“Do you think I’m an idiot?” Anraí tried to frown, but a sly grin broke through instead. “Why, Son of My Heart, I no sooner saw the two of these, but I’d decided on that. It will be a grand baby!”
They were both laughing as they came to Ó Cadhain’s barn, leading the lovely Thoroughbred mare and the little broken king.
Chapter Eight
Grand Shoulders, Continued
Tadhg Ó Murchú tore his newspaper into tiny bits as he gazed at the sky through his parlor window. He was angry at the news, but he shredded the paper more because he had the habit of shredding papers, once read, than for any immediate reason.
Outside it was a lovely day, and the people on the street outside were dawdling. There was a cluster of women outside the tobacconist and grocer’s shop, and they hadn’t moved for twenty minutes. He wondered what they were discussing.
So Gladstone had finally lost his temper (or his reason) and stuffed Parnell into Kilmainham Gaol. The priest himself had predicted it, but that didn’t make it any easier to live with, now that it was fact. It would be very hard to preach restraint in the pulpit as well as to certain of his back-parlor friends.
More immediately upsetting, however, was the plan to boycott Ó Cadhain, who was taking up the lease on ten acres from which Seán Garvaí had been evicted. This would be the first boycott on James Blondell’s land, and Ó Murchú had rather had hopes for Blondell. It would make more sense if they did the boycott on the bailiff, Fenton, if they were going to do it at all. Fenton was every landowner’s bailiff, at his price. This very day he would descend on the Séamas Ó Conaola family, not a quarter mile down the street, and pitch them into the road. Perhaps he would have to tear the roof down, for Bríd NíAnluain, Séamas’s wife, would not leave easily.
Ó Murchú would have liked to have someone to talk to about all this, but the only person he could trust, and who might understand both the issues and his reservations, he dared not approach. He would have to keep his mouth shut.
He was used to it.
The newspaper was confetti over the embroidered pillow on the window seat. His housekeeper would shake her head. He tried to gather it up in his hands.
There was movement out the window. Not the women at the shop—that knot was stable, even larger. Two men ascended the rectory drive, dressed not in báinín but in rough hacking jackets. One wore high boots and one heavy gaiters, and for a moment Ó Murchú had no idea who they might be. His stomach twisted, for he could not imagine anything good out of the day.
As they neared the door and passed behind the forsythia, which was in thick leaf, he could see stripes of them.
It was Anraí Ó Reachtaire, of all people, with his new horseboy. Ó Murchú let out a very relieved sigh and rose to get the door before the housekeeper could be bothered.
“God to you, Father. Good evening,” said Anraí, though it was near noon. He had his hat in his hands, and his face and hands had been scrubbed to the point of irritation.
Ó Murchú wondered if he himself were half that clean. He felt a pang of guilt, that the man should go to such trouble for a call. Of course it was the office, not the man. He gave Anraí a “God and Mary” in return and held the door for both men.
Ó Reachtaire wore boots and the assistant rude leather gaiters, as was only fitting. But somehow, on him, they looked less demeaning and more like … the priest couldn’t put a name to it.
As he looked politely into the man’s face, Ó Murchú suffered a small shock. He had never seen MacEibhir in the light of day.
The eyes were enough. Unlike most of the residents of Carraroe. Father Ó Murchú had traveled. He knew that eyes of such peculiar size and color did not exist. Not anywhere. Not out of disease, or accident, or strange, foreign blood. Nowhere.
But the eyes were not all. As Tadhg Ó Murchú stared at the brawny, neat form, his own sharp eyes played him a trick. He blinked, twice, sure that the whiteness was tears or sun glare. Or perhaps he was going faint.
Ruairí MacEibhir caught the priest as his knees buckled, and with one hand he held him upright. When Ó Murchú could focus again, he found that the fellow was grinning at him, as though they shared a secret.
“You must remember Ruairí,” Anraí was saying. “When I had that spell, this winter before, he’s the one who … ”
“I do remember,” answered Ó Murchú. “Very well.” He swayed on his feet.
“Are you all right, Father?”
He took a hard breath. Ruairí MacEibhir was still there in front of him, and aside from the eyes, he was just a fine-looking young man with prematurely grey hair. Very well groomed. Smiled a lot.
Ó Murchú felt the hair on the back of his neck rising against his collar.
“It’s because of Ruairí that we’ve come, Tadhg.” Anraí began to relax. He sailed his hat onto the chair by the door and followed Ó Murchú into the parlor, where he stared at the large pile of shredded paper on the pillow, wondering what it could mean.
The priest’s quick eyes glanced from one man to the other. “Couldn’t Ruairí come to me by himself? I’m the priest for all the parish.”
Ruairí lifted one foot, absent-mindedly, and stamped it on the floor. “That’s the problem, Uí Mhurchú. You are priest to all the parish, but not to me.”
Anraí cleared his throat. “He means, Father …”
“He can explain what he means.”
Ruairí stamped again, his thumbs in his belt. “I mean I am not of your tribe. I am not a Christian. I have not been baptized.”
Ó Murchú’s face expressed incredulity. “You mean you don’t remember being baptized.”
“Of course that’s what I mean. But I doubt it was done while I wasn’t noticing!”
Ó Murchú lowered himself into a hard, spindly armchair which sat beneath a lithograph of St. Peter’s in Rome. Anraí quickly deposited himself in the chair opposite, and Ruairí MacEibhir sat on the pile of shreddings. Seeing immediately what he had done, he laughed and dusted himself, sending bits of paper all over. Some remained on the seat of his canvas trousers. “Very few people remember being baptized, Ruairí. It happens when we are infants. I presume your parents are dead, or they would have told you. If you ask any surviving members of your parent’s generation, or perhaps if you could find the midwife who bore you, she would tell you that you had been baptized properly.”
The grin spread from ear to ear. “The midwife who attended my mother was a stranger, a poor woman whom my father hired in the very night of my arrival and who was sent home never knowing clearly where she’d been. Such is the custom of my family. And I have reason to believe that she is dust on this earth. My own people were killed long ago and did not come back.”
The priest glanced over to Anraí, and his eyes asked quite clearly whether he was supposed to understand that Ruairí MacEibhir was one of God’s simple ones. Anraí looked agonized and his fingernails gripped his trouser knees. “You see, Tadhg, it’s like this with Ruairí…”
Feeling he understood plainly, the priest shushed him with a gesture. “Be easy, Anraí. Remember you aren’t strong yet.
“What about the priest of your parish in Kerry? He would have records.”
Ruairí put his elbows onto his knees. “Though I have been to Kerry in my years. Ó Murchú, it is scarcely my home. I am out of Connemara.” He said each word of the phrase again, with emphasis: “out—of—Connemara.”
The priest turned his head half away, like a dubious bird. “Not so.”
The grin came back. “No one more so. I am of Connemara and I am not baptized. If you doubt me, it is easy to prove it.” He stood, and his pleasant face knew a moment’s uncertainty. “How strong is your floor?”
“Ruairí, my son. Don’t do it!” cried Anraí.
Ó Murchú rose along with Ruairí. “How strong is … Why, what on earth are you going to …
“… do?” He was speaking to a good-sized horse. It was standing beside the window seat, its four neatly-
trimmed limbs braced, taking up all the room between Anraí and the picture of St. Peter’s in Rome. It was a pale horse, like the horse of the Apocalypse or the horses in the fields of Connemara.
Or the white horse that accompanied his dreams in the cart, going home from Knockduff, months before. Or like the horse of his vision, only five minutes ago, which had made him faint.
It had large brown eyes and a neat grey forelock, and it seemed to grin at Ó Murchú with its pleasant, homey face.
“Oh, Ruairí, you blundering jackass!” Anraí rubbed his face with—his handkerchief. Both were red. Then he glanced apologetically at the priest. “Doesn’t he look fine, though?” he asked in a small voice.
Ó Murchú said nothing, and the horse reared above his head, up against the ten-foot ceiling, where it faded.
“And that is why I have not been baptized,” finished Ruairí MacEibhir, wiping the grey hair out of his brown eyes.
With difficulty, the priest sat down. He folded his hands in his lap and did not look at them. MacEibhir stood before him, his head tilted attentively, and Anraí rubbed and rubbed the knees of his trousers. At last Ó Murchú glanced up.
“Animal magnetism?”
Anraí bounced in his seat, in his effort to be agreeable. “Indeed. Animal is what he is.”
“I mean … hypnosis is the Greek word. You have a way to make me believe you turn into a horse.”
Ruairí’s ready grin came back. “I surely do, Ó Murchú. And I fear I have made your floorboards believe it, too.”
Ó Murchú looked where he pointed, to see the large, almost circular scuffs on the varnish. “I would be upset by that, if I believed them to be real,” he said calmly. “Men of this parish paid to have those boards hauled along the old Cois Fhairrge Road in the time of the last pastor. They were very dear.”
Anraí muttered under his breath, while Ruairí answered, “Then I’m very sorry for it, and I will replace your floor with something stronger. But if you run your finger in those dents, Priest of the Parish … ”
The priest did not take that opportunity. His round, black eyes were fixed sharply on the grinning face before him. He didn’t even hear when Nóra, his old housekeeper, tottered into the hall behind them.
“Are you a tinker, then? They’re the only Irish to play this sort of game, and with horses, especially.”
Ruairí broke into a laugh quite out of place in a rectory, and he hit his thigh with his cap repeatedly. “Sweet airs of May, Ó Murchú! Believe I’m a tinker or believe I’m a fairy, but accept from me that I have not been baptized and … ”
The one word caught Tadhg Ó Murchú. “A fairy?” There was a long pause, during which his eyes moved rapidly, looking at nothing in the room. “Dear God, I hadn’t thought of that.” He stared so at Ruairí that that one shuffled back, almost into the old woman.
“A fairy?” The neat, dark head tilted right, then left, very birdlike. “An Irish fairy?”
“Out of Connemara.”
“Out of Connemara,” Ó Murchú repeated. “Dear God again. I must walk.” And he strode past Ruairí and Anraí with the step of a man who was going a very long way.
Ruairí raised his rather thick eyebrows at Anraí, who shrugged.
“That man is one of the little dark ones,” said the fairy. “He knew me, though he didn’t know what it was that he knew.”
“They call him the Welshman, though … ”
There was the howl of a cat behind the old horse trainer. He jumped, to find Nóra staring at the small snowstorm of paper on the window seat and ground into the carpet below.
“I’m sorry about that, old woman,” Ruairí said, with his oiliest charm. “When I sat on the little bits, I didn’t know you were careful about them.” He dusted his backside once more, scattering white.
Nóra watched the fall in great bitterness, and her eyes were caught by the damage to the imported, varnished wood floor. Ruairí was out the door in a moment, leaving old Anraí to bear the blows.
Father Ó Murchú was down on the beach, with the grey horse trotting beside him. The stones that cluttered the shore were rounded and gold, some of them the size of sheep and some the size of a man’s head. Ó Murchú hopped them with the ease of a child; his black cassock was wet up to the knees.
The horse kept to higher, smoother ground.
“Why do you want me to baptize you?” asked the priest, looking straight in front of him.
“Máire NíStandún has made that a condition,” replied Ruairí MacEibhir, who pounced onto the same rock that supported Ó Murchú and skidded over it neatly and down to the next.
“Clever with your feet.” The priest said it as though it were no compliment.
“I should hope so.”
“What do you mean, ‘a condition’?” Ó Murchú shouted, because the wind was high and so was the blowing surf.
“A condition of our betrothal.” As Ruairí raised his voice, it went into his nose more, as happens with the people of Connemara. And with horses.
Ó Murchú stopped dead. “Of your …” His quick eyes moved over the receding waves. “Was she serious?” His question was addressed to the water. Then he said, “She’s too good for you.”
The grey head nodded. “I should hope so.” Then his grin stretched tight. “Do you want her, too?”
Ó Murchú growled, like a cat. “You can’t be that ignorant of my calling, pagan though you are.”
“I’m not ignorant at all,” answered Ruairí, and he kicked a large stone with his foot.
Ó Murchú noticed the heavy shoe and the leather gaiter, which was getting wet. “Where do your clothes come from, when you turn from horse to man?”
“They are with me from the time I was given them, thirty-seven years ago.
Ó Murchú stared, turned off, and began to walk again. “You’ve worn them for thirty-seven years and they haven’t fallen apart? Is that fairy magic?”
Ruairí scrambled in the surf to keep up with him. “Not at all! I haven’t worn them for all those years, for it was thirty-seven years since I took this form in this place.”
A cold wind hit the priest in the back. “What do you mean? You spent all those years as a pony on the hill? And did nobody ever see you?”
“I was not a horse, Ó Murchú, nor yet a man.” He flopped his hands against his sides in a floundering attempt to explain. “I told you, Priest, I am out of Connemara.”
Ó Murchús’ hands were balled in his pockets. He stopped at the end of a spit of land, with the fairy behind him. “Out of … In the earth, as the stories put you? With the dead?”
The usual grin faded from Ruairí MacEibhir’s face. He looked at Ó Murchú with a peculiar reserve. “Don’t you know all about it, Tadhg Ó Murchú? Weren’t you born knowing what you know?” He took one step closer. “This shirt of mine, now. I got it from off a dead man, the last time I came out here, among … ”
The priest gave a sudden scream, for he had recoiled and was falling. He hung ten feet above the water, dangling from the fairy’s hand. Without much trouble, Ruairí pulled him up and onto the rock again.
“Clever … with your hands, too.” Ó Murchú’s voice shook.
“Legs and hands. All but my head, as my father was fond of saying.” The grin broke through again. “Ó Murchú, did you think I was about to slay you for your cassock? Believe me, dead men are not stingy of their old belongings.” With exaggerated care, he stepped backward off the rock, letting the priest pass without touching him.
Ó Murchú began to laugh. “I believe I have pulled my seams. What a bother: I’ll have to sew them at night, lest my housekeeper finds out.” As he smoothed the garment flat, a thought struck. “Thirty-seven years ago was forty-five. That was the famine.”
“It was a bad time enough,” answered the fairy soberly.
Ó Murchú pulled the windblown hair from his eyes and he stared at the other as though he were a sheet of newsprint, while Ruairí shifted from foot to foot. “And you
haven’t been back since.”
“Didn’t want to.”
The small black eyes at last relented. “What do you remember about that time?”
Ruairí hugged himself, perhaps from cold, and gazed out to sea. “I remember that gold could not buy food for those who needed it.”
“It could in Galway,” said the priest. “It could in Dublin.” Ruairí sighed. “I don’t go to Galway by choice. I don’t go to Dublin.”
“Was it you, then, who was trying to buy food? For yourself?”
At this Ruairí showed teeth to Ó Murchú, but not in a grin. “By all the black hounds, man, grant me some credit!”
“And where did you get the gold?”
“From the dead, of course. From the dead!” And then the angry grey horse stamped along beside Ó Murchú, toward the pier at Carraroe.
“It’s not enough reason,” said the priest to the horse. His ears were now red and chapped, and he stood at the place where the road ended in the water. “Wanting to marry is not enough. I’m not at all sure you were meant to be baptized. You are not a human.”
“So my father said,” replied Ruairí, who had recovered his temper. “That we were another race and a much better one than you.”
Ó Murchú smiled tightly. “I don’t say he’s wrong. I don’t know that you—whatever you are—came in need of a saviour.”
The black-shod foot of the priest skidded on the gravel of the road. “And all the stories I have heard of meetings between my church and your people have ended badly for you. You might dissolve at the touch of holy water. Or turn into stone.”
Ruairí stepped along beside the shorter man, and his feet on the road surface still sounded like hooves. “Naturally, Ó Murchú. The stories are told by you, and not us. But if your magic is so potent against my kind, why do you worry?”
Ó Murchú gave him a black, birdlike glance of disgust. “Do you think I want to do you harm?”
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