“For a ghost that has left some earthly duty undone, some ill deed not atoned for, must haunt this earth and will not find its rest until it has made amends or done some act of great kindness to a stranger.”
“Ooh,” said Colin, “that is dead spooky, so it is.”
“And that,” she said, “that is the story of how Connor MacTaggart cut down a faerie tree, was tormented by the Shee, was summoned by the banshee, and became the Saint Stephen’s Day ghost—the Thevshee of Beal na mBláth, in thrall to the Doov Shee for as long as they wished.”
There was a very long silence. Then Colin said, “That’s a cracker story, Mrs. Kincaid, so it is.” He was obviously impressed. “Thank you very much.”
“I think it’s terrible sad, so I do.” Jeannie Kennedy’s lip trembled. “Poor Connor. Poor Fidelma.” She looked up at Kinky. “I like stories with happy endings, so I do.” Then she smiled. “Mebbe the second part of the story’ll have a happy ending? Mebbe you’ll tell us if Connor’s ghost got away from the Shee.”
Kinky shook her head. “Not now, Jeannie. I’m sorry, we’ve run out of time. It’s not just Eddie’s mammy’ll be after me if I don’t get you home now. It’s nearly quarter to one.”
She was fully prepared for a chorus of “boo-hiss” and “not fair.”
She held up her hands. “There’ll be another time, and I don’t want to spoil the story by telling you the ending, so now I want you all to get on your hats and coats.”
It was crowded and noisy in the hall as the little mob got dressed. When they were ready to leave, Hazel stepped forward. “Mrs. Kincaid, I—that is, we—want to thank you very much for the pies, and the Ribena, and the lovely story, like. And we hope you have a very merry Christmas, a happy new year . . .” Then the words tumbled out: “And we hope you’ll have no ghosts this Saint Stephen’s Day.”
Kinky was still laughing as she shut the door behind the last child. She shook her head. If only Hazel knew how appreciated her wishes were. Kinky certainly wanted no more ghosts, no more doings with the supernatural.
She stood looking at the closed door. Children, she thought, they’d all really enjoyed the story. Even Colin Brown, she’d recognised, after his initial skepticism, had believed every word. Perhaps it was because she’d told the tale convincingly. And why shouldn’t she? Hadn’t she lived it and wasn’t it true?
When she’d been telling it, hadn’t she been transported back to her own childhood, to the sights, the sounds, the smells, and all the feelings of her home in County Cork?
When the children wriggled at the talk of spiders, she’d been uncomfortable herself. To this day she couldn’t stand the creatures. The kiddies might not have been feeling the chill of the blizzard when she described it, but when she’d been speaking, the sights and bitter cold of it had been as vivid to her as they had been forty-odd years ago.
As had other things in her childhood that hadn’t been part of the story, so she’d not mentioned to them.
She’d been lucky growing up there when she did, she told herself, when life was simple, her world was small, and her family was all she’d really needed.
Kinky sighed. Over the years she had learned that life is always moving on, and it was from that year and its terrible ending that her own life had changed at a terrifying speed.
Seeing and hearing the banshee on Christmas night and the death of Connor on Saint Stephen’s Day were bad enough if they had been all that had happened. They weren’t. Not by a long chalk.
In the next four years she’d grown from a girl to a woman, had seen more, much more of the Shee, had fallen in love, and had started down the road that brought her here to Ballybucklebo, where, if she didn’t get into her kitchen, this year’s Christmas dinner would spoil for lack of her attention.
Da had been fond of sayings like “Eating time is eating time, and talking time is talking time, so eat up . . . and shut up.”
Now was “start seeing to the dinner” time. More reminiscing could come later.
15
Kinky lifted two ceramic bowls with aluminium foil lids tied on with string. She placed them in a huge pot full of water and put it on the stove top. Christmas puddings took the longest time to cook of all the dishes she was going to prepare. She lit the gas. They’d be boiling soon.
Potatoes needed peeling and she concentrated on her task, putting the white tubers in another water-filled pan ready to be parboiled prior to roasting in the turkey fat.
It was her pride and joy to cook for her doctor and his friends, but her inner woman needed attention too. It was a bit past her usual lunchtime.
She put the kettle on, slipped three potato-apple fadges under the grill, and sat on a stool to wait for them to toast. She’d be having her Christmas dinner with Cissie Sloan and her family later, so now she wanted only a shmall little snack to tide her over.
She smiled when she thought about Cissie Sloan, who was one of Kinky’s best friends. Cissie, it was whispered, had her dresses made by Omar the tentmaker she was so large. The only other woman of comparable girth in the townland was Flo Bishop, wife of Councillor Bertie Bishop, the richest and meanest man in Ballybucklebo.
Doctor O’Reilly would have more time for the medicine, so, if he wasn’t forever locking horns with that Bishop over one or another of the man’s get-rich-quick schemes. Like the time he’d tried to take possession of Sonny Houston’s empty house while Sonny was in hospital. Kinky snorted at the very thought. The cheek of that man Bishop. As they’d say up here, “He’d wrestle a bear for a ha’penny.” Be that as it may, despite all the conniving of Bertie Bishop, Sonny was living in his own home now married to Maggie MacCorkle, her that had told Eddie Jingles’s Ma that her son was here today.
Maggie was one of Kinky’s and Cissie’s friends too.
Cissie Sloan. Kinky chuckled. The woman could talk on the intake of breath, but she had a heart of corn, one of the kindest souls in the place. She was a patient of the practice, but then weren’t most of the inhabitants of Ballybucklebo? And didn’t Kinky Kincaid know as much about every one of them as her employer, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, did? And wouldn’t that knowledge stay with Kinky to the grave even if they tried to drag it out of her with teams of wild horses, so?
One thing about living in the village and her position here, both of which she loved, was she had to have the trust of everyone. And in a community as wedded to gossip as this one, the fastest way for Kinky to lose that trust would be to let something slip.
All of Doctor O’Reilly’s patients had their weaknesses. Kinky knew many of them. Even her doctor was not faultless. It wasn’t often the big man made a mistake, but he could. The last time one was pointed out to him, had he got angry? He had not. Not at all. Doctor O’Reilly was a big man in more ways than one. He’d thanked his assistant, Doctor Barry Laverty, for noticing.
He was a smart one that Barry Laverty, even if he was a bit unsure of himself. He was going to make a great partner next year. If he stayed. That lady friend of his, Patricia Spence, was a beautiful girl and a Cambridge student of civil engineering. Sometimes Kinky wondered if the demands of her profession and of his might come between the youngsters. Och, well. Time would tell.
No matter what happened to his love life, Barry could do a lot worse than live his days in Ballybucklebo. Granted, it was a bit bigger than her corner of County Cork, but it was the kind of place Kinky loved best. Small enough that everybody knew everybody else. Were the people inquisitive about each other? Certainly, but if one villager needed help they’d not have far to go for it here. In the years she’d lived at Number 1 Main Street she’d seen more Good Samaritans than the travellers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho.
A grand spot with grand people.
Kinky heard the kettle whistling and went to make her tea.
She put the tea things and the hot buttered fadge on a tray and carried it along with still vivid memories of her girlhood to the upstairs lounge. She set the tray on the coff
ee table and plumped herself down in the comfortable overstuffed armchair by the fire.
Now that the children were gone, Arthur Guinness had reclaimed his rightful place close to the hearth. He lifted his head, half opened one eye, yawned mightily, and went back to dozing. Lady Macbeth lay curled in a ball against Arthur’s tummy. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes tightly closed, and the tip of her pink tongue stuck out from the centre of her small mouth.
Kinky poured tea through the strainer, then guiltily put in two spoonfuls of sugar. She was on the heavy side—fat, if she told the truth. And what was the point of telling lies? Och, but sure, and hadn’t her Da always liked his tea sweet, so? All the O’Hanlons had.
She gazed through the window. The steeple of the Presbyterian church opposite was limned against a sky of smoky indigo. Wind lifted flakes past the icing sugar–trimmed spire, then dropped them onto already laden yews that bowed over dark tombstones. Each grave marker wore an ermine stole.
It was pleasantly dim inside the room, and the glow from the fire made a cosy half circle around Kinky and the animals. Just the spot for a nice cup of tea, a bite, and a think. She added milk to her tea, sipped, and remembered.
Was it really forty-two years ago tomorrow that poor Connor MacTaggart had been lost in the blizzard? She shook her head. Forty-two years.
It was then that Kinky, a girl still answering to the name of Maureen, had started becoming a woman. In those early years after his death, Maureen O’Hanlon, who had heard and seen the banshee on Christmas night, had more glimpses of the other world. And had understood how the sight, Ma’s gift, could come to a body.
But forty-two years? She bit into a cake, savouring the contrasting tastes of the potato and apple. My Lord. So long ago, and yet the story she’d told the children and what had followed had stayed with Kinky as clearly as yesterday.
She smiled and looked outside to where the flakes whirled and tossed. It was a pretty sight, the gently falling snow. Looking through the window was like peering into one of those fluid-filled glass globes with a miniature church or winter scene in it. When you shook the ball, tiny flakes were stirred up, and as they settled it looked as if it were snowing.
She wondered if God liked to watch snowfalls and so shook up the earth’s globe from time to time.
The thought made her smile, but whether it had been the Almighty, the banshee, or the faeries who’d caused the Saint Stephen’s Day blizzard of 1922, that had been no matter for humour when poor Connor froze to death out in it. The storm had rocked the lives of everyone involved.
Despite the warmth in the room, she shuddered.
Since Connor’s passing, life on the O’Hanlons’ farm had followed its cycle of the seasons; the work of a farm never ceases, but there had been a subdued air about the place. A sadness. Everyone grieved for Connor in their own way.
Fidelma, the saddest, grieved most of all. For more than a year after Connor’s death, she’d barely spoken, couldn’t be bothered to bicker with her younger sister, stopped going to dances, kept away from boys. Fidelma was eighteen and strikingly lovely. She had Ma’s black eyes set under heavy lids that gave her a mysterious look. Her dark hair hung to her waist, and when she walked it swayed to the thrust of her hips.
Fidelma went to her work as a shifter at the linen mill in Clonakilty and did her share on the farm, but mostly she kept to herself. If she was free and the weather fine, she would take long, solitary walks. Where she went, nobody knew, but Maureen sensed that always her sister took memories of Connor with her.
Maureen too felt for Connor, but in her own way. She certainly missed him, his cheerfulness, his music, his love for her sister, but she didn’t have time to brood over his loss at a time when she was leaving girlhood behind, becoming a young woman. Schoolwork was getting more difficult, but she loved it. She had also discovered camogie, the women’s version of hurling, a team sport that was reckoned to be the fastest stick and ball game on earth. And it was great craic after the schoolday was over, and on weekends.
When Miss Murphy who taught Latin droned on about mens sana in corpore sano—a healthy mind in a healthy body—she had a point. You felt so alive after an hour of galloping about a field with twenty-nine other girls all carrying curved sticks, chasing a hard ball, and trying to whack it past the goalposts. You felt even more alive when your team won.
She’d been so busy with her schoolwork, her camogie, and her chores that next Christmas was on her almost before she knew it. She’d tried on that next Saint Stephen’s Day to comfort her sister but had been politely kept at arm’s length.
A couple of days later Fidelma had burst into tears and run off to her room when someone told her that Eamon MacVeigh had heard pipes in the high pasture on Stephen’s Day.
She would take no comfort and for months became even more withdrawn—until one Sunday in May, after church service and a family lunch, she rose from the table and said, “I’m going for a walk. Would you like to come, Maureen?”
Maureen blinked. She and Fidelma hadn’t gone walking together since Connor’s passing. Why was she asking her now? She looked at Fidelma and knew her sister well enough to recognise that something had changed. She hoped it was something good. Maureen glanced at Ma.
“Go on with the pair of you,” Ma said. “The fresh air will do you both a power of good, so.”
Maureen smiled as she rose. “Hang on. I’ll get my cardigan.” She rushed up and down the stairs, nearly tripping on the bottom step.
She followed her sister across the farmyard and onto the lane.
Puffball clouds drifted drowsily across a soft blue sky, and through the fields their sleepwalking shadows trailed after. Bees hummed in soft airs that were heavy with the scents of gorse, broom, heather—and cow clap.
Fidelma strode along and Maureen walked at her shoulder, glancing at her sister, willing her to speak.
As they turned onto the main road, Maureen asked, “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.” Fidelma walked away from Clonakilty in the direction of Beal na mBláth. The road curved to the west, and the sun, shining now in Maureen’s eyes, forced her to hold a hand to her forehead to cut the glare. Drystone walls shimmered in the heat.
The road was dry, and tiny puffs of dust rose from their steps. Ahead of them a pair of brimstone butterflies fluttered, partners in an aerial slip jig.
The hedges were ripe with fuchsia, flowers purple and scarlet like gypsies’ petticoats, and hawthorn blooms, white as bridal dresses. Maureen took off her cardigan and knotted the sleeves around her waist.
They rounded another bend, and Fidelma stopped.
“Fiddles . . .” It was the pet name Maureen had used in babyhood when she couldn’t say Fidelma. She only used it if she was trying to get closer to her sister. “Fiddles, that’s Connor’s place.” Another deserted and decayed cottage, she thought, just like the hundreds of abandoned cottages that have littered Ireland ever since their occupants were evicted during An Gorta Mór—the Great Hunger—the potato famine of 1845 to 1849.
Fidelma turned and looked at Maureen. “I know,” she said. “I come here a lot.” She took Maureen’s hand and squeezed it. “Don’t think I’m crazy, but . . . but, Maureen, I did love him so very much.”
She tried to understand exactly how Fidelma felt, but Maureen was fifteen. She loved her family but she’d never been in love, although she’d had a very soft spot for Connor. She tried to put herself in her sister’s place. “I know that,” she said, still not fully comprehending. “We all do.”
“When I come out here, I feel him somehow . . . somehow close.”
Maureen thought of Eamon, who’d been guided by pipe music to Connor’s corpse and who’d sworn he’d heard the uillinn pipes in the high pasture five months ago on Saint Stephen’s Day, the anniversary of Connor’s disappearance. “Have you ever actually . . . actually seen him, or maybe heard his pipes?”
“I have not.” Fidelma shook her head and sighed. “I’ve not
been as lucky as Eamon MacVeigh.” Fidelma looked hard at Maureen. “It’s just . . . just a feeling. It’s silly, I know that.” Her look was so wistful it tugged at Maureen’s heart.
For a moment she didn’t know what to say; then she ventured, “Should you not . . .” She looked down, scuffed one foot, looked up, and cocked her head to the side. “Should you not, maybe, be trying to get over him?”
Fidelma nodded. “I know I should, but it comforts me to think he’s near. Can you understand, Maureen? I did love him. I still do, so.”
And that love could well be keeping Connor nearer than Fidelma knew. Maureen hesitated. What she was going to say would hurt Fidelma, but Ma had taught her that sometimes hard things had to be said when you loved someone if you thought it would help. “I think, Fidelma . . . I think you have to let his memory fade. You must. For his sake as well as your own.”
Fidelma took a step back. “Maureen, that’s cruel.” Her voice was harsh. “I know you used to tease me about him when he was alive, but I don’t need you having a go at me now. It’s cruel.”
“It’s not meant to be, Fiddles. Honestly. I know you’re hurting, just like I did two years back . . . you remember, when Snooks died?”
“For goodness’ sake.” Fidelma tutted and shrugged her shoulders up. “Snooks was only a mangy old cat. Connor was a young man.”
Maureen swallowed. She sensed that her sister was lashing out like a wounded animal. She wasn’t going to let Fidelma hurt her, but she wasn’t going to swallow the hurtful remark either. Her voice was cool. “I was only little. I loved Snooks. He’d been there since I was born. I loved him. He was my cat.”