The Nature of Water and Air

by Regina McBride

  “One’s child carries on one’s heart in this world.” He said this not as if it were a sentiment, but a well-known fact.

  I remembered the forehead and eyes of the man I’d seen lying in the makeshift bed in the kitchen with my mother when I was five. This was that face. He’d always been there in my life, strange to think. Sleeping many nights of my childhood a few rooms away from me. But hidden from me. Inhabiting another world within the same house.

  “You loved Agatha,” I said.

  His jaw tightened. He ran his finger over the bit of grain he’d been tracing on the table.

  “And did Agatha love you as much as you loved her?” I remembered her complaining to Mrs. O’Dare that he wanted her to leave her house and all her keepsakes.

  He looked gravely at me. “I’d have laid at her feet but she wouldn’t leave the big house.”

  It struck me then that I now stood at the threshold of my mother’s story. But the question floated from my mouth as if it arose only out of curiosity. “Where did Agatha come from . . . before she lived in the cliffs at Dunshee?”

  He put his cup down and sighed. The wind outside shrieked softly in the stones. He drew a breath and told me what he knew.

  · 28 ·

  HER MOTHER’S NAME HAD BEEN Nuala. Before Agatha had been born, Nuala’d had two daughters, both of whom she’d left in an orphanage. One had died there and the other Agatha had never been able to trace.

  Nuala was a vagrant who begged on roadsides. For a long time she and Agatha inhabited an empty car on neglected property. When they did join bands of travelers Nuala had difficulty getting on with them because she drank if liquor was available to her and it made her quarrelsome.

  When Agatha was five Nuala left her in an orphanage where she stayed for three years. The nuns taught her to read and write and gave her a taste of civilization, but Nuala returned for her, probably, Angus felt, because a woman with a child could beg more money than a woman alone.

  When Agatha was thirteen or fourteen, Nuala took up with a man and became pregnant. They were living together near Dunshee in the man’s caravan. Some traveler women helped with the birth and delivered a girl with a dark birthmark over one eye and temple. After the women left, Nuala wouldn’t hold the child no matter how much it cried. Once while Nuala slept, Agatha gave it her finger to suckle. One night when she thought Agatha was asleep, Nuala took the babe down to the beach, walked thigh deep into the tide and held the creature under until it drowned. Agatha had followed at a distance and had seen. Nuala brought the dead child back to the caravan and in the morning light carried it to the camp of the women who’d delivered it and told them it had stopped breathing in the night.

  But one of the women suspected the child had been drowned and the next day Nuala disappeared, leaving Agatha on her own in Dunshee. Agatha lived in coves along the cliffs, begging sometimes, hiring herself out to the locals to drive cattle or to help with planting or harvesting.

  • • •

  It was not long after she’d married Frank Sheehy that Angus first saw her lying on the stones on Dunshee Beach, sunning herself, a herd of seal cows gathered not far away on a jutting rock.

  He was eighteen years old and traveling with the same band of tinkers he’d been with when his father had been alive.

  Her eyes had been closed and the sea at that hour was crashing so loudly against the rocks she couldn’t have heard him in the distance, yet she seemed to sense him there. She lifted her head, meeting his eyes. He did not attempt to approach her but stayed where he was, standing on the foreshore. Sensing that he did not pose a threat to her she lay back again and closed her eyes. The next time she raised her head to look at him he yelled to her over the noise of the ocean, “Are you a selkie?”

  She’d smiled and climbed down off the rock, picked up a pair of silvery slippers covered in sand and approached him. The dress she wore was dun colored and silken, finely constructed, the sleeves and hems inlaid with beads and seed pearls. But her fair hair was wild and uneven at the ends, her skin red and freckled with weather, her lips chapped. The long dress dragged heavily, impressing a pathway after her in the sand.

  “Maybe I am a selkie,” she said, stopping a few feet from him.

  “But it isn’t sealskin you’re wearing, is it?” he asked, dismayed by the opulence of the dress.

  She looked down and touched a bit of ruching on her bodice. Her eyes floated up to his and she gave him a little conspiratorial smile, as if the dress were a testament to a certain power she could have over a man.

  “It’s silk brocade,” she said. “Do you like it?”

  “I didn’t know selkies wore finery,” he said, nervous over the anomaly of her.

  “You shouldn’t presume to know too much about selkies.” Her flirtatious smile caused waves of warmth to move through him. He felt for a moment unsteady on his legs.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  “Selkies are mysterious creatures.” She smiled at him again and wandered off, moving north along the beach, her slippers hanging from the fingers of one hand.

  He saw her a few more times after that, lying on the rocks or holding her dress in a clump at the thighs, letting the tide rush in over her feet. He didn’t approach her but she always spotted him in the distance.

  One day he found her sitting in sand with her back to a stone, curled into herself. As he got closer he could see that she was weeping. When she saw him she went into a breathless, brokenhearted tirade about her husband’s sister Kitty Sheehy and the stupidity of the servants in the big house. How she was treated worse than an animal might be treated. How she wanted to take something of Kitty’s and break it.

  He sat next to her, putting his arm around her, and she let go of the anger. After a few minutes of sobbing quietly in his arms, with her face still pressed to his chest, she told him about the birth and death of her infant sister. Angus had a feeling of unreality as she spoke, as if she were relaying a dream. She told him how she’d come to be left alone on Dunshee Beach. How she’d come to be married to Frank Sheehy.

  “He’s the only kind one in the house,” she said.

  “Why doesn’t he stop them from treating you poorly?” Angus asked.

  “He tries,” she said, releasing herself from his arms and looking into his face. “But he’s unaware of most of it.”

  They’d looked quietly at each other and she said softly, “It isn’t a real marriage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s very ill.”

  That was the first time he kissed her, her mouth tasting of salt from the tears.

  “Now you know all this about me, you’ll not think I’m a selkie anymore,” she said, with genuine disappointment.

  “I’ll always think of you as a selkie,” he said, moved, and kissed her again.

  It was after that day together on the beach that he’d traded for a sealskin, cut it and formed it into a dress for her.

  • • •

  We sat lost in our thoughts a long time before Angus said, “I think she believed that the life of a traveler could never be anything but unendurable.”

  I was quiet, thinking of my mother with her baubles and tiered dresses and knickknacks.

  “Promise me, Mare, never to breathe a word of this to Clodagh.”

  “Yes.”

  “She stands to inherit. Isn’t it better for her that she believe her father was a rich man?”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked gravely at me. “What have I to give her?”

  “Everything,” I said.

  He shook his head, faintly stunned by my words. He was thoughtful awhile before he said, “The last time I saw Clodagh she wasn’t even six years old, in the kitchen at Mercymount Strand. I watched through a kind of distorted window in the wall while she talked to Agatha.

  “Tiny, soft-haired little thing. Agatha squatting down holding the little hand in her fingers and the girl’s intense face full of the weight of the world. Agath
a stood to tend to her cooking and the child gazed up in the direction of that odd distorted window as if she knew I was watching her there, though Agatha had assured me that it couldn’t be seen through. The sadness pierced me to go to her, to kiss her wee cheek. That day I almost broke down and went to her.”

  I listened, hardly breathing. I remembered the moment he was talking about. She’d been cooking bacon and I’d gone in to tell her that the person upstairs was not a ghost and she had crouched down to me and had told me that men were clumsy and that they came and went in death as they did in life.

  “Why do you think Clodagh could always feel you there?”

  “Because we share the same heart.”

  “She is your beloved girl.”

  “Yes,” he said and looked at me strangely, a heaviness to him now. He stared at the plate of half-eaten food on the table before him.

  “You’re a good man, Angus Kilheen,” I whispered as the lamp dimmed and the glass discolored with the smoke.

  The wick had gone under the oil, but a thread remained afloat and glowing.

  “I’ll light it again,” I said.

  “No, lass. I’m tired. I want to sleep.”

  • • •

  I lay in the near dark watching him sleep, his head curling toward his chest, breath passing in and out of his nose and mouth. My eyes dampened and the vision of him glimmered and blurred.

  He woke, as if the rush of emotion in me had stirred him from sleep.

  “Why so sad?” he whispered, his palm to my cheek. I pressed my hand to his and held it there. He looked at me with such affection I felt my heart enlarge, each pulse emitting a small charge of joy. As his face moved closer to mine I drew in breath, remembering my mother drawing in breath for the last time, the wave lifting and holding her aloft. There had been pleasure for her in that surrender.

  When his mouth was on mine, a calmness filled me, broken only by a tremble of exhilaration. He folded me in his arms. Hadn’t I always looked to him for my origins? He was my history. Before I had a face I was with him, a point of damp light residing in the darkness of him. I was, I told myself, about to recover something impossible to recover.

  The rapture came in easy surges and I felt suddenly detached like I was floating, looking down at inlets appearing and disappearing at the hem of the sea. I had the agonized sense that I was watching the receding shore of a beloved place.

  When Angus rolled off me I turned from him and wept soundlessly. How would words ever find themselves now? Why did all unions end with separateness? What had I wanted that I was so grief-stricken now? To sleep inside him? To stop breathing and let him breathe for me?

  • • •

  The thread in the lamp still glowed and the wind screeched faintly in the drystone wall. “Angus,” I whispered. He stirred and opened his eyes as if he were looking back from the other world.

  “I am your beloved,” I whispered. “Tell me.”

  “You’re my beloved.”

  “I’m your beloved Clodagh,” I whispered.

  “Aye,” he answered faintly, turning onto his side with his back to me. A few moments passed before his body went rigid. I stroked his arm, waiting for him to soften, but he got up suddenly and found his pants and coat and went outside.

  I felt strangely at peace and fell into a deep sleep.

  • • •

  He came in at first light shaking with the cold.

  “What’s your name, lass?”

  “Clodagh.”

  He stared down at me on the pillow a long time with a kind of awe, examining my face as if he were seeing it for the first time. His eyes glowed with tears.

  “Didn’t you ever think I might be Clodagh?” I asked quietly.

  “Yes.” There was a long quiet. He struggled with a grimace of grief and anger. “You’re so much like Agatha. You’ve the same sadness in the very skin of you.” There was another long quiet before he asked, “Why, love? After ye knew, why didn’t you put a stop to it?”

  The question confused me and my heart drummed hard. “I need you. I’ll not lose you.”

  “But to know I was your father . . .”

  “That was even more to lose, wasn’t it?”

  · 29 ·

  IN MORNING LIGHT ANGUS SAT heavily at the table. I went about things, nervous of him, of what he might say now. I boiled a kettle, cooked food. He watched me, his eyes wide open and damp, full of the daylight through the open door. He did not eat what I gave him, holding his fork and staring at it, turning it in the light.

  “Christ Almighty,” he said softly.

  The day was full of the noise of the sea below the cliff. By noon the surf was loud and the gulls keened each time it rode out. Wind filled the cottage through the open door, sending the flowers between the stones of the walls stirring.

  I was relieved that he had slept so little the night before and was too exhausted for irreparable decisions. When he went to lie down, I sat on the rush chair watching his face change in sleep, a rapt defenselessness growing in his expression.

  For hours I waited for him to awaken. I was standing in the doorway looking out when I knew his eyes were on my back. Though he was still in the bed across the room it felt as if his fingers were traveling down the bones of my vertebrae. I froze, an ache of bright particles between us.

  I heard the bed creak as he got out of it. I turned and met his eyes.

  “For God’s sake, lass,” he sighed, shaking his head, disheveled with sleep.

  I approached him slowly, holding my hand out to him, but he recoiled, shy of the touch of me.

  I looked at him, hurt. “I’ve always been part of you,” I said.

  He clenched as if he were feeling physical pain. “We can’t stay together,” he said sternly.

  He moved through the cottage, gathering things together.

  “Where are you going?” I cried out.

  “I’ll stay in the caravan tonight,” he said.

  “You can’t go off!”

  “I’ll not go off. Not now. We’ve got to think about this, for God’s sake,” he said. I watched him walk down the hill in the late afternoon light, then ran back in and searched the room to make sure he was leaving important things behind; things he’d not go away for good without. His oilcloth tarp. His kit of steel needles.

  • • •

  In the dark of night I was awakened by the creak of the door and my heart went wild but soon sank again when I realized that he was searching for something. Feigning sleep, I watched his shadow move through the dark of the room. I heard the creak of a rush chair as he sat down. He whispered something onto the air and I was certain in that moment that my mother was there; that all along the two had been meeting each other secretly in the dark.

  As the pain of exclusion burned in my chest, the smell of my mother’s skin and hair returned to me.

  Angus’s whisper grew slightly in volume. “Through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault . . .” He had come for the Blessed Mother with the broken hand. It was her he was speaking to. Slowly, I understood that my mother was not there.

  I held my hands to my face and laughed softly until my fingers were wet with tears.

  • • •

  He did not leave that night, but slept on a pile of clothes on the opposite side of the cottage. Smelling him as I could across the darkness, I wept. I could not find repulsion in myself. My desire for him had not disappeared.

  I remembered the times in the fields at Kilkee, how he used to reach for me in the dawn, lofting me upon him, groaning through half sleep; how we’d spent our mornings in shivers of bliss and amnesia.

  • • •

  In the morning I gave him a cup of tea. His face had softened to me and he stopped resisting my eyes.

  “You can still go to music school, Clodagh,” he said.

  “I can’t remember the Bach pieces or the Preludes,” I said.

  “You can learn them again.”

  “No,” I s
aid. “No.”

  “You must be full of regrets,” he said.

  “No, Angus,” I whispered. When I reached across the table he started as if I might hurt him.

  “I don’t understand how everything can change so suddenly for you.”

  “Have you no conscience?” he asked, a serious intensity come into his eyes.

  “It’s missing in me, Angus. Something was missing in my sister’s lungs. They were not complete. And something is missing in me, but it’s not something of the body.”

  He looked hard at me, struggling with the idea. Finally he said, “I’m going away for a few days. Alone. To think.”

  “Don’t, Angus,” I said. “Please.”

  A stoniness came into his face that made me suddenly furious. As he moved toward the door I said, “I needed a father when I was little.”

  He stopped and did not breathe.

  “I needed a father.”

  He stared into the light through the open door, a tiny fleck of his eye brightening painfully, and I felt him imagining me, remembering me when I was little. As if I were not that same girl there with him now.

  “When I was afraid of things, I needed a father.”

  He tensed his mouth. In that moment he looked older than I’d ever seen him look

  “Stay,” I said. “If only for that.”

  “You don’t need me in that way now. You’re not afraid like that now.”

  “I am. Stay because I’m afraid.”

  A soft tension transformed his face as he seemed to consider it.

  “Stay,” I said, putting my hand on his arm.

  He withdrew, like I had just gored him, gathered some things and left.