The Crow of Connemara

by Stephen Leigh

  Then it happened . . . I was standing near the entrance to the cave, and a rush of cold air from within stirred the legs of my pants and fluttered the collar of my jacket. I felt the touch of hands on my face, plucking at my clothing, and I heard voices calling: some high and fair, others low and ominous, dozens of them calling in Gaelic and in languages that sounded older than any I’d ever heard. A dark fog seemed to surround us; in the mist, the forms of people moved. I heard the blowing of horns, the sound of hooves, the bellow of what might have been a bull. They passed by me and gathered around Máire until she was lost in the midst of them. “Máire!” I called out to her, frightened both for her and for me.

  “Yeh needn’t worry,” I heard her answer, though I still could not see her. “’Tis only me people, awake again for a time.” The black cloud continued flowing from the mouth of the cave and past us, moving westward over the fields, with the sheep running startled from the apparition and the sounds of its passage fading, until only Máire and I were left. The light from the cloch was now extinguished and Máire sagged, cradling her left arm. She let the cloch drop to the ground, as if she could no longer bear to hold it.

  I went to her and held her. She leaned against me, letting me support her weight as if she’d been stricken nearly lifeless. “There’s a door we can open,” she told me, her voice but a husk. “The power’s gone now, but the cloch and the voices of those who held it before me . . . they told me there’s a gateway we can use. Yeh are part of it, too. Yeh are to be the bard,” she said.

  “Me, a bard? An’ a gateway to what?” I asked her. With one hand, I picked up the cloch, the emerald stone. She didn’t seem to notice, and I placed it in the pocket of my jacket.

  She spread her hands, as if confused. “To another world, or perhaps it’s only to another version of this one. But ’tis a better place. ’Tis where some of the Old Ones have already gone, where I should have gone long ago, had I been wiser.” She looked up at me, her face illuminated by moonglow, and hers was no longer the face of a comely young lass, but that of an old woman, her skin dry and cracked, her eyes rheumy and contained in a nest of wrinkled flesh. With the vision, I felt as if a spell had cracked and broken within me. She smiled, toothless, and I laid her on the grass, standing and stepping away from her, horrified. “I need you, m’love,” she told me, her voice quavering like a hag’s.

  A cloud passed over the moon, hiding her face from me, and as the clouds slid away again, her face had transformed again, no longer that of the hag but the young Máire again.

  I continued to step back from her. “What’s wrong, m’dear?” she asked, and I thought I could hear the hag’s voice overlaid with the sweet tones of the Máire I knew. She looked westward, to where the black fog filled with voices had gone. “We have to follow them. ’Twill be in the west, the portal we must open. We have’ta find it.”

  She stopped as I stood there, shaking my head. “I ca’nah,” I told her.

  “No, yeh must!” Moonshadow slid over her face: Hag/Máire/Hag/Máire. Máire’s face was not only her own, but the hag’s . . . It stared at me with violence and fury, a madwoman’s eyes. She stared at me as if I were a thing to be devoured.

  Máire lifted her arms toward me, like she wanted to clasp me to her again, but now fear clutched me harder than any love I had, chasing away the infatuation and the lust. I didn’t know what I was afraid of; I only knew that she’d become someone—or perhaps something—that I no longer understood, and for all the wanderlust in me that wanted to always see new things, I could not make myself step back into her embrace. I continued walking away, and her hands dropped. “Rory!” she called after me, but I turned my back on her. “I ca’nah do this without yeh,” I heard her say, her voice pleading.

  I didn’t answer. I started to run, leaving behind Máire, my bike and my suitcase, the cavern, everything. “Rory!” she called again, her voice a storm wind that chased me over the fields and past the mound of Rathcroghan and even to the road. I began walking under the moonlight and the stars away from her, and with each step, I wondered about the choice I’d just made and whether it was the right one.

  Part of me was still there with her. Part of me will always be, I think.

  It wasn’t until I was far from her that I realized that I still had the stone in my pocket. I took it out, looking at it. It was now nothing more than a polished stone, and I put it in my pocket again as I continued to flee.

  I still hear her, in my dreams. I think I hear her call my name. I hear her say that she’s waiting for me, that she needs me, that she loves me still, that I must come back to her and I must bring the stone.

  And I wake wanting to follow where she’s gone: toward the west coast of Éire.

  But I don’t, and I find that I also can’t stay here, not when Máire haunts the land for me. I won’t—I can’t—walk the west coast as I planned, because she’s going there. Instead, I traveled back to Dublin, and from there went across the Irish Sea to Liverpool and booked passage for America. I’ll go farther west than Máire, and I’ll hope that with the sea between us, I’ll stop hearing her call.

  I’ll hope that she can discover the path she so desperately wants to find without me.

  I’ll hope that I’ll forget her.

  12

  Toss the Feathers

  IT HAD BEEN WELL INTO the early morning hours when Colin finally stopped reading the journal, and the implications still rang in his head. He’d taken the jeweled pendant Aunt Patty had given him and held it for a long time; he’d gone to sleep with it in his hand, but what little sleep he’d managed was racked by dreams where he and his grandfather were together, and the dark-haired Máire was there also, and he and his grandfather were sometimes one person and sometimes two.

  The next morning, he woke and showered, then picked up the journal again, reading earlier and later entries, and going back and rereading the section that talked about Máire. He wondered what Aunt Patty had thought of the journal, and if she somehow knew the resonance that shook him as he read his grandfather’s tale. The description of Máire, the description of the cloch and what she’d done with it . . .

  The entire tale was unbelievable, yet the words had grabbed him by the throat and shaken him. He wondered if it was all some elaborate fiction his grandfather had made up, a fanciful tale that had never happened, a story that Rory had written for some reason. Colin found that he couldn’t believe that. He’d paged through the earlier sections of the journal, and those were the entries of a young man wandering the land, carefree and wide-eyed, and enjoying whatever his journey gave him. And after that entry aboard the Mauretania, Daiddeó Rory never mentioned Máire, the stone, or the strange events again. It was as if he refused to even think about it, and once again the journal was filled only with the mundane minutiae of his travels: his arrival in New York City, his wonder at the sights, and—eventually—his meeting the woman he’d marry, a second-generation Irish immigrant.

  Daiddeó Rory continued to wander throughout his life. Colin remembered that his grandfather always seemed to be somewhere else, that it was rare that he and his grandmother were home for more than a few months. But he’d never gone back to visit Ireland again.

  Daiddeó Rory never went back because he was afraid that if he did, he’d meet her again . . .

  Without any evidence, without any proof, Colin was certain of that.

  He stared at the journal, now closed on the bedspread next to him. He lifted his glasses from his nose and rubbed at his eyes. At the same time, he heard a horrified cry from the kitchen: Jen’s voice.

  “Aaron! Colin! Get in here!”

  Colin rushed into the kitchen as Aaron came hurrying in from the other bedroom. They saw Jen standing by the sink with a horrified look on her face, pointing to the kitchen table. A crow was sprawled unmoving, its wings outspread as if it were making one last attempt to fly. Finnigan the cat was also on the ta
ble, sniffing the bird and tapping it with a quick paw. A few feathers were scattered around the table. Colin grabbed a dirty fork from the sink, pushing Finnigan back from the bird as he approached, and prodded the crow with the fork. There was no reaction from the animal.

  “It’s dead,” Colin said, pushing up his glasses.

  Aaron shook his head. “Finnigan probably got it while we were out grocery shopping earlier, Jen,” he said. “The damn thing must have got in then somehow.”

  “I came in to get lunch ready, and that thing was just lying there,” Jen said. “Though I could swear I glanced in here when we got back and didn’t see it or Finnigan. Jesus, that’s creepy!” She inhaled deeply, and let it out again. She glanced at the window where the crow had appeared earlier, and Colin followed her gaze. The window was shut, the catch engaged and the glass intact. “How the hell did a crow get in here? Who put it in on the table, and why? The door was locked, and it didn’t come in through the window. Jesus . . .” She ran her fingers through her hair.

  “You want me to call the cops?” Aaron asked, but Jen shook her head.

  “And tell them what? That my cat killed a bird on the kitchen table? There’s nothing missing in the apartment that I can tell, there’s no note with the bird and no obvious threat, and no sign that anyone’s been in here. I can’t figure out how the damn bird got in here, but . . . Colin?”

  Colin realized that he’d been staring at the bird the whole time that Jen and Aaron had been talking. He found himself shaking his head. “You got a garbage bag?” he asked Jen. “I’ll go put it in the dumpster out back.”

  Jen handed him a plastic bag; Colin and Aaron, both grimacing, maneuvered the body into it while Finnigan mewled in protest. Several black feathers were left on the table. Colin cinched the bag shut. “I’ll be back in a few,” he said.

  Carrying his burden, he made his way outside and around the side of the building to the dumpster. “Look,” he said to the air, still holding the bag, “if this is all supposed to be some kind of sign, I wish you’d be a lot more obvious about what it means. What are you trying to say? Are you telling me I’m making a mistake, or that I should be leaving or going or finishing my doctorate, or what?” He opened the garbage bag and peered in. The bird’s dead eyes stared back at him, the beak slightly open as if in a perpetual, silent caw. After staring at it for a moment, Colin resealed the bag. “Okay,” he said to the sky, feeling rather foolish. “You had your chance.”

  He tossed the crow into the dumpster and went back inside, where Jen was scrubbing the table. The feathers were gone. Aaron was padding around the apartment, looking to see that nothing was missing and evidently trying to figure out how the bird had entered the apartment. Colin went to the sink and washed his hands; Finnigan, on the floor, was doing the same with his tongue.

  “Weird, huh?” Jen said.

  “Yeah. Definitely on the weird side,” he answered over the running water. He shook off his hands and dried them on a dishtowel. He heard Jen start to say something, stop, then start again.

  “Hey, little brother, not to change the subject, but I saw Tommy talking to you at the cemetery yesterday. You have a job offer?”

  The shift was jarring. He still could see the crow’s dead eyes staring at him like an accusation. Colin shrugged, forcing himself to concentrate on what Jen had said. “It seems like I was the last one to know Tommy was going to ask me that,” Colin said. He watched as she took the dishtowel he’d just used and wiped down the table. “I take it you know what he wanted.”

  “Mostly, yes.” She hung the dishtowel on the rack at the side of the counter. “So, are you staying?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’m thinking about it.”

  Without saying anything, Jen went to Colin and hugged him fiercely. After a moment, his arms went around her as well. He heard her cry, muffled against his chest, and his own eyes filled sympathetically with tears, splashing on his glasses as he blinked. “I’m going to miss Dad so much,” he heard her say. Finnigan came over and brushed against their feet, wrapping his tail around their legs. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over this. It’s like there’s this huge hole in my life all of a sudden, and I have to keep stepping around it or I’ll fall in and be lost. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. I do.” Guiltily, he realized he was thinking more of himself than he was of his father. The image of the dead crow came back to him, overlaid on the memory of his grandfather’s words in the journal. “You feel like you’re missing a part of you that’s supposed to be there.” He stroked her hair, cradling her. “You’ll get through this,” he said. “All of us will. We’ll keep going; that’s what he’d want us to do.”

  Jen sniffed, releasing him. “Yeah, he would,” she said. “It’s going to be hard, though. And it’ll be hardest of all on Mom.”

  “You’ll help her. So will Tommy and Aunt Patty.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll try,” he told her.

  Even as he said the words, he wondered how true they would be.

  “Hey, Beth,” Colin said as the door to his mother’s house opened, revealing the Doyle’s housekeeper behind it.

  Beth was a short woman, less than five feet tall, and plump. She possessed a plain face and hair that had once been brown and was now mostly gray, pulled back into a long French braid. She wore, as always, a loose skirt and white blouse decorated with blue-and-yellow vines on the collar, and a plain, cotton apron tied over it all. Her surname, Banaszewski, screamed her ancestry. So did her first name—Elzbet—but she had always simply been “Beth” to the family. He didn’t have a memory of when she hadn’t been part of the household.

  Her face split into a smile as she saw Colin, and she nodded approvingly as she looked him up and down. “I have no time to talk with you last night,” she said. “But you look healthy.” Her voice had maintained its strong accent despite decades in the States. “They feed you good there in Seattle, then.”

  “They treated me just fine,” he told her, “but the food there doesn’t hold a candle to your pierogi.”

  She beamed at that and hugged him once fiercely. “Come in, come in,” she said. “Your mother, she is upstairs with your aunt, but Tommy, he’s in the back room. Go see him, and I tell her you’re here.”

  “Thanks. I’ll go in and see Tommy, then.”

  “You want something to drink, to eat? No pierogi, but I have leftover makowiec in the fridge.” She patted his stomach. “I know you like that.”

  “I’m just fine, Beth. I ate lunch with Jen and Aaron.”

  Beth gave him another quick hug and went toward the stairs. Colin went into the back room, which still smelled like a funeral home, every available flat surface holding a vase of flowers. Tommy was sitting on the couch, appearing to stare at the flatscreen TV even though it was off. “Mom could open a flower shop,” Colin said.

  Tommy stirred, craning his head around. He gave a short, polite laugh. “I know what you mean. The smell is pretty powerful.” Tommy’s smile twitched, faded. “You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you?”

  “Made up your mind about what?” a voice interrupted before Colin could answer. He turned to see his mother entering the room. “I hope that means you’re taking Tommy up on his offer.”

  Colin looked at Tommy. “Man, nothing is secret in this family.”

  Tommy shrugged. “I asked Mom if she thought you’d agree.”

  “And I told him that you would,” his mother said. “Because it’s what your father would have wanted.”

  And there it is, the guilt ploy . . . Even Tommy realized it. “Mom,” he said. “That’s not fair. If Colin’s going to stay, it needs to be because he wants to stay, not for any other reason.”

  “Your father’s wishes don’t matter now that he’s gone?”

  “Mom . . .” This time the protest came from both of them.

&nb
sp; Her eyes were shining in the light coming in from the windows; she wiped at them once, a gesture that wasn’t lost on Colin. He could see the pain in her face, her exhaustion in the lines drawn by the light from the windows, and she hugged herself as if cold. “I know you think it’s selfish, but it’s not. Your father and I have never asked any of our children for anything unless we believed it was in your own best interests, even when you didn’t see it yourselves. This is no different. You’re needed here, Colin—maybe you can put school aside for a semester. Your brother needs you, and the family needs you. I need you. We’ve just experienced a tremendous tragedy, and it’s going to take all of us together to help us heal.”

  Colin saw Tommy’s sympathetic glance toward him. “Mom,” Tommy said, “I know you and Dad always tried to do what you thought best, and for me, that turned out to be the case. For Jen, too, mostly. But Colin’s not me and he’s not Jen. If Colin needs to do something else, then I completely understand that, and I not only won’t stand in his way, I’ll support him unconditionally.” He paused—and Colin saw the polished, studied cadence of a public speaker in that. “And that’s what you need to do as well, Mom,” he finished.

  His mother’s eyebrows lifted and her head tilted. “That sounds as if there is something else that Colin is intending. Colin?” His mother’s gaze hadn’t left him, nor had she relaxed the arms folded over her stomach.

  “Mom, I know how much everyone’s hurting right now, and believe me, I am, too. And I appreciate that Tommy’s going to take over Dad’s path. We all miss Dad . . .”

  “Colin.” His mother’s mouth tightened into a line, pulling the skin of her cheeks into taut, short canyons. “Just tell us what you’ve decided—or tell us if you haven’t.”

  The image of the crow on the table flashed across his mind, followed by the memory of his grandfather’s journal. The competing pulls of family and his earlier decision to leave school and pursue music in Ireland seemed to tear him in half, ripping down the center of his mind. His head ached, his pulse throbbing in his temples. He put his hand in the pocket of his jeans, cupping the well-polished surface of the crystal Aunt Patty had given him. The stone felt icy. He clenched it tightly, pressing the silver lace of the cage into his skin.