by Laura Legge
Go back to the house, Muireall said. Lili will be so lonely.
If only Euna could steep the starwash above the glass roof. She needed to see her friend’s face more clearly, to know how stern this demand was meant to be. Sometimes Muireall had a bit of play in her. But sometimes, sombre and firm, she meant to punish. With strops and school rulers, if needed, she meant to punish. I just wanted a minute on my own, Euna said, trying to sound dutiful.
Muireall broke several flowers from a nearby stem, wee and white in the low light. Euna could not be sure, but she worried by their shape and shade they might be foxglove. Take this back to the house, Muireall said. Tell Grace to make you a tincture.
Euna knew she would have no privacy tonight. What she wanted now was much simpler: to avoid punishment. To keep her body free of this tincture. She took the plant from Muireall and in so doing grazed her hand. Her interaction with the fish farmer had stirred up so many feelings, desire and fear and frustration, that she needed a place to rest them. And why not in Muireall’s hand, caked with loam and clay? It tingled, that fleeting touch.
Thank you, Euna said. Muireall struck her on her flank, surely, as if Euna were one of their two stabled horses.
Euna left the greenhouse and headed back across the heath. Somehow the ground had grown colder. She walked as quickly as she could, to keep her feet in perfect tact. The fish farmer had been kind – why had Muireall told her for years that everyone was a possible enemy? Now her trust had a hairline crack in it; a trace of red marrow was showing. She glanced down at the possibly poisonous flowers in her arms.
When she got to the door, she was grateful not to hear any sound in the house. Then, entering, she ruptured the thing she had so loved. She wanted to be air, as here and gone as air, but she was far from pure. She was inexact, embodied, the long nails that turned into trimmings, the long hair that clogged the bath drain. The feet that forked the perfect dark.
She stubbed her toe on the grandmother clock by the library door. The hulking thing clanked and shook. Then Euna heard footsteps coming from upstairs – by the pointed sound, she knew they belonged to Grace. She always wore Florentine heels, even when inside, which made a fine art of her legs. Her beauty had in many ways made her life more difficult; these hang-ups, the heels, a habit of smearing her cheeks with rouge even before sleep, were more obligation than choice. They had only worsened after Muireall broke off her relationship with Grace, choosing instead to follow a life of celibacy.
At the top of the stairs, a torch illuminated Grace. She gestured with her free hand for Euna to come up the stairs. Euna obeyed. She was still carrying the plant, and when she reached Grace she handed the blossoms to her without saying a word.
Through the thin door, Euna could hear Lili singing her nightly devotions. She would be in her sleep tunic, on her knees beside the bed. A chrostag! Today I smelled like an old reindeer. A chrostag! Today I wore dirty nylons. The chorus, A chrostag! – naughty girl! – never changed, though each day she added the particulars. Euna wondered what would happen if she were to kneel now and sing her own version.
Grace smelled the flowers, then let Euna do the same. It was not foxglove at all. It was full, holy hyacinth. Had Muireall really been trying to comfort her – had she sensed a pit and aimed to fill it with flowers? Fear had such a loud way of speaking. Maybe all of these acts had been tender, plucking the plant, striking the flank, and the violence had not been in Muireall’s hands but in Euna’s mind.
A chrostag! Today I was a very bad girl but oh, I will be better tomorrow. This was always the final line of the song. Soon Euna would hear the sounds of Lili snoring, as she had every night that month. In the lull between sing and snore, Euna said, Muireall wanted you to make a tincture of that.
Grace’s grin had a cutting edge. She wants to make you smell beautiful, she said.
The women had many ways of furnishing their time: weaving on their grand loom, divining using frogs and figs, playing their synthesizer, making perfumes for one another. This last pastime often ended in an odd stridency of smells, especially when all four of them wore different scents on the same calendar day. Euna’s tended to be bloomy, big, and exceedingly sweet, though she had never chosen that character and in fact got the occasional rash because of it.
Grace patted Euna on the top of her head, as if a mother sending her girl to bed. She and Muireall were twenty-eight, Euna and Lili eighteen, and in moments like this the smallish gap felt mammoth. Euna took her nightgown from their communal dresser, which was nestled into a nook close to where Grace had been standing at the top of the stairs. They were not allowed to keep clothing anywhere else in the house. All of it had to be folded in the same way, sweaters with the arms pulled forcefully behind the back, underwear rolled into pipes. As Grace descended the stairs, presumably to trim and vase the hyacinth, Euna moved behind the paper screen and changed into the nightgown. She neatly gathered her linen shirt and trousers, then placed them in the bottom of their shared laundry hamper. The next day, she would beat them with salt and flat-edged stones, along with the rest of the garments of the coven.
She felt her way into the bedroom, as Lili had already blown out the eventide candle. She laid on her side of the bed, closest to the porthole. From that window, there was a ladder one could climb if she needed to use the latrine. Euna rarely woke in the night, but if she were to sleep on the far side of the bed, she would almost certainly feel trapped. She would toss for hours, wondering what would happen if she needed to pee and did not want to wake Lili and her thousand attendant remarks.
The bed would have been perfectly comfortable, had it been larger. The mattress was filled well with foam, and the pillows were cased in antique silk. But in order to lie down, Euna had to turn onto her side and align her hips to Lili’s, rest one hand on her own leg and tuck the other near Lili’s backside. This was the part that made her feel rangy and inelegant. Each night the same question: what to do with her hands?
She lifted the coverlet to her jaw and then creased it between their two bodies as a kind of border. Lili was snoring, but gently. Through the porthole, the moon floodlit one feature of the room – a painting of Cairstìne Bruce.
Over the curve of Lili’s ear, Euna watched the image. Watched and watched and in the moonlight watched. After a long while her eyes were scraped dry. And then she had no choice but to close them, and hope she would not dream.
*
Two weeks later, the women had started to feel downcast by the short, sunless days. Every year was the same, a slow decline in their energy, starting in October. That was the heaviest month, the evening light first excised. Lili had suggested they distract themselves by celebrating Samhain a few weeks early, and at breakfast, no less – to everyone’s surprise, Muireall had agreed.
The four of them were sitting around the table in their usual seats, Euna on a campstool, Muireall on a bishop’s throne they had found abandoned by the edge of their property. Muireall had made a tart of common nettles and some unnameable kind of mince. It was a chore to choke each bite down. If bland were a colour; if beige were a taste. But it was an offence to use sauce or seasoning on others’ cooking, so Euna worked her fork in and out of the tart without a word.
Where did this meat come from? Grace asked Muireall. I didn’t think we had anything left.
Muireall drank from her tankard of tea. She was in the business of withholding – rationing their bath salts one day, their rhubarb preserves the next. She seemed to be relishing this moment she was presiding over.
I need to know what I’m eating, Grace said. I don’t want to get fat again, like I did when you hid whey in our food.
Muireall drank her tea with a little satisfied smile.
Grace said, Just answer. Christ.
The word clanged. Against their copper mugs, their cuts of maybe-mutton, the strange thing rang. Life Grammar, CIX. No discussions of religion or overtly religious language will be tolerated inside Cala. In the fern garden, residents are all
owed to whistle hymns, provided they omit all lyrics. Muireall straightened the neck of her black tunic, which she sometimes wore over her uniform linen shirt for warmth. She was looking straight at Grace. Pardon, she said. It’s just crushed mushrooms and a slice of pig fat.
Euna blamed herself for the tension. Since meeting the fish farmer she had become increasingly sullen, sometimes rude, and she could only imagine the effects of her behaviour on the other women in such a sealed environment. And so she tried to calm everyone by pouring a round of water, rearranging the posies at the centre of their table. She was desperate for conversation. But she could only think of the fish farm. Do you know, she asked, that salmon eat their own kind? At the farm they’re fed fishmeal and oil.
Lili touched the pompoms in her pigtails, mismatched, one large and one tiny. They don’t really have a choice, she said. Her fingers were swift, lifting the curled ends of her hair. She asked, Would they be better off dying?
The wind tossed a pale detail at the bay window, antler, branch, or bone. The sound was sharp, and they started. Nature, here, tended to encroach. Euna said, I don’t know what it’s like to be a fish. I wish I did.
Muireall’s laugh was bright and genuine. You can be so strange, she said, pinching a sprig of parsley from Euna’s lips. As it had in the greenhouse, their touch felt charged. And perhaps even more so, this being an act of care.
Euna is a damp lump lately, Lili said. She’s making the walls mouldy. She won’t even play sgàilich.
You naughty goat, Grace said, winking at Euna.
All the women kept speaking, one over the other, but Euna was no longer among them. The touch from Muireall had reminded her of a more vital touch, in the fish farmer’s hut – so brief and unobtrusive, that clap on her upper back. Between the two of them had moved a dark, flickering current, a sort of pop and snap. Mearanach, she heard someone say now, another word for delirious. The -nach sparkling and black, like a horsewhip through air, morning light catching leather.
An idea penetrated Euna. She felt the tip of that dark current again. When I went to get the fish, the – she improvised a title – foreman said I could come back if we were really stuck, she said.
Muireall took a slow drag of her tea. From the mug came the smell of peat, a sea-mossy sweetness. Is my food not good enough for you? she asked.
Truth was Euna was sick of the tart and the earth tea and the burned ends of tree resins that always fucked with the vibe of the table. She was sick of tucking her ankles underneath it while her thighs pulsed, pretending the tick of the grandmother clock was discreet, even pleasant. It was killing her to be sinless. Through the window she looked at the mattock. They used it mostly when gardening, tilling ground that could house bushes. For a pulse she saw blood on its metal head.
I’ve been so hungry lately, Euna said, coolly as she could. It’s nearly winter, you know. I need to feed myself.
XXX. No woman living at Cala shall develop feelings for anyone outside of the coven. XXXI. A woman in the coven may unintentionally contravene XXX; should this happen, she will under no condition explore the feelings in a physical manner. This is for the safety and well-being of all parties involved.
On the table they kept an unopened bottle of wine, a token of some untouched, luscious future. They all wanted to drink it; Euna, deeply. But they restrained themselves each meal. They knew an occasion would come. Some special day would swoop down on Cala and the women would need a red. Until then they would find other ways to hold off their thirst.
Why don’t you go hunting if you need meat so badly? Muireall asked Euna. I saw a few hares last time I was out on the heath.
Rabbit was Euna’s favourite food, braised, slow-roasted. Most days the animal would get her mouth wet. Now the idea of eating it disgusted her. The bodies that lived on land – badgers, deer, rodents she could not name – seemed tainted. Even vegetables, the leeks and the white-skinned turnips, were thick with earth funk. Not the sea creatures. All salted, clean as a loch.
Lili, Euna said, turning to her friend. Do you remember how good that salmon we had on the equinox was, covered in ginger?
The girl perked up. She seemed thrilled by this memory. Of course, she said. I think about it all the time.
Grace said, I could use some of that oil. This weather is ravaging my face.
Absently, Muireall had started to play with the wine bottle. Euna waited for her to speak. Her grip tightened when she reached its neck; rare for the other women to express an opinion contrary to hers. I don’t care what you do, she said. But if you see another soul, you will come back here right away. I won’t let you parade around, getting the attention of everyone in town. It’s not all about you, Euna.
Euna nodded. She finished her tart and waited for the others to do the same before carrying their plates outside and scraping them into the compost drum. She brought the plates inside and, with a pail of water from their storage cask, rinsed them one by one, chary of chipping the porcelain. The other people in town, according to Grace, had taps. But Muireall insisted they honour the legacy of Cairstìne Bruce, who had been unable to afford plumbing. They showered in the latrine, even in winter, water going rigid on their clavicles. Ice hitched to their small notches.
As she cleaned the dishes, Euna heard the squeak of the cork in the dining room. She was shocked. She took her time, poured washing soda, scoured the last traces of fat from the plates. Then she came back into the dining room to see Muireall’s mouth stained red, as if blood-fed. Grace lipping the top of the bottle, Lili sitting spellbound. Euna had to leave. She felt, at any moment, her friends could equally get naked, wield the mattock, throw fake meat at the wall, dance in open ecstasy. Wild women, caged in peeling wallpaper.
She took her turtleneck from the wool basket. The frost would have dissipated a bit by now, it being mid-morning. Still the world was bound to be cold, especially by the loch. I’ll come back soon, she said.
We haven’t even celebrated Samhain yet, Muireall said.
Euna said, I know. But I’m doing this for Cala. She thought she heard a small growl from Muireall, a cornered creature. Euna knew it would be wiser to wait until Muireall was calmer before leaving the grounds. But wisdom, in her life, had been a weak master. She crossed the threshold, into the frost.
*
The hut was empty when she arrived an hour later, having walked her feet into strident pain. At least this time she had remembered to wear boots. Having taken the path along the sealoch, she had managed to avoid all of the townsfolk. But any pride she felt in her stealth now disappeared. He was not here. She had deluded herself. She did not even know how fish farmers worked, if they were given temporary contracts, if they sailed from port to port. No wonder he had not known who she was.
She was too drained to return to the farmhouse right away. So she closed the door of the hut and lay down on its hard cot. A hundred hard thoughts lay down beside her. Her life was going to continue exactly as it had been. And so she would have ice on her collarbones all winter. And so she would eat nettles at the same time every day, and fall asleep each night to the sound of Lili snoring. And so she would never bear children. And so she would lose her looks and be a wretched, run-of-the-mill witch. And so, after all the hard work of enduring, she would just die bored.
She had started to sweat. She ran her hands along the rough blanket the fish farmer, or whoever now inhabited this hut, slept under. It was terribly thin, as if military issue, and it was peppered with small holes. There was no pillow. The only way she could make herself comfortable was to rest on her back with one leg straight and the other folded in a triangle, her head turned to the right.
Her fear had a form, of a wave moving over her, polished and black. There were no windows in the hut. Pale light filtered only through tiny pits in its door. Before long, the wave was indiscernible against her skin.
*
Euna opened her eyes in a state of confusion. She had woken in one of two bedrooms for the last decade, and this
was neither. This place was cooler, less adorned. And then she made out the fish farmer’s face, cragged and attentive, a foot above hers.
I hope it’s okay that I touched you, he said. You weren’t answering.
She had been so timid the last time that she had hardly allowed herself to look at him. She saw now that he had thick, black eyebrows connected above the bridge of his nose, and a full head of silver-flecked hair. Around his neck, where she expected to see iconography – Jesus on the cross, a pentagram – was a plain pendant made of driftwood, a thick block with no other markings.
Euna sat up and felt the cot shift beneath her. I shouldn’t be here, she said.
The farmer was looking at her with something close to concern, or pity, and she did not like to be looked at in that way. She wanted to be desirable. Magnificent. A horse loose on the heath, not a bird in need of feeding.
I came to get some food, she said, nuzzling a little into her turtleneck. Her face was icy and she worried it was lined from sleep. So she thought it best to hide everything but her eyes, which were green and lovely in most water surfaces. Muireall had banned mirrors in the house.
The farmer said, smiling, I already told you we don’t sell fish here.
Euna could not move farther into her turtleneck without disappearing entirely, so she sat there wondering about the parting in her hair. Was it dry, dandruffed? He would never love such a saltine. She felt much worse than she had walking into the empty hut. At least then her future plans had been deferred, not rejected.
I’ll catch my own, she said. I should never have bothered you here. Standing, she realized her foot had fallen asleep.
One chapped hand, on her breastplate, held her in place. With the other hand he tugged down her turtleneck, baring her lips. The damage of autumn on her mouth – he dampened it. He dulled its brand. Her skin lit up like an electric cage. He asked her to lift her arms and then removed her turtleneck and linen shirt, leaving her uncovered. He did the same with her trousers. No ritual. The hut was so cold that once she was nude, she was in pain. Her scalloped underclothing, at least, was washed.
