They fell on him and it was like a nightmare, like the way he imagined hell when the priest talked about it on Sundays: a place where demons broke your bones and tore your skin so that your body was fire, but you deserved it because you’d been wicked, or cowardly, or wrong.
He never saw the cat again; it probably died in the bushes into which it disappeared, most likely close to death already, and Patrick’s sacrifice was meaningless.
Patrick was curled on the hard dirt, kicks landing on the softest parts of him, punches beating blood into the ground. Each blow was a crunch, a crack, a wet spreading. The world was made of pain, of the taste of blood and dirt, of the smell of his own piss soaking his trousers, of the screams and screeches of the boys.
When Patrick thought that he might die, the blows suddenly stopped. Through swollen eyes he saw the boys look up as one and gasp, “It’s the witch!” and they scattered, leaving Patrick lying broken on the ground with his arms over his head.
When he parted his elbows, he saw Ann. She stared at him for a full minute before speaking.
“Your ma has the supper ready” was all she said. And she took him in her arms like a baby wrapped in swaddling.
When his wounds had finally healed, Ann sent Patrick out to work. Mary Ellen didn’t even try to argue, although it was she who had insisted on his schooling, who harbored a secret hope of one day sending her son to the seminary. There was good money in being a priest. But both women knew there was no use in sending Patrick back to school.
As it turned out, there was also good money in farming, especially for a boy unknowingly promised to the farmer’s daughter.
* * *
—
John O’Connor was one of the few Catholic farmers in the area. He didn’t rent his house from a landowner; he didn’t work the fields for his lease. He’d built his business from his father’s scrap of land and from the prize bull that was his mother’s dowry.
He would never have hired a cripple like Patrick, but he had taken his wife to Ann and Mary Ellen when Patrick was still recovering from his beating. For years, John O’Connor and his wife had been waiting for a baby. They had tried everything the doctors had recommended, but doctors were expensive, and nothing had helped. So his wife had suggested they visit the witch women. Standing outside the cottage door, staring into the twisted orchard that surrounded the house, waiting for his wife to emerge from the mysterious room within, John O’Connor made himself a promise. If these women helped his wife get with child, he would owe them. It was a silent promise, a passing thought, but, once he had made it, the trees of the orchard trembled, leaves swaying although there was no wind. And when his wife emerged from the cottage, clutching a cloth bag of herbs, one of the women—the cripple boy’s mother, he thought, although no one was truly sure anymore which of the women was the mother—stared straight through him with her clear gray eyes and he knew his promise had been marked.
When John O’Connor’s daughter was born nine months later, he sent for the witch’s son.
* * *
—
On the farm, Patrick struggled. His left leg, which had always been weak, never recovered from his beating. He couldn’t keep up with the other boys. The hay they hauled was heavy, the land they worked was rough and rocky, and Patrick’s arms shook.
But he was good with the animals. The horses pulled the plows straighter when Patrick was at the whip. The chickens laid twice the amount of eggs when Patrick cleaned their coop. The cows let themselves be milked without kicking, allowed themselves to be led to slaughter without a sound.
Most importantly, Farmer O’Connor’s prize bull would allow nobody but Patrick to feed him or lead him from his pen. Everybody else the bull charged at. He had gored two men already.
John O’Connor was a superstitious man. The witches had given him a daughter, and he felt that meant he owed them. Farmer O’Connor worried that if he let Patrick go, the bull would stop mating and ensuring the O’Connors’ livelihood. So he kept the Rys boy on, and little by little Patrick became a man, his pay enough to bring home to Ann and Mary Ellen with a little left over to save for his own future.
Patrick’s future was called Catherine. Catherine O’Connor was a plain and lonely girl who sought out as friends the girls in school who were more beautiful and more interesting than she, in an effort to somehow become—or at least to seem—more beautiful and more interesting herself. At first it would work: As a friend, Catherine was kind and attentive, and the girls would soon confide in her, study with her, invite her to tea at their houses over the summer vacation, and go over to supper at hers. But one by one the girls would leave her. It happened the same way every year: After a few shared suppers, her most recent friend would stop coming over. She would avoid Catherine at school. When invited again, the girl would turn away, telling Catherine that she had found herself a better and more suitable friend.
While Catherine’s heart broke every summer, her father would secretly send his daughter’s friends to see Ann and Mary Ellen in their cottage. They would come in the night, silent, the farmer’s cart waiting on the road out of sight. The women’s business relied on discretion, on maintaining their reputation. As they left, Ann advised them that unless they wanted to have to return for another infusion—or, even worse, to have the remedies fail and to be sent to the nearest mother-and-baby home in disgrace—they should avoid Catherine O’Connor’s father’s farm at all times, or, what might be more effective, find themselves a new friend.
John O’Connor, ever superstitious, felt he owed the women again. He saw their frowns, their pursed lips at the sight of him on market days. He knew they were discreet but wanted to ensure their silence. So, when Catherine finished school, her father suggested she marry the witch’s son.
Catherine was quickly made to understand that she did not have much choice in the matter, so, when Patrick Rys asked for her hand in marriage, she accepted.
15.
Haunted places
Sligo and Drumcliff, 2012
I knew what to do then, what to expect. I turned the last page over and saw an address near Drumcliff, County Sligo, scratched quickly there, a couple of lines of directions from a main road probably not far from here. Finn sat unmoving. Ida immediately took out her phone.
“It’s the middle of nowhere,” she said. “Like, literally.” She turned the phone toward me, zoomed out, then in again. “It’s not even on a road.”
But a suspicion was rising in me fast, like the tide. “Would you say it’s about an hour’s walk away?” I reread the start of the letter while she checked. Mandy had described where Ann Gorman and Mary Ellen lived. In the middle of the countryside, a good hour’s walk from the town.
“About that, yeah,” said Ida.