The Fire Opal Read online

  Mam was about five hours in labor before the baby was born. As soon as the baby drew air and screamed, Peig showed her to me.

  "It's her, Maeve. It's little Ishleen come back to us."

  Peig placed her, wrapped in a blanket, in Mam's arms.

  I stroked Mam's hair, my heart swelling with happiness. "Shall I fetch Da, Mam?"

  When she hesitated, I looked at her anxiously, aching to see Da and Mam smile at each other and embrace.

  "Right now I'd like to just lie quietly," Mam said.

  "Oh, please, Mam!" I whispered.

  "Oh, Maeve, there will be plenty of time for that in the morning."

  "But, Mam, when he sees that it's Ishleen and apologizes, you'll forgive him, won't you?"

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  She looked at me in silence for a moment, then drew a deep breath and sighed. "Yes, I will, Maeve." Her eyes filled. She tensed her mouth, reached for my hand and squeezed it.

  "All right, then," I said. "Mam, let me hold her awhile," I pleaded. "You sleep."

  She handed me my tiny sister, then lay back and closed her eyes, but opened them again suddenly. "Wear these while you hold her." She took off the necklaces with the bottle and the spiral and gave them to me. Instead of putting them on, I placed them around Ishleen's neck. Mam fell asleep.

  Old Peig lay down on the pallet spread for her near the hearth and dozed.

  Ishleen twitched and cooed. She was so warm, and softer than the belly of a newborn calf. I studied her tiny, perfect features in the low light, her lips pursing like a little star. Her round, delicately veined head was bald beneath soft tufts of blond down.

  Holding her securely in my arms, I laid my head back against the pillow and closed my eyes, inadvertently drifting off to sleep.

  An intense chill came into the room. A strange woman was kneeling between me and Mam. I knew then that I was sleeping and struggled to awaken, but couldn't. At one point, the woman's dress brushed against my arm, and there was a slimy feeling to it, and a smell of the foreshore. Flapping its wings wildly, the swan began to cry

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  out, but the woman overpowered it somehow, until it grew silent. No one awakened. The woman stared at Ishleen, and then at me. I suddenly saw her retreating between the curtains closed around us in the box bed.

  I managed to open my eyes, but could not move. Ishleen was asleep, and so was Mam. The swan was gone. I could smell the odor the woman had brought in and could feel the chill she'd left behind her.

  The rushlight dwindled low on the ledge, the flame about to cave into the hot wax. Most of the room was plunged into shadow.

  With effort I was able to move. Very gingerly I got up and lit a fresh rushlight. That was when I noticed Mam's eyes, wide open and staring at nothing.

  I shook her arm. "Mam! Mam!"

  I pressed my ear to her heart and heard it beating very slowly and quietly.

  I tried to awaken Peig, calling her name and shaking her arm, but she was heavy with sleep, her mouth open and drawing noisily at the air.

  I ran to the Cavans' house and got Da. On our way back, we saw the swan lying dead on the rocky descent that led to the beach.

  We were able to awaken Peig, but we could not awaken Mam.

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  ***

  CHAPTER 7

  ***

  Mam was like a vacant shell. She stared through me into some remote distance. She could be slowly led places, and she would eat and drink when fed, but she had no will and seemingly no awareness of what was going on around her.

  Da brought a doctor in from Killybegs, and when that one had no answers, he went as far as Galway to fetch another. That doctor was also at a loss.

  I undertook to care for both Mam and Ishleen while my father and brothers fished or worked the ground, or cut turf.

  I put the necklace with the triple spiral back around Mam's neck. I thought of returning the necklace with the bottle to her also, but feeling nervous for Ishleen, I wanted to protect her, too. Being so small, she wore the

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  necklace awkwardly, so I wrapped it in soft wool and sewed it into a kind of sealed pocket on her nightgown, so it was always with her.

  I was often whispering to Mam, touching her face, unwilling to believe that she could not hear or feel me there.

  Mam, Ishleen and I slept together at night in the box bed. I sometimes startled from sleep, thinking I could hear Mam breathing at my ear. But usually it was the wind outside whistling between the stones, and sometimes it was a strong tide crashing at the rocks below. Or it was tiny Ishleen herself, drawing breath while she slept near me and mewing like a lamb. I held her to Mam's breast, where she nursed. When she finished, she fit easily into the curve of my arm and looked at me with shiny wet eyes, reflecting any embers still red in the hearth fire and the single candle lit nearby, a beacon, a tiny pulse of fire burning for Mam in hopes that she'd awaken.

  One night, half-asleep, a kind of disembodied conversation took place, real or imagined, between myself and Mam. She wanted to know how Ishleen, was.

  "Are you here, Mam, in this room?" I asked.

  "No. It is miraculous that you can hear me. I am far away from you."

  "Where are you?"

  "I don't know, Maeve. I can't see things clearly." She told me that she was cold, that she didn't know

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  where she was or how she had gotten there, and that she could not stop shivering, though she seemed to be composed only of air.

  A frigid breeze and two different smells accompanied her voice. The more mysterious one was like the fragrant dripping wax of burning candles, scented by some wood or flower. But mostly she brought with her the smell of pure cold. If ice or frost could have a smell, sharp, crystalline and intensely clean, it would be this fragrance Mam brought.

  "It is very cold, but at least there's light. All around me most of the time there's light and there's movement. Wherever I am, I am not alone," she said.

  "Who is with you?"

  "No one I know, but they are all in the same condition as I am."

  When I awakened, I wrapped Mam's body in blankets, but I feared this would do little to stop her disembodied self from suffering with the cold.

  The next time one of these conversations took place, I was awake. I could hear Mam's spirit but could not see her. Was the sound of her voice on the air itself? Or was it somewhere inside me? I wondered. Where was she and why was she so cold?

  Sometimes, when Ishleen would fuss or make little noises, the air around me got tense. I heard Mam take in her breath and sensed her listening.

  During the day, I spoke to Mam, narrating to her little things that were happening.

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  "Mam, Ishleen is smiling," I'd say quietly, so that she might see this for herself if she was nearby.

  It became habit, this speaking softly to Mam. My father and brothers exchanged looks when they heard me do it. I understood how Mam had felt when they'd thought she was mad.

  One day while cooking at the hearth, Mam told me again how unbearably cold she was. "Try to see where you are, Mam, and I will come and get you," I cried.

  I heard someone clear his throat. I turned and saw my brothers, having just come in, looking at me in horror.

  "I'm not mad!" I barked at them, and they glanced away, but I knew when I turned around again that they would be exchanging looks. Still, I wasn't going to give up talking to Mam, and decided if they wanted to think I was mad, they could go ahead.

  I couldn't stay angry with them for long. At least I could speak with Mam. The three of them had lost her completely and suffered over it.

  During the day, I sometimes took Ishleen outside in my arms and peered down at the bay. Da and my brothers sat morosely in the boat, each lost darkly in his own thoughts. My father stared in a haunted way at Woman's Crag as gannets screeched and circled it.

  At night before the hearth fire, Da rarely spoke and hardly ate or even tipped a glass of whiskey. I sometimes put Ishl
een in his arms, thinking she'd give him

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  some joy, and though he'd rock her gently for a few moments, he seemed at a loss and always asked me to take her back.

  Fingal hardly acknowledged Ishleen. Now and then when she'd cry, he'd look across the shadows of the cottage at her in sullen bewilderment, then hang his head.

  But it was Donal who brooded the most. The pain he felt made him anxious and combative. Donal knelt beside Mam trying, again and again, to awaken her. Once, as he was doing this, I saw lit threads between Donal and Mam igniting and fading and igniting again. When he got up and moved away from her, I saw the threads still attaching them.

  "Donal is the softest of the three of you children," I was surprised to hear Mam's disembodied voice say to me.

  "But he always seems so strong, so ready to fight," I whispered quietly.

  "That's a way of hiding softness, Maeve."

  One late afternoon after a day's work, Da and Fingal were somber when they came in. They sat before the fire, bearing their grief silently somewhere deep and hidden within.

  "Where's Donal?" I asked.

  "He's having a walk. He'll be home soon."

  I looked outside and saw him throwing stones down the cliff toward the bay.

  When he wasn't back by dark, I took a lamp outside and saw him swimming in the dangerous tides of the jagged shore, taking awful risks, tempting death.

  I screamed for Da and Fingal, who went and yelled at

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  him over the noise of the swells until he came out of the water. When they brought him home, he was soaked by the tide.

  "I wish an entire battalion of bloody English soldiers would come! I'd cut their throats by myself, every last one of them!" he said.

  I gave him a cup of tea, and he dashed it against the hearthstones, shattering the crockery, the boiling water flying at me and burning my forearm.

  I screamed, and my father yelled at Donal and shook him by the shoulders. "We are all hurt by what's happened, Donal. Not just you!"

  There was a little butter on the shelf, and as tears of anger and grief fell from my eyes, I rubbed it into the burn. I knew Donal was already sorry. In my peripheral vision, I could see him looking at me. That was his way. He was fiery with impulse and angry with the world. But whenever his words or actions hurt me, he was always contrite. He never apologized out loud, but it was always in his eyes.

  I stroked Mam's hair and she breathed quietly, her eyes always half open. It bothered me that Mam was left to lie most of the time in the box bed or sit in a chair with her head bending forward. I hated leaving her alone when I went outside.

  She could be led places walking, but it took so much time because she moved so slowly and only when urged.

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  One night as we had our tea, I said to Da and my brothers, "We've got to make a special chair for Mam, a chair with wheels." They all gawked at me. "I want to be able to take her outside and down to the beach. I don't want to leave her here alone if I have to go far."

  My idea was met with silence. Undaunted, I drew a picture of the chair I imagined. "She should go out for air and be near the tides. She should come with Ishleen and me when we pick mussels from the stones."

  "What's the point of it? She isn't aware of anything around her," Donal said.

  "How do you know that?" I asked angrily. He stared, wide-eyed, at me, then hung his head and seemed ashamed.

  In spite of my irritation with him, I kept talking, but was met with more silence.

  To try to create a dialogue about the chair, I pointed to Mam's old rocking chair and said, "This would be perfect if we could have wheels put on it."

  Immediately both brothers objected with technical reasons why that was a ridiculous suggestion.

  "Something like a wheelbarrow might work," Fingal said.

  "A wheelbarrow? I'll not have Mam lying in a wheelbarrow. She needs a chair."

  "Maybe another kind of chair, not a rocker, could have wheels put on it," Donal said. "Invalids have iron chairs."

  "Yes, something like that. What do you think, Da?" I

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  asked, but he remained silent, drinking his tea and staring into the fire.

  But that night as I was getting ready for bed, he called me over to him.

  "We'll go to the blacksmith on Saturday to ask about a chair with wheels."

  I threw my arms gratefully around him. As I was about to go, he said my name. I stopped and looked at him, but he kept his eyes on the flames in the hearth.

  "Do you think she forgives me?"

  "Oh, Da," I said. "I know she does. She told me so that very night after Ishleen was born." He stared at the flames with damp eyes, not seeing them.

  That Saturday, Old Peig came to keep her eye on Mam, and the rest of us went by pony and trap to Killybegs.

  When we got out of the trap and were walking to the blacksmith's up a street adjacent to the wharf, Da pointed out a little shop with lace curtains in the windows: Muldoon's Fine Imports. It was an anomaly among the other rough buildings, as if it had been lifted from some cultured place.

  "That's where I bought a gift for your mam once," he said.

  "A comb?" I asked. "With little jewels on it?"

  His eyes widened. To hear it described seemed to stir him. "Yes," he said. "Do you know what ever happened to the comb?"

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  "It's at home, Da," I said. "You know how much Mam loves it."

  He stared at the glimmering windows of Muldoon's and went very far away in his thoughts.

  I remembered Mam describing this shop to me. I could see, through an open curtain, a shelf lined with colorful bottles and trinkets.

  "They have scent in heart-shaped bottles," Mam had told me. "Imported from across the Irish Sea."

  "Can I look inside, Da?" I asked.

  He nodded, and while he and my brothers loitered outside the door, I went in holding Ishleen in my arms, never thinking to give her to Da to hold, so much had she become an extension of me. My arms had grown used to being sore from carrying her.

  I hardly breathed at the sparkling atmosphere of the shop, little blue and crimson bottles and jars, oval-shaped soaps in porcelain dishes, the air smelling of dried roses.

  I turned at the end of an aisle and found myself in the doorway of an attached room, a seamstress's shop where a woman was engaged in sewing hems. She looked up and nodded at me invitingly, and I stepped in, browsing through bolts of fabric. I stopped suddenly. On a headless dummy between two curtains stood an extraordinary dress, fashioned of what looked like bronze velvet and strips of gold and deep crimson silk. It was stately beyond any garment I had ever seen. Around the waist hung a belt heavy with metallic embellishments.

  From an oblique angle, I moved in closer to it.

  "What's it made of?" I asked breathlessly.

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  "It's made of metal, but very finely wrought, so it looks like cloth unless you get close."

  I had seen drawings of such dresses, but not nearly as beautiful, in the book that Donal had about medieval heroes.

  As if reading my thoughts, the woman said, "Such a dress is for a woman on an adventure, don't you think? A woman who has an urgent quest."

  She stood up, then led me to a spot about one foot directly behind the dress. Taking sleeping Ishleen from my arms, she told me to look straight ahead. In front of the dress was a mirror in which I could see my head and neck reflected. If I looked fleetingly, I could experience the impression that I was seeing myself wearing the dress. My image hit me like a bolt of lightning; my heart pounded with a mysterious feeling of expectation. For a reason that I did not understand, associating myself with the dress filled me with a surge of possibility. The dress exuded the temperature and aroma of cold: sharp and crystalline, as if it had been in the same place where Mam was captive. It was, as the seamstress had suggested, the dress of a strong, adventurous woman. In such a dress I might travel to unknown frozen regions and rescue
Mam.

  Someone else had come into the room, but I disregarded whoever it was and reached out to touch the fine metal of the dress with curiosity and fervor. A familiar womanly voice came from the new presence in the room. "Maeve."

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  Turning with a gasp, I saw Mrs. Cavan looking at me with raised eyebrows and a half smile.

  "What an extraordinary dress," she said.

  The seamstress, still holding Ishleen, looked perturbed by Mrs. Cavan's presence. The smile had fallen from her face. She carefully handed Ishleen back to me.

  "It must cost dearly," Mrs. Cavan added, gazing at the dress with intense interest. Her eyes flashed in my direction.

  "Maeve!" Da called, leaning his head into the shop. "Let's be getting on."

  As I moved toward the door, I caught my true reflection--my rough rust-colored flannel skirts, my old boots covered in mud--and my heart fell slightly.

  "Maeve," Mrs. Cavan said, stopping me. "I received a letter from Tom. He asked me to send you his regards."

  I nodded, and in a barely audible voice thanked her, trying to continue on my way. But she stopped me again.

  "Shall I send him your regards?"

  I paused, but could not make myself agree to this. "No. Please don't," I said, and rushed to meet Da at the door.

  The blacksmith's shop, bare-walled and smelling strongly of leather, shocked me back into the real world. In a daze, I showed the blacksmith my drawing. He nodded, then he and Da got into a conversation about the complications of making such a chair, and the price. I

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  noticed Donal and Fingal looking through a half open door near the back of the shop, where I could hear a man speaking in covert but fiery tones. I went and stood with them, looking in. The orator had long hair and curly sideburns, and wore a wool cap with a brim set over his forehead. He sat on a stool addressing a group of seven or eight other men.