I got up, holding one of Cale’s candles in each hand, and I walked around the perimeter of the place. To the rear, behind the chimney, there were the gnarled skeletons of three straight lines of trees. The tops of their trunks only just showed over the epic forest of weeds.
I hadn’t realized Ida was beside me until she spoke. “An orchard,” she said.
I jumped, shoes slipping on small stones. In the shadows of the broken stone wall, illuminated by my candles’ flames, I could see what looked like symbols carved into the barks of the trees. Circles and spirals, stars and crosses. The same symbols repeated on the stones of the cottage walls, faded almost to obscurity, but still raised enough that I could feel them under the pads of my fingers.
When it happened, it was almost expected. My fingers touched paper. Impaled on the thorn of a briar, wedged into the stones of the wall, right next to the grooves of a carving that looked like an eye.
The others didn’t say anything. They just waited for me to read.
Dear Deena,
Here is something you have to understand. Once the curse comes to you, it doesn’t let go. I’m a whole lifetime from seventeen, but still the banshees have screamed for me, sent me running. Or perhaps I’m part of your curse.
Mary Ellen was far from seventeen when she died, but when she did it was still the lingering remains of the family curse haunting her. You’ll see. Once a bad apple, always a bad apple. There’s no way to climb back onto the family tree.
16.
Shared beds
Drumcliff, 1918–1935
Sligo was a town that talked. Once it became known that John O’Connor’s daughter would be marrying the local witch’s son, tongues got to wagging.
“There has to be a reason,” the townsfolk said in audible whispers.
“There’s only one reason it could be,” the townsfolk replied. “The girl is already with child.”
But Catherine was a good girl, a God-fearing girl, who would remain chaste until her wedding night, and the wedding was not hasty, which meant no illegitimate child was involved in the couple’s unlikely marriage. So the whispers turned again to witchcraft.
Town rumors had always held that the women who lived in the orchard down by Drumcliff were witches. It was said that the boy’s mother, Mary Ellen, had the power to turn into a fox, Ann a black bat.
At the same time, Mary Ellen and Ann were afforded a certain respect. Doctors were expensive. But for a barter, a trade or a slip of coins into the hand, Ann and Mary Ellen would produce a vial or jar, a bunch of cloth-wrapped herbs that would, more often than not, cure an ailment within a week. Long gone were Mary Ellen’s days of muscle strain and constant hunger. There was money to be made for midwives and abortionists with a day business in apples.
Yet the town talked. And, though it was true that Patrick wanted his own happiness, his own success, he also knew that a tenuous link to the O’Connors would not be a bad thing for his mother and Ann.
Even so, Mary Ellen worried. “There are evil men in this world,” she told Ann after Patrick announced his engagement. “I don’t want my son to be one of them.”
“He won’t be, love,” Ann said. “There’s no evil in him.”
The trees of the orchard shook their branches in the breeze. A couple of bad apples dropped to the ground.
“You’re right,” Mary Ellen said softly, and she took her lover’s hand. “But still, in that house, I hope he has sons.”
* * *
—
Patrick and Catherine Rys had two daughters. Lizzie was as plain and blond as their mother, and Julia was as copper-haired and slight as their father, although they were both somewhat stronger of stature. Of the strength of their hearts, however, Patrick knew very little: He learned before his children could talk that his own heart lay with animals more than with humans, and his daughters were a puzzle he loved greatly but had no desire to understand.
However, Julia, like her father, was enamored with the bull.
Patrick’s father-in-law’s prize bull was still going strong and when Julia was sixteen—an age when most girls, her sister Lizzie included, grew weary of animals, preferring to spend time with their friends—Julia could still be found at her father’s side early each morning, small hands stroking the hide of the great gray bull.
“That girl’s got her granny’s witchcraft in her blood,” said John O’Connor, only half joking.
Patrick’s mother still lived in the overgrown cottage with Ann Gorman. Neither had ever married. They still slept in the small bed they’d shared as young women, insisting to Patrick that this was simply for warmth. “You know the nights are fierce cold around here, love,” Mary Ellen would tell her son, and he’d try hard to believe her, to ignore the whispers on the farm and in the town, to pretend that he didn’t know the whole of Sligo spoke of his mother as the widow witch, to wish away the niggling knowledge inside of him that, in the cottage his mother shared with another woman to whom she was not related, all was not as it seemed.
So, when his father-in-law said that Julia had Mary Ellen’s witchcraft in her blood, Patrick spoke gruffly. “She’s learned how to tend to the bull from me,” he said. “That bull will outlast me, you mark my words, and, if she’s not here to care for him, you can kiss the O’Connor cows goodbye.”
John huffed and shrugged, but he didn’t say another word, just leaned on the wood of the fence every morning and watched Julia.
Whenever Mary Ellen visited the farm, she watched him watching. She felt his eyes on her granddaughter like a fire in the pit of her gut. She couldn’t say anything—there was nothing to be said—but she added certain herbs from the garden into the cider Ann sent him, to ensure he would stay away.
Still, the fire in her gut became hotter every time she walked over to the farm and saw John O’Connor leaning on the fence, watching.
As Mary Ellen’s fire grew, the rain stopped, the air became hot and dry. By July the grass was yellowing and the farmers were losing their crops. The river slowed to a muddy trickle.
“It’s not natural,” the fishmonger said on market day. “Heat like this in Sligo.”
The women at his stall stopped and shook their heads. “It isn’t everywhere,” one of them said. “I’ve had a letter from my nephew in Galway—the weather’s same as every year down there.”
“Unnatural,” said the fishmonger again.
At the O’Connor farm, crops wilted and animals grew thirsty. Only John O’Connor’s prize bull was given the same rations of water as before, and every day the farmer sent Julia into his enclosure to sponge the creature and cool him down. It was Julia’s favorite part of the day, and she would splash the water on the bull and on herself, rinsing the morning’s dust from her dripping dress.