by Erin Hart
“A freight elevator.”
“I didn’t see anybody around, so I opened the gate on the fourth floor and got off. Then somebody upstairs must have called the elevator, ’cause it took off.”
“With the gate still open?”
“Yeah. Some of these old buildings—I had my flashlight, so I took a look down into the shaft, to see what I could see. And then I hear this voice behind me—‘Careful. It’s a long way to the bottom.’ It was the blind guy I saw earlier. I wondered how he knew the elevator wasn’t there. He says to me, ‘You were on that elevator, weren’t you? This afternoon.’ And I’m thinking—how the fuck does he know that? He’s blind. So I asked him, and he says—” Truman’s voice had dropped to a whisper. Shame rolled off him in waves. “He says, ‘Because you still smell of those flowers you were holding.’ Next thing I know, he’s behind me—” Frank stopped breathing. “And he—puts his hands on me. What did he have to go and do that for? I’m not a fucking queer. I had to get him off me, and it just—happened.”
Unburdened at last, Truman Stark laid his head on the table and sobbed like a child.
6
All night, Nora had tried to sleep and failed. It was something of a reversal; Cormac was the usual insomniac. She lay beside him in the gray morning light, listening to the pulse of the surf outside, reading a musty old volume she’d pulled from a bookcase behind the door—Ortha na nGael: Hymns and Incantations—a compilation of verses collected in western Donegal in the late nineteenth century. Most were dressed up as Christian prayers, invoking the trinity or the Virgin or Saint Brigid, but retained their old shapes from the time before trinities had anything to do with Christ. The verses had been translated from the Irish, no doubt filtered through the transcriber’s Victorian sensibility, but much of the beauty and plainness of the original language remained. Even written on the page, their repetitive rhythms still held the power of incantations.
In addition to the prayers, there were stories of shape-changers, and eerie lullabies; charms for all sorts of bodily afflictions, for fire smooring and night shielding; invocations addressing the moon and sun, for rituals of birth and death, and blessings for all sorts of animals, and not only cattle and sheep, but the wild beasts that figured in the local mythology as well: the salmon and the swan, the bull, the horse, the otter and the limpet, the seal. Rare glimpses into the rhythm of daily life in a place that had been for centuries the last outpost of the known world.
Nora closed her eyes, hearing the music of the words, seeing the images they brought forth, of darkness and light, of work and harvest, the damp breath of animals. The words carried a palpable sense of wonder from the people who had composed and repeated them so many generations before. Nora looked back at the book on her lap, fallen open to a charm against drowning. The words of the last stanza seemed to float up off the page:
A part of thee on grey stones,
A part of thee on steep mountains,
A part of thee on swift streams,
A part of thee on gleaming clouds,
A part of thee on ocean-whales,
A part of thee on meadow-beasts,
A part of thee on fenny swamps,
A part of thee on cotton-grass moors,
A part of thee on the great surging sea—
She herself has best means to carry
The great surging sea.
She herself has best means to carry.
She closed the book and set it aside. How did someone even attempt to carry the great surging sea?
Nearly two weeks had passed since her parents had arrived to take Elizabeth home with them to Saint Paul. Two weeks since the return of her hazel knot, discovered along a river path by Seng Sotharith, and two weeks since she learned that her parents had taken her protector in, that he would be staying in her old room and embarking on studies that would eventually transform him into a physician’s assistant.
It was also exactly two weeks to the day since she and Cormac had helped to recover the preserved body of a young woman from the blanket bog above the rocky beach at Port na Rón. When she went into the bog, the young woman had been wearing two long black woolen stockings and one high-button shoe, a long skirt and petticoat, along with a shirtwaist and short jacket, in the fashion of the time. Her clothing had been preserved as if she’d dressed in it only a few days before, and not over a hundred years ago. There was still no definitive proof that the body in the grave was Mary Heaney, but Roz Byrne was now on a mission to trace the female line, to see if any link could be established through mitochondrial DNA between Mary Heaney’s descendants and the faceless female from the bog.
Nora turned to observe Cormac, breathing softly, his chest moving up and down in a steady rhythm. How many times had she lain like this beside him, trying to comprehend the lightning storm of thoughts and dreams that crisscrossed his brain in sleep? She put out a hand, feeling the warmth of his breath against her palm, hearing in the back of her head the notes of the melody he’d sent her that first night in Saint Paul. He still hadn’t spoken its name.
Maybe Cormac was right, and Elizabeth would come around. Maybe someday she would want to know the truth about her parents. But what was the truth? Nora knew she had to brace herself for the possibility that Elizabeth might travel the rest of her life on a razor’s edge, on the one hand loathing the creature responsible for her mother’s death, and on the other, feeling affection for the decent human being her father had appeared to be.
The universe had turned out to be a much stranger and more fluid place than she had ever imagined. All the boundaries and borders she had once believed in now seemed to be shifting and disappearing. Nothing was cut and dried. If anything, she felt much closer now to the view she had held as a child, where any eventuality—wondrous or hair-raising—was equally possible. The image of Tríona walking along that street in Lowertown, the book turned backward in the library stacks, how Harry Shaughnessy just happened to be the person who picked up Tríona’s photo on the library plaza. The seal who had delivered Elizabeth from harm. These things could not be real, and yet they were—as real and true as any events in the history of the world.
Nora was beginning to realize that she had clung desperately to her own version of Tríona, much like one of the faithful might adhere to the legend of a saint—though everyone knew that saints’ legends contained only fragments of truth, along with large portions of exaggeration, even falsehood. In some ways, keeping Tríona preserved like a saint under glass was almost as much a diminution as the calumnies Peter Hallett had engineered. Surely the truest remembrance would not reduce her, not make her any less in death than she had been in life. What about the hidden, contradictory sides of Tríona Gavin? They had existed, and might still be discovered—maybe it wasn’t too late.
Rising from the bed, Nora tiptoed downstairs, past the door of Joseph Maguire’s darkened room. He was still in hospital, and would remain there for another few days. He had awakened from forced slumber a changed creature, not himself even to himself, but submerged in a sea of strangeness, speaking in a language no human could understand. Cormac hadn’t yet faced the prospect of what would happen when his father was ready to come home.
As she passed through the hallway, Nora perused a series of silver prints that hung on the wall. Photographs of seals—portraits, really—taken by Cormac’s great-aunt Julia. Perhaps it was the combination of the gray dawn and the waning moonlight, but each image took on the aspect of a ghostly negative: the seals’ eyes glowed white, their formerly white whiskers now looked dark against pale muzzles. She had often wondered what it was that triggered Tríona’s fascination with these creatures. Was it the wordless, soulful eyes—the soft, motherly bodies? Or perhaps the amazing way they could move and hold their breath underwater? Nora herself had always judged seals a little too strange and ungainly, but Tríona had been extraordinarily drawn to them. Evidently the connection had been passed down to Elizabeth.
Nora leaned forward to read the light
ly penciled caption beneath the last portrait: A still dawn at Port na Rón—July 1947. More than sixty years ago. The last and most haunting of the pictures showed an animal with a star-shaped mark around its one good eye.
Seized with a sudden desire to greet the dawn at Port na Rón, Nora threw on her jacket and shoes and slipped out of the house. As she pulled the door closed, the latch fell into place with a loud click. She stood still for several seconds, making sure Cormac had not been disturbed.
The sun was not quite up as she made her way over the headland. A thick mist drifted over the harbor ahead, and through it she caught occasional glimpses of the sea, as calm and glassy as it must have been that morning in 1947, with only a few ripples stirring against the pebbled beach. She stood at the top of the ridge, drinking in the fishy scent, while out in the harbor, a sleek form twisted up from the water and landed with a splash, the sign of a creature reveling in its own strength and speed, the sheer joy of sensation.
Nora climbed down to the beach and kept walking, not stopping to remove shoes or clothes, but striding straight out into waves until she was up to her hips, and within ten yards of the seal. It swam closer, only an arm’s length now, its whiskered face raised out of the water. She could see how the features on one side of its face were scarred from some ancient injury. The same face as in the portrait, she was sure of it. How could that be? She reached out a hand to touch its fur, and the creature allowed her. It felt sleek, warm beneath the wetness. She remembered the words of the charm:
A part of thee on ocean-whales,
A part of thee on meadow-beasts,
A part of thee on fenny swamps,
A part of thee on cotton-grass moors,
A part of thee on the great surging sea—
She herself has best means to carry
The great surging sea.
The seal regarded her for a few seconds with an air of infinite compassion, before opening its mouth to offer a single rounded vowel of a bark. Was it a greeting or a valediction? As if in answer, the animal twisted away with a flourish of its tail, and sank once more into the sea. Nora took a deep breath, and plunged straight down. She felt compelled to follow. What was it Tríona had seen that day she had been rescued from drowning?
Nora swam forward, eyes wide open, when all at once someone or something caught her by the waist and lifted her clear of the water. Setting her upright in the shallows, Cormac took her face between his hands. “I can’t let you do it, Nora—”
All at once it occurred to her what he must have imagined, following her, watching her walk out into the sea. “Oh, Cormac, I wasn’t trying to—”
“Weren’t you?”
“No—I don’t know what I was doing. But it wasn’t that, truly—I swear.”
“You walked straight into the water, with all your clothes on—”
She looked him up and down. “So did you.”
“But I was only going after you—” He stopped and sighed, resting his forehead against hers. “Why are we doing this to ourselves? You’ve been running from me for nearly two years, Nora. Why do you keep running?”
“I don’t know, Cormac. I can’t—”
“Can’t what? Do you really believe Tríona would want you to suffer as you have? I know you could go on punishing yourself forever—but when will it ever be enough? You wanted to know the name of the tune I sent—I’ll tell you. It’s ‘My Love Is in America.’ Do you understand? Can you not see that I love you? Stop running, Nora. Stay with me. Be with me.”
She looked into his eyes, and felt deep within them—and deep within herself—an immense, eternal pulse, calling up the words of that ancient, mysterious charm: She herself has best means to carry. When she offered Cormac her answer, it did not come in words.
As daylight broke over the headland, the mist slowly disappeared, and the surf began to churn around them with the incoming tide. The rising sun threw golden shafts on gulls and choughs as they took wing, and on the wet, curious faces of three young seals cavorting in the waves beyond the harbor rocks. High above the headland, almost out of sight, a lone sea eagle soared aloft.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to a number of people who helped with research for this book: Dónal and Libby Ward, for their hospitality, for sharing their knowledge of the history, folklore, and music of their home county, and for introducing me to some of the wonderful, hidden corners of southwest Donegal; Jill Cooper of the Minneapolis Rowing Club; Hannah Texler of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Tim Whitfeld and Anita Cholewa of the Bell Museum/University of Minnesota Herbarium, Doug Mensing of the Minnesota Native Plant Society, Jennifer Doubt of the Canadian Museum of Nature / Musée canadien de la nature, and Dr. Carol C. Baskin of the Department of Biology at the University of Kentucky, for details on Floerkea proserpinacoides (false mermaid); Kathleen J. Craft, Ph.D., for information on population genetics and its application to the world of forensic botany; Ann Marie Gross of the DNA Section at the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, for information on DNA analysis and BCA procedure; Sergeant Mary Nash and Detective Jane Laurence of the Saint Paul Police Department for help with police procedure and background (and to fellow writers Kent Krueger and Lori Lake for sharing law enforcement contacts); Patrick J. Cleary of the Garda Síochána (retired), for assistance with Irish police procedure; flute player and physician Dr. Frank Claudy, and Jean Cleary, RN, for help with information on PTSD, emergency room procedure, and hospital admissions; fiddle player Randall Bays for background on Useless Bay in Washington State. I am indebted to my friend, artist Virginia McBride, for her creative support, and to her son and fellow artist, Owen Platt, who created the wonderful map of my fictional location Port na Rón. And I am grateful to Dáithí Sproule for his invaluable help with Irish language translation, and to singer Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh of Altan, whose beautiful rendition of “An Mhaighdean Mhara” helped inspire this story. The help of all these individuals undoubtedly prevented many errors; they are not responsible for the literary license I have taken, and any faults that remain are mine alone. Thanks also to my wonderful editors, Susanne Kirk and Samantha Martin at Scribner, and my peerless agent, Sally Wofford-Girand. And to the countless people who offered encouragement—not to mention a bit of gentle nudging—fans, neighbors, and friends (especially Lisa McDaniel, Karen Mueller, Lori Hindbjorgen, Elizabeth Childs, Pat McMorrow, and all the Widening Gyre writers); my beloved family; and my incredible, inspiring husband, Paddy—go raibh mile maith agaibh.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Erin Hart is a Minnesota theater critic and former administrator at the Minnesota State Arts Board. A lifelong interest in Irish traditional music led her to cofound Minnesota’s Irish Music and Dance Association. A theater major from St. Olaf College, she has an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She and her husband, musician Paddy O’Brien, live in Saint Paul and frequently visit Ireland. Erin Hart was nominated for Agatha and Anthony awards for her debut novel Haunted Ground, which won the Friends of American Writers Award in 2004. Her second novel, Lake of Sorrows, was a 2004 Minnesota Book Award finalist. Visit her website at www.erinhart.com.
Also by Erin Hart
Lake of Sorrows
Haunted Ground
Copyright
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Copyright © 2010 by Erin Hart
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