PANDORA

by Rebecca Hamilton

  “I believe the other side is written in English.”

  “Ah. There it is. How about that?” He gestured to the open chair again. “Yesterday I tried to order pancakes and got three pitchers of prune juice to go. ‘To go’ was redundant.”

  She sat down slowly. “You’re very strange.”

  “Even for an American?”

  “I think so.”

  “Number twenty-six on my list of flaws. Right there behind impatience, which you ranked twenty-fifth, if you recall.”

  “My, but you wound easy.”

  “How’s your father?”

  She looked at him dryly. “Outstandin’.”

  “Out standing in his cemetery waiting to shoot me. . . . sorry. I’m actually having a terrific time here in Ireland really.”

  “Are you?”

  “Jolly.”

  “Tell me what you truly like about us, Mr. . . . I mean, Lane? I’ve heard all the bad, haven’t I?”

  He clutched his water glass, nodding profusely, struggling in search of a national virtue. “Ireland . . . great rain . . . love the green. I had a green parrot once.” He cleared his throat. “Can you be more specific?”

  She smiled a Giaconda smile. “What do you think of our children?” The cash register rang where the elderly couple she had passed in the aisle was now paying. “What do you think of our elders?”

  “The Irish make fetching children and wonderfully wizened senior citizens,” he said crisply. “It’s only in-between that they’re as homely as toads.”

  She studied him with her mouth open.

  “I was just kidding,” he said.

  “You should never work with people,” she advised in somber tones.

  A burly woman with puffed sleeves but without guest checks or pencil showed up to take their order. Sosanna asked for boxty and juice. Lane asked the waitress if she was going to write things down.

  “Not if you order in English, love. We’re out of the prune juice, but if you try to order in Irish again, I’ll have to draw up a contract and have you sign it.”

  “I think I’ll just have Irish coffee.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s got the four Irish food groups, doesn’t it: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat?”

  Whistling softly and shaking her head, the waitress retreated. Sosanna was studying him again. “You should try the muesli,” she said.

  “No thanks. It’s hell to clean off a sidewalk.”

  “What? Oh. You’re referrin’ to Flann Macloy’s . . . indiscretion.”

  “My drubbing,” he whispered.

  She smiled for real this time, pleased that he had a sense of humor about himself. “You’re only slightly intolerable,” she said.

  “Ach, please don’t feed the bear. I’m not equipped to handle compliments.”

  “Contrary to my first impression, I’m beginnin’ to think that’s true. You’re very fractious. Livin’ in the boonies with a lot of Connemara rustics may calm you down. And . . . I may have been a little hard on you. You were harsh in your analysis of the Irish, and I was harsh in analyzin’ you. We’re probably both wrong.”

  “I’m wrong?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Purely as a matter of intellectual honesty, I am not wrong.”

  “Oh, dear, I spoke too soon.”

  “I thought women liked honesty.”

  “Honesty, yes; arrogance, no.”

  “I thought you said I conquered arrogance? We were going to work on my ignorance, as I recall. Very business-like, you said. Well, I’m being business-like. When I noted the Hibernian disposition for ridiculous fantasies about red and green midgets hiding under tree roots, you said ”

  “I copied the inscription on the Pillar.”

  “What?”

  She drew the folded sketch out of the pocket of her jeans. “I admit you made me curious. Funny how you can grow up near a remarkable thing and never think about it. So I decided I should have a look . . . for myself. Then I thought it would bear some study.”

  She went on explaining, but he was wholly absorbed with what she handed him, and when he looked up, he asked: “You did this for me?”

  “I guess you weren’t listenin’. I . . . skip it.”

  “You did this for me,” he concluded in a murmur.

  “Your arrogance is showin’ again. It was all ciphers to me. Bunch of child’s scribblin’ and a map. I figured you could tell me what it is.”

  “It’s a map of Peru.”

  “Peru is it? Is that significant?”

  “It means the series is complete. It means . . . there are only three of them.”

  “Three of what?”

  He came awake suddenly. “This . . . scribbling, you called it. Was it fine lines? Too fine for you to draw?”

  “Well, I done my best. I’m only a member of that in-between generation of Irish who are homely as toads, you know, and we aren’t particularly good at sketchin’.”

  “You nailed Peru, but the details may be microscopic. May I keep this?”

  “I s’pose. I can always make another for myself.”

  “If it’s no trouble . . .”

  “No trouble at all. You know what a lamb my father is. He’ll be glad to row me out there anytime.”

  Their order came.

  “I’ve got to get closer . . . read the fine print,” he muttered distractedly.

  “What fine print? I did a fair job of renderin’, if I do say so.”

  “Oh, this is great.” He snapped his fingers on the drawing. “Really great. I’m glad you did it . . . for yourself.”

  “That’s right. For myself. In your arrogance, you probably think it was just for you, but there are certain issues mysteries, shall we call them about myself and my family that I’m ashamed to say I’ve never figured out. It’s got to the point where anythin’ my father opposes is somethin’ I want to pursue. He won’t talk about the Pillar, and he won’t talk about my mother. Sometimes I get the feelin’ I’m the only one in the whole village who doesn’t know a secret about me.” She paused to sip her juice, trying to lend casualness to her next words. “I wonder if maybe you’ve heard somethin’. There in the pub, I mean. You must have got a snootful about the McCabes. What did they say about us, if you don’t mind my askin’.”

  He waggled his hand dismissively. “Just talk. Can’t say I paid much attention. They went on about your mother, I think.”

  “What about her?”

  “Just some nonsense. They were yanking my chain because I’d had my first run-in with your old man.”

  “What exactly did they say about my mother?”

  “I don’t know . . . something about whether or not she was naked or wearing a red cape when she saved your father from his grave ”

  “The bastards!”

  “Not worth getting upset about. A bunch of drunks spinning wild tales.”

  “I’m not upset. What else?”

  Her jaw muscles were clenched and her nostrils distended very prettily, he thought. She had a glow that reminded him of bread dough in an oven just before it browned.

  “What else?” He stirred his coffee slowly. “It was just Irish faerie tale drivel. I didn’t try to keep it straight. They all said she was a strange woman, and one of them called her a merrow, and another said she was the lianhan sidhe ”

  “My mother is the most lovin’, patient, carin’, gentle creature in the whole district. None of them know her. They’ve never even seen her up close. I’d like to hear them talk about her to my face, that’s what I’d like!”

  He looked amused. “You’re very fractious for a Connemara rustic living in the boonies. But I’m feeling calmer already.”

  She slugged down the rest of her juice. “That’s why they call it Ireland.”

  ***

  It was a day for courage. She had defied her father by taking the sketch to the American, and when she left Glenna’s Kitchen, Sosanna McCabe did what she had been thinking of doing fo
r years. She sought out Mabbina Conneely’s cottage just off the street and behind the chemist’s.

  Growing up and going to school in Darrig had acquainted Sosanna with many rumors about her family at one time or another, but she had never been able to separate the hurtful gossip of schoolmates from what their parents truly believed.

  “Your real father’s dead, Sosanna! My parents were at his funeral. You live with his fetch!”

  A fetch. An exact double. This information hurled at her by a jealous competitor on the football pitch before she was nine. And often, thereafter, it was repeated, because she had fought with the girl. Her father had been nearly buried alive, yes, but everyone there that day had seen him saved, she asserted. How did she know, children as young as she demanded. And elder names were cast at her as witnesses to a contrary theme of death and duality. The persistence of the belief troubled her, even though it was ridiculous. She had even used it against her father in anger once, a year after she heard it for the first time: the “you’re not my real father” speech. And she had wondered for a time if her father’s grave was what her mother sometimes searched for at night and in the dawn. Finally she had decided that even if he wasn’t her real father, he might as well be, because he was the only one she had ever known. A good father, a magical father, to be sure, who had taught her everything she knew of nature. Even now that they were at each other’s throats, she still respected his knowledge.

  Her mother had her own notoriety to bear. Bare. That she had appeared nude in the churchyard at a funeral seemed indisputable. There was no erotic connotation to it, no accusation of immorality. It was merely another proof of the derangement and alienation that invested the McCabes. At least Lady Godiva had acted in a cause. Una McCabe had reverted to her true and shocking self, according to some. And that was where the merrow thing got started. The claim that she had a red cape, which allowed a merrow to swim in the sea, was added later and seemed neatly to explain her nudity at the funeral that day. Sosanna had never received a satisfactory account of the funeral episode, but she thought she knew what the elements were. Her mother’s fondness for bathing in the sea, her father’s near drowning in pursuit of her, the grief, a bereft moment in the rain when her mother had showed up au natural . . . something like that.

  All through school there had been fatuous stories that linked her to her mother’s behavior. The boys had used the idea of McCabe nudity to attempt liberties; the girls to castigate her for being wanted by the boys. She had bloodied more than one nose of each gender in making a point to the contrary.

  And yet there were hints that her own birth had been extraordinary and more or less secret. Some said she was born in the sea. Others that she had hidden gills. Who would know except her parents and the midwife . . . the midwife, Mabbina Conneely?

  So now she was knocking on that cottage door in the street behind the chemist’s and greeting a startled Mabbina. The woman had become a fright in her widowhood, having let herself go to seed and perhaps becoming unstable and unreliable for information. Sosanna tried to assess this in the older woman’s watery blue eyes and pasty face, and failing to do that, she stole glances at the cluttered interior of the cottage to which she was reluctantly admitted, trying to define the sole inhabitant.

  Except for one strict corner filled with religious icons and candles, the place had melded into a single living space where kitchen, bathroom and bedroom met in an untidy parlor. Bedclothes were draped over the settee, dusty hair curlers lay about like spiny sea urchins, and white saucers hung at every level of shelf and furnishing like UFOs in flight. The smell of cooked cabbage was pervasive. An orange-striped Cheshire cat licked one of the saucers and strode through the middle of the room as if she were the owner.

  “I know this is a wee bit odd,” Sosanna said, “you and me havin’ never really met since I’ve grown up, but I should have come to you long ago for my own peace of mind.”

  The wary look Mabbina had worn from the doorway intensified. “I . . . I . . . I’m not out much these days,” she said. “You would be . . . ?”

  “You know who I am, I think, Ms. Conneely. No need to be alarmed or to pretend. I’m Sosanna McCabe, and you were probably the first human to touch me on this earth, discountin’ my mother’s womb.”

  “Aye, aye . . . has anyone touched you since?” Mabbina murmured, a mix of fear and belligerence.

  “What do you mean?”

  The woman positively hummed, as if she spoke in songs and was trying to find the proper key. “You’re a McCabe,” she concluded, and there was no music in it.

  “Then it’s not just my fancy that you’ve always avoided me.”

  “Most has.”

  “Has it been that dramatic? I admit, my father’s the local pariah probably a necessary service in the tedium of any village but you . . . you’ve done everythin’ but cross yourself whenever we’ve met.”

  “Your father’s the Watcher.”

  Sosanna’s first inclination was to laugh. “A Watcher is the last one to be buried, and my father is very much alive,” she started to say, but the words never got out of her throat. Because, of course, it fit so well: the man who returned from the dead, a “fetch” to her classmates, and equally speculative the claim that he was the Watcher. No new graves in her own lifetime. It must be true.

  But why hadn’t he told her? Everyone knew but her. It was just circumstantial that she hadn’t heard it before now. A “fetch,” the children had called him, because it had more impact on them than the fact that he was the Watcher. Had he feared she would blame him for her isolation from her peers? That “you’re not my real father” accusation must have cut deep in a man already struggling with alienation. So he had let it drift, the full revelation, letting his daughter find out or not find out lest she hate him for causing her loneliness. The pang of his need for her charged Sosanna’s reply to Mabbina Conneely:

  “And proud of it,” she said with a tremble. “You’ll not deny that he takes care of Darrig’s ancestors.”

  Mabbina regarded her more directly now, as if trying to reconcile the young woman’s humanity. “You’ve still got the fey look about you,” she said stubbornly.

  “The fey look. Well, that’s a new one. Did I have it when I was born, Ms. Conneely? Did you see it in my squinched up little eyes?” She suddenly realized that the orange-striped cat had disappeared in the clutter. “You were there. Was I born beneath the cliff, like they say? Did I have gills and scales?”

  “You weren’t born at the foot of Thiollaney Merriu.”

  “Well, that leaves gills and scales,” she said with uncertain derision.

  Mabbina Conneely wagged her head. “You was normal, normal as any babe can be.”

  Where was the cat? It had been sitting right there, but of course it was a Cheshire cat, like Alice in Wonderland’s. “Normal as any babe can be I don’t get that.”

  “All babies have . . . characteristics . . . it’s completely normal,” Mabbina said, her eyes guileless with fear and sympathy.

  “Characteristics?”

  “You know . . .”

  “Tell me.”

  “Like . . . like the O’Neill’s whelp that had more hair than a goat when it was born, and the Armaghs little girl that had the strawberry birthmark in the shape of a perfect Celtic cross at the base of her spine.”

  “And what did I have, Ms. Conneely?”

  “Nothin’ to speak of. Just the whitest skin white as milk and eyes that were open and I swear could see me. Not squinched up at all, as you put it.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Well, there was your toes, of course.”

  “What about my toes?” She kicked off her shoes, and that was when she discerned the cat again, there all the time, sitting in plain view in front of a garish quilt that lay in a heap among newspapers and magazines.

  “There ! . . . you see?” Mabbina pointed at Sosanna’s bare feet. “You outgrew it. ‘Twas just a baby thing, like birth hair, and it went a
way by itself.”

  “What went away?”

  “Why, the extra skin, of course. The skin between your toes.”

  26

  Mr. Billy went crazy. The magpies were shrieking in the line of trees at the south end of the churchyard, and the mongrel dashed this way and that, as if he had been given the order to attack but not the location of the foe.

  “Billy, Billy . . . to me!” Brone cried, arms wide, and his voice was more plea than command.

  It was not the magpies the dog was focused on, he knew, but what had brought them here and excited them. The faolchÚ nna did that to magpies across Europe. Wolves of any type did that to them. Of course, there were no wolves left in Ireland. None but the one.

  “To me, Billy!” he cried and got close enough to throw himself on the distracted dog’s neck. “Ah, Billy, you mustn’t, you mustn’t. What would I do without you? The only livin’ thing on the face of the earth I . . .” He left the word “trust” unspoken, as if he were suddenly addressing the bitterness inside himself.

  The dog struggled and whined, and when his master buried his face in the scruff of his neck, Mr. Billy twisted to lick his face, then strained trembling toward the grotto. In the territorial world of that which belonged and that which did not, he sensed the trespasser.

  Brone picked the dog up bodily and carried him all the way back to the house.

  “It’s sorry I am, Billy, but it has to be. For your own good, for the good of us all though strike me dead, if it’s not almost as foolhardy for me to go back.”

  With the dog shivering and groaning, Brone brought out the tether and secured him to the heavy table leg in the kitchen. Then he hurried out, slamming the door. Over the footbridge he went and straight across the churchyard, Mr. Billy raising a perfect howl behind him.

  The raucous magpies had reached a frenzy in the trees. How they struck terror into him when they acted like this. He feared all such ill-omened birds that wore night for plumage jackdaws, ravens, crows but especially the magpies. For they harbored a drop of the devil’s own blood under their tongues, and they alone had kept their white accents during the crucifixion, refusing to go into full mourning. His very own father had warned him of the bird. Had read him “The Raven” by Poe, saying they were all of a feather but that the magpies were the worst.