Away Read online

  The girl in Ireland had let go of the young man’s shirt, placed her hands beneath his arms, and gently removed him from the two whiskey barrels that had served as his raft. Clearing a path through cabbages and teapots, she had dragged her treasure up onto the beach to let it dry in the sun. She had put her two warm hands on either side of his cool face and ran her thumbs along the bones above his eyes, the delicate skin of his eyelids. She traced his collarbones with her fingers and tentatively touched the soft hair on his belly. Disturbed by the chill of the sea that had enveloped his body, she lay down beside him on the beach, loosened her long red hair across his shirt, and placed her head on his chest. He stirred as she did this and spoke the word “Moira” once again. When she dropped her arm lightly across his narrow hips a cold hand came up to meet hers. The sun rose higher in the sky, drying her skirt, his trousers, causing the silver vessels to wax radiant. Mary relaxed, watching the steam rise from her skirts, measuring the size of the hand she held against her own until the warmth of the stones around her and the sun above made her drowsy.

  That is how her mother, the priest, and a handful of other islanders had found her early in the afternoon, surrounded by cabbages and teapots, asleep in the arms of a dead young sailor.

  Esther’s mind is skilled at building inner landscapes, those she has never seen, those that lie beyond the views her windows frame. There was, for instance, a grand house built by her father on a hill three miles to the north. It was struck, because of its high elevation, by lightning and it had burned to the ground. There was a resort hotel built by her father on a peninsula ten miles to the east. It was buried, because of careless farming practices and because of its low elevation, by sand. And fifty miles to the northeast the original O’Malley home-stead – a territory of rock and scant pasture – is now composed of rotting log buildings and rock torn open by prospectors. The traces of wounds left behind by industry are permanent. Fragile architecture abandoned by settlers is not.

  All of this propelling Esther towards her place; her large bedroom with its view of the lake, her barns and fields and orchards. Her father, defeated by houses and hotels, had collapsed himself into his wife’s family at Loughbreeze Beach, had kept accounts and had run for public office. He had opened a shoestore in the village of Colborne, two miles up from the lake. He had spent leisurely hours inventing names for the cumbersome pieces of furniture in the house. He had given his daughter access to water.

  It was what her grandmother, daughter of an Irish girl named Mary, had wanted for the twelve-year-old Esther, and she had wanted it despite her certain knowledge of the impending curse of the mines. “For God’s sake,” she had yelled, “stay where you are, be where you are.” She had thumped the floor with her cane, “Try to understand, but try not to interpret.”

  “Any interpretation is a misinterpretation,” Eileen had told Esther. “Remember that.”

  Delight and fear had broken over Rathlin Island like a pair of consecutive tidal waves.

  It had been a hard winter and a long one, so the appearance of the cabbages had been met with general rejoicing – Mary’s widowed mother being one of the chief rejoicers. From the four principal points of the island, the sparse population set out for Mary’s beach where it collected cartloads of the vegetable, each family throwing in a few teapots for good measure. Never before had there been so bountiful a harvest. No potato patch, no garden plot, had yielded such abundance, and the smell of boiled cabbage would pervade the island for weeks to come.

  As for the arrival of the whiskey, it was considered a miracle beyond all telling. Tempered over the centuries by scarcity and the slavish daily labour necessary for survival, the island’s population was neither wasteful nor foolhardy. A life of debauchery was, in fact, simply beyond the powers of its collective imagination. The liquor was put in the custody of the priest, stored behind the church, and distributed whenever wakes or weddings demanded it, thereby alleviating, for many years, the financial anxiety that normally accompanied such occasions.

  But as the priest, Mary’s mother, and all the other islanders knew, no unplanned harvest was reaped without cost. Sudden wealth such as this was a gift from “the Formoire, the ones from the sea, the others.” All the green and brown and silver objects on the beach could only have been deposited by them in payment for something stolen. There was fear in this. From the moment the first few islanders stood that day on the hilltop, surveying with astonishment the totally transformed beach – the prone couple, the new dark stones, the vegetable matter, the wooden casks, the fine silverware – they knew what it was that had been taken.

  Mary, they believed, was lying in the arms of her faery-daemon lover; or, what was more likely, what was left of Mary was lying in the arms of what was left of her faery-daemon lover, he having returned – with her – to the sea from which he had undeniably emerged.

  Those who looked down at the beach that morning crossed themselves and turned to Mary’s mother with compassion in their eyes. They knew, and she knew, that Mary was away.

  After the great excitement connected to the collecting and squirreling away of cabbage, cask, and silver had died down, the islanders turned their attention to the body of the young man. Some ventured the opinion that it should be left where it was in the hope that the tide would reclaim it. Others suggested it be burned, right there, on the beach. No one wanted to touch it for fear that they themselves would be “touched” and then “taken” as Mary had been. As islanders, they prided themselves on the fact that few of their people had been snatched. One old woman once, and a couple of babies removed in their cradles. Mostly, it was believed, the faeries confined their abductions to the mainland. Still, the islanders knew of the ones who lived under the waters and this abandoned body clearly belonged to one of them. After much deliberation and examination from a safe distance, Father Quinn made the final decision. The young man’s body was human, he announced, borrowed most likely by “them” for the purpose of seducing Mary, and then abandoned when the job was done. In fairness, it ought to be given a decent burial, though not, of course, in consecrated ground. Prudence demanded, however, that only she who had been touched touch the body, and so Mary herself should prepare it for its final rest.

  Mary had awakened to the sound of her mother’s voice calling her name and a view of the fluttering silken hairs on the young man’s chest. “I’m Moira,” she whispered, her mouth near his unbeating heart.

  “Mary!” her mother shouted, and the daughter heard the sound of her old name but did not respond to it.

  “Mary,” her mother called, venturing closer, “he’s gone back and it’s you who must tell me if he’s taken you with him.”

  “My name is Moira,” said Mary, sitting up and staring out to sea, one hand grasping the young man’s curls possessively.

  “And how,” asked her mother, her voice ringing through the air, “how would you be getting a name such as that?”

  “He gave it to me,” she said, simply.

  The islanders stood in a group, wide-eyed and silent. Mary’s mother began to weep. There was no doubt in any mind now that this girl on the beach, sitting on the strange black stones, was merely a flimsy replica left by “them” or by him in Mary’s place.

  Father Quinn began to shout instructions. “Moira!” he yelled (for there was no doubt in his mind either). “Moira, this body beside you must be prepared for burial and you shall have Mary’s mother’s cabin in which to do this. It’s only you who can wash the body and lay it out for it’s only you that has been touched. I’ll send some of the men to carry it and dig the ground to bury it. Mary’s mother can stay with a neighbour. It’s only you who can touch it, Moira, do you understand?”

  And when she did not answer he shouted again more clearly, “Do you understand?”, for although he had heard her speak her name he was not quite certain that she used words in the manner of the island people.

  Mary nodded, her hair ablaze in the early afternoon sun. She looked at her
own live arms, her long legs, and then at the still limbs of the young man. Her heart was full to bursting. Everything about him was hers now, all hers forever.

  “You are only three generations away from all this,” Esther remembers her grandmother saying. “You are only two generations away from me. Don’t think it couldn’t happen to you, too. Pay attention.” And Esther allowed the pale, slim body of a drowned sailor to reveal itself, limb by limb, muscle by muscle in her inner theatre. She was being shocked and moved and shamed by skin and ribs and collarbones, just as, later in the story, she would be tossed and shaken by the gestures of a young dancer.

  Mary had returned a stranger to the rooms in which she had lived her short life. She had been touched, had become significant, and because of this all around her had become insignificant, distant beside the still reality of the young man’s body, now lying on the litter that the men had made and later carried to her table.

  The day had grown darker as a memory or aftershock of the night storm drifted across the atmosphere. Outside the small window a single hawthorn twitched and then shivered in a sudden breeze. Mary added more turf to the fire and gathered water from the rainbarrel to warm for the washing. She removed the young man’s clothes, now stiff with dried sea water, recognizing the parts of his body she knew from the beach, and learning, instantly, the parts that she didn’t know. The skin at the back of his knee brought tears to her eyes because of its perfection; his groin was a dark flower. As she held up first one hand then the other to wash them, she saw the light of the candle shine through the translucent skin that connected his fingers as if they were partly webbed.

  She dressed him in a clean pair of her dead father’s trousers and one of his shirts, and then undressed him again because he looked so fragile and helpless in clothing several sizes too large for him. Then she boiled and ironed his own sea-wrecked clothing. While she worked her eyes travelled back and forth from his calm face to the window where she could see the priest scuttle over the stones like a large insect, cleansing the beach with his holy water. Before she dressed the young man again she tore a ribbon of fabric off each of his ruined garments and tied the strips into a knot that she would keep.

  She dampened his hair and combed out his curls with her fingers. She removed one black curl with a knife and tucked it in her underbodice, and then removed a skein of her own hair and placed it in the breast pocket of his shirt. Repeating the process she cut another of his locks and one of her own and solemnly braided them together. Then, drawing a stool up to the table where the young man lay, she sat down to watch out the length of the night.

  Rathlin Island being in the far north of the country, and this being early summer, light drained imperceptibly from the sky until, some time before midnight, the light of the setting sun was replaced by that of the rising moon. Inside the cabin Mary spoke softly to the one she knew was a friend to her, comforting him as she might have comforted a child. She thought only occasionally of Father Quinn and his holy water, believing him to be powerless now in the radiance of this new holiness. She had never been awake in the cabin at this hour and was pleased to discover the night-life; spiders dropping, silent on silken threads, a blur of moths’ wings near the candle, and abrupt mice on delicate feet. She felt contented, knowing her life’s destiny to be fulfilled, her heart to be given or taken away. In the manner of her old eloquence, which she vowed she would never make use of again except to address him, she began to make words for him and to sing these words to him in a clear, quiet voice:

  Dark houses will never swallow you,

  Nor graves, nor any other thing that’s closed.

  It is you who will always have bright skies above you,

  The ceiling of water through which you moved.

  My heart is made of the soft wings of moths,

  Or the silver threads that spiders make in the night.

  You who swam easily into my hands,

  Carrying with you the Otherworld’s light.

  That night, while Mary sang to the young man, hearth fires burned bright all over the island and fireside gatherings blossomed in each small dwelling. In the tiny villages of Cleggan and Kinramer, Church Bay, Ballygill and Ballycarry, tales of the Sidhe were told and the properties of Fetch, Pookah, Banshee, and Love-Talker were discussed. One old man remembered his mother telling him of a fisherman she knew from the mainland who was abducted by a mermaid. Another said that his own dog had been stolen and had come back with a troublesome predilection for hens’ eggs. The children of the old god Lir were brought to mind, how they had spent hundreds of years as swans, confined to the turbulent waters of the Moyle, which churned through the strait separating the island from the mainland. Even Robert the Bruce was reported to have been fetched by the famous spider of the seven webs he had watched while hiding out in one of the island’s caves. It was the consensus of opinion that it was always the brightest and the best that “they” were after. Mary, they agreed, had been a child given to spending far too many hours on the seaside … almost as if she were hoping to be fetched, standing as she did on the sand, her skirts hitched up to reveal long white legs, her red hair blowing towards the sky.

  The next morning the men who came to collect the corpse, in order to put it into the grave they had dug five fields back from the sea, found Mary still singing. They handed her the canvas sack and watched as she fitted the young man’s body into it, lifting first his legs, then his hips, then his shoulders. She touched his lips with her fingers before pulling the canvas over his face. Then, without looking at the men, she pushed his curls under the fabric and sewed a seam over the curve of his skull.

  Esther walks on this last evening – a June evening pregnant with light – through the twisted orchard. Petals from scant blossoms are falling from unpruned boughs as she creeps by, and her eyes are filled with the low sunlight that she remembers from after-dinner baseball games. Using a stick that has been greyed and smoothed by a journey on the Great Lake, she pokes angrily at rusted remains – a galvanized pail, a trough with its bottom missing – relics from the time when the painted barns stood tall and milk from gentle-eyed cows was still brought to the table. Relics from the time when she was twelve and her grandmother Eileen had decided to spin out a story.

  Though she is eighty-two, and age has weakened her heart, arthritis crippled her hands, Esther takes pride in the fact that her eyesight is “acute.” She likes the sound – and the meaning – of the word “acute.” It suggests a state of alertness; an animal assessing the danger or pleasure of being where it is.

  She pauses now and then to look out over the lake and up into the sky above it where gulls swerve, catching the low sun on their white bellies and exploding into shine. She remembers her father calling them “star gulls” on evenings like this one. She remembers old Eileen sitting with the family on the open front porch, saying, “Once I used to look for a white sail,” and then saying nothing at all.

  She comes to the end of the orchard and slowly pivots, turning her back to the posted signs that announce DANGER EXPLOSIVES to the aluminum pier, the conveyor belt, and she begins the creeping walk back. The sun is no longer in her eyes and the old house hovers – a white ship moored in a sea of long grass, the cedar bush crouching on one side of it, the lake an apron unfurled on the other. There are hay rakes and iron ploughs scattered and rusting all around her. Underneath grass, earth, rocks, and charred timbers on the hill three miles away there are thick chunks of solid glass and a few fragile pieces of doll’s china that no one knows about. Under the sand of the peninsula that reaches out into the lake there exist rooms whose wallpaper depicts bridges, willows, and streams – the scenery of a foreign land. Under the water at the end of a germinating jetty there are pilings clothed in seaweed that remember the search for a white sail and a pale hand.

  She has spent the past month preparing for the eventuality of this last evening and tomorrow’s last morning. Entering the old house now she stares at the furniture, the drawers and c
revices she has filled with messages – messages to no one in particular. Small bits of paper are taped to the legs of tables and to the seats of chairs; they are pinned to sofas and hooked rugs. They clutter up boxes of costume jewellery and hang from the ends of old tools in the woodshed. Even the odd pane of new clear glass has a story attached to it. Depending on her mood, she had written either something simple – “John broke this one … he was not punished” – or something more precise and factual, listing dates, events, and places. Occasionally her own emotional history was recorded. On an old copper boiler she had written the words “I wept for joy. The lake was calm and light engorged the kitchen”; words that will mean nothing to the others who find them. Attached to the metal case of a gold pocket-watch that rests alone on the dining-room table is a luggage tag, and on this is written, “There was often one of us who was away.”

  If the case were to be opened, no timepiece would be revealed, only thin glass under which rests a lock of black hair, braided together with a red-golden tress and fashioned into a circle. Near this lies a bone hairpin around which is twined a single long thread of the same red-golden hair, a shard of turquoise china, and one black feather, old, torn, and seemingly neglected.

  The smooth wooden stairs creak under Esther’s feet as she advances down the hall to the large room with the view of the lake. Outside, the poplars at the front of the house are catching the fire of the final sunset. Because the wind has picked up and the lake has grown restless, it is difficult to separate the clamour of approaching machinery from the crash of waves on beachstones. Esther thinks of the million-year-old fossils that decorate these stones and how the limestone record of their extermination has brought about the demise of her own land-scape, the enormous hole in the earth, the blanket of concrete dwellings that is obliterating the villages she knew as a child. As she climbs into the sleigh-bed that has always been in this room, she knows that what she wants is to give shape to one hundred and forty years. She wants to reconstruct the pastures and meadows that have fallen into absence – the disassembled architecture, the great dark belly of an immigrant ship, a pioneer standing inland stunned by the forest, a farmer moving through the beams of light that fill his barn.