The Crow of Connemara

by Stephen Leigh

  Then she stepped back and the moment was over. She turned, her cloak swirling like blood in water, and she crossed the fringe of beach and stepped over the boulders and back onto the roadway. She took the handle of the cart as Colin stood there, still tasting her on his lips. He didn’t seem capable of moving, didn’t want to move. “I need to go now, Colin,” she told him. “Thanks for the walk, but yeh still owe me that drink.”

  “Let me help you get the groceries on the boat,” Colin called out.

  She shook her head. “I’m fine. Niall’s there waiting for me.”

  “Ah, Niall,” Colin said. He said the name as if it were a curse. “When will I see you again?”

  “Soon,” she said. “Do yeh trust me?” He nodded, and she laughed: it was sparkling silver, like the cage that held the emerald jewel in his pocket. “I told yeh that yeh should’nah trust me,” she said. “But if yer going to anyway, I’ll find yeh. Soon.” The wheels of the cart protested as she started to walk toward the boat, but after a few steps, she stopped and looked back at him. “Oh, and that lady in Ballemór. She will twist her ankle, I’m afraid. But not because of anything I did.”

  With that, she waved to Colin and took the cart in hand again. She walked quickly away, her cloak billowing behind her and the cart of groceries squealing its helpless protest. Colin watched her, his own hand raised. He saw someone jump down from the boat as Maeve approached and come up to her—Niall, he thought. They embraced, and Niall lifted the cart onto the boat.

  The stasis that surrounded Colin lifted then. He left the beach and clambered over the rocks, and began the slow walk back to Ballemór.

  “Right, so now yer having him walk yeh with yer groceries down the bleedin’ street. Yeh might as well been holding feckin’ hands. What the hell is this, Maeve? He’s not worth this, I tell yeh. He’s a leamh. Nothin’ more. He can’t help us. Have yeh seen the cloch? Have yeh even asked him about it?”

  Niall waved his arms as Maeve stared blandly at him. His accent, usually fairly thick, had only become more pronounced with his agitation. The Grainne Ni Mhaille rocked underneath her, its blood-colored sails cracking sharply in the wind as the ship cut through gray-green chop, heading into the harbor at Inishcorr. Thatched roofs were visible just beyond the small, heather-clad arm of land that sheltered the deep harbor, and the Grainne Ni Mhaille canted over as the crew handling the sails adjusted them to tack windward and into the harbor’s gentler waves. Maeve steadied herself against the railing; Niall had to crouch to catch his balance on the wet boards of the deck.

  “Are yeh done?” she asked Niall. “Because right now I’m not listening to yer prattling.”

  “Yeh planning to shag him, or have yeh done that already?”

  Maeve glared at him, blinking against the salt spray. Her hair was plastered against her forehead. “’Tis not any of yer business a’tall, Niall. Never has been, never will be. I keep tellin’ yeh—I will do what I need to do. Are yeh done now?”

  “Nah, I’m not. And yeh’ll hear more a’ it till yeh know the sense I’m making. We have t’ings we have’ta take care of. What’re we going to do when the gardai and the NPWS decide to try and throw us off the island by force? What then? How much of our hand do we show?”

  “T’ain’t yer choice, Niall. ’Tis mine. Alone.”

  “’Tis yeh that has to do the job, I agree.”

  “Aye, and I need this Colin for it. I need the bard.”

  Niall scoffed loudly. “That may be or it may nah. But the decision affects us all, don’t it? If yeh make the wrong choice, then everything we’ve worked so hard to accomplish all falls apart. And I worry, Maeve—if yeh have feelings for this man, actual feelings, then are yeh going to be able to do what needs to be done a’tall? Can yeh answer me that?”

  They rounded the head and the boat’s swaying calmed. Maeve stood up, holding onto one of the hawsers. “Yeh know me, Niall, and so yeh know I’ll do what I need to do for us. Have yeh forgotten everything? And as for feelings . . . well, the boy’s a tool that I need. That we need. No more. Is that what yeh want to hear?”

  “’Tis a tool that yeh must break when yeh use it. So I want to hear the truth as to whether yeh can do that: the person that yeh are now, not what yeh once were.”

  Maeve laughed. “Well, then, here ’tis: what we’re hopin’ to do isn’t easy, or yeh or some of the others could just do it yerselves, but yeh can’t and yeh know it. Yeh need me because I’m the only one who can open the path. Not even Fionnbharr can do that. So I ask yeh: what choice do yeh have, Niall? Yeh aren’t going to be able to save yerselves, whether ’tis against the gardai or the NPWS or just the leamh out there. Yeh need me. So shut yer bleedin’ gob, why don’t yeh, and let me do what I need to do without asking me stupid questions.”

  Niall didn’t answer—not directly. He strode away from her toward the front of the boat, stripping off his shirt as he went. At the bow, he dropped his pants and kicked off his shoes, standing naked there for a moment. He glanced back at Maeve, then dove into the water. There were three or four seals who had come up to the ship as they rounded the head, swimming alongside the boat; they vanished at Niall’s splash. The remaining four of the ship’s crew pointedly avoiding looking at Maeve, and none of them spoke or called out after Niall. The Grainne Ni Mhaille sliced through the water in an awkward silence. By the time they tossed the hawsers to those waiting at the dock and tied up the red-sailed hooker, twenty minutes later, a bull seal with a blue-black coat had already clambered from the cold water and was sitting on a rock off the shore, staring outward at the water as if standing guard over the island.

  Maeve was first off the ship. She passed the seal with her lips pressed tightly together, and strode up toward the village without speaking, ignoring the basso honk the seal sent her way. It wasn’t until she was in her own small house with the door safely shut that she allowed the salt tears to come.

  “Tell me about the Oileánach,” Colin said to Mrs. Egan.

  They were sitting at the table in the dining room, with the usual ample breakfast filling a plate in front of Colin. Mrs. Egan sat across from him, with a mug of black tea and a blueberry scone. Colin watched her face as he asked the question, and saw the tightening of the lines of her face as she lifted the mug and sipped. “And why are yeh wanting to know about the Oileánach now?” Mrs. Egan asked.

  “I met a few of them at the pub last week, but Lucas didn’t seem to like that I was talking to them.”

  “’Tis a fine young man, that Lucas is. A good head on his shoulders, even if he is a musician,” Mrs. Egan remarked, then glanced at Colin. “Meaning no offense to yeh personally, Mr. Doyle, of course.”

  “None taken,” Colin answered, trying not to smile. “Believe me, I understand the sentiment—I’ve heard it often enough from my parents and family, I’m afraid. But what is it about the Islanders that makes everyone here seem to dislike them?”

  Mrs. Egan sniffed as she tore off a bit of the scone and put it in her mouth. “Ah, they’ve gone too dry, they have,” she said. “I’ll be needing to make up a new batch.” Colin waited. Mrs. Egan swallowed and put her hands around the steaming mug. “The Oileánach stole that island, first of all. ’Twasn’t theirs, but they just came and took it, wit’out asking.”

  “I thought Inishcorr had been abandoned.”

  “Indeed, it had,” Mrs Egan admitted. “But that still doesn’t change the fact that those people just stole the place when they had no right to do so.” Her voice added an audible sneer to “those people.” “They’re not normal people a’tall, Mr. Doyle. Not normal a’tall.”

  “What do you mean, Mrs. Egan?”

  The woman leaned back in her chair. The cane backing creaked and complained. “Ever since they’ve come, all manner of odd things have happened. Things that can’t be explained. I already told yeh what happened with my poor Darcy.” She pointed to his pict
ure on the mantel. Darcy smiled back at them: white-haired and wiry, his eyes surrounded by wrinkles and his thatched farmhouse behind him as a backdrop. “And t’ain’t all. People have been seeing creatures that shouldn’t be there, the very devil’s beasts, I tell yeh: great hounds with glowing eyes and fur like orange fire, fog haunts that wrap around yeh in the mist and suck yer very breath away; and people have tales of seein’ the ghosts of their dead loved ones walkin’ the roads of a moonlit night, as if those who are buried now are restless in the cold ground. That’s the Oileánach’s doing. They’ve stirred up things best forgotten.”

  Colin couldn’t stop his head from shaking, and Mrs. Egan’s eyes narrowed.

  “Sure, and yeh can scoff at that as yeh like, young man,” she said. “But I remember my grandmother saying that in her own grandmother’s time, the little people and the good folk were always about, as well as things that one wouldn’t want to meet: ghosts and spirits and bewitched creatures. The fey folk would come out of their mounds at night and ride about. There were witches and sorcerers who could take on the appearance of animals, and the night was a time when sane folk stayed inside. Since these Oileánach have come, there are tales that make it seem like those times might be comin’ back again with them.”

  “The Islanders I’ve met just seem like people to me,” Colin told her. “They didn’t seem fey at all.”

  Mrs Egan had lifted the mug to take a sip of the tea. She set it down again, hard enough to shiver the cutlery on the table. “Well, fey they are,” she said emphatically. “Why, just yesterday Mrs. Brennan was telling me that one of ’em gave her the evil eye down near the greengrocers and hexed her as she was coming out with her sacks, and that evening at home she twisted her ankle something terrible on her back stairs.”

  “Anyone can twist their ankle,” Colin answered, but he remembered Maeve’s comment: “ . . . that lady in Ballemór. She will twist her ankle.”

  “That may be, and I know it. But I also know what I’ve seen with my own eyes. When my brother Darcy died, God rest his soul, I was there, and saw everything with my own two eyes, I did. The sky was a’stormin that night, and the spirits, the Old Ones, they came calling for Darcy’s soul, howling and shrieking outside. One of the Oileánach, that dark-haired witch woman, she just appeared in Darcy’s house like she’d come down the chimney and made herself out of the smoke, and in the meantime the denizens of hell were shaking and tearing at the windows and door, shrieking like mad things. Even the good Father, who I brought out to bless Darcy on his way, was in a desperate state. Then the fiends tore open the door and they rushed inside, and it was only our prayers that saved us then, I tell yeh. I still worry that they took Darcy’s soul with them, since he wasn’t a believer as I am and hadn’t been inside the church in a donkey’s years, but the good Father, he tells me not to fret and that the holy water would’a stopped them from taking Darcy away to eternal damnation.”

  Mrs. Egan picked up her mug again, and Colin saw that her hands were trembling with the memory. “You said there was a storm that night,” Colin began skeptically, but Mrs. Egan’s eyes over the rim of her mug stopped him from going further.

  “I know the difference between a common wind and something unnatural, Mr. Doyle,” she told him firmly. “’Twas no mere gale. It nearly put me heart crossways in me, it did.”

  “I believe you,” Colin said, though frankly a storm combined with whiskey-lubricated imaginations seemed more likely to him—he’d seen Mrs. Egan tipping the bottle in the dining room cabinet of an evening. But the remark seemed to mollify Mrs. Egan, who settled back in her chair once more. She tapped with a fingernail the plate on which her scone sat.

  “Yeh should stay away from ’em, Mr. Doyle,” she declared firmly. “No good will come of it, and yeh can take my word as pure gospel. Those Oileánach don’t come to church, they stay to themselves, and they cause nothing but trouble when they come to town. Yeh just ask the gardai how many fights they’d had to break up because of ’em. They’re the devil’s spawn, and ’tis true that they can curse people and give the evil eye.”

  “Mrs. Egan—”

  “’Tis true,” she insisted. “Yeh don’t want to believe that because yer soft on that black-haired beauty that leads ’em—yes, I’ve heard all about her and yeh—but she’s just bewitched yeh, Mr. Doyle, so yeh can’t see the real face she wears. Well, one day you’ll see it in truth, and yeh’ll be wishing yeh’d paid more attention to what I’m telling yeh.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood up, wagging a forefinger in Colin’s direction. “Yer caught in her charms, Mr. Doyle, but in the end, she means no good to yeh. None of ’em mean any good to any good Christian person.”

  Her lips pursed together in a moue of disgust, and—mug and plate clattering—she strode off into the kitchen. He heard the china rattle hard in the sink and the water begin to run. Colin decided that further argument would be both useless and counterproductive on his part.

  He stared at his breakfast, but his appetite was gone.

  16

  Learning New Music

  COLIN’S CELL PHONE RANG a few afternoons later as he was leaving a practice session with Lucas and his group at Regan’s. “Mr. Doyle, this is Joseph Mullins from Mullins’ Used Books—yeh asked me t’other day to keep me eye out for that O’Neill book? Well, I’ve found a copy—an early edition, though not the first printing, from 1903.”

  Colin caught his breath at the news. “That’s fantastic, Mr. Mullins,” Colin answered. “I’d really like to see it.” He didn’t dare ask “How much?” because he was afraid that the answer would deflate the excitement of seeing the book. His checking account was already looking terribly thin in just the month he’d been here. He shouldered the guitar in its gig bag and waved to Lucas as he headed out of the bar. The wind was blustery, and he could hear it in his cell phone’s speaker. Even though the morning’s weather report had called for a partly cloudy day, it seemed that rain was threatening from off the coast. “I’m just leaving Regan’s, as it turns out. Is the book at your store? I could drop down there in a few minutes to take a look.”

  “’Tis,” Mr. Mullins replied. “I’ll see yeh in a moment, then.”

  Mr. Mullins was waiting as Colin stepped into the dark shop, the bell atop the door jingling as he entered. He appeared from the back of the store with a battered book clad in scratched and faded brown leather. He patted the worn cover as he set it on the counter. “Here yeh are, then, Mr. Doyle,” he said. “There are cheaper reproductions of the book out there, I know, but I thought yeh’d appreciate the genuine article.”

  Colin picked up the book, feeling the embossed cover with its Celtic cross patterns around the lettering and the central image of a harp entwined in a tree. The book had seen better days, certainly—the cover’s edges were blunted and frayed, and someone had scrawled the name “Samuel” in pencil across the edges of the yellowed pages. When he opened the book, the smell of musty old paper filled his nostrils; a concentrated burst of the odor that filled the entire shop with its stuffed shelves of old volumes. The paper itself was brittle and fragile, with flyspecks and water stains, but the music was readable. Colin adjusted his glasses and hummed one of the melodies to himself as he traced the staff with a forefinger. “The University of Notre Dame has all the O’Neill books and sheet music in their Rare Books and Special Collections section,” he told Mr. Mullins. “I got to examine this one once when I was there; their copy’s in much better shape, but this one”—he tapped the book—“this one’s been read and used and loved, I can tell.”

  Mr. Mullins shoved his own glasses up the slope of his long nose. “Don’t know about that,” he said. “’Twas in an estate collection that a colleague of mine in Knocknacarra bought. I had him send it over. So, ’tis what yeh wanted?” The proprietor paused; Colin knew what he was waiting for.

  He took a breath. “I’d love to have it,” he said. “But .
. .” He shrugged, feeling the weight of his guitar strapped to his shoulders. He saw Mr. Mullins’ gaze go to the covered instrument. “My funds are rather limited. How much are you asking for it, Mr. Mullins?”

  The man’s mustard-brown teeth bit at his lower lip for a moment. He had a bad case of receding gum lines. “Well, ’tis a rare one, yeh have to admit, and nah easy to find. But ’twas part of the estate bundle, so my friend didn’t pay full market rate. Still, he knows what it should go for, and I have to pay his costs and a bit of profit on top . . .” He sighed. “I couldn’t let it go for less than €250,” he said, “and that’s with me making very little, and that’s God’s very truth. Again, yeh know there are reproductions out there yeh could get for much less—why, Mel Bay has a paperback edition that I could sell yeh for €30. I could have one of those here in a few days . . .”

  “I have that one already,” Colin answered. “Can’t really be a traditional musician without it. I guess I was just hoping . . .”

  “Hoping what?” a new, familiar voice intruded. Colin glanced over his shoulder, then turned completely, grinning.

  “Maeve!” he said. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  She smiled back at him. Her long cloak hung open, caught only at the collar. She was wearing a long, plaid skirt and a red blouse with a small raven embroidered on it; a silver chain glistened on the red, with a stone caught in silver wire, much like the one in his pocket. “The two of yeh were talking so intently yeh must not have heard the bell.” She stepped up to the counter next to Colin and glanced down at the book. “Yeh buying this?” she asked Colin. “’Tis a grand book, I’m told.”