Thin Air (27 page)

She followed the stream as it got younger and higher and wilder. At the place where she had drunk on her last visit, she looked up towards the crag above and saw what appeared to be a break in the rock, a shadowy entrance, a door. The longer she looked at it, the more certain she became. Up there were her answers. Up there was peace of mind.

The mossy scree was almost sheer. Brigid clung to fragile branches and braced herself with her stick as the climb became steeper and more treacherous. She stopped often to catch her breath and to gulp the sweet, mossy water; pure fuel for the fire within her.

The climb became precipitous, arduous. It took all Brigid’s attention, and she forgot about the portal she had seen. A rock moved beneath her foot and a bough snapped in her hand but her stick, her magical piece of hazel, saved her each time. Mud and moss stained her new jeans; sweat soaked into her blouse. Still she climbed and finally came to where the water broke out at the foot of the crag. She drank there, the wildest and best of all water, tasting of stone and of darkness. And then she looked up.

There was no door, no entrance into the rock. What she had seen was a shadow, an overlap, a joke. She tapped with her hazel rod as if it might change the rock’s ancient mind. She knocked harder, then struck, then beat until the rod broke in her hand and became two splintered hazel sticks, no more. Then she sat at the base of the cliff face and wept.

The Travellers had said their prayers. They had added to the offerings around the well and were about to leave when a woman came stumbling out of the woods and in among them. Her clothes were dirty, her hair tangled, her face wild and tear-stained.

The Travellers stood their ground. A calmness in them comforted Brigid. She sat on the broken wall of the church. The little group consulted among themselves, then a woman moved away from the child and the young man she was with and came to sit on the wall beside her.

‘Something has you troubled,’ she said.

Brigid’s tears began again. ‘My daughter,’ she said.

‘Did she die?’

Brigid shook her head. ‘Missing.’

The woman looked up and, with a gesture, dismissed the others who were waiting.

‘A few weeks, is it?’ she said to Brigid.

Brigid turned to her, a spark of hope in her eyes.

‘I can see a lot, Mrs, but you must cross my palm, and you must swear not to repeat a word, as God is your witness.’

‘As God is my witness,’ said Brigid.

The woman’s hand was open. Brigid’s heart lurched. She did not carry money with her in the mountains, nor food, either. They seemed to weigh too much up there. She felt in her pockets and found, to her surprise, the gold pin that she had picked up near the hare’s bolt hole. She put it on the open palm.

The woman nodded. ‘Was your daughter riding a horse?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Brigid.

‘I see him now,’ said the woman. ‘A grand cob, a speckled cob.’

‘Yes!’ Brigid’s eyes were bright with hope but the woman shook her head.

‘’Tisn’t good, Mrs,’ she said. ‘’Tisn’t good at all. You won’t see her no more.’

‘Is she dead?’

‘She is, Mrs. Looking down on the two of us now.’

The woman watched as the passionate light died in Brigid’s eyes and was replaced by sadness and certainty.

‘She didn’t suffer, Mrs, and she isn’t suffering no more. It’s us who suffer, who get left behind. I lost two of them myself.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘I did, sure. In a fire, it was. A long time ago. But you have to let her go, Mrs. Take some thing that was belonging to her and bury it and say a prayer. Have you other children?’

‘I have. Two. Three. One’s abroad.’

‘They need you, Mrs. Your dead daughter doesn’t. Go home now, straight away.’

Brigid stood. ‘How?’ she said.

‘’Tisn’t told to me,’ said the woman. ‘But it’s finished, now. Go home.’ The woman gestured, almost angrily. Brigid turned and set off, over the wall and through the bushes. The place was strange to her now, wild and alien. She had no idea what she was doing there.

When she was gone, the Traveller woman inspected the pin in her hand for a long, long time. Eventually she kissed it, then touched it to her forehead, then tossed it into the ruined well. The stream felt it, found a bed for it, and began the long, slow process of covering it over with silt.

Aine met her mother at the top of the boirin and raced down on the bicycle ahead of her. Gerard was in the kitchen, lighting up the range.

‘Dad!’ Aine shouted, and her voice seemed to have more than the usual excitement in it. ‘Mam’s back.’

In the early morning, Brigid got up and slipped down to the meadow beside the lake. She brought a small shovel and the little pink wrist band that the hospital had put on Martina when she was born. There had been four of them in the drawer in her bedroom. Now there were three.

No one was about as she dug a hole that was comfortably deep, and dropped the little strap into it, and replaced the rich, brown earth. But the cattle that had come down from the winterage stood in an inquisitive line like mourners, and from the orchard the Tinkers’ cob looked on and kept his secret to himself.

And on the water, a single swan watched everything, then drifted slowly away.

MY THANKS TO THE
Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Annaghmakerrig, to the Ennistymon Library, and to Jane Tottenham, all of whom have kindly helped me by providing that essential commodity; work space.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1999 by Kate Thompson

cover design by Michel Vrana

978-1-4804-2418-0

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

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