The iron headboard was gone, but its presence remained, having worn off the whitewash of the wall it had once pressed at. It had left its shadow, a replica of itself in all its dovetailing curves. The old bed’s springs were still there, mortared, with earth and hay and chicken droppings, to the floor and stone wall like a great and elaborate fossil, struggling to mulch its way into the structure of the decaying house.
The bar from which the yellow curtain had hung was still there, too, and a bit of the curtain itself, which I walked up to and touched. It was hardened and cold, the weave of it broken down.
A driftwood chair my father had made leaned against the hearth wall, its seat collapsed, one leg crooked. Two chickens roosted in straw beneath it.
I moved close to the hearth, amazed to find, sitting on a small protrusion of rock in the wall, my grandmother’s majolica cup with the periwinkles painted on it, a stub of ancient candle stuck within. On the wall, the rotted husk of the basket she had once kept dried heather in to revive the dying embers of a fire. I stared at the bare area of the hearth where my father had lain when he was banished from the iron bed. I closed my eyes and saw him as he’d once stood at his great height, and I felt his eyes on me and his tender regard for me. It was as if he were there again. I felt him holding my hand and smelled the food from the tidepools. Dulse and sea lettuce and murlins. And the girls seeming to hold in their breath as if they sensed him, too.
And the presence of my mother, a saline smell and a terrible stillness.
Everyone had said that the horse would fall, the way it climbed the windward side of the rocks, down the slick descents to get the tether grass that flowered yellow between the limestone ridges. He was, in spite of a twisted leg, adept and strangely sure-footed on the cliffs, like the black-faced sheep. When he came up missing that’s where the women went to look.
He was dead far below, stuck between rocks. No one knew how to retrieve him, and it would only be powerful, exploding waves that might rise up and free him from the rocks and carry him seaward. But none strong enough came for days, and the women gathered at the cliff around the site, keening and throwing flowers down to his broken body, lighting votive candles, leaving them on the shelves of rock, a high wind coming in now and again, sweeping the lot of them off so they shattered and the bits of glass flew.
In the days before the sea finally lifted Macdarragh and carried him off, my mother stayed among the women, her face hidden, anonymous in her black shawl, her own grief mingling with the rest. But when the days of vigilance were over and the horse’s remains were lost in the ocean, she disappeared. I felt the pressure of fear in my stomach, the sense that the universe had come loose of itself.
I walked with my father looking for her. We camped the island. It may have been only one night we slept under a hedge of stones, but it seems to me it was a long wandering the two of us did, so it could have been a fortnight, every second so vivid. We were under a strange spell and pulled by a dangerous enchantment. The animal grace of my father, a febrile brilliance to his eyes, the tension of the search and the cold blasts of western wind made us light-headed, even euphoric in our quest, as if we were following after a glimmering promise.
We’d gone full circle around the island when we came back to Macdarragh’s Cliff and found her there below in a rock pool, a few yards from the rocks where the horse had fallen.
She floated and bobbed with the shifting forces of the sea, suspended about a foot below the surface. She was bent slightly at the waist, looking down, her face hidden in her dark, softly rippling hair. The dress, thin and white and translucent as a membrane around her, shredded at the hem, moved in different directions like the tentacles of a sea jelly.
My father squatted on his haunches and let out a wild, yet restrained, moan, then with sudden fierce energy jumped up and made me stand behind him. He tied me to his back with the rope, coiling it around us both again and again so that I was painfully pressed to him. He hooked the end of the rope to a jutting rock, then lowered us both down, him managing the rope with all his might and me so meshed to him I felt every strain and ache of his muscles as we descended.
At the bottom, with me still bound to him, he pulled her up to a narrow ledge of rock, forcing her head back and breathing into her mouth, pressing at her chest, groaning between every attempt. He sat back, unwinding me from the painful tie of the rope.
Eventually, the day darkened, the wind cold, both of us with our eyes pinned to her, waiting for her to cough and wince or sit up suddenly. But the wind had dried her and the salt from the sea glowed where it had gathered in her eyebrows and around her nostrils; thin clumps of her hair salted and quivering stiffly against the face, her eyes half open, empty.
“I can get her back, Deirdre,” he said. “I can bring her around.” And I believed he knew something about living and dying that I did not know. He had been drowned and returned himself.
My father made me wait with her while he crept along the under-ledges of the cliff and came back eventually with a curragh. He lay her in it, and I sat behind her and he in front, and he rowed south and easterly to the skellig.
It was a low cave there where we went, and inside he lay her carefully in a shallow basin of rock, then made a small fire, and we warmed ourselves.
“’Twas I, Deirdre, who drove the horse off the cliff,” he said to me.
He told me to go back, to take the curragh, that he had another hidden there on the island, and that this is where he might bring her back and the two would return to the Blasket together.
As I set off he said, “Say you forgive me, Deirdre,” and I thought he meant forgive him for driving the horse from the cliff.
I did not want to forgive him for that, or for the way he’d taunted my mother to try and bring the love out of her. But he looked at me with his eyes so sad and pale. “Say you forgive me.”
I nodded.
I crossed back to the Blasket, but I did not go home. I weathered the night half frozen and chattering under a ledge of rock, never taking my eyes from the firelit cave. In the deep of night, huddling into myself, I opened my eyes once and saw that the fire had gone out.
I must have fallen asleep, because when I awakened the sun was bright. I rowed back. The tide was high and washing into the cave where I’d left them. I rowed back to them, navigating the little boat to its entrance and, standing knee high in the water, beached it on rocks.
“Da,” I called. “Da.”
There was no answer. Then I saw them, in the basin where he had lain her. They were together, pressed face to face, the ropes coiled around and around them, chest and waist and hips, their arms free, her face to his neck. The water all around them was red. I stared at him. “Da,” I said, thinking him still alive and just beside himself with grief. I took the redness of the water to be a trick of minerals or iodine from the rocks. But the longer I looked, the closer I grew to knowing. A forceful tide washed in and spilled over into their pool, stirring up the red water with clear, and that’s when I saw the clear water going red around his wrist and I saw the gash there, and came to understand the source of the redness.
As the three of us descended the hill back to Eileen’s, the girls sobbed softly.
I had neglected to put on my hood, and rain was coming down hard and streaming freely over my face and hair.
“Deirdre,” Eileen said as she opened the door. “Come in out of the wet for the Love of God.”
She extricated the lamp from my grasp, took my coat, and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. I stared at her fire.
“How did I get back that day from Skellig Michael?” I asked, watching the gently lapping flames around the turf.
“Deirdre, why do you want to dredge up such sad history?”
“Please, Eileen,” I said softly. “I need to know this.”
She paused. “There’d been a search party. I was there. Sean, too. Padraig Scanlon and a few others. ’Twas bright sun that morning, the bay as calm as new milk, and the
re you were below, crossing.
“No one could have known, Deirdre, from your manner, that there was a thing wrong. But I knew, the two of us sharing secrets since we were small girls. ’Twas an unnatural calm on your face. You told us that you’d been at the neck of sand where Ossian had been called away to Tir Na Nog. But you weren’t coming from the direction of the legendary site.
“ ‘Where is your father?’ Padraig kept asking you, but you hadn’t an answer.
“Padraig and Mairtin took the curragh back in the direction where you’d come from. And no one could have guessed what they were about to find in the skellig cave.”
“How long after that did my grandmother and I stay?”
“Holy God, Deirdre, I don’t know. A month at most, I’d say.” She paused and said, “And after you left, Kate Beg said that every time she passed the cottage, she could hear the bars of the iron bed ringing within, so a few of the island men, fearful of a haunting, crossed the bay and fetched a priest from the Ventry church, looking for some way to purge the cottage of damnation. The priest prayed in the house and said that the bed of two suicides should be destroyed, so the men burned the bag of stuffed straw and feathers, and they carried out the iron headboard and tossed it down into Macdarragh’s rocks. And Jesus God, if the same thing that had happened to the horse himself didn’t happen to this headboard, stuck there in the rocks where the horse’s body had been stuck until a great wave had carried it off. But the headboard remains there to this day, a sad monument. I don’t go down there,” she said, and her eyes filled. “But I’m told that in the spring the kelp winds round the bars of it, knotting up in its curves and eddies and it still hums with the tide.”
“I want to see it,” I said.
“Ah, you don’t.”
“I do.”
When the rain stopped, the girls and I walked across the headland to the cliff and the rocks and looked down together at the site. And there, stuck at an angle between the jagged rocks, the headboard of my parents’ bed, black and corroded now by the waves, eaten away with the salt water.
“We came and lit candles here,” I told the girls, “when the horse, Macdarragh, lay in those rocks.”
“In such a windy place?” Caitlin asked.
“How did they stay lit?” Maighread asked.
“They didn’t for long, but we kept lighting them anyhow.”
“I wish we had candles now,” Caitlin said.
Gradually the dark washed from the sky and we descended to the pier where the boatman was waiting.
The two girls slept with me that night in one slim bed. We did not speak much. Now and then one or the other would press a kiss to my arm or cheek or wind a finger through my hair.
After I said good-bye to the girls at Enfant de Marie I felt an issue of blood. I took a coach to a doctor’s house in Kilorglin, and that afternoon I was admitted to the local hospital. The nurse posted a letter to Manus in Dublin. The bleeding, which remained light, stopped that same night, and the doctor told me that the baby’s heartbeat was steady.
Early the next afternoon, Manus walked into the room, two or three days’ of growth on his face and jaw.
“Jesus, Deirdre,” he said softly and earnestly. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” I said, “and I think the baby’s all right now,” I told him.
He held my hand and stood at my bedside. “I only got word a few hours ago,” he said. “I was at the building site until this morning.”
“I can see that,” I said.
He looked self-consciously down at his rumpled clothes, then back at me, passing a hand through his uncombed hair.
When the doctor came in, Manus shook his hand. He was an older, white-haired man with a kind face and a quiet, reassuring voice. He explained to Manus that there’d been a slight rupture in the membranes at the cervix. He recommended that I take no chances and stay in bed for the rest of the pregnancy.
“When should I take her back to Dublin?” Manus asked.
“Not for a week at least,” the doctor answered, looking at me. “And I’d be very careful about that as well.”
The doctor’s hesitation filled me with caution. “I’ll not go back to Dublin then, until the baby is born,” I said.
They both looked at me, and there was a pause before the doctor nodded and said that if that were possible it would be the best thing. He told Manus that his sister, a widow, Mrs. Donovan, had extra rooms nearby, and Manus undertook the arrangements and hired a private nurse.
Mrs. Donovan’s was a modest but well-kept house, and the room I was granted appealed instantly to me, papered pale green, with a raised darker green foliate motif. Often those months, lying there in repose, I would study the curves and patterns of that design and muse that if it were red, it would have a distinctively Eastern character. But the green and the bit of knotwork portrayed as leafy vines and inhabited by rabbits and birds gave the impression of an old Celtic forest. An arched window, deeply set into the wall, faced the bed, and through it I could see the branches of a pear tree and an area of garden. When the casement was open, the curtains, broderie anglaise, billowed toward me, catching and brightening the daylight.
Manus was intrigued by the thickness of the walls and the Baroque character of the window. He had remarked more than once that it was a very sturdy little house, and that was something I came to feel immediately: the safety the room offered with the fire going at night and the wind blowing outside.
The winter months would prove an extraordinary time in my life. Everything and everyone was at service to my determination that this baby live. It became for me the focus of the universe. Though I had books at my disposal, I preferred to daydream, gazing at the garden through the window, charting the slow changes in daylight and weather, whispering to the baby within me, “Sta-a-ay,” my repetitious interior chant.
As I lay in my room in Mrs. Donovan’s house, trying to see my mother’s face in my mind’s eye, I remembered the story she used to tell me about how, when I was three or four years old, I had run from her out onto the edge of a rock that overhung the sea, a far drop below. I’d stood in bare feet at the very precipice of that rock and raised my arms. The wind had blown me back, back, away from the edge. I’d turned again, happy and ignorant of the danger I’d been in, and run to her.
The first time she’d told me that story I’d been eight or nine years old, and she’d said, “I stopped fretting over you after that day, Deirdre.”
“Why?” I’d asked her.
“The wind’ll always rescue you,” she’d said, looking into my eyes, “and the water’ll never swallow you.”
I had marveled over that then, wondering what it meant to have the elements looking out for me so. But as I’d grown older, what she’d said about the wind and water made me angry.
And one night when I was twelve, she’d told the story again near the fire.
“You don’t want me to need you,” I’d said to her.
She had not replied but had colored, as if ashamed. She had stared into the embers.
As I recalled this, my mother’s face became vividly clear to me: her wide eyes and wind-burned skin and the vein that stood out on her forehead, that ran from one eyebrow up at a slightly broken angle and lost itself in her hair, the vein I had forgotten about until this moment, that appeared when her feelings were roused.
There would be nights in Mrs. Donovan’s house when I’d awaken in the dark and feel my mother close to me, hesitating at my bedside, bringing with her an ineffable fragrance, something like bog-lilies and guttering candles.
One night, the baby’s turning and rolling awakened me. I lay there for hours in a protracted joy with a new certainty that he would come. The world slowed down around us. Thunder sounded outside, and I felt the room brace itself around us to receive the downpour.
How bold and comfortable he was, a little watery acrobat. I felt his first flurries of independence, sensed the daring in his nature, so that I asked him, “When d
id you stop being inseparable from me and become your own mighty little self?”
Sarah Dooley, who had four children, two of them sons, had told me that her boys had been distinctively different from her girls. “More physical,” she said. “More rough around the edges and when you’ve got two of them,” she said, “they pound each other.” I sensed it even now, the subtly different nature of his energy: slippery and mercurial, testing his muscles as if he were feeling his potential. His excitement charged through me, so different from the slower, calmer twists and turns of my girls.
I had told Manus the first day when I was moved into Mrs. Donovan’s house that I didn’t want him to tell his mother where I was.
“I have no contact with her. I haven’t been answering her letters,” he said.
“Well, she will contact you, wanting to know how I am.”
“What should I say to her?” he asked.
“I don’t care what you tell her, Manus. Just do not tell her where I am. And tell the girls not to as well.”
After a moment’s thought he nodded his head. “All right.”
On the weekends Manus came down from Dublin and brought the girls to visit. After he’d taken them back to Enfant de Marie, he and I spent long hours talking, as he stoked the fire, keeping it going.
He had no access here to his drawings and his study. Here, he could not, on an impulse, rush off to whatever he was working at.
On one such weekend, when I’d been here about a month, I learned that the girls had told him of the trip to the Blasket. I told it to him again in my own words.
“There was a time I wanted to tell you. When we were first married.”
The Marriage Bed Page 24