by A. A. Glynn
I had chuckled at Sean-een’s earnest narrative, recounted with the correct degree of west of Ireland awe. When Sean-een came out to the cottage to repair the wall, Leonora was tickled pink with him. She would take him sandwiches and tea when he took a break, and the pair of them would sit under the low wall, beyond which was the lip of the headland and the heaving green-blue of the Atlantic. Yarns of old Ireland galore flowed out of the little stonemason to the delight of my American wife.
He told her of Grace O’Malley, the pirate queen of this coast, with her galleons and her lusty sons, and how she refused to bow her knee to England’s first Elizabeth, whose court she visited in all her barbaric splendor. He told of fishermen’s superstitions; of women of blinding beauty and heroes as tall as mountains; of ghostly beings of the mists and of saints; and the cunning Little People whose line probably stretched back to the Druidic gods whom Patrick banished. Sean-een’s tales were told with vigor and liberal scatterings of the Irish language. Leonora relished all of it, and she appreciated how the little stonemason’s narrative gifts made him kin to the tale-tellers of her own ancestry.
But she had enjoyed these yarns in the sun-blessed and salt-tanged balminess of summer, now replaced by driving rain and, in the dark, turbulent storm that now gripped the land. I knew—simply knew—we faced something out of the deeps and shadows of Sean-een’s legends.
I parked on the grass verge beside the garden wall and we carried the girl into the cottage. We laid her out on the bed in the spare room and, in the garish electric light, we both noticed something odd about her plain and rudimentary dress.
“It’s like no material I’ve ever seen,” murmured Leonora. “It doesn’t seem to be cloth. It’s almost a kind of fur. It’s so functional, so strangely old-fashioned, just a dress with no trimmings, like something that grew on her. And I can’t detect any sign of undies, no ridge of a bra-strap such as a dress so tight should reveal. Dan, it’s all so weird.”
She bent closer to the sleeping girl and gasped: “And, look, she seems to be drying naturally. I thought we’d have to use a towel on her, but her dress, hair, skin—everything—is almost dry while we’re still wet.”
Leonora touched the dress and, as she did so, the eyes of the sleeping girl opened abruptly. Fully alert and lit by a smoldering, malignant light, they stared directly at my wife. They showed total hatred of her. Leonora stepped back quickly. Her body stiffened and her face underwent an instant change.
Often, I had quietly noted how, in certain lights and shadows, she could look astonishingly Indian. Now, she appeared more Cherokee than I had ever seen her. Her nostrils flared and her mouth drew back in a tight, humorless grin that showed her white teeth. It was as if she sensed something about the girl on the bed through some faculty closer to an earth-origin than any I possessed. Whatever passed between the girl of the storm and my wife was some unspoken animal communication.
Then her eyes turned on me, and the flame in them died. I saw depths of water worlds in them, and I heard again the sea song, enticing, drawing my soul out of me as the ancient chorus mounted.
I began to hear a voice, not through my ears but, in some way, within my head; a sentence or two in a language vaguely Irish, some form of Irish which was already ancient when the earliest monks of Hibernia lettered their first books for the glory of the God brought by Patrick. Then it became plain English, an enticing statement raised over the seductive chant of the sea song:
“I will have you, man of the O’Hynes. We, the seal-peop1e, will have you. I will have you from the land woman.…”
Like a man half drunk, I watched a smile spread over the face of the woman on the bed, an alluring snare of a smile. The eyes showed yet deeper ocean depths, and they drew me like magnets as the chanting of the sea song rose higher.
Then the anthem rapidly faded as the eyes closed again and the face became composed in a sleep that appeared as innocent as a baby’s.
Helpless as to what we should do with the girl, Leonora and I stood watching her and I tried to gather my senses once more. My wife seemed not to have noticed how I had been affected by the enticement of the eyes and the sea song. We saw the dampness of the strange dress, the pale skin, and jet hair dry before our eyes; even the bedding on which she lay seemed to be dry. Once, her eyes opened and, as if attempting a hospitable truce, Leonora asked: “Is there anything we can get you? Food? Drink?”
The girl shook her head in an emphatic negative and closed her eyes again.
“Maybe we should just leave her. She seems to be all right,” said Leonora. She clenched her fists in her defiant way and added firmly: “But, tomorrow, Dan, we’ll do something about her. Tomorrow, we get that woman—that creature—out of here.”
In our bedroom at the rear of the house, we turned in. Settling into the sheets, Leonora said again: “Remember, Dan, tomorrow, we get her out of here!”
She fell asleep almost at once, perhaps not surprisingly because she’d had a busy day, topped off by the anxious business of finding the strange girl on the homeward road.
Girl? No, she was not a girl. Of that I was absolutely certain. I slipped my arm around Leonora and held her tightly, knowing that our precious oneness was being undermined. For I knew that it was by design that the creature of the storm had entered our lives, and our finding her was not so much a chance discovery as a taking of bait.
I was of the O’Hynes clan that had been rooted in this Atlantic fringe of Ireland for generations, and ancestral legends warned me about the true nature of the creature found beside the road. I wanted to flee with Leonora at once, but I was already more than half-captured and my will was being drained. In near panic, I held my wife yet tighter, fearing that at any minute, the creature of the storm would intrude upon us, paralyzing me with the compelling allure of her sea-deep eyes.
Something of my tumbling confusion must have penetrated Leonora’s slumber, for she stirred and murmured something throaty which sounded like Cherokee but, with my small knowledge of the language, I could not distinguish it.
Dear, lovable Leonora, I thought, the capable American girl under whose skin there ran a paradoxical current of Indian mysticism. Her family’s Cherokee descent is a common enough one in Oklahoma, and their claim of aristocratic standing among the grouping known as The Five Civilized Tribes was a valid one.
The Southern Cherokee were among the first Indians to be herded along the hundreds of bitter miles called “The Trail of Tears”, forced from their Florida home to the new Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma. The policy of displacement was devised by the old Indian-killer Andrew Jackson, called Sharp Knife by the Indians. That name became a curse.
Leonora’s family had deeply held traditions. One concerned an ancestor, a shaman, a medicine man of potent powers and a virtual saint among the Cherokee. He died in the harsh exile of the alien plains country soon after the uprooting. Often, I fancied I saw proud Cherokee strength in the structure of my wife’s face, and the melancholy race-memory of the Trail of Tears in her striking, dark eyes, and they spoke of the old shaman in the family line.
All night, I lay sleepless and apprehensive while troubled thoughts roiled in my mind. I thought of Leonora’s background and of my own family, which, as little Sean-een had put it, was followed by ancient things. And, strangely, I thought of my grandfather whom I had never known, and of his place of origin, the Galway fishing village of Roundstone, called in Irish Cloc-an-Ron, which means Rock of the Seal.
Seals, seals, why was it always seals?
Again and again through that tortured night I believed I heard the chanting of the sea song, far away and almost one with the murmur of the ocean at the end of our small garden. Possibly, Leonora heard it too, for she turned and muttered several times.
At last, I dozed for must have been a brief time and awoke to early daylight, finding that Leonora was already up and dressed in a t-shirt and skirt. She turned to me decisively.
“Dan, I meant what I said last nigh
t,” she declared. “I want that woman—that thing—out of here. I just looked in on her and she’s still sleeping.…”
Not sleeping, I thought. Waiting her time, scheming.…
“…but I want her out, pronto, Dan,” Leonora was saying. She dropped her voice and added quietly: “I dreamed last night. Indian dreams. Understand? I dreamed of the Ponca Deer Woman!”
Befuddled, I muttered: “Dreams? Deer Woman?” Then I thought in a disjointed way how dreams bring mystic messages to Indians, indicating paths to be taken or avoided or opening up some personal revelation of significance.
I began to dress hastily and, as I did so, I began to hear the sea song, distant at first then mounting in volume. There was a climbing tension in the air which began to take a grip on me and I was impelled to move out of the bedroom, across the kitchen and into the spare bedroom as if driven under hypnosis. I was only vaguely aware that Leonora was following me. All the time, the sea song was increasing in intensity.
I entered the spare bedroom as if ensnared, netted by an outflow of psychic energy and dragged into sea-green depths like a captured fish.
Held in thrall, I seemed to plunge into a water world. Salty greenness crashed around me in huge, surging waves but, above it all, I heard that captivating song, chanting its age-old Irish. I was pulled deeper and deeper then; above the thunder of the waves and paeans of the sea song, I was aware of the seductive voice of the sea creature whispering in my head: “…man of the O’Hynes, I have come for you…I have come to take you from the land woman…I have come for you.…”
I was abruptly aware that Leonora had grabbed me from behind. With remarkable strength, she dragged me from the room and through the kitchen to the outer door. She somehow managed to open the door and push me out into the garden. I felt the grip of the psychic sea-depths lessen as I gulped fresh air and became aware of the sun in a flawless sky and the ocean, swinging in post-storm tranquillity under the lip of the headland just beyond the garden wall. Leonora rammed me against the wall of the cottage and held me there. Inside my head, the sea song faded.
“We’ll get the Guards, Dan,” she gasped. “Tell them we found her and she’s sick or something. There’s something—something dangerous—about her. We need help to get her away from here. Dammit, Dan, don’t look so bewildered. Our only hope is the telephone booth down at the crossroads. Get in the car, go down there, and call the Guards.”
I gulped again, befuddled, fighting for breath, still partially hypnotized by the sea song and the psychic storm into which I had been plunged. Leonora lost her temper and began to hector me.
“Damn and blast you, Dan O’Hynes! What’s wrong with you? I told you we must do something. I had Indian dreams. Remember? That girl is bad medicine. Dammit, I’ll do it myself!”
She hastened to the car, parked outside the garden gate. I heard the engine cough into life. Almost at once, the sea chant and the illusion of my being dragged beneath the ocean began again. Alone in the garden now, I turned to face the cottage door.
The woman of the storm was emerging from it, tall and stately as a queen. She advanced on me with her arms spread wide, like a woman enticing a toddler to walk towards her. The sea song mounted, the girl’s ivory face was illuminated by a magically enchanting smile and the silky female voice sounded in my head: “…now I have you, man of the O’Hynes…we, the seal people, have you…follow, into my arms…into our kingdom.…”
Somehow, she had swung in front of me and was walking backward, towards the stone wall beyond which lay the drop to the sea, and I was following. Sharp pearls of teeth showed in her smile and I followed, unable to help myself, yearning for her and the kiss of her mouth, led on by her and the persistent sea song. I never knew how we crossed the wall but, somehow, we were beyond it and moving towards the very edge of the headland, step by step. In a matter of seconds, I would be with her, beneath the waves and caught in some unimaginable rapture. It was a fate I was longing for with every shred of my being.
“No!” Leonora’s scream pierced the illusion that gripped me, drowning out even the sea song, and I was vaguely aware of my wife, advancing on us with her face changing.
The woman of the storm halted and turned to face her. Again, that blaze of hatred flared in her eyes, and the smile was transformed into a wicked, sharp-toothed snarl.
Leonora advanced on her in a deliberate, flat-footed Indian stalking style, and a metamorphosis had occurred in her face. It had become more profoundly Indian. The high cheekbones had risen yet higher and the skin had thinned, seeming to have aged, becoming parchment-like, stretched over the bone structure. Her nose had taken on a more masculine prominence, and her face resembled that of an old and wise Indian.
Leonora continued towards the sea woman then, suddenly, she sent forth a guttural rising and falling of sound from deep in her throat. It was something old and yet from the New World—a Cherokee tribal chant.
The sea woman stood on the verge of the headland, rigid, staring at Leonora who was now not truly Leonora. Then, like an uncoiling spring, my wife leaped. Her hands were clawed, reaching for the sea woman’s face and her chanting turned to a cross between a blood-curdling screech and a rapid-fire rattling. It was the Cherokee turkey-gobble, the ultimate challenge to an enemy. After uttering it, a warrior would either kill his adversary or die in the attempt.
As Leonora almost came to grips with her, the sea creature stretched back her mouth into a snarl and uttered the only sound we ever heard from her. Sharp and angry but mewling and pathetic at the same time. It was the bark of a seal.
She turned to me just as she twisted away from Leonora’s scratching nails, giving me a last sea-green stare which held a magnetism which still haunts me yet. Paradoxically, it also contained an unmistakable menace. She sprang away from Leonora and, even above the still-sounding turkey-gobble, I heard a parting threat:
“I will still have you, man of the O’Hynes…we, the seal people, will still have you.…”
Then she dived from the lip of the headland. She hung against the sky for an instant and, as she smote the water, I had a last glimpse of her outfit that surely was the seal-folks’ collective idea of a woman’s garb, stored in their consciousness from the sight of an unknowable number of drowned women over an unknowable number of centuries.
The waves closed over her and Leonora ceased her gobbling.
At length, well out to sea, a head surfaced—the unmistakable blue-gray head of a female seal. It turned and looked back at us in the way of seals when they know humans are watching. Even at that distance, I felt the intensity of its stare. Then the head disappeared.
Leonora circled her arms around my neck and put her mouth close to my ear. Now, she was in every way the old Leonora; the transformation that made her an Indian male had passed.
“It’s over, Dan,” she breathed. “Thank God it’s over.”
I could only mumble: “You did it. You drove her away—but—but—”
“Not me alone. In a way, I was possessed. Don’t try to figure it out, but remember what Sean-een said about your family being followed by old things? Well, it’s kind of the same with mine. Let it go at that.”
I thought of her shaman forebear, and a sentence from a textbook on anthropology came to mind:
“A characteristic of the shaman is a belief in possession by some human, animal, or mythic creature to the extent that the shaman becomes that being in reality.…” Then, on its heels came thoughts of the “shape-changers” of Celtic mythology and of the Irish hero of heroes Fionn Mac Cool, who became a deer and an ear of corn, among other things.
“You became the old shaman,” I gasped. “But you’d driven off to the crossroad telephone. How did you turn up here just at that moment?”
“I’ve told you—I was possessed.”
“The old shaman,” I mused. “I almost begin to see it: the ancient wiles of a land people against the people of the sea.…”
“I was on the road when I had a strong in
timation that you were in trouble,” said Leonora. “Then I seemed to see big Oklahoma spaces, hear chants, and smell wood-smoke. I think I came close to seeing Manitou himself, herself, or whatever Manitou is. I turned and drove right back without really knowing what I was doing. And you, Dan, you knew all along what she was. Somehow, I know that you understood that she was a seal woman, and that she would have you for a husband, finally taking you beneath the sea forever. I remember what Sean-een told me about seal-wives.”
“I had a shrewd idea as to what she was the moment we found her,” I said. “But she took hold me from the start, at first in a subtle way, and I could not break free.”
“I knew she was bad medicine,” she said, stroking my head possessively. “I felt the animal in her and knew that she was hostile to me and we’d have to fight it out sooner or later.”
“I suppose Sean-een told you the whole story,” I said.
“Yes, one day when he was fixing the wall. It was familiar, so close to the story of the Ponca Deer Woman, of whom I dreamed last night.”
I knew what she meant. In their regular ceremonial dance, the Ponca Indian girls go hand-in-hand in a ring round a fire. From nowhere, a supernatural intruder slips into the ring, a beautiful girl in a white buckskin dress. She has black, hypnotic eyes, so beautiful that the others in the ring cannot tear their gaze from them, so they never notice her feet. But those outside the ring can see that they are the hooves of a deer.
The men join the dance and choose partners. Deer Woman takes a man who is enchanted by her eyes, holds him in a tight embrace. He lies with her only one night and dies shortly afterwards. It is as well, say the Poncas for, after that one night, he is no longer a man.