Come away, O human child!
To the woods and waters wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
—W. B. YEATS
Siobhan breathed in the cool lough mist, feeling the moistness fill her lungs and seep into her soul. It was her tonic. Sitting on the low stone wall that hugged the lee side of the lough, she was surrounded by the mist. In grammar school, when she had studied Saint Francis and learned how he had referred to other creatures as Brother Otter or Sister Dove, she started to think of the mist as Sister Mist.
The lough shore was Siobhan’s favorite of all her special places. It was here that the poems came to her. She felt them emerge from the mist, or rise from the surface of the water, or descend from the surrounding mountains. They nestled in her mind because she welcomed them gently, nurturing and encouraging, so that when she put pen to paper she only had to write down what was already inside her.
But today she felt an unfamiliar longing, not the secure serenity she always associated with this place. It made her uneasy. Siobhan had always been content here, living with Uncle Keenan by the shores of her lough. Why today did she feel as if a strange new dimension had thrust its way into her life? A sense no longer of just living but of waiting. Waiting for something—or someone. Siobhan was wary of strangers.
For more than three hundred years imperceptible evolution, like water on a stone, had transformed the Leeside from an old coaching inn into a quiet neighborhood pub. In its early days it sheltered travelers between Clifden and Galway, and secretly harbored the occasional smuggler. But the nineteenth-century famine and poverty in the west, followed by the advent of motorized transport, had isolated it from all but the locals, who finally claimed it as their own. So for the people who had known it all their lives, the pub was the same now as it had always been. Siobhan loved that about the Leeside; it was her rock, her island. Uncle Kee had enisled them both upon it.
Siobhan was, at this moment, standing behind the bar, washing the interminable glasses. She looked around, as she often did, silently chanting her self-made mantra: “I love living here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I love living here. I can’t image living anywhere else. I love living here…” Each rendition was another granite pebble in her wall of isolation, another layer of protection.
Siobhan knew that oddness was the cornerstone of her identity. She felt strangers smell her apprehension. People who knew her tolerated her introversion, but to many it seemed out of place in someone who worked in a pub. Siobhan tolerated contact with people she knew for the simple reason that they were unavoidable. Her interactions with friends of her uncle or regulars at the pub were mere ripples on the surface of her sea-chasm of isolation. She smiled vaguely at jokes, ignored banter, and often appeared to be of subnormal intelligence with her air of detached, blank pleasantness. She caught the fleeting looks of puzzlement or pity, and was unconcerned by them. Siobhan knew she was peculiar. How could it have been otherwise? She had no mother. For her, this explained everything. How could she be like the other children? She had no mother. For that matter, she had no father either, only Uncle Kee. She’d lived with him since a week before her second birthday, twenty-five years ago.
Siobhan couldn’t remember that day. Uncle Kee never talked about it. On her seventh birthday—her “golden birthday,” seven on the seventh of April—she’d nerved herself to ask him the question. What she wanted as a gift this year was information.
“Uncle Kee, why did Mamsy die?”
Holding hands, they were standing next to her mother’s grave, which was next to her grandparents’, in Saint Brendan’s churchyard. They visited the graves each year on Siobhan’s birthday, early in the morning. Looking down at her, he gave the bare bones of an explanation as to how her mother died, and why she had come to live with him. “Mamsy died in an IRA bombing…and also your da. So I came to fetch you to come live here with me.”
He squeezed her hand and she regarded him with wide, grave eyes. “Why isn’t my da buried here as well?”
Uncle Kee blinked and shifted his gaze to the headstone: HERE LIES MAUREEN NORA DOYLE. BELOVED DAUGHTER, SISTER, AND MOTHER. FLYING WITH THE ANGELS. After a moment or two he cleared his throat and shrugged slightly. “I never knew him, love.” He squeezed her hand again and smiled down at her. “So, there you are, then. Any questions?” Only a thousand. “Right. Off to school with you.”
They turned and began walking toward the school. So that was that. He had explained matters—but not actually answered her question. As she let go of his hand to go inside, he suddenly squatted down.
“One more thing, love. You’re seven now and I should be telling you this. I named you Siobhan. Your mamsy and her…your da called you Susan. But it didn’t suit you at all. Not in my book. So I named you after Auntie Siobhan.”
“Susan is an English name,” she said.
“Aye.”
Siobhan nodded and left him. She understood that Uncle Kee wouldn’t want her to have an English name. Susan. She puzzled over the word. It sounded vaguely familiar but that was all. It held no value or singular meaning. It didn’t sound like a real name, not the name of anyone she would know.
But she had gotten some answers because now she was seven and had been brave enough to ask. The reason she had no mother was because her mum had been killed. Killed. Not just died of cancer or in childbirth or something ordinary like that. She’d been killed—and not by getting hit by a bus crossing the road or in a car smash. By a bomb—an IRA bomb. Siobhan knew what the IRA was, of course. She always watched the evening news in the pub and read the newspapers. Uncle Kee never censored her reading material. The more she knew about the world outside, he said, the more she would appreciate living at the Leeside. In fact, he often pointed out news stories about young women being killed or hurt. Once he even told her about a former girlfriend of his who’d been murdered in Dublin. “Picked the wrong bastard to fall in love with, she did. Some people wear charm like a second skin and that kind are always trouble, darlin’. Just another reason to give most folks a wide berth.”
Soon after her birthday Siobhan started writing MMWKBAB in tiny letters in her school notebooks, which stood for My Mother Was Killed By A Bomb. Tiny, tiny letters they were, in the margins of all her notebooks. Finally, inevitably, she wrote it on her arm in indelible ink, like a brand. In her neatest printing, as if she were proud of it. But she kept it carefully hidden under the long starched sleeve of her white uniform blouse. After two weeks it was still there; she was careful to wash around it. Then one of the nuns noticed it.
“What’s that writing on your arm? Are you cheating, Siobhan?”
No, no, Sister. Just doodling, I am.
Sister Mary Sebastian helped her wash it off in the girl’s bathroom with strong yellow soap and righteous scrubbing, until her skin was butcher raw.
Thank you, Sister.
Siobhan finished drying the last of the glasses; they hung like jewels in their appointed places. She always did her work thoroughly and well, not for her own satisfaction but to ease Uncle Kee’s burden and because of Time. Siobhan and Time were kindred spirits. It wound itself slowly around her, never varying its pace in her universe. Time stretched itself, unfolding and expanding, luxuriating in its freedom from its own boundaries. For Siobhan, Time was a friend and, in its turn, Time bestowed itself like a gift on her and never outpaced her, as she saw it do to so many others.
The glasses finished, Siobhan went through the swinging door into the kitchen to prepare the meat pies and sausage rolls for tonight’s customers. Because she could daydream, Siobhan preferred cleaning to cooking; the latter demanded her full attention. Once, when she was seventeen, she mortified herself and Uncle Kee by forgetting to add salt and suet to the meat pies—they were inedible. She had never forgotten his pained, humiliated expression, although he had murmured to her that it was all right. She had solemnly vowed never to let it happen again.
The back door banged and she heard Uncle Kee’s voice coming from the mudroom.
“Siobhan! What are you doing?”
“I’m cutting the meat for the pies. Why?”
His ruddy face ducked into the doorway, wearing a pleased expression. “Because I’ve got news, darlin’. We’re going to have a guest tomorrow. An overnight guest here at the pub. So we’ll have to clean out that extra room.”
“A guest?” Siobhan looked at him blankly, her bloodstained hands paused in her work. She felt the familiar tightening in her stomach. A stranger? Staying here at the Leeside?
“Is it someone we know?” Siobhan asked without hope.
Uncle Kee shook his big head. “No, but don’t be afraid, now. It’ll not be like that other time. It’s someone we’ll both enjoy meeting. An American professor of Irish studies. He wants to come here to meet me. Sean is sending him down.”
“But we don’t let rooms,” she said tonelessly.
“I know,” he said quickly. “But it’s only for two nights, and Sean says he’s great altogether. He’s been staying in Clifden and eating at Sean’s restaurant every night for a week. Sean told him about our study of Irish literature and he wants to come. It’ll be grand, you’ll see.”
Siobhan looked at her uncle’s flushed face, trying to push down the panic. He didn’t get excited very often. Having the man to stay would be all right. She wouldn’t mind, she wouldn’t. It would be all right—no need to have doubts. This professor and Uncle Kee would spend all their time together talking about his greatest hobby, the study of Irish literature. This was an interest she herself shared, especially poetry. She took a deep breath.
“It does sound grand, Uncle Kee. You’ll have a brilliant time with the man. Are you knowing anything else about him?” She resumed her slicing carefully, her hands shaking a little. Not everyone was like that other man.
“I’ll tell you later at tea. I’ll just be clearing the junk out of that room from now until then. Then we can give it a good going-over together, so.” He started pulling off his muddy boots.
“Right.”
Uncle Kee started up the back stairs and Siobhan heard his head smack against a low beam.
“Ah, goddammit!” she heard him mutter.
Siobhan smiled in spite of herself at his outburst. She thought he must be very excited to forget to watch his head going up the stairs. Keenan Doyle had to be careful coming through the doorways of the Leeside, too, for he wasn’t a thread under six foot six and the Leeside was built in the days when he would have been considered a giant. He always seemed to fill any room he was in, and told her many times how his mother lamented that she’d spawned a son who didn’t fit the scale of their home. We should have named you after the giant Finn MacCool, she’d say. Uncle Kee himself often commented drily that he’d developed quite a thick skull from cracking his head on the low oak beams.
But Siobhan loved his bigness, his protective bulk. She vaguely remembered when she was very small, being awed by his size and amazed by the gentleness of his touch. He acted as if he were afraid of breaking her, wondering at her little-girl fragility. She, in turn, had been circumspect in her physical approach to him, sensing his strength and power. He would never hurt her intentionally, this she knew, but his massive size was daunting and she was shy of it, though not of him. Her mother had been tiny, as Siobhan was, and Siobhan remembered her quicksilver touch, sometimes impatient, tugging her here and there, pulling or pushing on clothes and shoes, snatching Siobhan up to bestow quick hugs and kisses.
As she grew older, Siobhan was less intimidated by Uncle Kee’s size and began to delight in his bulk, climbing around on him as if he were a living set of monkey bars. She felt like a feather in his strong hands. She sensed that he loved her smallness and she was glad she wasn’t growing much taller. They were comfortable with each other’s sizes. Then as her school years progressed, and Siobhan became prepubescent, she grew reticent about physical play with him after the nuns taught proper behavior for young ladies. Strange, mysterious feelings were eluded to with sinister ambiguity. This new physical shyness began her retreat within.
Siobhan brushed a stray wisp of her black hair from her face. She wore it pulled back most of the time to keep it out of her way. Her hair hung almost to her knees and when untethered, draped like a cloak around her. She was a tiny, pale woman with grave, clouded eyes and limbs like kindling. Her one friend, Maura Doherty, once told her that for a long time she’d thought Siobhan was a fairy or kelpie who would one day disappear back into her fairy mound to be lost forever. They had laughed at the silliness of it.
Years of helping Uncle Kee in the pub had developed Siobhan’s stamina; she was much stronger than she looked. From a very early age she was determined to help him, to do her part, to make his life easier. His grateful smiles were the sun in her world.
After the meat pies had baked, Siobhan escaped outside to sit in one of the old basket chairs. The Leeside was a plain, two-story pub, built of gray stone with a slate roof. It sat within an embrace of hills, at once soft and rugged, at the edge of a dark, narrow lough. The pale sky spread like a domed canopy over it all and sent breezes down to ripple the surface of the water and the surrounding tall grasses in concordant rhythm. The pub wasn’t situated in the village of Carnloe itself but was almost two miles down the lough road, which was little more than a cart track. This enhanced its atmosphere of isolation.
Siobhan’s heart always lifted, she could feel it physically rise in her breast, whenever she gazed upon her lough. She thought of it as her lough. She’d written about it once but never could she bring herself to share her poems. They were part of her essence that she carried deep inside.
The lough was narrow, deep and primordial,
An unexpected fragment of sea allowed in by the ancient glacial shifting of land. When at long last the earth settled,
The lough was trapped there, surrounded by the ice-sired mountains.
But Nature was not so cruel as to separate the lough from its mother ocean.
A small river was left as a lifeline,
And now the lough welcomed fresh waters from its companion mountains,
Feeding them to its progenitor. And the lough was content.
She was intimate with all its moods, serene under a quiet sky or battling a tempest. She loved it as she loved Uncle Kee.
The day was monochromic; pearl gray air and water, the hues of the surrounding hills subdued in acid tones. The earlier mists had coalesced and matured into a cool, steady drizzle, and the atmosphere was muggy, heavy with moist anticipation of things to come.
She could see Blasket, her pony, stilled on his familiar knoll, the only movement coming from his swishing brown tail. A Connemara pony, he was sturdy and sure-footed, serene and secure. He and Siobhan understood each other. Part of that understanding was keeping their distance, since Connemaras liked to roam free. But when Siobhan needed to ride with a primeval urgency, the pony absorbed her emotions and ran like a demon, leaving her spirit soothed. Matching the rhythm of her breathing with his and the pulsing beat of his hooves were her only coupling with freedom. For herself she did not seek it, but an occasional taste of his was frighteningly heady.
As Siobhan sat looking at him, the restlessness invaded her limbs and the urge to ride came upon her. A whistle and clap of hands were all that was needed to bring Blasket to her side. Because of her tiny size she always mounted from the stone wall, and then they were off, the free yet devoted pony and his bareback rider. Siobhan reveled in the sweat-tanged smell of him and the velvet moistness of his hide.
But today she didn’t ride as long as she normally would. She had the spare room to prepare. As she turned Blasket toward home, she saw her uncle waving at her from an upper window. Time to get ready for the stranger, she thought. Siobhan didn’t want him at the Leeside but for Uncle Kee’s sake she’d have to bear it. She would bear anything for Uncle Kee.
After she slid off Blasket’s back, he trotted away, full of pent-up energy. As she climbed the back stairs with her bucket and rags she was wishing the man wasn’t an American. Her mind, so well trained to lock away unpleasant memories, sprang open suddenly to reveal the leering face of the Alabama tourist who, seven years ago, had lunged at her in the dark hallway. She had been petrified into immobility, neither making a sound nor trying to fight the man off. Only when the man’s wife heard him laugh and came out of their room did he stop kissing and fondling her. His apology went unheard over the rushing of blood in Siobhan’s ears. Flattening herself against the wall, she had slowly walked backward to her own room, not understanding his wife’s accusing stare. She locked her door, placed a chair in front of it, wrapped herself in her duvet, and sat on the floor all night in front of the open window, shivering but not from the cold. Siobhan was unable to block the nauseating memory of the man’s hand squeezing and roughly rubbing her breast. No one had ever touched her there before, not even she, herself. No one was ever supposed to.
Siobhan didn’t know what to do. But she knew she couldn’t tell Uncle Kee. He would kill the man and then be sent to jail. The next morning the couple checked out, three days early. Siobhan couldn’t keep any food down that day, and finally told her uncle what had happened. The depth of his rage was biblical; the barstool that the man had sat on was smashed against the stone wall. Uncle Kee tore the bedclothes from the guest-room bed and burned them behind the shed. He canceled all the people who had booked the room for the remainder of the season.
They hadn’t had overnight guests since. Until now.