“Beats dancing in the road.”
“Does it?”
He looked at her for what seemed a long time. “What d’you do for music when you’re kicking up the dust?”
She leaned into the car, turned the key, tuned the radio to Connemara Community FM out of Letterfrack. A documentary of The Phantom of the Opera was underway, and Dubliner Colm Wilkinson and Rebecca Caine were singing “The Point of No Return.” Sosanna’s eye fell on the green object lying in the back seat. Hibernian Dream Pillow was stitched in emerald across the pillowcase.
“What’s this?” she said, lifting it out. “Who would have taken you for a dreamer? You’re becoming one of us.”
“I . . . was showing it to someone.” He shrugged. “Do you know what it is?”
“Well, it says it’s a Hibernian Dream Pillow see? Easier to read than the menu at Glenna’s.” She glanced at the tag. “‘. . . guaranteed to carry both true believer and daring doubter into realms far and near.’ I s’pose that covers everyone standin’ here at the moment.”
The poignant music suddenly infected her, and she swirled away from the car, embracing the pillow as a dancer. On the third turn he was there, tapping the pillow as though he were tapping a shoulder. When she paused and her grip loosened, he tossed the pillow to the road without breaking eye contact. Then he stepped into her suspended embrace a hand to her hip, the other cradling her warm fingertips and carried her into a soft swirl to the refrains of “The Point of No Return.” For a few moments that were not moments at all they forgot who they were, who the other one was. The hard realist tasted a reverie; the searching idealist felt grounded on air. Unnoticed by either, the gloaming stole close and still.
It was the interlude that belongs to the naÏve and the vulnerable, to immature teens, first loves and habitual dreamers, and it came to them when they were old enough to know it for what it was: circumstantial, illusory, impossible to sustain. Except that they both wanted to sustain it.
Unexpectedly he felt her body grow fluid in his arms as the fragrance of her hair filled his nostrils, and it seemed to him that her mystique was possessable after all. Her sharp tongue kept men at bay, but when you got close enough, the defenses dropped. She panted as lightly as a doe, and his fingertips caught the shiver up her back. Such heady mortality my, my, but this put wild ideas into his head!
And she was shocked at how natural his embrace felt. This could be habit-forming, she knew. His rhythm, his strength, his gentleness all told her something more profound about him than had his words. He was not so haughty; nor experienced. He held her like he was carrying chiffon. She felt free and secured at the same time. Could she trust this man? His hand on the small of her back trembled with power and restraint. The dampness on his brow said he was as nervous as she. He must be feeling the same shock . . . .
When the haunting strains ended, Lane Andersen swallowed dryly and went to the car and turned the radio off, while Sosanna McCabe, blinking sternly, picked up the pillow, dusted it off, and said she would take it home and wash the cover.
“I’m thinking of staying a month,” he said in a voice squeezed tight, “one month, whether I’ve figured out Thiollaney Merriu or not.”
“Good,” she said, equally choked. “Take a month to figure out Thiollaney Merriu.”
“Then . . . it will be all right we can have a relationship for a month?”
“No. When your month is up, then you’ll know whether you want to start one.”
37
But it was a relationship now, and she knew that. Only she needed to keep him at arm’s length while she figured it out. She argued with herself in colder terms than she actually felt, because there was danger here, perhaps more than she was seeing at the moment. Where was the harm if some will-o’-the-wisp Yank came through stagnant Darrig and romanced her a wee bit, she asked herself. She had reacted appropriately (perhaps too appropriately), putting the relationship on her terms and preserving her dignity. He was sincere enough, standing behind his convictions, and as far as his acerbic manner, she could give him back arrow for arrow. Who played that game better than the Irish? No, there was no danger there she would lose her head. As long as she understood who he was and what his limitations were, they could share . . . whatever. It was herself and her family she didn’t fully understand. And no one here in Darrig was giving her any answers to that enigma, though Lane Andersen was giving it a try. I’m still in control of this, she told herself. I’m not running away, and I’m not rushing in.
So why was she giddy when she arrived home? Why had she turned back to Thiollaney Merriu instead of continuing on to the village, as she had intended? Because you’re hauling a green pillow around, lass, she told herself. She could have left it with him, but she had said she would wash the pillowcase, and anyway, she wanted to savor the perfect little rhapsody: a pas de deux to those charged strains coming from the radio, a dance in the dust of Connemara at sunset. It was scripted. It was irresistible. Getting in his car and driving with him to Darrig would have taken something away from the magic.
She hand-washed the pillowcase and put it in the “gentle” cycle of the dryer. Then she tried to mat a picture of Lough Corrib, whose purple-gray waters on purple-gray days had a compelling effect on her; but she misframed it and let the X-acto knife fall from her hand as if she were flitting away lint. She put on headphones to block out the television her father was watching and twice checked the dryer, twice resumed a crossword puzzle in a newspaper that had begun to yellow, twice flipped through the same copy of Irish Roots Magazine. When she lifted her eyes from the glossy pages the second time her mother was gazing at her.
It was a look Sosanna hadn’t seen since she was a child trying on roles and precocious liberties. But with her father so close at hand, she couldn’t bring herself to share her feelings with her mother.
And yet it was he who talked of the old days when dances were held in the house. Eels and smoked fish hanging over the hearth, while teams of dancers took their rounds on the slate floor of the kitchen. The parlor and the kitchen had been one then, with the staircase marking the divide. And her father still liked to point to the cracks in the slate and say, “That’s where we put the stones to rest the planks where people rested a spell. Mum and dad sat just there, and I trimmed the paraffin lamp, and the cailleach was over there by the fire with the curtain drawn.” Sosanna had never asked what a cailleach was, not wanting to interrupt his fervor. But if he seemed animated by the memory of his own social moments, he never saw Sosanna’s needs for the same, as if his experiences should suffice for his family.
“I’m going outside for some air,” she said.
“‘Tis practically the dead hour,” her father protested from the Morris chair.
“Nowhere near midnight, father dear, and I’ll just be at the footbridge.”
She glanced at her mother when she said where she would be.
The sky was littered with spangles, like snow beginning to fill in a dark landscape. Almost immediately she saw a falling star to her right. “I wish . . .” she began, but it was down before she could form the words. If you saw a falling star on the left, it was inauspicious, of course. So you only wished on the ones to the right.
She stood at the footbridge until she was shivering and her sole wish became for the light nylon jacket she had left on the peg by the door. The harsh cry of a nightjar turned her attention to the churchyard. Her mother called them corpsefowl, because they were a bird of evil omen. The Pillar of Thiollaney Merriu rose gray from the low mist on the pond, and then, higher up on the right, she saw another telltale streak, and this time she got it out: “I wish to know if I love Lane Andersen.”
Almost immediately the house door opened and against the brief golden rectangle Una McCabe emerged. As luminous as a winter moon, the older woman glided through the darkness until mother and daughter stood face to face.
“Am I disturbin’ you, Sosi?”
“You know you aren’t.”
Sosanna’s laugh was only a breath of surprise.
“What is it?” Una said, facing around again.
“I can’t believe you just asked me that, when only a minute ago . . .”
“A minute ago what?”
“Nothin’. You always know what I’m feelin’. And you’ve been watchin’ me all night.”
“I’ve never seen you so distracted, and what else has changed in Darrig except that the American has come?”
“D’you think father knows what I’m feelin’?”
“He might fear, but he doesn’t know. Nor do I.”
“. . . nor do I,” Sosanna echoed. “I’m twenty-eight, and I thought I knew what I felt about men. I s’pose I let myself in for this thinkin’ that way, I mean. One man is not all men, and God knows I’ve known few outside our little village. Am I that naÏve, mother?”
“All love is naÏve, if you want to call it that. All love begins with hope.”
“So what should I do?”
“Wait.”
“I’m doin’ that. But I can see already we could run out the clock. He’s only a visitor, after all. I can’t expect him to change his life, if I don’t reciprocate. Only, I still don’t know how I feel about him.”
“Has he said he loves you?”
“No. But I think he does. I mean, that’s the confusion, isn’t it? We’ve scarcely met, how could we be in love? And you know we started out like badgers in a barrel. Still . . . the air feels like lightnin’ is gonna strike any second when he stands close.” Her
far-away look drew down on her mother. “What did you mean by his declarin’ himself to me? Is that how you know your own feelin’s?”
“I only meant it’s easy to mistake your heart when someone says they love you. And I wish there was more I knew to tell you, my Sosi.”
“But . . . how can you not know? You love father.”
Una’s gaze went back toward the pond. “Love is like a mist. When you’re in it, you can’t see a thing. And when you can’t see it, you could swear you’re breathin’ it in just the same. But when you can’t see it, and you’re breathin’ nothin’ but free air, you don’t feel a thing and you’re glad.”
Sosanna stared back blankly. Her mother had always spoken so directly, and now she sounded deliberately evasive, almost as if she didn’t want her daughter to find an answer. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“No one understands love . . . or freedom.”
Freedom? Were they talking about freedom? She supposed they were. “But . . . how did you decide?”
For just a moment Una’s sea green eyes stirred with something as confused as Sosanna’s own torment, but then like waves that had run themselves out, they ebbed back to safer depths. She kissed her daughter on the brow.
“I’m sorry, Sosi. I can tell you this much. Stay free until you’re sure one way or the other. If you stay free, then you will know, sometime, somewhere. It’ll be you tellin’ me, when you’re sure. Not me tellin’ you.”
Una chaffed her bare arms and started back toward the house. Sosanna waited a few minutes and followed.
As if by design, her parents had already gone up to bed when she entered. The green pillowcase was dry, and she took it up to her room where she pressed the top of the “Dream Pillow” between her chin and her breast and gently worked the case up over the bottom. “You’re standin’ much too close, Mr. Andersen,” she whispered. Funny that he of all people had introduced her to something akin to sidhe magic. On impulse she tossed the pillow onto her bed. She had tried falling stars, and she had sought her mother’s counsel, now she would sleep on Lane Andersen’s magical pillow. A good day’s hopes deserved a good night’s dreams . . .
***
She awoke suddenly and for no apparent reason in the deepest part of the night. Her heart was racing and her brow and the back of her neck were damp, but she couldn’t remember whether she had been dreaming or if she had heard something in her sleep. Swinging her feet to the floor she froze momentarily at the cry of the nightjar. Then she pattered to the casement and peered out.
The vapid sky was crisp with pinpoints of light, but lower down the silhouetted trees looked like bulky matrons toweled in turbans and wading through steam. Ragged streamers seemed to nudge up where the mist lay thick as sediment, subtle whites flashing within grays. The pond was cloaked, but the agitation must be very close to it, she thought. Something was out there. And all at once a wave of dread washed over her, because she knew what it was.
She never questioned it, just slipped into her clothes and carried her shoes downstairs to put on at the front door. Out she went into the webbed air, straight across the footbridge into the damp grass. The sea beyond the grotto was faint but insistent, waves rushing in to witness something this night. Tombstones appeared in ordinal rows, like gray-coated leprechauns forming a gauntlet. And then there was the pond, black and immutable, and beyond it . . .
Her mother digging.
Una McCabe wielded the shovel with an electrical fervor that was horrifying. Hollow-eyed, an expression of terrible need on her face, her ash blond hair bobbed luminously in the mist. She had dug no more than a foot into the grave, and there was a section where the turf was intact, but this she spiked with the shovel even as Sosanna tried to restrain her.
“Mother, mother . . . what are you doin’?”
Una paused robotically, her lips drawn back in a thin rictus. There was a
lime-hued translucency to her skin that gave the impression of a less than supple core. Her gaze was fixed. But then her blinking had always been mechanical, as if she had to remember to do it.
Sosanna stared back as though she had never seen her mother before. This
mud-smeared woman had a shovel, and so she could not be responsible for the other unearthings. Those had shown no evidence of a shovel. In fact . . . in fact, it was probably the suggestion brought about by those other ravagings that had triggered this . . . episode. And it was an episode. The haunted human being locked onto the shovel would presently break out of her obsession and become the mother she had spoken to only a few hours before again.
“Mum . . .” she took her by the shoulders “there’s nothin’ here that has to do with father. If he had any other wives, they’re not buried here. And even if they were, diggin’ ‘em up can do no good. In the name of Christ, mother, leave them to their eternal rest. Look . . . look at the name.” She brushed the headstone. “‘Maura Lynch . . . see that, Maura Lynch. So it couldn’t be his wife, now could it? It would say McCabe, if it ”
Una was already walking away from the grave, walking toward the house at a stately pace, the wanderlust light seeming to follow her, leaving just a leaden gray at the gravesite.
“That’s right . . . go back, mother. Wash yourself and go to bed . . . try not to wake father. I’ll . . . I’ll be along shortly.” Sosanna looked down at the desecration. “Right after I tidy up.”
She raked with her hands, miring herself in the muck, trying to fill the foot of missing subsoil then dressing it off with the blanket, but the grass was twisted and torn and she pieced it together badly. A Frankenstein of a grave that made her think: where were the missing pieces of her family? her maternal grandmother and grandfather? her uncles, aunts and cousins on her mother’s side? All from the north around Belfast, she had been told. Dead, dispersed, never really a family in one place to begin with. Her mother’s maiden name was Tobin. Sosanna knew of Tobins in Kilkenny and Tipperary in the south but she had never heard of any from Antrim or County Down in the north.
The harsh cry of the corpsefowl coming from the grotto prompted the end of her efforts. She got off her knees just as a second cry flowed past her to the south. Something had frightened it. She sensed that she was no longer the major presence in the churchyard.
Muddied to the e
lbows, she moved blindly toward the pond to rinse her arms. At the water’s edge she knelt and hesitated. An oddly repellant charge was tingling over her exposed skin. She looked down into the water at a conjugation of gray: those weedy ramparts and thin towers needling out of a rotting castle keep her mother had described. But of course she couldn’t be seeing beneath the black surface in that limited light. She leaned close to be sure. And suddenly she realized where the repulsion was coming from. Raising her head, she peered fiercely across the pond. It must be there. The Water Wolf. It had to be there. Staring straight at her. But the mist refused to part.
38
The McReedys’ old Volvo ghosted slowly up the road to Thiollaney Merriu at the dinner hour, pulling an empty horse trailer. All five of the surviving family were in the car five variations on the same face. It was a lantern-jawed prototype with a bulbous forehead, and it differed mainly in the depth of lines around the mouth and the slackness at the neck and the erosions around the eyes. In the back seat young Ryan was taut and plain at sixteen, while his father Ahern and his uncle Dwyer on either side of him had the blear-eyed pastiness of hard drinkers. At the wheel, old McReedy’s spinster daughter Keely made the most of the look, her auburn hair framing and narrowing the prominent brow, her chin tucked back as if she were perpetually trying to swallow something caught in her throat. Next to her wrapped in a blanket sat the patriarch himself, decrepit Crevan, whose waxen skin seemed stretched to the breaking point over the promontory cheekbones and jutting jaw.
They had heard the rumor of a grave being opened from Sybil Corcoran, Keely McReedy being first on Sybil’s “Don’t tell a soul, but . . .” list, and now they were en route to pull old Merna McReedy from her eternal resting place. Permission to dig a fresh grave at the churchyard next to the new church up the hill the other side of Darrig had come easily. Since Brone McCabe had declared Thiollaney Merriu full, and since old Crevan could charitably be declared to have one foot in his grave already, it hadn’t been difficult to make the case that if he couldn’t be buried next to his wife, then they should meet at a time and place of mutual convenience, i.e., the new churchyard. The McReedys’ transparent agitation excited interest, however, and one could suppose that Sybil Corcoran’s horror story would be unearthed just about as quickly as Merna McReedy’s moldering cadaver. So long as they rescued their matriarch from desecration first, the McReedys didn’t care.
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