14.
A weak heart
Drumcliff, 1890–1918
Patrick Gerald Joseph Rys was a weak and sickly child. Food was scarce and, even with Ann’s apples to keep her from starvation, Mary Ellen had been hungry throughout her pregnancy.
Patrick was skinny, stammered and walked with a slight limp, but he knew from a very young age that his heart was the weakest thing about him. Not a man’s heart: strong, boisterous, tenacious, and hardy like the hearts of the boys in school, like their fathers’. Boys with strong hearts did not cry. They hardened their feelings so that they barely knew them, didn’t seem to feel fear.
Patrick, on the other hand, was indecisive, insecure, and afraid. He didn’t play with the other children for fear of ridicule. His teachers, the townsfolk, and the parish priest declared that a boy like him was doomed from the start. Not by his limp, his skinny limbs, his trembling legs, but because of his home. No man of strong heart could be raised by two women, the men of the town insisted. No normal boy could live with witches. And deep within the ugliest part of himself Patrick believed them. From his infancy, when not in the company of his mother and Ann, he was snapped at, roughed up, smacked, and beaten more than the other boys, the ones with fathers and siblings, the ones with wiry limbs and strong hearts. It wouldn’t have occurred to Patrick to see the correlation. That his heart was only weak because the men of the town made it so.
Patrick only saw the rough local boys who kicked pigs’ bladders around the town for lack of a real ball, who pinched the girls and punched each other, who dared themselves to jump into the river and could run around for hours on skinny, scraped legs that never trembled in the way Patrick’s left leg always had.
One evening on the road home from school Patrick came across a big group of them—the limpless, strong-hearted boys—clustered tightly around some loud game. He squared himself to walk as quickly as his shaky legs could carry him right past the scrum. Patrick didn’t notice until he was level with the shuffling cluster of boys that what they were circling was making noise. A heart-rending noise, a desperate noise, a noise of war and dying.
Patrick stopped despite himself. In between the boys’ stick legs there was a cat. Or rather there was a creature that had once been something resembling a cat. A black and mangy thing, more sickly skin than fur, more bone than sickly skin. What hackles it had were raised and it hissed and spat as if it were five times its size and actually stood a fighting chance against six boys who had no boots on their filthy feet but managed to kick anyway.
Patrick shouted “Stop!” before remembering that there was one of him and six of them.
The pack of boys turned from their original prey, who seized upon their distraction and streaked away, broken tail cocked like a fishhook and bony legs working so fast they were only a black blur.
They fell on him and it was like a nightmare, like the way he imagined hell when the priest talked about it on Sundays: a place where demons broke your bones and tore your skin so that your body was fire, but you deserved it because you’d been wicked, or cowardly, or wrong.
He never saw the cat again; it probably died in the bushes into which it disappeared, most likely close to death already, and Patrick’s sacrifice was meaningless.
Patrick was curled on the hard dirt, kicks landing on the softest parts of him, punches beating blood into the ground. Each blow was a crunch, a crack, a wet spreading. The world was made of pain, of the taste of blood and dirt, of the smell of his own piss soaking his trousers, of the screams and screeches of the boys.
When Patrick thought that he might die, the blows suddenly stopped. Through swollen eyes he saw the boys look up as one and gasp, “It’s the witch!” and they scattered, leaving Patrick lying broken on the ground with his arms over his head.
When he parted his elbows, he saw Ann. She stared at him for a full minute before speaking.
“Your ma has the supper ready” was all she said. And she took him in her arms like a baby wrapped in swaddling.
When his wounds had finally healed, Ann sent Patrick out to work. Mary Ellen didn’t even try to argue, although it was she who had insisted on his schooling, who harbored a secret hope of one day sending her son to the seminary. There was good money in being a priest. But both women knew there was no use in sending Patrick back to school.
As it turned out, there was also good money in farming, especially for a boy unknowingly promised to the farmer’s daughter.
* * *
—
John O’Connor was one of the few Catholic farmers in the area. He didn’t rent his house from a landowner; he didn’t work the fields for his lease. He’d built his business from his father’s scrap of land and from the prize bull that was his mother’s dowry.
He would never have hired a cripple like Patrick, but he had taken his wife to Ann and Mary Ellen when Patrick was still recovering from his beating. For years, John O’Connor and his wife had been waiting for a baby. They had tried everything the doctors had recommended, but doctors were expensive, and nothing had helped. So his wife had suggested they visit the witch women. Standing outside the cottage door, staring into the twisted orchard that surrounded the house, waiting for his wife to emerge from the mysterious room within, John O’Connor made himself a promise. If these women helped his wife get with child, he would owe them. It was a silent promise, a passing thought, but, once he had made it, the trees of the orchard trembled, leaves swaying although there was no wind. And when his wife emerged from the cottage, clutching a cloth bag of herbs, one of the women—the cripple boy’s mother, he thought, although no one was truly sure anymore which of the women was the mother—stared straight through him with her clear gray eyes and he knew his promise had been marked.
When John O’Connor’s daughter was born nine months later, he sent for the witch’s son.
* * *
—
On the farm, Patrick struggled. His left leg, which had always been weak, never recovered from his beating. He couldn’t keep up with the other boys. The hay they hauled was heavy, the land they worked was rough and rocky, and Patrick’s arms shook.
But he was good with the animals. The horses pulled the plows straighter when Patrick was at the whip. The chickens laid twice the amount of eggs when Patrick cleaned their coop. The cows let themselves be milked without kicking, allowed themselves to be led to slaughter without a sound.
Most importantly, Farmer O’Connor’s prize bull would allow nobody but Patrick to feed him or lead him from his pen. Everybody else the bull charged at. He had gored two men already.
John O’Connor was a superstitious man. The witches had given him a daughter, and he felt that meant he owed them. Farmer O’Connor worried that if he let Patrick go, the bull would stop mating and ensuring the O’Connors’ livelihood. So he kept the Rys boy on, and little by little Patrick became a man, his pay enough to bring home to Ann and Mary Ellen with a little left over to save for his own future.
Patrick’s future was called Catherine. Catherine O’Connor was a plain and lonely girl who sought out as friends the girls in school who were more beautiful and more interesting than she, in an effort to somehow become—or at least to seem—more beautiful and more interesting herself. At first it would work: As a friend, Catherine was kind and attentive, and the girls would soon confide in her, study with her, invite her to tea at their houses over the summer vacation, and go over to supper at hers. But one by one the girls would leave her. It happened the same way every year: After a few shared suppers, her most recent friend would stop coming over. She would avoid Catherine at school. When invited again, the girl would turn away, telling Catherine that she had found herself a better and more suitable friend.
While Catherine’s heart broke every summer, her father would secretly send his daughter’s friends to see Ann and Mary Ellen in their cottage. They would come in the night, silent, the farmer’
s cart waiting on the road out of sight. The women’s business relied on discretion, on maintaining their reputation. As they left, Ann advised them that unless they wanted to have to return for another infusion—or, even worse, to have the remedies fail and to be sent to the nearest mother-and-baby home in disgrace—they should avoid Catherine O’Connor’s father’s farm at all times, or, what might be more effective, find themselves a new friend.
John O’Connor, ever superstitious, felt he owed the women again. He saw their frowns, their pursed lips at the sight of him on market days. He knew they were discreet but wanted to ensure their silence. So, when Catherine finished school, her father suggested she marry the witch’s son.
Catherine was quickly made to understand that she did not have much choice in the matter, so, when Patrick Rys asked for her hand in marriage, she accepted.
15.
Haunted places
Sligo and Drumcliff, 2012
I knew what to do then, what to expect. I turned the last page over and saw an address near Drumcliff, County Sligo, scratched quickly there, a couple of lines of directions from a main road probably not far from here. Finn sat unmoving. Ida immediately took out her phone.
“It’s the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Like, literally.” She turned the phone toward me, zoomed out, then in again. “It’s not even on a road.”
But a suspicion was rising in me fast, like the tide. “Would you say it’s about an hour’s walk away?” I reread the start of the letter while she checked. Mandy had described where Ann Gorman and Mary Ellen lived. In the middle of the countryside, a good hour’s walk from the town.
“About that, yeah,” said Ida.
We smiled, bright and sudden, like two people who have learned to see what the other is thinking in a very short amount of time.
“There’s something wrong here,” Finn said. “This doesn’t make sense.”
But Ida and I weren’t listening. Heads bent over her phone, we mapped out our route. Drumcliff, or close by. North again.
“We could walk it,” I said. “It’s not properly dark yet, and we have our phones for flashlights.”
“Have you two even stopped to consider how crazy this is?” Finn said. “This doesn’t mean Mandy is leading us to her. She could have set all this up before she died. And, either way, what kind of a fucked-up treasure hunt did she think she was playing at?”
“We were supposed to do this together,” I told him. “As my birthday present. A road trip. She was meant to tell me all this in person. Instead, all I have are her letters. All Ida has. This is a thing we’re doing, with or without you.”
Finn softened. “I wasn’t backing out,” he said. “I just . . . Mandy’s funeral was yesterday. I know you’re grieving. Hurting. I can’t imagine. I just want you to be careful. Because if . . . if she was here last week, like Cale said, if she left all these letters before she died . . . then at the end of this, wherever that is, she’ll still be gone.”
I saved the location on my phone. “You’ll see,” I said. “You will.”
Cale had listened throughout the reading of the letter and was standing still behind the bar, eyes on the words I had just read aloud, customers forgotten, pints left to go flat on the bar. Her grandparents, who seemed to be used to this kind of behavior, circled around her, busily tending to the pub patrons. The sound of the last of the stallholders still chatting together after the market drifted in through the open doors.
This place was in the story I’d just read. This town was the one Mary Ellen arrived at after having walked the whole way from Donegal. The market that had been closing up outside when we arrived was the same one she’d come to 132 years ago, met Ann Gorman, carried my great-grandfather in her belly. We were right inside the story. The past was so close we could touch it.
Cale reached across me and touched one of the pictures on the wall by the bar. Heat rose in my cheeks as her arm brushed against mine.
“Look,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”
She pointed to the frame under which I’d found Mandy’s letter. It showed a sepia print of a large group, a family perhaps, under whose feet were written the words Sligo, 1877 in faded cursive script. Along the border of the frame a more modern hand had noted down names.
“Look,” Cale said again, with more urgency.
I read through them, stopped suddenly in the middle of the row. I trailed a fingertip up the dusty frame from the name—Ann Gorman—to a thin, blurry figure with light hair, blond maybe, had the picture been in color: a girl in her early twenties, unsmiling, flanked by an older couple, who were probably her parents.
The young woman’s name was Ann Gorman, Mandy had written. Ann had been cast out of her mother’s house two years before for reasons she did not like to discuss.
How many Ann Gormans were there in Sligo in 1877?
“You see?” said Cale.
“Ann Gorman,” I whispered. “Ann, who lived with Mary Ellen.”
“She’s family,” Cale said. “My—hang on.” She cocked her head as she worked it out. “My great-great-great-great-aunt.”
“What?”
Cale nodded at the photo. “That’s the oldest family picture we have. My granda found it a few years ago when he was researching our ancestry.”
“Whoa. It’s the same Ann,” I said, head spinning. “It’s why Mandy sent us here.”
Cale was nodding, eyes wide. “My granda always said there was a witch in the family. An herbalist. After she died, Granda found her recipes. They’re the ones we still use now. She had a small orchard, like we do. Her parents kicked her out. Like it says in the letter.”
“Because she was a witch?” asked Ida.
“That’s not what we were told,” Cale said. “My granda always says she was kicked out because her parents found her with another girl. Which I suppose back then was just as bad as witchcraft.”
A warmth entirely unrelated to the cider I’d been drinking rose through me.
“Which means,” Cale went on, “that if I’d been alive back then, I’d’ve been basically screwed on both counts.” She laughed.
I studiously avoided the meaningful look I could feel Finn boring deep into the side of my head.
He cleared his throat to get my attention and when that didn’t work he said, “That’s such a coincidence,” to Cale, while still staring at me.
Ida, who wouldn’t have known the real meaning behind Finn’s words, shook her head. “Not a coincidence,” she said. “Mandy knew all this. She sent us here because of it.”
“I knew it,” Cale said. “I knew there was a reason you came here. And your sister, the one you’re looking for. I knew I recognized her. Our families’ histories are tangled together.”
She shook her head in wonder, eyes dark and shining. She was so pretty it was hard to look at her for long.
Finn glanced at me, then at Cale. His mouth twisted into something that was part mischief, part innocence. “When do you get off work?” he asked. “Because we’re going to your—what was it?—great-great-great-aunt’s cottage, if you’re interested in coming too.”
He opened up the route on his phone and Cale tilted her head to squint at it. She gave a secret smile.
“That’s the long way,” she said. “Believe me. But I know the area better than a map. I can show you a shortcut.”
* * *
—
Just like that, we became four. The journey I had begun alone that morning—although it felt like several lifetimes ago already—had widened, expanded to include my best friend, the niece I never knew I had, and a mysterious half-stranger, who led us off-road through fields and forests, over streams and marshes, drinking in our story like it was fine apple cider.
Twilight misted itself across the sky, changed the cloudy blue to the purple of a new bruise, streaked with scarlet. It was almost
eight. Houses started to light up, windows shining in the growing dark, the people inside settling into their evenings as we walked past.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket: Rachel again. I didn’t answer, couldn’t face her voice, knew that the moment she realized I wasn’t really at Finn’s house, this journey was over. She’d be after me in a heartbeat.
My phone rang again.
“You know you should answer,” Finn said, holding aside a branch of brambles to let the rest of us pass.
I tucked my phone back into my pocket. “I don’t want to worry her,” I said.
“She’ll be over at my place in minutes, checking with my mam. She’ll know you’ve run off.”
The vibrating of my phone set my teeth on edge.
Finn gave me a stern look. “And my mam will know I’ve done a runner too.”
“Fine. I’ll text her.”
Got your voicemail.
I wrote quickly, the light of my phone in the darkness under the trees blinding me.
Sorry I haven’t called. Still at Finn’s. Just need to figure some stuff out. I’ll see you tomorrow, k? Love you too.
I let myself imagine Rachel’s face when I returned home with Mandy. The shock, the awe, the disbelief. Even deep in the worst of their fights, my sisters could never seem to separate completely. Even when Rachel refused to open the door to her twin, they sent messages, they spoke on the phone. There was a mystery to their relationship, a complicated dance of affection and resentment I didn’t understand.
When I found Mandy, I would ask them. Armed with the stories of our family’s past, I would sit them down and make them look at what had split them, what had happened at our mother’s funeral to cause their sisterhood such distress.
* * *
—
The evening sun started to set in earnest, and I picked up the pace, the thought of Rachel finding out I was gone spurring me on. She would not accept stilted messages and vague excuses for long. In the distance, a bird cried. A sound so like a keen, a scream.
All the Bad Apples Page 9