A Ghost in the Throat

by Doireann Ní Ghríofa

  The woman utters no discernible words, but there is a low howl held between her chattering teeth. I am gripped by the mother-urge to hold, to comfort, to shield, but most of all by the urge to recite the magic words that always press reset, that always conjure calm from panic. I lift her face in my hands, find her eyes with mine, and say, ‘Everything will be OK.’ I ease her sad body up and steer her along, my palm very gentle at her elbow. As we walk together through the dark, my ears and eyes are on high vigilance, terrified as I am that a car might round the bend too fast to stop. I know I can’t fix her but I do what I can, I settle her safely into the car, I stroke her hair until her sobs ease. I ask if she needs the hospital and she shakes her head. I ask if she wants to go home, if she feels safe in the cab, and she nods, so I click her seatbelt, slam the door, and never see her again.

  When I return to our car my fingers are shaking too much to fumble my own seatbelt into its latch, so my husband shoves it in with an exasperated sigh. He is angry. ‘That girl was so drunk she won’t even remember you tomorrow. You could have killed us,’ he says, ‘and for what?’ I want to ask why he didn’t help too, but before he has even turned the key, a van veers past, making of our car a flimsy echo of its speed. I see it clearly, then: in abandoning him here, on this blind bend, to run into the dark – fearless, or foolhardy, or both – my actions had put both of us at risk. To him, I was merely interrupting a situation that was already under control: there were others there who would surely have resolved the whole mess. I had seen something very different in those male shadows as they fell over a woman sprawled on the ground. Turning the key, his lips are tight white.

  The rarity of his anger makes it startling. I apologise and we drive on in silence. I wonder why these urges are embedded in me: the quick apology, yes, but also the desire that might surge up at any moment, faster than synaptic flash, sending me sprinting into the dark, too quick to be thwarted by shouts of reason. In attempting to do the right thing for one, I endanger another; in my efforts to help a stranger, I jeopardise both my husband and my children. I hadn’t even paused to consider them. Even now, as our car gathers speed, I am buzzing with the sparkle of achievement, the delight of donating my small assistance to another, the thrill of giving a kindness and expecting nothing in return. I don’t, however, feel that I can take any credit for my actions – it felt almost as though I was being driven into the dark by some force too powerful to resist. How mysterious, our instincts, those sudden engines that roar up to steer us towards new ends.

  All the way home, I puzzle over his question, ‘and for what?’ I am still thinking about it as we brush our teeth, as he wraps his arms around me and kisses my neck, then falls asleep. In the dark, I realise that there is only one way I could cast this incident as transactional, but it’s far too esoteric to reveal to him, and besides, I can’t bring myself to wake him. Let me tell you, instead. Perhaps it was the familiarity of giving myself away that first made me leap from the car, but in the moment that I bent towards that road, it was dark – dark as a river – dark enough to set some old sensation stirring in me. In helping that stranger up, maybe I was a shadow twin of the stranger who once heaved my own weeping, drunken self back from the railings of another river in another night. In rocking her, maybe I was rocking my own old aching self. Maybe there was some equivalence embedded in that moment, some weird reciprocity. In whispering to a stranger that everything would be OK, maybe I was casting a spell over all of us in our sorrow and pain, over her pain, and his pain, and mine, and maybe it was true, maybe it really would be OK, this time. Maybe it already was.

  II. DRIVER AS PASSENGER

  Much later, another Friday night finds me alone and moving fast, deep under a river. Down here, all is bright, even when the world above is dark. I imagine what stirs unseen beyond the tunnel: the layers of squelching murk and all the fast gallons of liquid, swerving its cargo of trout and pike, so many eyes, so many hearts hurried through the hurrying river, while moonlight dances briefly on its surface. Underneath, I am blazing through a tunnel of dazzling fluorescence, my radio so loud that the bass throbs behind my breastbone. Once the tunnel begins to slope west, my foot meets the pedal again, rushing me into the night.

  I’ve been invited home to give a reading from my poems, so I am following this road back to the small, wet fields where countless incarnations of my family have found themselves waking up, morning after morning, day after day, century after century. Magnet-fast, I flash past signs that all repeat each other – [SLOW] [SLOW] [SLOW] – past dark windows, past the glimpsed hill-silhouette of two horses who doze in tree-shadow. This is the way home. My momentum is very recent; the fastest my grandmother’s mother could have moved was gallop speed. Through miles and miles of night countryside, my four wheels spin blank as clock-faces, and above, a thin metal vessel is filled with heat and music and one warm body with one small heart pulsing and one mouth filled with song: me.

  Swift, the twist from ordinary to catastrophe. In eerie slow motion I grasp that the lights approaching me are not the innocuous beams from the opposite side of the motorway. No, these headlights are moving towards me. Wrong, I think, the wrong way. Time slows to a sharp clarity as the oncoming headlights swivel crimson, then white again. The car smashes against the central verge, spinning now, spinning wildly in chaotic circles across both lanes, allowing me to glimpse something else in motion behind it – another vehicle, also spinning – and I am minor and inconsequential, moving unstoppably towards two vehicles, both whirling like parallel entities in deep space, each spinning its own arc, while I careen towards them, gripping my wheel and gritting my teeth. The radio must be still playing, but I hear nothing. I hear nothing at all.

  My body, sensing shock, switches itself to some long-buried incantation, whispering Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God, my breath short, rasping. I am a splinter, a flimsy distillation of all the humans who collided in the haphazard pattern that eventually yielded me, a woman who birthed four children, who squandered her days in housework and daydream, a woman who lived for thirty-six years before steering herself into a grisly death on the motorway. My mind flashes to my children, tucked snug and dreaming, while downstairs my husband is sipping a beer and watching sports on TV, oblivious. My heart hurts. Oh God. Oh God. My mouth is still moving when my car reaches the collision.

  The first car is spinning faster now, as I skid an arc through the deep mud beyond the hard shoulder. My wheels spin and slip. I wince, feeling debris rolling and banging violently under the car, so many smashed fragments of plastic and metal and glass, all airborne, soaring under me on their path to embedding themselves in the margin. My car slips sideways as they pass below, the steering wheel tugging itself away from me fast as a slapped cheek. As my hands wrestle it back under control, my mind flies away, imagining whether a stranger will someday bend to that dirt, lift a splinter, and wonder at the moment that tore it from its whole. Still, I grip the wheel, still Oh God, Oh God, veering sharply into the periphery, still, the two cars are spinning, nudging each other, now, and if there are human shadows in those vehicles, I do not see them. I feel as though I am alone in this dark, my feet dancing on the pedals, swerving around a pair of revolving, empty cars.

  Then, shockingly, I pass it. I have passed it, I think, I am past, I am on the other side, and somehow, somehow, I am alive. My hands are shaking uncontrollably, and I find that I am weeping, though I don’t know when the tears began. The gasping continues, the incantation of Oh God Oh God Oh God. I force my mouth to stop. I inhale, indicate, cut the engine, and try to call emergency services. My hands are shaking so much that it takes three efforts before it rings.

  An exceptionally calm woman notes my details, asks me to ‘Please say that again.’ My eyes dart as I speak, straining to the side and behind and ahead again, but it is so dark outside that I can’t see a thing; my rear-view mirror feels both very empty and very full. When I ask her what I should do, I am giving myself away once more; I am putting my decision
in her hands. When I ask her what I should do, I am weighing another sprint in the dark against the easy glide to another’s direction. When I ask her what I should do, she knows the answer and delivers it with a firmness that is unequivocal. She forbids me from running back to the other cars. Instead, she orders me to drive on, ‘Yes, now, immediately,’ for fear of causing a further collision. She weighs my potential helpfulness against the danger I could present to others and tells me that I must leave.

  I do as I’m told. Good girl. My knees are shaking, and the steering wheel keeps spilling through my slick palms. Perhaps it was never as clear as I imagined; perhaps we are each capable of choosing a different direction, depending on the road on which we find ourselves. Perhaps the kaleidoscopic versions of ourselves that inhabit our days and nights are capable, in fact, of anything. On this particular night, a calm voice tells me what to do and this time, I do not defy it. This time I see the sense in the command and I comply. I thank the voice on the phone. I say goodbye.

  All my mirrors are bursting black. The consequences of denying my urges are excruciating. My desire to help doesn’t disappear as I accelerate – it badgers me, blaring relentlessly in the dark through which I drive. Have I left someone howling behind me? Tomorrow, I will spend hours searching local news bulletins for any listing of a serious collision and find nothing, but I don’t know that yet. Now, I make myself do as I’m told. On this road, I drive away.

  11. blot. blot.

  Thugas léim go tairsigh

  Three leaps, I took – the first to the threshold

  —Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill

  a fleeting distraction from anguish may be found in devising a revenge. Or two.

  At Raleigh House, Eibhlín Dubh was grieving. She was also plotting.

  —

  Quietly, fingers unbolt a stable door.

  Quietly, so quietly, hooves are muffled by burlap sacks.

  Quietly, the twine is tied, the rope tugged.

  —

  When Eibhlín Dubh welcomes the mare home, it is by gentling her brow to that of the beast: two faces, each held in the warmth of female breath.

  Others, however, begin to worry. What punishment might Morris inflict upon discovering this theft? The sole defence anyone could suggest in these circumstances is concealment; such a problem must be hidden.

  The shot sends a ricochet of sound galloping the courtyard walls. Again, the mare’s legs shiver like a foal’s, a slow crumpling that makes waves of her hooves once more, dashing against the earth. Again, the warm, wet spread of blood in mud. She grows still. Her body may now be buried anywhere, but her face cannot – with its unique markings, it could still identify her as Art’s. So, the necessary separation, the blade, the back-and-forthing. The hearthstone is heaved aside like a door. By shovel blades, men dig the room in which her face must remain. Skull under stone: when Eibhlín sits by the fire, she is never alone.

  —

  Within weeks of the shooting, a coroner’s inquest is convened. In opposition to previous assertions by the magistracy that the murder of this ‘outlaw’ was legitimate, the inquest asserts ‘a verdict that Abraham Morris and the party of soldiers were guilty of the wilful and wanton Murder of Arthur O Laoire’. All the soldiers involved – including Green, whose musket shot killed Art – are transported to what was then termed the ‘East India Colonies’. Morris remains in Ireland, although he soon leaves the grandeur of Hanover Hall and secures temporary rooms in a city lodging house instead.

  In a verse of the Caoineadh sometimes attributed to Art’s father (who had, it seems, predeceased Art by several years), Eibhlín rails against the perpetrator of all her woes.

  Morris, you runt; on you, I wish anguish! –

  May bad blood spurt from your heart and your liver!

  Your eyes grow glaucoma!

  Your knee-bones both shatter!

  You who slaughtered my bull-calf,

  and not a man in all of Ireland

  who’d dare shoot you back.

  Perhaps revenge might be considered the opposite of altruism. Whereas the latter leaves a human interaction lopsided, vengeance demands a strict balancing of the equation. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

  —

  The second retaliation occurred on 7 July, when Art’s teenage brother Cornelius cantered the muddy roads and cobblestones that led to the sewer-stench of the city. He knew that Morris had rented rooms at Boyce’s lodging house, so he chose a spot near Hammond Lane and leant discreetly against a wall. Time has rendered the shape of his weapon opaque – magistrates later stated that it may have been a musket under his coat, or perhaps a blunderbuss. As he watched the comings and goings from the lodging house, his finger traced cold metal. Daylight faded. By eleven, the summer night had lured a light to some windows and a drowsy darkness to others. Beyond those drapes, sleep was beginning to weave the strange fabric of human dream, while out on the street, Cornelius was yawning.

  Inside, Morris was growing weary too. He climbed the stairs to his bedchamber, latched the door, and began to ready himself for sleep, as sounds of tipsy merriment rose from beyond the window. The moment that Cornelius glimpsed Morris’s silhouette at the window, his heart broke into a gallop and his cheeks blazed. He took aim. Glass splashed its cold splinters into the bedroom, and Morris startled, staggering back. Several shots flew awry, embedding themselves just below his window, but one found its way into his body, piercing the warmth between ribcage and hip. Before Moriss’s knees had even met the ground, before his first gasp for help, Cornelius was already sprinting away. His heart roared as he shoved through the muddy streets and dark laneways of the city, chest heaving, until he heard the low shush of river-waves on the docks. Soon, he was standing on the deck of a ship, turning his face towards the horizon. Perhaps salt-spray lashed his cheeks. Perhaps his cheeks were dry.

  The magistrates were quick to issue a proclamation for Cornelius’s capture. Among contemporaneous notices against those suspected of ‘forcibly carrying away Arabella Allen, of CORK, spinster, with intent to marry her’, and those ‘who houghed the cattle of Thomas BUTLER, of Woodvill’ is a proclamation ‘against the persons who fired into the bed-chamber of Abraham MORRIS, of Hanover Hall, Co. Cork, Esq., at his lodgings in the City of Cork’. A substantial sum had been gathered from Morris’s allies, including a sum of more than £45 from William Tonson, a sitting MP, and 100 guineas from Morris himself. Over subsequent months, the reward grew. Cornelius, however, had reached America, and would never return. Both brothers’ voices were lost to the rooms of Raleigh forever.

  Despite his wounds, Morris did not die. He lived to limp in to Art’s murder trial and to limp away from his acquittal. On 6 September 1773, the Cork Evening Post declared, ‘Last Saturday September 4th at Cork Abraham Morris was tried for the killing of Arthur O’Leary where he was honourably acquitted.’ Morris may not have suffered official punishment for Art’s murder, but he did suffer greatly with his wound; it never healed. For years, he must have wept through fever dreams and repeated infections and agonies, until he devised a plan to fund his recovery. His belongings would all be translated into cash. On 1 July 1775, an advertisement appeared in the Cork Evening Post:

  To be sold by auction at Hanover Hall the seat of Abraham Morris who is going away for the benefit of his health, all his household furniture, bullocks, cows, sheep, farming and other utensils.

  What would he do with the money? Where would he go? Months later, a second notice was published:

  Cork: 25 September 1775: The creditors of Abraham Morris Esq. are requested to send in their demands to James Boyce of Hammond’s Marsh where the speediest methods will be found to discharge same.

  Any scholarship I find deduces that Morris died of complications from his wound two years after it was inflicted – an extravagantly slow and painful death. I can understand the basis of this deduction: why else would the landlord of Morris’s lodging house be settling debts on his behalf? Nevertheless, I can’
t resist searching burial records for his name. I fail. I have yet to find evidence of Abraham Morris’s death.

  —

  Three times, I have written begging letters to Raleigh House, but the house is quiet, the house won’t reply. Finally, I confide in a kind librarian who takes pity on me, sending a friend he shares with the current occupant to plead on my behalf. The answer, when it comes, is indisputable: this woman wants to keep her private rooms private. Her door will never yield to my shoulder-bone. When I weep, I weep for me, I weep for you, and I weep for Eibhlín.

  After the tears, however, I can’t sleep for acid-guilt. I lie in the privacy of my bed and imagine how vexing it would be to have a stranger presume a right to intrude in one’s home. I come to hate myself for the selfish arrogance of my repeated requests. Again, the illusion of control: I may not be able to rewind my clumsy intrusions into this woman’s life, but I can control the ritual of gesture. In the dark, my screen is a candle.

  Soon, the streets of Macroom will wake to birdsong. There will be footsteps, then a key in a keyhole. A hand will gather the objects I have chosen: white roses, freesias, lilac lisianthus and trachelium, carnations and chrysanthemums. Those stems will be bound in twine and cloaked in cellophane, then ribboned and stickered and driven to Eibhlín Dubh’s door.

  A knucklebone will rap.

  Beyond, the sound of footsteps. The click of a key.

  That door will open, if not to me, then to my gift: a bouquet and a note to say Sorry. This choreography purchases not only an apology, however. It also secures oblique entry. At Raleigh, my pale rosebuds will wink open in the dark. In an older darkness, the night air grows scented, too, where Eibhlín is sitting alone. Under her bare feet lies a hearthstone, and under that stone lies a skull, tender as a fallen rose petal.