Bridie's Fire (3 page)

He traced the long pale scar that ran across Bridie's face from temple to chin with his fingertips. ‘I'll never forget the day you won that. There I was rowing to the Great Blasket Island, and when I look back what do I see? My own darling girl running along the high cliffs and then, like a bird, launching her sweet self into the air, red petticoat flying. I tell you, child, my heart was in my mouth as you fell. I've never rowed so hard in my life. When I found your little crumpled body lying on those sharp rocks and the spark still in your heart, I knew it was a miracle.'

‘Will there be a miracle to save us from the hunger, Dad?'

Bridie felt her father sigh. He drew her closer to him, folding his jacket around her to keep her warm.

‘I'll tell you a story. A story about your own sweet saint,' he said.

Bridie shut her eyes and let the sound of his rich, deep voice wash over her. She loved the way she could hear his words with her skin, not just her ears.

‘When St Brigid was a baby and her mother was living with the druid, they left her sleeping in the cradle and set out to work in the fields. But when the druid looks up the hill to his house, he sees great licks of flame leaping from the windows and his own home a-blazing. He comes running up the hill to save the little baby, and as he runs closer, the flames stretch from earth to heaven. But when he reaches the babe, there she is lying in her cradle, smiling the sweet smile of the innocent, and the flames all around her are leaping from the holy presence of the little babe herself. And the druid's house wasn't burnt to the ground, for the flames were the fire of God. St Brigid was never harmed because the fire burnt within her, in her heart and her soul. And I swear, when I first held you, Bridie, I saw that fire in you, darling girl. You make sure no one ever puts it out. That angry fire will keep you strong against all the evil the world can bring.'

‘So the evil will come?' said Bridie in a small voice.

‘There's always evil to battle, but the O'Connors have fighting spirits. No matter what lies ahead, nothing can put that out, not the wind, nor the sea, nor the sharp rocks of Dunquin. Nor least the English and their famine. But it's time you were asleep, my darling, you'll be saying your prayers and curl up with your brothers in your little bed. It's off to dreams of
T
í
r na n
Ó
g
for you.'

He swept her up in his arms and carried her inside.

It was the stench that woke Bridie, even worse than the smell of the black potatoes that they had grubbed from the soil yesterday. The cottage was rank with it. Brandon woke up too and whispered, ‘What is it, Bridie, what black curse is it?'

In the dark, they heard their parents stir to waking and fling the door open to the night. They listened to their father's voice rising in despair.

‘Rotten, black and rotten the lot of them, rotting in the pit, they are!' Their mother wailed in the darkness, keening as if there had been a death in the house.

Bridie and Brandon went outside and stood beside the pit in the moonlight, shivering even though the night was warm. The air felt thick and heavy and Bridie tried not to breathe too deeply so that the rank and bitter smell wouldn't get inside her. It smelt of death and misery. She reached out for Brandon's hand and drew him closer, so close that she could feel his heart beating as hard and fast as her own.

The hunger came sooner than they'd expected. Before the month was out, there were no potatoes to be had anywhere on the Dingle Peninsula. Brandon and Bridie and the O'Farrell children spent hours every day scouring the beach for tough little periwinkles, and scraping limpets from the rocks. All the cockles and mussels had been taken long since. Soon the rocks were stripped bare. Even the dulse and sloke seaweed that they raked up with their hands was sparse, for now there were crowds of hungry villagers trying to harvest what they could from the shores.

One day the children came home, and Mam was at the hearth, cooking up a mixture of gruel and nettles in the pot over the stove. She took the limpets from Brandon and set them to roast on the fire. Then she spooned a little of the nettle brew into a wooden bowl and handed it to Bridie.

‘Here, girl, take this to the poor wretch out by the side of the house,' she said. When Bridie looked doubtful, her mother waved her outside. ‘Remember, we're never so hungry that there's not someone hungrier than we are,' she said.

Bridie found the man propped against the wall of the cottage, his breath coming in short gasps. She squatted down beside him and offered him the bowl but the man just stared back at her with glazed eyes. She tried to spoon the porridge into the man's mouth, but it ran back out again. She wiped a bit of it away with the hem of her dress.

‘Mam,' she called, stepping away from the man. ‘Mam, come quick.'

‘Jesus and sweet Mary,' said her mother, kneeling down beside the man and taking his hand. ‘Will there be no end to it?'

That night, Bridie heard her parents arguing in fierce whispers. ‘
Erra
, woman, you can't be going hungry now with the state you're in. You've got more than your own mouth to think of feeding.'

‘But if they catch you, man! Think of it! What will become of us all if they send you to New South Wales? I couldn't be doing it alone. There's no money for thread and besides that, not a soul who can afford to have their finery mended. You must think of the children and not your pride.'

‘Husha, girl. It's the children and yourself that I am thinking of! Whatever way the wind blows, I'll not watch my family starve. I'll be a rogue for as long as I need and no longer. And I swear I'll never take a penn'orth from a poor man, but I'll feel no grief for the ill-bred upstarts that can afford to lose a lump of loot. And who are the real rogues, when there's food a-plenty in the land but none for the starving? When a fine man like Mick O'Farrell is forced to the public works, working like a dog for a bag of coarse meal that won't feed his starving children?'

In the small glow from the embers, Bridie saw her father pull on his boots and slip out the door. She listened to the wind howling off the sea and shuddered at the thought of her father taking the currach out on those wild waters. She'd heard of small parties of men making raids along the coast and disappearing into the dark night. The embers flickered and then grew dimmer and Bridie closed her eyes and prayed for the fire inside her to grow stronger, strong enough to keep the darkness from swallowing up each of the people she loved.

3

St Brigid
'
s Eve

Bridie sat on the threshold of the cottage with the door at her back and her lap full of rushes, making St Brigid's crosses. Her fingers were numb and aching from the cold but she kept on knotting the rushes, turning them over and binding the centre until each cross was perfect. Out across the sea, dark clouds were gathering on the far horizon. She wished her father would come home. She'd woken in the dark of night to the wind howling off the sea like a banshee. She heard the anxious whisperings of her mother and felt the cold winter air blasting into the cottage as her father opened the door and slipped out into the blackness.

Brandon struggled up the steep path from the
cuisheen
and then turned onto the pathway to their house. He dropped the sack he was carrying and sat down beside her on the step, panting. His knobbly red knees stuck out through his ragged trousers and he rubbed them for warmth.

‘They're only empty shells, Bridie. The rocks, they're scoured clean. There was nothing to gather. Do you think they'll work, even though they be empty?'

Bridie didn't answer. She stared out over the green fields to the sea, the St Brigid's crosses in her lap, unable to look into Brandon's anxious face. Ever since she could remember, they'd scattered shells in the corners of their home every St Brigid's day, and prayed to the saint to keep them safe from hunger for another year. But last year, St Brigid hadn't listened.

‘This year, we'll shout to make her hear us,' said Bridie, tightly knotting another cross.

That afternoon, Bridie and Brandon walked down to the small clutch of houses that stood above the
cuisheen
. Bridie carried a basket filled with the rush crosses. There were other Brigids at Dunquin, but none of them had wanted to help deliver the crosses this year. When Bridie had asked Brigid MacMahon to join her, the little girl had simply stared and turned away to face the fire again, too exhausted by hunger to move. They trudged down into Dunquin with heads lowered against the driving wind. Their bare feet were blue with cold and icy needles of rain
soaked their worn clothes.

‘I don't see that crosses and shells can keep us safe,' argued Brandon.

‘For heaven's sake, boyo. Sure, our prayers will be answered one day,' said Bridie.

‘They haven't done, have they?' he said, kicking at a clump of grass by the road. ‘Mam's always a-praying and it doesn't make anything come right. I'm still hungry most of the time. Even with the food our dad brings home that we hide in the hole, there's never enough.'

‘Cut the sign of the cross on yourself and ask God to forgive you. The Devil will hear you and we'll lose what little we have left,' she said sharply. Then she looked at the boy and her heart leapt with pity. He looked so small and sodden, with his red curls plastered darkly against his pale brow. ‘Darling boy, I know what you're saying. Sometimes I feel mad as a bull with our St Brigid. I'm thinking, isn't it a saint's business to guard her people? Especially when that saint knows so much about the hearth and the home? But then I'm reasoning, I've got you and our dad and Mam and baby Paddy and together we make a grand family so even if there isn't food, there's plenty of heart. So c'mon, bucko. We'll go down the
cuisheen
to see if Dad's coming home in the corrach, and we'll give each of the men a cross to take home with them.'

The sea was wild, foaming white and churning, the sky like black slate. Except for the swirling movement of the ocean, it was hard to tell where sea and sky met. There was no sign of the little boat.

‘He won't try and come home across that, will he? He'll stay on the Great Blasket Island, to be sure?' asked Brandon, suddenly anxious.

Bridie pulled at the strands of black hair that whipped across her face and stared out at the wild sea. She knew their father wasn't out on the Great Blasket Island. She was sure he had gone on a foray further along the peninsula. She scanned the sea and shoreline, willing the currach to come into view. The waves rose up on the sea, like walls of water, as if it was boiling, the Devil himself stirring its heart.

Further down along the pebbly beach, a group of people gathered around something. It looked like a seal that had been washed onto the shore, its black body humped on the beach. Brandon and Bridie took the narrow path along the clifftops towards the village, keeping apace of the crowd that was moving along the beach. Bridie's basket grew sodden in the driving rain, the little crosses unravelling as the water swelled the rushes. Doggedly, the two children pushed on through the wind to the village.

They went from door to door, offering a rush cross to anyone who opened. Half the houses were empty now – so many people had left, taken by death or gone to America to escape the hunger. Some people didn't even open their doors, and those that did had nothing to offer the children in exchange.

It was in Muiris MacMahon's house that they found the party of people who'd come up from the beach. The door was open to the road and a single candle illuminated the small front room. No one spoke as the two children entered the house. Laid out on a door, his wet clothes gripping his still limbs, lay a giant of a man with a sharp, craggy face. For a moment Bridie didn't recognise him, and then it was as if her heart froze and the cry that was forming in her throat was stilled by horror. Brandon ran to the body and took a cold, swollen hand in his own, but Bridie backed away and stood in the doorway, staring at her father's corpse.

‘Stay, child,' said an old woman. ‘Muiris has gone for your
mamai
.'

Bridie looked down at the water pooling in the bottom of the basket and the swollen, useless crosses. The women all began to keen, their voices rising in a spiral of grief. Bridie turned and ran. The cobblestones of the village bruised her heels as she raced to the cliffs. She stood face to the wind, fighting to hold her feet on the narrow winding path, and flung the basket of crosses out into the churning sea, roaring with rage and misery. Brandon reached her side and took one of her trembling hands in his. They stood watching as the basket swept skywards in an updraft before it plummeted into the ocean, the crosses scattering in the wind and water.

‘Oh Brand, I heard the banshee keening last night – heard it in the wind, and didn't stop our dad from stepping out! I never thought we could lose our dad!' She pushed her fists against the front of her worn dress as if trying to stem the pain.

There was no one at home when the two children returned, but the door was open. Mam must have run, with baby Paddy in her arms, down the long, bleak slope to the road. Bridie pushed the door shut, closing out the wild night and huddling close to the turf fire. She put her face so close to the smoking embers that her eyes stung and the tears ran free, coursing down her numb, cold face.

For months after her father's death, Bridie felt as if the fire that flared inside her had been turned inside out, and her skin was alive with heat and flame. Most mornings she would leave the house at dawn and scurry across the wet grass. She scoured the beach and hillsides for food with a wild fervour, searching in the hedgerows for nests and nettles – anything that could be thrown into the pot to stretch out the last of their stored meal.

Spring began to unfold, with tufts of green in the drystone walls, pale yellow primroses in the lanes, and foxgloves spreading their velvety leaves across the damp ground, but none of it was beautiful to Bridie. At night she lay in bed with Brandon and listened to the wind off the Atlantic battering against the stones of her house, but it sounded with a different voice. The hearth she sat beside, the brown and green landscape with the clouds hanging low over Mount Eagle, none of it was the same without her father in his place. Her
dadai
was underneath the earth, underneath the crowds of snowdrops pushing up through muddy soil and Bridie found no joy in seeing new life sprouting in the fields, no pleasure in the birdsong from the hedgerows.