But minutes later he closed his eyes like a devotee and returned to the sacramental territory where I was not permitted.
• • •
I walked into town alone to get food for a meal. I’d left Angus as he was pulling a heavy trunk out from under the boards of the bed. If we were going to make the fair at Caherciveen at all, we’d have to leave soon and travel steadily until we arrived. He needed to go through some of his things, to organize his wares for selling; to make a ledger. We were at the end of our money so something would have to be done.
When I returned I saw Angus out in the field gone after Declan. I went into the caravan and my heart stopped. An animal-skin dress lay on the bed, black and silver point, speckled in places. I told myself it might not have been the thing I immediately took it for, for hadn’t I only fleeting memories of my mother in her fur dress? Hadn’t I wondered if the thing was real at all, seen only in half or quarter light; illuminated only in sections? Never in its completeness. But it was with the senses that come alive in the dark that I recognized it; its gray-green smell like air before a heavy rain, and its faint animal reek. When I closed my eyes and touched it I knew the heavy, glossy texture warming under my palm.
It kept a semblance of my mother’s shape as if she had just taken it off. My eyes filled and the contours of the dress grew less distinct and trembled as if seen through water.
When Angus came in he stopped at the threshold. He saw my hand on the waist seam of the dress, the dampness in my eyes.
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
He paused then let go of a sigh. “It belonged to a woman . . . a woman who is dead now.”
“What woman?” I asked.
He said, “That day in the woods in Dunshee you said you had a friend named Clodagh. That her relations owned that big house where you stayed.”
“Yes.”
“This dress belonged to Clodagh’s mother.”
“You didn’t tell me you knew Clodagh and her mother.”
“I knew Agatha, Clodagh’s mother.”
“Why do you have this dress?” I asked him. He sat down on the edge of the bed placing a hand protectively over one of the cuffs.
“She left it with me.”
“Why?”
He paused, looking down at the dress, taking the sleeve distractedly in his hand.
“You were friends?” I asked.
“Agatha and I loved each other, lass.”
Everything slowed. I stared at the side of his face, his eyes keeping themselves to the dress. For a moment, the familiar curve of his cheekbone seemed foreign to me.
“You asked about a woman out of my past . . . . I’ve meant to tell you about her, love. Who she was to me. What was between us. You must have known her, your own friend’s mother.”
“I knew she had a lover. I always thought it was the big dark-haired man, William Connelly, that I saw sometimes at Rafferty’s.”
He smiled, softly surprised by the revelation. “Not at all, love. Not William Connelly.” His face then flushed and grew serious with the idea of it.
“Why did you keep that from me, Angus?” I cried. “When I mentioned Clodagh’s name to you in Dunshee . . . you didn’t tell me.”
“I should have.”
“Why didn’t you?” I held his eyes trying to read them.
“Because I wanted you . . . ,” he said.
I looked again at the dress and ran my hand distractedly through the netted hem, causing the numerous little shells to click together, trying to retrace how I’d come to the certainty that the other man was my mother’s lover; at how true it had once felt. I remembered him standing in Mrs. Rafferty’s with the slipper shell. A small grief rushed me at the loss of William Connelly and I stirred harder at the threads and shells. Angus looked nervous of the way I touched the dress, as if I might hurt it.
“I’ve seen this dress before,” I said. “I know this dress.” Something blighted rose up in a wave from the center of my body, and with it a resentment that he should have the dress. I tensed my mouth, holding back tears. I should have had it, I thought. It was mine more than his. I clutched the net hem in my hand and squeezed it roughly. For a moment I hated him.
He watched me with caution. “Who was she to you, lass?” he whispered.
The air in the caravan filled with a din. I stared at the dress. “She was . . .”
I wanted to say it. To claim the dress. To force him to let go of the sleeve. I stared at his hand, at the strong sinews of his forearm, weather-bronzed, the hair glinting a coppery gold. A slow, velvety darkness filled my chest so I could not feel my heart there. If I told him I would lose him. If I told him, how would we go on together as we had been?
My eyes flashed to his and away again. The question was on his face. The truth he was waiting for me to confirm or dispel.
“She was . . . ,” I began and went quiet again. “She was my aunt.”
I heard him sigh. From my peripheral vision I saw him lift his arm, run his hand through his hair the way he had that first time I’d seen him on the bus, years back.
“Sweet Christ,” he said softly. A long quiet passed between us in which I would not look at him. “Agatha lost contact with her sister ages ago,” he said.
My mother once had a sister, I thought. I resented him for knowing things I had never been allowed to know. And the twinge of anger in me compelled me to deepen the lie.
“Yes,” I said recklessly. “My own mother was adopted by settled people. As a very small child.”
“Why did you tell me once that Clodagh was your friend and not your cousin?”
I felt on the edge of a precipice. Telling him the truth would be like diving into the dark. Even now I knew the revelation that Agatha’s blood ran in my veins would change things between us. He would leave me if he knew I was her daughter. My desperation to keep him spurred me on with the deception.
“We knew each other as friends long before we knew we were cousins. We only learned the truth a few years ago.”
“You never tell me about your life. About your own mother.”
“I’ve led an uneventful life, Angus,” I said, gazing openly into his face. I felt the pressure of lying in my body, the exhaustion of it, something heavy to drag after me. “I lived with my mother in Bray. I went to Immaculate Conception school . . . . There’s little more to tell.”
I thought he might ask me what Agatha’s sister’s name was, and then what would I say? But he didn’t.
“Why do you have no one in the world to answer to, lass?”
“I do have people to answer to . . . ,” I said.
“You haven’t much trouble leaving them behind you.”
A painful sensation of shame moved through me. I saw Mrs. O’Dare’s and Sister Seraphina’s faces in my mind.
I said nothing. I thought he’d ask me more questions and I wondered if I’d slip, make a mistake. But he had gone quiet and I sensed that he was reluctant to know anything more.
“You’re Agatha’s niece,” he said softly, as if trying to take in the idea. I felt him studying me the way I had just studied him. I kept my uneasy gaze on the dress.
He moved past me, taking coal from the bin and matches to begin a fire, and went outside.
I studied the stitches, carefully wrought. Who had made this dress? Angus was the craftsman. I’d seen him sew Declan’s harness when it was torn. He had a kit of steel needles and coarse leather thread. What did this dress mean between them?
I ran my finger along the perfect scarwork of the seam where the fur was missing and it was only soft black flesh. The man who had constructed this dress knew the slope between my mother’s waist and hips. He knew how much room to leave for her breasts.
The dress made me lonely. It was as silent, as unforthcoming as Agatha herself. He had made it, I was certain. She was where his thoughts went when the remoteness came into his eyes. She was who he whispered to that morning of his sad dreaming when he’d made love to me.
I remembered the sounds of them together behind the kitchen wall at Mercymount Strand, her breathy animal cries; him calling out to Christ. I bent into myself, closing my eyes.
• • •
That night after the meal, he said, “You’re like her, you know.”
“Yes,” I said faintly.
He shook his head. “I’m a bit amazed at myself.”
I could see the flames moving back and forth across his eyes. “Why?” I asked.
“You’ve always reminded me of her. But I’d never admitted that to myself. But now it’s so clear I feel I’ve been lying to myself.”
When our eyes met again I felt we were strangers. His mistrust floated on the air between us like smoke.
“The first time I had you I thought of her. But I told myself then it was because you’d been in that big house where she’d once lived.”
He sat awhile with his shoulders hunched, his head down, before he got up and wandered off into the dark field.
I went inside.
• • •
I don’t know why I put on the dress. Maybe because there were two of us there now. Agatha and me. Maybe because I wanted it just to be one of us. I was afraid of the history between them. But now it infused everything and I had to take the weight of that history onto my own body; to locate it.
When he came in I squinted with the brightness of his lamp. He put it down and stood unmoving before me. The look of me in the dress seemed to cause him pain.
I put my arms around him but he did not move.
“Let’s just hold each other tonight, love,” he said. But the idea of not having him then was unbearable to me and meant that he belonged to her.
“Angus,” I said softly. “Angus.” I lay back on the bed holding my arm out to him. He approached and sat down on the bed beside me, his eyes intent on me.
He let go a breath of surrender, his hand shaking as he touched the dress. Intimate with its architecture, he pulled the lacing at the chest. He kissed the sleek, musky seams at the waist and hips and licked the salt from the hems and the coarse threads knotted with shells, then lifted the skirt up around my waist and was inside me in a moment.
“You’re the bloody spit o’ your aunt,” he said, holding me hard beneath him.
• • •
That night he fell asleep on top of me, the weight of his body putting pressure on my ribs, pushing my stomach and heart into too close a dialogue. I tried to wake him, tried to make him roll off me, but his repose was terrible and heavy. I tried to adjust to the shallower breathing but still could not sleep, overheated by the sealskin dress and the furnace of Angus’s body.
Once I was able to rouse him out of oblivion, but he only rearranged his arms more tightly around me and pressed his face against my neck, making a wet nest of my hair. The noise and rhythm of his breathing did not belong to the graceful man that I knew, but to a more desperate man, each breath trailed by a little windy cry.
• • •
All the next day into night, taking the main roadway down from Limerick to Tralee, cars racing past us, we were quiet and serious, Agatha present in the air between us. Riding through a certain valley on the way, littered with the graveyards of the poor, crumbled Irish crosses, the fields dismal with the silence of the perished, I found him staring at me like I was someone else. It was Agatha he was looking for, I told myself. I panicked. Surely, I thought guiltily, he could see that I was her daughter. Had I not been told all my life that I resembled her? If I had always seen Mare when I looked into my mother’s face, then surely he saw her when he looked into mine. If he knew the truth it would drive him from me. Being her niece afforded a little distance. Being her daughter none. How long would it be before I found myself admitting it?
It was the first time since I’d been with him that Angus parked right in the thick of things among other travelers. In the caravan nearest us a man and woman yelled drunkenly back and forth, one to the other.
“I’ll tear the face off o’ you,” the man cried out.
There was a clattering of pans and a stifled yell.
Angus seemed oblivious. He sat with his hand over his brow drawing a ledger for the selling he hoped to do.
I opened the door and looked outside. Three filthy children ran barefoot, squawking as they splashed through muddy ruts full of rainwater.
I lay down on the bed facing the wall. When Angus left the caravan he did not say a word to me.
• • •
Angus recognized a woman at one of the fires. I saw him when I came out of the back of our caravan, standing close to her saying something. She laughed and bent her head. She leaned suddenly forward to stir the embers and a little gold crucifix glimmered and swung from a chain around her neck. She sat down on a rock before her fire and the cross lost itself in the dark of her cleavage.
She looked at me with pale, intrigued eyes. There was something ruddy and attractive about her. She was older than him, I imagined, buxom and wide in the hips, and she had thick red hair laced with gray and tiny lines radiating away at the outer corners of her eyes. She beamed at me and I had the feeling there was mockery in her smile.
“Well, introduce me to the girl, you brute!” she cried.
“Mare, this is Nan.”
“Sit down at my fire, love.” Her purple skirt was patched with dirt, the hem frayed and muddy.
“You’re a young lass to be mixed up with himself,” she said, jerking her chin at Angus, smiling. Her manner was so outgoing, her voice so falsely exuberant, that I shrank. She put her arm around me and I smelled spirits on her breath.
“And how do you feel this fine evening, Mare?” Angus stood near Nan, looking down at us where we sat.
“I’m well,” I uttered faintly. She dismissed me easily, then went on to Angus about her husband being in the north.
She touched his leg as she spoke and he watched her approvingly, looking at me once with gravity and something deliberate in his eyes, as if he had chosen to put distance between us.
Nan’s face was red and heated and I could feel the fire in her body. When a moment of quiet passed between them, she stood up erect and smiled, wiping the ashes from her hands onto her bosoms.
• • •
That night Nan poured me and Angus drinks from a bottle of whiskey and we stood among others around a fire. A drunken woman screeched and reeled to music coming from a television set that sat on a rickety chair, the plug rigged up to a box on a cord coming from a caravan door. The figures on the screen were phosphorescent and barely discernible. The dancing woman laughed and tripped over her skirts.
Pretending to listen to the chatter of the men and women, Angus and Nan stood side by side, but it was all heat and exhilaration between them. They behaved as if I were not there, and sometimes she’d lean into him or touch his arm as she spoke. She spilled a cup of liquor and they both knelt down to get the cup, laughing when it kept rolling away from them.
I rushed off, desolate with the whiskey, and went to the caravan to lie down. The voices drifted and the wind came up, breathing a whoosh into the fire.
A bit later when I returned to the site where I’d left them, I found Angus and Nan gone and the dog asleep in front of her caravan. I opened the door a small way and saw them together on the floor, fully clothed. His head lay in her lap and she stroked his hair, her blouse open, pulled over one shoulder.
I ran out into the blackness of the fields weeping and tripping in the grass and the stones. I saw the dim lights from two caravans parked together in a field. As I drew closer I recognized the young fiddler I’d seen playing at a fair a month or so back. His face was streaked with tears. With him were the two old women I’d spoken to that day, and an old man. Only his mother was missing from the group.
A wooden casket sat on a slipshod table between the two caravans.
“Here’s to Deirdre McArthy,” the old man cried, holding his glass in the air.
“A fine old thing,” said one
of the old women, “though she had the divil in her.”
The others laughed and said, “Aye.” But the young, oily-haired fiddler stared at the violin he clutched to his chest. His damp lower lip hung and his shoulders shook with tears.
I stepped on a dry twig and they all looked up into the shadow from which I issued. One of the old women made the sign of the cross.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said.
The young fiddler’s face tensed and he wiped his chin with the back of one hand.
The small, thin old woman approached me, reaching out her arm. “The old one dies, Jackie Boy, and look what comes in her place. She’s tears on her face, as well. Desperate in herself as you are, Jackie.”
“Give the girl a glass,” cried the heavy woman and the man complied.
“Saints be praised. Is the world not filled with miracles yet? Not a lovelier girl under summer stars.”
“Have a reel. Old Bill’ll play. Have a reel with the girl, Jackie.”
I was swept up, turned in a reel in the young man’s wooden arms. His eyes stared intensely at me, watery and flecked with firelight. When we stopped I was breathless, soaked in perspiration.
I sat with the evening air cooling me, drinking the whiskey, beside myself, struggling not to think of Angus.
A gravity had overcome the group; they were discussing something I did not understand, anticipation in the air.
“Before we bury old Deirdre, her son here will eat her sins,” the heavy old woman informed me.
“What do you mean?”
“He’s a good son and he’ll not have her goin’ into the gloaming with all the sins that blacken her soul. He’ll eat a dish of praities and cabbage from off her chest before she goes into the ground.”
The casket was opened and the food ladled into a dish. The putrid odor of the corpse mixed with the steaming cabbage, deepening and dissolving with the wind.
The thin demented man stood there hunched over the casket, huffing, crying, half choking as he ate.
• • •
I slept that night with the small old woman who swore in her sleep and kicked at the caravan wall. The heavy woman slept on a pallet on the floor. The old man and the fiddler had disappeared into the darkness to bury the corpse.
The Nature of Water and Air Page 24