The Nature of Water and Air Page 19

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Of course you would,” he smiled. “You’re a Sheehy.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Well, there was talk that Frank Sheehy married a selkie. He died not long after and she went back to the sea.”

  “Really?” I felt myself clench at his words.

  “This is the beach of the selkies, Clodagh. When I was a little boy I saw a selkie, myself. I used to watch the shores from that window with the red curtain,” he said, pointing back at the hotel.

  I looked up and saw the red curtain moving with the breeze.

  “One morning,” he said, the tone of his voice growing dramatic, “I saw something moving in the kelp. It took her near an hour to unwind herself. By the time she was loose of the green, she’d already come partway out of her sealskin. When finally she was free she stood on the stones. A woman more lovely than any under summer stars and I was besotted with love even at my tender age.”

  The descending sun penetrated the mist at the horizon. I tried to read his eyes. I felt flooded with the old uneasiness the story inspired in me.

  “For near a fortnight I’d not let my own mother near me for want of the selkie. Isn’t that funny? I wanted the selkie to be my mother. And if my old mother had not been a strong-as-iron Irish woman I might have broken her heart.” In these words I heard a ghost of resentment. He looked out over the water.

  “Is it true, then?” I smiled skeptically at him.

  “I’m telling you what I saw with my own eyes, Clodagh.”

  “Your voice is different when you tell the story.”

  “I’ve told it many times in my life. But ’tis true.”

  It got dark almost suddenly, the bright head of the moon appearing, clouds passing it swiftly, insubstantial as smoke.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “What you told me about Frank Sheehy’s wife.”

  “Some do, some don’t.”

  “I don’t think Lily and Kitty believe it.”

  As he walked me north to Drumcoyne House along the headland, the sky cleared and stars became visible. He pointed out the floating red lights of the night fishermen moving on the water far below.

  “They say all fishermen in their heart’s heart are longing to come across a selkie. For don’t we all really have it in us to go to the devil?”

  “Why do you compare selkies with devils?” I asked, unnerved.

  “A man never heals from contact with one. Men drown or go to the drink if she gets away from him with her sealskin after they’ve been intimate. It’s like they’ve been burned or branded. A man who takes her must hide her skin. Some men forge the skin into a dress.”

  “A dress?”

  “Some men make the dress, thinking it might domesticate her. It’s justified as an attempt to balance the animal with the human. But with the skin shaped for a human body she’ll never get her seal shape back. The man destroys that possibility. It’s the more desperate man that makes the dress, mutilating the skin into human form. It’s like trying to reforge her nature. The thing the man loves is the thing he is most afraid of. It’s an agonizing thing to love a selkie.”

  I walked uncertainly on the rocky path, a temperate wind blowing up from the sea.

  He must have seen distress in my face because he asked, “Are you all right, Clodagh?”

  “I’m cold,” I said.

  He took my hand as we walked. “Are you? Your hand is so warm.”

  “I’m all right, Denis,” I said.

  “Clodagh, I’m going to Galway for a few days and then I’m coming back with my cousin and her lad. The May fires will be lit in the fields north of the Hibernian for the next week. Will you come with us one night to see them?”

  “Yes,” I said, and smiled at him.

  “I’ll telephone you when I get back,” he said.

  We said good-bye at the gate of Drumcoyne House. As soon as I could no longer see his figure descending the hill, backlit by the sea, I walked down again a little way and sat on a rocky ledge.

  The water came in and went out slowly, the last of the western light beginning to die.

  • • •

  In the parlor at Drumcoyne House hung a great painting of my father. He was drawn, not handsome. His expression remote.

  I asked Lily if she’d show me the rooms where my father had lived and she led me to a back staircase and up a narrow flight.

  On the landing she took my wrist and peered into my eyes. “Everything is as your father left it. Please don’t touch any of the curtains or any of his clothing. Time has made them fragile.”

  I emulated her grave, silent walk.

  A series of starched infant dresses preserved in glass boxes lined the walls, along with photographs of a baby in a ruffled bonnet and gown gazing irritably into the camera. And several photographs of a brooding boy at different ages, dark haired with shadows about the eyes. And a photograph in which he stood on a chair, wearing a little suit and a confrontational expression, flanked by two teenage girls.

  “Your father was fifteen years younger than Kitty, and twelve years younger than myself. Our mother died when Frank was very small and Kitty and I raised him with the help of servants and little help from our father, who traveled a great deal and eventually moved to Dublin. Our father died around the time your father married your mother.”

  In my father’s bathroom, a pipe from a water heater fed into an eerie copper tub. A massive china cabinet was lined with medicines and tinctures that had separated, the dark concentrated at the bottom of the bottles. All with little Latin names printed on strips of paper around them.

  She did not let me stay long in the rooms, but I returned later when she said she was going to have a rest. Somehow she’d heard my footsteps though her room was across the house, and she appeared in the doorway as I stood in my father’s office looking at the open book on his desk.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right, Clodagh,” she said. “You’re his daughter. You should look.” But she appeared fretful, protective.

  She took a breath, struggling to relax. “Come here,” she said, taking me to a room with an iron bed and a large armoire. “This is the room your mother lived in with him. You stay and look. Some of her things are still in this closet. Look.” She opened it with a creak and a rush of cold air. “These linen maternity dresses I had made for her. She didn’t know that she was expecting a child until a week after he’d died.” Most of the dresses were black or dark floral prints.

  She held one of the black dresses up to me in front of a vaguely warped mirror in a long frame. “They would fit you well, I think. Though most are black, and of course the midriffs are extra spacious . . .”

  “Did she wear these?” I asked.

  “Yes, she did. I just ask that you leave his things. You see, I’ve pressed the clothes and they’re in a certain order.” She fidgeted a moment then moved to the door. “I’ll leave you to look.”

  “Please, Aunt,” I said, and she turned.

  “Yes?”

  “Did my mother really live in the cliffs before she came to this house?”

  “I know only that she was a traveler girl. That she was on her own. She’d tell us nothing else and Frank’d not let us press her.”

  “Denis Lanaghan thinks she was a selkie,” I said.

  She let out a little snort. “Clodagh, there are people in Dunshee who believe that fairies put coins in their pockets.”

  “What can you tell me about my mother, Aunt?”

  She looked at me thoughtfully. “She was smart,” Lily said, the color coming up in her face. “Frank thought she was an innocent but she was a bit wily.” She gazed at me, the muscles around her mouth tightening.

  “You never liked her,” I said before I could stop myself.

  “I just meant that she knew where things came from,” Lily said. She sighed. “I’m sorry, Clodagh. It was hard for us. She followed neither codes nor decorum. She had
her ways about her and it was hard.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and ran my finger along a swirl of raised threads on the embroidered bedspread. I felt angry and didn’t want to look at her. I tried to remind myself how difficult my mother could be. How she had sometimes driven Mrs. O’Dare to the end of herself.

  “I understand, Aunt,” I said, but did not look up from the bedspread.

  She hesitated a moment in the doorway. When she was gone I opened my father’s drawer looking for clues to who he was. Everything was neatly arranged: some papers about geological findings, sentences underlined, passages starred in the margins, but all in scientific language, inscrutable to me; a pipe so clean it could never have been smoked; a shoe brush and blacking. I got little sense of him from these things.

  I closed the drawer and sat on the bed with my head in my hands. A part of me wished I had never seen the weatherbeaten woman who’d taken my mother’s purse; the woman she’d said was her own mother. I wished I could believe that she had been a selkie; that the story of my father finding my mother driving cattle was just a cover for the truth: that he had made love to her on the rocks and had cut the heavy sealskin and formed it to fit her human body; sewn it with coarse thread and decorated the hems with fishing net and seashells. And that it had been the call of destiny that had drawn her back to the sea.

  I yearned to feel the heavy satin fur of the sealskin dress. The story of the selkie had a terrible draw for me, but nowhere in myself did I believe any longer that my mother had been a seal that turned into a woman and back into a seal. If such a thing were possible at all, it had not been my mother’s truth.

  I got up and moved about the little museum of a room. The air seemed to remember a blighted girl; a girl who had come into this house having hired herself out to farmers to drive cattle. A girl with filthy feet who’d slept in a cave in cliff rock. If she was like an animal it was in the way a girl raised outside of houses was like an animal: more intimate with the elements than with the stillness of rooms. Startled, in love with the luxury of decoration. But not inhuman. Not magical.

  · 22 ·

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I smelled smoke coming from the indigenous wood, the racing of my heart told me it was a tinker fire. I went outside and walked swiftly through the oak trees where I saw the brown-and-white horse standing unharnessed, looking at me from the edge of the clearing.

  Angus Kilheen sat on a rock tending a fire, his head turned, looking toward the trees out of which I issued. He seemed afraid to breathe, and what must’ve been in his mind moved into mine as well: the sense that I was not altogether real. I touched the slim trunk of a tree to steady myself.

  An insect moved past my face and I recoiled, waving it away. With that, Angus’s face softened. I stayed where I was at the edge of the clearing and the silence went on between us awhile.

  “You don’t remember me,” I said.

  “I do remember you, of course. A man doesn’t soon forget a lovely, clean-skinned girl waiting for him in his bed.” He adjusted a kettle in the fire, the morning light so bright I could barely discern the flames. “You took me aback, love. I thought you were a phantom.”

  I kept my place in the trees until he said, “Come here to me now, Mare. I’ll give you a cup of tea.”

  I felt a shock at the sound of my sister’s name.

  He squinted in the sunlight watching me approach.

  “Sit down,” he said, gesturing to a rock. As I sat, he rinsed two cups distractedly in a pail of water and set them on a flagstone. “You’re a lovely sight to see, all grown up as you are now. Are you staying in that fine house in the oaks?” he asked.

  I wondered how he knew. I would tell him, I decided. I would tell him who I was and ask him if he’d ever met my mother. But the steadiness of his look made my blood rush, and like the time I’d awakened in his caravan, the thought of conjuring my mother between us made me wary. A darkness filled the soft of my stomach. I looked at the ground. “Yes. My friend from Bray has relatives there.”

  “And what is your friend’s name?” he asked.

  “Her name is . . . Clodagh.”

  “And is Clodagh there in the house in the oaks?”

  “No. She’s in Bray. She was here but she left.”

  “And so you’re staying with her relatives?”

  “Yes, I’m staying on to visit the west.” I paused. “Do you remember that time on the Wicklow field . . . you asked me if I’d been west and told me it was the best place on earth?”

  “I’ve thought of you often since that night in Wicklow.”

  He held my eyes and a breeze blew the smell of him to me, something like wet ground, arable and warm; weather-softened. A smell that excited me.

  “Why did you go the next day?” I asked.

  “You were too young a girl for what I found myself wanting from you.”

  His words made me feel the heat and definition of my body.

  “I went to Wicklow the last few summers looking for you.”

  “You did?”

  I remembered the fires in the field. “Why are you always alone?” I asked him.

  “I’m not alone. My ghosts keep me company, lass,” he said.

  My heart quickened. I felt envious of his ghosts.

  “I have ghosts, too,” I said, and regretted the childlike defiance in my voice. I looked away from him. The noise of the sea grew louder from the beach below us. A petrel reeled in the air, its shadow breaking the sunlight between us.

  When I looked at him again, he was smiling a little; his face full of expectation. It struck me that he had looked different five years before in the evening light in Wicklow. The naked light of morning illuminated every nuance of his face now. It was not less beautiful, but sadder than I remembered it. He was an older man than I’d thought him to be. He changed his mind about the kettle and took it from the fire before the water was halfway heated, settling it in a bed of earth and ash.

  “I lit fires on the edge of the field where we’d met. When you didn’t come I camped on the Greystones Road where you said you lived.”

  “I thought of you too, Angus,” I said, and laughed faintly at the inadequacy of the words.

  “Do you know the story, Mare, of Finvarra, the Fairy King of Ulster?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He carried off a beautiful human woman to live with him in the Land of the Dead. That was what I dreamt of after that night on the Wicklow field. Of carrying you off.”

  It was almost uncomfortable, the quickness with which my blood rose to him, my body so ready to betray me. He touched my cheek and I closed my eyes, pressing the side of my face to his palm.

  “We live in two different worlds, don’t we, Mare? This is the second time you’ve crossed into mine,” he said, intent on me. I tried to control my breaths but they were audible and uneven. “You came to me and waited in my bed when there weren’t a dozen words between us. And here it is now, love. Beltaine.” He laughed softly and shook his head. “You walk into my camp on the eve of May. The day fire and light enter the blood. Every Irish soul is pagan on this day.”

  The sea air blew my hair against the side of his face and lifted the hem of my dress, exposing one of my knees.

  I shivered, knowing something irreparable was going to happen.

  He leaned in and his mouth touched mine softly again and again. When his tongue parted my lips an alarm of pleasure fountained up inside me, followed by waves of warmth.

  We stood and he drew me toward the caravan but we did not go inside.

  “I study music,” I uttered strangely, as if to remind myself who I was.

  He sat on the steps and faced me, kissing my skin as he unbuttoned my dress. I could not keep my mouth still with the trembling and the pleasure. He pulled the dress down over my shoulders and I felt the rough of his palms on my breasts. He drew me closer and took a nipple in his mouth, pulling and tightening with the soft heat of his suck. I looked up at the sky and watched the clo
uds rush toward the sea as the dress slid off, his breathing at my neck amplified over the noise of the surf. A sweat came up on my temples, under my arms, a slickness between my legs; my body a languid weight I could not hold alone.

  He tried to make me look at him but I kept turning away, closing my eyes. “Mare?” he kept asking. “Mare?” as if it were a question. I hid my face against his neck and he lifted me onto his lap. There on the caravan steps, in the bright of morning with the sea roaring below us, he guided me onto him. I cried like I’d never been entered before, like what I’d done those few times with Finian counted for little now.

  I lost my face in his hair, holding tightly to his neck and shoulders, clutching his thighs tensely between mine. He hardly moved his hips beneath me and I found myself driving against him breathlessly, the pleasure building and breaking until I was all salted air and the screeching of gulls; the bounding rush of water. I felt the burn of my mother’s slap on my cheek; saw her standing damp and naked before me, her skin red from the heat of the bath, the pewter heart swinging between her breasts.

  I wept, my hair wet, stuck in my mouth, my thighs aching. I lifted myself off him and crouched down on the ground gathering my things. In a moment he was with me on the limestone earth, his mouth on mine. What had been held for so long in abeyance drove us now and we grew defenseless in the heat of it.

  When it was over, we lay entwined listening to the crash of the sea, waiting for the clamor of our pulses to quiet. He winced as he disengaged, as if my body had burned him, then reached out and grabbed my dress from where the wind had blown it, caught in the wheel of the caravan.

  I took it from him and put it on. “They’ll be waiting on me for the meal,” I said. “I told them I was just going for a walk.”

  He stood and buttoned the top button of my dress.

  “Can I come back to you tonight, Angus?” I asked.

  He took my face in his hands and kissed me. “Yes, lass,” he whispered.

  “When the ladies in the house are asleep,” I said.

  • • •

  I ate the meal with my aunts in half a trance, my body surging; little clocks beating in all the soft junctures of my muscles. I wanted to cry, like I’d survived something dangerous and mysterious. Like I’d gotten somehow lost, ravished by elements; left sore and dreaming and without breath.