When on that day on Streedagh’s strand Ineen was at last able to rise from the stony sand where she had fallen, when Sorley had gone away out of sight with her child, she looked to see if anyone of the town had observed her with him, and she thought none had; the beach at that hour was nearly empty, the few women in black shawls, waiting for their men, looked only out to sea. After a time she took up the purse he had given to her, feeling the strange sleek leather and the coins moving inside as she carried it. She went up from the beach and to the village, and the people, the women, watched her pass; she knew that they did, and she neither looked toward them nor avoided them. Doors were shut as she passed. She took no notice of that.
The old church where her father had been buried, where her false wedding had occurred without solemnity or joy—she had come to think that her story was not uniquely sad, except that it was: for when she had first come here the story, the thing, the sin, had already progressed beyond escaping. She pulled open the door against the grasses that grew now so densely there, almost as though to keep out human souls, to forbid them entry to a holy place into which they had no right to go.
Foolish, foolish.
The altar, now without cloths or furnishings of any kind, was gray in the small light through the pointed windows. She went to the altar and knelt on the one low step before it, and crossed herself; then she rose and placed the purse on the altar. She stepped back into the aisle, and knelt where Cormac Burke had placed his mother’s ring on her finger, where it still was now. She bent forward, put her hands on the cool stone, and then lay facedown; she spread her arms open so that she was a cross there before the altar.
Take it, she said without words. Take it and consume it, or do as you will. It is not mine. I have nothing that is mine. I pray to die here now, but if my prayer is not to be granted, I ask for the power to live.
Later she would have no memory of how long she lay there. She prayed to feel her sin and her pain, and never to cease; she grew deathly cold and thought yes, she would be allowed to die, and for a time was dead: and then felt a hand upon her.
Not Cormac. Not Sorley.
A young priest of the abbey not far away had been given the duty to care for this little church, which was consecrated no matter how ruinous now: to sweep, to repair, to lay flowers on the altar. He spoke to Ineen, softly, for he too supposed that she was dead and he did not dare to call her back, but she stirred then, lifted herself up, and turned to see him. The gold remained on the altar where she had laid it. The priest helped her to rise farther, as far as to her knees, and he began to pray: the words soft as rain, his hands folded before him and his eyes closed.
She wouldn’t die. She had been ordered to live, and she would, she would have the power. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti, the priest murmured, moving his hand over her in a cross.
She went to the women, the ones who had cared for her in her waiting and in her giving birth to the offspring of Sorley. She knew that they remembered all that had happened in her house in those days, but they didn’t speak of it, and neither did she. Just a slip of a boy, they had said to her, and never afterward asked what had become of it. She went with them on rounds that never ended, one birth following another until the last day; she watched closely everything they did and wrote in her memory everything they said, which was written down nowhere else. Whether three went to a house or only one she went also. In time one of those whom she followed would allow her to come forward, and with her ears full of the mother’s cries and curses and prayers she’d observe the crowning of the infant head glossy with slime, blind and inanimate; and then when a child came fully forth, she was taught how she must put her hands upon it. Every one that she saw appear in the year of her watching, and then in her own attending, was only a human child, a boy or girl that lived or died. But when she walked the beach alone she could in some weathers perceive creatures made as if of spindrift or smoke, who came and vanished and returned again all in a moment. She knew well that the sea could bring forth things that could not be understood or grasped, not by her, though perhaps sailors or sailors’ wives could know them; but she was sure these came not from the sea but to the sea. They were of earth, or had been, and now of nothing, or nearly so. Where from here would they go? What land, if any land, lay in the West?
Often when the women were gathered in Ineen’s house, putting up their remedies and their possets, crushing leaves or boiling them, each with a prayer to say with it, they told stories; and on a day in winter one told of the king who was born with ass’s ears. He grew up still having them, she told, and he hid them under a great hat if he could, or he spoke to his knights and his brehons from behind a curtain, so his secret would not come out.
They all nodded, and shared a smile; they knew the story.
Well so, the teller said, the one man who knew the king’s secret was his barber, who could not cut the hair of the king’s head if his hat was on, and in that way he came to know. And the king made him swear that he would never tell no one what he knew. But he was a garrulous fellow, you know, and liked to talk, and he lived in fear that he would let the secret out of his mouth, as he longed to do.
Ineen put down the bunch of rosemary she was tying up with straw, and was still.
And what, said another, did he do then to relieve his heart?
Why he told the stones, and he told the reeds in the river, the storyteller said. And he told the secret to a tree. It was a spruce, and somehow it happened, look you, that a harp-maker took that tree, and from it made a harp. And when the king’s harper first played on it in the hall, the harp sang out that the king had ass’s ears; and the king hung his head and put off his hat, and there they were, believe it or not.
None of the women had ever told Ineen’s secret: if they had done so she surely would have known of it. But had they told it to the stones, had they told the seals?
What I have heard, another woman said, is this: that the king left his hall and wandered in shame, until he came to the place where St. Brigid was. He knelt before her in his grief and laid his head in her lap and wept. And the saint stroked his head for a time, whether long or short I don’t know, and when she ceased the ears were gone.
Gone like that, a woman said. The blessed saint.
Ineen was weeping softly now like the king with his ass’s ears. The women looked away, or to their work, so as not to break in upon her grief. Would he, her son, after years it might be, find a saint for himself, who would remove for good the webs between his fingers, the mossy fur on his back, his teeth small and sharp as a saw’s?
“Look there,” one woman said, who had turned to the window—the one from which Ineen had once seen the Spanish ships founder. She got up to see. Out on the harbor waters was a narrow ship with a prow like a dragon, its long oars plunging and rising and plunging again into the gray sea, coming toward shore.