At the last minute, I remember my shelf in the milking parlour and hurry back to grab a plastic bag and fling in all of my own cold milk. So many bottles peer back from that dark – among them, those of the milk bank – as ready as ghosts, pale and prepared. I close the door. I walk away.
5. an unscientific mishmash
mar a bhfásaid caora
is cnó buí ar ghéagaibh
is úlla ’na slaodaibh
na n-am féinig.
where sheep grow plump, and branches
grow heavy with clusters of nuts,
where apples spill lush
when their sweet season rises up.
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
in the weeks after the baby comes home from the hospital, all my old routines return, preventing me from dwelling too much on the strange weeks that followed the birth. I am gladder than ever of my lists and the daily chores with which I fill them: the hoovering, the groceries, the baths, and the laundry. It is an anchoring, the simple joy of drawing a line through a task. Whenever my daughter settles into my elbow to feed, I reach for a book. Through scholarly volumes, through histories of eighteenth-century Ireland, through translations and old maps, I continue to find all the information I can on Eibhlín Dubh’s life, no matter how obscure or tangential. The more I read, the more my folder of notes grows.
In the months after my daughter is born the act of reciting the Caoineadh comes to feel like time-travel – I am carrying this baby in the same sling and whispering the same verses as I did with her brother. When her sleeping ear rests against my chest, it reverberates with Eibhlín Dubh’s words. What dreams might she spin from these whisperings? What galloping hooves? What howls?
—
The public health nurse arranges a home visit and I lose myself in scrubbing, my mind whirling around the dread that she’ll point to some stray cobweb or juice spillage as evidence to remove my children. My palms are slick, watching her set her scales on our kitchen table. She asks for tea, and I curse myself silently for not having a pot ready. By the time I return with our best chipped cups, she is leafing through my folder. I want to dive across the table, growling No! Mine! Instead, I pour her tea and try to smile. She laughs at herself, tapping the page. ‘Art O’Leary! Probably as close as we got to boy-bands, in my day.’ I try to mask my grimace.
While she reminisces about her school days, I let my tired gaze drift to my teacup, how it curves like an ear, embellished with twists of blue. I think of the gesture a cup demands, the tilt towards a mouth, the flow. My eye translates the image on the cup and I flinch. How have I not noticed this? For years, I’ve been drinking from a cup of starlings. I think of their song, how deftly they regurgitate strands of true, remembered sound, weaving it into their own melodic bridges: a fusion of truth and invention, of past and present. The expectant silence that always follows a query drags me back to the nurse, who has paused her finger in its trespass of my scribblings and is peering at me. She repeats her question. ‘Taking a night course, are we?’ I shake my head. ‘So what’s all this for, then?’ My shoulders answer on my behalf, my whole body pickling crimson. She soon turns to scolding me about the baby instead: no feeding schedule, no set sleep routine, one would imagine with a fourth child a mother would be a little more, well … she lifts her brows and palms.
After she leaves I weep, more in rage than in shame, her words lingering: So what’s all this for, then?
—
I don’t know what it’s all for, but I keep going anyway, in the misguided hope that if I can simply exhaust my obsession it might come to bore me, eventually. It’s a foolish approach that only makes things worse, because the more I read, the sharper my rage grows. This feeling glues itself to the introductory paragraph that often precedes the translations, flimsy sketches of Eibhlín Dubh’s life that are almost always some lazy variant of the same two facts: Wife of Art O’Leary. Aunt of Daniel O’Connell. How swiftly the academic gaze places her in a masculine shadow, as though she could only be of interest as a satellite to male lives.
In my anger, I begin to sense some project that might answer the nurse’s query. Perhaps I’d always known what it was all for. Perhaps I’d stumbled upon my true work. Perhaps the years I’d spent sifting the scattered pieces of this jigsaw were not in vain; perhaps they were a preparation. Perhaps I could honour Eibhlín Dubh’s life by building a truer image of her days, gathering every fact we hold to create a kaleidoscope, a spill of distinct moments, fractured but vivid. Once this thought comes to me, my heart grows quick. I could donate my days to finding hers, I tell myself, I could do that, and I will.
—
I begin with an unscientific mishmash of daydream and fact, concocted while scraping porridge gloop into a bin, gathering schoolbags and coats, badgering children into the car, biting back curses at traffic lights, kissing three boys goodbye, and driving back home again. All the while, I keep one eye on Eibhlín Dubh and one on my daughter in her car seat. She grows in that rear-view mirror. Soon, her eyes are open as I turn towards home. Soon, her gurgles can almost be translated into words. Soon, she is tugging at the straps in which I have bound her. Soon, she is smiling back at me. This is how years pass in that mirror: soon, too soon.
One morning, at 9:23 am, I pause at the school gates. Instead of turning left towards home and its basketful of ironing, I turn right, my fingers wandering radio stations as I drive. A former taoiseach has died, and his achievements are repeated through the fond, caramel nostalgia of men: A great man. Ah, a great man. I push the dial to silence. Now only three voices are borne along our path of bitumen and asphalt, and all three are female: mine, my daughter’s, and that of the GPS who guides us towards Kilcrea in a tone that is flatly authoritative. [Turn Left] she directs, her voice scoured clean of social expectation.
We are lifted over the river by a bridge so narrow that it sings less of engines and more of hooves. I open our windows and cut the engine. Birdsong flutters in. It may be late October, but the trees here are still deeply leaved, singing richly in the breeze, exactly as trees sang when Eibhlín Dubh approached this place. Goosebumps punctuate my skin. She was here. A horse carried her across this bridge, over the river Bride. Betrothed. Bríd. Soon she will meet the river Lee, her name will change, and she will become something else, but for now, this little river lingers under the trees, humming her own liquid melodies.
Beyond the bridge, the abbey rises from a patchwork of fields, warm and wormy under an unseasonably cloudless sky. My daughter smiles. She is wearing a bright pink cardigan knitted by her grandmother, a female text in which every stitch is a syllable. I lift her, along with my bag, my phone, my notebook, pen, and camera, and shuffle through the stile sideways. This is the life I have made for myself, always striving for something beyond my grasp, while hauling implausibly complex armfuls.
Walking the neat avenue towards the abbey, I remember that Eibhlín Dubh, in walking this same path, would have found it bordered by bone. In 1774, Charles Smith documented his travels here in The Ancient and Present State of the County and City of Cork. Arriving at the approach to this abbey, he describes ‘high banks on either side, formed entirely of human bones and skulls, cemented together with moss; and besides great numbers strown about, there are several thousands piled up in the arches, windows, &c.’ All those bones have been neatly tidied into the ground in the meantime; the only skulls beyond the soil now are ours and those of the crows.
‘Kilcrea’ means ‘the church of Créidh’, after the first abbess to establish a holy house here. Later, monks built a celebrated monastery on this same site, sturdy stone walls against which their devotion would ricochet, while later still, in another time, to another tune, Eibhlín Dubh spoke her grief in their ruins. Now, autumn comes and brings me with it, drawn by a motive I can’t quite explain, even to myself. Perhaps this pilgrimage is my first step towards her. I walk, and as I walk, my heels imprint themselves in the dirt, adding another line to its old ledger of foo
tprints. Within, I arrange my body as I imagine others held theirs – I look up.
Above is the scriptorium where monks bent over a table, filling the air with the steady scrape of quill on vellum. Careful, careful replications: oh, the serious labours of man. Back then, poems were traditionally commissioned by taoisigh – leaders of the old Gaelic order – who would employ a (male) bard to commemorate a person or an event in verse. These poems were copied into duanairí, handwritten anthologies that often also held genealogies and sacred texts. By contrast, literature composed by women was stored not in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song. I have come across a line of argument in my reading, which posits that, due to the inherent fallibility of memory and the imperfect human vessels that held it, the Caoineadh cannot be considered a work of single authorship. Rather, the theory goes, it must be considered collage, or, perhaps, a folky reworking of older keens. This, to me – in the brazen audacity of one positioned far from the tall walls of the university – feels like a male assertion pressed upon a female text. After all, the etymology of the word ‘text’ lies in the Latin verb ‘texere’: to weave, to fuse, to braid. The Caoineadh form belongs to a literary genre worked and woven by women, entwining strands of female voices that were carried in female bodies, a phenomenon that seems to me cause for wonder and admiration, rather than suspicion of authorship.
At Kilcrea, the sky is darkening, and in my arms, my daughter is shivering and beginning to sing: ‘Ba ba black she, How ya do the do?’ I wrap my coat around us both as we stand where Eibhlín Dubh stood. I speak some lines from the Caoineadh, my voice springing back from the stone walls that once witnessed her voice too. When I say, ‘Mo chara go daingean tú,’ my daughter peers up at me, amused, then tilts her head sharply, mimicking the cadence of my words. I say it again, this phrase one might begin to translate as ‘O, my steady companion.’ I feel it so strongly here, her echo. This is our beginning.
—
Leaving Kilcrea, even my fingertips tingle electric. I wonder what I might learn of Eibhlín Dubh’s days were I to veer away from the scholarship I have simply accepted thus far. I think again of all those blunt, brief sketches presenting this woman in the thin roles of aunt and wife, occluded by the shadows of men. How might she appear if drawn in the light of the women she knew instead?
By the time I step out of the car, I have devised a plan and chosen my tools. I may not be an academic, but I believe that I can sketch her years in my own way. I begin, of course, with a list. In addition to revisiting my previous reading, planning research trips to her homes, and tracing archival sources, I will return to a publication from 1892, The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade. In two volumes of crisp, yellowed pages, an author who names herself as Mrs Morgan John O’Connell details a stash of family letters, found ‘in old Maurice O’Connell’s secretaire, brass-handled and many-drawered’. Maurice was Eibhlín Dubh’s older brother, inheritor of the house they grew up in, and distributor of the family wealth. As one might expect, the letters between these brothers slant towards the concerns of men: military politics, trade arrangements, finances, and so on, but there are occasional references to the lives of women to be found there, too. I decide that I will return to these texts and commit an act of wilful erasure, whittling each document and letter until only the lives of women remain. In performing this oblique reading, I’ll devote myself to luring female lives back from male texts. Such an experiment in reversal will reveal, I hope, the concealed lives of women, present, always, but coded in invisible ink.
In choosing a pair of women to draw Eibhlín Dubh with, I find that I don’t need to search long. I am drawn towards the woman Mrs O’Connell refers to as ‘[Maurice and Daniel’s] many-childed mother, with her weird gift of Irish improvisation, her practical shrewdness and good house-wifery’, and when I discover that Eibhlín Dubh had a twin sister, I feel another path open itself to me. I begin to sketch her by the light of these two women, slowly braiding my research and daydream with the italics of Mrs O’Connell’s book, and if a small voice in my head still asks ‘Why?’ it is quiet enough to ignore.
—
INSTRUCTIONS TO MAKE A MARIONETTE
1. Fold a page laundry-smooth.
2. Repeat. Repeat again, until the paper pleats resemble a pale accordion.
3. Sketch a female silhouette.
4. Use a sewing scissors to snip a woman of it.
5. In lifting her female outline from the cuttings, you are birthing her from the page. She is not alone. Observe how they all rise: hand in hand in hand.
6. Remember this lesson: in every page there are undrawn women, each waiting in her own particular silence.
—
éirigh suas anois,
rise up now,
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
When Eibhlín Dubh first floated in warm darkness, she was not alone. Even before her mother’s fingertips discerned the bubble-twist of embryonic limbs, her twin was first to feel her stir against her.
—
An ocean before sunrise churns vast and vivid with countless individual ripples, each in its own momentum. In the half-light beyond the beach, a farmyard grows hectic, with horses nuzzling oats, eggs finding fists, and milk tumbling from udders, hiss by hot hiss. Inside the house, a girl strides into the parlour and kneels to yesterday’s rubble-coals. Ash dances to her breath, and below, three embers begin to glow. From the kitchen, the smell of bread lifts, smooth white rolls speaking careful English for the family, brown loaves laughing in Irish for everyone else. Through each room lilts an excited murmuring, for today the woman of the house, Máire Ní Dhonnabháin Dhubh, is in labour.
This is not the first time her body had set upon the work of birthing; of the twenty-two children she will deliver in her lifetime, Máire will bury ten. A generous mistress, her sole thrift lies in her meticulous control over the household’s eggs. Such is the contrast between her broad generosity and this particular tight-fistedness that she is affectionately nicknamed Pianta Ubha – ‘Egg Pains’ – a poignant choice, given the extent to which her ambitious body is bound to pregnancy. For decades, Máire’s breasts are never far from milk, nor her womb from new life. Now, her body opens wide and her roars are joined by infant howlings – first one female voice. Then another. Twins. Girls. Máire falls back, thighs wet and shuddering. She names her newest daughters Eibhlín and Máire, but to all, they will be known as Nelly and Mary. Their mother does not rest long, for the running of Derrynane House is no small endeavour, and a profitable smuggling operation also falls under her supervision. Such ‘trade’ wasn’t unusual then, but the scale of their practice did bring this family unusual wealth. Along with her husband, Dónal Mór, Máire conducts frequent departures of hides, salted fish, butter and wool, along with imports of tea and wine, sugar and brandy, tobacco, lush silks and velvets.
The two infant girls will be fostered to wet nurses until they are sturdy enough to rejoin their family at Derrynane House. When they return, it will be alongside a child of their foster family, an almost-sibling who will become a trusted servant-companion. The language the twins learn at the breasts of their foster mothers is Irish, but their home language is English, a linguistic dichotomy that is at the heart of this family. Mrs O’Connell writes,
They spoke English, wore clothes of English fashion, and conformed more or less to English customs in everyday life; but they hankered in their hearts after the lost lands, the old tribal rights and privileges, and in moments of excitement used the Irish speech they had first learned.
By the time Nelly and Mary were born, the Penal Laws imposed by English colonisers had inflicted such brutality that the original social order had been, for the most part, demolished. These laws had been carefully devised to subjugate the native population and nullify any hazard that they might present to the Protestant Ascendancy, who now occupied their stolen lands. Irish Catholics were not to be educated, not allowed to hold possession of a horse worth more than £5
, nor were they permitted to vote or bear arms. Unregistered priests were to be castrated; rewards were offered for a priest’s decapitated head. There were, however, means whereby an ambitious matriarch could quietly contravene such a system. Derrynane Bay was remote and rarely visited by authorities, so here, Máire and her family could maintain a certain discretion. Enticements in the form of brandy and fine tobacco were sufficient to purchase silence.
In addition to managing home and trade, Máire was also a poet. Many of her surviving verses involve her addressing people at work in Derrynane. I translate one of the extant verses recorded by Mrs O’Connell as follows: ‘Hurry now, ladies! Draw that yarn swiftly, for your spinning wheels are sturdy, and your bellies never hungry.’ I find further fossils of her voice in the archives of University College Dublin, allowing me to imagine this woman as her daughters might have seen her, striding from courtyard to stable, her long, fair hair braided and neatly pinned up, dressed in the finest imported cloths, tailored to suit her taste of ‘bright coloured silks opening over a satin petticoat, and fine lace caps and ruffles for dress, and the dimity and calamanco’. I set to translating one of these exchanges, in which Máire is boasting of her home: ‘There’s a low riverbank and a high riverbank, Shade from the heat and warmth from the cold, its face turns to the sun and its rear to the frost.’ On hearing this sentimental outburst, a man nearby was said to counter –
There’s a low riverbank and a high riverbank,
Its face to the frost and its rear to the sun,
Its middle squashed, and a rocky strand,
And that’s all you have, Máire Ní Dhuibh.
There is such cleverness in this exchange of wit, in how deftly the rhythm of her initial boast is flipped through the retorts of servants, that one can almost imagine the hearty laughter that would follow it. When Máire pokes fun at a servant boy at breakfast: ‘More than our own home and Ballinaboula, / I’d prefer an appetite as fine as my boy here’, his retort again flips her own rhyme and metre, cleverly spinning a rejoinder:
A Ghost in the Throat Page 5