• • •
Angus found me the next day. It was because the old woman I’d slept with went to the fair and told her wild tale about the young girl who’d appeared out of the dark when Jackie’s beloved mother was about to go under. Angus followed her back to camp, the woman wearing a dark face.
“She belongs to this one,” she said. “They were after having a row and he wants her back.”
The young man gazed desolately at him.
“I’ll not go back with him,” I said.
“Come here to me, Mare,” Angus said impatiently. “Nothing happened between me and Nan.”
“I saw you with her and her bosoms sticking out of her dress.”
He approached me and clutched my wrist, pulling me after him out of the camp.
The young man bristled but Angus’s size must have made him think twice.
“Nothing occurred between us. I had too much of the drink in me.”
“So you would have if you could have.”
The tinkers were listening. “Leave us some privacy!” Angus cried out.
“There’s things need to be settled between us, Mare. It’s too lonely a world, love. Too lonely for us that belong to each other to battle. Come on now, lass,” he said, and with his arm around me we walked back through the rocky field to the caravan.
· 26 ·
BUT WE DID NOT SETTLE the things angus said We needed to. We did not talk about the things that had been left unclear. We kept, instead, a deliberate quiet around them. And even with the uncertainty and mistrust, the blood wildness between us did not stop. It was this that kept him quiet, I was sure; as if he were afraid that further revelations might cause that to dissolve.
Sometimes I would find the sealskin dress lying on the bed and I knew he wanted me to put it on, and when he’d look at me in it the air around him seemed to take in its breath. He hesitated before he touched me, and when he did he closed his eyes and I felt him forget me. Afterward he’d turn penitently away and disappear into himself.
It was mid-July when we rode out to the end of the Dingle Peninsula to Slea Head, where Angus said there was an abandoned stone cottage he wanted me to see and that perhaps we would stay there a night or two. We stopped on an uphill road overlooking the sea in a driving wind.
He pointed to the crest of the headland where I could see a bit of stone wall. A slew of screeching gulls rose up over the cottage, carried inland by the wind.
“I’ll have to find a spot for the caravan out of the way of this wind,” he said. “There’s a break below in the hill.”
I got out and wandered onto the headland while he drove the caravan around to settle it. A group of seals rode the rough water below, looking up at me expectantly with darkly human faces.
“I used to call it ‘singing cottage,’ ” Angus shouted to me across the noise of wind and sea as he started up the headland on foot. We met at the back of the cottage, the air full of an undulant high-pitched whistling.
“It’s bits of dead grass or moss caught between the stones causes the whistling in a high wind,” he said.
The sky above us was as dark and uneasy as the water below. A difficult coastline jutted out into the sea, descending gradually from the front of the cottage. “We’ll hear the water beatin’ at the rocks until dawn.”
He wandered around the cottage looking at the earth, then squatted down pulling up bits of dry root and rubbing them between his fingers. “If ever I’d have settled, it might’ve been here,” he said. “Many years ago here I planted seed potatoes that I never harvested. Left the little things dead asleep in the earth to rot.”
The wooden door creaked open as I pushed it. The stone room inside was cold and full of shadows, purple flowers sprouting from the cracks in the rock under the single window. A blackened pot hung on a chimney crane above a trace of ash in the hearth, and a wicker creel sat on the floor with a few dry ribbons of kelp in it.
“Someone was here not too long ago,” I said.
“Me,” he replied quietly. “I was here in April before I went north to Dunshee.” He’d brought a bag of supplies with him from the caravan and began setting pieces of coal in the ash. A rumbling sounded in the sky and the room went a shade darker. “Light a lamp, Mare. It’ll go even darker soon,” he said. He went to the door and faced out.
I could find no paraffin for the lamp so I lit a thick candle and placed it in a saucer on the table. I was hungry and began to cut bread and cheese and slice tomatoes for a meal. I set it all out on plates on the stone table and drew two creaking rush chairs from against the back wall.
The gray sky went almost green and the rain deepened to a downpour. “A bloody candle does us little good,” he said.
“I couldn’t find the oil.”
“It’s right in front of you, girl,” he said, pointing to it among the provisions we’d brought up. I watched his face, hurt by the irritation in his voice. I reached for the lamp but he moved brusquely toward me and grabbed it, filling and lighting it.
I sat down, stung.
Angus kept the door open as the rain came down, letting it pool in the dips in the clay floor at the threshold, shocking me, reminding me of my mother. All the while we were sitting down to eat, the rain dampened the floor. The glass flue of the dry lamp shook in its metal bracelet with the wind, and the flame leaned desperately, fluttering like a flag.
“Why do you leave the door open that way?”
“It’s bad luck to close off the weather so completely.”
The humid air infiltrated everything, and though it was cool I felt myself sweating, my loose sleeves luffing at my skin. The purple flowers quivered between the stones.
When the meal was over the rain stopped. Angus went outside in front of the cottage while I stayed in the torn rush chair watching him through the open door, a new wind blowing his hair, getting under his loosened shirt.
I turned away from him and focused on the cinders still glowing and crackling under the pot. When I looked up again he was on his way back in, his eyes set on me. He sat down again across from me and said, “Tell me about Clodagh, your cousin. What is she like?”
I stopped breathing. “She’s . . . a nice girl,” I said.
“I imagine her a quiet girl. Is she?”
“Yes. She is quiet. Why do you ask about Clodagh?”
He turned his eyes to the cinders. “Agatha was the mother of my twin daughters. Mary Margaret who is dead now these many years, and Clodagh. Your friend Clodagh is my daughter.”
“No. Agatha was married to Frank Sheehy.”
The orange cinders glowed in his eyes. “Yes. But she’d been married to Frank Sheehy for almost a year before I bedded her. She was a virgin. The man was ill, lass.”
An awful quiet filled me. Stunned, misty quiet like the air over Dunshee. I tried to concentrate on his words but the meaning of them eluded me.
“Promise me you’ll never tell Clodagh this,” he said. “When I take you back.”
“I promise.” My voice floated to me from another corner of the room.
“So you see . . . there was a great deal more between Agatha and me than you knew.”
“Yes,” I uttered.
We sat quietly for a few minutes, then he left for the caravan to collect the bedding and some more supplies for the night.
I walked outside and stood watching his figure move down the headland in the gray afternoon light, trying to think about his words. He’d said that he was Clodagh’s father. For a moment I thought I was not Clodagh and, shivering with the wind, I asked myself the same questions Angus Kilheen had asked. “What is Clodagh like? Is she a quiet girl?”
· 27 ·
AFTER ANGUS RETURNED WITH THE supplies he took paddy the wolfhound and walked down into Ventry, the nearby town. I found the caravan where he’d parked it below at a break in the hill. I searched the chest where he kept a few little keepsakes among his tools. In the main box with the screwdrivers, vials of lighter fluid and loose coi
ns mixed up with nails and screws, I found an old novena with finger-worn pages and a man’s rough wooden rosary with a metal cross, and wrapped in a paper bag, a tiny plastic statue of the Virgin with a magnet at the base. I found what looked at first like a small metal book. I pressed a catch on the side and it squeaked open, revealing a double frame attached at the middle. On one side was a photograph of me and Mare as small girls, Mare looking off to the side dreamily while I fixed the camera’s eye with a serious expression. In the other side was an illustration of the Virgin Mother in a blue mantle, her palms pressed together. Delicate floral engravings on the frame enhanced each image. I slipped my fingernail into an opening behind the photo and pulled it loose. On the back my mother had written in childlike letters: “Beloved girls—Mary Margaret and Clodagh,” the word “beloved” misspelled. Under that Angus had written it again, spelled correctly.
I held the picture a long time, searching our expressions, then turned it over to gaze at the letters my mother had penned, trying to drink in what she’d felt when she’d given him the picture; wondering if the words were for his benefit or if she’d really thought of me as such.
I scaled the wet hill back to the cottage leaning into the force of a battering wind. When I reached the summit near the cottage, my eyes were tearing. I tried to think as I stood, leaning into the wind, looking out to sea.
A father was of the dead. A father was a shadow, an idea conjured and dispelled, never to be fathomed. But Angus Kilheen was of the flesh; all mouth and skin and anxious heat.
A strange elation bled into my anguish. He belonged even more to me now than he ever had. Silver light, barely contained, showed itself in the edges of the clouds: restrained, as if something were about to break. And while the sea below folded and unfolded, the same silver, almost blinding light appeared and disappeared on the crests of the waves. Anguish and elation overlapping like the tides overlapped and ultimately blended. I could not hold to the gravity of what this revelation meant. I could not hold to that.
The words that I needed to speak to Angus were somewhere on my breath but I didn’t know how to say them. I knew that I’d not say them. At least not now. I remembered my mother going into the sea. I had hoarded the knowledge, held to the intimacy it afforded me with her for three or four days before telling Mrs. O’Dare. I’d been an oracle then, as I was an oracle now: my throat, my mouth full of light.
• • •
On their way back up from Ventry that night Angus and Paddy wandered along the beach and had a swim. They came back, soaked with the sea. The fire was almost out and I was lying under the fleece in the makeshift bed. When he got in next to me he was penitent for his earlier mood. He leaned close and said, “I’m glad I told you the truth of it. It was eating at me.”
I hesitated and said, “It’s all right, Angus.”
He kissed me, his beard grazing my cheek, hurting faintly, arousing a loneliness in me. I turned away.
“You’re angry,” he said.
“I’m not,” I said and looked earnestly at him. “I’m really not. I’m tired. I just want to sleep.”
“You’re not tired. I know when you’re tired.”
“I’m not angry, love. I really am tired.”
He gazed into my face, then laughed softly. “You’ve never said no to me before.”
“I love you,” I said and touched his face.
Twice beside him that night I reached the edge of sleep but awakened each time feeling afraid, trying to remember what it was that I knew that had caused such agitation in me, but it eluded me like the tail of a dream, and I sought to remember it only halfheartedly.
I looked at him as he slept and a minor convulsion of understanding moved through me. And though the fire was almost out, the room sustained an artificial brightness, the shadows of the flowers throwing configurations on the wall.
• • •
The next morning we wandered the headland. The previous day’s clouds were long since gone and I found deliverance in the vitality of the elements: the driving wind and blinding sun. In the mad, exhilarated screeching of the puffins and kittiwakes.
Was it not an unspeakable thing? I asked myself. A father and daughter loving each other in this way? In the other world it was. But maybe not here, I told myself. Here the dead were recovered. Or maybe I was newly dead. Coming so far west I’d left one life and had come into another. And now, knowing what I did, I was drawn into a stranger, even more deeply hidden world. An inheritance, I told myself. I’d come into myself. I shuddered and felt within me a great reservoir of emotion, all feelings bleeding into each other: desire into shame into tenderness into loss, and back into desire.
Wanting room for my own reverie, I lingered behind, Angus walking a few yards in front of me. Once, remembering the kiss he’d given me the night before, I lost my footing on the rocks. I wandered off onto the beach, veering away from him. When I closed my eyes a vision of his face was burned there like a light I’d stared too hard into.
Near day’s end, we climbed up toward the cottage and sat down on the rim of cliffs. Two herons made slow ascents into the air and re-alighted near the threshold of our cottage. The female walked in through the open door, her faint shadow flashing on the wall. I was certain she was wresting the half loaf of bread from its paper bag. I didn’t tell Angus. He was facing out toward the sea and I was worried he’d go in and upset her. The other heron walked nervously back and forth, stopping once and cocking his head, his eye pierced in our direction.
Angus turned, spotting the heron in the cottage, and jumped to his feet. “The trespasser!” he said.
“No, leave her! Leave her, Angus!” I said.
“It’ll eat what little we’ve got left in there,” he said.
“I’ll go!” I cried, imagining him rushing at her, a panic of wings and the bird panting with an open beak.
I walked slowly toward the house. “Go out, love!” I cried to her. “Go!” But she backed farther inside, knocking the candle off the table. I went in through the threshold and she backed in farther, letting loose an echoing, unearthly shriek.
“No, no, my girl,” I said softly. “It’s all right.”
I stepped to the side and she ran out the door. With a heavy downpushing of wings she ascended on a swell of wind and seemed to lay a moment in suspension over the house, her feet stretched out behind her.
Angus came in and finding me crying hugged me and turned me in a playful circle. “Silly child! Shaken up so by the shyness of a bird!”
• • •
In the afternoon I sat for hours inside on the edge of the bed, hardly moving, while outside in front of the cottage Angus worked a piece of tinware. I listened to the exertion of his breathing as he labored; his intakes of air, his exhalations. Every faint sound from him hurt and captivated me.
I asked myself, should there not be in me a reflex against him? I struggled to feel it in the stillness. But it was not there in me.
I went to the doorway and watched as he welded a decorative coil of metal as a design onto the pot in the complicated style that the man in Kildare had said looked “Iron Age,” like something “dug from a bog.”
He looked up and smiled at me, warmth flooding his expression. A few strands of his hair stuck to the dampness on his forehead and temples. I smiled back and a flame of sadness deepened in my chest.
Soon he would leave the hot metal to set and the sparks to die on the wet ground. If I did not prepare a meal, he would lead me to the bed. I revived the coals on the hearth, peeled a turnip and some potatoes, put them into a pot to boil. Distractedly I set things out. Plates and cups. Butter. I cut bread and made tea.
• • •
It was near dark when he came in. I lit the lamp and set it on the table. He held my eyes strangely as he ate, and a panic seized me that he also knew the truth.
I reached across the table and touched his hand. “What’s wrong, Angus?”
“It does something to me, this cottage fasten
ed to the earth. The stillness of it under me.”
“What does it do to you?”
“I used to think that something tragic awaited me in stillness. I believed that if I could move freely I could avoid it.”
“And you don’t believe that now?”
“I don’t know what I believe now, lass. But the sadness of the world settles in the calm of a house.” He paused and said, “Maybe we should leave this place soon.”
“No, Angus. I want to stay still for a bit.”
With his eyes downcast, he ran a finger along the rough wooden grain of the table and I saw that he wouldn’t fight me; that what had drawn him here still held him.
Out of the quiet between us I asked, “Why did you never go to see your daughters?”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Clodagh believes that Frank Sheehy was her father. And so does everyone else. It’s better for her. She stands to inherit things, most likely.” He looked down again at the table. A wave of anger moved through me.
“Weren’t you ever curious about her?”
“I did see her sometimes . . . and Mary Margaret too, before she died.”
“When did you see them?” I asked, surprised.
“When they were infants. Sound asleep they were, in their mother’s bed. But I saw Clodagh again after that.”
The lamp sputtered, the flame gone low and ambery, before stretching again and brightening the room.
“I used to hide upstairs in that strange old house and Agatha’d come to me in the night. I asked her to show me Clodagh and we walked very quietly into the room and I stood watching her sleep. But I had to rush out because the child stirred as if she could feel me there.”
“What was she like?”
“Beautiful shadowy little thing, she was.” His eyes shone.
“Didn’t you want her with you?”
“What a question you ask,” he uttered as if I’d slapped him, and in his pained expression I saw Mare’s face pass over his like a shudder in water. I had once moved the rough hairs of his mustache and run my finger along his smooth upper lip, noticing how similar it was to my own in shape and prominence. Like me he always listened with parted lips, and tensed his mouth the way I did to restrain a smile. Like my own, his temples dipped inward slightly between his forehead and his cheekbones. His eyelashes were gold at the roots, like Mare’s. I had mused over these likenesses before, never imagining them to be signs of a blood relationship.
The Nature of Water and Air Page 25
