the banshee
January 1978
Christmas came and went but it didn’t mean much without Father. Mother stopped going to church of a Sunday. Instead she walked the fields or the glen or made her way down to the river at dusk, or, if she’d made the tea, she’d wait until after twilight, when mist fell upon the low pasture, and wander the chary-lit fields in her nightgown.
Our mother was not right, and we knew it. Something was wrong and it was more than just Father leaving. After all, he’d left before. She began to cry, at night when we were supposed to be sleeping, her sobs sounded softly in the hall, the stairwell, on the old wood and stone. And in the morning she would say nothing of it to us, and we were too scared to ask.
In the evenings, after the Angelus, Mother lowered the flame on the paraffin lamps so that the fire was the only light in the room. The cats twitched in their sleep. And I’d watch the taut lines gradually ease from Mother’s face as she slumbered. In an hour or so she’d wake and head out into the fields. The one time I’d pressed her, asked her where she was going and why, she’d looked at me as if I were mad. I have to get out of this house, she said. Do you not understand that?
My sister and I drank our tea, chewed quietly on our biscuits, and when the fire died down I placed more coal upon it. Together, we watched over our mother as if something at any moment might steal the breath from between her parted lips, and we waited, as if by being there, we could prevent it.
March 1978
The clouds raced toward Rowan and I could see the twinkling lights of town as the sky darkened. I sat on the wall outside the scullery, waiting with Mother’s shopping list for Pat Malone’s dairy lorry crumpled in my pocket. Smoke curled up from the chimney and seemed to tether the gloom above us. The first drops of rain pattered against the sheets on the clothesline.
Culleton’s old tractor was climbing the rise of his fields and I immersed myself in its sound. I did not hear Mother until she was pulling the sheets from the line, her white hands working like claws. When she spoke her voice trembled through the rain.
Desperate it is, they can’t even get off their arses to bring the washing in from the rain. Soaked it is, soaked, and your man sitting on the wall staring at it like a feckin eejit. Sure that’s all right, Mammy will do it, Mammy has nothin better to do, of course not, sure, Mammy will cook me dinner, Mammy will wash me clothes, Mammy will sew me jumpers, Mammy will wipe your feckin arse for you, too! Mary, Mother of God, grant me patience. She shook her head frantically. I don’t know, I just don’t know so, Lord Jesus, I don’t.
Her eyes were swollen and red. Her cheeks streaked from where she had wiped at them roughly. I knew the word sorry carried little weight with her, would most likely send her into another rage, and besides, these days, I no longer knew what I was guilty of and supposed to be sorry for.
Mud spattered the bottom of the white sheets as she struggled to hold them; clothespins fell to the ground. She began crying again.
I rose from the wall to help, but when I reached for the sheets she yanked them from my hands and glared at me. Her tears had stopped. This is how she had looked at my father before he left.
I stared at water pooling in the muck. I’ll go up the road and wait for Pat, I said, but did not move.
Aye, you do that, Mother spat. I looked up as she struggled into the house, the white washing falling down around her.
I went up the road and waited in the rain. For shelter, I stood in the ditch beneath the thick hedgerows. I shivered and listened as cows moved heavily through the fields. Finally, in the distance, I could see the lights of the lorry on the far hill as it threaded its way from stops at the Three Mile Cross. I imagined Pat Malone placing his deliveries, for the Culletons, old Mrs. Molloy, and the Walshes, in their roadside boxes. The thought made my stomach sick with hunger. I stamped my feet to keep warm. The fields were flattened and the sedge dark. The odor of coal smoke hung in the air, thick and weighted by rain.
The lights of the lorry came around the bend, its motor muted by the wind, and I stepped out into the road. As he came to a stop Pat rolled his window down. He sat high in the lorry with the motor running and his wipers ticking loudly back and forth, spraying water down upon me.
Howya, Pat, awful morning, I said, and he said, It is, Michael, it is. I stepped on the lorry’s running board and reached up to him with my mother’s list. He shook his head.
I’m sorry, Michael, but your mother is in arrears with me. She hasn’t paid for the last two months. I told her last time she could have no more credit until she paid up.
I stared, my mouth agape. I wiped rain from my eyes.
I’m sorry, Pat said, I can’t. He rattled the gear stick and jammed the lorry into gear. I stepped off the running board. The lorry lurched as Pat eased out the clutch and then it pulled away, its exhaust belching oil-smoke, its black tires flinging wet muck back at me. In a mist of diesel, I watched it clamber up the hill toward Listerlin. The macadam beneath my feet felt unsteady; my mother’s list dissolved into small wet ribbons in my hands.
I looked up the road toward the Three Mile Cross and thought of the milk and eggs and rashers and sausages and bread left in the tin boxes in the ditch. The rain fell harder as I crossed the fields. I slipped on rocks as I traversed the swollen burn, and the grass I clutched at was thick and full, like a mossy head of hair, in my hands. A lone sheep bleated mournfully amongst the rocky sedge. I wiped the muck on my trousers.
I thought of old Mrs. Molloy, who had the shingles and whose brothers had been killed during the War of Independence. When I was younger and Lugh went on the bottle, I’d often led her four thin-shanked cows up from their grazing down by the Flats and she’d always invited me in. She longed for company but no one ever visited her. We’d sit by her smoky fire with a mug of tea and some braic. The inside of her house was black with soot and smelled like a dung heap. I felt bad that there was no one to look after her, and I felt guilty for thinking so much about the smell of her. Gradually, I stopped herding her cows and left it to Lugh, whether he was drunk or not. I stopped visiting, too, and the longer I stayed away the more my shame grew and prevented me from returning at all. The rain was lashing the slate roof of her house now, and in the graying, I could not tell if she had a fire going, but I hoped she had.
I climbed over the stone stile and searched the ditch. The Culletons and Walshes all had big lads working down in Waterford; they could afford what I would take. I watched the road for cars as I rifled through the boxes. I stuffed a loaf of bread, a pint of milk, and six individual eggs into my jacket; there were no rashers or sausages or black-and-white pudding. When I climbed the stile I looked back down the hill the way I had come and saw our house. Blackbirds rose from the tree line. Flaherty’s hounds had finally woken. Smoke curled from our chimney, and I moved slowly; everything was becoming silent again, and in that numbing silence, our house offered no suggestion of warmth.
Mother was folding the washing in the kitchen. She had the scrubbing brush out and there was soapy water in the sink. The clothing that had fallen and been washed again was stretched across the clothes rack to dry.
I set the milk and bread on the kitchen table. The room was warm and dimly lit. Mother had yet to turn on the lights and I assumed her eyes were bothering her again.
Mother of God, she said, you’re drowned to the skin. Quick, get out of those wet clothes. She reached for the sleeves of my jacket and began to pull it off me.
She glanced at the table as she huffed with the exertion of removing my jacket. Where’s the rashers, and the black-and-white pudding? she asked.
I wrung the water from my jumper and hung it before the fire. Pat said he was out. He’ll get us tomorrow.
Mother placed a mug of tea on the table before me and grunted. A fine lot of good that does us today.
I nodded.
She stretched the jacket upon the rack. Slowly, she pulled the eggs from the jacket pockets and turned with them in her hands.
One was cracked.
What’s this?
I looked at her and shrugged.
She held the egg up as if I might deny its existence. Pat didn’t give you eggs like this, she said. Where did you get it?
Pat wouldn’t give us anything, so I went up to the Three Mile Cross.
You stole these eggs, and this bread, and this milk?
I didn’t respond, there was nothing to say, and then she slapped me, once, hard across the face. And I didn’t move, not even when she slapped me a second time. She raised her hand again, and that’s when I shouted, It was you that lied, and that’s been lyin! Pat Malone said he told you you had no more credit with him until you paid him the two months’ worth you owe. Did you forget that? Did that just slip your mind? And why haven’t you paid him? I know Da’s been sending you money. What have you been doing with it? Or are you planning on leaving as well?
There’s been no money. Your father’s sent nothing.
Of course he has, I know he has —.
There’s nothing.
He must have sent you something.
I’m telling you there’s nothing! Your father has sent no money since he’s been gone. She laughed weakly, bitterly. Three months and not an effin penny. Nothing. What in God’s name does he think I can feed you on? Ah, sure, I guess he’s not put a lot of thought into that.
She sighed. I’m sure the whole town knows. Oh, and they’ll have a grand old time of it when I sign up for the dole and the child allowance. Moira McDonagh this and Moira McDonagh that—“The poor bitch! It serves her right, her husband’s left her and now she can’t even feed her children”—and they call themselves Christians, all of them bloody hypocrites.
She turned and threw the cracked egg into the basin, where it rattled against the metal. She leant against the countertop with her back to me and lowered her head. I wished he’d taken you with him, she said. Oh God, do I wish it. Every single day looking at you reminds me of him.
Cold damp smell of ashes in the black hearth. Rain on the air. A wind sighing down the chimney, and Mother silent in her bedroom again. Molly was at the sink washing dishes, her sleeves rolled up, hands pink from the scalding water. I watched her features shimmering in the glass of the window; every so often she blew hair from her face. Beyond the angle of her flushed cheeks, gray fields bent, flattened by the wind.
Is she all right? I asked.
Molly held her forearm across her brow and sighed. I don’t know, she said. She wouldn’t eat this morning.
What’s the matter with her?
Jaysus, sure how should I know?
I went out to the coal shed but there was no coal, only the cat and her kittens, who looked up sleepily from their warm tea chest of straw in the corner, the littlest ones mewling in their sleep, as wind whistled through the rotting timbers.
On the second day Mother still refused her food, and then again on the third. The following morning, before breakfast, I walked the fields and found a small tree that had been felled by the storm. I went back to the house for the axe, cut the tree into logs, and brought back as much wood as I could carry. It was wet but I thought it might still burn. The sun was glinting on the wet fields but a chill was in the air. As I’d worked, my body had warmed and I’d forgotten the cold, but all the way home I shivered and cursed that I’d forgotten to bring my anorak.
In the kitchen Molly was sitting at the table alone. Mother’s breakfast was under the grill warming. It’s no good, Molly said. She won’t eat it.
Jay, did you try?
Molly exhaled and pursed her lips. Do I look like a jackeen? A’course I tried, aren’t I just saying she won’t eat it?
I began to stack the wood by the cooker. Molly was still staring at me. I looked up.
She puked as well, she said. It’s all over the floor.
My aunt Una said that my mother had broken a geis, and that is why bad things were always happening to her. First with our father leaving six months before, and now with her sickness. A geis, she said, was a magical prohibition placed upon you, and you should never never break it. Once broken it was like a weapon, a bag of arrows cast at you but that might do injury to another if evoked. My uncle Oweny said it was rubbish. While he might have believed in lots of things, he did not believe for a moment in a geis. And Uncle Brendan seemed to agree. He sat at the kitchen table, shaking his dark head at his sister. For fucksake, Una, he kept swearing. For fucksake!
Whatever a geis might be, it seemed tragic, as tragic as the tale of the children of Lir—Aodh, Fionnghuala, Fiachra, and Conn—who we learnt at school had been transformed into swans by their jealous stepmother, Aoife. They were beautiful, but they were sad because they could never hug their father again, nor could they hug one another although they loved one another very much. The curse lasted for nine hundred years and in all that time their love was so great that they never parted. When one grew sick the others sheltered him with their feathers and kept him warm. When the curse was lifted they died and went to Heaven. But my aunt didn’t talk about any of that; perhaps the thought of my mother dying and going to Heaven bothered her too much.
If Mother was anything, she was a swan, she was that beautiful, and if she was cursed, then it was to be beautiful like the children of Lir. But I considered why someone would place a curse upon her and what she might have done to break it. Whenever my uncle drove Mother to the doctor’s up the country and Molly and I had to stay with my aunt Una, I worried. Each time my aunt recited her story over dinner, I was sure that it must be true; it seemed our mother was going to the doctor more and more frequently, yet she seemed less and less well.
It was June and the sky was almost cloudless. They were making the trip up the country again and Oweny held me at the car, his large hands firm on my shoulders. Mother sat in the front seat, bundled with blankets, but it was not cold. When she saw me staring, she smiled and waved good-bye; she’d lost weight and looked pale. I looked back to my uncle and asked him, Uncle Oweny, why does Auntie Una keep saying Mammy has broken a geis?
Uncle Brendan, who’d been circling the gravel and absently kicking stones, looked up. That effin bloody woman! He turned his back and continued cursing.
Oweny’s grip grew tighter and he sighed. Is she telling you that nonsense again? Don’t mind your aunt Una. She’s a cracked one.
And for a time, that seemed to be the end of that. But in the country, ghosts, spirits, and faeries could take hold of one at any time. One always had to be aware walking the long unlit road from the town, or in the winter, after leading the cows to pasture after milking, of the Host who would at any moment take unwitting souls for their own. All they had to do was call to you, and if you listened—just once—you were gone. I convinced myself that my uncle was right, and perhaps that is why it came as such a shock to all of us, even to Aunt Una, when my uncle, pale and shaken, returned home alone.
Aunt Una stayed with us while our mother visited with the doctor, and at times Oweny and Brendan would stop in with food or news. Oweny made it sound like a holiday, like going to Butlins. Your mammy needs a rest, he said. Sure she’s dead tired, has been run off her feet with the two of you and getting the house and the field in order.
He seemed more stern than normal, as if he felt he had to be, but we saw that it was only a guise for the tenderness that was always there and that became evident when he wasn’t thinking about his new role. I guess he felt a certain responsibility as our temporary guardian and was not quite sure how to go about it; he was queerly not himself—at times strict and at other times overly attentive—and Molly and I did not know what to make of it.
We would wake together in the night and speak aloud, already knowing the other was awake and thinking similar thoughts: our mother wasn’t holidaying; it was laughable to imagine her sashaying around some rural hospice on the edge of some peaceful coastal town. She had never been gone this long from us, and after a day or two we grew scared but told ourselves it was foolish to be scared. We were n
o longer little children, there was nothing wrong, and we would, after all, see her very soon. Uncle Oweny had said so.
Doesn’t your mammy have the life, Uncle Oweny said at the supper table. Sure wouldn’t we all like to be away at Butlins for this long. But then he made us all say a prayer for mother before we ate. We knew he meant well but we no longer believed him. We felt as if we were slowly being singled out, isolated from other children; adults looked at us differently, a sad strange look that lingered on their faces. It was a look that frightened Molly and me, made our pulses quicken and our chests tighten. Cancer, they whispered in hushed tones when they thought we could not hear. Cancer.
Una was placing stew on the plates when Oweny pushed back his chair with a loud squeal and said he needed to go for a pint. Molly and I looked at each other as the door closed behind him, watched through the window as he made his way up the gravel, and as he paused at the gate and stood there unmoving.
The weeks passed and the days grew shorter. Twilight came more and more quickly, darkening the fields. Mother seemed to be gone for so long that I feared she would forget us entirely. I imagined the hospital in Carlow and Mother wandering the halls, her head losing all thought and memory of us.
Now her name hung on the air at the edges of our lips as a prayer. A soft breathy exhale. A hush. At night we dimmed the paraffin lamp, climbed the stairs together, and whispered across the space and divide of our separate beds in the cold room: God bless Mammy and make her well again. Amen.
I’d wake and find that Molly had slipped into my bed sometime during the night. She’d be snoring loudly and it would take me a while to fall back asleep. I’d stare at the ceiling and listen for the sound of cars out in the silent countryside, track one from miles off and follow its journey through the night, mapping the roads and hills by the sound of its engine revving and slowing until one or another came to our road, and then drove on up the hill toward Tullogher, or bore east toward us. And then I’d wait for the headlights that would track across the ceiling as they passed, one sliding beam stretching the window sash across the ceiling and down the wall, and then gone. Only the sound of the car as it made its way down the bend, off into the country, and soon silence. And in the silence I’d wonder how far away mother was, how long it would take us to reach her if we needed her, if something were to go wrong.
In the Province of Saints Page 5