The Bird Woman (22 page)

But after the first elation it’s a lonely business settling in to create something, and there are artists who need to talk
their way all along the road and others who don’t want to say a thing in case they lose sight of the path ahead. Liam always
went quiet when he was planning a piece or making a piece, a strange, tense quiet shot through with excitement. He never seemed
to need me to question him too much about his progress, so I just assumed he would do as he always did and I left him alone
and trusted that he’d come back when he was ready.

Word spread, and more and more people came for my hands. On the way out they slid their donations into the box. I still did
the library in the mornings, so life began to ease financially, but the Healing took a lot out of me, and I was always tired.

Liam said things weren’t as tight as they had been. How would I feel about letting the library go?

I thought he meant I should see people mornings as well as afternoons, but he didn’t.

“Keep it the way it is,” he said. “That way you’ll have the mornings here to yourself.”

Still, I hesitated. A cheque every month is a cheque every month, no matter how small, and the only sure money we had
coming in. Plus, I didn’t want to lock myself into the Healing. I hesitated, but the next time he brought it up, I knew I
wanted to let myself be persuaded.

So in February I went to see the senior librarian in Kilkenny and told her I’d need to stop work in the library for a bit.
Only for a bit—I stressed that—I was fairly sure I would be coming back.

She was a quiet, intelligent woman, private and shy, not a woman I had any sort of a personal relationship with, though I
liked and respected her from my part-time distance. She said they were pleased with me and she could keep the job open for
me for a while if that’s what I wanted, the same as if I’d come to tell her I needed maternity leave.

I blushed and mumbled and told her I liked the work and it suited me well, but at the moment I had other commitments. I couldn’t
ask her to keep the job open, but could I reapply in the future if circumstances changed?

She’d looked at me while I’d said my piece about stopping work, but she didn’t look at me for the next bit, she looked at
the mess of papers she held in her hands instead.

“I’ve heard about what you’re doing now, Ellen, and I’d say you might find it very worthwhile—so much so that you might not
want to come back. All the same, I think I can truthfully say that we’d always be happy to look at an application. Perhaps
when the children are older? And perhaps you’d think of getting the qualification if you did? It would mean extra study, but
that wouldn’t be a problem to you; I think you might find you enjoyed it.”

Once again I blushed like a pubescent girl, said something vague about thinking it over, and fled.

She was the first outsider who had spoken of the Healing,
however indirectly. I’d have thought a woman of her education and intelligence would view it with scepticism, even derision,
but there was none in her voice. Rather, almost an honouring.

Whatever it was, the more I did it, the stronger it seemed to get. I was always careful to explain that it wasn’t up to me;
I didn’t know what would happen; I could promise nothing. Yet underneath all this caution I could feel my confidence growing.

It was the men that moved me most, for they were so awkward and shy and apologetic. They’d go on about whatever-ailed-them
being only a small thing, and not wanting to waste my time.

Then the eyes would lift up from the knees and meet mine, and there’d be a pleading hope in them and behind the hope a sort
of desperate challenge.
You cured my neighbours asthma.
My
sister’s child fell into the fire, and there isn’t a mark. An aunt of mine couldn’t open her hand from arthritis, and now
she’s back at the knitting.

The women could be the same, especially the countrywomen, but there were others with nothing much wrong except maybe a bit
of an ache in the knee that came and went. I know that knee well—it’s called Idle Curiosity. Liam said if I slapped on a good
hefty charge the problem would solve itself. He’s right, but I can’t do it.

Around this time a trickle of folk of a different breed began turning up at the door. Perhaps that’s too strong, perhaps not
a different breed
—the sick are the sick—but they weren’t sick in the way I was used to. They were mostly women, younger and better dressed
than my usual lot, and though the first ones were English or Dutch, there began to be Irish as well. They confused me at the
start. They might be ill, but they weren’t chronic, and mostly what ailed them was something that would have cleared by itself
in a couple of weeks. Then it dawned on me that they were using my hands instead of the doctor’s tablets.

Liam called them the Alternatives, and the name stuck.

They weren’t backwards either; I never had to prompt them or listen for what lay under “a bit of a pain.” From the moment
they stepped through the door they were telling me all about their lives and their problems, as well as a whole lot more besides.
They were very strong on what was wrong with the world, stronger still on the overuse of drugs in modern medicine, and as
for their views on farming, once they started they couldn’t be stopped. I came to know all their theories by heart, for they’d
all passed round the same books, which they spoke of as Paisley might speak of the Bible.

I thought them a strange crew, both frightened and totally sure of themselves, very down on darkness and pain, always on about
sharing and healing and light. They seemed to think it their task to be stuffed full-to-bursting with energy which they used
to ensure that their lives were stuffed full of projects, and if that energy waned or wavered, it plunged them straight into
fear. They saw sickness of any sort as a personal failure—it never seemed to occur to them that they might not be as much
in charge as they thought they were, that there might just be other reasons for sickness besides their much-cherished emotions.

Liam laughed at me when I gave out about them. He said that they meant no harm, and there might be sense in there along with
the dross. I should listen and learn.

“They think sickness is caused by a negative thought pattern, so you nip each negative thought in the bud and you’ll never
get cancer,” he said. “They’re only trying to protect themselves, Ellen. Their theories make them feel safe. Don’t begrudge
them.”

“Or heart disease or AIDS or a stroke or Alzheimer’s. So how are they going to die, tell me that? Or are they all going to
live forever and ever?”

“Death’s a frightening thing, Ellen. It’s not everyone wants to
look for the bones lurking under the flesh in the way that you go in for. And sometimes seeing something from sideways, or
underneath, or hardly at all yields more than looking it slap between the eyes. Anyway, what harm to leave them a bit of comfort?”

My usual snort of derision.

He’s right. I want to look straight and think straight, I’m not interested in theories spun to make things alright. And while
we’re at it, spare me guides and angels and crystals and all that New Age blether. Not that they matter, but they offend me.
Especially guides. We are our own guides, our own responsibility; we can’t wriggle out from under our lives as easily as that.

And spare me all this white magic stuff the Alternatives come out with as well. Magic is magic—the Dark Art—to be stayed away
from. If you meddle with white you meddle with black, for it’s stronger than we are, and who are we to decide when it’s the
one and when the other? We have no overview—it isn’t allowed us. So how can we begin to know?

And another thing—magic requires assent.

I do not assent to the use of myself for magic, and I never will.

Over time I grew used to the Alternatives, but I never was easy with them. Maybe they were right and maybe they were wrong,
but my hands wanted none of their theories, they wanted only to be placed where they directed me. And in this I was one with
my hands, for I didn’t like all this head talk; it wore me out and distracted my attention.

T
hat was a cold, slow spring when it came, reminding and reminding of the North. Everyone else was complaining. Not me. It
was the thinness I liked, everything breathing slow and quiet and almost—so you could nearly see through into somewhere else.
Sometimes down here the spring comes all in a rush. There’s warmth and an ease that holds; the fields and trees are decked
out overnight, and it all happens so fast you come close to forgetting the strangeness of it, the death-become-life. Not this
year. This year everything was miraculous: the buds on the chestnuts fattening and opening, the new-paint plumage of the songbirds,
the first swallows flicking around the cold sky. And behind it all, the rain moving over the mountains. Blue light before.
Blue light after.

Andrew checked on the buds every day and wrote reports in a notebook that Catherine had given him. It was a beautiful notebook—hardbacked
and ruby red in colour, a single vertical dark-yellow stripe running up beside the spine. I wished I had given it to him myself.
Even more, I wished that Liam had.

Catherine had been offered three days’ teaching a week at Limerick College of Art. She’d dithered around for a bit, then she’d
rung them up and accepted. As soon as she’d put down the phone to them she rang to tell us.

“Why not?” she asked herself down the line. “I’m sick and
tired of the Bugs and Blooms, and I’ve nothing else ready to work on. Besides, if I’m stuck for time I might get an idea.
If you haven’t got time you
always
get an idea.”

This was a good spring for Andrew because there was much to report. Everything came at the wrong times, the early things late
and the late early, all muddled up and confused. He checked progress, drew diagrams and sketches, wrote detailed observations.
The notebook was supposed to be a secret, so I watched but I never asked, and I was always careful that my face was blank
and my eyes somewhere else when he looked up from his task. I thought he might have Liam’s eye, combined with a bit of the
farmer, and the two strands twisted together would strengthen over time and steady him in the world. I was like any mother—planning,
dreaming, yearning. But I never could see through to the children’s futures, and maybe that’s as well.

Suzanna wasn’t into buds, she was into starlings. Suzanna’s so round-faced and pretty you’d think she’d be into round, pretty
birds like wrens and tits and robins. No chance. The starling-thing had started when the autumn flocks were in the air. She
knew the swishing sound of their coming, and she loved the way the air seemed to thrum and change shape with the birds as
they wheeled and dived. When the flocks began to break up in the spring, two pairs made their homes in holes in the ruined
outbuilding across the yard. One day she came rushing in, for she’d heard the steady cheep of the hungry chicks deep in the
wall.

“Mammy, Mammy, the babies are hatched,” she said, the awe in her voice like someone telling you the Berlin Wall had just come
down. She said she liked their coloured speckles and that fluting noise they make, but I think what she really liked was their
untidy shamelessness and that cocky chancer-ish air they have about them.

That was the spring the Good Friday agreement was signed
and the Troubles were formally brought to an end. Everyone here breathed a sigh of relief
Thank God that’s over and done with. Time to forget the past and move on to mobile phones and shopping malls and self-esteem.

I sound bitter? Liam says I do. He says if he didn’t know better he’d think I was an unreconstructed Republican, still moaning
on about abandonment, still ready to kill and be killed for a country united and free.

It’s easy for him—them—the citizens of the Republic. It’s not that I don’t want the peace, but thirty years don’t vanish away
on account of a few politicians putting their names to a bit of paper. They’re there like a bit of old iron lodged deep in
your gut, and the rust goes on seeping, year in and year out, till it has you stained right through.

That was the spring I began to notice that something was wrong with Liam. Liam has always been noisy about the place, if I
wanted to know where he was, I’d only to stand very still and I’d hear him humming or banging or singing along with the radio.
If Whiskey was with him he’d be having a whole long talk with her, and if she wasn’t he’d likely as not be talking to himself.

One windy morning in April the phone rang for Liam, so I went outside as I always did and I stood in the yard and listened
for where he was. Silence. I called, but there was no answer. I went back to the phone and took down the number, saying I’d
get him to ring when he got back. Then I went looking.

He was in the studio alright, but the radio was off and he was sitting over by the window with some papers he wasn’t reading
held in his hands. He was deep in his thoughts and hadn’t heard me come in. I was going to call out, but something about him
stayed me. I waited a moment, then turned round and let myself out very quietly. Then I stood in the yard and thought about
what I’d just seen.