Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (41 page)

A straggling, weather-beaten stone wall banded the property and was all but smothered in rambling rose canes and dark, gloss-green ivy. In the base of the hollow sat an old neglected farmhouse. The roof was partially caved in, the thatch wearing a frowsy look like a woman with a bad permanent. The walls still stood straight, though all the windows were cracked or shattered. The chimney, which canted up the western wall of the house, was a crumbling ruin, sprouting luminous green ferns from its every crack.

Casey took Pamela’s hand and led her down the steps with an air of barely suppressed excitement. Crocuses grew in golden abundance in the sunken ground, a cheery flash amongst the delicately mottled lichens.

She heard a sound like that of someone whispering and then laughing softly to themself.

“What’s that noise?” she asked, wondering how far they were in actual distance from civilization. Metaphysically speaking it seemed thousands of miles and at least as many years.

“’Tis a brook that cuts across the back corner of the property, it’s not very wide,” Casey gestured slightly more than a shoulder’s width, “but it’s a good-natured bit of water.”

Pamela, belatedly, began to suspect there was more to this walk than stretching the legs. “So you’ve been here before?”

“Aye,” he replied, “a time or two, out ramblin’ about an’ stumbled across the place. Literally, the first time, was dark an’ I fell over the stones there.” He nodded toward the crumbled foundation of an ancient outbuilding. He tugged her hand. “What I want to show ye is over this way, Jewel.”

He led her down an overgrown path, a barely discernible thread in the tall grass, that was knotted with tree roots cracking the skein of the soil. The path faded into a heavy carpet of needles, springy and sharp-scented beneath their feet. The undergrowth was sparse here, the evergreen branches overhead like softly up-tilted umbrellas.

“Here,” Casey said, halting in front of a huge tree, “is what I wanted to show ye.”

In front of her stood a tree that soared above the others, its bottom-most branches far above the tops of the surrounding trees. “What in heavens name is that?” Pamela asked, craning her head back as far as it would go.

“A sequoia,” Casey answered, the sound of a discoverer’s triumph in his words.

“A sequoia? Isn’t that impossible?” Above her, eighty feet high, stretched the proof of his words though.

“Well that’s what I thought too,” Casey said, one hand running down the rough bark of the tree. “So I asked Dacy’s brother-in-law, who belongs to the Belfast Naturalist Society, to come out an’ have a look. He’d a theory that seems to make it very possible. Ye see Jewel, Belfast is a city on stilts, which is something I did know. It’s also been at a much higher elevation in years gone past, an’ been swamped by the sea as well. About thirty feet down there’s a layer of peat bog that shows where the level of the land once lay. There would have been forests of Scotch pine, alders, willows an’ hazel with Finn MacCool’s red deer roamin’ through the thickets.” He made a broad sweeping gesture with his hand as though the ancient landscape were entirely visible around them.

“When the last ice age retreated it cleared the Lagan valley, but choked off the Lough, so the entire area of Belfast would have been a huge lake. It would have been there for a good long time, with streams feedin’ layers of sediment into it, mostly red sand or red clay, which is where Belfast gets its penchant for red brick buildins’ I suppose. Then the land began to sink an’ all of what’s the city today was undersea an’ for thousands of years layers of sleech—‘tis a fine blue clay—built up. The blue clay is an adequate foundation for smaller buildins’ but when they started to put up larger ones they had to provide a good solid underpinnin’ an’ so they drove huge balks of timber down through the softer layers ‘til they hit the red sands or harder clay.”

A suspicion was forming in Pamela’s mind as Casey waxed in his enthusiasm for Belfast’s geography, a subject for which he’d never before revealed a great passion. He was pointing to a drop in the land just beyond the tree now, where the earth had been sheared off some time in the past.

‘If ye look at the lay of the land, ye’ll note that there’s jagged escarpments here an’ there at the side of a broad, level plain. That would have been where the ancient seas hit the shore an’ left their mark. So if ye’d a bit of land that was high enough, it’s possible it would have escaped the floodin’. Effectively ye’d be standin’ on a wee bit of ground that was thousands of years older than what surrounded it even at a distance of a few feet. An’ the soil might be of a different consistency altogether, bein’ that sequoias prefer well-drained areas.”

“So you’re saying this tree has been here for thousands of years?”

“Well either that or some intrepid Californian dropped a seed out of his pocket several hundred years ago, which seems a little more far-fetched than my original thesis.”

He took her hand and led her to the low stone wall. They sat on the crumbling stone, the damp of the moss instantly penetrating their clothing. Casey, however, warming to his subject, seemed oblivious to the elements.

“There’s a strip of serpentine that shows up in the mountains of Scotland an’ then again in Ireland, an’ then picks up on the other side of the Atlantic in Newfoundland before runnin’ a strip down the eastern seaboard into the Appalachians. There’s a lot of controversy about the original landmass before the continents broke apart, but it makes sense in a romantic sort of a way, don’t ye think? That Ireland was part of what’s now the eastern North American coastline. Which would certainly explain why the Irish fled there like ‘twas the Hibernian version of Zion.”

“Either that or it was the first place the boat docked,” she said dryly.

“Ah, have ye no romance in yer soul, Jewel? Sometimes I have serious doubts about yer Irish blood. I think that Yankee practicality takes a high hand with it at times. Then ye give me a severe tongue lashin’ an’ I’ve no doubt that yer descended from the wild men that used to roam these hills.”

“You’re waxing rather romantic yourself tonight.”

“Aye,” a wistful note had crept into his voice. “’Tis this wee bit of land that does it. Stirs somethin’ in me that’s purely sentimental, I’ll admit. First night I came here it made me think of this man, Robert Praeger, who wrote a book called
The Way That I Went
, many years ago. He was a field botanist who’d spent a lifetime wanderin’ the hills an’ bogs, pokin’ into the burial mounds, swimmin’ in flooded caverns an’ diggin’ up fossils. It seemed a grand life. I wanted to do the same, just wander the ground for all my days. I could imagine him, the first time I saw this place, walkin’ through, stoppin’ for a pipe by the old chimney. It was almost as if I could see traces of a life I might have lived, here.”

Pamela felt slightly nonplussed, Casey was generally very practical when it came to jobs, taking up whatever was to hand. He’d never expressed any unfulfilled dreams in this vein before. And yet land was his natural element, just as water was hers. It satisfied something primitive in him, that needed no expression other than the pure joy of having a stretch of it to himself.

“Da’ read Praeger’s book to us when I was about eight years old,” Casey continued, “an’ I remember becomin’ obsessed by the fanciful notion the man had of a prehistoric Belfast under the foundations of the present one. That there would be primitive forests down there, with Neolithic men runnin’ through them in skins. I thought it’d be upside down though, a mirror image to the one I lived in, with the roots of their trees minglin’ with the roots of our own, an’ that if ye could find a wee hollow space by the roots of such a tree ye’d be able to wiggle through into this other world.”

He laughed. “Well I scared myself half witless, thinkin’ somethin’ truly awful was goin’ to creep up past those roots an’ come straight for me. I think my brain must have mixed a few stories together an’ then couldn’t separate fact from fiction. My Granny Murphy used to tell us terrible tales about these wee red men called the Fir Deargs, an’ then Da’ had told us about the Firbolgs, which as ye know were the dark people that populated Ireland before the Celts came. Somehow I’d mixed the two together an’ come up with a nasty brew.”

“Red leprechauns?” She raised an eyebrow, keeping a firm grip on her bottom lip with her teeth.

“Aye,” Casey responded, looking blackly at her, “it may sound amusin’ but I assure ye it was anything but to an eight-year-old. An’ they weren’t leprechauns,” he added with some dignity, “but only cousins.”

“Leprechaun cousins?” Her lips were twitching uncontrollably.

“Aye, leprechauns have all sorts of relations—piskies, brownies, coblynaus, redcaps, boggarts an’ the like.”

“Boggarts?”

“Aye,” he said, in the tone of a reasonable man, “they’re brownies gone bad.”

She took a deep breath through her nose, knowing that to laugh would insult him. For a man whose pragmatism, at times, bordered on hardness, superstition seemed an inexplicable anomaly. Yet, she’d seen him eye small hummocks of earth with a deeply suspicious eye. And she knew he never walked the hills at night without his St. Christopher’s medal tucked between chest and shirt.

“Did ye not have strange fears yerself as a child?”

“UFOs,” she said.

“UFOs? Where’d ye get such a notion?”

“I read an article in a magazine that interviewed people who swore they’d been kidnapped by aliens and tortured in all sorts of unspeakable ways. I remember hardly being able to breathe while I read it, yet I couldn’t put it down. I was struck by this absolute conviction that aliens were coming for me and I’d lay in bed at night rigid, waiting for them to show up. It was awful. My father had a terrible time getting me to sleep for months afterwards.”

“Ye must have been a sweet little thing, all green eyes an’ black curls.”

She snorted. “Hardly, I’d a terrible temper, got in fights with the neighborhood boys all the time.”

“Had a quarrelsome tongue, did ye?”

“Fist fights,” she said with some dignity.

“Fist fights?”

“Oh yes, defender of the small and weak, friend to the underdog, that was me.”

He cocked his head, perused her face for a moment, and then nodded as if he’d found the answer to a question that had been puzzling him for months.

“What?” she asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously at him.

“It’s just that I can imagine it. I’ve seen it myself, haven’t I? Ye’ve a righteous anger about ye to be certain. Ye’ll not compromise on a point if ye really believe it, an’ I’ve reason to know the truth of it.”

She eyed him shrewdly, taking in the air of barely contained excitement, and the way he looked about, as if this ramshackle little hollow were his own personal Camelot. Suspicion began to turn to misgiving. He jumped down off the wall and turned, placing his hands on the wall on either side of her.

“Casey—” she began, but he cut her off, voice eager, but tender with feeling.

“Do ye ever think of it? There we were an ocean apart, havin’ our own experiences, dreams an’ fears, not aware of the existence of the other an’ yet every decision, every fork in our separate paths was bringin’ us closer together. The first time I saw ye,” his voice was very low, and she could feel the touch of his eyes, soft on her face in the deepening twilight, “I felt as if all that time I’d been waitin’ for somethin’ only I didn’t know it until I saw yer face. An’ that,” he swallowed as if suddenly nervous, “is how I felt when I saw this wee bit of land, an’ the tree that had survived eons of time. It was as though I’d come home, and this place had simply been waitin’ for us to find it.”

“You want to buy this?” she asked, aware suddenly of the emerald gloom that had descended into the hollow.

“Aye, well—” he swallowed again, an odd half-smile playing about his lips, “as a matter of fact I
have
bought it.”

“What?!”

“Now Jewel,” he began in a wheedling tone, hands out in a supplicating gesture that was designed to sooth.

“You can save the sweet talk, you silver-tongued Hibernian bastard,” she said, hands on hips. “And explain to me how long you’ve been up to this.”

He attempted a weak grin. “I’m feelin’ a real kinship here to those neighborhood boys ye spoke of before.”

“
You’re
not bleeding,” she said grimly, “
yet
.”

He winced slightly and sighed, face sobering suddenly. “It’s only when I found the place I could see us here, growin’ old together, watchin’ our children play amongst the trees. I wanted more than anything to rebuild the house here on this spot, to feel it shape an’ form beneath my hands and rise up on a foundation that was more than just mortar an’ bricks. Maybe it sounds foolish to ye, but can ye honestly tell me Jewel that ye don’t feel it? This spot, this wee bit of earth is special. It’s consecrated.”

She did feel it, had from the minute he took her hand and led her down the stairs. She sighed, knowing he had her over a barrel. He saw the capitulation in her face and just barely restrained a grin of satisfaction. He took her hands, pulling her off the damp stone.

“I want to give ye a home Jewel, will ye allow me to build ye one? Will ye accept the work of my two hands an’ know that every board an’ nail is fastened with love?”

She looked about her, seeing it with an unromantic eye, being that it was now connected to the balance in their bank account for several years to come.

There was no denying that the hollow held great charm. Bottle green shadows clustered at the foot of trees and gathered amid the tall grass. The gate, once white, was furred with moss and tiny purple flowers. In this hour, between light and dark, it might have been the portal from the real world to a place of timeless enchantment. However, she could see the house would need a great deal of work, as would the outbuildings which would have to be re-constructed from the foundation up. On the other hand, the house, appearances notwithstanding, looked solid enough. The hollow was ringed in trees, a veritable forest of pine and elm, with a lone ash tree spreading its strong branches over the laneway. Yes, a good place to retreat from the world. To raise children and grow old, watching generations come and go.