PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  Thinking he had staked out the two extremes treacherous mythologies vs. innocuous mythologies he moved to improv. Here he assailed Irish folklore as being a puerile example that would be dangerous if it hadn’t become a charming tourist thing suitable only for children and cereal box logos.

  Even Doreen Brynn winced. He was going to crash and burn, she realized. It sparked a fatalistic admiration in her breast. She agreed with his every word, but she knew he might as well put on the Orangemen’s sash and parade through Kylemore Abbey to fife and drum as to attack traditional beliefs with such condescension.

  Sensing hostility at last, the intrepid speaker attempted to put on the brakes: “Of course, I’m sure the land of James Joyce and George Bernard Shaw has far more sophistication than the quaint minority I allude to,” he said, but the mention of a pair of Dubliners mended little. “Speaking here this evening just proves the point. Darrig is a progressive village rustic, sure, but you don’t confuse the preservation of tradition with gullible narrow-mindedness. Really, I mean that. Would I try to lavish blarney on the Irish?” He laughed alone. “I mean, sure I’ve run into a piece of work or two, I don’t mind telling you. You probably already know about my run-in with that troglodyte out there who owns the cemetery.” Brone McCabe was safe, he thought, everyone hated Brone McCabe. “. . . a monument to just that kind of superstition I was talking about. Talks to leprechauns and probably drinks them under the rainbow.” They were smiling now. All but one sourpuss. Good, good. “A real horse’s patoo,” he added on the fly for the benefit of the mirthless woman who regarded him coolly from the last row. “If there’s anything to this faerie stuff, I’m sure McCabe will turn into something with warts and bowed legs the next full moon.” He got a genuine titter out of that and gave up on the frowning woman.

  It took him five more minutes to stumble to a conclusion and invite questions, of which there were none, and then Doreen Brynn thanked him and invited Margaret Macloy to be “the mother,” a social distinction for pouring the cupan tae. The listeners flowed to the sideboard where there were bickies (crisp tea cookies) and two pots with knit cozies over them. But ten of the audience suspected the show wasn’t over, and the eleventh was the sourpuss who knew for certain it wasn’t.

  “Mr. Andersen,” she said sweetly, “I’m just a bumpkin who likes to read the cereal box when she eats her Lucky Charms, so I don’t know what a horse’s patoo is, but if it’s on the end I’m thinkin’, then you and my father should be able to hold your next conversation back to back.”

  Almond eyes flashing, umber hair whirling, she turned on her heel, and soared out of The Book Bog.

  “That would be Sosanna McCabe,” Doreen Brynn confirmed at his elbow. “Be grateful murder is illegal.”

  14

  The irony was appalling: Sosanna McCabe going to the meeting to spite her father and ending up defending his honor. And in between her coming and going she had been put helplessly through an emotional wringer, having to sit there unable to leap to her feet as she wanted and rebut the brash American’s words, because of course everyone thought of the McCabes when they thought of sidhe lore. Even before the speaker attacked her father directly, she had felt the glances from the audience. In a few short minutes, the stranger managed to capitalize on years of resentment harbored against her family. By the time he was halfway through, she had felt like the outsider. Worse, the Yank turned out to be not the rustic she had first thought when she saw him arguing in the churchyard with her father. In fact, he had a jaunty appeal, casually dressed, blissfully unaware that he still wore his cap, boyish in his enthusiasm. She wished he hadn’t been so sincere in pursuit of his fatally flawed thinking. It left her seething with no place to vent as she stormed back up the road and through the churchyard to the edge of the pond.

  In the final moments of the gloaming she kicked off her shoes and took one step into the ooze. What d’ya say to that, father? Your little girl goin’ swimmin’ at high tide and after sunset!

  Only she couldn’t swim a stroke, so this could be suicide. She didn’t care. She would just wade out and whatever happened happened. She should take the plunge, dive head first into the black water, see if he came running. You see how I’ve rejected your lies, father? Nothing much he had said had ever turned out to be true. When a butterfly landed on you, it didn’t mean you’d meet your future husband at that spot (certainly not that “horse’s patoo” Doreen Brynn had fawned all over and inflicted upon them tonight!); and when she was a teenager and had accidentally stepped on an unbaptized baby’s grave she had not contracted the deadly grave-merels, as he had feared; and his warnings ad infinitum that she should never, never attempt to swim those were specious too. So, here she was, ready to take the plunge. Are you watching, father?

  But she didn’t like the pond. It was black and rank, and the only thing you could see in it were the murky gold stones in the shallows by the grotto and, now and then, when the surface trembled, a fantastic shape like a sleeper turning beneath a thin sheet. The ooze was already creeping past her ankles. Her nice warm ankles that leeches would love to drain of a blood meal. “You’ll never make it back to shore, if you ever go wadin’, lass,” her father had assured her twenty years ago. “Beatris Cassidy tried, and that’s her grave right over there, if you care to read her name on the stone.” That was why Sosanna had never swum as a little girl, because she thought little Beatris had been fed to saber-toothed leeches.

  She didn’t see the line of bubbles that began to move toward her from the pylon. Didn’t sense the cavitation that was stirring from the middle of the pond. She did, however, sense the presence behind her, and when she turned, there was her mother, watching with intense interest.

  “I decided to go swimmin’.”

  “I see.”

  “It can’t be that hard.”

  “No.”

  “Are you here to save me?”

  Her mother smiled wistfully. “You’re doin’ fine, Sosi.”

  With her feet locked in the mud, Sosanna waggled her knees, then made a ponderous turn back to shore. “That man father argued with is an American writer. I heard him speak tonight.”

  “Did you?”

  “He’s a pompous ass.”

  “So your father said.”

  “I s’pose I went to spite father.”

  “I s’pose.”

  “He had nothin’ good to say about anythin’ Irish the writer, I mean. Accused us all of ignorant superstition. And everyone just sat there, charmed I expect.”

  “He made an impression?”

  “Not on me.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s all about ideas psychological explanations and such.”

  “And that’s why you’re swimmin’, is it?”

  “Of course not. I’m just . . . tired of things the way they are, is all.” She looked woefully at the water in which she stood.

  Suddenly Una reached out and almost yanked her daughter the last step to shore. Surprised, Sosanna glanced around to see what could have prompted such urgency.

  “Do you remember how I used to hold you right here on the edge of the pond, Sosi, and ask you if you could see to the bottom?”

  “You said there was a castle down there.”

  “A green castle.”

  “. . . with walls that move.”

  “A castle of weeds.”

  “I never could see it.”

  “Can you see it now?”

  “Now? It’s almost dark.”

  “It’s always dark in Thiollaney Merriu. Can you see it now?”

  She looked again just to humor her mother. “No, I can’t see it.”

  “Out further. By the Pillar.”

  “I still don’t see it.”

  “Then you shouldn’t swim here.”

  15

  Lane Andersen was essentially a forward-looking person, a typical Yank on the move, trying to catch up with yesterday by tomorrow. He had no time to dwell on a few fractious events. His run-in wi
th Brone McCabe, the guarded evening with Buskers’ hard drinkers, exotic perils in an induced dreamscape, and confrontation with Sosanna McCabe among the unreceptive in what passed for Darrig’s cultural elite were just way stations on his journey. The people in rustic Connemara, on the other hand, had plenty of time. In fact, sorting out relationships and attitudes was how they passed time. That explained why so many eyes followed him as he drove through town the morning after the library meeting.

  He had spent the whole night on the green pillow and could not recall a single untoward dream, if he had dreamed at all. He felt brisk and efficient. Infrequent swipes of the wipers on his rented steel-blue Fiat Punto did for the morning’s mist, as he turned down the main cross-street and discovered Glenna’s Kitchen. The sun was in full command by the time he had breakfasted on hand-mixed muesli, organic yogurt, homemade bread with local jams, tea-leaf tea (what other kind was there?) and

  fresh-squeezed orange juice. He hated tea, but drank half a cup to please Glenna, who seemed to thrive on maternalism. “I have committed health,” he pronounced in paying the bill and stepped out onto the street, feeling that it was not quite coincidence that Flann Macloy was leaning against the building.

  “I hear you’re givin’ speeches settin’ us straight, Yank,” Macloy said with false alacrity and a glance down the empty street.

  Lane took a step back. “What’s it to you?”

  “Ah, well, you’re an American, so naturally you don’t understand manners.”

  “Manners would that be the same as freedom of speech?”

  “You shouldn’t go insultin’ your hosts when you pay visits.” Macloy pushed away from the wall.

  “If illusions offend me, I say so. Get over it.”

  “If it was just illusions” Macloy whisked fingers across Lane’s left shoulder “I might brush that off. It’s attackin’ my woman that’s your undoin’.” He tried to repeat the gesture on the other shoulder but Lane twisted slightly.

  “That’s right, the little man you were picking on at Buskers said you had some illusions of your own about marrying McCabe’s daughter. But I didn’t attack her.”

  “Well, aren’t you the cocky bantam.”

  Macloy flashed a winsome smile that squared into a grimace as he delivered the sucker punch just below the belt. His other fist caught the inevitable sag with a lifting uppercut to the jaw that dropped Lane Andersen into a ball on the pavement.

  “There now,” Macloy said, thumbing his suspenders. “You’re all even with the board, Yank. Welcome to Darrig, a hospitable Irish village where manners are prized.”

  Lane smelled used muesli and orange juice, and there was an intact dinosaur egg lodged in his upper trachea right where he wanted to breathe. The sidewalk felt warm and stable, and he thought he might stay there for a few days, but that wouldn’t be polite. And here in Darrig you wanted to be polite. So he rolled around a bit until his knees were under him, and then he staggered to a crouch and more or less lurched down the street toward the Fiat Punto. With the help of a light pole halfway there he made himself back into an erect biped and finished the journey. For long minutes he sat in the driver’s seat, both hands on the wheel, head back, eyes closed, allowing nausea to make chill passes over his brow. Then the voice came quietly to his ears.

  “The Irish, of course, have always been good with their fists.”

  That could have been scrambled sonics still ricocheting through his ear canals from getting his bell rung, but he opened his eyes and there in the rearview mirror was another pair of eyes that he didn’t think belonged to a hallucination.

  “I s’pose you’ve heard of John L. Sullivan and James Corbett, on loan from the Emerald Isle to America,” came the brogue, “but the best I ever saw was Mike McTaigue. You should’ve seen him take the title from that Battlin’ Siki, Louis Phail, in 1923.”

  Lane blinked but the eyes in the mirror remained soft, unthreatening, encased in wrinkled flesh that just might be ancient enough to record such trivia as a 1923 prizefight, though the fellow was probably pure Irish blarney. “Who are you?”

  “Call me Abban. I saw you needed help. A priest never really retires.”

  “What were you going to do, give me Last Rites? I needed the whole Inquisition to handle that thug.”

  “No, no, no, not help with Flann Macloy he outweighs you by five stone I was waitin’ before that. You drove up, and after hearin’ you last night, I knew you needed help. Mind you, I was only mildly interested in what you had to say, and I’m only mildly interested in helpin’.”

  Lane adjusted the rearview mirror, squinted. “That’s good, because I don’t remember you, and if you heard me last night, you know I don’t rely on religion.”

  “You don’t rely on anythin’. That’s your problem. I scarce remember the last time I saw a body so faithless. But I could make your search a hundred times faster, if I felt like it.”

  Turning painfully, Lane sized up the pug face with the shock of faded sandy hair in the back seat. “What do you know about my search?”

  “Well, if you’ve come to Darrig on a book tour, you’re the first one ever. Nor do I think you’re here permanent to avoid taxes, so you must be researchin’. And given the nature of your past writin’s, not to mention the uninformed cynicism you put on show last night, I can say with confidence that you’re out to expose our poor Irish legends, and that can be foolhardy.” Tapping a finger against his nose, he added in a casual monotone, “And you’re not that hardy a fool, if you don’t mind my sayin’.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why I need you.”

  “With all due modesty, there’s no one knows more than I do about the sidhe, and about Connemara.”

  “You don’t sound much like a priest.”

  “I said I was retired, didn’t I? My interest in the sidhe is what you might call a lifetime hobby.”

  “What else are you interested in money?”

  The slight man “tsked” his tongue and sat back. “Such a cynic. Have you no been told your soul is bankrupt? Surely, your mother warned ya.”

  “Who are you?” Lane repeated sharply.

  “Your cynicism is astonishin’. You should watch more old movies. If I keep you alive for one month, I earn my wings. Start the car and head back to Kerry Street.”

  He didn’t know why, but Lane started the car and pulled away from the curb. “All right. So, you’re a clever old man with a little insight into people. I’m still not hiring anyone, if that’s what you’re after. Tell me when you want to get out.”

  “I’ve not said I’d help you yet. But just to make a point, if you’ve got any questions, try me.”

  “What?”

  “Ask away, and maybe I’ll save you some trouble. Turn right on Kerry.”

  “Trouble . . . What’s a Dream Pillow? And I go left on Kerry.”

  “Ah, the Dream Pillow. Well, like the label always says, ‘guaranteed to carry both true believe and daring doubter into realms far and near.’”

  Lane turned right on Kerry. “I’m mildly impressed.”

  “I told you, I know more about the sidhe than any of these people whose welcome you’re wearin’ out.”

  “Sidhe? I didn’t come here to research figments produced by generations of delirium tremens. I’m interested in Thiollaney Merriu.”

  From the back seat came a sound like lips smacking together.

  “A little out of your territory?”

  “Not at all. Thiollaney Merriu is just a part of hereabouts that anyone in their right mind would skirt. Terra incognita. Turn left at the dirt road.”

  Lane turned left. “I want to explore it. I want to look for tunnels, or a pagan site, or maybe catacombs. There’s more there than just a churchyard.”

  “There is.”

  “Then you know what’s there?”

  “‘. . . realms far and near.’ Use your Dream Pillow. But know aforehand there’s no escapin’ the consequences of your dreams.”

  “Did I
say I had a Dream Pillow?”

  “Beggin’ your pardon for breathin’, I got the impression you did. At least you were wonderin’ about it a moment ago.”

  “A sack full of hallucinogens makes a lousy travel guide.”

  “So you’ve had a dream.”

  “I had a dream. A real Brigadoon dream. I was drunk, drugged and my subconscious was in overdrive, if you want to call that a dream.”

  “‘Your subconscious was in . . .’ I’ll have to figure this out. Ah. The dream took you to see what you wanted to see. And what was that, pray tell?”

  “History. Not that I got to see much detail.”

  A gnarled finger extended into the front seat, gesturing to the left where Lane saw a simple gray-white cottage backed against oaks. He turned onto a trampled path that crackled with sticks and acorns.

  “Have you seen the grotto? It’s not very big, but they say men have got lost in there and never come out. Say hello to Mad Darby for me, if you see him. He’ll lead you out of danger, if you look for his light.”

  Lane laughed gingerly against the ache in his stomach. Mad Darby. Cautionary tales were a lullaby when you realized how totally predictable they were.

  16

  Una left the house when her husband was mowing the southeast plots, hoping he would not see her; Brone saw her but pretended he did not. She didn’t want to hurt him; he didn’t want her to think he saw and no longer cared.

  She was going for her daily ablutions. What else could you call them? Not enough that he had built her a virtual spa in the house outrageously beyond what they could afford and which she could not enjoy. She would sit there with the water burbling, staring at the jets, never moving until she felt she had shown enough gratitude, and then she would slip out of the plastic liner and within the hour be missing again though of course he knew she was gone to the sea. And in three decades he had never once felt that this was just a daily ritual, a stolen pleasure he should accord her in deference to her femininity and her ways. Never once felt certain that she would return. And she had never felt totally free of his oppressive shadow. She thought she loved him, but at those moments when he watched her, he seemed two-dimensional to her, and she wished he could feel as she did. She wished . . .