The Herbalist
For my daughter, Rosie
He just appeared one morning and set up
shop in the market square. It was drizzling. Everything was either a shade of brown or a
shade of grey. He was the lightest thing there, the one they called the black doctor. He
wore a pale suit, a straw hat and waved his arms like a conductor. The men spat about
dark crafts and foreign notions, but the women loved him. Oh, the rubs, potions,
tinctures and lotions he had. Unguents, even.
I went to the market the first chance I got.
Craned my neck, trying to see past the headscarves, but all I saw was a glimpse of a
bottle held high, and the gold-ringed fingers that gripped it. The women crowded around
his stall. God, but they’d no sense at all, clucking like hens.
One at a time, ladies, one at a time.
He sounded hoarse, not young. ‘Oh,
isn’t he lovely,’ some girl whispered. I nudged my way forward till I got a
poke in the back. I turned. It was Mam. She dragged me away by the collar. What did I
think I was doing, gaping at some heathen hawker? Gaping indeed: I hadn’t even set
eyes on the man.
I couldn’t get the herbalist out of my
head after that. The slightest mention of him made me giddy. I think some part of me
believed Aggie. For she had told my fortune at the carnival, the day before the
herbalist came to town. And she had sworn that love was coming.
It was an Easter Monday, and it was one of
those days. Father couldn’t bear for anyone to breathe the same air as he did, let
alone speak. So Mam and I set out for town, leaving him hunched over his cold dinner,
jabbing a finger at us by way of goodbye. Charlie had already made himself scarce; he
was getting good at that.
I thought we’d never get to the
carnival. I had won two free tickets for the Wall of Death in Kelly’s Easter Draw.
But Mam wouldn’t take the river path; she insisted on keeping to the road. Said
she needed time to make herself look normal. Her eyes were a bit red.
It was hot for April; my feet were swollen
by the time we got to Nashes’ Field. I took off my sandals and cooled my heels on
the grass. The carnival people were magic, the way they changed everything. Took what
was a plain riverside field and turned it into a foreign land of coloured tents and
stands, a land buzzing with people.
All were decked out in their Easter finest.
They queued for barge trips and lay about on blankets; some lads had their trousers
rolled up to dangle their toes in the river. The ground was scattered with tickets and
sweet-papers; I kept my eyes peeled for coins. Mam waved hello to lots of people but
kept moving in case anyone noticed she’d been crying.
‘Fortunes, fortunes!’ The voice
made me turn. A fat woman sat in a shabby armchair with a tray of cards on her lap. An
orange scarf was tied around her head, and the sign beside her read
CARDS AND
PALMS – HAVE YOUR FORTUNE TOLD!
She made a big show of shuffling the pack.
Mam paid her no heed; walked on as fast as she could. I slowed down, couldn’t help
myself.
The gypsy spotted her catch. ‘Come
here, young one, come on!’
Mam was far ahead of me. I ventured over.
Too late, I recognized the woman as Aggie Reilly, the town you-know-what. I’d
never seen
a woman of ill repute up close before. Her eyes were grey
and friendly, her round face brown, her nose beaky. She looked like a burnt hen. Not
quite the face of evil. A bit of a let-down, all in all.
She shuffled cards from one hand to the
other and then tapped the pack against the tray. It was lacquered black and showed a
golden Eiffel Tower.
‘Choose one, only one now,
mind.’
She spread the cards in an arc across the
Eiffel Tower. Her nails were ridged with earth. I chose one from the centre. It was soft
as cloth. Aggie Reilly snatched it from my hand. Her mouth pursed into a small
smile.
‘Let’s see what the future
holds. Oh, ghastly, ghastly! I cannot tell thee.’
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘What does the card say,
missus?’
A boy’s breath hit my neck. There were
three of them, lads that had sneaked up behind me.
‘The worst fate of all,’ Aggie
said, leaning forward.
Her bosom bulged from her dress and her dyed
hair straggled out from under her scarf. I hated her then. I wanted to walk away, but I
stayed. She held up the Queen of Hearts for all to see.
‘What does it mean?’ I
asked.
‘Love is coming,’ she said,
‘but not from one of these buckos.’
She jabbed a thumb towards the boys.
‘Cross my palm with sixpence, sweetie, and I’ll tell you more.’
I felt my face heat up. The boys roared with
laughter. Pádraig Greaney made the most noise, braying like a donkey.
‘Watch out, lads, love’s coming
for pale-face!’ he hooted.
And to think that I’d put my arm
around that little snot as he bawled for his mother on our first day of school. The boys
held their sides, pretended to collapse with mirth and rolled off across the grass.
Two girls nudged their way in front of me.
The Nash sisters – dosed to the high hills with Lily of the Valley. Milkie carried her
sunhat, to better show off her long white hair. The skin on her nose and chin was red
and peeling. She requested a palm reading, ‘a good
one’,
she added. Moll pressed her face into her sister’s shoulder and began to giggle.
It never took much to set her off.
I edged away from the fortune-telling. I
couldn’t see Mam anywhere. Midges bit my scalp, and my neck was burning from the
sun. I shouldn’t have put my hair up. The style I’d copied from
Modern
Woman
magazine was falling down. That’s what you get for aping hair-dos
you can’t pronounce. Chignon, my bum.
The carnival people were setting up the main
attraction: Daredevil Stanley and his Blonde Bombshell. A motorcycle revved inside a
large tent. You could almost taste the petrol. Tanned men in white vests were laying
down boards. They were making the ramp to the Wall of Death. The wall was huge, a
sky-high wooden stand creaking against the sun. There was already a queue at the bottom
of the rickety stairs, with Mam near it, nattering away to Birdie Chase. They were
holding each other’s elbows, as if they were about to start a two-step.
Birdie’s lardy upper arms would put you off your supper. It was odd to see her out
of the shop; she seldom left the premises since her fall. She wore a faded sequinned
number with no sleeves and had wound a white ribbon round the crook of her walking
stick.
As I watched, I noticed how thin Mam had
become. She used to look like Maureen O’Sullivan, but that day she didn’t
look like anyone, not even herself. She still pinned her hair away from her forehead,
and it still fell in dark kinks to her shoulders, but her face was pinched and her
collarbones stood out. We’d left in such a hurry that she hadn’t changed out
of her yellow housedress. It had been washed so many times it was almost see-through. I
felt ashamed of her, and then felt ashamed for feeling that way about my own mother.
I called out, and Mam turned and waved. I
ran over and hugged her tight around the waist. She smiled and took my hand. I was dying
to tell her that love was coming for me. She liked that kind of talk. But she would have
killed me for speaking to Aggie. The thing was, only for the likes of Aggie, our family
would have had no one to look down on at all.