Faery Tale (28 page)

“My feet are stinging,” I noticed after a minute.

“Mine, too,” KP said.

“It's because our nerves are slowly dying.”

“I think you're right.”

“We really should just dunk under.”

“Come on, girls,” KP said, lowering her voice, “you've just got to splash a little water on your neck. Adjust the thermostat!”

“Very funny.”

“Let's do it on three.”

She reached out to take my hand.

“One . . . Oh, Jesus, this is cold . . .”

“Two . . .”

“Three!”
We squealed, pulling each other under. We didn't have to say it, but we both knew. We needed to swim, not for us.

This swim was for him.

 

Clean, showered, and dinnered, we headed out for our last night in Doolin. We'd had a little wine with dinner, and that tended to bring out the “the Talker” in my sister. I was familiar with the Talker, not only because I'd been at the butt end of it throughout my life on vacations with my sister, but also because I had a little Talker in me, too. We got it from our father. The Talker is most interested in talking to strangers and pursues an interesting conversation with passionate abandon. Luring the stranger into a conversational trap, the Talker will speak with them the length of the night, obliviously ignoring the people who matter most—in this case, me. This night, KP had snared a group of three men—Sam, Rory, and Allen, and they were tour guides, the kind that lead busloads of people around the Cliffs of Moher. As a result, they were actually interested to hear what had brought me to Ireland.

“Whatever,” I said lightly, after explaining. “Nobody believes in faeries anymore. I might as well sit back and enjoy the Guinness.”

But Sam looked especially serious, even while the other two snickered. They noticed and quieted down, turning to him.

“Sam believes in faeries, don't you, Sam?”

“No,” he said, flushing slightly. “I mean, not really.”

“Oh, come on, Sam, tell her the story, the one you told us.”

I looked at Sam expectantly.

“Oh, well, you know. It was just something weird, you know? Like something that happened that was a bit off. Unexplainable.”

“Tell me, please. Really, I'd love to hear it.”

Sam told of his upbringing by a devout Catholic grandfather. But despite being religious, his grandfather was constantly telling them stories about faeries.

“Granddad,” they'd ask, “do you believe in faeries?”

“No,” would come his gruff reply. “And they've the nerve to exist all the same.” Sam's family lived near Ben Bulben, a “hollow hill” that's thought to be a place of the faeries, and before Sam and his brother went out to play on the slopes, their grandfather would warn them to be careful. It wasn't them falling off the mountain that he was afraid of. He was worried that they might fall
in
.

As a teenager Sam would meet his friends on the mountain, to spend the night drinking and camping in the woods. On one such night, he'd agreed to meet his friend at an old miner's shack so they could find a place to camp from there. But the time came and went, and there was no sign of Sam's friend. Darkness fell and it started to rain, so Sam figured he'd just spend the night in the shack and head home in the morning. The rain pelted down through the night, and all alone in the creepy old cabin, Sam was nervous, but he eventually drifted to sleep.

He woke in the middle of the night to the creaking of the cabin door, and sat up to find two men standing in the doorway. One was tall and slender with long hair blown wild by wind and rain, and the other was a stocky little man between four and five feet tall. They seemed very surprised to see Sam there. Sam couldn't think how on earth two men had ended up at the old miner's shack in the middle of the night. Unless they had a tractor or something. Now that he was listening, he thought he could definitely hear the sound of a tractor idling outside the door. After a moment, the tall man seemed to recover himself.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” Sam replied.

The shorter man then whispered something to the taller man, who cleared his throat.

“Do you mind if we ask who you are?”

“Uh, my name is Sam Healy, of the Sligo Healys.”

The tall man considered his answer, then turned to the shorter man, as if to explain.

“He says his name is Sam Healy, and he's of the Sligo Healys.”

The stout man nodded gruffly and murmured once again to the tall man.

“And do you mind if I ask who your father is?” the taller man questioned.

It seemed an odd request, but Sam answered. “My father is Seamus Healy, of Healy's Pub down in the valley.”

“He says his father is Seamus Healy,” the tall man repeated to his companion, “proprietor of Healy's Pub down in the valley.” At this the stout man nodded sternly and whispered once more to the tall man.The tall man cleared his throat.

“And do you mind if we ask you what you're doing here?”

“I was supposed to meet a friend to camp in the woods, but he never came and it started to rain, so I thought I'd stay the night here.”

The tall man narrowed his eyes at Sam and then related this, too.

The short man nodded and then the pair looked at one another.

“Well,” said the tall man carefully, “I think we're going to go now.”

“Okay,” Sam said, bewildered.

“Good night,” the tall man said.

According to Sam, the two men then closed the door and left. When he awoke in the morning and the rain had stopped, he wondered if it had all been a dream. On his way out of the cabin, he looked in the fresh mud for tire tracks. He was sure he had heard the sound of a tractor after all. But there were no tire tracks. To make matters more confounding, he realized in the light of day that the path in front of the shack was too steep (and far too narrow) for a tractor to pass through there.

 

“And that's it,” Sam concluded.

“So, do you still think it was a dream?” KP asked.

“I can't be sure,” he replied. “But I'll tell you one thing. When I hear your sister talking about how there are no faeries left in Ireland, I remember that night. And in my opinion, the faeries up on Ben Bulben are alive and well as ever.”

 

The next morning KP decided that since the pedometer had still not turned up, it was time to fess up that we'd lost it. We'd simply have to buy her a new one, ship it somehow. I was hoisting my pack into the trunk of the car, when something nudged at me just to look one last time. Halfheartedly, I moved a few of KP's things aside, and there, in the corner of the trunk, was the pedometer.

“Aha!” I shouted out loud. “Aha, aha, aha!” I ran with it, lofted in my hand, over to Kirsten—who'd just walked up to our hostel pal—doing a little dance around her.

“You are never going to believe what I just found . . . in the
trunk
!”

“No.”

“Aha, yes!” I exclaimed, holding out my palm.

“You did this.”

“I did
no such thing
.”

“But I looked in the trunk!”

“Well, maybe you didn't look
hard
enough,” I said, insulted. The girl was looking on, bewildered. “I think you owe somebody an apology,” I continued.

KP looked at the girl. “I'm sorry—”

“Not her!” I exclaimed.
“Them.”

“But why did they have
you
find it? Why not me? That's mean! It's like they had
you
find it just to spite me.”

“Well, maybe you couldn't find it because you never
really
believed they would help you in the first place. And I did.”

“It was mean.”

“Whatever. They proved it to you, and now you have to give them props.”

“Fine! I give them props,” she conceded.

But she wasn't
truly
convinced.

 

I had been trying in vain to get in touch with famous storyteller Eddie Lenihan all summer, and had only succeeded in doing so right before we left Galway. It was regrettable because Eddie lived in Crusheen, which was much closer to Galway than Doolin. So although we were now on our way to KP's friends' house in Kells Bay, we would detour back north to meet yet another man I'd seen interviewed in the documentary
The Fairy Faith
.

As we drove, I told KP another story from Ben Bulben in County Sligo. It was a story related by Yeats in
The Celtic Twilight
, told to him by villagers there. One night, a little girl disappeared. There was excitement in the village because it was rumored that the faeries had taken her. One man had seen it happening and tried to hold on to the girl in vain—he found he held nothing in his hands but a broomstick. The town constable instituted a house-to-house search and ordered all the ragweed in the field where the girl had disappeared to be burned, because ragweed was sacred to the faeries. I read aloud.

“In the morning the little girl was found wandering in the field. She said the faeries had taken her away a great distance, riding on a faery horse. At last she saw a big river, and the man who had tried to keep her from being carried off was drifting down it—such are the topsy-turvydoms of faery glamour—in a cockleshell. On the way her companions had mentioned the names of several people who were about to die shortly in the village.”

“And did the people die who the faeries predicted would die?”

“Yes, according to the townspeople, they certainly did.”

I told KP about my meeting with Peter Knight in Glastonbury, and how he believed a lot of the danger in these stories that surrounded interactions with the faery realm could just be Christian propaganda. We sat in silence for a while, watching the scenery pass by. Sam's story from the pub fascinated me. It provided a glimpse into the world I wanted so badly to experience. But there was no way we could make the long drive up to County Sligo to walk the haunted, hollow mountain. I could only hope that a visit to Eddie Lenihan could provide me with what I so desperately needed—some answers.

—KATHERINE BRIGGS,
THE FAIRIES IN ENGLISH TRADITION AND LITERATURE

 

 

 

 

E
DDIE Lenihan was practically Ireland's National Treasure. He'd appeared on television, in all the major papers, and he'd published numerous books—one in particular about faeries entitled
Meeting the Other Crowd.
He was a bit of a celebrity in America as well, at least in the storytelling world—he'd been featured on NPR, and the
New York Times
had singled him out as one of the few traditional storytellers left in Ireland. He was the folk heartbeat of the country, and I imagined there wasn't an eyewitness account of a faery sighting that Mr. Lenihan hadn't heard in his years of recording stories around Counties Clare and Kerry. He was a wild-looking man with curly, shoulder-length hair and a great bushy beard that gave him the appearance of being part man, part lion.

I felt an instant kinship with Eddie, and not just because I liked his frankness and easy spark of humor. I was only a young grasshopper, and he was a seasoned storyteller of epic proportions, but we had one thing in common—we were both digging for any stories that local people might share about supposed encounters with faeries.

Lenihan is so much more than a storyteller. Sure, when he tells a tale, you find yourself glued to the edge of your seat.You're nearly afraid to blink, that you might miss the slightest facial inflection, or worse, that you might carelessly break the spell he has so masterfully woven with his words. But more than that, Lenihan is a story collector. Sitting in his living room, KP and I were surrounded by cases and cases of mini-tapes, cluttering every available surface, each holding years, lifetimes of stories that Eddie had recorded. So it was only natural that he wanted to know, as soon as we sat down, how my story collecting was going.

“Have you found many faery stories since you've been in Ireland?”

“No,” I answered simply. “Truth be told, aside from one story about Ben Bulben, I haven't had much luck.”

“Yes . . .” Eddie leaned back in his chair, letting out a long sigh. “They're getting harder and harder to find. And you can't believe all the stories you hear. You just can't. When it comes to faery stories, or even ghost stories for that matter, I always say two things. One, if the person is a big drinker, I don't necessarily believe them. Two, if a person is on drugs, forget about it. You'll see anything you want to see when you're on either drink or drugs.”

“So how do you know which stories to believe?” I thought, thinking back to Sam's tale from Ben Bulben.

“I'm more inclined to believe a story when it comes from a person who is not afraid of the dark. Because look, imagination is a wonderful thing, and when a man is frightened, it can make him see things that aren't truly there. It's when you meet
practical
people, who have been out at all hours . . . I listen to those people. And very often you'll find out that what they have to tell you is not easy to dismiss.”

“Like what?” I asked, leaning in.

“Well, for example, even today, if you were to ask most young people, especially those living in the countryside, ‘Would you bulldoze a fort?' most of them wouldn't. Of course they'll laugh it off. ‘Ah, not that I believe in the faeries or anything, but, but . . .' They've all heard stories about people who have interfered with these places and who have come to some misfortune or even death within a short distance of time after destroying an old fort on their land. Now, it has to be said, those misfortunes might have happened anyway. But when you've been collecting stories as long as I have, you see after a while there's too many coincidences for it to be coincidental. There's something there. Whether it's the belief in these things that brings on the consequences, or whether faeries are factually and actually there, there's something to it.” Eddie looked at us intently.