The Nature of Water and Air

by Regina McBride

  • • •

  The heron came and stood at the door, looking in. She put one foot in over the threshold and hesitated. I froze where I sat in the rush chair, my heart in my throat, my pulses drumming. She walked in slowly, and stood a few feet away, regarding me.

  At the cry of her partner outside she startled, looked a bit around the room and wandered out through the door. I stepped after her, breathless as I watched her take to the air, unable to understand what it was about her that moved me so deeply.

  • • •

  Angus had left only one candle and a stale bit of bread and enough water for a few pots of tea. It was an oversight, I told myself. We’d both stopped paying attention to practical things.

  I waited for days, disoriented, worn out by devastation. One afternoon I fell into a slumber, the door held open by a heavy rock, and was awakened at dusk by the tumult of screeching gulls. I dragged myself outside. The border between sea and sky was on fire in the descending sun. The water below the cliff rushed violently inland.

  A burned smell was carried on the air, a drift of smoke moving seaward on the wind. I circled to the back of the cottage. In the valley below, a family of tinkers had set camp and built a large fire. A man and a woman in dark clothes sat on rickety chairs while three little girls ran around the flames squealing, throwing fistfuls of dry grass into the fire, which popped or rushed out as sparks, bits of red disintegrating to black.

  I smelled food on a gust of air and felt the ache of my empty stomach. As I descended toward them the woman pointed me out and they all stared at me, unmoving. I must have been an unearthly sight in the deepening light, the wind beating my nightgown and matted hair. The smallest girl ran to her father and held on to his legs.

  I stopped a yard or so from the fire and addressed the woman. “Please, Missus. Could you give me something to eat?”

  She looked desolately at me, as if the sight of me hurt her. The wind blew a gust of dark hair into her eyes, her face, heavily etched with lines. She blinked, then got up and ladled a cupful of beans into a dish and gave me a spoon. I ate eagerly, still standing while they all watched me. The beans tasted of ash.

  I asked her if she had something else. She gave me an onion and a potato from a paper bag on the ground and I scaled the hill back to the cottage.

  I lit coals in the hearth, heated the potato and ate it, saving a piece of it and the onion for the morning. I went back out and from the summit of the hill watched the girls who had resumed their horseplay around the fire below. The oldest one had tied the sleeve of a battered dress onto the end of a broomstick and lofted it over the flames like a flag. The hems caught suddenly, the dress blowing wildly, issuing a noxious, unsettling smell.

  The man roared, “Let go o’ the bleedin’ thing,” and the girl screamed and tossed it onto the blaze.

  • • •

  The next morning I stood cutting the onion when the door opened and the wind came in like a presence. The sun heated my back, my head, part of my face. I stopped my knife midway into the onion, a nausea spreading through me, sweat rising up in tiny points on my temples and neck and under my breasts. I weaved on my feet. The onion glowed wet and translucent and a residue rose up from it like the electricity left on the air after a lightning storm. The emptiness of my belly made me dizzy and I was out the door retching in the grass.

  • • •

  When Angus Kilheen came back to me later that day, I had no inclination in me for anything but water and dry bread and to lie curled into myself before the lit sods of the fire.

  He knew what was wrong and said that he remembered that the last time he’d seen a trace of my monthly blood was early in June when we’d been in the fields near Kilkee.

  He sat quietly at the table with his head in his hands. “Dear God,” he said softly.

  He said he would take me to Mrs. O’Dare at Mercymount Strand, that I needed special care now that he could not give me. And we needed to separate for a while, to think about the enormity of things between us.

  As we packed everything to return to the caravan I looked for the heron. Once while I was inside gathering the last of our things I heard the unearthly shriek in the sky and ran outside. A heron flew over the north-running cliffs, but too far in the distance for me to discern if it was my heron.

  I tore up a quarter loaf of bread and left it scattered on the hill.

  • • •

  Before we left the Dingle Peninsula, Angus drove the caravan off the main road. He got out and stood on the crest looking down at the tide coming in low, uneven turns. I wandered out after him and we walked about on the headland, and down a slope to a barley field we’d seen earlier in the spring newly planted. The barley was full of shadows and so tall now we could have walked within it unseen.

  “Soon it’ll be time to cut it,” Angus said.

  The barley stirred and reached with the wind, a dry, sloughing sound like an undercurrent of voices. I felt grief for it, imagining it cut and tied in barrows. The plows rested against the fence like they were dreaming of a day in the field.

  “You see the way all moments pass us,” he said. He was thinking of the loneliness ahead of him.

  “Soon’ll be All Souls’ Eve and the Advent of Darkness. Sister Margaret Mooney told me I’d been born in November because I was meant to understand the thinness of the world.”

  “Where will you go, Angus?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, Clodagh. To the north, I think. I’ve got to gather a bit of money together.”

  “You’ll write me soon, will you, Angus?”

  His eyes shined as he looked at me. “I will, lass,” he said. “I’ll not abandon you again.”

  We walked slowly back to the caravan. “How little hold we have on things, Clodagh,” he said. “How easily the world leaves us with nothing.”

  · 30 ·

  I WOKE FROM EVERY SLEEP with my stomach floating near my throat. I’d make my way outside and retch in the rainy grass at the side of the caravan while Angus cooked sausages or eggs under a tarp. The smell sent me back inside where I buried my face in the pillow.

  I lay all day in bed while Angus drove, rain beating the metal on the caravan walls. Near sleep I imagined that the house on Mercymount Strand was flooded to the ceiling and that I was swimming inside it near the vestibule looking down at the tapestry chairs with their collapsed, threadworn seats. The water cast wavering shadows and floating white lights on the walls. I swam along examining the stuccowork swirls as I passed them slowly. I found myself in the parlor high up near the ceiling looking down into the great room, which seemed to float before me and dissolve into the next room: cornices, wainscoting, dead-ended doors, the shapes of things distorted by water.

  I had to swim down, down into darkness to find the kitchen, which seemed to have sunk. Two night-fishermen’s lamps swayed there slowly back and forth on long cords lighting isolated corners of the wreckage, a dim eerie red as they moved. Things floated in the dark: my mother’s music box, her lace scarf, the little glass dog. I dove deeper, feeling the bubbles from my nose running up the length of me. The lamp swayed and lit the water in front of me and there was the stuccowork face from the kitchen wall, free floating.

  • • •

  The rain grew more and more urgent. I woke one night certain that Angus had driven us down to the beach and that it was waves of seawater and not rain hitting the side of the caravan.

  There was no place to dry our clothes, everything soaked, and even after Angus was able to repair the caravan roof and walls, the air was so damp inside that nothing would dry. I could not lie on my stomach, so much did my breasts ache. For a week I held down no food and was constantly shivering. One night my teeth stopped chattering and I started to burn up.

  For a few hours the rain stopped and Angus opened the door and window. I took off my clothes and lay on the damp fleece like I was about to go up in flames. The oil cooker made my skin glisten a dim orangy color. Moths ca
me in, fluttered around the cooker, and swept past my ears.

  • • •

  I could not bear the rocking of the caravan. Even when Angus wasn’t driving, it rocked and creaked in the wind. I cried for Mrs. O’Dare, for someone to take care of me.

  The thought of a comfortable bed and an electric fire stayed with me. The moments I actually felt hunger I had a terrific urge for Mrs. O’Dare’s steak and kidney pie. I told him I couldn’t bear it, squatting in the field to do my water. The dampness never leaving my clothes after a rain. The leaks in the roof. All the things that had never fazed me before.

  The pregnancy had brought me back to myself, and though I feared that the child might not be right I felt no panic in my body. Just a wish for comfort. A clean ruffled nightgown. The noise of a ticking clock that chimed the hour.

  We rode across Ireland and reached Mercymount Strand in early September. But a strange car was parked outside and all the beech trees were cut down. Unfamiliar curtains luffed at the screens. A serving woman in a white cap walked across the yard when I banged on the gate. I asked for Mrs. O’Dare and she told me she’d moved to Dublin and that the house was now owned by people called the Fitzgeralds from Antrim, who’d moved in the previous month. She had no address in Dublin for Mrs. O’Dare and I thought of going to Letty Grogan for it but could not bear the idea of seeing her as I was.

  • • •

  Angus said we should go to Lily Sheehy in Dunshee and as we left Bray, going westward toward Kildare, I saw the white arcades of St. Mathilde’s College in the distance. I told Angus to stop; that I wanted to see Sister Seraphina and tell her that I was alive. I imagined myself dissolving into tears in her arms, the way my mother had sometimes done with Mrs. O’Dare. He left the caravan on the roadside and we walked the winding road to the gate before being stopped by a groundskeeper.

  “Get out o’ here, ye tinkers! No begging in this place.”

  “We’re not beggars!” I said. “I’ve come to see Sister Seraphina. Can you tell her it’s Clodagh Sheehy come to see her.”

  “I’ll not. The likes of you’d be after begging from a poor old nun. Now make yourselves scarce.”

  Angus clenched his jaw. “This girl here has won an award at this school, you bastard.”

  The man looked me up and down, filthy as I was with my disheveled dress and knotted hair. “And pigs fly. Now get your filthy arses out o’ here or I’ll beat ye both senseless.”

  Angus spit at the ground near his feet. “If you weren’t hiding behind that rake I’d have you callin’ for your patron saint.”

  As we drove off, Angus red-faced, holding in his rage, I heard a distant bell and saw the arcades swarm with students moving between classes. I gazed after the distant figure of a girl who could have been me, moving there along a walkway with an armful of books.

  • • •

  We rode along the dark wooded passes of central Wicklow, around Glencree and the Sally Gap, along austere mountaintops into the valley of Glendalough, lush and quiet, heavy with ancient monastic ruins. As much as I wanted a bath and a clean bed, I kept making Angus stop, unable to bear things swinging and creaking in irregular rhythms; a tin and metal cacophony. We’d set camp in various places, once in a gutted church surrounded by heather.

  The September weather was temperate, even cool, but I felt hot and would get up at dawn to walk barefoot in the early frost.

  That month, ailing as I was, Angus cared for me as if I were a sick child. I begged him to tell me about the bird sanctuaries on the Donegal isles in the north where he’d seen boats propelled by polar winds.

  I longed for unfamiliar landscapes, a place with no trace of my own history, and I told him that we had to leave Ireland and go into the white face of the north, far into the Scottish Hebrides.

  For a while he laughed at me for the notion. “Such a place is annihilating in winter, lass.”

  But in my mind’s eye I saw a sun like a great star of Bethlehem blinding me as I crossed a remote field. I’d fall asleep imagining the sea frozen and composed at my feet and dream of my mother’s jelly molds, her cups and saucers set upon it as if upon a gleaming table.

  The queasiness in my belly lasted all day and all night. I’d call out to Angus where he slept on the floor at the foot of the caravan, crying about the heat, begging him to take me from Ireland, telling him it was a godforsaken country and I could no longer bear the place.

  “Clodagh,” he’d say, cooling my temples with a damp cloth. “You don’t want to get out of Ireland. You want to get away from yourself and from what’s inside you.”

  But his words made me angry and we’d fight; him admonishing the idea, insisting that I stop; me going on that if I could ride in a sled and feel the sting of snow on my cheeks I’d be all right.

  I indulged the irrationality of the notion because of the way it perplexed him, imagining that this was the way a daughter might torment her own father. I told him about a picture I had seen as a child in a book of Russian fairytales, of a girl wrapped in furs in a sled the shape of a swan. A picture full of peace and remoteness. This is what I needed, I told him. The cold and the white. The sled drawn smoothly along on the ice. He owed me this, for the love of God. After all that had happened between us. And though my words pained him he often laughed and shook his head at me. I was secretly pleased with his tender incredulity. Grateful to excite it in him, and pleased.

  • • •

  One morning the sun was bright and I came out wrapped in a blanket and sat with him near the fire drinking a cup of tea.

  “You must miss your music,” he said.

  “Sometimes I hear strains of the Debussy,” I confessed.

  “Is Debussy your favorite?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He was one of my favorites.”

  After tea, he took the radio apart attempting to fix it. “I know there’s a classical station comes out of Dublin. This close we should be able to receive it.”

  I watched him set the pieces about him. His hair had grown very long over the summer and a curtain of wavy strands hung before one eye as he unscrewed a cluster of wiring from a little metal plate.

  “Angus, I don’t really need to hear music,” I said to him, nervous of what it might stir in me.

  He looked up, half hearing, disregarding. I went back inside and lay on the caravan bed, vague transmissions coming and going as he worked, voices and cries and breaking music. He came in to me later and said he was taking the radio into town to have it fixed.

  “Angus,” I said. “I don’t like the radio. The noise and the voices.”

  “You’re missing your music school because of me. You’ll not be cut off from music,” he said. “A sin to waste a gift. My daughter has a musical talent. God knows I’ve enough to feel guilty about over you, love.”

  But when he came back he had a small used record player with two plastic speakers, and a new record wrapped in cellophane. “The only Debussy I could find,” he said. It was an orchestral symphony, La Mer. “I could not find any Debussy for the piano.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. “I don’t think I could bear to hear a solo piano.”

  He rigged the phonograph up somehow to the battery of a car and the turntable began to rotate.

  He put the needle on the record and moody orchestral impressions rose around us like attenuated veils. There were vigorous, emotional exchanges between strings and air. Graceful tidal waves of sound. As we listened, I caught him watching my face with crushed regard.

  We played it again and again. He’d bring the little phonograph outside sometimes and we’d sit on the rocks at the fire and listen, or walk about the outskirts of the camp, the music sweetening the wind.

  “Wasn’t this a good thing I did? Buying this?” he asked me more than once. He seemed pleased with himself, surprised. The music restored a dreaminess to the air between us; an innocence.

  A hope rose in Angus. He had not tried again to begin the trip to Dunshee and I’d said nothing about
it, both of us holding our breath at the way things were with us.

  He built a separate bed for himself, narrower, fashioned of boards, and placed it at the foot of the caravan. He came back from every fair and every excursion into town with a gift for me: a rose-pink coverlet for my bed; a crucifix made of quartz crystal on a metal chain. A sea horse pin for my coat. Things a father might buy a daughter. He looked at my court shoes one day for size, and came back with a pair of heavy boots. “For the rough weather ahead of us,” he said.

  • • •

  At the end of September, the nausea and the heat were gone. I was famished. First it was for custard with lashes of cream. Then cake loaded with currants, and chocolate biscuits with jam inside. Angus called it “children’s food” and bought a mutton chop and cooked it in the skillet and I ate it with my hands, sucking the marrow out of the bone.

  He laughed at me. “You’ve a fiery look in your eye for that chop, lass.”

  The October fires were already burning in the fields and the trees dropped their fruit on the roadsides. I gathered apples and pears, eating them as I walked, tossing the cores into the overgrowth.

  When I looked in the mirror my face was bright; my eyes vivid, a flush to my cheeks. Angus watched me in the firelight. He was no longer easy going to his bed when I went to mine. He sat very late at the fire, breaking up the banked coals, stirring bright sparks under soft ash.

  • • •

  I awoke in the dark one night, my bones knocking together with the cold. I remembered the chill nights earlier in the spring when I’d slept warm against the furnace of Angus’s body. I crept from bed with all my blankets, got in with him, and curled into his sleeping back.

  • • •

  At first light I opened my eyes. Angus had turned toward me and was watching me, his face close to mine on the pillow. In that half-state between dream and awareness, a burn of anticipation moved like liquid under my skin. When his lips brushed mine I touched them with my tongue.

  For moments we were suspended in the half-light of the kiss, a sensation of unreality between us. When the caravan moved suddenly in the wind, Angus broke the kiss and looked gravely at me, his eyes wet, unnaturally intense.