Patrick Henry
Him in the Gorse

<< continued from Part 1

She woke in a fit of thrashing, the throw cuffed about her ankles. She wiped her brow and saw the rosary on the table beside her cot. Simply wooden beads, buffed black, she thought. At once it unsettled her, how little she thought of the penance the whisky priest had assigned her. Niamh gathered herself, shawled the throw about her, and resolved to still herself before the hearth's dying embers.

The next morning, the Dubliner came as before, preceded as ever by the intimations of his figure in the fog, of those thorn-sharp pricks that told Niamh his hands were on the gate. She tossed open the door and raced to meet him on the path.

He waved at her, but his brow and the kestrel-swoop of his parted hair seemed feathered with distress. "Morning, Miss O'Suilleabhean."

"Leave."

"Beg your pardon?"

"Leave and go in the grace of God," she said.

"Is there somebody in the house? If you're under threat of harm, Miss O'Suilleabhean, I swear to you."

Her hands balled into fists and she stamped the earth. "I told you. I told you, I wouldn't have him! And you press me, with your Mister Gorham-if such is even flesh and blood-and him in the gorse, quizzing me like it's my catechism again, and I told you-by God, I told you, I wouldn't have him!"

By then he was at her. He intended to catch her fists, to level eyes with her and see if they might reason through this matter, but instead absorbed a flurry of punches to his breast. He danced back, but she bulled into him. So they squared about the path before her uncle's cottage, an odd boxing match, which to any onlookers would've resembled a spat between lovers.

Niamh spent her breath punching at him. She gritted her teeth. "Can't you leave me be."

"I'm not-"

"Faith! How can I know?"

"I've flesh and breath, and all else that signifies life."

"For now, you are. But maybe you're him, maybe you are."

"Miss O'Suilleabhean-Niamh-I assure you that I am not-"

She struck him, open-handed, across the face. She cut a sharp pivot on her heel and retreated to the cottage. He went after her; she heard the squelch of the flagstone, the syncopated squish of rock into muck timing his pursuit.

Before she could slam the door, he was within the cottage and shucking off his coat. He nodded toward the cast-iron oven. "You can't be that cross with me. I see you've set the kettle."

"Oh, you think it's for you, do you?" She bundled her apron around her hands and snatched the kettle. It gave off a whimper of steam. Niamh went to the door and hurled the kettle to the sod. Its lid popped loose, and the scalding water sluiced out. The heat evaporated, and it looked as if the earth itself were smoldering. Goodness-it had scarcely crossed the path. She dreaded inflicting on herself, even by accident, a plight from the fairy stories; there was one such tale she recalled, that the good folk stole a woman's appetite because she had tossed her soiled dish water on the walk. Niamh crossed herself, although the movements were little more than rote. She moaned, gritted her teeth, crashed back into the cottage. "Now the kettle's for you. Why don't you go after it."

The Dubliner went to collect the kettle. Niamh took to her uncle's chair by the hearth and sat there, arms crossed over her chest. The Dubliner returned with the tin thing cradled in his arms. Without question, he took to Niamh's kitchen, scrubbed it down and filled it with fresh water, and set himself to the alien task of brewing tea.

And though the Dubliner's efforts resulted in a bitter brew that made Niamh's teeth ache, she drank it and considered thanking him.

FROM "THE BLACK CISTERN," COLLECTED IN FOLK TALES OF THE WEST COUNTRY:

As recounted to the editor of this volume, by a native of the region.

So Mary stepped from the cistern and surrendered the tooth to the good folk. They formed about her a shawl of a shimmering raiment, the likes of which we've never seen before nor since. The very moment they had wrapped their spell and its gossamer about her was the same that Cearul, son of Derry, found himself at a crossroads cut through the bog. He was contemplating which of the three routes might take him furthest from his father's house and the wrath so unique to righteous men who've had their family names slighted. There was a fine mist creeping over the road, and the air was hearty with peat. Cearul remarked to himself, "But oh, if only I'd found myself digging for peat like old Father had so often asked-but what then? A man's not made for labor. A man's made for this world and what joys it has to offer. Mary! He ordered me to marry her. I'd had the thought myself, and what joys I could have with the girl. But soon as he ordered it, no, it became a duty and I couldn't take the thought of it."

It was then that a voice called from the depths of the bog. On the wind, the voice sounded reedy and thin. At first Cearul said to himself, "Sure it can't be anything." But the voice lilted again, and Cearul heard his very name: "Cearul, son of Derry," the voice said, "you have come to convey me home!" Cearul looked about him and, though he saw nobody, tore from the well-hewn road and into the bogs. It must have been a highwayman, or Mary herself, or perhaps someone come to collect on Cearul's arrears. But no matter: it was but breath, and that he could certainly outrun. Yet, as he dashed through the bogs, dodging any place where the earth looked weak, the soul's convicted words sounded nearer and nearer. "Cearul, son of Derry, you have come to convey me home!"

No, he was certain some mistake had been made. But in his rush, he had misjudged the ground, and so discovered that the bog had him by the ankle. He twined his fingers about his shin and gave as good a tug as he could muster. But the strength needed to leverage his foot from the muck caused his feet to slip out under him. He landed in the bog with a squelch of the muck. And when he was coming free, like a comet-in-reverse, a great arc of mud was flung into the air.

When the debris cleared, Cearul discovered that prostrated alongside him on the dreck was a grinning skeleton, a copper light like two burnished coins burning in its eye sockets. The skeleton's jaw hinged open with a fierce sound, as of chalk on slate. "A fine night, my lad"-so the skeleton said-"for a little stroll in the country. You can call me Mulligan; it's my kinfolks' name, so I suppose it's mine to share. So thoughtful of you, lad, to stop and carry me home."

Cearul crawled back from the skeleton and stammered out an apology, but Mulligan would hear none of it.

The two spoke for some time, until Mulligan had impressed on Cearul the duty to which he was fated. Somewhere in that country was a plot, which Mulligan's kin had preserved for him. He did not know where the cemetery lay, precisely. Perhaps it was a short jaunt, perhaps it was in a churchyard in Ulster! But when they neared a cemetery with a vacant plot that may have been his, Mulligan would give Cearul three sharp pokes. At that sign Cearul was to approach the graveyard and offer Mulligan's remains to earth.

"Not so demanding a task," said Cearul, though he couldn't recall a day in which he'd done more than cut his losses at the dice rather than cut so many yards of turf, or a day in which he'd lifted his cup rather than so many pounds of grist. Mulligan clattered his teeth, bleached by their years in the bog. "Then pick me up, lad, and let's get us both to our homes!"

For hours Cearul trekked with the jabbering skeleton slung over his shoulder, until the weight of the bones bore down into his shoulders. Mulligan's weight would tilt wildly, like the mainstay of a fragile trawler, and so tilt Cearul this way or that-from the roads into loathsome burns flush with kicking salmon, from the streams into rows of brambles, from the brambles to the roads.

At length Mulligan jabbed Cearul's ribs three times.

Cearul flinched at the prodding, but he said, "We're there at last, eh?"

"Maybe we are, maybe we aren't."

But Cearul knew his task and carried Mulligan ahead. He was at a graveyard, where the chapel had since become a moss-covered pile of stone and shingle. The stones were effaced or snapped or ground to gravel. He pressed ahead and begged of Mulligan, "Is this the place?" But the skeleton was dead on his back-not a chatter of teeth, not a rollick of its body, not the clank of its shoulder in the socket. When he passed between a pair of iron posts, countless plumes of fog and frost rippled from the earth. They moiled like spume on the choppy sea and soon gathered their shapes: men, women, children. They scooped rocks from the yard and hurled them at Cearul. Each rock struck. He could not press any farther, so he turned upon his heel and ran, nearly dropping Mulligan in his escape.

Cearul, son of Derry, had scampered across many acres before Mulligan spoke again. "So that was not the plot let for me by my people. How interesting. I was almost sure . . . . Well! Don't be glum, Cearul, my lad! I know of every cemetery in Ireland, for we creatures of the bog share the earth and all her secrets. Now head east, for there's a graveyard there that may meet my purposes."

For another three days, the Dubliner had pressed Niamh with his sloppy amends. Horrid tea, biscuits so charred she mistook them for coal, tiger-stripes of dirt on the floor which signaled his pure incompetence with a broom and bin. What a luxury, those days! No matter that Uncle Niall returned with his savaged hands and his slouched shoulders, only to crinkle his nose and beg of her, what was she burning in this damn house all day? But the pleasure of it-to sit in her uncle's chair by the hearth and read, be it the bible or such old things as The Taín or the fat novels that the Dubliner brought her on those days. (She should always thank her father for insisting that a child know her letters-never mind the belt, never mind that he'd left Niamh and her ailing mother for the promises of the sea and the hold's generous casks. But soon as her mind conjured that man and her mother, she ordered herself to snuff out that flicker of longing. It could do her no good, holding her heart near the wick of that still-hot loss.)

She thought it odd, that this Dubliner who was in the region to gather its tales, did not care to ply her with a book that he had written.

Still, at night, she dreamt of the frock-coated skeleton in the gorse. Now, that nightmare was occupied by another penitent in the church's sanctuary: a man whose parted hair swept like raptor wings. They could be separate entities. It could be one man studying his grave.

Regardless, Niamh knew: she should not be free of either of them, not for some time.

On the fourth day of her vengeful silence, Niamh eyed him over the pages of a novel as he bustled in a red-cheeked panic about the cottage. He had wrapped himself comically in her apron, with the band for the neck holstered awkwardly about a shoulder. Niamh thought of correcting him. After he had blundered through a sufficient range of chores, she placed a marker in the book. "I still haven't forgiven you," she said, "and cannot forgive you."

He dusted his hands on the apron's skirt. So, he knew that much of an apron's function. "I was hoping you'd come to." He stared at her through glasses frosted with flour, sugar. "Truly, I was."

"It's cruel to lie," Niamh said. She rubbed her temples, then held her forehead in both hands. Yes, he had brought the skeleton upon her, and it refused to vacate her dreams. "This Gorham of yours, yes? What's he tell you? What does he think I'm giving you?"

He rose a finger and moved to hurry out of the apron. He only snared himself further in its strings, and so Niamh went to him. With nimble fingers she untied the knots and slipped the apron from him. Their hands grazed in the flutter of strings and cloth. The contact sparked something in her nerves, which then rolled with the hot swiftness of ball lightning to her mind. She flinched and suffered the vision projected on the black of her mind. She knew at once why the Dubliner had not shared his poetry, knew at once his name and also knew she would never let it pass her lips, knew at once the raptor-swoop of his bangs as it faded to lead and then to white. She heard him seducing the Major's wife, then pleading with her in a schoolboy whimper when she refused him. She saw him watching the Major's wife from the wings of a theatre as she strode a stage in the guise of Cathleen ní Houlihan, a violent lust thundering in his breast, the great mallet of his yearning for her beating its tattoo against the drumhead of nationalist fervor. She glimpsed him in a legislative chamber, but could scarce believe such rubbish as Irish senators or a "Free State." And then she heard his twilight years, his pen scrawling a maudlin lament: Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?

Those were the years awaiting him. Those years crackled through her like creepers of lightning splitting a roiling mass of clouds. Niamh clutched her chest. This was why she had not been gifted a book of the man's verse. This Gorham had told him enough of her premonitions, that he realized his poems, in her hands, should betray him.

These epiphanies shivered through Niamh in mere seconds. It was sufficient time for the Dubliner to raid his coat pockets and produce a roll of velvet. On the table, he unscrolled the bolt of cloth and staged three items: a paintbrush, its bristles stained as if with the floss on stagnant water; a book of verse, in which there was a fresh-pressed flower; and a bit of chalk, tooth-jagged.

When Niamh asked what this display was about, the man panned his hand over the objects. "You suffer from premonitions," he said. "But according to Gorham, the past is also on display to you."

Niamh shook her head. "Please. I'd rather not."

"None of these presages any harm, I assure you."

Niamh balled her fists. First, she took up the opened book of poems. "This one's a trick," she said. "The flower was placed here only recently." She thumbed through the pages, chuckled when she saw a bookseller's mark on the inside cover. "At least Mr. Wilde is a better poet than he was a novelist."

She set down the book, then selected the paintbrush. Of a sudden, her throat was tight, and a cough overtook her. The Dubliner came up behind her and grabbed her by the shoulders, but she shook him off. She'd a glimpse of a man who bore a resemblance to her poet, sitting alongside a canal in Dublin. "No, by God-I'll survive, I shall. This one . . . you should be kinder to your brother. Jack? Yes. He's a fine painter. His canal paintings. The water, it's . . . it has kelp and algae blooms. In the painting, that is. In fact, there's shattered glass and bullet casings. Terrible. But he sees the poetry to it." She placed the paintbrush on the velvet. "And I like his art better than yours."

The Dubliner simpered. "My brother will be pleased to hear he has some appreciation amongst the rustics."

Niamh shrugged and took up the final bit-that toothsome bit of crumbling limestone. Flashes of the cemetery, of what appeared to be the backs of hers and Uncle Niall's head, of the drunken priest fumbling with the sacrament but-mercy be-only dropping choice bits of the Latin liturgy. Then she felt something like a man's gloved hand wriggling within her intestines-but no, it was the Dublin poet's fingers stroking something through the lining of his coat. The hunk of eroded stone. He had scooped it from the graveyard, then traipsed wantonly into the sanctuary with an off-tune whistle on his lip and sacrilege in his heart. And then the gravity of the grave yanked her soul by the yoke and dragged her to the disrupted loam where . . . where, she would not say, but in the earth so many fleshless jaws tacked together and clamored for her, their barbed phalanges needled into her palms, her wrist, and pleaded with her to sink into the earth, where she could absorb the chatter telegraphed from their clattering teeth.

Niamh dropped the stone, as if it had nettled her skin. "Oh, by faith. No."

"What?"

She rubbed her palms together. The meat of her hands tingled, then stung, as if caught in a scalding torrent. "Where did you get that?"

"If Gorham is right," the Dubliner said, "you already know."

Niamh took three steps back and hunched her shoulders, like a cornered barn cat storing its strength. "Please tell me-you only followed us the once."

"Followed you where, Miss O'Suilleabhean?"

Niamh seized the kettle and stamped into the kitchen. There, she slopped the kettle into a basin of water, then returned to the front room and slammed it on the hob. The beads on its shell at once fizzed, crackled, exploded into bursts of steam. She thought of laying her hands flat on the iron, wondered if her skin and the curse of this touch might melt and char on the blackened metal. She watched the kettle, the trickle of steam from its spout.

She said, "You were at the church with us. We didn't know you'd come in after us."

"I left early."

"Before the father. Oh, of course," she said, "of course, you're a Protestant, aren't you."

"I'll confess to that."

"If you keep mucking with this fairy business of yours," Niamh spat, "it won't be the only sin registered against you." The kettle wailed. She prepared the tea, scooped enough leaves into the strainer to brew a pot so bitter, it would punish both their throats. "But you won't stop. Oh, you've down quires and quires about Oísin and the Countess Cathleen. You traipse in your smart coat, and someone at a lecture hall takes it from you and hangs it nice on a gold peg, and then you're at a lectern and intoning in such a way, why, they hush like Jesus himself has sat down in their midst. And I hear you loose your lyrics like they were the wind:

The host is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of Clooth-na-Bare;
And Niamh calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.

That's the start of one of yours, aye?" She banged the kettle on the hob until the clanging echoed in her ears. "Sure, my Dublin dear, it's one of yours. But I beg of you. Let me keep what's mine, even if it be the deepest hollow of hell. Let him in the gorse be."

"You must have read my book." He wetted his lips. "It's the only way-"

She pounded the kettle again. He flinched. Niamh dropped the battered thing on the hob.

With crooked shoulders, he gestured at the teapot. She shrugged. He poured them each a cup. "I only followed you the once."

She forced herself to hazard the tea. It was sludge-thick, its flavor peaty as a mouthful of the bog. "You know they talk about you. Our folk here. Call you simple. A foolish boy blessed with money but damned with want of wits. But you," she shook her head, "you! Intent on setting your pen to your books, and with that little spade turning up every shard of flint ever touched by the good folk."

"Your people are dying and taking the old tales to their tombs." He sloshed the tea in his mug. "These legends, Miss O'Suilleabhean, these are our heritage. The common currency of our people, whether they live in Galway or Dublin, or far off in New York and Paris."

"Some things ought to be allowed their rest. But your soul won't be at rest till you've exhumed them all." Niamh drained her tea. "And till you've doomed them all to wander the earth, forever, with whatever revenant you leave at your funeral mound, under Ben Bulben."

FROM "THE BLACK CISTERN," COLLECTED IN FOLK TALES OF THE WEST COUNTRY:

As recounted to the editor of this volume, by a native of the region.

It won't do to bore you with further rehearsals. At the second cemetery, the third, the fourth, and then a half dozen more, Cearul, son of Derry, was chased off. Sometimes with rocks, sometimes with arrows, sometimes with rakes, and once with rusted pistols thrown like hatchets, for they were too ruined to fire. And still Mulligan's grave was undiscovered.

"There can't be any good to lugging you any further," was what Cearul, son of Derry, then moaned. "The dawn will be here in but a few hours. And you haven't seen a graveyard yet that's been to your liking."

"The way I see it," Mulligan said, his fleshless jaw snug against Cearul's shoulder, "you have to yourself two options. Find my final respite, or let me abide with you, however long you live. And I for one could enjoy the countryside in such splendor for many years more, mounted here on your back, if you'd be right kind enough to get fitted for a saddle."

Dead Mr. Mulligan's voice was so cold it'd make a lesser man's marrow gelatinous. Even still, Cearul shuddered.

That night, the next night, and several nights thereafter, Niamh O'Suilleabhean vowed to herself that the poet from Dublin should never again cross the threshold of the cottage she shared with Uncle Niall. All those days she grasped her resolve by the hilt, refusing even to unbolt the door when her skin prickled from the premonition of the Dubliner's footstep upon the flagstone path. His verses were as the very vespers of Death itself; his presence was like him in the gorse made flesh; his coat might have been stitched together from the remnants of Death's garb. When Niamh heard him pummel at the door, she retreated to her cot and nested under the scratchy throw. Only when the down on her arms no longer bristled did she toss off the blankets and resume her day.

It had been weeks, she realized, since she had enjoyed any waking hours to herself. Since she had been properly alone. The sort of raucous solitude that allowed her to shutter the windows and free her hair from its pins and wear the same dress for several days in a row. (It was a mercy she could grant her hands at the laundry basin, a mercy she could grant to her garments: she thought fewer courses through the caustic, soapy water and through the gnarling wringer would extend the lives of her hands and her clothes.) She could sing aloud and profane the Lord's name and raise a fire that the hearth could scarcely hold. And she could stand with her back to the crackle and roar, watch the split-in-twain trembles of her shadow bicker with one another. She could give voice to those twin shadows, birthed by her obstruction of the fireplace's hot light, and enact what, to her memory, were the hazy tremulations of another life, the dread reflection undulating beneath the surface of the premonitions and nightmares. Niamh bundled her apron, cradled it, rocked it; she saw one shadow passing to the other a swaddling thing. With an apron strap in her hand, Niamh flicked her wrist and heard the crack of a belt; she saw one shadow brandishing the switch, while the other thrust up an arm to stay the blow.

Exhausted, slicked with sweat, Niamh and the twinned shadows would slump cross-legged before the fire. A shadowbox family, with no audience, Niamh thought. She seldom allowed herself a thought of her family beyond Uncle Niall. She possessed only glimpses of her parents: the spirits heavy on her father's breath while he unbuckled his belt, her mother always feverish and clammy-palmed. They were impressions. Wraith-like, the memories of them would tap Niamh's shoulder with a bone-cold finger as if to remind her of something. But she saw nothing.

The fire cast these split projections from her: mother, father: emanations of her own being. She extended both hands toward theirs, as if to join hands and converge their energies. But the shadows lifted their arms away from her.

Niamh pushed herself to her feet. The shades dissolved into one another.

That night she spoke none of this to Uncle Niall. He remarked that she'd made the cottage reek like a smokehouse, and she'd better have kept some wood for the evening fire. She watched him eat in silence, and she asked after him-his rawed knuckles, his tensed shoulders, the callouses on his feet. He cawed in laughter and asked whatever had drawn such concern from the well. "If you're afraid that your uncle's in his dotage, well."

"And why should I think that?" She took his hand.

Uncle Niall coughed into his shoulder. When he frowned, his lips puckered and the creases by his eyes showed, dour and chocked with grime. "That Dublin lad. The fairy-story boy." He clicked his fingers, a sign that Niamh knew: he was wanting his tea and some biscuits, and with them, a seat by the fire.

She dropped his hand and went to prepare tea, a plate of biscuits, with practiced slowness. "Him. Faith." To her uncle, she said, "Wanted you to betray the good folk or to show him a stone circle or some rot. By God's grace, the man will learn yet: you're all fleecing him."

"Sure, I offered him a tale. One your mother and me was told, by our own Ma and Pa." Niamh heard four velvet-soft taps. Without looking, she knew that he had crossed himself. "Were told, never give these words to any but our own kin! But he didn't want another story about the good folk or about this or that son of Derry. No, by God, these past few days, a different fire was stoked in the lad."

"Uncle Niall," Niamh said. She had arrayed the biscuits in a crescent around the teapot and wasn't dissatisfied with the arrangement's look. She carried the tray to him. "Hadn't you always said, 'A fire in the eyes means a devil in the mind'? Ought to send him back to Dublin with the post."

"Niamh, now."

"Uncle." She handed him the tray. Together they walked to the front room, and Uncle Niall took his seat beside the hearth, the tray across his lap. She folded her hands as he poured himself tea. "Uncle, I have no interest in every stranger in the County. As you know."

"And if he was asking about Niamh O'Suilleabhean, whose uncle cuts turf, or digs potatoes, or fills sacks at the mill?"

"Especially then."

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