All the Bad Apples

by Moïra Fowley-Doyle

  Finn and Ida hurried to keep up, huddled together on the small and winding roads. Overhanging trees dipped their branches above us, and tangled around them, slicing through the air, glinting, were long silvery gray hairs. Another bird’s cry broke the silence, but at this point I’m not sure any of us were certain it was a bird.

  Nervously, Cale started to sing to fill the silence, old folk songs from our childhood, as if she somehow knew this was what she should do to still our fears. Her voice was clear and beautiful.

  Another scream sounded, closer this time.

  Finn raised his voice and sang along, full of false bravado. Ida chimed in with both a similarly feigned enthusiasm and the signature Rys tone-deaf ear. But Cale and Finn could have been a choir. High and low, bass and alto, Cale making up the harmonies like it was something she was born to do.

  When another scream sounded, we all jumped, whipped around, sure it had come from close by.

  “It’s a deer,” Finn said quickly, too loud in the quiet. “Or a fox. They sound like that sometimes. When they’re mating.”

  “That’s true,” Ida breathed faintly. “Female foxes scream.”

  But I knew it wasn’t a fox.

  “Come on,” said Cale, touching the stone that hung around her neck. “We’re almost there.”

  She motioned to us to leave the road. We hoisted our backpacks higher and hopped over a stone wall. In what was not quite a forest, we climbed hillocks and scrambled over fallen trees, tangles snatching at our clothes. Soon we were all but running.

  Until Cale came to an abrupt stop. Just ahead, in a little clearing, there was a small stone cottage, long abandoned.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” Finn said. “I can see the headlines now.” He stretched his hands in front of him. “Runaway Queer Kids Become Victims of Remote Cottage Chainsaw Killer, Surprising Absolutely No One.”

  “I’m not queer,” Ida said. “Sorry.”

  “Then chances are you’ll be the only one left alive.”

  It was not so much a house as an empty shell. It was not so much abandoned as reclaimed by the land. There was no roof, only a carpet of grass and three walls covered in leaves and tangles of bushes, scrambling ivy and blackberry brambles. It was hard to tell where the overgrown garden stopped and the house began.

  “This is it,” I said. “Ann Gorman’s cottage.” I turned to Cale. “Your great-great-great-great-aunt. Where my great-great-grandmother lived too. We have to go inside.”

  “No way, Deena,” Finn said, serious now, all jokes forgotten. “It’s bad enough you talking about banshees and curses and shit. If a ghost is gonna live anywhere, it’s in that house right there.”

  “Come on, Finn,” I said bracingly. “It isn’t even fully dark yet.”

  Except it looked like midnight inside the ruins. Somehow the countryside seemed hushed suddenly. I started to wonder if maybe Finn was right.

  Another scream sounded in the night. Finn’s fingers were a vise-like grip on my hand, but I could barely feel the blood flowing underneath my frozen skin.

  Cale set her backpack down on the remains of the stone wall around the house and from it she took a bundle of white candles and a small velvet pouch full of stones.

  Finn stared, mouth agape. “Candles?” he said, with a high-pitched edge to his voice I’d never heard before. “Seriously? This isn’t creepy enough without fucking candles?”

  “Candles to see ghosts,” said Cale. She handed one to me and I held it like an altar boy about to lead a service. “Talismans so they can’t harm us.”

  “Fuck,” said Finn. “This is not good.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts?” I asked him.

  “Not during daylight, I don’t,” Finn said. “Not at school, like, or at home. Not when we’re watching some crappy horror film.”

  Cale scratched a match to flame and my candle’s wick caught.

  “But here?” Finn’s voice went up about an octave. “In some old ruined cottage at twilight in the middle of fucking Sligo with you looking all possessed or some shit? Yeah. Yeah, I fucking believe in ghosts.”

  He continued to swear softly under his breath, but I was too preoccupied to really listen. There was something in this place. Maybe the banshees. Maybe something else. All around me, the air smelled like apples.

  Cale set out her stones along the walls, as carefully as if they were glass, or eggshells. “These ghosts are tied to us,” she said. “To me, to Deena and Ida. This house is linked to the three of us. They’re the only ghosts we should meet tonight. I don’t think the banshees would come here. Their tangle of hair would snarl in the briars; their rags would rip on the thorns.”

  Ida shivered. “You talking like some kind of fairy tale isn’t exactly helping.” She looked around, seemed to realize something. “But if this is Ann and Mary Ellen’s cottage,” she said, “then Mandy must have left another letter. The next part of the story.”

  I got up, holding one of Cale’s candles in each hand, and I walked around the perimeter of the place. To the rear, behind the chimney, there were the gnarled skeletons of three straight lines of trees. The tops of their trunks only just showed over the epic forest of weeds.

  I hadn’t realized Ida was beside me until she spoke. “An orchard,” she said.

  I jumped, shoes slipping on small stones. In the shadows of the broken stone wall, illuminated by my candles’ flames, I could see what looked like symbols carved into the barks of the trees. Circles and spirals, stars and crosses. The same symbols repeated on the stones of the cottage walls, faded almost to obscurity, but still raised enough that I could feel them under the pads of my fingers.

  When it happened, it was almost expected. My fingers touched paper. Impaled on the thorn of a briar, wedged into the stones of the wall, right next to the grooves of a carving that looked like an eye.

  The others didn’t say anything. They just waited for me to read.

  Dear Deena,

  Here is something you have to understand. Once the curse comes to you, it doesn’t let go. I’m a whole lifetime from seventeen, but still the banshees have screamed for me, sent me running. Or perhaps I’m part of your curse.

  Mary Ellen was far from seventeen when she died, but when she did it was still the lingering remains of the family curse haunting her. You’ll see. Once a bad apple, always a bad apple. There’s no way to climb back onto the family tree.

  16.

  Shared beds

  Drumcliff, 1918–1935

  Sligo was a town that talked. Once it became known that John O’Connor’s daughter would be marrying the local witch’s son, tongues got to wagging.

  “There has to be a reason,” the townsfolk said in audible whispers.

  “There’s only one reason it could be,” the townsfolk replied. “The girl is already with child.”

  But Catherine was a good girl, a God-fearing girl, who would remain chaste until her wedding night, and the wedding was not hasty, which meant no illegitimate child was involved in the couple’s unlikely marriage. So the whispers turned again to witchcraft.

  Town rumors had always held that the women who lived in the orchard down by Drumcliff were witches. It was said that the boy’s mother, Mary Ellen, had the power to turn into a fox, Ann a black bat.

  At the same time, Mary Ellen and Ann were afforded a certain respect. Doctors were expensive. But for a barter, a trade or a slip of coins into the hand, Ann and Mary Ellen would produce a vial or jar, a bunch of cloth-wrapped herbs that would, more often than not, cure an ailment within a week. Long gone were Mary Ellen’s days of muscle strain and constant hunger. There was money to be made for midwives and abortionists with a day business in apples.

  Yet the town talked. And, though it was true that Patrick wanted his own happiness, his own success, he also knew that a tenuous link to the O
’Connors would not be a bad thing for his mother and Ann.

  Even so, Mary Ellen worried. “There are evil men in this world,” she told Ann after Patrick announced his engagement. “I don’t want my son to be one of them.”

  “He won’t be, love,” Ann said. “There’s no evil in him.”

  The trees of the orchard shook their branches in the breeze. A couple of bad apples dropped to the ground.

  “You’re right,” Mary Ellen said softly, and she took her lover’s hand. “But still, in that house, I hope he has sons.”

  * * *

  —

  Patrick and Catherine Rys had two daughters. Lizzie was as plain and blond as their mother, and Julia was as copper-haired and slight as their father, although they were both somewhat stronger of stature. Of the strength of their hearts, however, Patrick knew very little: He learned before his children could talk that his own heart lay with animals more than with humans, and his daughters were a puzzle he loved greatly but had no desire to understand.

  However, Julia, like her father, was enamored with the bull.

  Patrick’s father-in-law’s prize bull was still going strong and when Julia was sixteen—an age when most girls, her sister Lizzie included, grew weary of animals, preferring to spend time with their friends—Julia could still be found at her father’s side early each morning, small hands stroking the hide of the great gray bull.

  “That girl’s got her granny’s witchcraft in her blood,” said John O’Connor, only half joking.

  Patrick’s mother still lived in the overgrown cottage with Ann Gorman. Neither had ever married. They still slept in the small bed they’d shared as young women, insisting to Patrick that this was simply for warmth. “You know the nights are fierce cold around here, love,” Mary Ellen would tell her son, and he’d try hard to believe her, to ignore the whispers on the farm and in the town, to pretend that he didn’t know the whole of Sligo spoke of his mother as the widow witch, to wish away the niggling knowledge inside of him that, in the cottage his mother shared with another woman to whom she was not related, all was not as it seemed.

  So, when his father-in-law said that Julia had Mary Ellen’s witchcraft in her blood, Patrick spoke gruffly. “She’s learned how to tend to the bull from me,” he said. “That bull will outlast me, you mark my words, and, if she’s not here to care for him, you can kiss the O’Connor cows goodbye.”

  John huffed and shrugged, but he didn’t say another word, just leaned on the wood of the fence every morning and watched Julia.

  Whenever Mary Ellen visited the farm, she watched him watching. She felt his eyes on her granddaughter like a fire in the pit of her gut. She couldn’t say anything—there was nothing to be said—but she added certain herbs from the garden into the cider Ann sent him, to ensure he would stay away.

  Still, the fire in her gut became hotter every time she walked over to the farm and saw John O’Connor leaning on the fence, watching.

  As Mary Ellen’s fire grew, the rain stopped, the air became hot and dry. By July the grass was yellowing and the farmers were losing their crops. The river slowed to a muddy trickle.

  “It’s not natural,” the fishmonger said on market day. “Heat like this in Sligo.”

  The women at his stall stopped and shook their heads. “It isn’t everywhere,” one of them said. “I’ve had a letter from my nephew in Galway—the weather’s same as every year down there.”

  “Unnatural,” said the fishmonger again.

  At the O’Connor farm, crops wilted and animals grew thirsty. Only John O’Connor’s prize bull was given the same rations of water as before, and every day the farmer sent Julia into his enclosure to sponge the creature and cool him down. It was Julia’s favorite part of the day, and she would splash the water on the bull and on herself, rinsing the morning’s dust from her dripping dress.

  Dry-mouthed, John O’Connor watched her.

  As the weeks went on, Sunday masses were a special kind of torture, the entire parish crowded into the church together. “At least the sermons are less boring,” Julia’s sister, Lizzie, said, and that much was true: The heat had inspired the priest to lecture his flock about hellfire and damnation, which was much more interesting than his usual digressions about taxes, but Julia had to admit that there was something in the sermons she found discomfiting.

  Perhaps it was how they changed the after-church chatter to dark mumblings about what the people of Sligo had done to deserve such a plight. This weather, the townsfolk decided, was clearly an act of God. Why else would only Sligo be affected? Why not Ballina? Why not Carrick-on-Shannon? Why were none of the neighboring towns and villages losing their crops to drought, their animals to starvation?

  It was either an act of God or it was witchcraft.

  While it is always difficult to tell where rumors are born, this one was often spread by people who had recently spoken with Farmer O’Connor. And hadn’t the widow Rys been seen around the farm far more than usual? And hadn’t John O’Connor had to stop drinking Ann Gorman’s cider after having been awfully ill? And wasn’t it strange, uncanny, two women living alone together in the middle of nowhere, with only their animals and their apples? And how were their apple trees not dying when there wasn’t any rain?

  Mary Ellen heard the rumors; it was impossible not to.

  “Don’t worry, love,” Ann told her. “They’ve nattered about us before and they’ll do so again. Once the rain falls, they’ll come to their senses.”

  But there was something dry and dangerous about these rumors. And there was a keen on the dusty air. A sound in the night that could have been screaming.

  Mary Ellen went to the farm during Sunday Mass time, climbed the wooden fence, and called to the bull. She stroked his gray head and fed him an apple from her orchard, plucked right off the tree. She wrapped her hands around his huge curved horns and whispered in his ear.

  “Protect her,” she said. “Or I’ll never let you rest.”

  The bull nodded his enormous head.

  * * *

  —

  When Mary Ellen had arrived in Sligo all those years ago, pregnant, starved, and limping, Ann had taken her in. She’d fed her what she could, had warmed water over the fire to bathe her, had rubbed strong-smelling poultices into her blisters, had laid her in Ann’s own bed. For weeks, she’d asked no questions, had only offered companionship, work, and a knowledge of herbs that would serve her for years.

  Later, when Mary Ellen finally spoke of how she had been betrayed by Gerald, had been evicted and shunned by her family, Ann offered her own story. Later still, she offered love.

  Some loves ignite like forest fires, burn down entire towns before anybody’s noticed. Ann’s first love was one of those, and she didn’t see the blisters from the burn until it was too late. Some loves smolder like a turf fire, are slow to start but will then burn bright and steady through entire winters. Ann and Mary Ellen fell in love within red embers, but with those they built up a fire that lasted their lifetime.

  * * *

  —

  It was so hot and dry that summer that a struck match burned extra bright. A group of town boys, who accidentally set an entire barn on fire after playing at camping nearby, got their hides tanned so hard they couldn’t sit for a week.

  So it was most likely a coincidence, what happened to Mary Ellen Rys and Ann Gorman. It was most likely the exact same thing.

  Julia had heard the rumors about her grandmother—everybody had. But she never really believed them. All Julia knew was that her nanny and her good friend Ann were experts on herbs and apples, could cure a cold in a day, and help birth a baby who’d turned in the womb so that its bottom was the wrong way up. Julia didn’t connect the rumors to the whispers of witchcraft that ran rampant that stifling summer. It wouldn’t have occurred to her.

  It occurred to her father later, when his mother�
�s little cottage in its tangles of brambles burned bright and dazzling one hot, dry night. When the fire burned out, the local doctor found the remains of the cottage’s two inhabitants locked in an embrace on their shared bed, as if they had died peacefully together in their sleep.

  The following morning, it started to rain.

  17.

  Prelude to kisses

  Drumcliff, 2012

  When I finished reading, the lightest rain came down like a fine mist, a gentle touch of loving hands.

  “They might have burned right in this spot,” Ida said in a whisper. “Mary Ellen and Ann.”

  “They didn’t burn them for being witches,” I said, watching Cale standing, like me, in the place her ancestor died. An ancestor with more in common than just a name. “They burned them because they were lovers.”

  “I guess back then it amounted to the same thing,” said Finn.

  Cale had said something similar earlier, but now her eyes were filled with tears. I felt complicated, like a sentence with too many small words, where you keep stumbling over the same ones, reading the whole thing wrong.

  Mandy had known all this before she left. Had known our ancestor had been killed for whom she loved. I knew now that her reaction to my coming out wasn’t intolerance but fear. It didn’t matter that times had changed. In our family, so many things remained the same.

  She could have told me, a traitorous thought came into my head. She knew all this; she could have told me before now. Could have said at least some of this on my birthday, before she disappeared.

  I missed Mandy like a thirst, something so vital I couldn’t not think of it. I ran her letter between my fingers in the way you do a piece of velvet, rubbing it the wrong way so it almost sticks against your skin.