Гарднер Дозуа - Mermaids!

Marna dived. She curved into the water beside the nearest whale, her arm caressing it as she came up, her flesh and the whale's looking like one easy body, then she held to the gunwale and kissed me, lips salt and cool and eyes wild as a hawk's and sad as Time. "Good-bye. If you fools of men would accept and keep what you have, it would be enough!" Her hair was swept back. I could see the gill on that side of her throat, a pale rose color, still pulsing as it had done underwater.

Every part of me wanted to dive with her. But she was gone again so quick I couldn't follow. Sinking with bubbles trailing her and her legs moving like a single fin, then getting small as the whales went down with her. All the whales behind her made one deep sweep as if led by her command. Then they were gone from that place and from all land.

After that I had to hang to a thwart to keep from going over while the blue-cold steel skin of the whaler passed so close the wash came creaming and tumbling into the dory and tried to suck me with it. Then I was half swamped and bailing with an old bucket. Somebody, one of the friendly island sportsmen—I was gagging too much to tell who—was hauling me into another dory then and cussing me for fifty kinds of fool. Telling me the Goddamned whales were gone and saying maybe I'd been the one to spook them. I didn't care much if he threw me overboard. It seemed kind of silly to still be breathing.

But maybe, I told myself afterward when I got calmer, I ought to stay around to do something about those shells she'd left behind.

There were a good many chancy stories about that morning. Ed Bigbee stayed so plagued and mad he wouldn't talk to me—kind of a wonderful relief—for two months, not until he knocked a hole in his living room floor trying to shoot a deer from his window and needed a good reasonable repairman to carpenter it. There were a lot of tales about whales having naturally vengeful natures, some saying they'd seen the lead mammal swallow the girl. I made "ee-yah" noises to that, it being the safest sort of sound to make around foolishness.

When all the to-do was dead and it was cold winter, with people dragging out the family pung for a turn around the back roads, and ice on Cherry Pond, I went down to the P.O. to call on Miss Orvington, who's held the postmistressing job forever, and asked her about a box a woman named Marna might've taken out some time back.

Miss Orvington fiddled with her stacks of paper—she has records of when Vice President Dawes, who sort of assisted Coolidge, summered here and took a box in the twenties—and came up with a slip for paid box rent. Signed, Marna something. Paid in U.S. cash. So I put a few more questions, knowing Miss Orvington's feeling for detail, and got out of her that Marna had sent boxes to this shop in Boston, and received checks from them for the contents of same. And I got from Miss Orvington the adjacent news that Marna—"same woman, a dress you wouldn't give an orphans' rummage sale"—had sent money orders to the Save the Sea Mammals Society, in Delaware. Then I plodded home and made up a seaweed-packed box of the shells and sent them along to Boston, and when I got their check sent it along to the Society.

I felt better after, but only a little. Still had the megrims, which hard work doesn't cure any more than not working does, and didn't feel kindly disposed to anybody. The straphangers came down in force in the summer, like blackflies with spending money. We all lived through that, and when they were gone counted our blessings and their money. Then the good days came. October with that autumn-nut kindness, a time of opening up, of hoping.

I was leaning on the rocks in the evening looking across to the Bradford Point light when Bailee Bigbee came up behind and leaned into my pipe smoke. He said. "The whales come back, but they didn't linger. Me and Papa was trawling last night and seen 'em. Gone now though. Swam off most while we watched."

"Shows their basic common sense," I said.

"That ain't all. Somebody left a package on your shack doorstep."

I thought with the way luck had run all year it would be a stack of summonses for city jury duty and such. But it wasn't. When I opened the basket and peeled back the blue cover, here was this spit-and-image of her, with a dash of me around the nose. About three months old and a hale specimen. Bawling his head off, but when I took him over to Molly's she knew what to do and instructed me in the essentials, and warmed up milk and so forth.

Time being, I keep these knitted hats snugged tight around his head. And he plays with the handsome exotic shell he brought with him—it was lying on his naked chest when I first saw him—but he has plenty of other toys for when he outgrows it. His hair's starting to come out fine, thick as a raccoon's. When it's long enough it will cover the gills, and then we'll throw away the hats. The gills are interesting but nothing you could explain to a preacher at baptizing time.

Merman Malifee's not a bad name. It has a kind of quiet ring to it.

The Irish version of the mermaid is the Merrow. Female Merrows are usually portrayed as intoxicatingly beautiful, but the male Merrows are startlingly ugly, with, in W. B. Yeats's words, "green teeth, green hair, pig's eyes, and red noses." In spite of their ugliness, though, Merrow-men are generally jovial and affable, and, in the great Irish tradition, like nothing better than to swap songs and stories over a tasty bite of dinner and a good shellful of brandy.

In the wry and lively story that follows, we meet the venerable Merrow Coomara, who, it turns out, keeps spirits even more precious than brandy in his fine, dry cellars on the bottom of the sea.. ..

Born in Cork in 1798, folklorist T. Crofton Croker traveled throughout Ireland in the early nineteenth century to collect the tall tales and legends of the country people at first hand. They were published in 1825 in his Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, one of the cornerstone books of Irish folklore.

JACK DOGHERTY LIVED ON THE COAST OF THE COUNTY CLARE. Jack was a fisherman, as his father and grandfather before him had been. Like them, too, he lived all alone (but for the wife), and just in the same spot. People used to wonder why the Dogherty family were so fond of that wild situation, so far away from all human kind, and in the midst of huge shattered rocks, with nothing but the wide ocean to look upon. But they had their own good reasons for it.

The place was just the only spot on that part of the coast where anybody could well live. There was a neat little creek, where a boat might lie as snug as a puffin in her nest, and out from this creek a ledge of sunken rocks ran into the sea. Now when the Atlantic, according to custom, was raging with a storm, and a good westerly wind was blowing strong on the coast, many a richly-laden ship went to pieces on these rocks; and then the fine bales of cotton and tobacco, and such like things, and the pipes of wine and the puncheons of rum, and the casks of brandy, and the kegs of Hollands that used to come ashore! Dunbeg Bay was just like a little estate to the Doghertys.

Not but they were kind and humane to a distressed sailor, if ever one had the good luck to get to land; and many a time indeed did Jack put out in his little corrahg (which, though not quite equal to honest Andrew Hennessy's canvas life-boat would breast the billows like any gannet), to lend a hand towards bringing off the crew from a wreck. But when the ship had gone to pieces, and the crew were all lost, who would blame Jack for picking up all he could find?

"And who is the worse of it?" said he. "For as to the king, God bless him! everybody knows he's rich enough already without getting what's floating in the sea."