The Fire Opal (5 page)

Fingal was not trying to sound condescending, but it was there always in his voice whenever Mam talked about things she called history and he called folklore.

I shouted out in defense of Mam. “A queen can rule and a queen can fall, just as a king can fall!”

“Maybe,” Mam said, “with even more terrible consequences than when a king falls.”

Da and my brothers went quiet again at the grave tone of Mam’s voice.

“You’ve never heard in school of the great queens of Ireland? The first was the goddess Danu.”

“Danu,” Donal said. “Weren’t she and her people defeated by the Milesians, who would rule the visible world, while Danu and her people, the Danaans, took possession of the invisible regions belowground and beyond the seas? Isn’t it the old myth that they still rule those regions?”

“It’s something like that,” Mam said, “though I believe big important pieces are missing from the history books. The Holy Isles were established eventually, and Danu became remote from the people of Ireland, though she longs to return.”

“But it’s a myth, Nuala,” Da said gently.

“How do you know that it’s a myth?” Mam asked, turning to him sharply. I could see by her clipped tone that she was very angry with Da.

“How could such things be real?” he asked.

Mam rolled her eyes. With my brothers she was a little more tolerant, but with Da right now, she was positively impatient. “There is more to the world than you can see directly before you, Desmond!” she cried, then pounded the table with her fist in exasperation.

There was a collective silence, which no one dared break.

Mam was very proud, and Da, I knew, had hurt her by dismissing her certainty that Ishleen would come to us a second time.

Donal shot Mam a pained look, and seeing it, Mam sighed, then said, in a softer tone, “But all that is hearsay. The ruins are what we were talking about in the first place. They were a convent, as we’ve always been told. A quiet hostel of nuns at prayer. After all, what good is a woman if she is not quiet?”

She gave Da a withering look, and his face fell. He hung his head.

I sat alone on my bed behind the curtain and carefully examined the triple-spiral stopper from the broken bottle meant for Mam. It was a single swirling unbroken line that formed three spirals, like the crest of one wave sitting on top of two others. I worried that the bottle meant for
me might not offer Mam all the protection she might need, so I put the triple-spiral stopper onto a string, then went out to her and told her I’d found it also at the ruins, and that I wanted her to have it.

Her eyes lit up, and she took in a breath, immediately drawn to it. Her hand shook slightly as she reached to take it.

“But don’t you want it for yourself, Maeve?” she asked.

“No, Mam, it’s for you.”

I gazed at the bottle intended for me, glimmering around her neck, and yearned to have it again in my possession. But I could not ask her for it. She had been so moved when I’d given it to her. Besides, when I thought of the mysterious woman’s concern for Mam, I knew Mam needed it more than I did.

Mam slipped out of the house in the middle of the night. I got up and saw my father standing at the open door looking down the cliff to the beach. It was the moonlight and the reflections of it on the water that illuminated Mam’s figure, standing there on the black rocks looking out to sea, her forearms and hands pressed to her belly, the crystal bottle glowing softly between her breasts.

Very faintly from somewhere in the distance, I could hear the soft murmuring of the swan.

“Don’t you hear it, Da?” I asked, and touched his shoulder.

He turned and faced me, his forehead fraught with distress. “Hear what, love?”

“The swan. Do you hear its voice?”

He gave me a piercing look, a further darkness cast over his brow.

“Not yourself as well, my girl,” he said.

I felt a wave of panic move through me. “But I hear it, Da.”

“You love your mother so much you think you hear something,” he said. “But there’s no sound other than the one we’re always hearing: the waves breaking below on the shore.”

That night, when Mam came back in, she did not sleep with Da behind the curtain in the box bed, but went into the byre and slept between the cow and her new black calf.

CHAPTER 5

T
he next morning, I stepped outside the threshold of our cottage to watch my father and brothers descend the cliff, making their way down to the sand and through the rushes, where they climbed into the small fishing boat and navigated the waters of the bay.

Close enough that the mists could not conceal it, a
skellig
rose from the sea, an isle of jagged peaks around which gannets and kittiwakes squealed and circled. When Ishleen was still alive, Old Peig had told us that long ago, the
skellig
was known as Woman’s Crag.

“Sometimes,” the old woman had said, “the goddess Danu herself came and stood there, looking longingly at Ard Macha.”

Sailors and fishermen still reported apparitions there occasionally, of an otherworldly woman.

Today the birds around it screeched and called, rising in nervous clouds, circling and alighting again.

Often my father did not take the boat, but walked south on the headland to a shelf of limestone under an overhang of rocks, where he fished for black pollack. But this morning, in spite of the noise and riot of the birds around the
skellig
, the sea was still. I watched my brothers help him spread the fishing net.

I breathed in the soft air and sighed, then went inside, where Mam was sweeping the earthen floor.

Suddenly she stopped the broom.

“You know why the birds are screeching like that today, don’t you, Maeve?” she asked.

When I looked at her, at a loss, she touched my cheek and said, “They hear your sister, too, through the voice of the swan.”

With Mam’s hand on my cheek, I could hear the very faint uttering of the swan, seeming to come from the air itself.

“We’ve got to do everything we can to help little Ishleen come safely back to us,” she said. “We need to pick the herb that grows wild around the pagan stones.”

Picking the vervain was looked down upon as a kind of pagan practice, but Mam did it anyway. She hated being dictated to, and, believing there was protective magic in it, she often dried and burned the herb.

“And we can leave a few offerings at the shrine of Saint Brigid, the patron saint of motherhood,” I said to her, the shrine being near where the vervain grew.

Mam liked this idea, and we gathered a few things
together that we might use as offerings: seashells, small stones we’d collected on the shore over the years, buttons and stubs of candles. Mam reached for the comb decorated with rhinestones that Da had bought her in Killybegs before they’d married.

“You aren’t going to part with that, Mam?” I asked. “Da gave it to you.”

The color rose in her face, and she tightened her lips. “I don’t like the way your da’s looking at me lately, Maeve, like I’ve lost my senses, when the fact is, my senses have never been finer.”

“Why don’t you soften to him, Mam?” I pleaded quietly.

She hesitated, but still put the comb in the wicker basket. When Mam got proud over something, she was as unmovable as a mountain.

We left the cottage and walked the cliff road to the site of the shrine.

Mam lit a bit of candle and put it into a china cup to protect the flame from the wind, and left it before the weathered statue of Saint Brigid, who stood in a grotto of rock, long dry grasses trembling in the breeze around her.

“Maeve,” Mam said. “Look, there’s the new pastor, Father Cormac.”

A thin, dark-haired figure was walking gingerly around the ancient stones, studying them earnestly, his hat pressed against his heart.

“How odd, Maeve. A priest in this place.”

In church every week, our old pastor, Father Flanagan,
had discouraged anything at all that rang of old beliefs. From the road once, he had seen Mam here gathering vervain and had railed at her to keep away from the pagan stones on her way to the shrines.

After that day, Mam had stopped attending Mass. I think she got a secret pleasure out of bucking convention, and continued to wander freely among the stones, which some of the local women found scandalous. Da, and the rest of us, still went to Mass. Father Flanagan had died the previous winter and this new, young pastor had been sent to us.

Mam gazed at Father Cormac intently as he squatted down and touched one of the stones.

“He must be a good man, this new priest,” she said softly.

It was then that Father Cormac turned and saw us there. Even at the distance we stood from him, I saw him blush to be caught here, but he rose up and smiled and waved his hat before he put it back on and walked toward us.

“You seem to understand something that our previous pastor did not, Father Cormac,” Mam said.

“What could that be, Mrs. O’Tullagh?”

“That there’s no great difference between the ancient saints and the new ones.”

“Well, historically you are right, Mrs. O’Tullagh.”

“Our Saint Brigid herself was originally the pagan Brigid, the goddess of mothers, smiths, poets and healers,” Mam said with a ring of bravado in her voice.

“Yes, the world is a much more complicated place than many give it credit for being,” he said, smiling widely at her.

“And you know also, Father, that a queen once ruled Ireland,” she said.

“Yes, there were great queens once ruling here,” he replied.

“Anyone else, Father, would deny that, would say that women were weak and dependent creatures.”

“I’d never say that, Mrs. O’Tullagh,” he said softly, and bowed.

I liked his pink face and mild blue eyes and his smile that made him press his lips together.

“Then you are a good and wise man, Father Cormac,” Mam said. “So much so that I think I might like to go back to church next Sunday.”

“I would be greatly honored if you did, Mrs. O’Tullagh,” he said. “I hope to see you there.”

He bowed to both of us and wandered down the road.

“Da would be thrilled if you went back to church, Mam,” I said.

Mam stiffened at the mention of Da. “Your father thinks I’m mad.”

“He doesn’t, Mam.”

“He does,” she countered firmly.

I looked into the wicker basket and noticed we still had the comb.

“I’m glad you’re keeping the comb, Mam,” I said.

“I’m not keeping it. I’m just looking for a good place to
leave it. Not as an offering, just as something that needs to be let go of.”

She wandered in among the pagan stones and threw the comb at a distance into the overgrowth. My heart sank, and I turned away. If Da didn’t believe that Ishleen was coming back to us, how would he ever redeem himself in Mam’s eyes?

“Maeve!” Mam cried out suddenly, pointing to something under what once must have been a druid altar. I ran to her. A swan was nested in a clump of moss and ferns, one injured wing lying across its side spread open like a fan.

“The poor creature’s probably a victim of Tom Cavan’s. He had a slingshot in his pocket when we found him yesterday,” I said.

Mam knelt down before it, and it stood and stretched its full length and flapped its powerful wing, holding the other carefully extended. Swans when approached were usually cantankerous, but this one surrendered fully as Mam lifted it in her arms. It was of a placid, docile nature, unbirdlike in the way it looked at us, its eyes strangely human, watchful and aware.

Walking home along the promontory, we passed two townswomen, Mrs. Callahan and Mrs. Molloy, both of whom had been cold to Mam since she’d stopped attending Mass. They huddled next to each other when they saw Mam carrying the swan in her arms a few paces ahead of me, the creature uttering softly, and Mam, not caring an iota what the women thought, uttering back.
The two women began to whisper, and after Mam had passed them and I was about to, one of them said, “Nuala O’Tullagh’s stone mad for sure.”

The other replied, “And that daughter of hers is following directly in her shoes.”

My heart plummeted. I tried to keep pace with Mam, but the words of the women kept repeating themselves, stunning me anew each time they did.

When we were near home, we saw Tom Cavan standing on the road watching us with his arms crossed. I stiffened, tightening my jaw as we passed him. I flashed my eyes in his direction.

“Are you responsible for this, Tom?” I asked.

He gave me that piercing, eerie smile. “Just for you,” he said.

My face burned and I took a deep breath, but without the bottle near my skin, I could not seem to suppress my outrage. I felt the fury and frustration distorting my features. He snickered as we passed him.

Mam and I scaled the hill, and while she took the swan home, I stopped at the Cavans’ cottage and knocked. Mr. Cavan opened the door. Farther into the room, Mrs. Cavan was stirring a pot over the fire.

“Tom did it again, Mr. Cavan,” I said. “He never learns. He gets pleasure from injuring helpless creatures, and no one ever puts a stop to it!”