“I just wondered where you were.” I tried to keep my tone light.
“He told me to go back.”
“Who?” I was alarmed; the mountain might not hurt her, but a man could. Why had that never occurred to me till now? “Who told you, Sarah?”
“The deer.”
I felt immediately relieved. Sarah had always talked to animals. But my relief was premature.
“I didn’t want to come back,” she told me, looking at me with her grave golden eyes, and then suddenly looking away.
“Didn’t you?” I said, not reproachfully, but to keep her talking, to keep us from falling into silence as if it were a treacherous ravine. But Sarah did not answer or speak much at all for the rest of the day.
At story time, she nestled in my arms, but I waited in vain for her nightly command: Story about my da. At last I broke our custom and asked her which story she would like to hear.
“No story,” she spoke at last.
I waited to see if she would say more. When she didn’t, I tried another tack.
“Will you tell me a story then?”
“Tell you a story?” she considered, sounding interested.
Ma rocked and hummed, as if she hadn’t heard, but I knew she was alert, even eager to know what Sarah would do.
“Once upon a time,” Sarah began. “There was a girl who could not see her da. And then, one day, she did.”
“She did?” I prompted.
“He was a deer, and she wanted to follow him. He was an owl, and she wanted to fly with him, he was a fish, and she wanted to swim with him. He was even—”
She paused for effect, a born storyteller.
“A snake,” she pronounced at last. “A small snake with red stripes hiding under a rock. He said, ‘I am a poisonous snake, but I won’t bite you.’ ‘Why?’ the girl said to the snake. ‘Because you are my own girl, and I am your da.’ And the girl wanted to live with the snake under the rock.”
“And did she?” I prompted after a moment.
“No,” she sighed. “She had to stay with her mother and her granny.”
I couldn’t help myself; I held her closer and kissed the top of her head. Sarah didn’t exactly pull away, but there was something tense and alert about her.
“But only for a little while,” she added. “Then she will live happily ever after. In a far away place. With many horses.” An animal she had seen only rarely but loved at first sight.
Isn’t she happy with her mother? I managed not to ask. As if she could hear my unasked question, Sarah announced in a strict mock maternal voice:
“It is time for bed.”
I could not sleep that night. When I heard Ma’s wheeze and Sarah’s softer more even breathing, I wrapped myself in a cloak and tiptoed out of the hut. I did not know where I intended to go or what exactly I needed, but some kind of storm was swirling around inside me, and I felt too small to contain it.
The night was clear and though the waning moon would rise late, the stars were generous with their light, and mountain stones and rock shone back, as if remembering: I am made of your dust. Despite the cold, I went barefoot, the better to heed any warning the ground might give me. I knew the mountain, too, the places where rocks were loose, where earth turned into air. So I found myself climbing, carefully but without fear, up a steep trail by the gorge with the river glinting far below.
Perhaps you also have discovered how movement, even easy walking, let alone climbing, loosens whatever emotion is lodged in your body. That is why emotion is called that. It wants to move. It wants dams to break and lids to fly off. When I finally came to rest on a bare rock that opened the night sky to me, that storm in my chest was ready to tear loose. And I just lay down on the rock and sobbed until I was quiet again.
Then I sat up and listened. Night intensifies sound; I could hear the water far below, slowly, relentlessly shaping the mountain. Air, almost but not quite still, had its intimate congress with pine needles and leaves. Every sound, however slight, made the silence seem more absolute and alive.
“Jesus,” I said his name out loud, touching the silence rather than breaking it, as if the silence was the flank of some dark, breathing beast. “Jesus, don’t!”
I didn’t even know what I meant by don’t, but then the tears started.
“Don’t take her away from me,” I heard myself say. “She’s all I have left of you; she’s all I have left. She is my life.”
I stopped, appalled at myself. Had it really come to that? Me, a widowed mother living only for her child, jealous even of the father she had so wanted her daughter to know? Apparently it had. For the last seven years I had been so absorbed in Sarah that I had scarcely noticed anything else. I didn’t even think of the past, except when I brought it to life for Sarah in the stories. And now, at least tonight, she didn’t want the stories, didn’t need them. How had I failed to understand: she would grow up, change? Already she was beginning to pull away from me. I felt blindsided by time, menaced by a future I could not imagine and did not want to endure.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “I am lonely. I am so alone.”
Did his holy spirit come to comfort me? Did he keep his promise that he would be always with me? Did I hear his voice, or have a vision of his face? Yes. No. I felt as I lay on the earth that he was in the very ground that soaked up my tears; he was the night sky curving over me, and the air touching me inside and out. He was in everything; he was in my bones; I could feel his essence coursing through me from my crown to the soles of my feet.
But oh, forgive me, Jesus.
I wanted him to be a man again. I wanted arms and lips and yes a cock. I wanted sweat and semen.
I wanted my lover.
Sarah needed her father.
Miriam mourned for her son.
There are some losses for which there is no consolation. Some longings no one else can fulfill.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
LIFE GOES ON
WELL, LIFE GOES ON.
I apologize for the hackneyed phrase, and you would not be alone if, when someone said it to you, you wanted to smack them, all the more so because it’s true. However much we resent it, however much we want to say: stop, no more, that’s enough, life doesn’t care. Even if you end your own life, life goes on. Perhaps one reason my beloved’s followers got so carried away imagining the End Time is that they couldn’t bear the thought of life just going on (and on) without him, either. Who can blame them?
Despite her occasional aloofness, Sarah remained an affectionate child, seemingly content. I began to worry that she had no human playmates, no human contact at all apart from Miriam and me and the people who came to seek us for our services. I might be lonely, but I’d had a life in the world, an adventurous life. I’d had friends, enemies, lovers, the love of my life. What life awaited Sarah here on the mountain?
“Don’t fret yourself, Maeve of Magdala,” said Ma one night, speaking aloud to my unspoken thoughts.
Whenever she called me by that title, I felt a strange mix of comfort and sadness. Only Ma shared any of my memories, and only I shared hers. For that reason alone, we needed each other.
“About what, Miriam of Nazareth?” I named her in return.
“That’s not my favorite title,” she sniffed.
“Oh, all right then, Queen of Heaven. What are you talking about?”
“You know.”
“Well, I might have a few moments ago, but I’ve lost track of my thoughts.”
“You were brooding,” she said. “Brooding about the Small Great One.”
Small Great One was one of Miriam’s names for Sarah. Only I called her Colomen Du.
“Don’t fret yourself,” she said again softly.
Sarah was asleep, but you never knew what she could hear even in her dreams.
“Is she going to be all right?” I whispered in a moment of weakness.
Though my mother-in-law was a famous oracle—at least in these parts—I had always been resista
nt and a bit resentful towards her angels, since they got my name wrong. All my life I’d had my own flashes of second sight, visions terrible or beautiful, none within my power to change. But since I’d been a mother, those flashes of foreknowledge had been more rare—or maybe I had averted my inner eyes. Now all at once I craved reassurance, as if it were food or drink, something I needed to live.
“Tell me she will be all right.”
“Don’t fret yourself,” Miriam repeated. “There is nothing you can do.”
My blood froze. I am sorry; there is no other way to say it.
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “What have the angels told you?”
Miriam closed her eyes and hummed her hum. How it had not driven me mad to hear her I don’t know, but perhaps a sound that evokes bees spiraling into air golden as honey is something you just surrender to.
“I am not to tell you any more,” she said, her tone almost prim.
“Why not?” I grew increasingly alarmed.
“You might interfere. You might try to change fate.”
“You just told me there’s nothing I can do, so how could I interfere?”
She looked at me pityingly, and shook her head, as if deciding I was too stupid to understand.
“Why are you always on their side?” I demanded. I suppose it goes without saying that the Blessed Virgin Mary was on the side of the angels, but I said it anyway. “Did the angels rescue you from being put under house arrest in Nazareth? Did they bear your beloved son’s only child and let you share in her life? Do they cook and clean for you? Ma, listen, Sarah and I are all you’ve got. You’ve got to tell me if Sarah is in danger.”
Ma closed her eyes again, not humming this time but making a low whistling sound through her teeth. I wondered if she was arguing with the angels on my behalf. For a long time, she was silent. Her headed nodded, and I thought she might have drifted off to sleep. Then she opened her eyes again, but she did not seem to see me.
“Only in you, my darling,” she crooned. “Only in you. I knew that.”
“Only in you what?” I spoke to Miriam; I spoke to my beloved, for I was certain he was here.
“Safety.”
Safety in Jesus, the one who had gotten himself killed, who had left the three of us to manage alone in desolate mountains.
“You must tell me,” I pleaded. “Will Sarah be all right?”
She Is Who She Is, came the answer. I don’t know from where.
A few days later, Sarah had her first misadventure. Or so it seemed to me. She came home late one afternoon covered with scratches and bruises. She ran into my arms and held onto me fiercely, her body shaking, but when I held her away from me to look at her, her eyes were dry and her jaw was clenched. I set to work cleaning her wounds and making salves for her bruises.
“What happened to you?” I asked her, quietly now, for of course I had shrieked the question when I first saw her.
She didn’t answer.
“Did you fall?”
Even before she shook her head, I knew she hadn’t. She was as sure-footed as the goats she followed or who followed her.
“An animal?” I asked, though I already knew the answer; no animal would ever attack Sarah.
Then I saw the unmistakable sign of a human bite.
“Sarah, who did this to you?”
She shook her head.
“Sarah, you must tell me.”
She didn’t answer, but she began chewing her cheek, not anxiously but thoughtfully, her eyebrows inching closer and closer together. Just like her father, I thought, wanting to laugh and cry and shake her all at once.
“Not a who,” she spoke at last, and she looked up at me with her golden eyes, eyes that never failed to startle me. Like light, they were always changing. They could be fierce as flame or soft as summer sun filtered through leaves. Now trained on my face, her eyes were keen, as though I was a landscape, and she the eagle, scanning for movement of unsuspecting prey.
“Not a who?” I repeated this odd turn of phrase.
“A them.”
“Them? More than one?”
Sarah nodded, and inexplicably, a small, secret smile played at the edge of her lips.
“How many?”
She paused and her gaze became distant as if she were trying to reconstruct the scene. As if she were almost curious. And the calmer she became, the more distraught I was. There was something wrong with this picture. She should be sobbing in my arms. I should be soothing and reassuring her, even as I planned my revenge. Which I was determined I would have.
“Sarah, did you recognize the people who did this to you? Were they from the village? Or were they strangers?”
She looked at me again directly, fixing me with her eyes, so that I felt an impulse to squirm as if I were the one being interrogated.
“Not telling.”
There comes a moment when it dawns on every child: She can’t make me. And in the same instant the mother realizes: she’s right.
I looked at my beloved child, at my beloved’s child and glimpsed the boy who gave his parents the slip and went back to the Temple to debate with his elders; I saw myself running off to the hidden valley between Bride’s breasts where I was not supposed to go. Both of us had been determined to encounter our own destiny, for lack of a less inflated word, and if our parents were beside themselves, well, to tell the truth we didn’t think about our parents much.
Precocious brat, I thought, you’re only nine. Your father and I were twelve before we started worrying our parents into early graves, which, come to think if it, they had yet to occupy. At least in Miriam’s case.
“It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to tell me,” I tried to regain control. “I’ll find out for myself. You stay here with Ma.”
Ma, as Sarah and I both called her, had all this while, been sitting and spinning nearby as if there were no crisis unfolding before her dreamy half-closed eyes. Maybe when you’ve seen your son crucified, a few cuts and bruises are not very impressive. But Sarah was my baby, and some one or ones had dared to harm her. I was a mother animal, and I intended to rend and tear in return. I rose and headed for the path.
“No!”
I paused and turned, shocked by the note of authority in Sarah’s voice. It was not a plea but a command.
“Sarah. This is not a matter for you to decide. I am the mother.”
I turned and walked again.
“I am the grandmother,” said Miriam. “You will stay here with us.”
I whirled around, suddenly furious with both Miriam and Sarah, so serene and absolute in their positions, sitting there, side by side, the old woman and the child, his mother, his daughter, wise, innocent and free of care. Because the mother (as I had just hailed myself) is the beast of burden when it comes to care.
“Jesus,” I muttered under my breath, and then I screamed it. “Jesus.”
“Are you taking his name in vain?” Ma inquired with maddening mildness. “Because you really ought not, at least in front of the child.”
“It’s up to him whether it’s in vain or not,” I snapped. “Jesus!”
I closed my eyes and clenched my fists and teeth. I wanted to storm off down the mountain, kill a few people, then maybe throw myself in the river. Whatever.
Then I felt his familiar warmth envelop me, even as I fought it, angry with him, too, angry with him most of all.
Easy, cariad, easy.
Easy? I answered him silently. Easy for you to say. You’re not here. Someone beat up your daughter. What do you expect me to do?
Listen to the child. And wait. This mystery at least will resolve itself.
When? How?”
By morning. Just wait till morning. That’s when most mysteries resolve themselves. Remember?
And for a moment I was there with him again, in the garden, standing beneath the tree that was as golden as Sarah’s eyes.
“Mama,” Sarah called, softly now. “Mama, stay with me.”
Wh
en I sat down next to her, she pulled my head into her lap and stroked my hair, as if I was the child who needed comforting.
My beloved proved to be right. Early the next morning, before Sarah or Ma was up, I was outside in our yard cooking stirabout in a cauldron over the fire. Out of the autumn mist appeared six raggedy boys of about Sarah’s age. It took only a glance to see that they were in worse shape than she was, sporting one or two black eyes each, along with impressive scratches on their faces and arms. They regarded me with proper awe and fear. I was, after all, a beansidhe or a witch, if you prefer, maybe even a goddess. I decided to make the most of my moment.
“How lovely,” I cackled like the crazy crone I was in training to become. “Meat for breakfast. Which one shall I slaughter first?”
The boys began edging away. I knew I had only to make a sudden movement towards them and they would scatter and run. I didn’t want to let them off so easily. So I just regarded them as if appraising them for succulence. In truth, they all appeared scrawny and underfed, as they no doubt were. Then, the smallest one, a boy with hair redder than my own and a face freckled like a map of the heavens, stopped backing up and took a step forward instead.
“S-S-S-S-arah,” he finally got the word out, and then, as if exhausted by the effort fell silent again—except for his knees, which knocked almost audibly.
“What business do you have with Sarah?” I demanded, taking a tiny menacing step toward the boy. Before he could turn and run, I seized him by his bright hair and held him fast. “Answer me.”
“W-w-we want to know wh-where did she learn to fight like that?”
Where indeed? I had been wondering the same thing.
“Boy,” I said stalling for time and waiting for inspiration to strike. “Boy, do you not know that Sarah is directly descended from the warrior witches of Tir na mBan, the eight fiercest warriors in this world and the Otherworld?”
He tried to shake his head, but of course I still had hold of his hair.
“The greatest heroes from every land come to their island for training,” I went on, getting carried away with my story.
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