’tall to us, and that’s all I wanted to tell yeh. I’m wishing yeh a good day, Superintendent.”

  With that, Maeve turned and left the office. She heard Dunn give an exasperated huff behind her, but he didn’t call out to stop her.

  She could feel the eyes of the sergeant at the desk on her back as she left the station.

  8

  The Banshee’s Cry

  IN HIS ROOM THAT NIGHT, as he undressed and put his glasses on the bedside table, Colin slid his Gibson from the gig bag. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding the guitar and slipping the pick out from the front pocket of his jeans. The wear-polished neck felt slick and comfortable in his grip, and he touched the strings lightly: an “E” in a high, open position. The B string was a little flat; he turned the tuning peg, strumming the top three strings with the pick until the tuning fell into place. Faintly, through the closed door, he heard Jen talking to Aaron, then the bathroom door closing. He hit the chord again, quietly, thinking that he’d play for a few minutes until Jen or Aaron came out of the bathroom, then he’d go in and use it himself.

  He put the pick back in his pocket, and began fingerpicking quietly: “The Lover’s Ghost,” one of the oldest of the Irish folk tunes he knew. As he played softly with his eyes closed against the fatigue of the day, his fingers seemed to move across the strings of their accord; he heard the tune shifting, changing slightly, the melody becoming more minor and urgent, as if he were calling up some ancient ghost from which the tune he knew had descended.