Ailsa
I don’t have any memories of my mother. She died days after bringing me into the world. All I knew of her death was that she had held me and my father and said it was the happiest moment of her life, the three of us together, knowing I was healthy and would live after she had been forced to bury so many others—some tiny, with translucent fingertips, too ethereal for this world, and others so plump and perfect my father was sure they would open their eyes and take a breath at any moment, but they never did. My grandmother says the peace my mother felt in knowing that I was strong and healthy was how she was able to let go and move on to the next world without me. But I carried my mother’s anguish inside of me. I’ve never known much of the peace my grandmother spoke of.
All too often mother and baby died together, one following the other into the mist from sheer desperation, but I had survived my first few crucial weeks on goat’s milk, my aunt’s breast, and my stubborn grandmother’s iron will. Or at least that’s what Jord, her Druid brother, my great-uncle, often said to me. My mother’s younger sister had married into the neighboring village, on another small island, so she came by boat to feed me for a while, but she was pregnant herself. Before news traveled to her, in my first days, grandmother dropped goat’s milk and honeyed water into my mouth from a soaked rag. She loved her goats, and they served us well in this instance, though I was sure they were possessed by evil spirits at other times.
But I suppose I also survived because Ros was born. At least that was the story told to us since we were babes at the breast. I had a high fever, burning from within, when just five moons had passed since my birth. My father went to my aunt, risking life and limb, guiding his own boat through torrential storms since Ros’s father, the master sailor, was at home for the birth of his own baby. Father begged my mother’s sister to come to my aid, but she was swollen with her own child, due soon, and naturally would not risk her baby’s life to save mine. Just as grandmother had dipped me in the icy river to try to bring down my fever since I would no longer take her goat’s milk dripped from a rag, Ros was born to the boat makers of the village. He was healthy, huge, and squalling.
My father had run through the newly fallen snow from the caves where we docked the boats, helpless, not knowing what had happened to his tiny daughter during the day-and-a-half nonstop journey he had taken, his beloved dog following in his plush, snowy footsteps. He was expecting, I’m sure, to find me dead, but instead he found me happy, full, and sleeping next to a red, wrinkled Ros, greedily suckling at his mother’s other teat. We both fed ferociously, sometimes simultaneously, and her milk flowed like the great southern falls, she used to joke.
My grandmother always laughed so heartily at that, as if they spoke some secret “milk language” that I didn’t understand. Grandmother told me that Ros’s mother’s milk had been nothing short of a nutritional miracle. After she nursed me back to health, quite literally, I was the picture of it. I was never sick again, and by the time fifteen moons had passed, I began drinking goat’s milk and honeyed water from a cup and eating bread and butter every meal with my father, with only four teeth. Every time grandmother saw Ros’s mother with a new babe at her breast, she laughed her sweet laugh and threw her silver hair over her hunched shoulders, telling the babe to drink up for it was the gods’ nectar.
Ros’s mother’s name was Leina, and I used to think of my own mother as a slightly fairer-haired version of her. She had waist-length auburn hair, not as bright as Ros’s but like the color of an oak’s acorn ripe on a tree. Ros’s mother was long and lithe, a dancer for the Druids, and her daughters would be too.
The first wheel of the year ceremony I can remember was my fourth birthday, the great summer solstice sunrise. I can still picture her on that night, spinning and glowing by the firelight, me kneeling at grandmother’s feet. After the dance was done, I would sit in Leina’s small lap, sharing the limited space with her two baby daughters, Rasha and Reina. Ros never sat in her lap with us in my memory, but he was always very nearby.
I treasured these peaceful moments, falling asleep by the fire, feeling as close to my own mother as I ever could, with my mother’s mother and Ros’s mother cuddling me under the stars. Sometimes I would see my mother in visions, walking toward me through the wheat or barley crop as I gathered the harvest with my father and grandmother. I had no memory of her face, but I could paint it in my mind from what everyone told me. She was fair-haired, “like the barley after it’s toasted,” my uncle had said, and so I had imagined multicolored strands of flaxen, golden, brown, fawn, and roan. “Your skin is like cream, just like hers,” my aunt had said during one visit for a festival as she rubbed my cheek. Grandmother told me one morning after a long walk on the beach collecting mussels that my mother’s laugh was like the seabird’s—an infectious, happy bubbling noise that filled the house. And so, bit by bit, a picture of her came together in my mind’s eye.
As children, we always esteem our mothers beyond what they could ever live up to. Mothers are mere mortals, but we paint them as gods because of their ability to heal and protect and encompass us with love. If other people’s mothers were goddesses, mine was their God, supreme above all. I had never had a satisfactory answer for her eye color, though. I had done what I thought was thorough investigating from reliable sources. When I asked, Grandmother had said they were beautiful and warm, brown like mine. But so often I thought the intention of her answers was to give me personal links to my mother so I would feel connected in our shared features, somehow. So I asked a less biased source than those in my mother’s family, Ros’s mother, Leina. At the time I asked, I remember, she was doing wash, one of the most laborious chores of the week, while trying to keep Rasha and Reina on task with their chores. Ros had run off and not stayed to help mind them as he was supposed to.
“Gods, darling,” she had said looking at me with anguish after the simple yet sad question, “I don’t think I remember exactly. She’s been gone so long, and me with three children of my own, whose eyes I barely remember.” She giggled at herself and then looked at my serious, young face, and her heart wrenched. “But I do remember that they were beautiful, sparkling, dark pools like yours.”
My father was the likeliest source of tenderness and romanticism. I had always hesitated to ask him specific questions about her because I could see the pain in his eyes when he answered or deflected my series of questions. I saved up my most important questions, putting them off or waiting until he was in just the right mood, not too happy because I didn’t want to bring him down but also not too sad because I was so afraid of pushing him over the edge. I spent my childhood watching him teeter on the edge of life, and I learned to tiptoe around his moods. I lived my twelve years of life before his death with my breath held, scared that any exhale might be the wind that blew him over. And even after all that tiptoeing, I still could not wipe the guilt from my child’s brow after he finally did leap to his death.
But when I found the right time, when he was in a neutral, matter-of-fact mood, we were out tilling and digging trenches for spring planting. It was a dry day, the best for digging, and the loamy soil roiled up under us with inviting minerals and moistness. It looked good enough to eat; how enriching it must be for our barley, I thought, as I sprinkled seeds from my pocket. I asked him the same way I had asked those before, “What color were Mama’s eyes?” I said it plainly, without emotion, looking up at him as he stopped to wipe his brow, leaning gently on the long pole of the shovel made from ash wood and slate. What I saw next I would remember forever. He actually smiled, huge and blissful, as the gentle spring sun shone down on his broad, creased, olive face, and he breathed it in like it was her creamy skin.
“They were the color of the forest.” He sighed. “Speckled brown like the tree trunks and autumn leaves but mossy green like the summer leaves and dark, evergreen, like the pines too. With gold flecks like the sun peeking through the branches and hints of black like the loamy soil beneath the oak.”
“Wow,” I had said, a child certain, in that moment, that no two people had ever loved one another as much as my parents had and also confident my mother was the goddess that father saw when he spoke.
“She looked like autumn,” he continued, unexpectedly, “with that golden fawn pelt hair, the forest eyes, and milky skin. She was like a harvest herself and wore the warm shades of the earth to show it off.” I had some of her old dresses, and I knew what he meant. Many of the women would repeatedly dye clothes in the darkest colors available to provide bright pigment that stood out against soil and stains, but her clothes were lighter gold and green and brown, like she was trying to blend in. “She knew what complimented her and that it was her natural beauty that made her shine. So few women are like that.” He looked down at me, suddenly concerned that he had upset me. He fell to his knees in front of me, holding onto the smaller shovel that I had been using that day, an old carved spade I shared with my hunched grandmother. He brushed the black locks from my face and said, “You know, Ailsa, she wanted a child so badly. She had lost so many and suffered so deeply for it. But still all she wanted was a child, and so all I wanted was to give her what would make her happy.” He looked away from me, biting his lip. “I’m so thankful that she knew you were here, safe and healthy. And such a delight.” he added at the end, meeting my dreamy gaze.
I remember that moment, not just because I learned a little more about my parents’ love and my mother’s looks, but also because it felt like he saw me for myself and not just as a token of his wife left behind on Earth, and the only thing for him to love in her absence. I was a whole separate person to love—not loved just because I came from her. He smiled into my eyes, our shared eyes, so alike in their darkness, finding acknowledgment and commonness in the reflection of his own gene pool, so far from his own land. Gently, he tussled my black curls, which matched his. “She will love you forever, no matter what, Ailsa. And I do too. That was the last thing she said.” He didn’t look at me when he said it but stared up somewhere into the clouds. “Back to digging, little one. We must finish by dinner. Grandmother is baking us fish.”
That night he picked all the bones out of my fish, slowly and carefully. I ate it out of his huge fingertips, calloused from farmwork, and sat in his lap, listening to grandmother tell funny stories about her most recent healing adventures at the hearth. “Should we really talk about this while we’re eating, Brigd?” my father asked her, laughing and cracking fish bones, while she talked about setting broken ankles and noses from a fight between two old men we knew and a harrowing journey up Goat Fell Mountain by two mischievous teenagers who claimed they were hunting. Grandmother just laughed at that and quietly mentioned that the stags were not the only ones rutting in this particular hunting scene.
Once the stars came out, he tucked me in, pulling the furs and wool blankets up under my chin and brushing the hair from my forehead in methodical, repeated strokes. That night I slept peacefully while the adults chatted by the fire into the night and fell asleep to the sound of my father’s deep voice answering grandmother’s soft and hoarse one. I held on to the edges of consciousness, not because I could make out what they were saying but only to feel the love and comfort of them near, in happy conversation.
We don’t bury our dead; we push them off on rafts made of alder wood, set aflame, and the river, wild as it approaches the sea, carries them to the next world. Only very special or specific elders and Druids were buried in the stone circle under the altar stone. My mother’s sea ceremony had been my first—I was barely a week old. The women had wailed for her in a special mourning song, as was custom, and it was said that a sadder keening was never heard.
I had been to at least a dozen funeral rites since then, and I had wept a little or sometimes not at all. Death was inescapably part of life here, in a constant way that you couldn’t put out of your mind for too long. Babies died, and we wept for the life they didn’t get to create; the elders died, and we wept for the life full of memories that we shared with them, not knowing how to go on without them. Warriors died in battle, but mostly in travel or hunting accidents, and young women died of disease or in childbed. When I wept, I wept in a detached way, even as a child, because I knew they weren’t departing into emptiness. I knew there was love and happiness beyond the living, and I suppose that is what people who fear death fear most—the uncertainty, not the dying.
When my father died, I couldn’t bring myself down to the shoreline. I couldn’t celebrate, I couldn’t mourn. I dared not weep; how could I have ever stopped? I felt assured my father’s spirit was safe in the afterlife, but I was devastated to imagine life without him in it. Grandmother had sent everyone after me, including Uncle Jord, who could track a rabbit in a snowstorm. No one thought to look for me in our own little barley field. Instead of watching my father’s burning raft drift off into the fog of forever, I took his large spade from the hook that it hung on in our roundhouse and made my way to the field to finish our family’s spring barley planting like we had done that day many years before when I learned about my mother’s eyes. That’s what he would have wanted.