The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  The pub had grown crowded, full of smoke and noise. The three of them were downing their drinks and ordering more. Soon glasses of Guinness were lined up on the table and I could not keep up.

  “We ought to go out now. It’s near dark,” Joan said.

  When we went outside, the hill was brilliant with bonfires. We walked a bit then stopped on the outskirts of a roadside fire. We all went quiet, staring into the flames, the air around us rippling with heat. A chair stood on a heap of wood in the center of the blaze, shaking, its edges smoldering, dissolving in red glitter.

  I felt Denis move closer to me, and a shiver of revulsion tightened in my stomach. I turned from the fire and looked toward the sea, remembering the heat of Angus Kilheen’s body. I moved a few yards out of the fire’s range where the air was cold. A purple mist still stirred vaguely at the horizon over the sea, like a dissolving curtain.

  When I turned back to the fire, Roy and Joan were kissing each other. Denis smiled at me and I smiled back. Encouraged, he moved toward me and reached for my hand and I let him hold it for a few moments before taking it back.

  When Joan looked in my direction I tried to think of something to say to keep the conversation going. “Why are there no male selkies?”

  “The sea is a woman’s domain,” Roy said and winked.

  Denis opened a bottle of Guinness. “Here in this place the stories are only about women.” He threw the bottle cap into the blaze.

  “Joan, you ought to tell Clodagh your story . . . you know the one . . . ,” Roy said.

  “Ah, I don’t mind telling Clodagh,” she said slowly, her gaze returning to the fire. “When I was little my mother saw a group of beautiful women in long dresses standing on the rocks that jutted up through the surf. You’ll know the rocks, Clodagh, from the south beach. Pointed, jutting rocks. My father said she was wanderin’ in the mind. But she swore she saw them, all lookin’ up at her as plain as day, as if they knew her to the heart. Still she was frightened of them. Two days later she was dead, of an aneurysm in the brain.”

  I looked at her. “Of course her vision of the women was attributed to her illness,” she said.

  “Who do you think those women were?” I asked.

  “Apparitions from archaic Ireland. A woman from Inisheer told me that people near death can see things that elude the rest of us.”

  “But who were they?”

  “We don’t really know. Whoever they were, they were kind. My mother said they looked at her with great gentleness in their faces. She felt recognized by them.”

  The purple mist over the sea had turned into dim streaks. On the inland side of the field the fires breathed and glistened, sending sparks up into the blackness.

  Denis moved in circles in the dark field, kicking at the earth.

  “Across the western sea lies the Land of the Dead, which was once called the Holy Isles of Women.”

  “Do you think those women were selkies?” I asked.

  “Some guess that in the old days they’d come like guardians to help the selkies ensnared by men,” Joan said. “They’d appear sometimes to them in their husband’s homes and show them where the sealskin was hidden. They rarely come now. They come for daughters and granddaughters and great-granddaughters of selkies to bring them to their rightful afterlife. Others say they’re from pre-Christianity, holy figures like the saints are to us now.”

  “Like an order o’ nuns,” Roy said. “A bloody order o’ sea nuns.”

  Joan clucked her tongue at the irreverence of his tone. He shrugged and made a sheepish face and she turned from him with an air of irritated victory. “But they’re hardly chaste,” Joan said. “They don’t involve themselves with men or bull seals. They keep horses and stags as their lovers.”

  “Surely it’s only myth,” I said.

  “You have to remember that aboriginal Ireland was different from modern Ireland,” Joan said. “Shapeshifting was a true thing; a phenomenon. The selkies, and those women, whatever they are, are living relics of an older time. Think of it this way. They’re a kind of dinosaur that’s survived. Beautiful archaic monsters slippin’ through the seams, transcending the centuries.”

  In that moment I envied her innocence, her patience with the strangeness of the idea and her willingness to suspend disbelief. I had worn those capacities threadbare in myself. I relaxed and let myself feel the drink in my body.

  A young man in a group passing the fire recognized Joan and called out to her: “Where are Willie and George?”

  “In Ailwee,” she answered.

  “Who are Willie and George?”

  “My brothers.”

  “Are you close to your brothers?” I asked.

  “I am,” she said. “The little buggers.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Eighteen now,” she said.

  “I had a sister,” I said.

  “Did you?”

  “We were twins. She died when we were five.”

  “Then you have one foot already among the dead,” she said. “To have a twin that is dead! You surely must have eyes that penetrate the layers of this world.” Though her words made me uneasy, she touched my arm, and I felt in the tenderness of that gesture an implied respect.

  I looked into her face. “I’m Agatha and Frank Sheehy’s daughter.”

  “You’re Agatha’s daughter,” she said softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh . . .” Her eyes flitted nervously away from mine, all the easiness gone out of her body.

  “My mother wasn’t a selkie,” I said in a tone of appeal.

  She hesitated. “She was a figure of local myth, your mother. Many people in Dunshee do believe Frank Sheehy had found a selkie. She used to walk in the tide dragging her new brocade skirts after her, frightening the superstitious with her unearthly looks and her white hair, pulling and eating the mussels from the rocks. In Kinvarra the fishermen called her ‘the apparition.’ My own mother always believed she was a selkie,” she said.

  A gust of sea air rushed inland, causing the flames to bend. I shivered. The burning chair collapsed and I could no longer distinguish its contours.

  “Where is your mother now, Clodagh?”

  “Dead,” I said.

  “How did she die?”

  “She drowned,” I said.

  “Did she now?” Joan asked softly.

  My face heated with anger at her assumption. The myth denied my mother’s humanity, the difficulty of her circumstances. “You’re mad, believing such things,” I said.

  An uneasy quiet passed between us before she said, “A selkie is not meant to live landed, Clodagh. She wreaks heartbreak on the children she bears.”

  The wind came up again, blowing Joan’s hair into her eyes. Denis and Roy had returned and now Roy claimed Joan for himself, the two wandering off upfield, leaving Denis and me alone. Joan turned, peering after me, her face growing indistinct as she moved farther from the fire.

  The flames leaned after them, raveling and unraveling like wind-beaten cloth. Denis pulled up a handful of dry grass and tossed it at the blaze, which sent them back up on the flue, blistering and smoking. He grabbed another bottle of stout and swallowed it down, his silhouette weaving vaguely before the brightness.

  “People are all leaving the fires,” I said, looking around.

  “This is a night meant for romance,” he said.

  “I’m not feeling well, Denis,” I said. I got up and started away from him, heading back to the Hibernian.

  “Wait, I’ll walk you,” he said, coming up next to me in the dark and taking my hand. We walked awhile before he stopped me and tried to kiss me.

  “No,” I said, pushing him away, rushing toward the Hibernian across a stretch of rocky terrain.

  Back at the Hibernian I went directly to my room at the summit of the stairs and secured the door.

  Outside the open window the sea crashed and stirred all night in the dark.

  • • •

  T
he next morning I woke at first light and slipped out of the room, leaving the key at the front desk. I walked north along the strip of beach, remembering all I’d heard the previous evening.

  When I neared Drumcoyne House I smelled the fire in the oak woods and moved quietly through the trees. I saw Angus sitting on a rock hammering at a piece of tin. His sadness felt atmospheric, beyond language. I wondered over his life, his isolation, realizing how little I knew about who he was. With his head bent over the tinware he looked like a boy.

  He was as surprising as the landscape: its rises and falls; land breaking all at once into precipices; the sea always stirring at its edges, tender and brutal by turns. It had happened suddenly. He’d been mine and then he wasn’t. Sparks flew from the tin as he banged at it.

  The wolfhound perked up its ears and barked at me and Angus turned and held my eyes a moment before returning his attention to the tinwork. The air was dense now with a promise of rain, the sky steely blue-gray.

  I stayed there, sitting on a stone on the outskirts of his camp. The dog came to me and I patted him. An hour must have passed, the sky growing darker. Angus put his things down suddenly and, without looking in my direction, went inside.

  I waited a few minutes then went in after him. I found him lying on the bed with one arm over his face, the other hand lying palm down on his chest. He did not stir at the sound of me.

  I noticed that he’d taken down the Virgin of the Sea and that the Blessed Mother with the broken hand lay on her side facing the wall. There’d been a fall from grace. I wondered how the Blessed Mother had lost her hand to begin with. In my mind I saw Angus sweeping her to the floor with the side of his fist. There had been falls from grace before. But how long had it gone on, his fury with her, before he’d asked her forgiveness and placed her back on her little altar?

  I took a deep breath and approached him. I stood over the bed and unbuttoned the top two buttons of my dress, my pulse running at a loose gallop.

  “Angus,” I said in a low voice. He did not stir.

  “Angus, love,” I said.

  He made a soft sound. I touched his arm and moved it gently away from his face until he looked up at me. I unbuttoned another button. “Move over and let me lie down with you.”

  “No, Mare. Leave me to myself now.”

  My fingers trembled at my buttons. When I did not leave he let out an irritated sigh and turned his face away.

  “I want you to know that I’m leaving Dunshee tomorrow, Mare.”

  My heart surged with pain. I moved away and sat down on the little bench. It occurred to me in the wildness I felt for him that if he wouldn’t take me in his arms the world might end. As my eyes filled his form grew indistinct.

  What had I expected, I wondered, trying to move into his world? I did not know Angus Kilheen. How could I have expected not to find grief with him; a man who moved alone in poverty?

  I asked Angus if I might boil a kettle. He nodded assent and I went out. A few minutes later he came out, picking up the empty cup I’d set out for him on the stone beside my own, and filled it with whiskey. He drank the shot down quickly, closing his eyes. When he opened them his face was flushed and his eyes watery. He sighed and sat down.

  “Will you have tea now?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. He watched me put the tea bags in the metal pot and pour steaming water over them. He took a second shot and as he looked up at the sky after a group of gulls coasting noisily toward the sea, a tightness left his muscles.

  We sat in silence. I could smell the coming rain, the cloud cover fraught with dimming light.

  After a third drink he said, “There’s no such thing as chance, Mare.” His face had opened, his eyes bright, the blue of them milky in contrast to the redness. He peered at me, the hint of a smile at the corners of his mouth. He was changed by the drink and I felt mistrustful, and embarrassed by the transformation.

  He went inside and brought out a small book bound in dark green cloth called The Little Book of Trees. Each plate page shimmered smoothly in the firelight. Under each black-etched tree its name was printed and below that, in smaller slanted letters, was its botanical name. Black Poplar. Populus nigra. In the forefront of the picture a close-up of a leaf and a blossom, nut or fruit if the tree produced any. On a page of coarser grain following each plate was some information about the particular tree and a bit of related folklore.

  “Sister Margaret Mooney gave me this book,” he said.

  “The nun at Holy Ghost Orphanage,” I said.

  He told me how she used to come to him and hold him when he would cry and tousle his hair and ask him what it was he was crying for. “I never knew how to answer the question so I told her it was because I missed the trees from the mainland, there being none on that rocky island.” The day he left the place she gave him The Little Book of Trees and touched his face and said to him, “Be good in your life, Little Soul, and if ye ever feel sad for trees again you’ll have them at your fingertips.” He sighed, shaking his head. “There’s no such thing as chance, Mare. It was no chance that I ended up in that place with Sister Margaret Mooney as my mother.”

  His voice sounded earnest and bumbling. It was as if Angus had gone and left this nostalgic, gently ridiculous creature in his stead.

  He looked at me and smiled strangely. “You said once that our destinies tied us together.”

  “And you laughed at me,” I said.

  He fumbled with his cup and poured himself another drink, gazing after a dark, seaward-moving cloud. This drink he seemed to take reluctantly, as if he were obliged to take it.

  “What happened to your mother, Angus?”

  “Died of the typhoid when I was eight months old.”

  “I’m sorry, Angus. What about your father?”

  He stopped breathing, his eyelids lifted in surprise. “My father? Fathers are inconsequential, Mare. They pass in the distance of their children’s lives. He took me from Sister Margaret Mooney when I was ten. He wanted me to beg for him, to keep him in the drink. Ol’ bastard didn’t give a shite if I lived or died. Why should I give a shite about him? It’s a mother that matters to a child.” He paused, focusing on me.

  “Tell me about your own mother, Mare. You’ve never spoken of her.”

  “My mother’s dead, too,” I said.

  “When did she die?” he asked.

  “Years ago,” I said.

  “Do you miss her?”

  “My mother didn’t love me.” The words surprised me as they came out.

  “How could that be?” he asked.

  “She said I tried to get in her skin with her. She didn’t like that about me.”

  “And what of your father?”

  I felt uncomfortable with the questions. “You’re right about fathers, Angus. They’re inconseqential.”

  In his eyes at that moment I saw a trace of the man I desired; but as if to chase the clarity away, he took another drink, wincing as he swallowed.

  “Yes, it’s the mother that counts,” he said hoarsely. I’ll never forget Sister Margaret Mooney preparing me for my First Communion. It was thunderin’ and the rain was pouring out of the heavens and she leaned in to me with a flushed face and whispered: ‘You are about to break bread with God.’ The lightning was flashing outside. I’ll never forget her, the lovely aul creature, as if she were in a great drama speaking to me in a stage whisper. ‘The Eucharist is the medicine of immortality.’ ” He laughed softly.

  We went slowly through The Little Book of Trees. He told me that it did not work well as a field guide since the etchings were so ornamental, but that he had memorized some of the folklore, and all the names of the trees. “It’s the names I love,” he said. “Ash, Cypress, Olive. I used to say them in threes. Sacred Laurel, Sacred Oak, Hazelnut. When I’m feeling anxious I still say them to myself. Silver Elm. Maple. Hawthorn. And then there’s the Glastonbury Thorn. That one I always say on its own, but not for comfort. That one I say under my breath as a curse.�
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  I smiled.

  “Glastonbury Thorn!” he called out, laughing. “Bloody Glastonbury Thorn!”

  Some of the folklore was like poetry. He read: “The cultivated Olive, Olea europaea, has an ancient history rooted in the dark beginning of the Wild Olive.” And: “Called by the Greeks and Romans ‘The Mournful Tree,’ the Cypress, Cupressos sempervirens, was sacred to the Fates and Furies.” And: “The Sacred Oak was known in ancient times as ‘The Oracle Tree.’ ”

  The sky had gone darker with the impending rain and the bit of fire had burned itself up. He put the book down carefully on a stone and looked out into the field, raising his hand. “ ‘A sweetheart from another life floats there . . . as though she had been forced to linger . . . from vague distress or arrogant loveliness . . .’ ” Creases formed at his eyes and I thought he was about to laugh and was startled when he began to cry. “ ‘As though she’d been forced to linger,’ ” he said.

  It was not Sister Margaret Mooney that he was thinking of. I wondered if it was his blood mother, but I felt from his intensity that it was a woman from his past, a sweetheart, as he’d said.

  “ ‘Never until this night have I been stirred . . . ,’ ” he cried, as if someone was in the trees. I stood up, my eyes raking the woods.

  The rain began, spattering down in big, warm drops.

  I stood forlornly, watching Angus go inside for shelter. “Come,” he said. I followed him in. He lay down on the bed with his back to me. The wind stirred the linoleum flap. A bit of tin settled among the tools.

  “Angus,” I said, touching his shoulder, wanting to ask who it was he’d spoken to in the field.

  “When the rain stops you’ll go back to the big house, girleen,” he said heavily.

  The endearment hurt me, touching something old.