by Debra Daley
My father. Josey O’Halloran. My mother. Nora Mulkerrin. Is any of this true?
‘Nora and I went to the well one day, each of us with a particular request. Nora wished to be released from the house of her father, Tommy Mulkerrin. Her mother was dead four or five years and Tommy had a second wife taken. The woman was not to Nora’s liking. As for me – ’ Something hardens in Kitty’s face. ‘The pain of being without a child was eating away at me. So we walked our rounds at the well and cast our pebbles into it. Nine times it was that we circled the stones and each time in went a pebble and we asked the well to grant our wishes – for Nora a husband and for myself an end to my barren state.’
Kitty sits nursing a silence. The sudden cry of the goat in the distance adds a plaintive note to the atmosphere in the cottage. The bleating sounds again and it brings to my mind the memory of a crisp morning and the pungent smell of goat’s milk. If I close my eyes I can see the goat – and I see myself. I am a little cold and sleepy. Has someone chucked me under the chin? I see myself in a fit of giggles, pressing my chin into the hollow of my shoulder to escape the tickle, while the goat backs away in consternation. Did this happen? Since I trust myself as little as I trust others, I am unable to slough off the suspicion that I am making things up.
The House of Kitty Conneely, Connemara
May, 1766
Kitty’s outburst of coughing rattles the rafters. She tamps it down with a pull on her pipe and says, ‘I will tell you this much: not more than a fortnight after Nora and I were to the well, there came along the boreen a stranger. It was on a day when we were in the field of Tommy Mulkerrin and sharpening our knives with a stone. The stranger was a wellknit young man with a crest of brown hair standing up against the gusts and a shape made from hard work. In his hand he held a spade. Faith, I can see him now. There was heartbreak on his face and determination in the gripping of the spade.
‘I will never forget it, the way Nora came straight up to standing with the squared shoulders and a clear eye, and the young man bringing himself to a halt and his gaze traversing the field and she with the black curly hair leaping all around her head and the wind going mad in the sky in its excitement. There was no use in him walking on, was there? He was bound to stop.’
Kitty reddens her pipe. ‘That was Josey O’Halloran himself, come down from the upland.’ She glances over her shoulder, which gives me to understand she is referring to the mountains in the north. ‘Sickness had his people taken, God rest their souls. A fever went on the father, and on the mother, too. After that, Josey was all alone in the world.’
‘I suppose he was evicted then,’ Captain McDonagh says. He glances at me sideways all of a sudden with a look that seems awfully tired. There is more to his expression, too, but I cannot think how to explain it. I am tired also, and temperamental, and he is darkly difficult to comprehend. Perhaps he, like me, is in need of remembering and that is why he stays to hear Kitty’s story.
‘He had nothing but his father’s spade and he was frightened out of his life.’
‘I would not doubt that,’ the captain adds. It is still very early and his tide will be caught, but I wonder why he did not leave at once after bringing me to Kitty. I suppose he wants to satisfy himself that she is telling the truth. He is the sort of man who is inclined to see a thing through to the end, I warrant, even if it should come to a disagreeable conclusion.
Kitty tells us that Tommy Mulkerrin would not have been inclined to welcome a penniless wanderer from the hills into his house, but it happened that the Mulkerrin was brooding at the time on the wrongdoing of a kelp agent in Galway. The agent was a very bad bit of work and a towering disappointment to the kelpers. He alone determined the worth of the kelp and oftentimes he rejected out of hand a fine load that had taken weeks of backbreaking toil to produce. The kelpers were expected to do nothing about it but grit their teeth and swallow down the aggravation, while the agent was living on the pig’s back.
For some time Tommy Mulkerrin had been composing in his head a letter of complaint to the governor of Galway about the egregious practices of the agent. He was keen to bring a compelling lilt to the prose, but he conceded that a talent for persuasion was marginally beyond his reach. The obvious candidate for the task was the schoolmaster of the parish, Kitty’s own husband, Michael Conneely, but Tommy had fallen out with Mike and the rift had not been mended. So it was that Tommy brought himself to ask the mountainy man, Josey O’Halloran, if he had it in him to plead the case of the disgruntled men.
Josey replied at once, ‘Sure, I can so,’ and his confident tone reassured Tommy that there would be no hard straining in the matter.
‘And what does Josey do,’ says Kitty, ‘but write the letter three ways, do you know that? In the Latin and the English and the old tongue. Wasn’t that a marvel in all fairness?’
‘But how had Josey O’Halloran learned his letters in such a remote place?’ I asked.
Captain McDonagh says, ‘Wandering schoolmasters and friars with the Latin and the Greek. That is how we come by learning in these parts, Miss Smith.’
Kitty jerks a thumb at Captain McDonagh. ‘This one was a fierce boy for Latin.’
Captain McDonagh waves the observation away. ‘I was off the flank of the Bens before I learned much at all. Now get on with it, Kitty.’
‘I will thank you not hurry me to my end, Connla. This story will be finished before you are much older.’
Captain McDonagh laughs. I like the sound of his littleheard laugh, a lazy roll of bass notes that reminds me of an easygoing sort of day. Hearing that laugh, you would not think that he had violence in him.
‘You will like to know,’ Kitty says, ‘that Tommy Mulkerrin took his time reading the letter, but finally he found it in himself to say, “That is to your credit, O’Halloran,” and he took up the quill and signed the letter ‘Myself Mulkerrin’. That same day the wife sewed the letter into an envelope made of rawhide and it was sent away by sea to Galway.’
Kitty pulls the pot from the fire without minding the heat of the iron and hands the potatoes around. I am beset by familiarity – the clink of a cauldron against its hook, the splash of water pouring from a pitcher, the swish of a petticoat, the patter of bare feet on the earth floor.
No reply to Josey’s letter ever came, apparently. ‘But,’ Kitty says, ‘it was no great surprise on us to hear what happened at Kilkieran Bay at the end of that particular time. It was a mild day and the kelp agent was out fishing. All of a sudden a squall blew up out of nowhere. In the blink of an eye the boat of the agent was overturned and the waters were seen to drown him in a determined manner. When the news reached us, Tommy Mulkerrin pondered on the incident. And then he said that in his opinion the letter had served its purpose.’
The match between Nora and Josey, she tells us, did not please Nora’s brother, Colman Mulkerrin. It did not help that his father marked off a few perches of his holding, thus lessening Colman’s share, in order to accommodate a house for the young couple.
The minutes lengthen and Kitty adds, ‘Do not worry, there is worse coming.’ She looks meaningfully at Captain McDonagh.
He tucks one of his pistols into his belt and places the other next to him on the bench. He stares at the pistol with a frown as if it is a conundrum. My mouth tastes as if something has burned in it. It is the bitterness of the tea leaves, no doubt.
I wonder aloud, ‘Am I the only child of my parents, can you say?’
‘Ah,’ Kitty sighs, distantly. Then she remarks, ‘Nora was awful fond of her children.’
Children. Brothers and sisters.
The elation that I feel is swallowed immediately by alarm as Kitty says, ‘She was warned by the women of the place about it. It does the children no good but harm to be always talking of them. The dear knows who might be listening. It is well known that the other crowd takes the brightest and best and spirits them away. Everyone knows of a handsome boy at the top of it for dancing or a lovely girl who could do wha
t she liked with a song – and one day they are never seen again. But Nora was forever petting the little ones and mooning over them. The things Pat could do with himself, she would say, and he not even three years old. Lookit, Kitty, he can balance on one leg on that tall stone in the field of Martin Lee and he is the steadiest boy that is in it. And Bridie is the class of girl who is not afraid to walk the whole world with herself. And Luke, isn’t he the sweetest little packet? By the Holy Mother, I cautioned her, dim your rapture for fear of tempting fate.’
Two brothers and a sister. I am swamped by the vast idea of them and I feel a deep pain within my breast, because I can tell by the sadness that has gathered in Kitty’s face what is coming next.
‘The great cold arrived,’ she says, ‘and the children died in it.’
There is an overwhelming tear at my heart for what might have been. I grieve for my disappeared siblings and for the stillborn hope of finding someone alive of my blood to whom I may cleave. But as my gaze rests on Captain McDonagh, I sense that I am not alone in my sadness.
‘It was a pitiless year,’ he says suddenly. ‘For the first time in living memory, the islands were shrouded in ice. The fisheries vanished and birds fell from the sky and the cold gave birth to famine. A dank spring rotted the crops in their beds and left nothing to harvest, and when the frost returned in the autumn it found people weakened by hunger and fever. It was no trouble at all to take their lives.’
Kitty says, ‘Bridie was the last to go. She had nearly six years on her by then. She was a fighter, too, by God. She did not want to leave. The grief had Nora and Josey nearly destroyed.’
I crane my neck to stare up at the filmy circle in the roof where the smoke passes into the sky. I suppose that a soul might look like that – a small, blurry radiance in the midst of shadows.
Oh, Bridie! Oh, Pat! Oh, Luke! Taken and they could not save you.
‘Nora did not want to believe the children were dead. Taken by the other crowd, that is what she hoped.’
‘Then she hoped in vain,’ Captain McDonagh says. ‘When our people are gone, it is certain we will never hear from them again.’
‘You are a fellow cut from the same cloth as Josey O’Halloran. He would not have a bar of the other crowd at all,’ Kitty harrumphs. ‘Lookit, man, those lads will spirit you away easy enough. Nab you when you’re asleep in the bed and it’s off to live in one of their mansions under the loughs. You must watch that you do not cause bad luck for yourself, Conn. Many’s the good man has had the life taken from him out of spite.’
Captain McDonagh stretches his legs. Is he getting ready to depart? I find I do not want him to leave. He says, ‘Hang it, Kitty, there is more than enough to grapple with in the world without taking on the invisible realms as well.’
She retorts, ‘What do you know, Connla McDonagh, you are only a man. You do not understand the power of the other side. That belongs to women.’
She raps her pipe violently on a stone to knock the ash from it.
After a pause, she says, ‘Do you know, Molly, that although some people die, they don’t go out of the world at all? Sometimes when you look at a person it is not himself that is there, but a fetch, we call it, a good-for-nothing that has been put in his place by the faeries. “I would not mind,” Nora said, “if that had happened. To be left some sort of likeness of the children would be better than nothing.” At any rate, it is said that on a certain wind you can hear their cries from the other side and that is what Nora’s ear listened for. Are you all right, Molleen? It’s very white you’re looking.’
I nod dumbly at Kitty, but I am not all right. My heart has sunk down under the heavy lading of this tale. The more Kitty reveals to me of those fatal days, the more I find myself discovered in them. Distinctly in my head, Nora and Josey speak and they are alive to me with such vividness I can picture it all.
Here is my third and final leap: it is an internal movement of belief that sends me in one precipitous bound over the gulf of time – and with that, I land in the cottage of the O’Hallorans.
It is an unseasonably warm autumn evening. I find myself curled on a mattress with a little doll clasped to my chest. My eyes are closed, but I am only pretending to sleep. In fact, I hear everything.
Kitty says, ‘Do you know what I am going to tell you now?’
I do, Kitty. I do know for I was there and I will tell it back to you and to Captain McDonagh in my own voice.
The House of O’Halloran, Connemara
October, 1749
The autumn that year was hot and dry and it seemed likely that the season would stretch itself out as a boon to the O’Hallorans. For all its toilsome effort, the kelp fetched barely one pound for the ton, but if the burning could be made to last through October, Josey O’Halloran might put his supplementary earnings towards the purchase of timber for a boat. The O’Hallorans and Kitty Conneely, the heart-friend who was always in Nora O’Halloran’s company, were laying into talk on this subject when there was a rustle at the doorpost. Martin Lee, an old neighbour, edged himself into the cottage and announced he was not stopping, only he had a skerrick of news to pass on.
He had come to tell Nora and Josey that the sacred well on the saint’s island was flowing for the first time in living memory. A crowd would sail the following morning to collect the holy water and Martin urged the O’Hallorans to do all in their power to join the throng. ‘There is not a man, woman nor child who would not go to Saint MacDara’s Island in the morning,’ he said.
Josey said, ‘Thank you kindly, Martin, but my work is already cut out for me.’
‘Faith, man,’ Martin pressed, ‘the saint’s island is the place to be on the morrow.’
‘The kiln must be cleaned and I have agreed to do it. I can be of some use to yourselves as a lookout while I am at it.’
‘God preserve your honour,’ Martin said. ‘I will drink to that.’
Devotions were against the law of the land. There were always bluecoats snooping about and the people must hide from them their patterns and priests and the sacred apparatus. Moreover, there was an additional force at work on Josey O’Halloran that prevented him from reneging on his pledge to clean the kiln.
Despite the passing of years and his coming to know Nora’s island home backwards, every sprawl stone and grass blade of it, Josey could never be other than set apart from the men born of the place. To their islander eyes he would always be O’Halloran the hill man. Nevertheless, he strived perpetually to prove the worth of himself in order to overcome the divide. It vexed Nora badly, though, that he felt bound to take on more than his share.
The night was drawing in. Nora said, ‘O’Halloran, if you do not lay down your head you will be no good for your work in the morning,’ and at last Martin and Kitty took the hint and shifted themselves.
As Nora rose to see them out, she noticed a sultry little breeze intruding through the doorway. It reminded her of the fug of body heat that strikes one when entering into a house packed with roisterers. That kind of thickening in the air is regarded as a warning. It is the sign of a band of faeries travelling from one fort to another and you will want to be on your guard against them.
And God with me, were there other signs, too, she wondered, that should be minded? The marvel of the flowing well and the blessing of the exceptional weather, for instance, and Martin Lee coming by to make a point of urging them to celebrate the miracle. Should she and Josey take little Molly and sail to the saint’s island in the morning after all? Col would say that his boat was full, but they could find someone else to make room for them. Nora wished she had not been so sharp to Martin Lee. She had put a sour mouth on her, she was ashamed to say.
Josey called, ‘I can hear you thinking, Noreen.’
‘It is only that I wonder why you must be at labour on the morrow when everyone else will sail to the saint’s island. Let us go, too.’
‘I gave my word to stay at my work.’
‘Josey, my heart, you too often s
acrifice your own convenience to others.’
‘I cannot be other than I am.’
‘Stubborn, you mean, and righteous.’
Josey took Nora in his arms and she mock-pushed him away, laughing, and said, ‘Am I not a terrible harridan?’
‘You’re well known for it.’ Josey pulled her back into his closeness and Nora sighed and pressed her hands against the muscles in his back. His life was hard, but his spirit was light. There seemed to be no end to Josey’s light, even in the darkest moments, and Nora could not have enough of it. It was difficult to believe that a circuit around MacDara’s well could be an action of greater virtue than the cleaning of the kiln by a man who would stay behind for the benefit of others.
*
Turning her head in its nest of curls, Nora watched as the cat rose from warming his backside at the fire and put his nose to the doorway. Josey made a grumbling sound, flung up an arm and began to stir. Climbing to her feet, Nora donned her petticoats and tied up her fall of hair. She reached for the cauldron, hung it on a hook and filled it with water from a pitcher.
There was an edge to the morning as sharp as an oyster shell. The earth of the floor felt especially smooth and cool underfoot. She noticed that the spade resting against a wall and the kelp hooks hung nearby were limned with light that had squeezed in under the door flap. It gave the impression that there was more to these humble objects than met the eye.
As she went about her customary tasks – the settling of the fire, the fanning of the embers with an apron, the putting of the potatoes to boil – Nora had the peculiar sensation that some kind of import was attached to them. She felt, as she picked up the bowl with the animals’ feed and the pail, as though she were acting her part in a mysterious, intricate pattern. They were all part of it, she and Josey and myself, Molly, and the tall two-year-old pig in the yard, and the goat.
At the sound of Nora’s step, the goat brought herself at once to the milking stool and waited while Nora threw potato peelings and seaweed mash into the pig’s trough. The pig shifted its stance, its hoofs making a sucking noise in the mud, and began to nose through the peelings. No sooner had Nora squeezed the first spurt of greyish milk from the goat, than the cat arrived to lick the drops that fell on the ground. Nora pushed him out of the way with her foot without breaking the rhythm of wringing the teats. The milk made its racket against the side of the pail, while the inevitable gulls cried overhead.