At dawn, wet footprints follow me through our dew-drenched garden, where a crow watches me scissor a single stem. Snip. By sitting that flower in the vase that found me in Carriganima, my sly orchestration raises rose-scent simultaneously across time and place, both in my rooms and in Eibhlín’s. This vase, so blue, matches the iridescent tide at Derrynane, which is in motion now, too.
Who is haunting who?
—
Eibhlín’s brother Maurice – now master of Derrynane – remained unwilling to extend his forgiveness. As he saw it, Art’s death had drawn ignominy on Eibhlín, and by association, on Derrynane. In June 1773, their brother Daniel wrote from France:
I learned the unhappy fate of poor Arthur O’Leary. I can’t express how much I’ve been shocked by it. The short acquaintance I had with him gave me a more favourable opinion than I had at first conceived of him. I still foresaw that his violence and ungovernable temper would infallibly lead him into misfortune … It’s, however, no small comfort to be assured there remains some livelihood for his orphans and widow … You are too generous to add to her misfortunes. I am sure you’ve ere now forgot that she ever offended you, and let you exert your friendship for her and children.
I find no record of Maurice’s reply to this letter. The purse of Derrynane supported many, but it would not be opened for this sister.
In August, just a month after Morris was shot, festivities were planned at Derrynane. Nancy, the twins’ youngest sister, was to marry. There was no chance that Eibhlín Dubh could attend the celebrations, but Mary did, with her husband and her beautiful children and her travelling chests full of finery.
The decade since she had left Derrynane had seen her transformation into a glamorous lady of society. Mary was now known as the beautiful Mrs Baldwin of Clohina, noted for her refinement, for her grace, and for the elegance of her fashions. In the summer of 1773, she was thirty years old, mother to six, sparkling in company, and deeply sophisticated. The gown she chose for this occasion was so fine that she became the talk of the celebration. A century later, people still spoke of it, as Mrs O’Connell discovered –
Old Miss Julianna O’Connell remembers old people telling her, when she was young, what a pretty creature Mrs. Baldwin was, and how beautifully dressed she used to be, particularly on some special occasion. She rather thought it was to Nancy’s wedding that she came with her pretty daughter. Mother and child were both dressed in open, long-waisted silk gowns over blue satin quilted petticoats, and the loveliest lace cap was partly covering the golden hair she wisely did not powder. When her brother Dan saw the six children, he immediately claimed this little damsel and three of the prettiest as real O’Connells, whereas poor brother Baldwin laughingly observed he was only giving him the plain ones for Baldwins.
While her family laughed and danced at Nancy’s wedding, Eibhlín Dubh was not in the room; she had left.
Through the following months, the letters make no further mention – none at all – of her or of her children. Such is the correspondence between brothers. We may perhaps infer, as Mrs O’Connell does, that Maurice was not swayed by Daniel’s previous appeal for compassion, because three summers later, Daniel repeats his request. On 6 July 1776, he writes:
Were it possible you’d bring your heart to forget the faults of the unfortunate Widow Leary, charity and her misery and misfortunes call upon you for mercy. I wish it may be, cu’d be, but dare not urge it from a sense of her offences. However, from my dear Maurice’s good heart anything may be expected. Follow but its dictates and I’ll venture to affirm you’ll forgive.
A delicate balance, this, the tightrope between respecting a patriarch’s righteous anger and encouraging the sheltering of a widow. Every time I read this letter, I worry over her brother’s phrasing of ‘her misery and misfortunes’ and ‘her offences’. Might we assume that he is referring to Art’s death, and the loss of her pregnancy? Or had some new catastrophe befallen her in the intervening years? I cannot bring myself to inflict further suffering on Eibhlín. When I attempt to imagine these years of hers, I see only the blizzard of TV static. Mrs O’Connell is more hopeful, however. She suggests that an eventual reconciliation occurred between Eibhlín and her mother, that Máire ‘forgave her … on the plea that no woman could have been expected to resist the pleadings of so handsome and attractive a suitor’. Máire Ní Dhuibh understood the force of female desire.
—
By 1791, eighteen years after Art’s death, Eibhlín appears for the last time in the family letters. No longer ‘the unfortunate Widow O’Leary’, she becomes ‘our sister Nellie’ again. At forty-eight years old, she is reduced to a pet-name, a quick scratch of a quill within a male text. I have never been able to find a date of death or gravestone for my beloved ghost, but each time I re-read her brothers’ letters, I grieve the point at which her name disappears.
I try to imagine the small treasures of her days, all she saw and took joy in: watching her sons begin to run, to ride, to read, their faces lit with Art’s old smile. The flight of bats and swallows. The branches reaching higher each year, their leaves turning gold, falling, and then budding green again. All the remembered fragments of her dreams, all her frustrations, her money worries, her lists, her days of egg-pains and brass-polishing, her days of stretching dinners to feed many mouths, her days of brave faces and darning, her days of no letters, of no word from sister or brother, her days of loneliness, her days of laundry. Her children, waving back at her from the garden, from their saddles, from carriages, always waving as they leave. They wave, her boys. They wave and wave.
12. omen – of planes and starlings
I. AFTERBIRTH/AFTERMATH
Through November dusk, I am pushing my sleeping daughter over the same city path Cornelius once ran, when I hear starlings. I see them, then – twenty, or more – claws clinging to a graffiti-scrawled hoarding ahead. Like a row of nightclub DJs, they tilt their necks and nod to the beat, then beak by beak, they set to remixing the soundscape. First, a remembered fire alarm, then a snatch of human speech, next a car’s ignition mixed with the spinning vinyl of a falling bin lid, a lighter’s snick-snick, fire alarm again, fire alarm, fire alarm, higher and higher, until their melody lifts pitch into a scream. Repeat. Repeat. They are raucous, these birds, and yet my daughter doesn’t stir. I wonder whether she is weaving their song into her dream.
As I come closer they startle skyward: a murmuration in miniature, ink blots swirling on a deep page. Untranslatable: is this an ominous display, a warning to predators, or a joyous farewell to the day? What, exactly, are they trying to say? I pause, my neck growing stiff and strange. The sense of observing something so eerie rise over the city reminds me of something else. Something I haven’t told you yet. Weeks before the doctor’s wand slowed over my belly, an airplane shadowed this city, a vessel that didn’t fly through the sky. It flew behind my eyes. I was the blue through which it lifted its human cargo, and although I didn’t know it yet, that plane, as it moved through me, was an omen.
The dream always unspooled the same way. I found myself idly observing an airplane as it climbed over the city, rising at an angle that appeared ordinary but swiftly became wrong, an ascent that grew steep and steep and steeper still, until – horror – it flipped back on itself, and started to fall, upturned and flat, plunging fast, until it crashed, making of the street a puddle of flame. Every time it exploded, I jolted awake. Only now do I see how my body was trying desperately to wake me, by translating a deteriorating placenta into a visual language that might startle me into action. It didn’t succeed; baffled though I was by this recurring dream-vision, I never asked myself whether there might be something to it. Every morning when I waddled, bleary-eyed, into the kitchen, my husband would kiss me and smile, ‘Don’t tell me – another plane?’ Then off I’d go, tilting merrily into my list for the day, deleting word after word and task after task, each deletion an attempt to blot out the creeping sense of dread this dream left in its aftermath.
I never questioned the dream until I found myself lying by a hospital window, my cheek pressed to a damp pillow. I was alone. The blue I watched was punctuated only by an occasional bird and the roar and rush of airplanes, swooping towards the airport on the horizon. I watched those vessels land, one by one by one, delivering tourists safely to the same city I had dreamt, and then, I understood.
I remembered the doctors’ eyes over their surgical masks the day before. They must have examined my failed placenta as a scholar might peer at a manuscript full of lacunae, seeking clues. Afterbirth: this red room, in its inaudible, inexplicable failure, had been the source both of my daughter’s nourishment and of her peril. Only through our doctor’s vigilance had this vessel succeeded in carrying its cargo into our world. What does an omen become if we thwart its forecasted doom? If harp strings split but no one perishes, who will tell of it?
When I think of the signs we are taught to fear – the single magpie, the broken mirror – I wonder at the scaffold that has fallen from each, the absent repercussion that first followed it. All our omens hold the mystery of some grave human consequence, now forgotten, leaving only the gleaming symbol in its aftermath. In attempting to comprehend a turn of ill-fortune, we may search for an omen as prelude, for to find such a sign imposes meaning on the chaotic. In seeking an omen, we frequently seek a bird.
In May 1622, a century and a half before Art’s death, the city I dreamt was ablaze. Flames ripped through all its paths and rooms, demolishing nearly every structure it met, whether composed of thatch and wood, or blood and tooth. In the smoulder-stench of the aftermath, one survivor deduced that the peculiar avian occurrence of a fortnight before must have had something to do with this catastrophic fire. An omen. Such a suggestion, once spoken aloud, spread quickly, for Yes, they said, Yes, of course the birds were an omen of the fire to come. They had all seen the two huge populations of starlings that had gathered in the sky that day, hadn’t they, screeching their eerie tunes? They had all seen the bird-war that followed too, leaving the city splattered with feathered corpses. No one had understood it at first, but suddenly the fire made sense, now that it could be rewritten as the repercussion of an omen. The bird-blood that smeared the walls and roofs must have been a warning of the red flames to come. What is an omen if not a translation of the past to fit a new form?
When such omens take flight through our lives, they swoop like echoes. When a human wants to test an echo, they always choose the same word to call.
—
‘Hello?’
‘Hello?’
All morning, a pair of strangers have been flitting from house to house through the village of Boolymore. The door they rap now belongs to a neat little cottage nestled in a neat little garden, where a neat little woman lives alone. This woman is known by three names. To her friends and neighbours, she is either Norrie Singleton or Nora Ní Shindile, but to the two officials who have arrived to inspect her rented property as part of Griffith’s Valuation, she gives her name as Honoria Singleton.
She tugs her shawl around her shoulders, cloaking herself in dark wool punctuated with speckles of ash, and spells her name carefully. Yes. H-O-N-O-R-I-A. Sir. The men’s eyes soon adjust to the smoky gloom of her cottage, taking in her belongings – the súgán stools, the kettle over the fire, the basketful of turf, the clutch of eggs in their chipped bowl, the thimble next to a spool of dark thread, the dresser, the delph, the silver scissors, the yellow curtains hemmed by her own hand – but these men have not arrived to compile an inventory of an old woman’s belongings. Her house is assessed at 5 shillings, and the small patch of land she keeps? Worthless.
Both worthless and priceless, her invisible heirloom, for within her, she holds a vast library of precious antiques. Norrie may have had three different names by which she was variously known, but to all, she was known by her encyclopaedic knowledge of song and story, for the bright slant to her eye and the tilt of her head. People travelled from afar to sit and watch her eyelids drop as she sought the thread with which to begin, and they stayed for hours, listening to her voice, enchanted.
Norrie lived a long and cultured life, her door always ajar to visiting musicians and storytellers. Located about eight hours’ walk from the elegance of Raleigh House, it was from this small cottage that Eibhlín Dubh’s Caoineadh was translated from voice to text for the first time. It was handwritten with care, moving mouth to ear to hand to page, and onwards into English, the language in which it would be published by Mrs O’Connell. We cannot know from whose mouths the echoes of our lives will chime. Norrie is the source and the surface from which Eibhlín Dubh’s voice reverberates to us. Little starling: she opens her mouth, and someone else’s words chirp out.
—
In my November, the starlings are landing on wires that extend from the city into the west. Neither Norrie nor Eibhlín would have recognised these cables, nor the tall silver pylons that punctuate the places so familiar to them. They would both, however, have known the starlings that perch there, the neat lines in which they cluster, chattering snatches of new sounds mixed with those handed down from long before, passed beak to beak, quick as gossip. From a distance, such birds might appear drab, but to look closely is to see the petrol-blue iridescence of their plumage, how their cloaks are speckled, with stars perhaps – or with ash.
13. to splinter the surface
gur thit ár gcúirt aolda,
our bright-limed home tumbling,
—Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill
the gesture of pinching clothes to the line requires my arms to reach skywards, to where clouds gush by, a flood suspended in layers of silvers and greys. I could be underwater, now; I could be breathing liquid, looking up to a Beyond that exists on the other side of the swell that hovers overhead. Call it a cloud.
—
Deep in an old, old night, our city lies dark in the valley. Behind one draped window, a woman startles awake from a nightmare; even in sleep, her grief cannot still itself. In the dread half-light, she sees her home crumpled to ruin, the lands all shrivelled, the animals vanished, the air deathly silent, ‘The Gearagh all withering, / without a growl left of your hounds / nor the sweet chirp of birds’. In her time, The Gearagh was an ancient alluvial forest punctuated with pastures and farms. The landscape itself was birthed long before, when an Ice Age glacier at Gougane Barra disintegrated, releasing a vast body of meltwater. In the gush and squash and crush of that flood, clusters of debris were shoved into hillocks. Grass grew. Weeds. Thorn bushes. Slow, those old centuries, as a forest was born of hawthorn, hazel, oak, and ash, where new birds sang new songs from each new branch. Soon, human voices lilted among those trees too, tending to the first generations of bovine jaws to gurn The Gearagh’s cud to milk.
Women worked by bucket-handles there, by brushes, pots and shovels, pinning clothes to lines, tossing grain to birds, feeding calves, hefting bucketfuls of well-water, peeling potatoes, holding children to their breasts, sighing and singing and stirring, and when everyone else slept, they bent in candlelight, darning fraying hems to suspend further unravelments. This was The Gearagh Eibhlín Dubh knew: hectic, boisterous, and invincible. Silence? Here? Impossible. For centuries this place defied her nightmare, in the laughter and song and turf smoke that continued to lilt on the breeze.
The first destruction of The Gearagh occurred in text. In the 1950s, planning documents detailed a hydro-electric scheme, the construction of dams, and a strategic flooding. Hands were raised, documents signed. A man lifted a map and circled an evacuation zone. Others nodded. The carts, the cows, the children, everything was led away, all the belongings and furnishings, the chairs and the tables, the baskets and pots and blankets, all carried to safety. Did the people lock their doors before they left? Did they leave keys in keyholes, or tie them on twine around their necks? In the distance, the river. Each ripple tense as a harp string. Plucked. Trembling.
The brutal heft of liquid comes rude and fast, flinging open
doors without knocking, rushing through private rooms, finding any clothing left behind: the torn, the ill-fitting, and the useless. Water smiles, puppeting those limbs, jigging legs and arms until they turn to rags, and then to fragments of rags, dancing them and dancing again until every ragged dress’s warp is tugged from its weft. A grand and ordinary unravelment, this, how fast the fabric of a soundscape can be unpicked. For six hours I think about that water as I rewrite these pages on a train, sharing a table with strangers who get drunk and drunker, laugh loud and louder, slamming the melamine table with football-chant fists until the keyboard shudders to my fingertips. No flinching. Each time I loop back to rewrite these paragraphs, I must watch The Gearagh flooding again. When I type the word ‘puppeting’, some invisible clock-hand ticks, some secret key twists, and without noticing, I bleed. Drop follows dark drop. Blot. Blot. Another daughter, dropped. The empty rooms of The Gearagh sing only of liquid. In my pocket is a tissue imprinted with dabbed lipstick, a sequence of wordless mouths come unstuck, each one red as blood.
—
When I visit, the waters are low, allowing ancient stumps to splinter the surface, their bleak limbs pointing, but towards what, I can’t tell. I’ve heard that the old rooftops can sometimes be seen through the water, so I lean my body over those deep gardens, all trembling with waterweed, where fish fly like crows. I am peering down from far above now, and although I don’t see them, I do feel them below, the hidden rooms where women fed milk to infants and lambs, where candles were quenched by their weary breaths, where they called their lovers’ names in rage, in desire, or in fear, where they roared as new life thundered from them, Oh god, Oh god, Oh god, all those hidden rooms in which they smiled and died – they exist still, somewhere beyond the surface, even if no one sees them.
A Ghost in the Throat Page 12
