A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

  I am painfully aware, despite my excitement, that I am no scholar, that my presumptions could all be a leap too far, this may not be Eibhlín Dubh’s son at all. My evidence is only the evidence of my body – I weep when I see that his first daughter was named Ellen, and two of his sons Arthur and Cornelius. This discovery brings to mind again the vexed letters between his uncles, discussing the educational bourse to Paris: ‘yet Maurice, Connor tells me that you and your Brothers have nominated a younger Brother of his to the first vacancy’.

  Ferdinand married Catherine O’Mullane in St Mary’s of Cork city on 9 July 1817. The more I read his wife’s name, the more it perplexes me, because in it, I sense an echo whose origin I can’t quite pinpoint. It takes weeks before I realise why it sounds so familiar. I once read of another alliance by marriage between the O’Connells of Derrynane and the O’Mullanes of Whitechurch, when Eibhlín Dubh’s brother Morgan married a daughter of their family. That their children included the politician Daniel O’Connell means that many academics have already studied this family line, making it easy for me to find his mother, Catherine. She died in her mid-sixties, having survived her husband by nearly a decade. Rather than join him in the O’Connell family plot, she chose to be buried at her own ancestral graveyard at Newberry, under a slab on which her name was engraved as Catherina. I wonder whether Eibhlín Dubh might have chosen a burial among her kin on Abbey Island, and find myself longing again for the Bible in which her son wrote his family history.

  It takes over a year, but eventually I find the Bible, or the Bible finds me. I am sitting on the top floor of the city library when it happens, among books so old that they must be locked in glass cabinets, with two men who observe as visitors read. I have returned to double-check a date mentioned by the historian John T. Collins, when I notice that he subsequently published a supplement to his original article on Art’s death. How had I missed this? It is in this supplement that I find the Bible, at last, transcribed from Con’s hand into type. I read every word, chasing the moment when he will mention his mother, when all my questions will be answered, and I can find peace. My eye gallops the text from beginning to end, and then my head falls to the table with a thunk. In front of two men who watch silently, I start to cry.

  I, Cornelius O’Leary was married to Mary Purcell at St Anne’s Shandon on 25th day of April 1814 by the Rev. Richard Lee, Curate of said Church. Cornelius Ferdinand Purcell O’Leary was born on 6th day of October 1815 and christened by the Rev. Richard Lee on 11th day of February 1816 by my directions. He was privately baptized on the day of his birth at Glade Cottage, Glanmire, the property of Miss Lily, where we resided from 3rd of October 1815 to 25th of March 1816, having previously resided at No.2 (Grand) Parade Cork. He was confirmed at Newmarket Church by the Right Rev. Dr. Warburton, Bishop of Cloyne on 19th of September 1824. (Died at Upper Dromore on 21st of June, 1846)

  Goodwin Richard Purcell O’Leary was born at Clashmorgan Cottage on 19th March 1817. I baptised him an hour after his birth. He was christened by the Rev. Arthur Herbert, Rector of Mourne Abbey at Clashmorgan on 12th July 1817, there being present his aunt, Mrs James Purcell, and his two cousins, Susan and Anne Purcell. It was a private baptism. July 25th 1817. C. O’Leary.

  I was born at Rathleigh in the parish of Tohnadroman in the barony of West Muskerry on 28th day of August 1768 (as I have been told), and my father, Arthur O’Leary of said Rathleigh, esq., was shot at Carriganimy on the 4th day of May, 1773. My wife, Mary O’Leary, otherwise Purcell, was born at Springrove on the 18th of March, 1774. Written at Paris. October 1827, Cornelius O’Leary. (In. another hand) She died at Sunday’s Well, Cork, on the 1st day of January, 1830.

  (The said Cornelius O’Leary, Senr., died at Upper Dromore, aged 77 years, 11 months and 23 days, on the 26th day of August, 1846.)

  I make myself read the third paragraph again and again, as though rereading it might somehow squeeze her name from his words. There she is, our Eibhlín, as she is always is: gone. Another erasure from another male text. If I can’t find her here, in her own son’s hand, then I will find her nowhere. The reasonable part of my brain insists that I give up now, but I still can’t stop. What will it take to make me let go?

  So many archives have been digitised and opened to online public access by the time I embark on this adventure that my curiosity is not restricted to any opening hours. At 4 am on a Tuesday I am the only one awake, curled in a blanket, following Art’s brother as he runs through our city again and clambers into a boat. I shadow him all the way to America, where his name appears in Farley Grubb’s compilation of the many runaway servants, convicts, and apprentices advertised in old issues of the Pennsylvania Gazette. Then I follow him up to the door of the chapel he will marry in, watching his name appear in the marriage ledger, letter by letter. I follow him onwards through the lean years until his death so far from home. How many letters might have made their way over an ocean from the rooms of Raleigh to his own hand? How many texts might have flown from the thoughts of those he knew, to land in his own? In a quiet moment, as he turned towards the window, did he ever feel a shadow grow over his skin, and wonder whether he was being hunted or haunted? There would never have been anyone there when he looked up, no brother-ghost, no magistrate, no mercenary seeking a reward; if he felt eyes on him, it was only me, only me. I have followed him as I have followed them all. I followed Eibhlín Dubh until she faded into the gloom. I followed her son Con through three marriages and two sons, then followed each of those sons from birth to the ground. I followed Ferdinand and Cath to the baptismal font again and again, each time pausing to watch a small river ripple through their babies’ hair. I have given months of my life to the effort of creeping after these strangers, and for what? I remember when I thought that this task would put me in service, somehow, to a woman I admired, but my small skills, self-taught and slapdash, have faltered. I have gone as far as I can.

  Perhaps, I think, letting go would be the first true kindness I have shown Eibhlín Dubh. Even in this, I fail. I tell myself again and again that I must release her, but when I lie down to sleep, I grip her nothing-hand so hard that I wake to find four red moons imprinted in my palm.

  16. wild bees and their fizzy curiosities

  Cion an chroí seo agamsa

  All my heart’s fondness

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  I. BAD TABBY CAT

  An old woman dies, and I arrive at her house with a car full of children and her keys in my handbag. Her home is now ours – as are all the zeroes on our mortgage documents – but the rooms still feel like hers. After the FOR SALE sign has been removed, I hold tight to any small traces I find of this stranger’s life – her plastic pegs shivering on the clothes-line, her teacups tucked into each other, neat as dreams, the basket of soft dusting cloths under her sink. Beyond her hangers, the wallpaper she pressed onto the interior of her closets gives them the air of distinct rooms within rooms. I attend tenderly to each of her machines, scrubbing them and setting them whirling once more, resurrecting the clockwork of tumble dryer, microwave, washing machine, and dishwasher, until they are all spinning again. Slat by slat, our flatpacked bed is assembled where hers stood for fifty years; I hope that I will soon hold a new baby here. Twisting the Allen key clockwise to tighten the headboard, I wonder whether I will inherit her dreams.

  In the garden is a stray kitten, scrawny and wild. Sweet little thing, I think, lifting her by claw and hiss from her wilderness of brambles. I press her to my chest. The harder she struggles, the harder I squeeze. Mine, I think. She spits. I’ve read that it is a kindness to neuter strays, but when I set to googling local vets I am taken aback by the fee. I arrange an appointment nevertheless, and purchase a sack of cat food and a plastic carry-cage. If this cat costs me money, she also costs me my husband’s ire. It’s not that he loathes cats, he says, or not only that, it’s the fact that I continue to foist further responsibilities on us without ever pausing to ask: more babies, more plans, and
more pets. I shrug. Let him be angry, she is worth the price. My fierce green-eye, I delight in her delight. When I spy on her tossing the gruesome corpse of a mouse in her paws, puppeting it back to life, I think how alike we are, how alike. She grows fond of me too, and takes to sleeping in our bed, kissing her cheek against my chin every evening until I am drunk on the golden whiskey of my own benevolence. My husband kicks in his sleep.

  The calendar carries us to the day when the vet will perform the cat’s operation. I lock her in the plastic cage and pay him to knife her and steal all her future kittens. She was right to be suspicious.

  When she wakes, she staggers away from me fast, lurching groggily through the garden. I chase her with my arms wide open. Here, kitty, here kitty-kitty.

  II. WHIRL AND BURBLE

  I love the garden and the garden loves me, but it isn’t mine, not really. I will always share it with the woman who began it, who arrived in a sun-dress to a newly built council house and cared for this garden all her life. I don’t know where she is now, but her bulbs are buried here. The very first morning that I walked through her garden, her daffodils’ buttery hellos were easily translated: they nodded. I nodded back.

  To work this soil is to sift an archaeology of a stranger’s thought. Each time I find an old bulb or the splinters of a broken cup planted for drainage, I am thankful for her labour. With every month, more of her flowers lift their heads from the soil, waving polite hellos in pinks and yellows and blues. I don’t know their names, but I think of her in every small act of weeding and pruning, of watering and fertilising. I pat the earth with gentleness. My nails are always dirty, my palms shovel-blistered, my knees drenched, but I don’t care. I am happy here. In mapping my own additions to this small plot, I choose with care, because I hold a specific desire for this place: I want to lure the bees to me.

  Plastic seed-trays soon proliferate all along our windowsills, each square of soil brimming with a velvet darkness from which tiny seedlings peek. I love the sprouting of their infant limbs, how they wear their seedcases like jaunty bonnets. Outside, my husband thuds a slow metronome, heaving his pickaxe back and crash and back and crash, hacking me a margin of new earth. When we stop for coffee he is quieter than usual, but if I don’t pay him much heed, it is only because I am busy thinking of the bees.

  Of the many species of bumblebee in Ireland, I’ve read that one third may be extinct within a decade. The cat watches from the wall as I set to work, a clumsy gardener who digs not by trowel or spade but by dented soup spoon. Every day, I am digging and grunting and raking, heaving compost from the shed, setting plump armfuls of plants and bulbs, and patting them down. Each new plant I choose is both nectar and pollen-heavy, every clump of colour designed to bloom as a lure. Here will be sunflowers and snowdrops, I tell my husband, holding his hand tight, and over there, lavender and fuchsia. Our peripheries will hold hedges of hawthorn and hazel, I’ll lure honeysuckle along the walls, and we’ll abandon a fat ribbon of untouched wilderness beyond, in which brambles and dandelions will flourish. It will be so beautiful, I say, and press my smiling lips to his in excitement. I am determined to rewrite the air here until it sings the songs of long ago; I want it rewound and purring with bees.

  We may imagine that we can imagine the past, but this is an impossibility. As a child I was so enchanted by history that I would sometimes sit by a stream and try to daydream myself back in time. To the hurryburble of water, my mind set to work, forgiving first the distant buzz of traffic, and then, through clumsy acts of further deletion, trying to subtract all the other resonances of modernity. This, I told my ears, this soundscape, yes, but minus cars, minus tractors, minus airplanes, minus the sad cow-howl of industrial farming, minus it all, until only stream-lilt and bird-chirp remain. Now, I would tell myself, this, this must have been what the past really sounded like. I was wrong. Long ago, the air was never as quiet as I presumed. It was alive, strumming the tune of those sisters so accustomed to drudgery, the background chorus of those who always hum as they work.

  III. AN OPENING OPENING

  As the new plants unfurled into sunlight, the bees began to arrive. I dragged a cobwebbed lawn-chair from the garage and spied on their busy rumps as they browsed the gifts I’d grown for them. The cat padded over to sniff my shin. I watched the bees and thought of the poet Paula Meehan. I’d heard her describe how cherished bees were in medieval Ireland, when entire tracts of our Brehon laws provided a legal framework for their behaviour. On a cockled vellum page of the fourteenth-century volume Senchus Mór in Trinity College, some of those old Bechbretha directives survived. Should a person happen upon a roving cloud of bees, it said, they could legally adopt it. Should a swarm be found trespassing, they would be allowed some seasons to mooch about freely, but if such pollen thievery continued into a fourth year, the neighbour would be due a swarm of her own as compensation. Bees flew through the law and into folklore. I overheard their song in one of my favourite stories from the Schools’ Collection archives, transcribed in Waterford in the 1930s. Siobhán Ní Lonáin was thirteen when she copied this tale from her mother’s voice to paper, a female text in flight. I translate it as follows:

  Long ago, deep inside the cliffs at An Rinn, there was a lios. One day a man clambered down, not knowing what was within. Suddenly, the cliff opened and hundreds of bees flew out. Then a small man emerged and brought him inside the cliff and down a tall stairs. At the bottom was a room where he found many fairies, all singing and dancing. For three years, he was held there, and when at last he left, they gave him a pot of gold. I got this story from my mother. Age 40.

  Whenever I return to this tale I feel it surge into a vessel of sound. Rewind it. Listen again, now: hear the heave and hurt of the sea, the cold drip of the cliff smeared with pale splatters, a man’s breath, torn and tearing as he clambers down the stone, all grunt and grip and grunt and grip, and beyond those sounds of human exertion, beyond the rage-squawks of seabirds, beyond the little give and sing of pebbles, another sound is beginning. It comes from within – no – it hums from within, from the unfathomable distance that exists in the cliff’s depths, through all its hidden caves and chambers. The man senses the sound before he hears it. He feels the air glitch in his fingertips, a sudden rumbling in his chest, and a resonance behind his breastbone. Still, he clings to the stone. Now the cliff is rasping itself ajar with a heave, and he watches, agog, as that crack grows, an opening, opening. Within, rushing fast, faster than drizzle, a city of bees is in motion. The lush hum of a single bee is a sound we can conjure easily, but we must magnify that sound now, through repeated multiplication. More. More. Listen: here they come.

  The man enters.

  The cliff closes.

  All the years he is locked inside that architecture of hive and honeycomb go unspoken. The seasons spin on without him. When finally he succeeds in escaping those rooms of dance and song and enchanted bees, his parting gift is – what else? – gold. He tucks that sweet glow under his oxter as he strides out of the cliff and out of this story, into some future plot we listeners are not privy to. The final words of this text occur in an utterance that is at once simple, and yet holds such power: ‘I got this story from my mother.’

  IV. WHAT I COULDN’T BEAR TO TELL THE BEES

  There is so much more to this old tale that I long to know. What was the man doing out on a cliff in the first place? Where did the bees go? Do his kin still tell this story of his, or has it been forgotten? Do the ancestors of those bees still wander that same cliff, fumbling through honeysuckle bells?

  The marginal plot of the bees is so much more interesting to me than the man’s triumphant acquisition of gold, and yet they are so quickly abandoned as peripheral characters in favour of the human narrative. The first question I would ask Siobhán’s mother would be, ‘What happened to the bees?’ I can imagine her exasperated answer, as she hurries on to her next task. ‘They’re only bees.’

  They are only bees, it’s true. In the absence of
the neurological embellishments that make moral beings of humans, we assume other creatures’ lives – their unique imperatives and plots – are somehow lesser by comparison with our own. However, a bee, being a bee, will accept her own death to let her sister bees live, a decision with which any human would surely struggle. The opposite of selfishness, this – if she stings, it is to protect others from danger, knowing that she will soon fall, sputtering in the dirt, donating her life so that others may survive.

  How lonesome I’d be, if the bees left the sweetshop I’ve built for them. I’ve done all I can to hearten them, I have hummed to them, I have fed and sheltered and loved them. I want to keep them here at all costs – even if it means lying to them. ‘Tell the bees,’ people used to say, ‘tell them of any bereavement, any family change, you must tell the bees or they’ll fly away.’ I had a secret I knew I should tell the bees, but I’d kept it to myself, because I would stop at nothing to prevent them from leaving.