July, 1854
just outside Creegh
west coast of Ireland
Just past noon in
mid-July of 1854 Mary McCarthy slowed to a sedate walk
from a leisurely
running pace which she could keep up for days.
She passed discreetly through the
tiny village of Creegh near the west coast of Ireland, heading south toward
Kilrush on the great River Shannon. But
not discreetly enough. From a shabby
tavern trouble followed her. Perhaps twenty minutes past the village she looked back to see if she
could begin running again. The winding
road through the low coastal hills of County Clare had indeed put her out of
sight of the village. However, three
horsemen were approaching. She faced
forward and continued walking. When the clip-clop of
the horse's hooves on the packed earth of the road was near she courteously
curved toward the grassy verge of the road to let the riders pass. They did not. One slowed down beside her to match her
pace. The two others came up behind her
and one of them rode off the road to her other side. Then he angled his horse toward her, forcing her onto the center
of the road. "Good day, fair
lady," said the man who had forced her to change her path. Mary glanced at
him. His dress and the tack of his
horse told of money and his attitude spoke of arrogant assurance. From his speech she judged him some petty
English nobility. He was a handsome
man, taller than most as best as she could judge a man in a saddle, with dark brown
ringlets, a round face, and laughing brown eyes. The horse was a sleek dark brown, obviously expensive. He was silently
laughing at her, and her temper flared, but she kept a rein on it. "Good day to you, sir." "Where are you
going?" "To my home over
the hill." He made a show of
standing in his stirrups and shading his eyes under the hat he wore. There was an emerald feather stuck in its
sweat band. "Oh, goodness. I suspect you of a fib, fair lady. I see no cottage ahead. And as I know this country well, I'm sure
there is none." "I think she's
afraid of us," the man on her other side said, a cruel smile on his
face. He was much of piece as the first
one, she saw. Perhaps a brother or
cousin. "No!"
replied the first. "Why, how could
she think that of us! We only want to
be her friends." "I have all the
friends I need," replied Mary shortly. "Oh, but we're
going to be even closer than friends."
This was from the man behind Mary.
She stopped and turned to look at him.
He was younger and blond and his horse was not so good. A poor cousin of the other two,
perhaps? Trying to match them in wit
and other ways. It was obvious that
they intended to rape her. She had
other plans, however. They did not
include gettting her clothes bloody, so she needed to get out of her clothes
without alarming them. And she needed
to get them off their horses. Their
mounts multiplied their effectiveness. Mary glanced at the
man on her right, he with the green feather.
He was the leader. She smiled at
him and spoke. "Well, now, I
would be friendlier if I thought you might have some coin about you." "Oh, yes, fair
lady. We do indeed 'have some coin
about us.'" "Then let us get
to it. Over there." The direction of her
nod was off to the side of the road up ahead where three trees made a pleasant
shade. She began walking again,
stepping around the leader's horse off the road, angling toward the trees. Then, looking playfully back over her
shoulder, she laughed and broke into a run toward the trees. It took a few moments
for them to react. The leader laughed
and kneed his horse into a trot. The
other two followed suit. Under the shade of the
nearest tree Mary let her pack slip off her back onto the ground. Then she began disrobing. By that time the
leader was under the tree too and was off his horse. He hitched it to a branch of the tree and stood enjoying the
show. The other two caught up and
ground-reined their horses. The leader
scowled at them and they hastily hitched their horses the same way. Ah, yes, Mary thought.
When she started screaming they did not want their animals able to run
away. She folded her clothes and placed
them on the opposite side of a tree, placing her pack atop them. That should shield them from any blood
spatter. The leader was the
first to reach Mary as she stood completely naked, hands on hips. The wind swirled her bright red
shoulder-length hair around her face and ruffled the russet pubic hair between
her legs. To them she would seem a
fourteen-year old girl, with the muscles of a farmer but still lithe and pretty. The wind was from the
leader to her, and she could smell the cruelty on him. There was no doubt. They planned to do terrible things to her,
then kill her. She put out a hand toward him and he took the bait. He caught her wrist in a grip that would have pained an ordinary woman. She looked him directly in his eyes. Hurt a child, would you? she thought. She twisted her wrist, broke his grip, and
it was now his wrist that was captured. He jerked his arm away, or tried to. She saw the exact moment when he understood that he'd made a terrible mistake. But by then it was far too late. three months earlier
south of Black Head point
west coast of Ireland
...dying, she found,
was easy.... She relaxed, fell away into
darkness, with no down, only away.... In that infinite
comforting sea floated a ghostly cloud, lit within by an invisible moon. Seeing better as her vision adjusted to the
dark, she saw fuzzy cloud-shape resolve into delicate misty leaves and
evanescent branches leading down to a ghostly trunk.... . Mary She smiled; her mother
was always telling her she had too much imagination for her own good. Her mother and the
rest of the family were beside her in the family bed. To keep from disturbing anyone Mary lay perfectly relaxed and
still. Her bedroom was as
dark as a cave far underground, but she thought nothing of this. A poor crofter's cottage in Ireland in 1854
could not afford a fire for warmth and light after bedtime. Wood and turf cost hours of hard labor. But being cold was
unusual. The Mary lifted her hands
to grasp the covers -- or tried to.
They moved only a little way from their folded position on her
chest. She was wrapped in a sheet and there
was a weight above it molding the sheet to her. But there was enough
room to let her rub the material between thumb and fingers. It was very coarse and thick and seemed to
be wrapped several times around her, even her head. She ceased all
movement. This was a funeral shroud. She couldn't be
dead. She had been very sick, yes, but
now she felt very healthy, better than she had in many years. True, she was freezing cold, she was very
thirsty, and her stomach cramped viciously from hunger, but these were not new
experiences for a poor Irish woman. And
she felt full of energy and well-being and a serene contentment. Had she been
buried? No. She couldn't be. She
would be suffocating from lack of air. Then she realized
something. She could not feel breath
moving into and out of her lungs. Her
chest was not expanding and contracting.
She wasn't breathing. Nor was her heart
beating -- or so she thought. She
managed to move one hand just enough so that she could press her fingers to the
pulse point on the wrist of the other hand. No. No pulse.
Though that proved nothing; it had never been easy for her to find the
pulse point. Maybe she had missed it
again. She considered all
this for a time. She felt no panic, no
urgency to do anything. She simply wanted
to understand what was going on. Finally she decided to
accept what had happened to her, at least for now. Perhaps it was a miracle.
She was a pious and dutiful and loving woman, and it was not beyond
reason that God would grant her a small miracle. She began moving her
hands, exploring her surroundings as well as she could despite the restriction
of the cloth and the earth piled atop and around her. It felt heavy but not crushingly so. Indeed, it felt as if the earth was clasping her lovingly, like a
swaddled infant. This was so
interesting that she stopped moving and simply relaxed and savored the feeling
for a time. Another interesting
sensation attracted her attention: her hands were beginning to feel slightly
warm, as if she had immersed them in warm dishwater. They also felt as if they were dissolving into the imaginary
water. With that sensation
came another: she tasted the fibers of the cloth making up the shroud, as if
her hands had become her tongue. This
was not terribly exciting; the taste was pretty boring. Except it was as much
feeling as tasting. For suddenly --
like an optical illusion where a picture suddenly appears totally different --
the sensation that her fingers were dissolving flipped into the sensation that
they were becoming smaller, thinner, and much more numerous. Small enough to feel the tiny fibers that
made up the cloth. The fibers were very
fine and fuzzy, kinking and wrapping around each other to make the threads
which made the yarn which made the cloth. So vivid were the
taste/touch sensations that she could almost see the cloth. And she saw that if she pulled the strands
with her imaginary fingers just so -- and she found that she could indeed pull
them -- that the cloth unraveled and became a very fine dust. Now, with the cloth
around them gone, she could move her hands a little more and could feel/taste
the earth. The tiny, normally barely
visible grains of earth felt more like gravel, and tasted of iron and copper
and other less-identifiable tastes. And
her many tiny fingers could move between the chunks of the "gravel,"
pulling/eating at the stuff which glued the gravel together. Slowly, patiently, she
extended her real fingers into the softened earth. It caressed her fingers and arms like the softest, finest dust,
so fine it felt almost like water. Extending her real
hands moved her imaginary fingers and their softening influence. She pushed her arms above her chest, above
her head, above her torso, and with some effort sat up. It was as if she sat up under water, through
water as heavy and resistant as molasses. Now she could reach
her hips and soften the earth enough to pull her legs out of the cavity in the
earth in which they rested. She
stood. Her head broke through the earth
and she saw faint light through her closed eyes. Mindful of the dust on her eyelids, Mary rubbed them very carefully
with her imaginary fingers -- she had no desire to "soften" her flesh
to mush -- until they seemed dust-free.
Cautiously she opened her eyes the tiniest slit. A faint remnant of dust brought tears to her
eyes. She blinked them several times
until they were clear and peered around her. The waning crescent moon shown in the clear sky. It was a quarter of the way down the western
sky toward moonset over the Irish seacoast and the Atlantic Ocean beyond
it. She could hear the mile-distant
breakers rolling ashore as a quiet murmur.
Hundreds of miles that way was America, where her eldest son and two of
her daughters were. She was, of course, in the cemetery where her father and other
relatives had been buried, on the low hill overlooking the beach. A simple head stone marked her grave and
similar headstones around her marked others.
The light was too dim to make out the inscription on her grave marker
but she knew what it was -- what she had chosen years ago. She'd bought the headstone and had it carved
to make sure the job was done right: "She loved God, and God loved
her." A cold wind came from the west, making the knee-high grass in the
fields about her sway and dance so that the grass almost looked like waves of
water. The frigid wind caressed her body intimately. She felt no colder than before, however. Interesting, she thought. She was not
shivering and did not feel the expected cold-brought goosebumps on her arms and
legs. Mary put her arms on the waist-level grassy verge around the grave and
crawled up onto the surface. . As she stood upright she noticed with a little pang in her breast that
several small bouquets of flowers had been laid against her tombstone. They were dry and shrunken, as if they had
been there for at least a week and more likely two. She looked down at herself. Dim
as the light from the moon and sky was, she could still see that she was a
mess, her simple dress thin and dirt-stained, her body equally filthy. She grasped her dress-front and shook
it. Dust flew up from it. It made her eyes water, so she faced into the
wind to let it take the dust away. The dust should have made her sneeze or cough. But she was still not breathing and so had
inhaled none of it. Her entire dress was dirty. She
looked around. There was no one about,
hardly surprising at possibly three hours before dawn. She slipped her dress over her head and,
returning to her gravesite, swatted her gravestone with the dress, standing so
that the wind off the ocean carried the dust away from her. It was a disrespectful use of a gravestone but it was, after all,
hers. She smiled at the thought. With the dress she wiped as much dirt and dust from her face and neck
and torso as she could. She noticed
then that her long curly red hair, liberally shot with grey, was gone. She raised a hand to her head.
There was a short nap of very fine hair covering it, like a newborn's
hair. Mentally shrugging, she used the dress to wipe clean the rest of her
body, inspecting herself as she did so. She was as skinny as a child.
No; skinnier. Every ounce of fat
seemed to be gone, leaving her ribs prominent.
Her hipbones almost seemed to poke through her skin; they were still
woman-wide, however. Her skinniness was
that of starvation, not a return to childhood.
Though, fingering her flat breasts, she could almost believe that. However, her nipples and areolas were still
woman-sized. She searched again for
a heartbeat and found none. She decided
that this was not incompetence in finding it.
Her heart truly did not beat; blood did not course through her veins. Yet she felt absurdly
healthy. Just cold and hungry and
thirsty. She could do something
about that. There was food and clothing
at home, water in a small stream that crossed the path on the way there. Her body as clean as she could make it, she beat the dress clean again
and re-dressed. Glancing about to orient herself, she started walking. . Perhaps a quarter hour
later she came across the small stream.
She drank her fill of the icy water.
It satisfied her thirst and eased the hunger pains. She could have drunk
too much and made herself sick. But she
had an interior sense of exactly how much water she needed and as she approached
that point she slowed and then stopped her drinking. She, and she supposed
everyone else, had always had this interior knowledge. But this seemed much clearer than her former
vague sensation of being full. As she walked toward
home, thinking about this improved self-knowledge, a sharp pain in one foot
stopped her. She sat down on the grass,
chiding herself for not walking more carefully. But her feet were so tough-soled from going barefoot most of her
life that she rarely needed to think about where she placed her feet. Interesting; the grass
and ground beneath her bottom merely felt cool, not near-freezing as it should
in early spring. Lifting her hurt foot
onto one knee, she inspected the wound.
In the dim light she could just barely see that a small shard of stone
was embedded in the tough sole of her foot. She pulled it out and,
as she did so, noticed a strange feeling.
It was as if her flesh was closing up behind the exiting stone. She could actually feel it pushing the stone
out and, with it, little fragments of dirt and grass. Tossing the stone off
the path, she looked at her wound. It
was hard to tell in the dim moonlight, but the gash seemed to be closed. Only a little flap of skin curled away from
it, exposing a triangle of raw flesh. Carefully she brought
her hand near the flap, thinking to nudge it closed somehow without touching
the raw side. When her finger neared
the skin she could feel her wound with one of her -- what was it? -- her shadow
hands, the ones that had gotten her out of her grave. Her shadow hand could
touch the flap of skin without dirtying it.
As she did so, she somehow saw the flesh, as if her shadow
fingers were also shadow eyes. And
shadow tongue -- for with her hand she also tasted the copper of blood
and something like but not pepper, something like oregano, a taste/odor of
corruption, smoke, and a dozen other tastes that she had never had in her real
mouth. Confused by the clash
of what her real eyes and shadow eyes saw, she closed her real ones. Confusion disappeared. This was much better. In the world of
shadow-touch and -taste and -sight she could, she found, come effortlessly
closer to her skin without bending her neck forward, because she was not
"seeing" with her eyes. As
she moved her shadow hand/eyes she saw all around it what seemed like fog. But this fog was
transparent, and somehow she sensed that it was alive. It touched her all over, including the raw
flesh uncovered by the flap of skin, and she knew that the fog would harm her
if it was caught inside her when she folded the skin back into place. She wished the fog
near her skin gone. And it went, as the
raw skin somehow ate the fog that touched it, leaving the raw skin
momentarily clean. Startled, she opened
her eyes. What an extraordinary thing
to happen! But she was not
done. She closed her eyes again and
with her shadow fingers coaxed the flap of skin closed, working at the edge
where it had folded back rather than at the narrow tip of skin. Slowly, slowly the flap curled itself closed. As flap and foot reconnected Mary could
"see" tiny threadlike fibers reach out from sundered skin to newly
covered flesh and weave the no-longer-sundered flesh whole. As it did so she
became aware of the fact that skin was not one layer but three, each with a
different function that she understood perfectly. It was if she were remembering something she had known for a long
time and was being reminded of it. Yet
that was not the case; she had never read or heard about this body of knowledge
that was suddenly hers. Mary opened her flesh
eyes, peered at her foot. It seemed
healed. With feather-soft touch of her
real fingers she caressed the hurt spot. It was hurt no
longer. Ticklish, yes, but only as much
as the rest of her foot. This was not
very much, given the thickness and toughness of her soles. Shoes were terribly expensive for poor
Irish, who walked barefoot everywhere and only put on their shoes when they
entered a village or the home of a stranger. Mary sat back, looking
at the crescent moon without seeing it.
Her side of the family was said to be gifted with healers, and she knew
she had once had some small talents in that direction. But she had never heard that they were this
gifted. She certainly had not been. Maybe that was what
had happened to her. She had healed
herself of death. If that was so, why
wasn't she breathing? Why didn't her
heart beat? She seemed to have
healed herself of much else. Her back,
ever sore this last year, no longer hurt.
Her fingers, once gnarled and painful from arthritis, were straight and
strong. And, looking closer in the
dimness, she could see that that the flesh of her hands was no longer loose and
mottled. She had healed herself of age. Her belly clenched
worse. She was hungrier than ever;
perhaps the small healing she had just done had come at cost to the rest of her
body. She needed food. Standing, she saw that
the westering moon was noticeably lower.
She had less time to get food and clothing from her home if she were to
do it secretly. And she thought she
must do it that way, at least till she had time to figure out how to break the
news to her family that she had returned from the grave. She got to her feet
and set off again on the path through the grassy fields. . Her home was still quiet when she reached it a bit later. She stood for moments listening outside the
closed front door. Carefully she tried
to open it and the door swung outward.
Good; most poor Irish had so little that thieves had no reason to try to
steal from them. She and her husband
had never barred the door. Pausing, she listened at the cracked door a moment then slipped inside
and closed the door to keep out the cold, to keep her family from waking up. The hunger in her belly screamed for satisfaction, but she had carefully
thought through what she must do here.
She ignored the hunger as she had so many times in her life. For a moment she stood and listened to her family breathe. None of them snored; she had trained them to
sleep on their sides. Two of her
youngest daughters were here, the older two married and gone to America. Her oldest son of three was in that country,
too. Here was also her mother and her
husband and two younger sons. But one person snored. It was
the widow O'Toole. For years Timothy
had fooled around with her. As long as
they remained discreet, Mary pretended not to know. Mary and he had not been husband and wife in a physical way for
years, and she had been relieved that he had somone to keep him from bothering
her. Her heart turned over in her chest, because she just now understood
that she was going to have to leave them all.
She had left them all.
She was dead. Or dead
enough. She still did not breathe, her
heart did not beat. Turning aside she crept carefully around the edges of the room, which
was as dark as her grave. The windows
were closed to keep out the poison of night air, and they were mere wooden
shutters, glass being too dear for poor people like her family. She used feet and hands to avoid unsuspected
obstacles. In minutes she reached the storage alcove where clothes hung on pegs
and lay folded on narrow shelves.
Working by feel she found and wrapped a scarf around her neck, selected
two dresses and her long coat, slung the dresses around her neck like scarves
and pulled on the coat. She also took a pair of her youngest son's oldest pants, the ones he
rarely wore anymore because he had grown out of them. She draped them around her neck like another scarf; when she got
the chance she would put the pants on under her dress. She folded tightly two changes of underwear
and three pair of long stockings which, not having feet, were really only leg
warmers, and tucked them into the coat's big pockets. She also found her brogans, tied the laces together, and slung
them around her neck. As an
afterthought, she fitted one of her youngest son's two belts around her waist,
the one that was too small for him. She left on the shelf the vast apron, almost as long and full as a
dress that showed her status as a grown woman.
She had always hated that totally useless, wasteful symbol. She was deft and careful when she washed
anything and did not need to be constantly wiping her hands on her lap. She crept into the kitchen. It
was little more than a fireplace, shelves built into the sides of the house,
and a narrow table against a wall to prepare food. She located bread and stored several small hard loaves in coat
pockets. She desired salt but could
think of no way to carry it. She located a long-bladed butcher knife and made her way out the side
door to the adjoining meat room where smoked and salted meat hung from the
rafters. Her belly screaming at her for
food, she took one of the little loaves of bread from her pocket and bit off a
generous hunk, cramming the bite into her mouth then replacing the loaf in her
pocket. Her mouth was dry at first, then there was a spurt of saliva as she bit
into the bread. Its tart rye taste was
heavenly. Chewing the tough bread, she
cut two big slabs of ham from a hanging haunch and crammed them into another
bulging coat pocket. She swallowed the
first mouthful of bread and swayed on her feet. The relief from her clenching belly muscles almost made her
faint. She managed to stuff two more slabs of meat into her pockets before
they were completely full. Now it was
time to leave. She desperately wanted
to eat more, but there was not enough time. She tucked the long blade beneath her belt, tightening the belt another
notch to keep the knife secure. Then
she drifted through the living area like a ghost and eased open the front door. . She had not been quiet enough.
She heard movement behind her and felt an enormous shock across her
upper back. If not for the two dresses
and the pants around her neck the blow likely would have killed her. She stumbled through the door and went to her knees. Another tremendous blow struck her, this
time on her side and back and upper arm. Rolling desperately in her lumpy and clumsy clothing, she escaped
another blow that whistled by her head.
On her back she looked up at her assailant. Despite the dim light she rocognized her husband. He drew back his long wooden staff to strike
down at her and she screamed, "Timothy!" He froze, squinting and gaping down at her in the dimness, the staff
sagging. Then he lifted the staff again
and she rolled desperately several more times, feeling the hard length of the
knife in her belt pressing against her body. Quickly she got to her knees, scrabbling at the knife in her belt. It had turned at an acute angle to the belt
but not fallen out. Finding the hilt,
she jerked the knife from her belt and pointed it at her husband as he
approached. She screamed at him, angry.
"Timothy, I'll cut you!
Before God I will!" He paused. She could see his
bearded face in the twilight that was ever-so-slightly brightening the eastern
sky. He was angry but momentarily
confused. "Who are you?" he
demanded. She got warily to her feet, crouching with her weight forward on her
feet so she could move quickly. She
knew with absolute certainty that she had a cracked rib and broken arm, but she
had strength enough to hold the knife point out toward his face. "I'm your wife, you idiot!" she screamed at him. She was certainly breathing now, huge gasps,
and she could feel her heart beating wildly.
Anger and fear gave her enormous strength just now, but it couldn't last
long. Her body was eating up the very
last of her resources. Timothy stepped back, the staff now raised in a diagonal in front of
him for protection. Anger and fear
warred on his face. He was a very
superstitious man, fearing bogles at night and wearing charms to protect
himself from the faery world. A light flared at the doorway.
Several people came out. One
held a torch. A quick glance showed
that it was her second oldest son Michael before she brought her gaze back to
the closer threat. "My wife is dead!" he said. "I've come back! This is a
fine greeting." "You're nothing but a thief!" "A thief that knows you have a purple birthmark on your right
side. A thief that knows that you threw
up when you butchered your first pig!" Her husband stepped back again, no longer angry. If the light were better she knew she would
have seen his ruddy face turn pale. "How do you know that?"
He was joined now by the two sons who still lived at home, at his side
but a little back. The flickering light
of the torch that Michael held high cast a weird light on everyone's faces. "I'm Mary Katherine Frances "Back!" Timothy said, placing the staff straight across his
body, making a barrier of it. He
stepped back, the staff pushing his sons backward as well. But no one moved far. They
needed one more push from her. Knowing
Timothy she knew just what would work. Mary took a step forward.
"Darling Timothy, don't you want to kiss me?" She took another step forward. "Everyone in the house!
Now!" Timothy shouted. He
turned and pushed the people behind him with his staff. They rushed inside the house and the door
slammed. Mary could hear the rarely
used locking bar thud into its socket.
She also heard Michael protesting.
He was not superstitious and he was a brave man. But her husband would keep him in the house
for a time. Mary felt pride in Michael. He
had always been her favorite, though she had hid it well, she thought. It was time to go. For a time
at least she was safe. She rearranged her twisted miscellany of clothing and patted her
pockets. One of the slabs of meat had
fallen out. She picked up the dirty
meat. The dirt was clean dirt; the meat
could be washed clean. At the verge of the rough yard she stopped and looked back. Poor as it was this had been her home for
more than twenty years. The last time she had left home it had been hard. But then at least she'd been taking Tim and
the young ones and a few precious items with her, taking part of home with
her. This time there'd only be herself. She paused for a moment more, looking at her home, then turned and left
it forever. . At first she was going
to walk to the Burren, the limestone hills to the east. There were So she backtracked
toward the cemetery, eating ham and the hard, crunchy bread as she went, taking
small bites and chewing well. She did
not want to get sick from eating irresponsibly and maybe throw up some of the
precious food. She walked on the
softer earth on the path to make it easier for them to follow her. Along the way she would begin to walk more
and more on rocky ground, then veer off carefully, hoping that they would
continue on to the dead-end of the grave. She snickered at the
play on words despite the pain in her ribs and arm. Then she thought a
little more and devised a yet better plan. Stepping carefully off
the path onto some stones Mary examined one of the bushes beside the path. There, that small but sturdy branch would
not be missed if removed carefully. Reaching for her
knife, she remembered how she had softened the earth of her grave. Perhaps she could do the same thing with the
branch. Leaving the knife
where it was, she placed At first nothing
happened. She persevered, concentrating
on the roughness of the bark, imagining the She felt her hand
warming and seeming to dissolve, turning to mist. The mist reformed as long, thin fingers, dozens, hundreds of
them. The imaginary fingers sank into
the branch, which now seemed the size of a log, taking her consciousness with
them. Down into the wood she
swam, the "log" expanding to the size of a huge tree trunk laid on
its side. She saw/tasted the pathways
where water and the food dissolved into it flowed. The food seemed to sparkle and she somehow knew that the sparkle
came from sunlight absorbed through leaves hours before, during the day. The vistas of
information opening up fascinated her, but she had a purpose here. She turned her attention to changing the
wood, softening it. A moment later the
hardness around her turned instantly to mush and she found herself plunging
downward as the wood surrounding her consciousness became fluid and fell. She opened her She glanced up. She could see better now because the east showed
the brightness preceding dawn. Looking
down she saw that her hand was plastered with a white mud-like substance: the
dissolved wood. She shook her hand and
the mud turned to liquid and fell away, leaving her hand clean. She stared at her hand
for a moment. She had a powerful tool
here. And a weapon if she wanted it to
be. But a knife could turn in your hand
and cut you. She would have to explore
this power very cautiously. Stepping carefully on
stones back to the path she went all the way to the grave, still leaving an
obvious track, and filled in the grave as well as she could with her hands. Then Mary tiptoed away
from the grave on the hardest looking ground and thickest grass that she could
find. She walked backward with
occasional turns of her head to see where she was going, occasionally mussing
the path with the leaves of the branch. This probably would
not fool determined trackers in daylight if they looked for signs leading away
from the grave. But she hoped they
would conclude she had returned to her grave and would not look for her
tracks. She also hoped that wind and
time and maybe one of the frequent rains of Ireland would wipe out all tracks. . It was just past
mid-day when Mary came across another of the streams that wound down from the
hills to the east to spill into the ocean.
This one was big enough to bathe in, though barely. She looked all around
carefully and, seeing no one, took off her clothing. She placed everything except her knife in a pile under a solitary
scraggly tree so small it was barely more than a bush, but large enough to hold
a small flock of birds who twittered back and forth in avian conversation. Carefully Mary entered
the frigid water at a hard sandy piece of stream bank that would not show
tracks and stabbed the point of the knife into the water at her feet. There it stood concealed but easily reached
if she had to grab it. She lay down in the
water, just barely deep enough to cover her entire body. She gasped at the shock but the sensation of
cold immediately disappeared, replaced with a refreshing cool feeling. Somehow she knew that her skin had thickened
and the tiny blood vessels near the skin's surface had tightened, shutting off
the blood to the skin. She supposed that was
a magical talent, but it had used natural resources. Everyone's skin could do this to some extent, just not as fast or
as much. She immersed her head
in the water and twisted it sharply from side to side to swish the water around
it. Then she popped her head out of the
water, shook and brushed the water from her eyes, and looked around. Nothing. No one. She went back to
bathing, stopping every few minutes to look around and listen, but soon she had
completely bathed and left the water. Drying off with one
clean dress, she donned underwear, leg-warming footless stockings, her youngest
son's castoff pants as a sort of petticoat, and a clean dress over it. She draped the shoes around her neck. Then she dried the knife very
carefully. It was very valuable, and
not just in monetary terms. With it she
could prepare food and protect herself. As she finished all
this she realized something -- there was no pain, or even stiffness, from the
blows she had received this morning, even in the most contorted position. Her body had healed itself, and so well that
she had automatically bent, sat, lay, and otherwise twisted her body while
washing and re-clothing herself without any thought for her injuries. She stood still for a
few moments, thinking about this. Then
she peeled her dress over her head so that she could look at the arm that
Timothy's blow had, she had thought, broken. No bruises, not a
one. She fingered the bone of her upper
arm, so near the skin of her emaciated body, where she had been struck. There was no knot of healed bone. But the bone had
been broken. She had known this in some
esoteric way, feeling it, almost seeing it, not just as a guess. Thoughtfully she completed dressing, finishing with
the long coat and the belt with the knife tucked inside it. She was back to normal, with breath and
heartbeat like anyone else, and her body was warm. Her stomach was full but not over-full after a morning of slow
eating and well-chewed food. She squatted and arranged her meager belongings and tied them into a crude
pack with a handhold, then stood upright, crossed her arms, and leaned
against the scrubby tree. She needed to pause and think, not rush to
do something, anything. That was one of
her weaknesses, that she always had to be doing something, anything, going
somewhere. Timothy used to call her Mary Always on the Go. For years she had tried to learn to relax and had
only moderate success in acquiring this skill.
Now the instant she decided to do it some mysterious spirit or engine
inside her took over her body. Her body drew
in a deep breath and very slowly let it out.
All her muscles relaxed except those needed to keep her standing upright. A Time seemed to slow, then stop. For a moment she remained an observer unattached to
the rest of the world. Then she seemed
almost to move forward, into
the world. She felt herself -- sink into
the In the slight shade
she From out
of her contented timeless stillness the reminder rose up from the deep
reservoirs of her mind: there was no going back to her old life. Even if she wanted to -- and she did not, as
much as she missed her mother and children and even her husband -- she was now
perhaps thirteen years old physically.
Maybe she was even a virgin again.
At some convenient time she would check. Her
earlier plan, to hole up in caves If anyone
did indeed believe that that Mary had returned to life, they would expect her
to go east along the southern shore of Galway Bay, to Ballyvaghan. A substantial village of several dozen
souls, it was only five miles away, with a church, small dock for fishing
boats, and several small businesses and homes.
It was where Mary and her family had always gone for civilized niceties. So it
would be best to travel south down the coast a few days to a distant village
and see what work she could pick up. A
woman, especially a young one, would find it near impossible to live alone, so
she would have to steal more boy's clothes and pretend to be a boy. Perhaps, with these strange new powers, she
could make herself look more like a boy. Or even
become a boy. She looked
downhill, to the west and south, thinking about the journey. And the powers that had cured her of death
and age brought themselves to her attention yet again. She could see everything perfectly clearly,
but this was more than just having cured herself of her decades-long
nearsightedness while she was in the grave.
As she focused on ever more faraway bends of the little stream her body
was automatically reshaping her eyes to bring each bend closer, making her eyes
temporarily into weak binoculars. Just how
much she could change herself -- and without doing herself harm in the process
-- she would have to find out by experiment.
Very careful experiment. But for
now all that was speculation. She had
to attend to more immediate needs.
Survival alone, without kin or even friends, would not be easy. But she
had no fear. She was an accomplished
woman, used to devising clever stratagems to make do with very little. She was also used to hard work and God had
given her a new life. More, she had
been given extraordinary gifts, perhaps magical, which she had only begun to
explore. She was
young again, totally free of duty or expectation. Mary could go to any place in the wide world, places about which
she had only heard or read. And when
these new powers were mastered -- what might she be able to do? Though she
would have to be careful. Even in this
modern age witches were not kindly thought of. For a
moment she remained totally relaxed, at rest.
The air was as clear as crystal with something of the inner light of
crystal. The slight breeze of early
afternoon was just cool enough to caress her cheeks, and the cool air moved
calmly in and out of her lungs…. …what
would she see, what would she do in the days and years to come? She
reached down for the handhold of the pack, picked it up, and strode off
downhill to find out. | |
Chapter Two
