Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  He would do anything for Taleen. The first time Joseph had caught the memory of her scent on his skin, his heart had quavered and beaten faster. It had been something like being hungry and filled at the same time, air racing beneath his ribs, but unlike anything else he’d ever felt in his entire life. Where the sky had been pale before, now it was shockingly blue, scorching his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he saw Taleen and he wanted to know only her. He wanted to swoop her up and carry her away. This was the kind of love that lasted forever, and it was a miracle that he had found it.

  If he concentrated enough, he could make his thoughts jump into her heart, he was sure of it. He ran his fingers along the backs of his hand, and a jolt of electricity shot through him. He could not sit; he could only pace with a rhythm that matched the strum of his heart. He constructed a list of reasons to see her, ways to avoid the too-watchful eye of the colonel when he returned. Joseph knew, absolutely knew better than he’d ever known anything before, that Taleen wanted him. He could feel her wanting him, could feel the gold cord that ran from the center of his chest to the center of her sparrow ribs.

  The best thing to do under circumstances like these was wrestling practice, and Joseph had already agreed to practice every day. Every afternoon, the two stable boys, Sean and Owen, were assigned to Joseph as wrestling partners, but Joseph had to teach them freestyle wrestling before they would be of any use as practice buddies. Joseph didn’t know how to teach, so the wrestling sessions were a series of sustained humiliations for the two boys, who kept getting pinned to the ground instantly by Joseph. The alpha status felt like a drug, like the one time he’d taken X and his heart had split open with expansiveness.

  Owen and Sean hung their heads.

  “You’ve got to give us a chance. We can’t be your mates at this if we don’t know the landscape,” said Sean after being flipped to the ground and neatly pinned yet again.

  Joseph fought with the impulse to keep using them as his guaranteed-to-fail opponents, because how often was he ever going to get that? He could demonstrate his mastery, strut his prowess. The absolute icing on the cake was that Taleen saw him winning every practice match. There she was, leaning into the fence, her slight frame resting like a dragonfly paused in flight, her wings glittering, her young dragon of a dog, Madigan, standing next to her.

  She scanned the scene, watched Joseph pin first Owen, then a slump-shouldered and reluctant Sean. Joseph’s penis sprang unbidden under her far-off gaze, but when he looked up to wave at Taleen and drink in her admiration, she was gone.

  He dismissed Sean and Owen and trotted after her, wending toward where he thought she might go, back to the bustling kitchen, the underworld of her mother, Deirdre, and all the other kitchen and house staff.

  “Hey, Taleen,” he shouted when he caught sight of her. He picked up his pace and came even with her. Madigan took hold of his arm in his soft mouth, a special greeting reserved for Joseph.

  “Taleen,” he said, softer this time, wiping dog saliva on his pants. “Did you see our wrestling practice?”

  She whirled around, her dark tendrils whipping across her face like seaweed. “Practice? Is that what you call it? Cruel is what you should call it. You’re kicking those boys silly. They don’t know what you’re doing. They’d never wrestled once in their lives until you and your colonel came back excited as garden geese about you being the brilliant wrestler. Cruel, Joseph, that’s what I call it.”

  Joseph did not sleep that night. He spent the hours trying to figure out how teachers taught something new. All he could think of was using his father’s method of yelling, humiliation, scolding, slamming a few doors, and cursing a blue streak. Then he remembered the way his grandmother had tutored him in math. She’d taken things one step at a time, and she’d always served brownies at the end.

  He talked to Deirdre the next morning. He explained how the extra food was a part of his training plan.

  “Not every day, lad. We can’t have that. Send them to the back door of the kitchen every other day after your wrestling matches. I’ll find something for them,” said Deirdre.

  Joseph announced his new wrestling plan to Sean and Owen.

  “Today, we’re starting with the wrist hold. And we’ll keep doing it until you can do it in your sleep.”

  Sean and Owen eyed him suspiciously. “Then you won’t be grinding us into the dirt today?”

  “No. See, there’s no point in that. Prepare to learn the gentlemanly sport of wrestling,” he said, as if it had been his idea all along.

  Chapter 20

  Deirdre and Taleen slept together on exceptionally cold nights. The small peat fire glowed, and the mother and daughter curled into each other. Both of them allowed their hair to be unfastened. Taleen’s dark hair flowed into her mother’s hair, which had only recently begun to sprout bits of white around her temples. They talked quietly to each other.

  “There are good reasons not to use the sight,” said Deirdre. “Aye, just as many reasons to use it as not to use it. It’s always there, niggling at you. You can’t throw it off, but there is always the choice of using it or not, or speaking of it. You don’t think the sea eagle ever stops searching, do you? Oh, he must sleep and who knows what the sea eagle dreams. But sure, when he’s awake, he never stops using that which he was given.”

  Taleen picked at a fingernail that had been bothering her all day. “How do I know when it’s the sight that’s niggling at me or only something that I want so very much?”

  “That is my point, daughter. How can I talk with you about what you want without using my own sight? I see him all over you, your young Joseph. I see you wanting him. It shows on your shoulders and dances along your ears.”

  Taleen worried for the first time that too much sight raced around her and her mum, depriving her of sole access to her thoughts and desires. “I knew it the moment he was lifted from the sea and brought to us. All of my life was meant for that moment,” she sighed.

  “Oh, Taleen, you are so young, and a seventh daughter lives so long that all this will be hard to remember one day…”

  Taleen sat up in bed. “No. This is not a child’s love. You think it is, but in this way you are wrong.”

  Deirdre squeezed her eyes shut and tucked her lower lip under her upper teeth. “Young Con has the makings of a fine husband. Perhaps not now, but someday, when you are both older. And he is Irish. You can’t cross the line. The colonel will never allow it. Joseph is not one of us,” said Deirdre.

  Taleen heard the pause in her mother’s voice, the skip, some unnatural positioning of tongue and mouth.

  “What do you see with your sight?” demanded Taleen. “There is something that you see that I cannot.”

  Deirdre sat up and crossed her legs.

  “He is from across the water, true enough. He is from far away and he is strong and vibrant, the very makings of a hero. No wonder the colonel has taken to him even if he does use him like a racehorse, showing him off here and there, wagering on him all over Ireland with the wrestling.”

  Taleen had to agree with everything that her mother said. Perhaps her mother did understand; Joseph was a hero and he had come for her.

  Her mother continued. “My sight tucks into the near future and reads the past, mostly about the body. Yet I cannot see his days to come. It’s as if they are shot out to the stars that we shall never touch. Aye, that far away,” said Deirdre.

  Taleen considered this, and the truth of it mingled with her skin and her breath, and the potent mixture confirmed the miracle of his arrival on their long beaches of Tramore.

  “He is like no one else I’ve ever seen,” she said, shivering at the memory of his touch.

  “There is one thing that troubles me. The hounds have taken to him in the way they only treat our clan. These hounds are from our long line and they answer only to us. They treat the lad as one of their own. And this cannot be. This is what troubles me beyond all the rest,” said Deirdre.

  The next m
orning, the dense fog off the sea proved a harkening of the November weather. The cold began to settle on the land and work its way indoors. Taleen quickly disappeared outdoors before the onslaught of morning chores so that she could give in to the unstoppable thoughts of love. She and Madigan slipped into the stables and warmed themselves by the colonel’s best mare.

  The boy was glorious in his sweet skin and honey breath. Taleen had never seen the likes of him anywhere, not with the sailors strutting along the docks of Tramore and certainly unlike any lad here. Joseph had come for her, which meant that there was more magic in this world than even her mother understood. She could never leave the Isle, her mother had made that clear. A seventh daughter of a seventh daughter cannot leave, cannot cross water vast enough that the other side remains unseen.

  So if something brilliant was going to happen in Taleen’s life, it had to be delivered to her. And with her sight, which had been passed down since the beginning, she had seen the boy coming like a brilliant wave reaching for her.

  There had been no mistaking it when he had been pulled from the sea, splayed out naked and gasping for air, when she had woven her fingers between his toes. She had felt a ping low and deep start in her belly and travel between her legs, and she had seen something in the future such that she’d never imagined. It was something bigger than the Comeragh Mountains to the west and it was all about Joseph and her, about the two of them galloping off like Queen Maeve and her king. The vision was that grand.

  “He doesn’t know all the bits of what we are,” her mum had said. “He thinks I’m a darling good cook and you’re a stunning lass and he’s fast in love with you. If you try for the likes of him, you’ll be naught but a tragic ballad sung by drunken men and wistful women. He’s a gentleman, or at least he is deemed so by the colonel.”

  Taleen returned to the kitchen and took over the preparation of morning porridge and puddings while Deirdre attended to several children from Tramore, one with terrible worms and the two with deep pleurisy. They had come to the kitchen door as her patients always did unless they were in such a state of suffering that Deirdre was called to go directly to them. Her mother always said that her sight was about the vessel of the soul, and if she lay on hands, she saw a dazzling map that showed inflammation and clogged bowels, hearts that beat too feverishly fast, big clumps of things that showed up in the wrong places like the kidneys or the liver. With some of the ailing people, Deirdre could lay on hands and remove the tangle of unhappiness (with the help of good herbs and hot drink), but with others, the affliction of bones in particular, the sideways curl of the spine, she could not but offer tender hope and prayer.

  The sight emerges early with the seventh daughters, but in the young years, one could never be sure where the sight would settle. Some became strictly bone menders, others like Deirdre could lay on hands for the most frequent ailments, and others saw forward. These were the ones who parted the vapors of time and saw into the future. While they were the most sought after, Deirdre believed this was the most dangerous sight to have, because people were never pleased with the results. They wanted to know if they would find a husband or a wife. Would they have a babe? Would the crops be abundant, and would their favorite horse win the race? And when the truth was seen and revealed, happiness was not often the result.

  Daughters with this sort of sight were better off learning to make butter or weave linen. Deirdre hoped that the sight should settle on something useful for Taleen. Just this morning she had told Taleen, “Come with me while I send the worms out of young Orla. It is a wonderful skill, and we’ll see if you take to it.”

  “I don’t want to heal those with worms. I truly do not. I want nothing to do with arses and worms. Here is what I see. I see Joseph riding home with the colonel and he has won another match and he is the champion and he glows a great gold color and even the colonel cannot deny the greatness of my Joseph. They are riding in the coach and they will here by dark, and I will be waiting for him.”

  Chapter 21

  “It’s time you saw more of our countryside, and, by coming with me, you’ll be a great help to us. Tom can stay at home and finish his large order of barrel straps, and the children will be with him,” said Glenis.

  Anna perked up immediately, wanting to be useful to the kind couple. Anna had only just returned from her morning visit to the outhouse.

  “Yes, I’ll do anything to help. Where are we going and what are we doing?”

  Glenis stood by the hearth and struggled with Nuala’s hair, which looked like it had exploded overnight.

  “We’ll take a cart of thatch to a cousin in Skibbereen, if he is there. If he is, he’ll continue on to Glengariff and you and I shall turn around and come home. If we’ve missed him, then you and I shall travel on by ourselves,” said Glenis, pulling a comb through the child’s hair. Nuala grimaced and braced herself by holding on to the seat of the chair.

  “When do we leave?”

  “Promptly. Before the morning is done with us. Tom has packed the cart and everything that will sustain us.”

  Anna obviously still missed a good part of what happened here; she did not know that their horse cart had been packed in the early morning as she had slept, or that Glenis and Tom had even talked about a trip to sell thatch. Nevertheless, she hurried to her bed and recovered the two scraps of fabric that tied her to home. Although she wished they’d been more meaningful or beautiful, she wanted them with her if she traveled. They were simply all she had of home. They left within an hour.

  Anna and Glenis rode their one-horse cart, pulled along by the high-spirited O’Connell, a horse of unparalled perseverance, or so Glenis claimed.

  Anna’s questions were innocent enough at first.

  “You and Tom have a lot of cousins. We’re carrying a load of thatch and you say it’s forty miles to your cousin’s home. Isn’t that a long way to go to sell thatch?”

  “Not so long,” said Glenis. “And we use the term ‘cousin’ in a loose way. Let’s just say we’re related by blood somewhere since the beginning of time. Excepting that Donal in Skibbereen truly is a cousin.”

  “And Tom thought it better for you and me to go?”

  “Aye, he did think so.” Glenis’s rich red hair was pulled back and held by one of the sticks that Anna had carved for her. A cloud of shorter hairs had slipped loose, framing her face in thin ringlets that bounced in time to the wagon.

  Anna’s lawyerly brain woke up again, remembering the steady but overly casual string of visitors who’d come by Tom and Glenis’s house in the last week. They’d arrived with fat satchels filled to bursting and left with far lighter loads, all of which had been covered by a smoke and a drink with Tom, the men helping with the second crop of potatoes, while Tom tended to the horseshoeing. No, this was commerce. Anna turned in her seat and looked back at the tightly bound thatch.

  “We’re not just delivering thatch, are we?”

  Without looking at Anna, Glenis let the horse go on for a moment, the steady plop of the hooves strumming Anna’s heart. Glenis pulled up on the reins and the horse snorted and stopped, flicking his dark mane and stamping his feet. The November sun was still warm, and the smell of the ocean reached them on a light breeze. Glenis wrapped the reins tightly around a polished knob in front of the bench seat.

  “I told Tom it was just a matter of time before you added everything up. He said all you could think of was finding that nephew of yours, Joseph, that you had no eyes for anything else.” Glenis took in a breath. “We’re smugglers.”

  And as soon as Glenis said this, the bare spots filled in, like the thousand-piece puzzle of birds she used to do on family vacations to Vermont. Suddenly the picture emerged. It was not synchronicity at play when neighbors visited Tom and Glenis at night, just happening to have come with cloth bags filled to bursting and leaving with bags flattened and rolled tight. And once, just once, Anna had seen a look from Tom that she hadn’t been able to identify. Anna catalogued everything, and T
om’s sideways glance had been unmistakable; she had placed it under not true, even though she hadn’t wanted to do so. Lies live in sideways glances.

  The puzzle pieces floated into interlocking spaces and plopped into their rightful homes. The frequent visitors passing by to talk with Tom relayed more than idle men’s gossip in his blacksmith shop, which camouflaged the chatter with the clanging of metal on hot metal. They were smugglers. It all made sense.

  Glenis gathered up her skirt and leaped from the cart. “Come down, Anna, and we’ll stretch our legs and let the horse rest his.” She walked to Anna’s side of the wagon.

  Anna felt the shift in Glenis; an imagined membrane between the two of them dissolved. She pulled her skirt up with one hand, revealing far more bare thigh than Glenis had done.

  “God in heaven! Must you open the garden gates all the way?” said Glenis when she saw the flash of flesh.

  “Sorry,” said Anna, jumping to the ground, joining the other woman as they stepped along a pasture, walking as wanderers do, without destination.

  The Irish woman bent over to pick up a stone that caught her eye. She rubbed the smooth disk in her palm with her thumb. “We could not get by, none of us, with the old Penal Laws. The English strangled us with their embargoes; they’ve left us without the ability to sell what we make and grow, and they refuse to allow other countries to trade with us. So we trade goods in and out without benefiting England. We’ve done so for generations.”

  Anna sidestepped dried sheep turds, then stopped to face Glenis. “You’re smugglers. And not just the two of you. Is every person I’ve met thick into the black market?”

  Here in the land of mist and green, nothing was what it seemed to be. Even if Anna had been in her own time, it would have taken her at least this long to figure out that affable Tom was a prime organizer for the underground market. Of course; everyone who had any wits about them would strategize around sanctions against marketing linen, wool, corn, and anything else that looked lucrative.