C. E. Murphy - No Dominion - A Garrison Report

“All that’s in me heart now is getting me auldest niece off this hill alive,” Sheila said cheerfully. “Ask me again on another day and perhaps I’ll tell another tale. Now I’e a plaster for ye when we get back to town, but ye mustn’t take it off for three days.”

“You always say that, Auntie.”

“And I always mean it, and I trust ye’s always listen.” Auntie Sheila gave Caitríona a green-eyed glare that made her laugh and squirm at the same time, for as often as the cousins listened, they also didn’t. No one could stop themselves, not with what they called Auntie Sheila’s magic plasters. Auntie Sheila herself called them Band-Aids sometimes, because she’d lived in America for a time and that was the American word for plasters. Cat’s youngest brother was certain the magic of Auntie’s plasters was that they came from America, where everything was better, and so of course no matter how soon a lad took the plaster off the wound beneath was healed.

That, of all things, that was the moment that came back to Caitríona over and over as she stood at her auntie’s graveside. None of the other times, none of the hunting thigh-deep through mucky bogs for ancient bodies whose spirits Auntie Sheila said needed laying to rest, not the hundred times Cat had asked again what lay inside Sheila’s heart, not the digging for herbs or the winding of holly and hawthorn together for protective boughs to hang above a door. Those things did come back to her, sure and so, but it was the magic plasters that she couldn’t stop thinking of. She had plasters in her purse now, ones she always carried so she would always think of Auntie Shelia.

And thinking of those plasters was safer than thinking about the tall lean American woman who was Auntie Sheila’s daughter, and who had no tears in her eyes as she stood alone at the grave, for all that the whole family stood together. Joanne Walker still remained apart, her jaw set in a way that reminded Caitríona of Auntie Sheila, though they didn’t look so much alike as all that. Cousin Joanne wore her own black hair short and had shoulders like a man, broad and strong in the black knit turtleneck that fell over faded blue jeans. She wore shoes like Auntie Sheila had favored, heavy boots for walking in, and at her throat glimmered the silver necklace Auntie Sheila had always worn.

Caitríona wanted nothing more on the earth than to ask Joanne the story of Auntie Sheila and himself , the man not one of them even knew the name of. Joanne’s father, who’d stolen Auntie Sheila’s heart and never given it back. Cat was the oldest of the Irish cousins and only seventeen, so she had no memory of Auntie Sheila’s pregnancy. It was something the sisters barely spoke of, and only when they were certain Sheila was nowhere within hearing. She’d fallen in love, they said, and come back to Ireland to bear a child when a baby out of wedlock was still a shocking and shameful thing. She’d shown not a whit of shame, they said, but before the child was born something happened, and not one of them knew what. Sheila had grown reserved and cool, given no sign of joy when her daughter was born, and in the dead of night six months later she had left Westport for America, only to return days later with no babe in arms. She’d said not a word about it, either, save that Siobhán was with her father now, and that was the end of it.

And now Siobhán, who called herself Joanne, was here, because Sheila had announced months ago that she was dying, and she’d say no more about that than Joanne’s father. She called Joanne to her and they’d disappeared together, touring Europe, Caitríona’s mother said. Learning to know one another before it was too late, though from the look of it they’d not known each other well enough for Joanne Walker to weep over her own mother’s death.

The whole of them, all the clan who were MacNamarras once and O’Reillys and Curleys and Byrnes and some few MacNamarras still, they stood together as one, left behind by the American cousin who turned and walked away with the first fistful of dirt thrown onto the coffin, and that was that, so. The end of Joanne Walker as much as the end of Sheila MacNamarra, and the one left a hole because it left them with nothing at all of the other.

And sure, as Cat’s da would say, and sure if Caitríona wasn’t still thinking of magic plasters when she reeled off the train early on a Monday after the St Patrick’s craic in Dublin town, and sure if those thoughts didn’t bring her to visit Sheila’s grave first, before going to the Reek herself, as she’d done a dozen times since her aunt’s death.

And sure and if she didn’t pass Joanne Walker on the way, and another woman, calling herself Maeve, who was the tallest thing Caitríona had ever laid eyes on, and sure and if by the end of the maddest three days any mortal had ever known, if Caitríona didn’t know then that her aunt had been the Irish Mage, and that she, Caitríona O’Reilly, the oldest niece of the MacNamarra clan, was meant to take up that mantle now.

Perfect, Caitríona O’Reilly thought, and because Joanne was on her mind, she then heard the word echoed as Joanne would have heard it: pair-fect . And what, Joanne would have wanted to know, was a Pair Fect? Maybe it was two people who were fecked, as if fect might be the past tense of fecked , which was already the past tense of feck , the Irish way of saying a word that puritanical American television always bleeped out. Unless it was an Irishman saying it, because feck slipped by their censors when the more Anglicized version of the word wouldn’t.

Americans and Irish. Separated by a common language. Caitríona put her fingertips against the glass case encompassing the Clonycavan Man, one of the most perfectly conserved bog men to be found in Ireland. His fragile thin skin, sagging over shriveled muscles, his bones, his teeth, they were all stained rich mahogany brown from the ancient peat they’d nested in. Pickled, they were: bog acid pickled the creatures caught in it, and she’d read about each and every circumstance that improved the chances of a body being preserved instead of disintegrating. They were many, and in Ireland, they were easy to come by. Nearly sixty bog men had been found over the years, and that, Caitríona reckoned, was just the ones they’d found . Whole civilizations might be buried in the peat, if only they dug deep enough.

So it wasn’t only herbs Auntie Sheila had been digging for in the bogs. What could be worse than being murdered and thrown into the bogs but to lie in rest for centuries before being dug up by a rumbling peat harvester with teeth so vicious that no one could be sure if the poor mummy had been cut in half before death, or if his lower half had been severed and chewed up by the peat cutter. And the Clonycavan Man, he was one of the lucky ones. He’d only been murdered, his head smashed in and so well-preserved there were still bits of brain inside his perfectly preserved skull, and they knew what his last meals had been as well. And he’d been a bit of a dandy as well, with imported hair gel in the straggly hair that remained on his head. Caitríona hoped he’d died before being chopped in half, but she could feel the poor creature’s spirit still trapped within his body, the agony of his death never leaving him.

Auntie Sheila had searched out lost people like these in the bogs, and laid their spirits to rest. But these ones, the bog men brought to the museum on Kildare Street, they had been separated from their place of death before Sheila had found them, and their spirits cried and clawed at their glass coffins, a torture the anthropologists could never study. It was the memory of bog-tromping, and the thought of these glass-encased bog-men, that had brought Caitríona to Dublin at all.