“Are you a witch or are you a fairy? Are you the wife of
Michael Cleary?” [1]
I turn my head, try to look out of the bedroom window and see the doctor leaving. With a dismissive snort, Michael tosses what looks like a medicine bottle in the waste paper basket. I turn away with difficulty, trying to curl up in bed and find that flitter of warmth that must exist somewhere in his house. It is such a cold day for March, so cold. I hear no one in the street as I drift off.
I look for a way in. I want to be with the invisible people. I remember having wanted that since I first heard them spoken of, while others have fled from something they believe is unholy. I feel the presence of magic, but it is not touched by Satan.
‘No Biddie, come back.’
The panic in Lizbeth’s voice startles me. I look back at her. I’m running around the wooded hills of Ballyvedla. My legs are shorter. I am eleven. I turn back to the Fairy ort in front of me. Any sign of a palisade disappeared centuries ago; now it is only a bank of earth in a circular ring. That is all that I need. I search for the opening to the otherworld. Maybe I have wandered into it already. I feel the spirits of the Tuatha De Danann. I am no longer little Biddie. I am the wise goddess Briged, the exalted one. I compose ancient poetry and heal those who worship me. I make the words of those who boast of their good fortune, turn to ashes in their mouth. I shake mountains, I …
‘Biddie,’ Lizbeth is screaming now.
I look one more time, then turn and hurry to where Lizbeth is standing, breathless and terrified, rooted to the spot. We are in the mortal world.
‘You didn’t hear the banshee scream, did you?’ She shouts, terrified maybe that I will drop dead in front of her.
‘No,’ I respond.
‘Are you mad?’ she cries breathlessly.
I wonder if I am.
He will call for me at 2:00pm. My fingers, marked with the pricks of countless needles and pins, tremble as I straighten my hat. I’m worried that I’ll stab my head with the hat-pin. I don’t want to cancel our walk. It will be a whole week before my next afternoon off. I am seventeen.
Everything is alright; there he is smiling with a small posy of flowers, which he holds out to me. I feel my heart leap in a way it has never done before.
‘Afternoon, Bridget.’
Afternoon ,Michael.’
He takes my hand and leads the way.
He chats about what our life will be, listing the wonderful plans he has. After a while he slows and his smile fades, and he looks around. He says, ‘maybe I shouldn’t crow so. I wonder if we are being watched by the invisible people of the mounds.’
I squeeze his hand, and try to quell our fear.
I awake, unrefreshed, remembering my dream. What I idiot I was when I was young. Then I look around at who has been gathered in my room and will myself to sleep again.
I stay in Ballyvedla, he takes work in Clomnel.
‘I’m doing this for us, Bridget,’ Michael says, he holds his knapsack over one shoulder, while his finger caresses my check. ‘Be a good girl for your parents.’ He gives my bottom a little tap. I cover my face with my hands, and see blurred the new gold band gleaming weakly on my left hand. But time passes and things became easier.
It finally arrives. I am twenty-four. I stare at it for ten minutes. I touch it gently, worried it will fall apart. I don’t think I have ever seen anything more beautiful. I cradle it in my arms, and then place it in the centre of the kitchen table. It is completely mine. Its name is emblazed in bright red, SINGER. I get out my work.
The hum of the needle stops the day he comes to the front door with his arms full of his belongings. ‘I’ve decided that now is the time Bridget.’ The first time I use the machine when he is in the house, Michel rushes in, a cloud on his face. He stares at the scene for a moment, then swallows and states quietly “I require peace in my home,” then turns and leaves. I will have to regulate the machine’s hours to when he’s absent.
‘What God has joined together,’ I am constantly told by my parents, as Michael places his shoes under the bed.
There is something warm near my face. I open my eyes. Pain radiates through my right arm. Someone is holding it down, hard on the bed. A stinking concoction smelling of grass and roots is in front of my nose. I can make out Mrs O’Donnell from number seven, trying to give an encouraging look. Michael takes the vessel from her and holds it even closer. The sickly, fungal smell invades completely.
‘Drink,’ he says, pushing the rim of the bowl so it crushes my lips into my clenched teeth.
I hesitate for a second but then drink. I learnt a while ago that physical
resistance is useless against Michael.
I’m delivering eggs to Mrs. Purdy’s farm, ringed by the hills of Ballyvedla and their fairy forts. I see her directing the milking, in her oversized galoshes and her dead husband’s long grey coat. She stands firmly; none of the workers question her, at least not to her face. Her pale hair is tied in a bun. Children are scared to do the deliveries saying she resembles the herald of death. However, she smiles at me as she takes the eggs, a smile of recognition maybe? I try to see myself in the same position at her age, but fail. She makes an appointment for next week when I will fit her new Sunday dress, but she has little time to chat. I realise that envy tastes bitter. On the way home I go via the hills, because it’s not the usual way, and sit in the middle of a ring of earth for a few moments. I lift my face to the sun, enjoying the silence. I hadn’t come here for years. Lisbeth had of course, told my father of my childhood visit within five minutes of our return. I had seen him angry before, I received blows
for several infractions, but that time there was little force behind it and his hand trembled, as did his voice.
‘Do you want them to take you?’ He held me by the shoulders and shook me. ‘To join them in the ring and be danced to death. To be out of reach of us, and love and God?’ My father crossed himself and murmured, ‘unholy things.’ It was said with disgust but it was also very quietly.
My father arrives with others. Michael shows them into my room and they talk about me as though I’m not there. I suppose I’m not to them, but I don’t really care. I was seen at the fairy ring by Mrs. Kennedy or one of her dozen children. I make her out now a few feet from my bed, talking yet again to Michael, in her conspiratorial tone. I close my eyes hoping that sleep will remove the rancid taste of Michael’s potion left in my mouth.
It is only February. I complete a morning gown for Mrs. O’Reilly and a party dress for Isabella Dean. I collect the payments and listen to the clink of coin in my pocket as I walk home. I enter the amounts in my business ledger with the black cover while the household ledger sits next to it between cracked red covers. The colours ended up being appropriate. Michael grumbles that I can’t keep the red ink away from our home’s expenses, but forgets the increasing instances of his sticky fingers in the money tin, or the few times that he writes things in
black ink himself. The cellar smells of the beer he received in return for some of the barrels he created to hold it. I now earn his wages threefold. I tell him it would be better if he minded home and hearth, and allowed me to continue my work. I expect the response I get, and nurse my stinging cheek with a handful of spring snow.
A few weeks before my sickness, my father says I was not acting like myself, I cannot be his Biddie. I do not listen to him; I do not listen to my husband. The neighbors tut.
‘I like to walk by myself when I make deliveries,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to make small talk with someone who will slow me down. What route I take is my own business.’
I try for the last time. ‘Michael, we are now part of the modern world, do you honestly believe that magic people are looking to steal me away?’ I may as well have been talking to the hills.
Michael’s look becomes even darker. When I was eleven I had been forced to spend the day on my knees in chapel, the stone cutting my bones and callouses growing. Now, I am no longer a child, my father has passed the responsibility on to another.
‘You will not tempt them. You will not go there again.’ I feel my fingertips’ tingling as Michael’s vice-like grip tightens on my wrist.
‘I want my wife back.’ It’s funny he never says my name. He hovers over my bed in the cold room I have returned to, yelling in my face. I am too weak to move. Every part of me aches. My stomach churns and feels bloated. I wonder if I’m with child. I want none and had thought I’d made sure to guard against it. Their clasp would keep me bound to hearth and home. Their cries would wake me from any dreams.
Has the doctor warned Michael of vermin or lice? I smell my nightgown; it has become awash with paraffin. I’m not cold anymore.
They lift me up above the fire, surrounding me, voices chanting, my father’s, Aunt Mary’s, and Cousin Lizbeth’s. The evil is to be banished.
‘Putting a changeling away will cause the human child to be returned,’ a voice says, but I’m not a child any more. I am twenty-six.
Then I hear a voice I know
‘Go back to the other realm, changeling, send my wife back to me.’
There is still enough in me to find the right spot to wound.
‘The only person who went off with the fairies was your mother Michael.’ Yet again talking back is a mistake. I cannot fight anymore. If I weep and beg forgiveness maybe…? No, what I really need is to be is seventeen again. It is useless to spend time contemplating this. I hear the banshee wailing, piercing the glass in the window pane, and I have no more time.
In 1895, in Clomnel, County Tipperary, Ireland, Michael Cleary was convicted of manslaughter after Bridget Clearly was burned to death in front of their kitchen fireplace. Four others were convicted of ‘wounding’.
[1] Irish
Children’s song https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=es&p=3466
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