His faded, dark green jacket with cloth buttons looks like it was once formal wear. It is fitted to him, but tight across the chest and shoulders, and his pants are worn and his boots muddy.
“I’m Nevan,” he says, peering at me and ignoring the others.
“Regina,” I say.
“Regina Cæli, the Queen of Heaven.”
I smile, repressing a thrilled and awkward laugh.
Gwen and Anne seem nervous, maybe because of his disheveled clothing, but his presence excites me.
They are his sheep in the tide, he explains, his Kerry accent easier to understand than that of the other locals I’ve met. “They break a fence,” he says, pointing to a nearby headland. “When they get very close to the edge of the cliff, they get the urge to jump.”
•
The next three days are bright and nearly cloudless. I am the slowest cyclist of the three, Gwen and Anne often waiting ahead at a distance for me to catch up.
We pass farmers with donkeys or blunt plows on the fields, and women in shawls, driving calves along the road. We stop in various towns to buy bread, tomatoes, and cheese from little shops, then sit and eat on hills facing the beach, or in meadows near running brooks. Gwen knows the names of the wildflowers: bluebell, foxglove, heather.
In whatever wild, windy, lonely place we hike or cycle, my breath ragged from riding or climbing hard, I imagine Nevan appearing in the distance.
Huddling and shivering in a small tent battered by wind, we camp one night on Slea Head, at the tip of the peninsula. In the morning we visit prehistoric stone huts at the edge of the sea, then travel north to wild beaches outside Ballyferriter, the farthest westerly point on the mainland.
We stop our bikes on a roadside with a view of three hill cliffs, grass like yellow-green velvet covering the tops that sweep upward before falling sheer, in jagged rock, hundreds of feet down to the sea, where the water foams hard and gannets flee the splashing waves.
“These cliffs are called the Three Sisters,” Gwen says, holding tight to the map, which flutters in the wind. I ask Anne to take a photograph of me with the cliffs in the background. After the postal strike ends, I will send it to Tracy and Sheila.
My sisters are at the forefront of my thoughts now. I blame the fierceness of the Atlantic winds for the tears streaking my face.
•
I said good-bye to Anne and Gwen at the Killarney Youth Hostel, and set out again for Inch Strand. After checking into the little hotel, I take off my jeans, T-shirt, and sweater and put on a blouse and long skirt. Walking back to the beach where I saw Nevan, the wind whips the skirt wildly at my legs.
I walk on the strand and climb a hill toward the headland that Nevan had pointed to. He is there with five or six sheep, guiding them into a fenced area. As it begins to rain, he spots me, and gestures to the sky, then beckons me.
“I was just going in for a cup of tea,” he cries over the wind. I study the wide spread of his shoulders as I follow him down a hill to a cottage, which is set against a descent, protected from the ocean gales. He turns once and gives me a warm, flirtatious smile, and I smile back. The whitewashed structure appears ancient with slates on the roof and one nearly opaque window. He pulls the rough wood door open and we step inside where the dark air is cold, and smells of paraffin and some unnamable mustiness. My eyes struggle to adjust, the single window admitting almost no light. One wall is curved like it might buckle. The floor is earth.
Nevan pours water into a heavy black kettle that hangs from a crane, then stirs the embers beneath a layer of ash, reviving an old fire, and adds a new chunk of turf. The flames bristle, sending a spark airborne. In the sudden light, holy pictures appear over the mantel. I am surprised to see a portrait of John F. Kennedy.
A big stuffed chair with no legs, torn grayish upholstery covered in faded roses, faces the hearth. The fire now brightening, Nevan stands and brushes off his knees, and I notice that the ground all around him shimmers. He sees me looking and says, “Shattered glass. Ground down as fine as sand.”
In a soft voice, he announces, “My mother died almost a year ago now. This room is very much the way she left it.”
I wonder if it is meant as an apology for the state of things.
“The day my mother died, the mirror fell. One year,” he whispers.
He points to the chair and I hesitate. I take a step back as if his mother is sitting there. He urges, “Sit,” moving close and indicating the chair. I settle on its edge. He pulls up a cane chair and sits between me and the hearth.
On a table against the wall is an old wooden hairbrush, dark bristles matted with coarse gray-white hairs. A comb missing a few teeth, also fraught with the same gray-white hairs, lies next to it. A stub of candle stands between them, and just behind, a warped unframed picture of Christ leans against the wall. Crowned with thorns and embracing the crucifix, he lifts his eyes to heaven, irises drifted up so high they are hardly visible.
I look again at the brush. The hair has a gloss and resilience to it, a vague shimmer of oil like the hair on the head of someone living. A delicate, sour stink issues from the cushion of the chair beneath me. A nerve goes tight at the back of my neck.
I see Nanny’s wizened face, slightly whiskered, her sunken chest rising and falling. I hear Nanny muttering under her breath.
Nevan clears his throat.
“Why didn’t you clean up the broken mirror?” I ask.
He tenses at my question. The kettle begins to steam, but he makes no move to go to it.
He shakes his head. “I should have.”
There is still a strain of hope in his voice when he says, “I’ve had this idea that someone would come. That a woman was going to arrive to this remote place.”
A part of me holds back an incredulous laugh, wondering if he means that a woman would come and clean it up, but then I understand.
“A woman meant to be with me . . .” he continues. “When I saw you on the strand a few days back, I thought you might be . . .”
With every moment I feel myself closing off to him more. His pained inward smile becomes a grimace. He knows he is driving me away, but he doesn’t seem to know how it has happened, how he has lost me.
The kettle trembles at the boil, steam hissing from its spout. He turns and looks at it as if it were reprimanding him.
He gets up, takes the kettle off the crane, and settles it in the shimmering earth around the hearth. He does not make tea, but just stands staring down at it with a surrendered smile.
“I think it’s stopped raining,” I say, rising to my feet, relieved to put air between myself and that cushion. He faces in my direction but doesn’t look at me, his eyes on something just past my shoulder. I feel afraid, but not of him.
•
On a chilly night, my father sits in near darkness in the backyard looking up at a sky crowded with stars. When I go out and ask him what he is doing, he explains to me what constellations are.
“Do you see those very bright stars up there? That’s the constellation Orion, the hunter. Can you see the bow and arrow?” he asks, his breath forming a cloud.
“I don’t see the hunter,” I say with frustration.
“Do you see those three bright stars all clustered together? That’s Orion’s belt, so even if you can’t picture the rest of him, you know he’s there in the sky when you see his belt.”
Dad has a friend back in Yonkers named Jim O’Ryan. I ask him, “Is Orion the Irish constellation?”
He laughs, a high-pitched delighted laugh. “Maybe it should be,” he says. After a silence, he laughs again.
The cold is biting. He notices I am shivering, takes off his jacket, and puts it over my shoulders. He sits back in the chair and I stand beside him. We see a star fall and streak the sky, and a pink one that moves a tiny bit, like it is shaking.
•
The wind is harsh as I set out on my way back to the Inch Hotel. My eyes fill with tears, blurring my vision. I see something ah
ead, being pushed in by the tide. It looks like Nanny, sodden in her old gray coat, her glasses cracked, her eyes open in my direction. It is like the sea has spit her up from its depths, and in spite of the wind all around me, I smell her—stale urine, Noxzema, menthol cigarette smoke.
I try not to look at the sheep as it ebbs in the tide.
•
Back at the Inch Hotel, I sleep with the light on. It must be two or three in the morning when the bulb flashes and goes out. I hear a low twang and vibration and I am no longer alone in the room. A figure stands at my bedside, waiting for me to look. I hide under the blanket, curling my body into a tight fist. I press my face into my pillow so as not to breathe it in. “No, no, no,” I mutter through clenched teeth.
In the two weeks I’ve been in Ireland, I have kept the enchantments at bay, even at night. Even with the sad smells coming from the wallpaper and the old warped wooden dressers standing, waiting in the shadows, I have managed.
Hidden beneath the blanket, I am grateful for every sound outside the room: footsteps, the jingle of keys, someone coughing, a turning knob and a door squeaking open. I listen hard, these sounds holding me to the everyday world.
•
A deck of cards sits on a little table near Nanny’s chair. She holds her cigarette in the air between two fingers.
•
When she comes home from work, my mother hugs me, and I lean against her, the vibrations between us very strong. I give the sensation a name: doubling. I explain to her, “There is the Trinity, which means three, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. They are three and one at the same time. And then there is the doubling, which is the mother and the daughter, who are two and one at the same time.”
“You’re a sweetheart,” she says and kisses me on the forehead, then embraces me again. She is tired from work, and sighs into my hair.
•
Mom is looking at a picture in a magazine of a painting, a woman in a shawl wearing an expression that is both bold and thoughtful.
“Who is she?” I ask.
“Cathleen ni Houlihan,” Mom says.
“But . . . who is that?”
Mom thinks a moment. “She’s Ireland herself.”
“Ireland is a woman?” I ask, amazed.
“Yes,” Mom says, and laughs a little.
•
It is dawn, and when the morning light begins to filter in, the figure leaves. I fall into a deep sleep, and wake two hours later, raking the room with my eyes. I still sense the presence I thought had gone.
My stomach aches as I think of Nevan’s mother’s brush like something alive, the hair stuck within the bristles still growing. I think of Nanny’s smell and how it filled the air of our house long after she died.
“Start at the beginning,” Kim said when she wanted me to tell her what happened in my family, but I had no idea what the beginning was.
I hear the sea through the window, the steady drive as a tide pushes in. For the first time I think that maybe Nanny is the beginning. Maybe this answer has always been there, just under the surface. The tide retreats gradually, then forcefully returns.
•
I arrive back at the Killarney Youth Hostel, check in, go upstairs, choose a lower bunk in a large room filled with beds, slide my backpack beneath it, and fall into a shallow, uneasy sleep, relieved when young foreigners mill in and out, speaking in Nordic and European tongues.
It is afternoon when I get up. The enchantment is still not gone. I take out the postcards of Yeats country, the place where the silver and golden apples grow. Maybe the lit shroud of mist around Classiebawn Castle is really a kind of curtain, and if you pass through it you might find yourself in Tír na nÓg.
The book of Irish myths said that there are various entrances to the Otherworld. A woman once visited standing stones in County Mayo and disappeared from her mortal life without a trace.
If I can just get to Yeats country.
•
My mother and Nanny have a terrible fight. My mother yells at my father and sends him to the store. I go with him and after we get the things we’ve been sent out for, my father pulls into the parking lot of Manny’s Lounge. As I wait, the snow gathers. The wind blows against the car and when my father comes out, snow has blanketed the entire windshield and I am shivering.
When we get home, I stand in the front yard looking up, the snow stinging my face. I turn in circles staring into the blurred sky, little burning cold flakes shooting straight down into my eyes.
•
Spring comes early. Sister Maria del Rey is preparing us for First Holy Communion, distributing holy cards to each of us. On one side is a picture of a young woman, startled from her reading by a dove. On the other side is a picture of Jesus.
The light coming in the windows of our first-grade classroom takes on a dark greenish cast. The sky brightens a moment and then explodes with a crack and a boom, but no rain falls.
Sister Maria del Rey explains that the young woman is the Virgin Mary and the dove is the Holy Ghost. “All three members of the Trinity are present in the Host that you will receive through this sacrament.”
She lets us gather at the window and look out. When the clouds shatter and it pours, Communion takes on an aura of danger.
•
As I approach the communal kitchen at the youth hostel, I hear sounds: a cabinet opens, a drawer closes. I am nervous that when I look in, no one will be there. But there is someone. A young woman with blonde, curly hair, standing near the oven, turns and smiles at me. I nod at her, take a plate out of a cabinet, and put my packet of Ryvita crackers on it. She eyes them and offers me a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, one of two she’s just slid from a cast-iron frying pan onto a plate.
“Please! Please! Please!” she says in a halting accent, then puts the sandwich on a separate plate and holds it before me. She points at my jar of instant coffee, shakes her head, and points to a coffee pot percolating on the stove. She turns the burner off and pours us each a cup.
It is around four in the afternoon, and we sit together eating in the bright, empty dining hall, everyone else still off visiting the sites. I know no German but learn that her name is Brigitte. Her English is poor so I try speaking in Spanish, but she shrugs apologetically. I wonder why all the other Germans I’ve met so far are fluent in English and she isn’t. I have some sense that she does not quite fit with everyone else, but I am not able to put my finger on why.
Her clothes, very simple and clean, are worn. And facing her across the table I can see, by tiny lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, that she is older than I thought, maybe in her early thirties. I notice she wears a wedding ring.
She has been in Killarney for two days, she tells me in broken English. I try to focus but I hear a buzz at the back of my head and see a shadow fall across the table. She senses something is wrong with me and reaches across the table, touching my forearm with her fingertips. Not knowing what else to do I point to my temple, feigning a headache.
•
My mother is yelling at my father, things I’ve heard Nanny say. “You are incapable of supporting this family. You are a dreamer and what good is that to any of us?” I sit at the table. I try not to listen. I watch the snow through a small opening in the curtain, and am anxious to go back out into it.
No one eats. With glazed eyes, Jerry gets up and runs from the room.
Crying, Tracy stands up and tries to follow him, but Mom won’t let her.
“Sit down!” Mom demands, then goes into their bedroom and comes back with the big pale blue envelope in which she keeps love letters my father sent her when he was stationed in Korea during the war. “These are all a joke! You read through any of them and have yourself a big laugh.”
She pours the letters out of the envelope and into the garbage, then empties her dinner plate, uneaten chicken and mashed potatoes, on top of the letters. My father jumps up to fish out the letters, cursing under his breath. All three of us g
irls start to cry, and now, when we get up to rush from the room, she doesn’t stop us.
•
Brigitte and I ride in a horse-drawn wagon, what the locals call a pony-and-trap, through the Gap of Dunloe, a valley formed millions of years before by glacial ice. Cars are banned from the gap, but we see people wending their way by foot. The massive glacial rocks create strange echoes.
“Give a shout!” the driver recommends.
“Brigitte!” I yell and my voice echoes back at us.
She waits for the last audible echo to fade, then yells out, “Regina!”
I yell, “Verfallenheit!” and she yells, “Cornucopia!”
I tell her a word in English, and she shouts: pamphlet, sandwich, shoes. And she gives me German words to shout: Bleinstift, Pferd, das Karminrot. Each shout makes us laugh louder than the last.
After we ascend to a summit, a magnificent view between Macgillycuddy’s Reeks and the Purple Mountains, the driver turns and says in a droll voice, “There’s a pub up ahead but I don’t think the two of you are in need of any libation.”
Brigitte looks to me for translation. I point at the driver, then circle a finger a few times at my temple to indicate crazy, and then point at the two of us. We dissolve into laughter.
•
Nanny babysits us while my parents attend a PTA meeting. The others are all asleep when Nanny appears in the doorway to check on me. I pretend to sleep. A few minutes later I hear her in my parents’ room and my stomach feels uneasy. I get up and peek out my door. I’m not sure what I am seeing. Nanny is naked, her pale body soft and sagging. She utters angry words in such a low register that I can’t hear what they are. She slowly paces, arms swinging. She walks down the hall and into the living room, then circles around into the kitchen and out again into the bathroom. She seems to be going deliberately into each room but not to get anything or do anything, just muttering as she passes in and out of it naked.
•
I walk Brigitte to the bus station. She seems anxious. Passing a small church, she touches my arm and gestures that she wants to go in.
Ghost Songs Page 10
