In the glen, the air was warmer as if it had been collecting the heat of the day; now, near dusk, it was moist and heady, the way a hay shed would be, full of the smell of heated seed, dank moss, animal, and sweet fennel. I leant against a tree for support and waited for the pain in my side to subside. In the graying, the tree trunks stood dark against the light at play on the glen floor. I looked back the way I’d come, and in that moment I saw her, illuminated by the peculiar light.
It was the witch of the glen, Peadar O’Suilbháin’s widow. She looked up, a faraway gaze in her eyes, the shawl falling loosely about her head so that her hair spilt out. She was singing, her voice young and filled with happiness. In the last of the light she looked radiant and completely lost in some dream.
The woman put up a hand to shield her face from the glare of the sun sweeping through the trees and squinted toward the treeline where I stood. It was my mother and it was the witch, and she was lost and far away and did not recognize me at all. I began to cry.
My mother squinted until the flax cleared. The sun dipped further on the horizon and the light in the glen paled.
You fool, she said, what are you doing standing there?
C’mon here and give your poor old mammy a hand. This basket’s getting too heavy for me. I approached, and when she looked up her face was bright and flushed. She smiled. Sure, what are you crying for?
I shrugged. I thought you were a witch.
She laughed. Tears came to her eyes. Oh God, I am that.
I thought you were the witch Ní Suilbháin.
Mrs. Sullivan? Ah, Saint Jude have mercy on us, sure, she was no witch, the poor old crature. Mother shook her head. I don’t know which she had it worse in—the livin or the dyin. I hope I don’t end up that way.
She handed me the basket and pressed her hair back beneath the shawl. Her fingers were swollen from nettles. She sucked on them absently. I took her hand. She looked about the glen. It’s beautiful here this time of the year, she said. I used to come down here a lot when I first met your daddy, and she stared at me. Y’know, you look just like him—the spittin image. And for all that I say about him, it’s not a bad thing. He was a handsome man.
I passed the basket from arm to arm. I stared at the forest floor. She often compared me to my father when she was angry and I’d always assumed she meant I was ugly. I doubted that I had been in any part of her thoughts for some time.
The odor of chemicals was strong in my nostrils; I wrinkled my nose. Is that the smell of the perm? I asked.
Do you not like it? She beamed. I know, sure it’s rotten, isn’t it? But I think I’ve gotten used to it. Chrissy said I had to keep it covered until it’s set. I’ll wash it before we hit the town.
The town?
Sure the lads are taking us into the dances this weekend—did you forget? Perhaps I’ll pick meself up some rich fella in there. A doctor from the Rouer or Inistogue, perhaps a rich Yank, what do you think about that, then? Perhaps I’ll get a young fella for meself, wha? She nudged me with her hip, and I stumbled and almost dropped the basket.
Mother raised her arms and pirouetted across the flat grass, the dead wood, and the dark leaves, one hand gracefully curved against a man’s, who spun all the while, invisibly. The setting sun sparkled through the trees. I imagined the way she used to dance with Father when they were first married, before her illness and his America had taken them away from each other.
Come here, she cried, give us your hand, and I went to her. She took my hand in hers as if she were changing dance partners and spun me effortlessly as if I were her small boy again. Birds rose in startled flocks from trees like sparks off tinder. We danced and the light came across the fields in a flood and then the two of us were falling, holding each other tightly.
Spring 1980
My mother spoke with the dead. After the doctors declared her cancer free, she could feel and hear their ghosts, see them as clear as day. It was a reprieve, she said, and it was consolation, a constant reminder of what she should not forget and never take for granted. But in the country, the essence, the sense of death was everywhere. It was a fox half buried in muck at the side of the ditch; it was a dog floating in the river. It came in the form of disease like mad cow or hoof-and-mouth or rabies or distemper or encephalitis that left rabbits dead in the road, their faces grotesquely contorted, twisted from the inside out. It was the odor of pig slaughter that drifted over the fields from Milo Meaney’s, of blood and feces and lime that destroyed the remains of carcasses. Death was Gerald Power turned about, sucked in and out of a combine harvester and spraying the field red with bone and gristle. It was Patsy Prendergast jumping into the Barrow after the pubs had closed because there was nothing better to do and no promise that things would ever change. Or poor queer Brigid Long, who had been found wandering the fields and taken up the country, a place you’d never want to go, and her babbies left all alone without her. That was a kind of death as well.
Mother made sure that, whether she went or not, we attended Mass every Sunday. She’d walk with us the four miles into town and wait outside with the men while the service went on. It made the men uncomfortable—they shuffled their feet, sucked on their cigarettes, and coughed loudly; they were talking men things and her presence was an intrusion into this world. But my mother was beyond caring; and I’m sure her world was much more interesting. A world that vacillated between rapture, humor, and despair.
Howya, Moira, they would say in chorus and I’d hear her voice, a laughing singsong of Howya, John. By God, Sheamie, you’re looking well. Lookit you, Mulligan, and poor Peg in there offering up blessings for your soul, you blaggard.
The first time our mother trusted us to go to Sunday Mass without her, Molly and I only made the pretense of doing so. Dressing in our Sunday best—or rather, the best that we had, which only meant that our clothes were freshly washed and not threadbare—we headed off down the road, and once out of sight, we slipped through the fields and spent the next few hours in the woods. When we returned, she was sitting by a roaring fire of coal and bundled up in jumpers against a cold only she could feel, for it was still summer, and warm. She asked us what it seemed she already knew.
Did ye go to Mass?
We couldn’t lie—we knew she knew the truth, and so we told her. We could not understand the pained look in her eyes, how badly we had disappointed her. She nodded and stared back at the flames, sadly and strangely subdued.
When Mother came to church with us, she circled the holy water font like an aged cat sniffing something that has been dead on the road for days. When I asked her why she hesitated to bless herself with the holy water, she stared at me. Her face was close to mine.
I meet God in other places, she whispered. She tightened the shawl around her scalp and sat at the back of the church silently, mouthing words to prayers that were different from our own. Her demeanor was one of confidence and sublime calm. Often she went to the church alone, when there were no priests and no parishioners, and sat amongst the candles lit for the souls of the dead. Her coins clattered in the tin and then she lit her own. She never received Holy Communion and always rose late for the liturgy and responses, seeming startled from her peaceful reverie. Yet, on the long walk home through the fields, avoiding the roads, she’d laugh as she picked herbs and plants for seasoning the late supper.
It was an early spring morning; the chill had left the air and all kinds of smells were coming up from the warming earth. I held Mother’s hand as we entered the churchyard. The men stood gathered on the gravel smoking, but Mother no longer saw them.
A bleedin ghoul, John Delacey muttered as we passed, just like me dead wife, but it was at me he glared as we mounted the steps—he could not look my mother in the eye. I thought of Mag Delacey’s gray headstone in the dun field beside the church and wondered how or why he would say such a thing: my mother was no ghoul. But thinking of Mother alive and Mag Delacey dead and the difference between the two of them, between living and
being buried in the ground with the worms and the muck, made me hold my mother’s hand all the more tightly.
It was Sunday again, and Mother had stayed home, sullenly staring into the fire. Molly and I lit candles for her, offered up separate prayers, and were grateful when Uncle Oweny picked us up on the long road coming from Mass. Our aunt Peggy had run off, taken the night boat from Rosslare to England with an American doctor. He knew she would be back—this was the third time and she always came back—but he wasn’t good at the cooking and he knew there was always good food to be had of a Sunday when people had to be Christian and charitable.
Oweny looked about the kitchen table, pushed buttered potatoes and bread into his mouth, chewed vigorously, and washed it down with tea.
’Tis some fair weather we’ve been having, he said, and nodded enthusiastically.
Jay, that’s fine tay there, he said, grinning at Molly and me. Molly, smiling sheepishly, rose to bring him the pot that was steeping on the grill.
Are you a hand at readin the leaves yet, Molly? he asked.
Molly shook her head as she poured the tea. Only Mammy, she said.
Oweny nodded, food bulging in his cheeks. He gulped the tea. His boot thumped the floor in time to the music on the wireless.
Moira, you’re lookin awful tired, so.
I am awful tired, Owen.
You’ve not et?
I’m not hungry.
Mother placed her elbow upon the table and rested her cheek in her hand. Outside a soft rain spilt through the sun and, in dazzling, color-lit streams, fell sparkling on the fields. Miles away, I could make out three interlinked rainbows sharpening in color over Rowan. There could have been countless more, receding as far as the eye could see, linked like dreams all the way from the valley to Sliabh Coillte in the East. I thought of Mother’s moods, which seemed to move with the weather and the tides and the moon until there was no discovering where she was or where she would be.
I’ll go out on the river this weekend, Oweny said. Bring you back a fine pair of salmon. That’ll get the color back in you. Daddy used to say a salmon would cure a dead man. Daddy used to say —.
You weren’t old enough to remember Daddy, Mother said. She held her head as if it were hurting her; she sounded very tired.
Our knives and forks scraped on our plates. The room grew warm from the cooker. Mother’s eyes fluttered closed, her breathing deepened. It was as if she were asleep.
Christ, Moira, sure what’s wrong with you? Oweny asked. He stopped chewing, his knife and fork poised in his hands as if he were ready for battle.
Mother came back quickly; her eyes opened and they were bright with pain. She reached for her mug of soup, wrapped her shaking fingers tightly around it.
Is it the sickness again? he asked. Sure, what have the doctors —.
Fuck the doctors! What do the doctors know of anything! Mother shouted, slamming her mug upon the table with such force that it cracked. Ceramic splinters scattered across the table. Hot soup splattered on the cement floor. She sank back into the chair.
Molly scooped up the broken shards of mug with the broom and dustpan. I poured my mother another mug of soup and placed it before her, more out of the need to do something than just sit there and gawk at her and because there was nothing else I felt I could do. The radio seemed loud in the quiet that followed. Oweny nibbled at his food, his body stilled of activity, until he could bear the silence no more.
Aye, sure the salmon is just the thing. You’ll see. The wonders a salmon can do now, by God, you’ll see.
Mother clutched at her mug as if she were losing her hold on everything tangible and real about her.
The bands of color were dissipating, becoming pale and washed out over Rowan. The rain clouds had moved east. The fields were so green, the sun so bright I had to close my eyes from the brilliance of them.
On Fridays during Lent our mother made sure we ate fish, that we blessed ourselves before every meal and as we passed before every church. During confession she waited outside the confessional, the final leveler of due soul wage, counting the minutes of our sins, and then the minutes of our contrition. Before confession we prayed for guidance so that we might disclose all of our sins to the vulpine shadow within.
But she never went into the black box herself. Again and again Father O’Brien would come out to talk to her, but she would already be leading us by the hand, genuflecting before the Eucharist, and then walking swiftly up the aisle, her heels and her voice echoing, trailing in lilting farewell, and filling up the vastness of the church’s high vaulted ceilings.
Ah, now, sure, wasn’t that awful quick, she’d say once we were outside—Are ye sure you told him everything?
I certainly did, Molly said.
How many Hail Marys did he give ye then?
Four.
And Our Fathers?
Four.
And what else?
Nothing else.
Are ye lying, because I’ll know if you’re lying.
I’m not lying, I swear to Jesus I’m not lying.
There’s no need to be swearing to Jesus like that, you’d have a good mind to go back in there to Father O’Brien this very minute.
Sorry.
It’s not forgiveness from me you’ll be needing at all. And what about you, you devil?
I blessed myself, rolled my eyes heavenward, pushed my face into what I imagined contrition looked like, the look on all the adults I’d seen leaving the confessional. She squeezed my hand and laughed.
By God, I don’t know what the world’s coming to then. You never got out of the holy church with that in my day.
Father O’Brien was a plump, well-fed little man from Cork, with full cheeks and a flushed face—I often imagined him at the altar or in the confessional, wondering what the maid had prepared for his supper and the progress of the Cork match that would be playing on the color television in the presbytery after the Mass on a Sunday. He had receding red hair and heavily hooded eyes with pale eyelashes that gave the impression of boredom, and small fine white teeth that he sucked on in contemplation, as if they were sweets, before he spoke.
When he saw my mother he called, Moira! We must talk before it is too late! And, as my mother fled up the sacrosanct aisle, his voice rose to a high pitch at the end, giving it a sense of authorial despair, like a parent scolding a child. He wanted her confession of what he must have believed were dark and exciting sins. He wanted everyone to recognize that she was a sinner who, unless she confessed and received absolution, would never know salvation. She would never give it to him, she said, not even on her deathbed. God could take her as he found her, if God would take her at all.
You were sleepwalking again, Mother said in the morning. Her eyes were wide and unblinking, but I didn’t think she was seeing me at all. Her voice sounded as if she were speaking from a dream.
Rashers were spitting on the grill. The heady odor of strong tea filled the kitchen. The walls and windows were covered in condensation; beads of moisture reached up into the corners of the ceiling where the plaster had darkened with rot.
I woke with the moon beaming through the curtains, she said. It was filling up my whole room like a great pale eye peering in on me, so I got up and looked out the window, and there you were, walking across the field, down by the woods, toward the marsh.
She glanced toward the dark corners of the ceiling and hesitated. Her eyes no longer seemed to respond to light. All the electric lights in the house had been turned off so that she could see properly, and it seemed she was always waiting, longing for the natural gray of twilight to descend with the promise of night.
I kept losing you between the trees, she continued. You were like a ghost and at first I thought you were a ghost, but then I says to myself, sure, don’t be daft, isn’t it only Michael, and it was you, and I just sat there and watched and waited for you to come back in because that’s what the doctors say, leave a sleepwalking person alone and eventually they�
�ll wake up. She nodded, pleased with herself.
You passed right below my window, she said, and before you came in, you looked up, stared straight at me, and for a moment I was scared again because I thought, it doesn’t really look like you at all, and your eyes they went right through me, so pale and lost they were. But then the clouds shifted before the moon, one of Flaherty’s dogs bayed, and everything was right again. It was you, as you had been, and it must have been a queer trick of the moonlight for me to think anything else.
I almost had to laugh at me own silliness, she said, and then you came in so, climbed the stairs and fell into bed. And straight to sleep. It’s strange so, how it is that you sleepwalk like that. And that I could have thought you were someone other than yourself. Strange.
Molly and I looked at each other; we chewed our toast quietly, supped our tea, and then Molly rose and cleared the table. She turned on the tap and bent over the sink, her shoulders rounded and trembling, the sound of running water filling the silence.
I have to feed the dogs, I said and went to the door while my mother stared at her tea leaves. But in the hallway I leant against the cold wall, closed my eyes, and cried.
I did not sleepwalk and neither did Molly. In fact, we woke each night to watch that ghost tread back and forth across the moonlit fields. We watched the ghost return to our house every night, track muck and twigs and shit across the carpet, climb up the stairs to its bed, into which it clambered with barely a sound. We watched and prayed because the ghost that roamed the countryside every night, walking the dark fog-shrouded fields, searching, looking for something that in the light of day was lost and forgotten, was our mother.
On the school bus Cait’s eldest brother, Martin, led us in song. And when Sheamie Walsh or Brean McDonagh or Tessy Furlong got off the bus, they continued singing, their voices a rising and falling swell of sound following them down the boreen as they waved good-bye and disappeared into the gray twilight.
In the Province of Saints Page 13