Novelties Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction

by John Crowley

  At the other end of the house the unbarred door was opened and shut again. She felt a gust of wind that made her shiver.

  “Bar the door, Cormac,” she said. She turned with reluctance from the window and went into the narrow tangle of hallway that led to the door. “You’re a fool, Cormac Burke,” she said, not quite as gently as she had intended, “to come all the way up here in this weather, and to tell me about the ships, is it?”

  She stopped then, because the man who turned to face her from barring the door wasn’t Cormac Burke. She didn’t know him. The water coursing down his mantle and the brim of his hat spattered rapidly on the floor; there was a puddle around his booted feet, and when he stepped toward her the boots made a sodden sound.

  “Who are you?” she said, stepping back.

  “Not the one you named. One very wet.”

  They stood facing each other for a long moment. In the darkness of the hall she couldn’t see his face. His Irish had a Scotch intonation, and sounded wet as well, as though the water had got into his throat.

  “Might I,” he said at last, “claim some hospitality of this house? A fire, if you have such a thing? I wouldn’t trouble you long.” He held up both hands, slowly, as though to show he wasn’t armed. The two hands seemed to glow faintly in the dark hall, as silver objects or certain seashells do in dimness.

  She came to herself. “Yes, come in,” she said. “Warm yourself. I didn’t mean to refuse the house.”

  He stripped off his wet mantle, heavy with water, and followed her into the comparative warmth and light of the main room of the house. He stood a moment looking around him, seeming to take inventory of the place, or as though trying to remember if he had ever been in it before. Then he went to the chimney corner and hung his mantle and hat on a peg there.

  “We get few guests,” she said.

  “I think that’s odd,” he said. His hair was lank and gray, and his face was white like his hands, though now in the light of the fire and the rushes they seemed not to glow spectrally as they had in the hall. His eyes were large and pale and with some melancholy humorousness in them that was disconcerting.

  “Odd? We’re far off the traveled roads. It’s a long climb up.”

  “But it’s the finest house nearby. A traveler who put out the effort might be likely to find more than a cup of water for himself.”

  She ought to have resented this calculation, but she couldn’t, he said it so frankly. “You must be a skilled traveler then,” she said.

  “Oh, I am.”

  “And from where?”

  He said a mouth-filling Scotch name she didn’t recognize and said his name was Sorley.

  “A kinsman of Sorley Boy?”

  “No, not of that clan,” he said with a faint smile that made her wonder if he was lying, and then wonder why she wondered. “And what’s your name?”

  “Ineen,” she said, and looked away.

  “And right too,” he said, for Ineen is only “girl” in Irish.

  “Ineen Fitzgerald,” she said. To another that would have stopped further inquiry. She felt it wouldn’t with this Sorley; and in fact he asked her what one with such a name did living in this northwestern place.

  “There’s a tale in that,” she said, and turned away to the window again. The Spanish ship was stove in now, the breach in its side was evident, it was shipping water and seemed to pant like a dying bull as it rose and fell on the foamy waves. There was flotsam, boards, barrels. Did men cling to them? With a sudden fear she realized that the sea might not take them all, not all those dozens. Some might live, and gain the beach. Spanish men. Spanish soldiers. What would happen then?

  “They are only men after all,” said Sorley.

  So intent was she, had she been all that day, on the ships that she didn’t find it odd that he seemed to have read her thoughts.

  “All up and down the coast,” he said, “from Limerick to Inishowen, they’ve been putting in, or trying to; breaking up, most of them. Most of the men drowning.”

  “Why have they come? Why so many?”

  “No reason of their own. They never wanted to. They meant to sail and conquer England. The sea and the wind drove them here.”

  She turned to him. The fire behind him seemed to edge his gray hair with light, to give him a faint, wavering outline.

  “How do you come to know so much of it?” Ineen asked him.

  “Travel with eyes and ears open.”

  “You came up from the south, then.”

  He answered nothing to this. The wind rose to a sudden shriek, and the rain made a fierce hissing in the thatch of the roof. Outside, something loose, a bucket, a rake, went blowing across the yard, making a noise that startled her. In the loft, her father groaned and began the Commination: “Cursed be he that putteth his trust in Man, that taketh Man for his salvation…”

  Sorley looked up toward the dimness of the loft. “What others are in the house?”

  “My father. Ill.” Mad and dying, the word meant. “Servants. Gone down now to the beach, to watch the ships.”

  “When the Spanish come on the beach, they will be murdered. Half-drowned they’ll come out of the sea and each be struck by a mattock or an axe, or be stoned or sworded to death, till all those not drowned will be just as dead.” He said all this calmly and with certainty, as though it had already happened, perhaps years ago. “Ill luck to come up out of the sea, alive, and speak no Irish.”

  “They never would!” She—a Geraldine, a Norman, of the oldest and highest Norman aristocracy Ireland had, however she might have fallen—had no illusions about the villagers below her; but to murder the Spanish, their true friends, only because they were Spanish—that was too monstrous, too ridiculously savage. Sorley only smiled, his thin fixed smile; she had begun to think he smiled only the way hawks frowned, out of his nature somehow and not his mood.

  “Would you have anything to eat?” he said. “I seem to have come a long way on yesterday’s dinner.”

  Called to herself again, reminded of how inhospitable she’d grown in her long exile, she blushed, and went to see what might be in the house. On an impulse she drew a jug of red wine from one of the remaining tuns. When she returned with this, and some herring and a loaf, he was sitting on a stool by the fire, looking at his long pale hands.

  “You see how much sea has blown in today,” he said. She looked more closely, and saw that his hands were dusted with a fine white glowing powder. “Salt,” he said. His face was dusty the same way. She accepted his reason for this without thinking that, while stones and driftwood left long in the sea may become salt-encrusted like that, she had never been, though she often spent whole days walking in sea spray along the beach. She brought him a bowl of water, and he dipped his hands into it; it seemed to hiss faintly. When he withdrew them wet, they had again become glistening and faintly opalescent.

  “Now it’s seawater in the bowl,” he said. “Look into it, Ineen Fitzgerald.”

  She did look in, apprehensive and not knowing why. The bowl was old dark crockery, thick and cracked. For a strange moment she did seem to see the whole sea, as though she were a gull, or God, looking down on it; the ripples Sorley’s hands had made in it lapped its edge as tides lap the edges of the world. She saw something moving over the face of the waters, indistinct and multiform, as though the creatures might be rising to look up at her as she looked down; then she saw it was only a faint reflection of her own face.

  She laughed, and looked at Sorley, who was smiling more broadly. Her apprehension was gone. She felt as if she had been playing a children’s game with him, and it seemed to make an intimacy between them; an elation almost like the elation of nakedness, of childhood games played naked. It was the same fierce indifferent elation she had felt watching the ships. She was vaguely aware that a charm had been worked on her, a charm like the charm in fast sea breezes and scudding cloud, a charm to make her free.

  Stop it now, mad girl, she told herself, too much alone, sto
p all that. She pulled her shawl around her. Sorley ate herring and bread, delicately, as though he didn’t need it for sustenance. He poured wine into a battered cup and tasted it.

  “Canary,” he said. “And fine, too.”

  Without really considering it, she took a cup for herself and filled it. “What do you do abroad, Sorley?” she said.

  “Looking for a wife, Ineen Fitzgerald,” he said, and drank.

  I am a man upon the land

  On the beach, Cormac Burke stared helplessly at the oblique lines of waves folding together and dashing against the beach with a noise like a rising but never climaxing peal of thunder. His voice was raw from shouting against it. A few shards and pieces were still coming in on the tide: a window frame, a barrel stave. Strung out across the beach in tight, self-defensive knots, the villagers ran from one to another of these treasures and exclaimed over them.

  He had tried to organize them into a troop of sorts, armed men in front, then other men, the women to salvage, a priest for the dying. Hopeless. He had tried to explain to them that there were three things that must be done: aid should be given to the hurt; the goods should be rounded up and put in piles; the soldiers must be disarmed and, for the moment, made prisoner, for the English would certainly see them as invaders and any Irish who helped them as rebels. Their arms could be taken from them and hidden; later…But it was useless. The sea was mad; and there was no organizing these kerns. They went their own way.

  On the beach, now nearly covered in sand, lay three—four—bodies. If he had not known them to be Spaniards he wouldn’t now as darkness came on have known they were men. But he knew; he had rushed toward them with the others when they came tumbling from the sea, staggering up like apes from the withdrawing water. They had reached out hands to him: Auxilio. Succoro, Señores. And the Irishmen with him, crying out like animals, their faces distended so that he seemed not to know them at all, had murdered them; had almost murdered Cormac when he tried to stop them.

  Now he stood farther off, afraid to watch any longer to see more Spaniards come ashore, knowing he would not again try to interfere in the villagers’ madness, yet unable to leave. If he had a gun. Tears of frustration and helpless rage mixed with the rain clouding his vision. He turned away from the sea and looked up to where, just raising itself above a coign of rock, the roof of the Fitzgeralds’ house could be seen. Was there a light burning? He thought there was.

  And what did you do when they came ashore, Cormac?

  I could do nothing, and the Spanish were murdered, Ineen.

  He pulled his feet from the muddy sand and began to work his way down the shingle, watching the sea and the knots of men, and, far off, the ship, whose masts were now parallel to the slabs of sea that bore it up.

  Little ken I my bairn’s father

  It wasn’t the wine, not entirely: though when she went to draw another jug she noticed that her lips and nose itched a little, growing numb, and that filling the jug she was slapdash; she spoke aloud to herself, saying she shouldn’t have babbled on to this stranger, and laughed.

  She had told him about her father, who had been a priest, and was a cousin of the Earl of Kildare, and how the English had persuaded him to come into the new dispensation and he would be made a bishop by the queen; how he did so, despite all his kin’s hatred of him for it; how he renounced his vows and the True Church, and married the frail daughter of an English lord in Dublin.

  And was it that his family hated him for it; or that his wife despised him and lived in a continual state of loathing and shock at Irish ways and the Irish until she died, soon after Ineen was born, leaving her loathing behind her, solid as furniture; or that after their promises, and in spite of a hundred letters her father sent to London, and twenty visits to Dublin, the English never began raising her father toward the promised bishopric, not so much as a wardenship—apparently satisfied that promises had been enough to draw him out of his church; or was it that in the end he had lost even the false and empty parish the English had given him, where he preached to nearly nobody, because at last Desmond—his distant cousin too—rose up against the English and heresy, and her father had to be taken off by sea lest he be hanged by his flock: was it that terrible story, or was it God’s vengeance at his defection, that had made him mad? The English, as though tossing him away, had placed him in this northern isolation and given him a piece of the wine trade—wine! that with his breath he had once altered in its red heart to the blood of Jesus!—and let him live on a tariff he collected, a useless middleman. Was all that enough to make him mad? Or was God’s vengeance needed?

  “It hasn’t made you mad, Ineen,” Sorley said, and she saw that the story had washed over him without altering his features. “And Desmond is dead, who fought for Mother Church. Whose vengeance was that, then?”

  She returned now with the brimming jug, and Sorley saluted it with his cup. She filled the cups; two drops splashed out and stained the linen of her sleeve as quick as blood. She dipped the sleeve in the bowl of water, pressing water through it absently. “I wouldn’t like to drown,” she said. “Not of any way.”

  “Avoid the sea.”

  “They say men drowning can see treasures lost in the sea—ships sunk, gold, jewels.”

  “Do they? And do they have candles with them to light up the darkness?”

  She laughed, wiping her mouth. Her father cried out, dreaming; a sob, as though someone were stifling him with a pillow. Another cry, louder. He called her name; he was awake. She waited a moment, feeling vaguely ashamed. Maybe he would sleep again. But again he called her name, his voice edged now with that piteous panic she knew well, which grated on her senses like a rasp. “Yes, Father,” she said gently, and went to the press in the corner, from which she took a jar of powder; some of this she mixed into a cup of wine, and, having lit a rushlight at the fire, carried the wine and the light carefully up into the loft.

  Her father’s white face looked out from the bed curtains, his white cap and large pinkish eyes making him look like a terrified rabbit looking out from its burrow.

  “Who is it in the house?” he whispered urgently. “Cormac?”

  “Yes,” she said, “only Cormac.”

  She had him drink the wine, and kissed him, and said a prayer with him; then when he groaned again she laid him firmly down, speaking calmly but with authority, as she might to a child. He lay back on the pillows, his stricken eyes still searching her face. She smiled, and drew his curtains.

  Sorley sat unchanged by the fire, turning his cup in his fingers.

  Why had she lied to her father?

  “They say too,” she said, taking a gulp of wine, “that there’s a bishop under the sea. A fish bishop.” She had seen a picture in a bestiary of her father’s.

  “Certainly,” Sorley said. “To marry and bury.”

  “What rites does he use, do you think?”

  “And the mackerel is the fish’s bawd. Men!” He shook his head, smiling. “They think even the fish live by the laws they live by. A little handful of folk, huddled up on the dry land that’s not a tenth part of the size of the seas, and dreaming of bishops for the fish.”

  “How is it, then, in the sea?” she said, for some reason not doubting he knew.

  “Come with me and see,” he said.

  Far less the land that he goes in

  Where they went, that night, was not seaward though. Cold as his touch was, it was strong, and she would not have been able to resist it even if she’d chosen to do that, which she did not choose. She thought to press her hand against his mouth so that he would not cry aloud, but he was not one who cried aloud.

  She slept like one dead, and he was gone when she awoke, and her father too, calling from the loft, but she paid no mind, and got up; felt run down the inside of her thigh a dribble of slime she thought might be blood, but no, she hadn’t bled.

  He was not gone far. How she knew it she could not have said. She wrapped herself in a warm mantle and went out in
to the day, where the storm wrack still filled the sky and the sea. The ship she had watched could still be seen, dismasted and clinging to the rocks like unswallowed fragments in a mastiff’s mouth. She went down along the way to the beach, and it wasn’t long before she saw him striding ahead of her, holding his hat on his head for the offshore breeze. She passed the place where last night the men from the Spanish ship had come ashore; their bodies lay dark and shapeless as seals, half-buried in sand: no place a human soul could rest; they must be buried as Christian men, whatever. She would ask Cormac Burke to help.

  He had not turned at all to look at the bodies of the men on the beach, kept on till the turn of the cove and the flat rocks that went out into the sea, where the seals did sometimes lie to bake their cold bodies. He was after tossing away his hat, and then his cloak, and when he came to the rocks he was as naked as he had been in her bed in the night. And when he bent to reach into the seaweed and the crusted stones wedged in the great split of the rocks and found something there to don, she knew whom she had had in her. She had known all along, but now she knew to see and to think: to think what would come of this, now and in the months and years to come.

  And he has tae’en a purse of gold

  And he has placed it on her knee

  Saying “Give to me my little young son

  And take thee up thy nurse’s fee.

  “And though shalt marry a gunner good

  And a right fine gunner I’m sure he’ll be

  And the very first shot that e’er he shoot

  Shall kill both my young son and me.”

  THE WAR BETWEEN THE OBJECTS AND THE SUBJECTS

  HOW LONG THE WAR has gone on is not known, not even to the subjects; its beginning is not remembered by the objects, who cannot remember anything at all, being objects. It began with the opening of metaphorical eyes on the subjects’ part, and the appearance before those eyes of the other, obdurate and irreducible—the object. The insult has never been forgiven on the one side, nor acknowledged by the other, which would maintain its entire innocence if it were capable of maintaining anything beyond its simple existence.