It was on that first night of our lives that, with all the weeping and invoking of the Holy Mother, my sister was named Mary. In the days that followed, the name Margaret was added to it. “Whatever might strengthen the petition to God to keep the wee creature alive,” Mrs. O’Dare had said. “Mary Margaret. The Holy Mother and a great Virgin martyr standing together.”
When we first began to speak, I could not manage the four syllables of my sister’s name so I called her “Mare.” For me it would always be her name.
“A mare is a horse,” my mother would complain.
But that was a delight for Mare, constrained as she always would be from physical exertion, and she’d imagine herself freely galloping the fields.
Air would always confound and imprison Mare. It struggled to separate her from me. And the fear was ever present in our house that one day air would be all she’d be composed of, eluding and containing her.
• • •
For the first five years of my life my mother woke repeatedly every night to check on my sister. I must have tuned myself early on to the rhythms of her fitful sleeping because I remember lying anxiously in wait for her, feeling her stir and seeing her shadow loom. Until I was two we were still in the buried bedroom, the dying turf light flickering on her face as she peered at my sister. And then she’d bow over me so I could feel the sweep of her hair on my skin, and hear the gentle bumping of her heart as she pressed an ear to Mare’s chest.
· 3 ·
THE RAIN WAS INCESSANT EARLY in our sixth spring. even when it broke for an afternoon, the air was dismal and misty and the sun shown only faintly on the horizon like lamplight through curtains.
We were five, trapped inside too much of the time, the grounds of our crumbling house gone to muck and saturation, the limestone walkways lichened. My mother stood at the parlor window, arms crossed at her chest. The sea and sky were gray and diffused, inseparable. Through the screen of the open window we could hear the nervousness of the water and smell the iodine-rich kelp stranded on the shore.
“I’ve seen this weather before,” my mother said to Mrs. O’Dare. “A spring that refuses to flower.”
“Spring will come in its own time, Agatha,” Mrs. O’Dare said.
“It feels like it never will, Missus. It’ll be dark again this day by four.” She looked uneasily at Mare, who dozed in the soft little chair my mother had fashioned for her out of bed pillows and bits of tired silk from old slips and blouses.
For days Mare’d been lethargic and our mother blamed it on the dismal weather. At night she’d loom over Mare, looking at her as if the turning of the world depended upon her. Some nights she’d carry her, sleeping, into the kitchen where she’d light a turf fire in the hearth, then sit before it rocking my sister in her arms, the smell of damp, burning earth wafting through the darkness of the house.
“Come sit down, Agatha,” Mrs. O’Dare said.
Mare stirred, drawing a noisy, labored breath, and my mother clenched as if it caused her physical pain.
“She’s off again in one of her dreams, poor Mary Margaret,” Mrs. O’Dare said softly.
My mother knelt before my sister’s chair, smoothing her hair. Through her sleep Mare grew earnest about the eyes, as if she were dreaming that like the spring, she was about to disappoint our mother.
“The rainy weather can’t hurt her, love,” Mrs. O’Dare said, leaning forward in her chair. “There’s nothing at all about fresh rain that’s bad for weak lungs.”
“But if she gets too cold in all the dampness . . .”
“She’d be on fire in an icestorm with all the cardigans and shawls you keep the poor creature wrapped in!”
My mother shot her a pained look. “You don’t understand how the dismal light is driving her to the end of herself. Bloody sun, holding out on her so.”
“Come and sit down now and have a smoke, love,” the old woman said soothingly, and my mother obeyed. Mrs. O’Dare lit a cigarette and blew out the match. A little black ghost from the flame escaped, wriggling upward on the air.
She passed the cigarette to my mother, wincing as she straightened her legs. “I’m crucified with the arthritis,” she said, leaning back in the chair. She was not a large woman, but soft and lumpy like pillows. What would she fix for tea? she wanted to know. There was a bit of bacon left. Would she boil that with cabbage and potatoes? She didn’t want to be driving out to the shops in this dismal weather to fetch anything like chops. She watched my mother’s eyes, which were set on the bleak sky outside. Graceful nets of smoke climbed the air.
I went to my sleeping sister, lacing my fingers through hers. I knew Mare could feel me through her sleep. I could feel her softness coming back at me.
Her forehead was round and hotter than the rest of her face, her eyelashes gold at the roots and feathery brown at the ends. She slept with her mouth open, her head leaning to the side, her body faintly humming. Her eyes opened ever so slightly as I touched her, a little damp light glistening at me from a distance.
“Leave her be, Clodagh!” my mother said.
I stiffened, but with soft defiance continued to stroke my sister.
“She’s hurting nothing, Agatha,” Mrs. O’Dare protested.
My mother was quiet for a little while but I could feel her watching me.
“Leave her be, Clodagh! Give the poor creature a bit of privacy!” she cried out with a fierceness in her voice, as if I were the source of Mare’s suffering.
“Agatha . . .” the old woman began in my defense.
“Stay out of it, Mrs. O’Dare!” my mother cried. “Stay out of what’s between my daughters and myself!”
• • •
When we woke the next morning, rivulets of rainwater dripped down the walls of the vestibule, forming puddles in the uneven dips in the floor. One of the walls was soft to the touch and issued an ancient smell. As my mother and I huddled in the parlor doorway looking at the mess, a chandelier crashed to the floor, bringing with it chunks of waterlogged plaster.
“Sweet Mother of Jesus!” my mother cried.
Mrs. O’Dare came running out at the noise. When she saw the disaster, an angry, self-satisfied flush burned her cheeks. She telephoned workmen, looking imperiously at my mother as she did.
When they arrived they had to break down the door to the upper house. A dank smell descended the stairs, filling my mother with dread. Each time there was a boom of footsteps above us or a banging of hammers, she cried out to the Mother of God.
Mare’s breathing grew more dissonant and drawn, and her cry strange, like the bleat of a weakling lamb. As my mother loomed over Mare, I touched her arm and she stiffened. She made Mrs. O’Dare take me, saying that she had enough on her over my poor sister.
• • •
That first day with the workmen upstairs, Mrs. O’Dare took an oil lamp and a broom into the dark hall. With my mother and Mare locked behind the parlor door, I helped the old woman sweep, her lamp casting an ambery church radiance over the broken walls.
“Your mother can fight me if she likes but I’m opening the house. The men will replaster and do the wiring in here once the leaks are taken care of.”
After she cleaned she left the oil lamp still lit on the floor in the usually dim hallway, and my mother, on her way to the kitchen, stopped in her tracks when she saw it. Mrs. O’Dare was standing nearby, ready for a fight, but my mother did not give her one, just stayed awhile where she was, staring.
The next day was Saturday and the men did not come. Mare and I played quietly with dolls in the morning and when she drifted off to sleep I went into the kitchen looking for my mother but did not find her there.
Mrs. O’Dare had relit the lamp and left it burning in the dreaded hallway in a determined attempt to get my mother used to the idea of renovation. I stood at the threshold, drawn in by the lamplight, which emanated a warm fragrance of burned minerals.
From a place where the corridor turned I saw the smear of a shadow and every muscle in my body
tensed, but released again slowly when I saw that it issued from my mother, who stood looking into a room, one hand touching the frame of the door. Her face was lifted as if with expectation, and I had the distinct sense that she was looking for someone.
As I moved closer to her, the floorboard stressed under my foot. She froze but did not turn. Her terror and expectation flooded the air between us so I thought I would swoon, and it was as if I felt her heart bumping under my own in the soft of my stomach.
She turned slowly, and her face, beatified by terror, darkened when she saw me. “Jesus,” she cried. “Christ on earth! Can you not leave me a moment of my own, Clodagh?”
My throat constricted and tears heated in my eyes.
She turned from me, and moving up the hall, looked around even more earnestly. Who was she searching for? Was it my dead father? Once I’d heard her say to Mrs. O’Dare that ghosts listened and watched, remembering for you the things you let yourself forget.
While retracing her steps, her body grew heavy. She stopped a moment and stared at the floor, then walked from the hallway, the flame in the lamp stirring the shadows on the blue, decrepit walls as she passed.
Breathing in the cold dankness of the air, I remained in the shadows where she’d left me, listening to the din in the silence.
· 4 ·
BEFORE BED I WALKED UP to My mother, folding My hands as if praying, and looked into her face. “Forgive us our trespasses,” I said.
She blinked, taken off guard. Color rushed into her face. I reached for her and hesitantly she put an arm around me before withdrawing it, and saying in a low voice, “Off to bed with you now.”
In the throes of that agony, I went in the car with Mrs. O’Dare to the shops the next afternoon. Driving south we passed a group of northbound tinkers going to settle in a field, their caravans moving slowly toward us, some people walking with their horses.
Two wild, freckled girls ran alongside a slow-moving car with their hands open.
“Please, a few pence,” one cried in a shrill voice.
The driver threw some coins into the grass on the roadside and they ran to gather them, laughing. Having found them they turned together in a circle, dancing a reel. I watched, envious of the way they fell laughing together and rolled in the grass, fascinated to think they slept at night in a caravan that creaked in the wind.
My own mother had been such a creature. A sun-speckled girl with dirty ankles and wild hair, bleached with weather. People who moved along roads and fields. My mother’s people. Uneasy with houses.
“They run in herds,” Mrs. O’Dare said thoughtfully, puffing on her cigarette as she drove. “Like horses.”
“The rain must have thrown them off course, poor desperate creatures,” Mrs. O’Dare said. “Tinkers don’t usually arrive to this field until summer.”
A tall thin girl passed us with damp staring eyes and I thought of the dark-eyed seals that came in the summer riding the surf.
“These are not the same tinkers that usually come through here. I’ve never seen any of these before,” Mrs. O’Dare remarked.
A woman with an infant at her breast walked toward us at a steady pace, holding out her hand.
“Where’s that poor woman’s shame?” she asked softly. “Suckling an infant in the light of day. Walkin’ along the road as if ’twere nothing. There could be men in this car and do you think she’d hide her naked breast?”
The tinker woman held the infant in one arm, her long freckled hand wrapped gracefully around its bald head as if it had been made for only that purpose. As we came up close to her I pressed my face to the glass of the window. “Give her something, Missus!” I cried.
“Why, Clodagh! I’ve nothing extra to give her,” Mrs. O’Dare said.
“Give her something, please!”
“I have nothing, love.”
When we passed her I knelt on the seat, looking out the back window. The woman turned and met my eyes. My heart drummed hard. She had the same pink speckled skin as my mother, though her hair was a coarse dark rope flopping at one shoulder. The infant trembled and shifted as the woman twisted further round to look at me. Staring after the woman, I was filled with an urgency for her. “Missus,” I whispered. In a moment she was lost among the gathering on the roadside.
I opened the car window for a better smell of the fire in the field. The same smell that was carried toward the sea every summer when the other tinkers arrived in that same field. The smell that agitated my mother.
Mrs. O’Dare had slowed the car and was watching me, a crease forming between her eyes as she looked into mine. “What are ye thinking, lass?” she asked.
Silence filled the car. I was confused by my longing for the dark-haired young mother. My face heated with shame.
• • •
After we made our purchases in the shops, Mrs. O’Dare took me to a tea shop for biscuits and a lemonade. The place was mostly vacant, it being an off hour. We sat at a table near a big window that looked out on an ascending street of houses with rough, gray walls, three or four bicycles leaning against one of them.
Our table was covered with a cracked, plastic cloth, a bright pink plastic flower in a bud vase in the center. After we ordered and the woman disappeared into the kitchen, Mrs. O’Dare sighed and sat back on her chair. “It’s nice to sit so in the quiet and have another bring you tea.” She smiled, the lines softening on her forehead as she looked out at the houses on the damp road.
“Why don’t tinkers live in houses?” I asked.
“On still about the tinkers, are you?” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Do you know why, Missus?”
“I suppose they’re suspicious of houses,” she said, sighing. “That they have strange ideas about houses, like your own mother not having the rooms properly wired and cleaned.” She ran a hand through the coarse gray of her hair, smoothing it in place.
From the inland-facing windows at the back of our house we could see the distant field where the tinkers camped in summer. Sometimes my mother stood outside watching the light and smoke from their fires.
“But how are they so different from the rest of us?”
“They’re rough people,” she said, lowering her voice. “Impoverished.” A mysterious, wild-sounding word. “Impoverished,” I whispered. Like the noise the wind made in the hawthorn tree.
“Your mother’s an odd one, though. She was all alone when your father saw her in the west. Too young to be on her own. She’s a mystery, lass.”
“Did my mother beg on roadsides?” I asked.
“I don’t know, lass. And don’t you dare ask her such a question.”
“Why not?”
“Your mother’s ashamed of what she comes from.”
“Why?”
At that moment the woman returned from the kitchen with my biscuits and lemonade, and when she left I had to ask my question again.
“It’s nothing to be proud of, Clodagh, being a tinker. There’s hardship in that life.”
“Where is her own mother?” I asked.
“She’ll not breathe a word on that subject. Not a peep about her life before she met your father. And you mustn’t dare mention anything I’ve told you.”
“She’ll get angry?” I asked. I felt a pang in my stomach when I thought of how easily, how unwittingly I could upset my mother.
I took a bite of a biscuit but it was stale tasting, a simple water biscuit. I’d forgotten to ask for chocolate or jam-filled biscuits.
I put it down, thinking of the tinker woman. “Did my mother once hold me to her breast the way the tinker woman held her baby?”
“Yes, lass. That woman was feeding her child. Suckling it.”
• • •
Before tea that night I took some coins from my mother’s purse, snuck quietly from the house, and crossed the field and the old Dublin Road in a light rain. I walked to the tinker camp to find the woman with the infant. I looked into each face peering out of open caravan doors o
r from under the tarp where the fire was lit. They were all quiet, their eyes on me. But I could not see the woman. The women I did see had fierce faces and none had an infant at her breast.
As I ran home across the field and the road I saw my mother standing behind the house, her hand shielding her eyes from the rain.
“What in God’s name were you doing?” she cried out.
I stopped a few feet from her, my heart pounding.
“I was looking for a lady.”
“What lady?” she cried.
“There was a lady with a baby that I saw when I was in the car with the Missus.”
“And what did you want of that lady?”
“To give her something.”
“Give her what, in the name of God?”
I opened my hand and revealed the coins.
“Where did you get those?”
“From your own bag,” I said.
“Little thief!” she cried. “Give them here.”
I gave them to her and she stood quiet, her mouth tight. “I want to know what you wanted with that woman!”
“I wanted to talk to her.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to ask her something.”
“Ask her what?”
I did not know how to answer her. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to ask the woman.
I shrugged and she let go a soft, involuntary laugh. But the gravity returned to her eyes. She looked away from me, uncertain of herself.
“Come in out of this weather,” she said, and I followed her inside.
• • •
In the middle of the meal my mother looked up from her food and said that tinkers were a dejected lot. Her face flushed so the ginger-colored hairs of her eyebrows grew indiscernible. She watched the quiet that passed between me and Mrs. O’Dare. Her breaths came quickly through her nose.
“What have you been telling her about me, you old cow?”
• • •
Lying in bed, I tried to imagine the night of my nativity. Maybe there was a clue in the buried bedroom that might lead me to remember how it had happened; how I had made the passage so intact; how Mare had never fully left the water of our mother; how she breathed in air like she was drowning.
The Nature of Water and Air Page 2