“I need a drink,” Maud
said.
I refrained from
mentioning she had already drunk too much. “If we don’t go
now, we’ll miss the bus to the airport,” I said instead.
“Don’t be so practical,
Wren,” Maud scolded. She signaled the pub man. He saw her
gesture, shook his head, and turned away.
“It’s because
we’re Americans,” I said.
Despite Maud’s
classic Irish beauty, her red hair and green eyes, the Irish
always recognized us as Americans. They always spotted the
way we moved through the world, proud, arrogant and afraid.
We’d spent the
early part of the afternoon pub crawling and music hunting.
We’d followed the strains of Irish songs from one location
to another, the music more intoxicating than the pints of
Guinness stout ale.
This place was
Irish Traditional, cheap linoleum flooring with scarred,
rickety tables and benches scattered about, the smell of
stale meat pies, ale and old-cigarettes-before-the-ban in
the hazy air. Overheated, it was stuffed with the warmth
and crush of human bodies. The windows were misted over,
obscuring the rainy September day outside.
“They’re starting
another tune,” Maud complained. “So why can’t I get another
drink?” She ran her hands through her short cropped hair,
hacked away after the accident. Even in the fluorescent light
of the pub, her dark red hair glowed, an aura of blood around
her head.
I reached out
to stroke a curl and she jerked her head away, our rhythm
ruined.
“Your hair looks
like a halo,” I said.
“Saint Maud,” she
said, “the patron saint of losers.”
The tables were
pushed close together, so that the drinkers sat claustrophobic
elbow to elbow. In the cleared space, a fiddler sat upon
a bar stool. While he fiddled, patrons took turns dancing
jigs. They earned applause and sometimes a drink, for their
ability to go through the ancient dance steps. Steps I once
knew well.
“Join in this
time, Maud,” I suggested.
When she played,
she stopped thinking about drinking. She stopped thinking
about the harp. I believed that she even stopped thinking
about Aoife.
“No, I’ve not
been asked.”
“They don’t know
that’s a harp you’ve got, and they never ask.” I wanted to
kick the wrapped canvas bundle at her feet, an addiction
worse than the alcohol. If I could only get her home, back
to America.
“Quiet, Wren,
they’re starting,” Maud said.
During this last
jig, an old man danced. He held his pint in one hand as he
leapt around the room and never spilled a drop. He wore glasses
with thick lenses that obscured his eyes. How could he see
to dance?
My legs quivered
with the need to join him, until a sharp jab of pain around
my damaged knee stilled them, but not my desire.
The last of the
notes died. The old man received a fresh pint for his dance.
Everyone turned back to the business of finishing the last
pint.
“You should have
played, Maud,” I said.
“Why didn’t you
dance then?”
I winced.
Maud touched my
bad knee. “Never mind. I can’t play well enough. In a year,
then maybe. If we stay.”
“We can’t stay.
We’re due back tomorrow.”
“It’d be easy
enough for them to find somebody else to teach Music 101
and Modern Dance.”
“And what would
we live on?” I said. Our old argument, often repeated in
this final week in Ireland, as both our time and money grew
short.
“You never used
to ask that before.”
“Before is dead
and gone.”
Maud dropped her
hand.
The old man appeared
at our table. “It’s Americans you are then?” he said. He
grinned, with black stumps instead of teeth. A musty smell
of old damp wool permeated his being. Old wool and worse,
I caught the effluvium of rotted teeth and aged shoe leather,
too long worn.
“So what is it
you’ve have wrapped there, swaddled like it was your own
wee babe?”
Maud unwrapped
the harp from its blanket and carrying straps. She’d never
been able to find a suitable carrying case. She cradled Aoife’s
legacy, a small Irish harp. Centuries of hands had worn the
wood in several places, diminishing the deep cut grooves
of Celtic swirls decorating the harp. Aoife died in the accident,
but her harp survived, a memento of death, a reminder of
despair.
Since she wouldn’t
play it, I wanted Maud to put away the dirty thing. I wished
that she had never inherited it and Aoife’s obsession.
She ran her hand
over the strings. The string cut into her palm and left a
trail of blood.
“Maud, your hand,” I
said. I reached out but dropped my own hand at her frown.
“It’s the blood what
tells,” the old man said. He raised his pint in her hand’s direction
as if in a toast. “Feeding the harp, are you?”
Maud ignored the blood
dripping from her palm. “Listen,” she said. “Do you hear it?”
“What?” I heard only
pub noise.
Maud tilted her head
to one side. “Don’t you hear it? The tune?”
The old man whistled
a low heavy tune. Dark spit spewed from his lips.
Pain crawled along
my knee. “Stop it,” I said to him.
He ceased and wiped
his mouth.
Maud stroked the harp
as if it lived. “It sounded like the old original tune, the one
from whence all the others came.” Blood from her cut ran into
the Celtic design and over the stain of Aoife’s death mark.
I grasped Maud’s arm. “What
nonsense, let’s go.”
The old man placed
his hand on my bad knee. I jumped. He held me fast. His fingernails,
torn to the quick, showed blood around the rims.
“If it’s the old traditional
songs you’re wanting,” he said, “then I know a place, a grand
place for the singing, dancing, and playing.” The best music
was played after pub hours, in tucked-away-out-of-the-way-hidden
places, where the Irish congregate to dance and sing. “It’s only
the invited that go, because of the haunting.”
“That’s just tourist
talk to spook us. You Irish love telling a tale to us gullible
Americans,” I said.
He tightened his grasp.
Heat crawled around
my scars.
“For they’re saying
as how the place is the home of one of the old ones, the Sidhe.
It’s said this one’s a priestess what sacrificed herself.” He
dropped his hand.
Maud sat frozen in
her chair.
On the clouded window,
the old man’s twisted fingers danced as he drew a Celtic symbol
that mirrored those on the harp.
“She cut the symbols
deep into her skin, till she bled her life away,” he said. He
drank again, and smacked his lips. “And if you’re willing to
pay for it, she’ll give you your heart’s desire.”
“Can she bring the
dead—music to life?” Maud asked.
“Forget it, Maud,” I
said.
She gazed at me, her
eyes clouded with drink and despair. “Can she make my friend
here, Wren, fly through the dance again?”
“I want to go home,” I
said. I sounded like a petulant child. I wished we were on the
plane already.
I caught sight of
myself reflected in the old man’s glasses. There was a smudge
of ink on my nose and the humidity made my hair hang in stringy
strands, like old brown rope. My long drab grey skirt covered
the scars around my knee. What would I pay to dance again? I
pushed the thought away.
“Closing!” the bartender
shouted.
The old man got up
and with a wink danced out the door.
Maud flung the harp
back into its blanket and carrying straps.
“Maud—”
“We’ll lose him,” she
said. She left, without waiting to see if I was behind her.
I limped after her,
her follower as always, out into the Dublin street.
Overhead a solid wall
of rain clouds blocked the sun. A light mist rising off the Liffey
River muffled the sounds of the early evening traffic. I hoped
the cold would dispel the froth of the ale from my mind.
We followed the old
man into the winding back streets of the old part of the city.
I struggled, moving as fast as I could to keep him in sight.
He moved fast for an old man.
Maud stepped quick
as if she’d forgotten my pain. Perhaps she had.
“Out of money, out
of time, and with any luck, soon I’ll be out of my mind,” Maud
sang. The harp thumped on Maud’s back in counterpoint. Even in
the failing light, her red hair glistened with the mist, a beacon.
The Irish, as they hurried home, brushed past us, their grey-cast
faces in the grey mist blurred.
We turned onto a street
paved with old, broken cobblestones and patched with tarmac.
My weak leg slithered over the wet slick stones and I fell. I
felt a sharp edge tear into that leg, the pain a sudden heat,
a reminder of great pain not long ago.
“Maud,” I cried.
So intent she was
on the figure ahead, she didn’t answer. At last she turned around.
The old man looked
back once, spun in a high twirl and vanished around a corner.
“Oh, Wren,” Maud said
as she helped me up, “now you’ve lost us again.”
“Nonsense, we’re not
far from the Liffey,” I said. I could still smell the dank river
stench; hear the muted rumble of traffic.
“Wait,” Maud said.
She stood frozen, a blood-haired Virgin of Christ. “Listen.”
I listened and heard
the sweet notes of a tin whistle. What other people could coax
such music out of a cheap toy, but the Irish?
We followed the high,
thready sound. I spotted him first, a young man, a boy almost,
as he walked along ahead and played. His clothes looked formal,
stiff and uncomfortable, from the back.
“Hey,” Maud called.
He turned a corner
and the music ended. We raced after him and into the narrow dark
street. The whistle player was nowhere to be seen.
I heard a whisper,
like a prayer, that made me feel the cold of the mist. Georgian
mansions crowded the sidewalk, aging spinsters gossiping together,
their flaking facades old shawls around their crumbling dignity.
I couldn’t recall this part of Dublin, dirty and decaying.
“Maud, let’s get out
of here,” I said.
“You go.”
I sighed and followed
her.
At the end of the
alley, a woman swept the stoop of a large stone building, a church.
She looked up.
At first I thought
her a nun, then she smiled and I saw it was a wimple of black
hair that framed her white face. She wore a long black dress
that enhanced the effect. What looked like a rosary at first
was a long knife, the hilt encrusted with jewels.
Her face shone white
and all Irish, strong features over pronounced bones, so close
to ugly as to be beautiful. And ageless. I could not guess if
she was in her twenties or fifties. Thick, tangled black eyebrows
marred her beauty, but leant humor to her face.
“Is this the place?” Maud
said, walking toward her.
“If you need,” the
woman said. She dipped the broom into a pail of sudsy water and
swirled the suds over the steps. In the weak light the water
looked dark and thick.
“It’s blood,” I said.
“Aye, it’s the blood
what tells,” the woman said.
“A pub fight?” I asked.
Like the blood pulsing beneath the skin, Ireland seethes with
violence, sometimes erupting like a cut artery.
“No.”
“It’s like someone
painted the steps with blood,” Maud said.
“Does it now?” the
woman said. She picked up the bucket and slewed the water over
the steps. “Look how dark the water runs, like the dark Liffey
it is, stained with Irish blood.”
The water wetted my
shoes. Something black and oily, a blood clot perhaps, tumbled
into the gutter. I limped back.
The woman laughed. “You
frightened of a wee bit of blood, are you? You’ll never last
long here, then.” She turned up the steps.
“You said if I need,” Maud
said to her, “I need a drink.”
The woman turned back. “You
can always find a drink in Ireland.”
“It’s not pub hours,” I
said. Would we ever get home?
“Aye and this is not
a pub,” she said. She smiled, white teeth bright even in the
mist. “You can always get a drink in Ireland if you’re willing
to pay.”
“I can pay,” Maud
said. She stepped toward the woman. She slipped on the steps
and almost fell. Aoife’s heavy harp slid over her back and gouged
into her shoulder blade.
The woman grabbed
her wrist. “Careful now, it wouldn’t be doing to break that lovely
harp of yours,” she said.
Maud laughed and said, “It’s
not my harp.”
I shivered with the
cold in her laugh.
The woman’s hand on
Maud’s wrist looked liked it was locked. I wanted to snatch Maud
away.
“Maud, please,” I
said.
Maud looked at me
then, looked at my leg, where the blood still trickled from the
cut. “Your friend’s marked,” the woman said. “It’s the blood
what tells.”
“Yes, marked with
Aoife’s death,” Maud said and turned away from me.
The woman smiled and
offered her other arm. I took it, if only to break her concentration
on Maud. Beneath the cloth on her arm I felt ridged skin. Beneath
my fingers the ridges moved.
“Battle scars,” the
woman said.
I hoped it would be
warmer inside, though I doubted it. September in Dublin brought
a damp, penetrating cold that blew in off the sea. I hadn’t been
warm since we’d arrived, perhaps before. Perhaps my heart had
frozen.
A blue shield stood
affixed next to the heavy oak door of the building.
“Blue plaque disease,” I
said. The name the Irish had coined for the myriad commemorative
shields, always blue, that decorated so many buildings in historic
Dublin. I squinted. “What’s it say?” I peered closer.
Some vandal had scratched
over the words. Odd, for the Irish are proud of their heritage
and their freedom from British rule. Not even the children would
be so bold as to mar a martyr’s memorial.
The woman drew a dirty
fingernail across the plaque and added another scratch. “During
the uprising the British caught this fellow and shot him to death,
making him a martyr to the cause.”
“Why is it all scratched?”
“They found out later
that he was a traitor and that it was his own people shot him
to death on these very steps. He must have run here, for sanctuary.
But this church has been deconsecrated. No sanctuary here. T’was
a great pity, that young soldier dying, he could play the tin
whistle like none other.”
I heard the strains
of a tin whistle, nearby, now. It struck deep within my wound.
My feet shuffled in a never-forgotten step. I pulled after the
sound, but the woman held me fast.
In the weak light,
it seemed her face shone white and luminescent, as if the skull
beneath the skin was about to reveal itself.
“The music,” Maud
said. She too tugged at the woman’s hold.
The woman started
to sing in a deep contralto, rough and rich. I didn’t know the
song, couldn’t understand the thick dialect. The air around us
vibrated with the wealth of her voice. The tin whistle stopped.
The woman sighed as
she unlocked the door with a large, rusty key. “Didn’t have to
lock this place, not in the old times, there wasn’t nobody coming
in then.”
“You mean because
of thieves?” I asked. The increase in drug use had brought more
crime and a different violence to Ireland.
“Oh no, had to start
locking it when an old drunk crawled in here and died.”
The place looked long
abandoned. The pews remained from when it had been a church,
only now they lay stacked against the walls. All the other church
trappings were stripped away. Nails and light patches showed
where crosses and religious paintings had once hung.
A table sat where
the altar must have been and on the steps to the altar a few
bottles and glasses stood. Even in the cold air, I smelled mildew
and rot.
“Froze to death he
did, the old fool,” the woman said.
Cheap neon lights
hung from the ceiling and I caught sight of Maud’s shadow. The
harp slung on her back deformed her into a hunchback.
“Do they come and
play here?” Maud asked.
“Oh, aye, every night
there’s a celebration.”
The woman led us to
the table. Maud eased the harp down onto a chair. She took off
her coat and beneath it her white silk shirt, a gift from me,
was spotted with blood.
“You’ve got blood
on your back,” I said.
“From carrying the
harp,” Maud said.
“You carry your own
battle scars,” the woman said.
Maud looked at me
with the sorrow of forever in her eyes.
I heard a rustle under
the table. A small mongrel stared up at me. The dog, black, brown
and white and of no determinate breed, gave a tentative sniff
at Maud’s harp.
“Get away,” I said.
I pushed the dog away with my foot, not wanting to touch his
dirty hide. He reminded me of the scrabble-haired mutts who followed
the tinkers’ carts. He growled and slunk away.
“Careful there, he
bites,” the woman said. She brought the drinks, generous ones
of Irish whiskey, to our table.
“Will the musicians
come soon?” I asked. We’d missed our plane by now. We’d be on
the next one, I swore to myself.
“You impatient American,
you have all the time you need.”
A rustle in one of
the high windows drew my attention. Ravens nested on the sill,
sheltered beneath a cracked windowpane.
“Wasn’t it a Celtic
belief that ravens steal the souls of the dead?” Maud asked.
She showed no inclination to leave and I resisted the impulse
to pluck at her sleeve.
“And how did you come
to be knowing the ways of the Celts?” the woman said. She refilled
Maud’s glass. She ignored my empty one.
“Part of learning
about Irish music is the Celtic stories.”
“Aye, Christians spent
centuries trying to bury the old ways. It still lies beneath
the skin.” The woman stroked the ridges on her arm. “It still
lives in the blood.”
“Looks more like it’s
covered with dirt,” I said. I rubbed my foot over the dirty floor.
Beneath the dirt, a pattern was carved into the stone. “What’s
that? An old tombstone? Are there people buried under this place?”
“Sure, but that’s
no tombstone you’re looking at.”
I looked closer.
The marks whorled,
lines curled back upon themselves. Somehow they reminded me of
my dance notations. I followed the lines with one pointed foot
and remembered when I danced barefoot, an elemental gliding along
the music. “It looks like an old Celtic ceremonial stone.”
“They built a church
upon a Celtic altar? A place of sacrifice?” Maud asked.
“This site’s been
holy for a long time.”
“Why was it deconsecrated
then?” I asked. I never got an answer for a clatter pulled away
my attention.
In one corner, the
dog worked at a bundle of black rags tossed there. At least I
believed it was rags, until I spotted the round whiteness of
a skull and the tumble of bones among the cloth.
“The mad nun,” the
woman said. She refilled Maud’s glass. “They say she broke her
vows, went mad, and killed her lover right over this stone.”
I swallowed hard.
I prayed the bones were only fakes, placed to impress the tourists.
I tried to make a joke out of those splashes of white against
the black. “And I suppose they walled her up alive?”
“What would her bones
be doing out in the open then? No, she danced herself to death
and they left her unburied, out of consecrated ground.”
“The Celtic priestesses
danced till they died,” Maud said. She stared down at the design
on the floor as if all the answers were etched there.
“Maud, you know how
the Irish love spooking the tourists,” I said.
The woman laughed. “Don’t
worry,” she said, “the lover’s blood’s long since soaked into
the stone.” Her sleeve pulled back revealing whorls of deep cut
lines in her forearm, the ridged scars. Some of the wounds still
oozed blood.
“How much are you
charging for all this creepy-old-Irish atmosphere?” I asked.
“What price are you
willing to pay?” the woman said. She took off her knife and placed
it upon the table.
The old man from the
pub came in, carrying a fiddle. He played the opening strains
of an old song I at last recognized.
It strummed along
in my blood. My good leg beat time, my heart along with it, desperate
for the dance. “I guess I can get lost in Dublin,” I whispered.
With the last of my
desire for life, I grasped Maud by the arm. “Let’s go home.”
“I am home,” Maud
said.
I stared at Maud.
Her eyes had glazed over and there was nothing in her face for
me. She picked up the knife.
I reached for the
blade. “No, don’t.”
“What price will you
pay, dancer?” the woman said.
I dropped my hand.
I wanted to dance. I needed to dance.
Maud plunged the knife
into my heart. I staggered in a parody of dance steps before
I fell.
My blood pooled over
the floor, running into the grooves of the ceremonial stone.
A raven landed upon my breast. He tore at the wound.
Rain beat against
the stone walls, like a soft echo of gun fire. The tin whistle
player came in and joined in the tune. I saw his face, the streaks
of blood on his head from where the stones had struck.
A young woman, dressed
in a nun’s habit, danced over the carved stone in the middle
of the floor. Her skirts fluttered over the carved pattern in
the stone. Around her head ravens flew and the dog nipped at
her heels.
Maud kissed me. The
pain faded from my leg at last and from my soul.
The music thrums in
my dying heart as Maud cuts the ancient lines deep into her arms.
Maud picks up her harp and plays, while the nun dances, and the
old man fiddles, and the boy plays. I feel my heart dance as
my blood soaks into the thirsty stone. I’ve found it, the song
of the blood.
For it is the blood
what tells.
