The Marriage Bed

by Regina McBride

  “Does the sea shrink a man as well?” I asked, this body a head shorter than my own father.

  “The sea distorts and changes the features so you’d not recognize your own but think him some man from the far reaches of blackest Africa,” Seamus Fehan explained.

  It was because she couldn’t bear it any longer that it was easier for my mother to believe this was him.

  First her father, then Macdarragh, and now Liam. Was it God against her? she asked, and the women silenced her, looking around them as if God were a man who might be eavesdropping at the door.

  The three men who’d brought him set off that very hour for the mainland to get a coffin, so he could be borne again across the sea and buried in the Ventry churchyard.

  One could reduce the danger of a haunting by touching the remains. But I would not. I did not believe it was my father, and in case it was, I wanted him to haunt me.

  A beautiful placard was carved: “Liam O’Coigligh, Beloved husband to Molleen Mohr.” I painted flowers around it. My mother and I stayed behind as the boat went off and the body was buried in the Ventry churchyard.

  So, a day later, when my father walked up from the pier, a battered man, his clothes so shredded they hardly covered him, his hair plastered to his forehead with streams of blood, people, hushed and terrified, followed behind the walking dead.

  It was a good half hour before my mother was convinced that he was not a ghost. She tended him for days then, cleaning and applying seal oil to his many wounds. He lay in the great iron bed while she pampered him. He told her how the sea had thrown him this way and that, taking him down very low into its deepest chambers. How he’d died there and then, but that in death he’d ached for her. “For you, Molleen Mohr. In death I could not let go of you.” He told her that he’d washed up onto a shelf in the craggy rock, and his spirit had floated and hovered there until it had found its way back into his body. Finally he’d gotten enough strength when the sea was easy, to swim across from the cliffside back to the island.

  He began to shiver with emotion. “I’m the one that won’t leave you, Molleen Mohr. Even dead I come back to you.”

  When he was strong again, my mother and he walked linked on the roads and pathways of the island. Mo Roí, she called him. My king. The island women followed, moved by the romance of my father’s condition. A man with a body in this world, and one in the next. The dead man who walks, they called him and wanted to be near him, my mother proud that he was coveted, his cuts and bruises decorative like badges. Girls and women murmuring awe, throwing flowers, carrying lamps at dusk and lighting their way. And I trailed after, among the adoring, the other girls coming up and touching my hair or looking into my eyes because I was his daughter.

  He did not go out again trawling that spring. Everyone brought us fish and helped my grandmother harvest her potatoes and cabbages.

  But as the world settled again, I saw that something had come ajar in my mother. At first she was confused. Once my father walked in the door, and she started, as if he were still dead and his return had been only a dream. I saw her have to remember everything. I saw her breathing hard, agonized and bewildered. I saw her hold her head in her hands. And for a while there was a strange ring on the air. A dead man could return. The dead came back.

  When the thrall of his return had worn thin, she watched him mistrustfully. She believed in her heart that he’d tortured her so on purpose. I watched her eyes, the way she snuck secret looks at him at night when we sat around the fire eating our potatoes and fish.

  Slowly, she ebbed away from him.

  ’Twas the following spring when the French boat was anchored in the sound, the island men crazy to gather their lobster pots from around Beginish. The boat blew its horn, and the curraghs were hurrying about, hauling in their cargoes.

  All the men were excited. The sea harvest was great that year. The French offered whiskey and porter and tobacco. The women insisted the men get money instead, but the men went wild with the celebrations.

  Padraig Scanlon, the islander whose pots had brought in the greatest load of lobster, decided he would buy a horse with his money, horses being a luxury, expensive creatures. There’d been none on the island for over a hundred years. Padraig had the biggest plot on the island and wanted a horse to pull his plow.

  The entire population of the island stood on the pier watching the boat coming across the sound, the waves lifting and dropping it. The docking facilities for a ship that size were inadequate, so the horse was tethered, held aloft in a high harness, and swayed a while in the air before being lowered by rope from the boom into the sea. The islanders, up to their necks in the waves, drove the poor creature up onto the sand.

  It was golden, sandy colored, fifteen hands, Padraig said, its voluminous mane and tail riddled with briars. Frills and strings of saliva flew from its lips around its bared teeth, the women all whispering to it and stroking the nervous giant as they might calm an upset child: “Wisha! Wisha!” and kissing the side of its face. It was, from that moment, between the horse and the women of the Great Blasket, love at first sight.

  The horse’s peculiar attraction to my mother could have been taken for granted. Some creatures took naturally to one person over another. But Kate Beg, who remembered the day that the schoolmistress and her tall, beautiful son had come to the island and how the son’s eyes had only been for Molleen Mohr, saw that it was just the same with this creature. And didn’t he look like Macdarragh himself with his long face, beautifully boned, and the same sandy-colored mane of hair.

  “The devil if it isn’t himself!” Kate Beg cried.

  And so the horse was called Macdarragh. And my mother stood before it wistfully, almost afraid. The horse nodded and moved close to her. She touched its face and took in her breath ever so softly. It flicked its ears, and with its mouth closed made a low, guttural neigh. “You’re like the mute one himself,” she said to him, “with the sounds from the depths of you.”

  The women laughed softly, moved, remembering the other, uttering about the truth of it. He was Macdarragh to a t they said, the closest article imaginable; mute and larger than life, nervy but gentle, full of restrained power.

  “He said he’d be back to you, Molleen Mohr, and if this isn’t himself before us, then I’ve not lived a day. The shape-shifter!” Kate cried and touched the animal’s flank gingerly and devotedly with her palm.

  Macdarragh refused to pull a plow, though the men hit him with switches, the horse up on its hind legs screaming. The men who’d already come to dislike him.

  “It’s too fine a creature to break its back on work!” Kate Beg scolded, running in among them, scattering the men like boys.

  “It’s got donkey blood in it, stubborn as the doost!” cried Padraig.

  “No donkey in this fine creature!” Kate Beg screamed.

  “We’ve been duped because we’re island men and they know we don’t know horses. Look at the twist of its back leg. A gimp leg. You’ve been bamboozled, Padraig. This horse’ll do nothing for you but eat and shit.”

  The men talked about transporting the horse back to the mainland, filling themselves with riot and severity, but the women took shifts guarding Macdarragh where he was put to graze in Glenagalt.

  In his company the women could do naught but utter his praises. “He’s a creature out of the old stories. Look at his lovely long tail! The sweep of it!”

  I was among the women and girls gathered at the fence to gaze and to feed him flowers, and he nuzzled us with his velvety nose and the soft breath through his nostrils. Better than any dog Macdarragh was for affection.

  Before he’d even see my mother come into view, Macdarragh would throw his head up and sniff at the air, then move side to side in anticipation. He’d raise his mouth to the side and screech. When she was close, he rumbled softly and held her eyes, besotted.

  One night the men watched warily from the cliff while the women gathered around Macdarragh on the beach and lit a fire, feedi
ng him directly from the home grain sacks, the oats that would have made the next morning’s porridge. We plaited his mane with fuchsia and ferns.

  The men drank the whiskey they’d gotten from the Frenchmen, and as the night deepened, the tinier children were bedded down in blankets in the sand.

  “Godless heathen lot!” one of the men cried.

  “We’re all cuckolded by a horse!”

  “Hey Cathleen!” Padraig cried to his wife. “That one’s a gelding and’ll not give you what you’re after.”

  “Hah!” she cried.

  “He’s got a good dangle on him, but it’ll not be standing up to you.”

  “Listen to the filth they’re speaking.”

  I went alone with my mother to visit Macdarragh one day, feeding him the leaves of an entire cabbage so that we might feel his warm breath on our palms and fingers. We played a game with him, taking turns, standing in front of him with our backs to him, and he would push us between our shoulder blades with his great head, propelling us forward. A kind of thrill in the jolt of it that made us laugh and feel both dreamy and giddy.

  Once we visited him with our own hairbrush to free his mane and tail of the briars. That day I saw my father watching from a distance, standing very still, a tension all about his figure.

  The French boat returned to the sound, anchored near the causeway on a night when the water was still. Preparations were being made now for the mackerel harvest.

  When my mother saw my father repairing a net, she knew he had it in his mind to go after the fish. She was angry, the sight of the net always rousing pain in her. When she asked him not to go, he went on repairing the net.

  Instead of fighting him she withdrew and sat before the embers, lost in her own thoughts.

  The first night of the fishing my father went out in the boat but returned early because of a storm, and found the horse weathering the rain in our cottage. It stood beside the bed, its twisted back leg bent and at rest, its head lowered. My mother was sleeping, the curtain partly open, one bare arm hanging from the bed as if she’d stroked the horse’s leg until she’d fallen asleep. My father lay on the stones in his coat near the fire. Throughout the night I looked over to him, his eyes always open, like the pale golden eyes of my grandmother’s ewes watching Macdarragh from their bed of damp straw in the corner.

  The next night the men went out again.

  Near dawn, Brighde Donnely and a band of women came to the door and said, “Come up with us to Black Head.” We followed them and saw the French steamer with its lights on, drifting at anchor near the causeway, the men carrying on. “They’re after bein’ stinking drunk!” Brighde said.

  “Is Liam there?” my mother asked.

  “He is,” Brighde said. We sat on the rocks and listened to what was going on, the laughing and the music and the carrying on, some the voices of Frenchmen, each woman picking out the voice of her husband, some of the men fighting like they were ready to murder one another, and then we heard the woman’s voice, piping up in French.

  “Jayzus God! They’ve got a slut on the boat!” Brighde Donnely cried in a loud whisper.

  “He’ll see his patron saint!” a woman whispered breathlessly.

  We could hear music playing, the voices of the men rising in laughter and jesting.

  My father was dancing hard, lifting the woman in the air and carrying her about.

  The men all laughing, dancing with her, some veering into the light, kissing her. There were loud cries in French and in Irish. Padraig Scanlon and Michael Dunne got into blows as if they might murder one another. Padraig picked up a wooden crate and broke it over Michael’s head.

  “Jayzus!” Mary Dunne cried. “Your Padraig’s after cracking my man’s skull open!”

  “The devils,” the women murmured one to the other.

  As rain began to fall, I followed my mother, who was moving back toward home. When we got to the cottage, Macdarragh stood at the door waiting and my mother brought him in against the dark, covered him and boosted the fire, then kept to him all night.

  Very early in the morning the men came back talking about the grand time they’d had of it, Padraig and Michael now with their arms around each other, sporting their bruises and cuts and broken bones.

  The women gathered in a band near the Way of the Dead, but my mother was not among them, and my father’s eyes raked the rocks and paths for her.

  I went with him, looking for her. It was the soft sloshing that we heard, that drew us down the slippery rock and around to the estuary in the tide pools.

  The horse was standing knee high in the water, the sound of the tide riding in and away in minimal wind. My mother was naked, washing Macdarragh. She poured a bucket of water over his back, rinsing away the line of foaming soap. She dropped the bucket in the water and embraced the horse, kissing its nose, both woman and horse oblivious that they were being watched.

  The color rose on my father’s face and he held in a breath. A moment later he was moving away over the hill at a fast pace.

  “The storm will be over by nightfall,” Mrs. O’Leary announced, coming in to us where we sat, the embers in her fire having gone low. “You’ll be able to cross tomorrow. After such a storm the bay will be easy.”

  I was tired and promised the girls I’d finish the story the next day.

  Nineteen

  In the morning a single boatman stood at the pier, and as we moved toward him, our boots clacking on the boards, I imagined that he was waiting exclusively for us.

  He helped us in, smiling and nodding at us, and we crossed the bay without exchanging a word.

  Except for a few chickens pecking at the white sand, the beach on the Great Blasket was deserted. The girls stayed close to me as we ascended from the pier. I looked above at the houses sheltered by the mountain, a few figures passing between, shadowy and half familiar.

  When we reached the rocky path we were still a few yards from the first house. From this point I could see the cottage I’d once lived in, poised there at the summit and facing off away from the rest. “There,” I said to the girls, pointing to it. It looked different than I remembered it, smaller, and the green felt roof had grown decrepit, dingier and weather darkened, edged white in salt, but still holding. The prospect of it disoriented me, and I felt a wave of fear, as if I were walking on ground that might suddenly shift and dissolve beneath me.

  A woman’s voice pierced me through the side. “Deirdre, is it? Deirdre O’Coigligh?”

  I stopped and faced her. I knew her right away in spite of her weathered skin and the streak of gray hair visible under the hood of her dark cloak. My childhood friend.

  “Eileen, is it?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes. I’m glad I’m not so changed that you don’t know me. You look lovely yourself, Deirdre, like a grand lady of society.”

  “Not at all,” I said, shaking my head.

  The wind came up suddenly, the particular noise of it here on the island catastrophic and achingly familiar.

  “These are my daughters, Maighread and Caitlin.”

  “Lovely to meet you both.”

  Both girls nodded politely.

  “Come in and I’ll give you tea,” she said, and led us in to her own hearth, boosting the fire and starting a kettle.

  “You’re with child,” she said as I removed my coat.

  I nodded as I sat at her rough-hewn table.

  “I married Sean,” she said. “You remember him. The three of us were grand together as children, were we not?”

  “I thought you would one day marry him, Eileen,” I said. “How is he?”

  “He’s off in Dingle too often, drinking. I don’t even see the back of him much these days. We haven’t been happy. We’ve no children.”

  “I’m sorry, Eileen,” I said.

  I struggled to relay my experiences. When I told her that I’d almost become a nun, she said, “I often wish I’d become a nun, Deirdre. It’d have been a happier life for me, I’m certain.
I’ve dragged my way through life, as it is now. God’s Son and his Glorious Mother my only comfort.”

  Each girl warmed her hands around the cup she was given, nodding gratefully, awed by the roughness of the little abode.

  She strained toward me yet seemed in my presence tremulous with hesitation. “What’s brought you here, Deirdre?” she asked.

  I held her eyes but found it difficult to speak. Finally I asked, “Does anyone live now in my childhood cottage?”

  “No one at all but Mrs. Herlihy’s cows and chickens.”

  “I’ll go and have a look at my old home,” I said.

  A quiet moment passed between us, and she said, “I go now and again to the island graveyard, Deirdre, and put flowers on your parents’ grave.”

  “The island graveyard,” I said to the girls, “is for the wayward and the unidentified. For unbaptized children and unknown sailors who washed up with the tide…for those not fit to be buried on the mainland in a churchyard.”

  The girls peered at me, their eyes wide. Caitlin touched Maighread’s arm. They looked stunned, afraid.

  Eileen bowed her head and looked away from me.

  “Might I borrow a lamp from you, Eileen? I’m sure the place is all shadows. I’ll bring it back to you.”

  The lane between the houses was barren now in the rain, and as we ascended I pulled my hood far over my face, shying from a few old faces looking out of doorways at the strange sight of my girls and me bearing the light under an oilcloth.

  Only one soul had needed to spot me from a distance for the entire island to know within minutes of my presence. They were afraid of me, I told myself, staying back from me so, as they had when I was fourteen.

  The elements had softened every edge of the cottage, and it appeared to be sinking into the ground. The crooked door pushed against the earth ground. It was dark and wet smelling inside, chickens starting up from their roosts, clucking nervously at our arrival. The lamp reflected back at me in two points of a cow’s eyes.