Ghost Songs

by Regina McBride

  Jerry grabs the car keys. He is going to meet his friends. I give him the bottle of Drano and tell him to throw it away somewhere far from this house. Tracy, Sheila, and I turn on the television and look for something funny to watch. I know Mom is finished for the night, but I see uncertainty in both my sisters’ faces. They are listening for footsteps in the hall.

  “She’s not gonna come out again tonight.”

  They look at me, and I say it again. Tracy turns the channels until she finds F Troop.

  •

  I hear from someone at school that one of Kim’s movies, The Goddess, a black-and-white film from the early sixties, is playing at the small art cinema, the Bijou.

  I go during the day to see it. Kim is vivacious in the beginning and looks young and slim and beautiful. But the story becomes very dark.

  At her mother’s funeral, standing all in black, with a little black veil hanging from a hat around her face, she cries out in anguish and loses her balance. Supported by others, she gives herself over to a guttural wail, an unfettered expression of grief that hits me like a blow at the base of my spine. The character has a breakdown.

  I return to my apartment and keep the door and window open, listening for voices from over the wall.

  •

  I think of Blake’s depiction of God, a horizontal figure in the air, wrapped in a snake.

  •

  I open a side cabinet beneath the kitchen sink that I thought was soldered shut like some of the cabinets in the bathroom. Inside along with soiled rags and desiccated lumps of steel wool, I see an old bottle of Drano.

  I freeze. I am turning inside out, my memories taking form around me. The rusty steel wool looks like knotted mats of bloody hair, the aftermath of a violent death. I reach in, intending to take it all out, to get rid of it so I don’t have to live with it here, but can’t bring myself to touch any of it. Shaking, I close the cabinet.

  A faint chord of dissonant music, like someone running her fingers across the strings of a harp, sounds above me on the air. Sweat breaks out on my forehead and the back of my neck.

  •

  I am lying in bed. A man materializes near the stairs to the kitchen, bowing slightly forward. His hair, which stands on end, glows, lit flecks rising like embers and ashes. He endures the pain of the fire. I sit up and he senses me looking at him and begins to lift his head, though it seems to hurt him to do so. I lie back down, my body quaking, and squeeze my eyes shut. I remember my father telling me that William Blake saw angels with fiery hair. I try to persuade myself that it is an angel.

  The cut worm forgives the plow. The cutting, I tell myself over and over, is not still going on.

  •

  I am too nervous to stay in my apartment. Instead, I get out of bed, get in my car, and drive. It starts to rain. I park on a road off the highway near the junction, the rain hitting the windshield and the hood of the car in a hard torrent. I can make out the blur of passing headlights. Even in its violence, the rain soothes me. I told my mother often when I was little how much I loved rain and she always replied by telling me that I belonged in Ireland. I wonder why my family did not leave New Mexico, and why it was that Ireland felt like an unachievable dream.

  •

  I sell my car and buy a plane ticket one way across the Atlantic.

  PART THREE

  I stand at the prow of the boat as it pushes through night-dark water.

  This morning I was in London, then took a train to Swansea, Wales, where I got on this ferry to Cobh Harbor. This dark is different from the dark everywhere else in the world. It is Irish dark. The sea is Irish, the wind, the dampness. I never belonged in the immense, arid barrenness of New Mexico, with its dry red rock canyons. How clear that is to me in this moment. If I ever go back there, I cannot imagine it will be for many years. I’m almost home now, almost in the greener world of bogs and mist.

  It is 4:00 AM and the other passengers are inside sleeping, the lights switched low in the cabin. I think that I can tell someone, and it will be true, that I am homeless. I sold my car, got rid of almost everything else, which had not been much. It thrills and terrifies me to be so free.

  I press my hand against the scarf around my neck, and feel it rippling in the gale. It is the only thing I have left that once belonged to my mother, inexpensive, almost transparent beige, nothing of particular beauty. I borrowed it from her when I was thirteen and never remembered to give it back. It was in my drawer among my things for so long I ignored it, until my mother’s death, when it took on the significance of an heirloom. And I have in my purse a copy of The Wind Among the Reeds, one of my father’s favorite books by Yeats.

  As dawn arrives, I can see Cobh Harbor ahead, the infamous place of departure where, during the famine, the coffin ships left for America.

  I am almost in Ireland, and the closer I get, the more I feel the proximity of my parents. Too nervous and excited, I have not slept for several nights and as the sun appears at the edge of the horizon I believe in the miraculous. The wind beats hard and my mother’s scarf loosens. I grasp it just as it starts to fly away, and hold it aloft, watch it ripple in the wind. But then I let go, and the wind takes it, carrying it in the air. It settles on the water and soon becomes invisible. I touch my neck. It feels bare, and I realize I no longer have anything that belonged to either of them. The copy of The Wind Among the Reeds in my purse did not belong to my father, though it is the same edition as the one he owned.

  I imagine my mother’s scarf moving unseen gracefully down into the chambers of the sea. I want it back. Something I can hold, an object no matter how measly, anything, a button, a piece of lint from one of their pockets.

  •

  I remember the little blue moon-shaped bottle. Je reviens, I think to myself as the ferry reaches the harbor. I shall return to you.

  •

  It is a mild spring afternoon, my first day in Dublin, and the sky is a mix of sun and clouds. I lug my big plaid suitcase toward a worn-looking brick house, four floors high, a bed-and-breakfast called Fatima House on Upper Gardiner Street.

  A petite woman with long straight red hair, her bangs in pin curls around her forehead, half opens the door and surveys my face and demeanor with a fierce, eagle-eyed expression. After a moment of hesitation, she seems to decide in my favor, and lets me in.

  “You’re traveling alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “On holiday?”

  “Not exactly. I’ll be moving to Dublin.”

  She squints into my face. “Are you Catholic?”

  I eye the crucifix around her neck, and reply that I am.

  She nods and introduces herself as Mrs. Cleary. I pay her in pound notes, which she receives with a dignified nervousness.

  She helps me carry my suitcase up an enormous, drafty staircase and leads me to a room that faces Upper Gardiner Street. She pushes the curtains open farther; I look away from the dust motes moving in new light. She gives me the key. “Breakfast begins at seven and ends at half nine,” she says as she leaves, closing the door behind her.

  The furniture is gray and beige like the bedspreads, the prim Victorian wallpaper, bloated in spots from what looks like decades of damp. The iron bars on the headboards remind me of something that might be in an asylum. Alone, I feel a sudden panic squeeze my stomach. I have a few names scribbled on a torn piece of loose-leaf paper by a musician I met in school who had been in Ireland a few years before. He had no addresses or phone numbers to go with the names. “You don’t need them in Ireland,” he’d said. “You go to the local pubs and ask for people.” I retrieve the scrap of paper from my purse. McDaids—Harry Street.

  I throw the door open and rush after Mrs. Cleary as she is descending the stairs and ask if she’ll give me directions to McDaids.

  •

  I follow my father outside to the car. The sky is a cold silvery blue, a hush over everything.

  “You see those birds gathering?” he asks, pointing to a telephon
e wire along Siringo Road. More birds land on the wire.

  “Why do they do that?” I ask.

  “They feel the snow coming. They like to watch it fall.”

  “How can they feel it? Can they feel the molecules coming?”

  He laughs. “The air changes, so yes, there must be molecules to that change.”

  Christmas lights glow in all the store windows as we drive along Cerrillos Road. “Light has molecules, doesn’t it?” I ask.

  When he says that he thinks it does, I ask if when a light goes out, it leaves molecules behind.

  “For a while, I think,” he says.

  •

  I open the door to McDaids and a wave of noise floods out onto the street, the single room of the establishment vibrating with laughter and yelling.

  Daylight filters in a big front window and through a heavy veil of cigarette smoke. I hold the piece of paper up to the bartender, who is filling a line of pint glasses at the tap.

  “The only name I know is Mike O’Donnell,” he yells over the noise, “but haven’t seen him in a year.”

  With nowhere to go, I head back toward Upper Gardiner Street, as groups of small black-and-white birds fly over the river and begin assembling on the roofs beyond O’Connell Bridge. I wander over the bridges and the streets along the quays, hoping that someone—maybe a young man—will recognize my essential Irishness and approach me; that there will be little I’ll need to explain about myself.

  I go to places I think this young man might go. I walk to the campus of Trinity College and sit in the quadrangle reading The Wind Among the Reeds, the title a sign to this man, who will almost certainly be a literary person. People stroll by but do not address me and I don’t make eye contact.

  When I arrive back at Fatima House that evening, Mrs. Cleary meets me in the foyer, where she is switching on a lamp, and sees me holding my copy of The Wind Among the Reeds.

  “My husband is from a small village in Sligo, near Yeats country,” she says.

  I’ve heard the phrase Yeats country before from my father, but for some reason thought it referred to a territory of the mind; the dreamscape of Yeats’s poems.

  “Is it beautiful?” I ask. “Yeats country?”

  “Oh yes,” she says, and goes on to describe hazel woods and lakes.

  When I ask her how far it is she tells me it is “all the way across Ireland and a bit to the north.” “All the way across” sounds far, the way she said it, and somehow that impression stays with me. Yeats country. The words glow in my mind as I climb the dark staircase to my room.

  •

  Dad likes finding me sitting in a corner reading his wrinkled copies of Yeats or Dylan Thomas, and one day brings me a journal to write my own poems in.

  •

  Father Godfrey, the tall, gangly Franciscan friar who wears black plastic glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, comes to the classroom and tells us that we are lambs of God, and that the sacrament of Confirmation will be another step toward our salvation. We each need to pick another name, a saint’s name. I know in an instant that my name will be Barbara.

  •

  The Grand Canyon will be our first big vacation. We will stay in a fancy lodge on the edge of the canyon. Mom is excited to go horseback riding. It will be one of the first things we do when we get there. The trail rides we’ve gone on in New Mexico have not allowed Mom to gallop her horse, but she makes calls and finds out that there are trail rides at the Grand Canyon that allow a mix of new riders and experienced ones. “I’ll get a spirited horse,” she says, proud of her ability as an equestrian. “A horse can feel what you’re feeling,” she explains. “If it senses your confidence, it will respect you.”

  •

  Mrs. Cleary has taken to knocking on my door, coming in, and sitting down on the edge of the bed to complain about unwed mothers in Ireland, and the loose morals of people who come to stay under her roof. She asks me to call her Theresa.

  People often ring the bell downstairs and she turns them away saying she is full, but most all of the rooms are empty, the doors wide open.

  “I pick and choose,” she says. “I never let the ones with the backpacks in. Why can’t they use suitcases like respectable people?”

  “Did you let me stay because I didn’t have a backpack?” I ask.

  “Yes, but mostly it was your eyes. I’m good at reading faces, although sometimes I make a mistake and let a heathen stay and then find myself cleaning up their vodka bottles.”

  •

  I buy postcards with pictures of the Book of Kells at Trinity College and write one for each of my sisters and my brother.

  I ask Mrs. Cleary where I can mail them and she informs me that there is a postal strike in Ireland that has been going on for months.

  “You take a chance by mailing them. They’ll likely not get through.”

  It registers for the first time how far away I am from my sisters and brother.

  •

  The movie Ryan’s Daughter, which was filmed years earlier in the West of Ireland, is in an extended residence at the cinema near Parnell Square. Waiting for the box office to open, I see a guy around my age wearing Levis and a windbreaker, and I peg him for an American. I approach him and we start to talk.

  Fred is from Illinois and we sit together at the movie and afterward we go to a crowded neighborhood pub for a drink.

  “You came all this way with only the name of a pub to go to?” he asks.

  I nod, embarrassed.

  “I can’t believe you’re staying in a bed-and-breakfast alone in Dublin when you could be seeing the beauties of western Ireland and meeting people from all over the world.”

  He tells me that he doesn’t like Dublin, that he’s only here because he’s going to take the ferry to Wales and then to London to fly back to the States.

  “The West is the reason people come to Ireland!” He tells me about the Killarney Youth Hostel, a beautiful building that looks like a Swiss chalet, situated on a green hillside.

  “I’d like to go to Yeats country,” I say.

  “But first you should go to Killarney. It’s the nerve center for people traveling in the West. From there you can find people to travel north with you to Yeats country.”

  •

  In Killarney I befriend Swedes, Italians, Germans, Australians, and in keeping with everyone else, exchange my unwieldy plaid suitcase for a large, bright yellow backpack, which can be left in safekeeping at the hostel while I go with others to see the local attractions. Because it’s so close to the Gulf Stream, the area, replete with lakes, lush and intensely green, feels almost tropical, the high trees filled with screeching birds with wild calls.

  In a little shop on the grounds of Muckross House, an old estate house of castle-like proportions at Killarney National Park, there are postcards of many of Ireland’s attractions. I buy some of Yeats country: one of swans in early morning light; one of Classiebawn Castle in an effulgence of mist; one of the hill, Ben Bulben, in evening light after a storm; one of hazel woods; and one of Yeats himself sitting with his dog. And postcards with pictures of the lakes of Killarney for my sisters and brother. I write them but cannot send them. I will wait for the postal strike to end, although no one can predict when that might happen.

  •

  I eat breakfast with Gwen and Anne, two Englishwomen in their midtwenties who work as physical therapists in London.

  Our conversation is interrupted by the loud voice of an arrogant American at a nearby table. We shake our heads and roll our eyes.

  “Well,” red-haired Gwen says, “he is obnoxious, but I do think he’s kind of attractive. Don’t you?”

  I shake my head no. “He’s a jock.”

  They both look at me confused.

  “There’s only one definition I know for that word,” Anne says.

  After a beat, the three of us burst into laughter.

  I ask them if they want to travel with me to Yeats country. Their time is limited and they can�
��t go that far north, but invite me to join them on a three- or four-day excursion by bicycle around the Dingle Peninsula, a thirty-mile stretch west of Killarney, high rocky cliffs, glacial valleys, and prehistoric remains.

  Leaving our packs at the hostel, we take only what we need, and within two hours are riding westward on winding pathways through small fields with thatched cottages, veering sometimes toward stretches of wild, uncultivated land overlooking the sea. Daisies and fuchsia grow thick along some of the narrower routes and byways. Cars rarely pass, but the occasional ramshackle lorry rattles by, some carrying big metal canisters to be filled with milk. Flocks of black-faced sheep have the right-of-way and we pull off to the side to let them pass. The light keeps changing in the sky, the hills alternately bright and in shadow. We ride for an hour before it begins to rain. We scale a hill to a small, isolated hotel overlooking Inch Strand. The rain keeps on so we decide to spend the night. We check in, store our bicycles, then take our packs upstairs to a room with three single beds. I go down ahead of the other two to the hotel restaurant and sit near a window, a vast view of the sea from up on this cliff. It moves in one great, subtle undulation, the raindrops disrupting the smooth waves of its surface, so it seems to shiver.

  Two figures in raincoats, a man and a woman, walk on the sand below holding hands, shielding their faces against the wet. From this distance, they could be my parents.

  •

  When the rain stops, the girls and I walk along the strand, gulls shrieking in the strong wind. The bodies of two sheep are pushed onto the shore as the tide comes in, their coats sodden with seawater. Their eyes are closed, but they appear unharmed, like they’re asleep. The water begins to pull them back to sea.

  “How strange,” Gwen says.

  When the tide pushes them again onto the sand, I avert my eyes and look ahead on a break in the clouds, where rays of white light shoot down into the water. The shrieking of the gulls intensifies as the water rushes away. I turn and see a young man in the distance on a sandy bank. I wonder if he is real. Shielding my eyes from the wind, I try to focus on him. His longish, tangled hair moves against his face. The closer he gets, the more handsome he appears to be, tall with prominent cheekbones, and a relaxed, full mouth, his eyes ice blue, gleaming and fervent.