‘What’s all this?’ said Margaret.
‘I dunno,’ said the fellow on the lorry. ‘It’s from the man with the toothache. That’s all I know.’
Soon the whole parish started to come. There were men with boils and women who wanted no more children; women who were desperate for children, and a child that was born on Christmas Day who saw ghosts and couldn’t eat. They had shingles and gout and stones in their throats, bad knees and haunted cow-houses. Margaret placed her hands on these strangers and felt their fears and their fears put her heart crossways. The people left in good faith and their ailments and their apparitions disappeared. She’d wake and find new spuds and rhubarb and pots of jam and bags of apples and sticks outside her back door. Her dreams grew black as the charred doors of Hell. She started to tell God she was sorry, started sleeping late and when she woke, neighbouring women would be there frying rashers, boiling eggs, talking. Strange men came and cleaned the moss off her roof, put new hinges on the gate, new putty in the windows.
Margaret grew frightened of her own death and passed water all around the house after dark. This still gave her satisfaction. One night, after a rich man asked if she could turn his old friend into a sow, she couldn’t help herself. She went in to tell Stack. When they stopped laughing, Stack thought of her slapping Josephine with the leather strap and the strange island men leading her away. The men in his dream outnumbered him. That was the hardest part of the dream. He suddenly knew she’d move away and couldn’t bear the thought of her being gone. She had taken off her boots and was there rubbing her feet in his kitchen. Her feet were bigger than shoe-boxes and reminded him of a song.
‘You’ve a fine pair of feet,’ he said, ‘God bless them.’
She didn’t answer; she just kept the silence and sat looking at him. He looked strong from the bogs. There were clocks, too many clocks ticking on his walls. She realised she hadn’t wound her clock in weeks, as though that could stop time. She didn’t want time to stop but the strangers were always coming, their palms filled with hatred and bitterness and even though she didn’t know half their names, it was all contagious. She thought about the Nowlan woman and what she’d said about the child.
‘My eggs are right.’
‘Your eggs?’
‘Come to bed for an hour.’
When they went into the bedroom Josephine was under the quilt. Margaret laughed while Stack tried to lift her. When he unbuttoned himself and she saw his penis, she thought of the lizard in her dream. He hadn’t, at first, a notion what to do but nature took over. Josephine did her best to get between them. When Margaret woke, Stack was gone and the goat was staring at her. There was a terrible stink of goat and hair all over the bed.
Margaret went back to her own house and ate two tins of red salmon, skin, bones and all and washed it down with a pint of buttermilk. She looked in the mirror. The whites of her eyes were like snow and her skin had turned into the skin of a woman who lives in salt wind.
The next morning she went into Stack’s house. He hadn’t slept, had walked the bogs half the night with Josephine.
‘Do you have a sledgehammer?’ she said.
‘No,’ he said.
‘No?’
‘But I’ve a fair idea what you’re thinking.’
‘You have?’
‘I’ve been thinking meself.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it the sensible thing to do? But I should be the one to do it.’
‘No,’ she said.
Margaret drove to Ennistymon and bought the sledge. As she drove along, she wondered what the priest would think. He would look at her mortal frame walking around his house, having conceived another illegitimate child. He would still be regretting the day he ever laid a hand on her but it was his weakness as much as his destiny that made him stretch out his hand. He was ten years older than her and it was him, not her, who had broken his vows to the Lord. And hadn’t she paid for her side with the death of the child? And that wasn’t her fault. Hadn’t the gypsy woman said it wasn’t her fault?
When she got to Ennistymon, the mad man on the bridge signalled her to stop.
‘There’s ostriches on the road!’ he cried. ‘Slow down!’
She was glad there were crazy people in the world. She watched him, wondering if she wasn’t herself a bit mad. When she rounded the corner, ostriches were walking down the main street. People were standing on the footpaths watching them go past and a young girl with plaited hair was driving them along with a stick. So, being mad was the same as having your wits about you, Margaret thought. Sometimes everybody was right. For most of the time people crazy or sober were stumbling in the dark, reaching with outstretched hands for something they didn’t even know they wanted.
She was expecting a child. She knew this the way she knew, after Christmas morning, that it was Stack, not the wind, on her doorstep; it was him shouted.
Margaret came home, pulled the priest’s bed out of the room, took it down the field, and doused it with paraffin. It was slow to burn at first, then blazed and turned into a bed of ash. She went inside and began to knock a hole in the wall between the two houses. Stack stood in his own house at the dividing wall and felt afraid. When that wall came down nothing again would ever be the same. He could feel the grief of Margaret Flusk. Her grief was beyond comparison. And her strength; Margaret had the strength of two men. Weren’t her legs and arms the same as in his dream? He stood there and heard the plaster loosen, then the stones.
She was there half the day. When she saw light at the other side it reminded her of the time her mother woke her, as a child, on Easter morning so she could see the sun dancing, to witness the resurrection of Christ. When she got through the hole in the wall, Stack was singing.
‘They say Clare people are musical,’ she said.
‘They say Wicklow people suck goats’ milk from the teat.’
‘That’s why we’re so good-looking.’
‘You’re a quare woman.’
‘Do you think this child will live?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you know nothing?’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Neither do I.’
‘Aren’t we blessed?’
*
Josephine did not like the new arrangement. Stack did not seem to love her any more. He didn’t even warm his hands before he milked her and he forgot to rub Palmolive on her teats. The woman stole her milk, tied her to his bedpost, then told Stack she belonged in the shed. When Josephine gave birth, Margaret weaned her kid just as early as she could and took her off on a rope to an ugly-looking pucán over the hill.
Stack had never eaten as well. Margaret churned butter, baked bread, made cheese out of Josephine’s milk and spent the rest of her days eating chocolate. He couldn’t keep her in chocolate. It was like throwing biscuits to Josephine. He’d go down to the shop and come home with Mars bars and Maltesers and find she’d taken another one of his mother’s possessions down to the haggard and set fire to it. She was always lighting fires, going around with a big belly bumping into things and then running outside to throw up her food. And always she went to piss outside after dark.
Day and night, the whole parish came: every man, woman and child, looking to get rid of ghosts and ringworm. The kettle was always boiling, teapots going and poor Josephine tied up, imprisoned in the shed. Even the priest came, saying he had a bad leg and was there anything Margaret could do for him?
Margaret could tell what Stack was thinking, beat him at cards and split a load of sticks while he’d be thinking about it. She threw out the television, wouldn’t let him have holly in the house at Christmas, and watched him when he ate. And at night she kept herself well clear of him, was as bad as the small farmer’s daughter who, in fairness, never threw up her dinners.
They say something bad will happen if you don’t throw out the feetwater. They say man should not live alone. They say if you see a goat eat
ing dock leaves, it will rain. Margaret gave birth in the priest’s house. There were thirteen women and nine children there that day running around with scissors and boiling water and telling Stack to get out of the way. He sat in his own side of the house with Josephine. Margaret’s screams shook the parish. Stack imagined he heard a slap and the cry of a child for several hours before he heard them and then an old woman’s voice saying, ‘… easy knowing it isn’t her first.’
Now that Stack knew a woman, there grew the knowledge that he would never understand women. They could smell rain, read doctors’ handwriting, hear the grass growing.
Margaret christened her son Michael, baptised him with a jugful of Josephine’s milk. When a fisherman came over from Inis Mór to buy the caul she would not take a penny. She invited him in and treated him like royalty, made him sherry trifle and custard. They talked late into the night until Stack grew tired and went to bed. When he woke, Margaret was still in the chair and Michael was fast asleep in the fisherman’s arms.
By that time the two houses were clean as polished wood. The two chimneys that had poured out smoke onto the Hill of Dunagore were now one. Wood and turf leant against their gable walls. The opening the woman had torn down was framed in wood and had hinges which were attached to a door which opened, and sometimes closed. Stack looked younger. Somebody saw him in Ennis having a shave, sitting up in the barber’s chair with a towel around his shoulders, telling a dirty joke.
Margaret did her best to give up on superstition. She started to believe that nothing she didn’t believe in could harm her. But however she changed her behaviour, she could do nothing about her nature. In all the years she lived in Dunagore, she never lit her own fire, never failed to pull rushes in February and, hard as she tried, could never throw out ashes on a Monday or go out as far as the clothesline without placing the tongs across the pram.
If, on the occasional dark night, she thought about the priest she did not dwell on it. The Lord’s work was indeed mysterious. If she hadn’t lost the priest’s child, she would not have inherited his house. If she hadn’t inherited his house, she could not have been washing her feet that night and she might have remembered to throw out the feet-water instead of throwing it like a spell over Stack and eaten his Christmas snake and had his child. As it stood, she had got into that bed beside the goat. And you know what they say about goats: it is said that goats can see the wind. Margaret too could see the wind; in her dreams she saw it shake the quicken trees, how the berries changed into beads of blood which fell on the greass all around that place where she had lain.
As for the child, he was nothing like Stack. For years he waited to see some mark of himself in his own son but none came. It mystified without surprising him. It was as though Margaret had spit the child or laid him. As a mother she was ferocious. Stack saw her bare her teeth at neighbours who stroked the child’s hair. And she gave him his own way at every turn. During his infancy, she rocked him until she had him ruined. Stack hardly got a wink of sleep. Margaret didn’t seem to need sleep. She’d be up at dawn and up every five minutes to check the child was breathing, then fall back into dreams which made her kick him, and often he got up and went back to his old bed.
Michael never crawled. He got out of his chair one day and made it all the way to the front gate and back. One day Stack went in to milk Josephine and found there wasn’t a drop of milk in her teats for the boy had sucked her dry. When the boy got hardy he went around the bogs with Stack, jumping ditches with a pole, wading in bog-water and was never sick a day in his life. He’d eat nothing only fish fingers, turnips and sweet things, rode Josephine around the front lawn, bought ducks and pushed them around the narrow roads of Dunagore in his own pram and grew tall as a stake. He could write his name backwards and upside-down. He made up stories, told lies when he was bored and walked around the house in his sleep. Margaret wouldn’t let him go to school, said there was nothing the people of that parish could teach him that she couldn’t teach better.
Michael was seven before Margaret gave up on the parishioners’ ailments and apparitions. She’d had enough of them and knew, if she sent her child to school, that he would suffer. But it was a long time before the people of Clare gave up hope and stopped leaving jam and sticks and herrings for Margaret Flusk and started doing her harm. One morning she got up and found peacock feathers stuffed through the letter-box. On another morning, all her tyres were flat. She herself could withstand anything but her fears hovered round the child.
Stack knew she was going before she went. She let the fire die one night, and the following morning Stack found himself walking down to the edge of the strand. He wanted to be there when it happened. He stood at the water’s edge and stared west. The day was calm. Soon a fishing boat full of Island men came into Doolin and a boat was lowered into the sea. The strangers rowed slowly to shore, their oars cutting neatly into the salt water. When they reached the land they tipped their caps but did not speak. One man looked familiar. When Stack turned, Margaret was looking him straight in the face then wading out, climbing without a word into the boat. The boy cried but Stack knew he would not cry for long. He held his son in his arms then let him go.
The morning was fine, the sea glassy. Nothing stopped him from getting on board, nothing at all. For a moment the men waited and it seemed that all he had to do to make his future happy was to climb into that boat and be carried away on a tide cut by the strength of other men. Instead Stack stood on the strand and watched the only woman he had ever loved vanish from sight. It didn’t take long. Closer to the shore a pair of gulls screeched over the water as though there was something down there only they could see. Stack watched them until his eyes grew sore then he climbed back up the hill.
When he got home, he let Josephine off the rope and soon she had her forelegs on the table, eating all that was left of a rhubarb tart. The track of Margaret’s thumbs was baked into the edge of the pastry. He was glad of Josephine. He could at least fulfil her needs. He sat down and looked for a long time at the bare, clean rooms. The sun shone on the teapot’s lid, the lino, the polished wood. So Margaret was gone. Hadn’t he always known she’d go? Hadn’t the dream told him? But he couldn’t judge her, not even when she took his son’s hand and rowed away with strangers. They were, after all, divided by nothing but a strip of deep salt water which he could easily cross.
Josephine licked the plate clean and stared at Stack. He followed her into their old bedroom, shut the door and closed his eyes. Tomorrow he would go down to Doolin and buy a bag of cement and brick up that wall. He would buy a bottle of whiskey, some fig rolls, and leave the television in to be repaired. He would not be idle. Winter was coming. The turf would keep him busy, and fit. There’d be long winter nights and storms to blot out and remind him of the past. Although he was no longer young his near future was a certainty. But if he lived for a hundred years he would never again venture up to a woman’s house in the night nor let her come anywhere near him with feetwater.
Some notes on the folklore/stories
The quicken tree is another name for the mountain ash or the rowan tree. It is believed to be a tree of formidable magical and protective powers. It is mentioned in mythology as having the power of enchantment. The Irish name, caorthann, derives from the word caor which means both a berry and a blazing flame. The name ‘quicken’ refers to its quickening or lifegiving powers.
Lisdoonvarna is a small town in County Clare famous for its match-making festival.
The words of the mother’s song: ‘What will we do for timber now that the woods are gone?’
A pucán is a sexually active male goat.
Inis Mór is the largest and most western of the Aran Islands.
Wicklow people are nicknamed goatsuckers.
Placing the tongs across the pram is said to prevent fairies from stealing the child and leaving a changeling in its place.
‘Surrender’ was inspired by an incident recollected in John McGahern’s Memoir, concer
ning his father who sat on a bench in Galway and ate twenty-four oranges before he married.
Acknowledgements
The author most gratefully acknowledges the assistance of The Arts Council of Ireland, The Society of Authors and The Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation in London.
Thanks also to The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig and The Blue Mountain Centre in Upstate New York. To Brian Leyden for the Leitrim names; Viv McDade, James Ryan and my editor, Angus Cargill, for their insightful criticism and to Gerald Dawe, Ian Jack and Fatema Ahmed for suggesting titles.
The author would also like to acknowledge the work and care of students and staff while resident at Dublin City University, University College, Cork and University College, Dublin. Special thanks to David Marcus, Colm Tóibín and Declan Kiberd for their generous encouragement and support.
An earlier version of ‘Close to the Water’s Edge’ was published in Birthday Stories, The Harvill Press, selected and edited by Haruki Murakami.
‘Night of the Quicken Trees’ was published in Arrows in Flight, Scribner/Townhouse, edited by Caroline Walsh.
‘Dark Horses’ won The Francis MacManus Award, 2005; it was subsequently broadcast on RTE, Radio One and published in These Are Our Lives, The Stinging Fly Press, edited by Declan Meade.
‘The Forester’s Daughter’ was published in The Faber Book of Best New Irish Stories 2004-2005, edited by David Marcus.
‘The Parting Gift’ was published in Granta 94: Loved Ones.
About the Author
Claire Keegan was born in 1968 and grew up on a farm in Wicklow. Her first collection of short stories, Antarctica, was completed in 1998. It announced her as an exceptionally gifted and versatile writer of contemporary fiction and was awarded the Rooney Prize for Literature. Her second short story collection, Walk the Blue Fields, was published to enormous critical acclaim in 2007 and won her the 2008 Edge Hill Prize for Short Stories. Claire Keegan lives in County Wexford, Ireland.
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