All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  But Mandy’s interest was piqued. She poked and pried, finally got out of our extended family members that there was a connection with the Ryses and Sligo. She spent three weeks traveling around the county, following town gossip and local history, until a tenuous lead brought her to a long-abandoned cottage in an overgrown orchard.

  In the middle of the burnt-out ruins was the huge gleaming skull of a bull. Inside its jaws was Mary Ellen’s story.

  Maybe Mandy had found Lizzie’s diary, where she wrote every story her sister had told her about the home, where she had pieced together the details of Mary Ellen’s life from letters her grandmother had hidden in the barn with the bull. Maybe that’s where Lizzie left her diary after Julia died: safe and hidden in the skeleton jaws of her sister’s prize bull.

  Or maybe the bull came back to life, opened his mouth and spoke.

  Mandy had a name now, an idea of where our family history began. She took the bull skull for protection and kept researching, digging through our family’s past, reconstructing its history, drawing the roots of its scraggly tree. Piece by piece she put it together, but it wasn’t until the day she left, the day of my seventeenth birthday, when she’d put the final branches in place, that she had a hunch: had suddenly considered that there might be a way to break the curse.

  To do that, she thought, she had to go back to the very beginning. To the apple-tree sapling. To the end of the world.

  She left her notes behind. The papers and books and diaries that had been stacked in folders on her desk. A decade of research.

  I found them, the morning after my birthday, in Mandy’s room with her note. I brought them home.

  I wrote the letters. It took days, while Rachel spoke to the police, while they searched Mandy’s flat, while her car was found, while they interviewed the witness who’d seen my sister falling to her death.

  While Rachel sobbed and stared into space, organized the funeral, fended off our family’s meddling and backhanded insults to the memory of our sister, I locked myself in my room and wrote.

  I scratched down the story as though I were possessed, and the words came out of my pen in Mandy’s handwriting. It felt like she was talking to me. It was the closest I could get to her. Maybe it was her working through me. It was all so much like a dream.

  Follow, follow.

  I knew I had to follow, suspected that once Ida had heard my story she would want to join this pilgrimage, recognizing the desperate need to understand where you came from. I kept the stack of letters in my backpack—later, my pockets—and placed each one when nobody was looking, and every time it was as if Mandy’s hand left them, not mine.

  Belief was a fraying rope bridge over a stormy sea. Strand by silver strand, I unraveled.

  * * *

  —

  When I stepped outside, there was a bull.

  Maybe it wasn’t a white horse that carried the warrior Oisín on its back to the fairy land of Tír na nÓg. Maybe it was never a horse. Maybe it was a bull. I climbed onto his back.

  Bulls travel fast. You wouldn’t think it, great beasts that they are. Especially this one. This huge gray mountain of a monster, horns twice as big as my forearms, hair coarse and legs long, loping across the countryside like an animal on a mission. But then I suppose we both were.

  The journey would have taken an hour and a half on two human feet, but on this enormous creature the trek was halved. We crested the coast, then veered inland, across fields and boglands that nobody was allowed to cut anymore to make turf for the fires in the way they used to.

  I don’t know how I knew he was the same bull as the one in the story, as the one who’d been haunting my steps since I left Dublin, the same as the one whose skull I’d been blessed with protection by Mandy years ago. But I knew, deep in the bones of my own skull. Mary Ellen had cursed him never to rest if he failed to protect her granddaughter. Maybe Mandy had called him back to protect me. Maybe my ancestors worked through her the way they did through me.

  I wasn’t afraid. I knew where I was going.

  I could tell we were close to the shore by the wind, wild and restless. This coastline kept its own climate, and right now it was mirroring all the storms I’d ever known. It stole my breath. It tangled my hair. It chilled my skin to a dull gray. It screamed.

  The bull took me down, down, down the steep steps and the dunes until his hooves sank into sand. I slid off his back and my muscles hurt as if it had been me running across the landscape. What was it the ghosts in the laundry had said? Julia’s and Cecilia’s voices in whispers; Nellie at the window, candle lit, ready to jump. The landscape remembers. Pain stays on in places like this.

  On the beach, the bull left me like everybody else had left me. He turned and walked away. I wanted to call out to him, ask him to stay, to hold my hand through all this, but he didn’t have any hands, and at this point I couldn’t feel mine either. I was numb to the bone. No hands, no arms, no feet, no heart. My voice was just a scream on the wind.

  Listen, said the ghosts. Listen.

  There were big black crows flying out over the sea and I knew that was where I needed to go somehow, the knowledge clear and immediate. I took off my shoes and left my bag on the shore.

  In this country, everything happened in the water. I had seen the banshee in the sea and Ida thought she’d seen Mandy in the rain, watched over by stone angels. Iron and bronze. I wondered how they decided whom to make statues of. Daniel O’Connell and all the angels, Jesus on everything, all these Marys, but only the virgins, not the Magdalenes. Our Lady, Star of the Sea, who watched over Dollymount Strand and Bull Island. Who watched over the ferries to England. She should have been the Magdalene, not the Virgin. Crying over the baby at her breast.

  “Our Lady, Star of the Sea,” I said to the water. “Different sea. This one’s an ocean. Goes all the way to America, like a bunch of babies with different names on boats and planes. Never to be seen again.”

  A voice came from the top of the dunes, called down to me on the wind. “Deena, stop, you don’t have to do this!”

  But I did. I didn’t have a choice. None of us did, all the bad apples.

  Follow, follow.

  I thought the shock of the first wave would bring all my blood to the surface, fill in my skin like a watercolor painting. But I could barely feel the water. So I went in deeper.

  Numb feet, numb knees. Numb belly when I got in that far. I might not have been in water at all. Rising, rising, rising numb where my breasts used to be. The rolls of my waist, the swell of my belly over tight jeans, an extra hole in the belt I borrowed from Rachel. Thighs that rubbed together when I ran. All that, gone. The skin pale and prone to flushing. The freckles like grains of sand that got stuck and decided to stay. Stray hairs everywhere that I plucked and shaved. Spots and pimples. Nerve endings. Endings.

  My neck barely felt the tug of the ocean. My lips barely felt the water’s kiss. If my lungs were this numb already, how would I know that I was drowning? If I was this close to dying, how could I tell I wasn’t already drowned?

  When I went under, I tasted apples.

  Dear Deena,

  It’s almost finished. I don’t have much time. I’m leaving, but I’m not leaving you. I wouldn’t do that. The story is almost done and after this you’ll find me. I believe with all my heart you will.

  27.

  Happy families, part II

  Sligo, 1938–1995

  It took Julia Rys almost sixty years to find her son.

  Julia never married. Never wanted to. She never had children after William, her only son. After she returned to her parents, she set herself to work.

  She still felt a compulsion to clean, to scrub and bleach each piece of fabric in the house. Her clothes, the towels, and bed sheets were always worn and soft from so many washes. But in the laundry she had hated the heat and steam, the thick gray
walls of the building closing in around her, so she was happy to be out in the fields. Little by little, she took over the farm, getting in good dairy cows to mate with her favorite bull and selling their milk all over the country. She would travel herself to shops and pubs, to schools and hospitals, saying, “Just wait, just taste. I know you think the bigger dairies’ milk tastes better, but just wait till you taste mine.”

  And it was true that there was something different to the milk from the O’Connor cows—for John O’Connor, Julia’s grandfather, whom I’m sure you remember, still owned and oversaw the farm. Still watched his granddaughter from afar as she fitted the cows with the metal teats and patted their hides with her small freckled hands.

  There was a certain sweetness to the milk that Julia brought. A certain crispness to the cheese. A strange tart taste to the cream. It tasted almost like apples.

  By the time Julia was twenty-one, when she had been home for around three years, she was all but running the farm. Her parents left the entire dairy in her care and although her mother often asked when she would find a husband, form a family, her father always shushed his wife.

  “We’ve Lizzie for that,” he told her. “And without Julia this farm would be near its end.”

  What Julia never said to her mother, but always wanted to, was always on the brink of blurting out, was that she did have a family. She had a son. A baby who had her whole heart, kept it with him wherever he was, which, she hoped with whatever heart she had left, was with a good and happy adoptive family. She had no way of knowing what had happened to William—even if she had asked the nuns, they never would have told her.

  Julia inherited the farm when her grandfather died. It was strange, the town thought, that John O’Connor should bypass Catherine, his own daughter, and his son-in-law, Patrick, who had run it for years, and leave the farm to Julia in his will.

  It was almost as strange as the circumstances of his death.

  * * *

  —

  John O’Connor died on St. John’s Eve four years after the night he brought Julia home from the dance on her seventeenth birthday. That particular year, the night Julia turned twenty-one, the dance was held in an unused field of the O’Connor farm. A makeshift barn was rigged up, an echoey dance hall with creaking wooden floorboards. The farmhands carried long tables from the house, unloaded chairs stacked in trucks from all over the parish. A generator hummed, lending light to the shortest night.

  The morning of the dance, Julia, in freshly scrubbed clothes, let herself into the bull’s enclosure and led him, palm on his gray hide, into the neighboring field. Then she stood a moment on the fence beside the bull, reached over to stroke his horns, then climbed carefully off the fence, not wanting to dirty her freshly pressed dress, her white stockings.

  “I’ll be back to bring you home in the morning,” she told him, and she pressed a palm against his warm, bristled cheek.

  * * *

  —

  The morning after the St. John’s Eve dance, John O’Connor was found dead in the neighboring field, his prize bull watching impassively from the farthest fence. Drank too much poitín, the people said sadly. An accident. A tragedy. Such a shame. Pillar of the community.

  For weeks afterward, the whole of Julia Rys’s farm smelled of sweet, fresh apples. The bull’s horns gleamed.

  * * *

  —

  After that, Julia owned the farm. When her parents grew older and moved to a smaller house closer to town, she, Lizzie, and Lizzie’s husband and their three children lived there happily and manned the dairy.

  It was only many years later that Julia could bring herself to speak to her sister about her time in the home, her work in the laundry, her baby. Julia let her words fall like a flood of tears. Lizzie clung to her sister and shared, wretched, in her grief.

  When the mother-and-baby home Julia had given birth in closed in 1993, when Julia was well into her seventies, she wrote to the council to try—not for the first time—to find her only son. It took two years of calls and visits, letters, threats, and tears, but finally the council gave her a name. She expected them to have changed it—the nuns, the records, his adoptive parents. She had spent most of her life clinging to the hope that her son had been part of a loving family, in America hopefully, where times seemed kinder than they did in Ireland, where he could grow up with opportunities and family, be whoever he wanted to be.

  She cried for three weeks when she learned that he had spent his childhood in the home, his adolescence in the industrial school. Her sister held her in a way she had not been able to do as a teenager, years of wounds wrapped up in each other’s arms. And, as Julia mourned her son’s imagined childhood, Lizzie and her children went about contacting the man he had become.

  Three days after they had sent a letter to William Rys’s address, Julia collapsed. She’d been feeding the bull when she’d felt a sharp pain, had fallen right beside the beast, who’d made such a noise her sister ran out of the house at once. At the hospital, Julia was diagnosed with lung cancer, fast-spreading and serious.

  Her family didn’t wait for William to answer their letter before finding his number in the phone book and calling him at home.

  William didn’t want to know his mother. He never had. The words of the nuns, of the Christian Brothers still rang in his mind. He’d had no other guardians, no other teachers. Their word was stone-written law for him, and always would be. To William, his mother had abandoned him—her, a fallen woman, unclean sinner. She’d sentenced him to a childhood with the nuns and the brothers. Why should he want her? Why would he bother?

  “I’ve no desire to meet the woman,” he said when Lizzie had explained who she was, had detailed his mother’s history through barely suppressed tears.

  “She’s in the hospice,” Lizzie told our father. “She only has a year at most. Don’t you want to say goodbye? Don’t you want to see her one last time?”

  “She’s all yours,” our father told her. “And after that she’s in the hands of God. He forgives sinners. You’d better hope He forgives her.”

  Julia died before he could change his mind.

  Dear Deena,

  Come find me. Come find me at the end of the world.

  All my love,

  Mandy

  28.

  The house at the end of the world

  Killybegs and Fintra, 2012

  When I was pulled out of the sea, all that was left were parts of me. As if I had crumbled half to dust on the shores of the real world. As if I really had made it to the otherworld, to Tír na nÓg, to the land of eternal youth.

  I came back in pieces, one leg stuck in the sand. Pressure on my chest, then nothing. There were metal bars where my shoulders used to be. A vise-like grip holding me down. Water everywhere.

  If you are the branches of your family tree, what are the roots? Who are the worms burrowing in underneath? What land holds you up?

  Something turned me over on the sand. My mouth spat salt water. Rivers of it, waves, convulsions. I coughed, I spluttered. My throat felt scraped raw.

  I heard an Is she okay? The voice was strangled, frantic, familiar.

  I heard a Give her space, child. A strange trick of my hearing made the words sound like they were coming from three voices at once.

  Something lifted me up. I stared into the gray face of a banshee, tangle of hair and wild eyes. Her grin was full of teeth. I wanted to scream, but my throat was salt crystals, crow claws.

  A warm hand slipped into mine. Squeezed. I hardly had the strength to feel her touch, but still she held me.

  Mandy. She’d come back for me.

  The world swam away.

  * * *

  —

  I came to in a cottage with a thatched roof and whitewashed walls. In the corner there was a clunky old television set with wonky reception playing one of
my favorite reality TV singing shows. From somewhere inside the house, three voices sang along.

  I struggled to sit up. A rough, thick blanket covered me, stuck with coarse gray hair that was probably a horse’s, but also maybe a bull’s. The room spun.

  My clothes were not my clothes: a tunic and long sweater I vaguely recognized but could not tell from where.

  Outside, the wind screamed and the storm battered at the rattling, single-glazed windows, whistled through the cracks, and left small pools of rain on the chipped white paint of the sills.

  Beside the front door, lying with his eyes closed, his sides heaving with breath, was a bull. The bull. The bull whose skull I sat with inside a salt circle while Mandy chanted words to the waves. The bull whose eyes stared at me through the window of a bus on a busy street in Dublin. The bull I’d seen, impossibly, in a series of connecting fields. The bull who had brought me down to the shore.

  “Are you really Julia’s bull?” I whispered.

  The creature opened his eyes and looked at me. Slowly, he nodded his huge head.

  I wanted to ask Where am I? but it seemed like a stupid question. The answer was right outside the window. Windswept cliff face, rain slanting sideways on the gale. Waves crashing in the darkness.

  Obviously, the end of the world.

  There came the sound of footsteps from farther inside the house. I clutched the rough blanket against my legs. Into the small living room drifted three women. They moved with eerie synchronicity to circle me. Three gray ghosts: hags with matted hair and wide mouths.

  I wondered if they would push me down the cliff. Tear out my salty throat with their teeth, leave scratches like red lines all up and down my skin.

  Their skin was so pale it had a gray hue. Their hair was silver and tangled. Their nails were long. They surrounded me.