Immaculate Heart (23 page)

“What did you do?” I asked. “I mean … how did you cope?”

Tess took a long drink of water before she answered me. “I suppose I had to pretend I didn't see it—didn't see what would happen to each of them in the future, what their lives would become. You can't grow into a loving and purposeful member of society in a place like that. You just can't. Nobody could.

“There was one wee lad,” she said softly. “Daniel. He was the only child I found on the front steps—it was usually the housekeeper who found them first thing in the morning. I couldn't sleep that night, the night Daniel came to us. I was sitting by the window just looking down over the street as the moon went down. I saw a woman hurrying up with something in her arms, and I knew what she was about. She was gone before I got to the door, and there was Daniel tucked inside a shipping crate. They let me name him.”

“Didn't it get cold at night?” I asked. “Even in Africa. I mean, didn't the mothers ever knock?”

Tess shook her head. “I imagine most of them waited until just before sunrise, the way Daniel's mother did that night. They'd be bundled up tight and out there no more than an hour. They were warm enough to live.

“Something happened to me that morning, as I took Daniel into my arms. He looked up at me with these dark, fathomless eyes, and it felt like how, in a dream, you might meet a loved one with a stranger's face but all along you know who it is underneath. I don't know, maybe that was why I thought I could reach him. It tore at my heart every time I saw him in the crib with the others.” She laid a pale hand on her chest, as if she meant it literally. “It always tore at me, but with Daniel it was even harder. I made sure I was always the one to feed him, but it wasn't enough. I wanted to lie down with him to sleep—to soothe him the way I'd been soothed as a baby—but there wasn't room apart from my own bed in the volunteers' dormitory. I suppose I knew by that point that I wouldn't be a mother myself, but I felt that instinct all the same, the instinct to nurture.”

“Ah, Tess,” Paudie said softly, so as not to interrupt her. “You've a heart of gold.”

She did cut herself off, though, giving him that look I was beginning to know all too well—the look that said
I'm not who you think.
“One afternoon,” she continued, “I brought him into the dorm and when the director came in and found us, she was very angry with me. She didn't see what I was trying to do, she didn't care enough to see it, and it drove me mad.” Tess closed her eyes as if to protect herself from the memory. “She'd a thankless job all right, but she treated it like a license to drink.” She opened her eyes and sighed as she reached for her water glass. “But they weren't all like that, in fairness.”

“Is that when you left?”

“Aye,” she said. “Only it wasn't by choice. They asked me to leave.” She cast a glance at Paudie, and he reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “Not many people know about that.”

“Just because of what happened with Daniel?” I asked.

She nodded. “I'm not ashamed of it, mind. I'd do it again if I could. It's just easier not to explain the whole thing.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Everything's for the best,” Leo said, and excused himself for a cigarette.

“Aye,” Paudie sighed as he inched his way out of the booth. “It's only we can't see it, for all our hopes.”

“Paudie, wait.” I drew out a twenty-euro bill, and he accepted it with a smile of thanks.

Tess picked something up off the table and looked it over before handing it to me.
Save a dozen souls in the time it takes to boil an egg.
“Looks like you knew about the holy souls after all,” she said.

I looked at the text on the card as if I'd never seen it before. “I didn't realize that's what it meant.”

“Let me guess. You bought it from Mag O'Grady, just for novelty's sake?”

It's easy for a person to scoff at something when they haven't taken the time to understand it.
“Touché,” I replied, and tucked the card back in my wallet.

“If you say that prayer sometimes … whenever you think of it…”

“Yeah?”

“It
will
help,” she said.

She meant Mallory, but I couldn't think or talk about Mallory any more tonight. We looked at our hands, the table, the crowd at the bar. Neither of us wanted to go back to talking about dirty forgotten children.
What happened when you went up to the hill on your own?
I wanted to ask her.
Do you know some people think the apparition wasn't Mary at all?

Then Tess turned to me and said, “Has anyone told you about the fairies?”

This swerve in the conversation left me stumped. “Fairies? Like folklore, you mean?”

Tess gave me a radiant smile, even more remarkable given what she'd been through over the past forty-eight hours. Her eyes glittered, and for a second she reminded me of Síle. “You can call it folklore, if you like,” she said.

I was going to say something about a belief in fairies maybe being incompatible with Catholicism, but I thought better of it. If I'd learned anything over the past week, it was that the Irish had their own brand of logic.

“You never heard any of the old rules?” she was asking. “That you should never speak to them, or eat their food or drink their wine, or you'd be lost to our world forever?”

“Nope.”

“None of the old stories? Not even from your gran?”

“My grandmother isn't much of a storyteller,” I said. “Not like Leo. She's very practical.”

“I wasn't aware of the impracticality of storytelling,” she replied dryly.

“You know what I mean.” I finished my pint and sat back with a sigh. “So what made you think of the fairies?”

“Oh, I don't know. I suppose there's been a certain feeling of unreality to life lately. It's strange to be here with you like this.” She traced a finger around the condensation left on the table by my pint glass, and I hoped she wasn't thinking of Streedagh. “I couldn't tell you the last time I was inside Napper Tandy's. I may have been a teenager.”

“Tell me your favorite story about the fairies,” I said.

“I'd have to think on that, now.” She bit her lip in a manner I found appealing. “There are so many of them.”

“Pick one,” I said. “Whichever comes to mind first.”

Tess took a breath. “All right. I have it. Now, there was a tragic series of episodes in our history among the ordinary people, who believed that sometimes the fairies might steal away a newborn child and leave a changeling in its place. The changeling would howl and grimace, taking no nourishment at the breast of the woman meant to be its mother. 'Twas plain, or at least the people thought so, that the real babe had been taken away. There were some who believed that if they cast the changeling into the fire, the fairy child would vanish and the true child would reappear in its cradle, though who knows how many mothers and fathers steeled themselves for the deed. We know it happened more than once. It must have.” As Tess spoke, I marveled at the change in her demeanor. Storytelling had given her new energy. “On other occasions, the parents might carry the changeling out into the night, up to some dark and boggy place in the lee of a fairy mound, and leave him there for the fairies to reclaim.”

I waited a beat before saying, “That's some story.”

“That wasn't the story. Sure, I was only givin' you a bit of background.” Tess smiled. “You wonder, don't you, what happened to the child left on the hillside in the wind and rain?”

Paudie came back with the pints. “It died,” I said, “and if the parents ever went back they'd've found the bones.”

“Ah, but what if it didn't?”

“What if there really were fairies?” She nodded, and I said, “But there aren't. The babies died of exposure, just like they would've died of third-degree burns.”

Leo came in, stinking of smoke, and Paudie made more room for him in the booth. I watched Leo look tenderly upon his fresh pint as he brought it to his lips—as if it were the face of a woman he'd loved all his life, his first drink instead of his sixth.

“It won't do to think on it too literally,” Tess was saying, which brought to mind Síle and our talk of happy endings. “When you're listening to a story, any story a'tall, you've got to believe in it with all you've got as it's being told, or else there's little pleasure to be found in it.”

I took my first drink and licked the head off my lip. “Okay,” I said. “I'll stop butting in. Continue.”

Once more Tess settled herself into a posture for storytelling. “Now, there once was a young woman in the west of Ireland who had the dreadful ill luck to discover a changeling in the cradle one gloomy morning. The sweet rosy face and twinklin' blue eyes of her baby boy were gone, and in their place a gaze blacker than coal and the scowl of a man who'd lived twice as long and twice as hard as he was meant to. The poor woman had gone through all the usual charms to protect her firstborn, as the mothers of her parish used to do. But there was no human magic strong enough to keep the fairies away from her wee boy, and now he was gone from her forever.

“She called her husband in from the fields, and together they decided what they must do. That night they walked five miles to the nearest
Shee—
the fairy mound, wreathed in whitethorn trees—and they left the changeling on a bed of sedge. From the first breath of dawn to the time they laid it down in the heather, the thing had not ceased to wail for an instant, and even as they left it miles behind them, they could still hear the echoes of its cries in the whistlin' wind of the night. In the silent cottage, they climbed into their bed, weary and heartbroken.”

Leo and Paudie were listening intently. “She's a beautiful storyteller, so she is,” Leo whispered. Paudie looked as proud as if she were his own child instead of his brother's.

“For a year or more, the couple mourned their loss,” Tess was saying, “and it was often whispered of in the village pub. In time, though, they had another child, and another, and another until there were six altogether, and as the years passed, the couple thanked God the fairies left them well enough alone. The loss of their firstborn still weighed like a stone on their hearts, but most days they managed to forget, so that the dull ache seemed to have no source that they could tell of.

“Each of their children grew tall and strong, and one after another, it came time for them to go out into the wider world to seek their fortunes. The eldest boy promised to return and care for the family acre when the time came, but until then, the man and the woman were as they'd been at the beginning: just the two of them, and the quiet hope between them. In this way the years passed, their joints stiffened and their hair lost all color, until one morning the woman awoke to find her husband lying too still beside her.

“The children could not come home again to share in the loss. They'd lives of their own now, in Dublin and abroad. One day her eldest son would return to till his father's land as he'd promised, but in the meantime, his mother rose and toiled and cooked and ate and slept alone—as no one is ever meant to.”

This was an odd thing to say coming from a nun, and I looked at her closely. Tess was so wrapped up in her story that she never paused to consider what she'd said, how the truth she'd just told reflected on her own life.

“It seemed to her that all the comfort had gone out of her snug little house,” she went on, “with her husband lyin' cold in the ground, and the widow began to pray that her eldest would return to her of his own choice, and live with her always.

“One day not long after, as afternoon settled into evening, the widow stood on the threshold and caught sight of a figure walking across the fields towards her cottage. Her heart leapt with joy, for who could it be but her eldest son come home to grant her wish at last?

“But as the figure drew closer, a sense of confusion settled upon her, for he did not carry himself in the way she knew, and his shirt caught the light as if the linen were woven through with silver. Now he was at the edge of her own land, holding up a hand to greet her, and yet this young man was not, could not be, her eldest son.

“At last the man reached the edge of the farmyard. He stopped at the gate and took off his hat. The stranger said, ‘Do you know me, Mother?'

“And the woman gazed up at him, her confusion giving way to fear. The sun was behind him, so that his face was cast in shadow, and his skin seemed to glow with the quiet radiance of the full moon. She began to understand.

“He spoke again, and his speech was unlike any she had heard before: ‘I am hungry from the journey, Mother, and I smell something simmering on the fire. What have you made for supper?'

“The widow could not bring herself to speak; it was all she could do to lift a hand and invite him inside. He bent his head so that he might enter the little cottage where he was born, and, leaving his boots at the door as his father used to do—though there wasn't a speck of mud upon them—he took a seat at the table laid for one.

“With trembling fingers, the woman ladled out the fragrant stew. She set the bowl before him on the table fashioned by the capable hands of his dead father, and once she'd sat down beside him, the young man bent his head and clasped his hands to utter a prayer, if prayer it was, for the words he used belonged to no human language.

“Then, with a grateful glance at her, he began to eat, and the way he did this too was fearsome and wonderful to her. Each spoonful delighted him, each bite of meat or potato brought another smile to his lips. There was a queerness to his every movement, too, as if the fairies had taught him a different set of manners. Even so, the widow once caught a glimpse of her husband inside the face of her strange guest, and such a terrible thrill it gave her.