With a final kick to Art’s rib, Morris’s men left. Their laughter left with them. The mare was hurrying away too, froth flying from her bit. She knew who was needed.
—
The horse who is galloping through our thoughts now is a female being, conceived, born, and reared in Europe.
Look: the stable is dawn-dark and straw-hush, and through this gloom, we watch her birth, swimming hoof-first from the warm ocean of her mother’s body. Little footling, her hooflets are waves, dashing wildly against the earth, amazed. Her mother nudges her, nostrils quivering, until the foal opens her eyes and stands. The foal grows before our eyes. She thrives. In meadow sunshine, she need only nuzzle her mother’s udder to release a rush of sweet milk. With her first gallop, she gives herself to the bliss of speed and the rush of the breeze. She is of solid stock, as bright and as quick as any of her foremothers. Through each generation of her family, a human voice has echoed the same words in a series of tongues: Good girl. Good girl.
Once weaned, she is schooled in servitude. Her life’s purpose, she sees, will be to bear a human weight, and she learns it quick, the ways of stirrup and bit, of rein and whip. She is soon sold from her mother’s presence; never again will she meet those dark eyes. Instead, she comes to know the crisp straw of cavalry stables, the swhisht and clang of swords, the tang of muskets, the smell of blood in mud, bluebell shade under a beech tree, and autumn apples. This horse is glory and servant, she is speed and death sentence, and she performs each of her roles impeccably. Oblivion: eventually, she will draw death on her master. Then, in reciprocity, his death will lead to her own.
No matter how many times the Caoineadh galloped from mouth to mouth, no matter how many academic works respond to it, one detail is always missing. We never learn this horse’s name. I cannot bring myself to invent one. Instead, I honour her among The Unnamed, a further absence among all the other female absences that are missing from this tale.
I want you to know that she was a female being.
I want you to know that she was a female, being.
I want you to know that she was.
—
The sole mercy I can send from my life to Eibhlín Dubh’s lies in how I choose to unspool the following events. So for a moment, let me gift her some ordinary peace. I could draw her dozing, a cheek resting on her arm. I could draw her writing a letter, winding a clock, or scolding a small boy. Instead, I draw her with her favourite blue vase, poking rose stems among the freesias. I try to let this moment linger as long as I can, but all too soon, inevitability intrudes. Some leaf-flash draws her gaze to the window. Some stray hoof-syllable frets her brow. Tick goes her clock, tick tick, and in the yard, then, she sees – reins – trailing – wet – saddle – empty. When she meets the horse’s eye, she is quick to translate her gaze. What does she do, then? Does she seek help? Does she send a messenger to the Baldwins? Does she summon a servant to alert a magistrate? No. Eibhlín, our Eibhlín, does not pause to think. She leaps.
Three leaps, I took – the first to the threshold,
the second to the gate,
the third to your mare.
Gripping the horse by fist and by knee, she gallops, she gallops, they both gallop for forty minutes or more, the exhausted mare heaving herself uphill over wet ground and down through crumpling pebbles and puddles. Eibhlín Dubh knows neither their destination nor what awaits her as the horse bounds through the river Sullane and the Foherish, as she trots the muddy paths between brambles and under branches, through pastures and streams and cow shit. Who watches them, as they go? The crows. The crows know. In such moments roadside furze always seems to blur, but Eibhlín holds tight, she grips the beast. On she goes, on and on and on – until she stops. Every time I read the following verse, my heart breaks again for her.
Fast, I clapped my hands,
and fast, fast, I galloped,
fast as ever I could have,
until I found you before me, murdered
by a hunched little furze
with no Pope, no bishop,
no clergy, no holy man
to read your death-psalms,
only a crumpled old hag
who’d draped you in her shawl-rag.
Love, your blood was spilling in cascades,
and I couldn’t wipe it away, couldn’t clean it up, no,
no, my palms turned cups and oh, I gulped.
Who is this crumpled bystander? To me, this elderly stranger sometimes feels like a manifestation of Eibhlín herself, returned in old age as a powerless witness who cannot change anything, who can only root herself there until her own young self hurries in, her body filled still with the stirrings of an infant who will never live. She watches her own young self falling, howling over Art’s corpse until those vowels falter and begin to take form as words, words that somehow summon the voice of her mother, and her mother’s mother, a whole chorus of female voices from her throat, all articulating the pain of this moment, all hand in hand in hand, all hovering in the rapture of those old words. Some alchemy turns this private moment public, turns a raw sound into articulation, into art. The horse hears that animal howl and understands, her forelock falling to her fetlock, her hoof scraping the ground.
The mysterious old woman is not only Eibhlín Dubh’s older self, however. She is also you, and she is me. We are both bound in that peculiar figure too; we peer through her eyes, we are wrapped in her dark cloak. We bend together to spread it over Art’s body. We give of ourselves to shelter him. We stand with her to grieve him. This stranger holds all of us. I will not allow Eibhlín Dubh to suffer this alone, nor will you. Let us step in and stand with her. We cannot permit reason to intrude upon this moment. Do not deny us this.
—
The first night of aftermath is darker than dark. Art’s horse is absent. Hours before, she was tugged away by a stranger, and though she whinnied her European curses, no one noticed the dwindling pendulum of her hooves.
The door of the mill is ajar, with candle-light flickering from the gap. Two men have hauled the strongest door in the village off its hinges, shouldered it here and set it over a pair of barrels, then lifted Art’s body and laid him on it – a generous gesture. Eibhlín sits on a rickety stool, her body rocking. Her husband’s left hand is clutched in her fingers, while his right hand lies open over an empty keyhole. She knows that she cannot expect her mother’s firm embrace, and yet with each creak of the door, she can’t help but glance up.
Art’s jaw has fallen open, but his eyes are closed. Rain sneaks through the roof to drip a metronome in the corner. It grows colder. By the wall, a cluster of mill-women stand, dark-shawled and serious. Eibhlín resents them for not weeping with her: ‘and to multiply my thousand cataclysms, / not one of them will summon a tear for him’. The rain falls. The rain falls faster. Listen: the drips tick-tick-tick over the whispers of strangers, the intermittent sniffling, the muffled condolences, and then, towards the door, one by one the sorrow-nodders go, to huddle outside with raised brows and rumours tilting ear to mouth, ear to mouth. Beyond, the river hums its old song.
Eibhlín’s right hand twitches to her full-moon belly, but her left hand remains with his, for as long as she holds her grip, her warmth will keep the cold from his limb. Now, her spine straightens. Now, she will begin. Now, those words again, those begun on the hill, when her chin was still wet-red from him, when only an animal and a stranger stood with her. Now her mouth opens, and the cold mill with its audience of farmers, gossipers, mill-women, and strangers grows silent, but for her voice.
—
But for her voice, I would be spending Sunday afternoon at home with my family, playing hide and seek, watching an old film, or carving roast chicken. Instead, I’ve left my daughter to sleep in her father’s arms again, snug and warm with a belly full of milk. I slow near a bric-a-brac shop, parking by a selection of items propped on the roadside: a fireside chair, a child’s bike, and several old gates. Here I am, I think, as my door sla
ms a clutch of starlings over the rooftops of Carriganima – I may be an inept detective, but I am a devoted servant.
I have exhausted myself lately, absenting myself from my own days to seek the days of another, and I have begun to feel troubled by my behaviour, questioning whether my attempts are really any more useful than the abrupt lines of biography that first provoked me. How dare I pry on the private moments of a life, stitching frills where the pattern calls for no such thing? My daydreams have choreographed rainfall on this village, sliding it into the mill in which Eibhlín Dubh keened, despite holding no evidence of the actual weather that evening. If my desire to make her feel true makes of her a marionette then that makes me … what? I roam the street in search of some remnant of the flour mill, sneaking down driveways and behind sheds, with raindrops dampening my face. I walk the length of the village again, trying and trying to find some remnant of that structure. Again, I fail. I fail her, I fail you, and I fail myself.
Shivering and glum, I turn to the only open door I can find. Beyond the roadside bric-a-brac a sign reads THE OLD CURIOSITY SHOP. Inside, the room is filled with crooked limbs of old furniture, football memoirs, gas lamps, mirrors, and sewing machines. The drizzle deepens to rain, knocking on the roof with a desire I recognise: let me in, let me in. A man pops his head around the corner, waves, then disappears again. My palm lingers on the cracked glass of a tall clock, the tiny jagged splinterings of its chest, its empty keyhole, its door ajar. I reach in to set its pendulum swinging, then notice a chipped side-plate beyond it, full-moon pale with a village inked in vivid blues, where a tiny couple wanders by a stream. Lost. A plump vase nearby glows blue as the autumn tides at Derrynane. Both the vase and the plate cost me a total of three coins: I smile as I leave.
Outside, the rain has lifted and the stream sings icy welcomes to my toes as they slip over the stones. This water must have driven the mill-wheel once, its liquid lunge sending the same circle around and around. Listen, the stream says. ListenListenListenListen. I do – or at least, I try to.
—
At Derrynane, should a girl grow lost or fearful, she might find her bearings by turning her head to the compass pin of the tide’s thrum, or by calling out to her twin for help. We do not know whether Mary held her sister’s hand in the mill. It seems unlikely, given that an entire verse of the Caoineadh curses her husband, ‘that shit-talking clown, / that bockety wimp, all mean frowns’. What could he have done to provoke such intense loathing? Mrs O’Connell writes approvingly, ‘Mr. Baldwin had the mare given up, which in the then state of the laws was the wisest thing he could have done for the widow and children.’ Wise, perhaps. Cruel, too. At some point in the early hours of her raw-throated grief, Eibhlín raised her face, red-eyed and exhausted, to be told that Art’s beloved mare had been given to the man who had ordered his murder.
—
Each autumn, when leaves begin to dream of gold, the night-tide at Derrynane shimmers neon blue. It swells with phytoplankton, each wave bustling tiny phosphorescent particles until specklets glimmer bright and brighter, then slowly grow dull again. For a human eye to perceive such bioluminescence, the night must be deeply dark.
After Art’s burial, Eibhlín lies in the dark of a bedchamber far inland, singing her sons to sleep. Soon she is the only one awake; only then does salt spill over her cheeks. What will happen next, Eibhlín does not know – but we do. Death beckons to death. Overhead, the shadows of dark birds loom.
—
At home, I am struggling to compose myself in the darkness that spills from Eibhlín Dubh’s life. I try to distract myself in my routine of sweeping, wiping, dusting, and scrubbing. I cling to all my little rituals. I hoard crusts.
Every day, I fall to my elbows and beckon more crusts from under tables and high chairs, crawling through banana goo, yoghurt, and crushed grapes. That I move through my days with grimy knees is worth it to retrieve these crescents of bread, still spit-wet, moulded by gum and by fist, because it is these crusts that allow me the strangest and most precious moment of the day, when I will hear my name fly from a crow’s mouth.
I spill a box of jigsaw pieces in front of the children, then turn my back on their diligent fingers to walk into the garden. Cool and plush, the carpet of this green room. A sentry’s neck tilts immediately towards the pad-pad of my bare feet, her squint-eye translating my tangle of unbrushed hair into the name they have given me. She opens her beak to roar that split-syllable across the valley, and I watch them all lift from parlours of twig, surging towards me by screech and by wing, yelling dark greetings.
When the government announces a nationwide snowstorm alert, TV bulletins display empty bakery shelves; now everyone hoards bread as I do. At breakfast, I can’t bring myself to chew my toast. My stomach squawks when I sip black coffee instead, feeling each hot mouthful grow wings inside me, lush and dark.
Even the smallest hungers can feed others. Viewed from above, our snowy garden must appear white as a page, and there I stand, a female silhouette, my middle hunger-snipped, as overhead, a hundred wings scissor a gale.
10. two roads, each blurred
Buail-se an bóthar caol úd soir
mar a maolóidh romhat na toir,
mar a gcaolóidh romhat an sruth,
Hit that narrow road east
where each tree will kneel for you,
[and] each stream will narrow for you,
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
I. PASSENGER AS DRIVER
In the night-city, it’s easy to blot out the dark. Here, the haloes of street lamps are set so close to one another that their amber glow falls unbroken through our car, a steady light that spills over the steering wheel and over my love’s hand, tinting the wedding ring he had engraved with my name.
I like to sit aside when he drives – I like to watch his hand, the hand around which he will soon twist my ponytail as he tugs my head back to kiss me. I like to watch his face too, the smile that grows there when he feels my eyes on him, knowing that soon we will reach the rooms in which our children sleep, and the walls against which he will push me until I moan into his palm. The night that I first pressed my lips to his, we were both nineteen, and although a year had passed since I’d been yanked back from the river-railings, my hair was still damp. With him, at last, I began to laugh. He entered my life with neither fanfare nor glamour. There was no elopement. He simply fell into step by my side, with his easy smile, his old t-shirts, his worn jeans, and his steady footfall. Now we are driving the same road we walked hand-in-hand as teenagers, faster still.
Approaching the suburbs, the lights grow more broadly spaced. I watch pools of darkness move over his face; how quickly they seep and dissipate. We hurry together through those small darks, a little late for the babysitter, and a little hungry for each other. The car is still lit intermittently from beyond, but the darker pools grow longer, now. I don’t notice which light is the last.
Our headlights are useless at the T-junction, their twin yellows staring ahead, illuminating only a knot of brambles. Instinct or habit tugs our heads to the left, to the right, and to the left again in vigilance, although we can’t see anything through the solid dark that shoves itself against the glass. In the absence of any approaching lights, he drives on. I tremble when the dull roar of the engine shudders us onwards into the unseeable. I’m not sure I can wait until we get home for his fingers, and maybe, I think, maybe I could ask him to find some quiet gateway, some secret spot where we could – just for a minute – but now we are rounding a bend, and now he is slamming the brakes, and now our car is screeching to a neck-aching halt.
We both hold our hands high, flimsy shields against that sudden light. Neither of us speaks, though both of us see the man standing next to a taxi, his face empty, while another car’s hazard lights blare crimson to dark and dark to crimson. Beyond the man I see another man, or maybe two, each with phones to their ears, and below them, now, I notice something else. Someone. A silhouette, splayed flat
across the white line. A silhouette in miniskirt and stilettoes. A silhouette that is writhing. A woman.
This blind slope, where the road twists so steeply at both neck and ankle, is the most treacherous place I could imagine for a young woman to lie alone in the dark. ‘No,’ says my husband. ‘NO. Do not,’ but tick goes my seatbelt and tick-tick goes the door handle. ‘No,’ he says again, ‘people are already helping,’ but my body is rising now, leaping from the car, and perhaps a better wife would obey, allowing others to resolve this unknown crisis, perhaps a better person would let herself be driven away, but I can no longer hear his voice, because I am running through the darkness, now, running and kneeling and touching this stranger’s shoulder, asking her name.
I see no blood, no broken bone, but she is howling and rocking, rocking, rocking side to side. Tyres screech another vehicle to a skewed halt behind ours, and when I glance back, I think I see my husband’s shadow flinch in his seat. The taxi driver approaches, lifting his arms in a loud shrug, palms up to absolve himself, talking fast, ‘I didn’t touch her, I swear, when I picked her up she was fighting with her fella, she clattered him square in the face, and then he kicked her, right in the’ – his finger towards his crotch – ‘and she just jumped in then, bawling, you know, and when I slowed down to ask if she was alright, she threw herself out the door, and I can’t leave her there, can I, but I can’t drag her into the car either if she won’t go, and’ – his phone rings and he turns to answer, still grumbling over his shoulder as he goes – ‘she’s going to kill us all with this carry on, the selfish b— Hello? Yeah, listen, I’ll be with you as soon as—’
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