The Fire Opal (8 page)

“Something like a wheelbarrow might work,” Fingal said.

“A
wheelbarrow?
I’ll not have Mam lying in a wheelbarrow. She needs a chair.”

“Maybe another kind of chair, not a rocker, could have wheels put on it,” Donal said. “Invalids have iron chairs.”

“Yes, something like that. What do you think, Da?” I
asked, but he remained silent, drinking his tea and staring into the fire.

But that night as I was getting ready for bed, he called me over to him.

“We’ll go to the blacksmith on Saturday to ask about a chair with wheels.”

I threw my arms gratefully around him. As I was about to go, he said my name. I stopped and looked at him, but he kept his eyes on the flames in the hearth.

“Do you think she forgives me?”

“Oh, Da,” I said. “I know she does. She told me so that very night after Ishleen was born.” He stared at the flames with damp eyes, not seeing them.

That Saturday, Old Peig came to keep her eye on Mam, and the rest of us went by pony and trap to Killybegs.

When we got out of the trap and were walking to the blacksmith’s up a street adjacent to the wharf, Da pointed out a little shop with lace curtains in the windows: Muldoon’s Fine Imports. It was an anomaly among the other rough buildings, as if it had been lifted from some cultured place.

“That’s where I bought a gift for your mam once,” he said.

“A comb?” I asked. “With little jewels on it?”

His eyes widened. To hear it described seemed to stir him. “Yes,” he said. “Do you know what ever happened to the comb?”

“It’s at home, Da,” I said. “You know how much Mam loves it.”

He stared at the glimmering windows of Muldoon’s and went very far away in his thoughts.

I remembered Mam describing this shop to me. I could see, through an open curtain, a shelf lined with colorful bottles and trinkets.

“They have scent in heart-shaped bottles,” Mam had told me. “Imported from across the Irish Sea.”

“Can I look inside, Da?” I asked.

He nodded, and while he and my brothers loitered outside the door, I went in holding Ishleen in my arms, never thinking to give her to Da to hold, so much had she become an extension of me. My arms had grown used to being sore from carrying her.

I hardly breathed at the sparkling atmosphere of the shop, little blue and crimson bottles and jars, oval-shaped soaps in porcelain dishes, the air smelling of dried roses.

I turned at the end of an aisle and found myself in the doorway of an attached room, a seamstress’s shop where a woman was engaged in sewing hems. She looked up and nodded at me invitingly, and I stepped in, browsing through bolts of fabric. I stopped suddenly. On a headless dummy between two curtains stood an extraordinary dress, fashioned of what looked like bronze velvet and strips of gold and deep crimson silk. It was stately beyond any garment I had ever seen. Around the waist hung a belt heavy with metallic embellishments.

From an oblique angle, I moved in closer to it. “What’s it made of?” I asked breathlessly.

“It’s made of metal, but very finely wrought, so it looks like cloth unless you get close.”

I had seen drawings of such dresses, but not nearly as beautiful, in the book that Donal had about medieval heroes.

As if reading my thoughts, the woman said, “Such a dress is for a woman on an adventure, don’t you think? A woman who has an urgent quest.”

She stood up, then led me to a spot about one foot directly behind the dress. Taking sleeping Ishleen from my arms, she told me to look straight ahead. In front of the dress was a mirror in which I could see my head and neck reflected. If I looked fleetingly, I could experience the impression that I was seeing myself wearing the dress. My image hit me like a bolt of lightning; my heart pounded with a mysterious feeling of expectation. For a reason that I did not understand, associating myself with the dress filled me with a surge of possibility. The dress exuded the temperature and aroma of cold: sharp and crystalline, as if it had been in the same place where Mam was captive. It was, as the seamstress had suggested, the dress of a strong, adventurous woman. In such a dress I might travel to unknown frozen regions and rescue Mam.

Someone else had come into the room, but I disregarded whoever it was and reached out to touch the fine metal of the dress with curiosity and fervor. A familiar womanly voice came from the new presence in the room. “Maeve.”

Turning with a gasp, I saw Mrs. Cavan looking at me with raised eyebrows and a half smile.

“What an extraordinary dress,” she said.

The seamstress, still holding Ishleen, looked perturbed by Mrs. Cavan’s presence. The smile had fallen from her face. She carefully handed Ishleen back to me.

“It must cost dearly,” Mrs. Cavan added, gazing at the dress with intense interest. Her eyes flashed in my direction.

“Maeve!” Da called, leaning his head into the shop. “Let’s be getting on.”

As I moved toward the door, I caught my true reflection—my rough rust-colored flannel skirts, my old boots covered in mud—and my heart fell slightly.

“Maeve,” Mrs. Cavan said, stopping me. “I received a letter from Tom. He asked me to send you his regards.”

I nodded, and in a barely audible voice thanked her, trying to continue on my way. But she stopped me again.

“Shall I send him your regards?”

I paused, but could not make myself agree to this. “No. Please don’t,” I said, and rushed to meet Da at the door.

The blacksmith’s shop, bare-walled and smelling strongly of leather, shocked me back into the real world. In a daze, I showed the blacksmith my drawing. He nodded, then he and Da got into a conversation about the complications of making such a chair, and the price. I
noticed Donal and Fingal looking through a half open door near the back of the shop, where I could hear a man speaking in covert but fiery tones. I went and stood with them, looking in. The orator had long hair and curly sideburns, and wore a wool cap with a brim set over his forehead. He sat on a stool addressing a group of seven or eight other men.

“Queen Elizabeth the murderess, daughter to the devil himself, Henry the Eighth, has new plans for invading Ireland. Living here as you do on the rocky western edge of our land, you haven’t yet seen too many of the English soldiers. But news of their approach is always on the air, and getting stronger. They’re determined to establish English control, limiting all forms of Irish independence.”

“The devils,” a few men muttered.

I followed my brothers as they stepped into the room, giving grave and respectful nods, extending their hands and introducing themselves.

“Emmet Leahy,” replied the man who got up from the stool and stood before us like a tower. Though there were certainly tall men in Donegal, this one had to be half a head taller than the tallest.

When we sat, Emmet Leahy continued to speak. “The rebellion has ended in the south with the murder of the earl. Clanawley is now a wasted land.”

“I’d like to join the mercenary army!” said Donal.

“So would I,” Fingal said.

Emmet Leahy smiled at them. “I admire your spirits, young men, but there is something we need more of in
this area right now. We must be organized. We need a faction, a steady meeting where news can be shared and plans made.”

“We will be in charge of that,” Donal volunteered.

Da appeared, and my brothers introduced him to Emmet Leahy.

I sat in the corner, rocking Ishleen, and the conversation continued about how the faction might work. That was when I had the vision for the first time. I saw myself in the dress, walking through an elegant interior blasting with drafts of cold wind, calling out to Mam, who called back to me from some vague distance.

Now and then I’d blink my eyes and focus on the real world. Da, my brothers and Emmet Leahy leaned forward in their chairs, facing one another. Donal was the one stoking the flames of the long conversation with his endless questions.

Indulging the dream a second time, I saw the seamstress from Muldoon’s. In the vision she had delicate white feathers at her temples growing directly from her hairline, just as the woman who had given me the bottles had. As I was imagining this, Ishleen stirred. I lifted her up so she could look around the room, and a bit of soft white down floated from her blanket and drifted on the air around us before dropping slowly to the floor.

From that hour, Donal and Fingal stopped their brooding and their harsh tempers. Everything that had ever engaged their hearts and imaginations about Irish
rebellion was suddenly given specificity and immediacy. Here was an opportunity to forge a path, and they threw every bit of themselves into it with great energy and seriousness.

Before we left Killybegs, I asked Da if we could stop again at Muldoon’s Fine Imports. My heart raced as we approached the quaint facade with the tiny lights twinkling within. But I found the door locked fast. I knocked hard again and again, but no one answered.

Da smiled at me and said, “You must really like looking at those dainty things, Maeve.”

“Yes, Da,” I said, staring through the dim windows.

“We’ll come back again sometime,” he said.

Confused by my reluctance to leave, my brothers looked ponderously at me. I wanted to tell them, but I knew they’d think I was madder than ever. I missed Mam intensely.

When we were well on the road back to Ard Macha, and my brothers were talking excitedly to Da about Emmet Leahy, I whispered, “Mam, I’m going to find you. I’m going to bring you back to us somehow. You must be so tired of shivering with cold.”

I could not get the dress out of my thoughts. Two days later, I took Da aside and told him about it. “I’m sure it costs dearly. I don’t know how much, but the woman there was very kind, and perhaps she could work out some special arrangement with us. Could you just come with me, Da, to look at it?”

I knew better than to tell him I had imagined myself rescuing Mam from the cold place where she was prisoner.

“All right, love,” he said. “We’ll go and have a look.”

The following week, Da took me back to Killybegs. Muldoon’s Fine Imports had closed down. Every glimmering curiosity, every scrap of thread, was gone.

CHAPTER 8

I
shleen grew into a little enigma: a fairy of a creature with a head of wild wheat-colored curls, shot here and there with red. She crawled early and walked early, driven by curiosity and an impatience to be engaged in the world.

When Ishleen was four and I was nineteen, she was fascinated by fire and the sparking of the embers. With great concentration and an awed silence, she watched the black-encrusted kettle above the flames come to a trembling boil.

Being small, she did not really understand what was wrong with Mam and spoke to her just as I did, combing her fingers through Mam’s hair. When we sat out near the beach, she decorated Mam with tiny seashells and sometimes with gorse flowers or maidenhair ferns.

Not only did Ishleen speak gently to Mam’s inert body, but she addressed the air itself when we were far from Mam, in the same way I did, thinking Mam might hear.

Ever since I had seen the dress in Killybegs, I drew pictures of it with a piece of sharpened charcoal. Paper was scarce, so I used the blank back or front pages of the books Donal hoarded near his bed. But when there were no more blank pages in those, I took to drawing the dress again and again over the written text, and this Donal refused to tolerate.

One bright windy morning, while pushing Mam’s wheeled chair out near the ruins, I discovered a wall of smooth flagstone that set my heart racing. I took out the charcoal that I kept with me always and began to sketch a life-size version of the dress on the wall before me. I gave Ishleen a piece of charcoal, too, and she set to scribbling with it on the wall near the ground. Seeing the life-size drawing of the dress filled me with euphoria and expectation.

“Mam,” I whispered, and turned the wheeled chair so that she faced the dress. “I’ve seen myself wearing this dress and rescuing you.”

I visited the drawing every day and added to it. If the rain partially erased the drawing, I drew it again. Since it had not fully faded each time, it began to take on many layers, growing more and more dimensional.

Though it thrilled me to see the drawing become vivid,
it frustrated me as well. It seemed so real, but it wasn’t there at all.

And even worse than that, Mam had gradually begun to speak to me less often and was quieter when she did, as if her energy were fading. And to my horror, along with the smells of guttering candles and ice, an unpleasant odor sometimes accompanied her, something vaguely rancid.

I would speak obsessively to the air, hoping for an answer from Mam, while serving the dinner or stoking the embers. My brothers had grown so used to it that they’d taken to calling me “Mad Maeve.”

At first Da barked at them for it, but over time, he stopped.

None of them understood what was happening to me, and I didn’t, either. I only knew that I couldn’t bear the idea of losing Mam.

It was just at this time that Tom Cavan, who’d been gone several years, was seen near dawn one morning in Ard Macha, carrying a spade and a lamp, his body and clothes covered in damp peat. That day I heard that the bog where the local men cut turf had been desecrated, and that the sky had been thick with vultures circling overhead. I went down there with Da and my brothers to look. Rough clods had been dug up and carelessly piled and scattered.