Granny Tales Part ii

Granny: I was ten years old and went to visit my Mamo* in Killybeg. My people on both sides were fishermen until there was too many sons and some took to building ships, which carried them into the craw of English Ulster, and me eventually to the this little canyon in flinty hills nothing like home. When I visited Mamo we ate sweet, firm fish every day, baked or skillet browned, or my favorite, hung over the smoky heat of glowing peat. I lived most of my life in Ireland in the crap traps of east Ulster, yet in our kitchen and in our hearts when we said ‘home’ we meant County Donegal*. Anyway, one night a storm blew in and Mamo* and my cousin Teltina and I went up to the attic of the little stone house, turned off the lamps and Mamo told this story: When she was little in a near by village there was a girl who had falling down disease. Her eyes would roll, she’d fall to the ground and begin to twitch and jerk, she’d wet herself and tear at her clothes, she’d make garbled sounds in her throat and sometimes spit blood or vomit. Teltina and I huddled beneath a wool blanked; Mamo spoke in the darkness, and though the stone house itself was rooted in earth, the roof was only wood and slate, and it moaned and rattled with the storm, chattered like a thousand bones when the squall blew rain. Most often, the girl fell down at her work in the scullery of a grand house, but one day in early summer she fell down in church, her arms and legs twitching, growling and groaning noises come from her throat. The priest called the girl and her father and the elder men of the village and they questioned the girl. What happened when she fell down? She said, "I pass from this world to the world of the beautiful lady." At first they thought she was speaking of the Virgin Mary, but when they asked more questions, they got concerned. What was she doing when she moved her arms and legs? "We swim and dance, and play in the sun." The priest scowled: clearly this was no Christian place. What were the sounds she was making in her throat? "I’m speaking and singing in the old language, the language they speak there." Where, they wanted to know, where was she? She had no idea, only that the beautiful lady met her and took her there when she fell down. Finally, one of the elders asked, "is everyone young?" "Oh, yes! Everyone is young, and the days and nights are always warm, and the flowers bloom everywhere and their smell makes me drunk, so when I wake up I’m still drunk for a little while." The elders gasped, and the face of the priest scowled and grimaced because they all knew where she was, Tír na nÓg, the land of eternal youth, eternal spring. The priest sent her home, but met with her father and the elders and said, "we have to stop the girl from leaving here." Her father said, "she’s just a girl, she’s making things up to tell us. Surely you don’t believe in the old tales." But the priest felt a real dread in his heart that the people in his parish would revert to the old ways and meet in secret to dance by the lakes and rivers and fornicate by the light of a full moon. Sure enough, word of the girl spread through the hills and bogs and all the villages up and down the coast. The next time the girl fell down, her aunts kneeled down and put their ears to her lips. Much of what she said was in her throat, but at last she did gasp out the name they were waiting to hear: "Nmv" she said, "Nfv." Neev*! She said "Neev", who lives on Tír na nÓg. This was proof the girl was winging north through the shrouded seas with Neev to the land of the ever young, the place where the old heroes lived. When the girl woke up, she did seem to be drunk. The old women took the girl to the kitchen and asked her questions in great detail, covering all that was known about the old land. They asked her, was it Neev who took her across? The girl was unsure at first, but then nodded, yes, it was Neev, that was her name. She told them one more thing: when they danced, they danced naked. The news was on the street and before the priest swifter than a bird could fly across the town, and through all the villages and hills. The priest, determined to stop things at once, passed out instructions that he be summoned at the first sign she was falling down, and then he waited. For a month she simply worked, peeling potatoes, cleaning, but not cooking, cabbage and carrots and fish and mutton, cleaning chamber pots, scrubbing cold stone floors, chopping wood and peat, cleaning her mistress’s children, cleaning the family clothes. The girl finally fell down while cleaning floors, and this time she was gone a long time, dancing and talking until at last she fell into a drunken stupor. The priest was summoned, but he was giving Extreme Unction to a wealthy parishioner, and arrived too late. This time when questioned, she had great detail on the land of the ever young, and could answer all the questions they’d asked before. She also told them, "the lady said I would be able to come and stay with them soon, and not come back. She said that when three full moons had passed there, dozens of years would pass here and you would all be gone." The priest scarcely had time to sleep. He waited for the call. He considered doing an exorcism, but she was not exactly possessed by a demon, she was simply traveling with pagan gods. Finally, as he dozed in front of his Bible and a glass of wine, the call came. He rushed to the girl, who was in the street at the market. She was jerking and tearing at her clothes: clearly she was dancing with the fairies and wanted to be naked. The priest knelt down, slapped her face again and again, "no you don’t!" he shouted, shaking and shaking her, slapping her face, but she quivered and garbled in spite of him, and one of the women said, "she’s with them now, you can’t touch her!" The priest grew fierce and angry and shook and shook the girl until her head lolled and snapped and eventually, she went slack and he let her go. He stood, trembling and exhausted as though he’d fought one of the old heroes himself. One of the old women knelt and said, "she’s gone. She’s gone to stay." But others in town didn’t see it that way. The way they saw it, the priest had killed her, shaken her so hard as to snap her neck, and a little examination of her body showed, yes, her neck was broken. The priest, at first declared, "I had nothing to do with it, she went over to the heathens of her own accord," but when the broken neck was evidenced, he said, "I had to stop her to save her soul. Isn’t it better that she be released from her agony by a priest and only spend a few lifetimes in Purgatory instead of burning forever in hell?" But, again, folk were divided. Was she, now, in Purgatory, or was she in Tír na nÓg? The law was called, but times being as they were, there was no rush to convict a priest, whereas forty years earlier it was a small matter to stone or hang a priest. The girl’s body lie, and the priest said he couldn’t give her a Catholic burial because she might be in a heathen paradise instead of spending timeless misery in Purgatory. People in the hills became divided and disquiet, and more reports of sightings and visions of old heroes came, and from deep in the sea loughs came the story that someone had seen Finn MacCumhail himself, riding over the waves on a great white horse. The girl’s body disappeared, and a new cairn was found in the hills by the sea. The law came and questioned the priest, who claimed the girl had gone limp on her own, he was not shaking her when she died, he claimed God had guided his hands and he was immune from questioning. The law was unhappy but didn’t come back. She was a scullery girl, he was a priest, and who knows what powers the old legends had. The loughs and bogs saw fires at night, poteen got hard to come by, and the pews in the church emptied as there were whispers of "murderer" following the priest everywhere. Then, summer drew on and Lunasa, the first of August, was at hand. This is was a celebration of the old religion not forgotten. There was a huge fire in a clearing on a cliff above the sea lough; there were drums and pipes and fiddles playing and men and women danced with the knowledge that lies deep in all of us of the old ways, before law and sin had civilized us. Suddenly, though distant and faint under the drums, the church bell was ringing. A dancer stopped, a drummer stopped and the ringing of the bell made them suddenly common local people in the light of the fire. The ringing trailed off oddly, and for a moment everyone stood in silence. Then, far off shouting called them to the village. It was dark, and there was confusion at first around the church, then the understanding spread: the priest was hanging from the bell rope outside the steeple. From inside the church someone shouted, "there are hoof prints on the floor! Finn MacCumhail has hung the priest for killing the girl!" The people roared their approval and the fires were begun in town, and the pipes and drums carried on until past dawn. In the morning, a magistrate from the county arrived. Sobriety returned to the town. The magistrate said that the girl had madness, and the priest had caught it from her. He pointed to the priest’s body, still hanging from the bell rope, and said he had hanged himself. He showed them that what had been thought horseshoe prints were simply quarry marks in the stone floor. It was lucky, he said, that the priest had killed the girl and then himself, or the madness could have spread through the countryside. He cautioned the people that there were taxes due, and encouraged them to return to their fishing and farming. The Bishop buried the old priest in a pauper’s grave outside the cemetery, installed a new priest from Italy who knew nothing of Irish lore, and admonished the people to return to their proper ways. "That was the end of the fires and dancing," Mamo told Teltina and me, huddled in the dark like pups beneath the scratchy wool blanket, and quivering at the rattling of the bones on the roof. She whispered, "the end of the celebrating, but not the end of the girl." Now Mamo leaned in very close; we could hear her voice almost in our ears, "every year to the day of her death she is seen riding through the village behind Finn MacCumhail on his beautiful stallion. They are clever, and can slip through almost invisibly, but those listening can hear the clop of the stallion’s hooves on the cobbles. On the first of August, if there’s a full moon, the bell in the tower rings, and the priest’s heels drag on the steeple roof, and now we know the girl is in Tír na nÓg, and the priest is burning in his hell forever." Then, suddenly, as though it were in the attic with us, and not in the street, we heard the rapid "clop" of a galloping horse, and my body went electric and Teltina and I grasped each other in horror, and my Mamo, sitting in the dark with her hand over a tea cup galloping on the wooden floor, laughed like a heathen dancer on poteen.

End of Granny Tales Part ii

Continued in Granny Tales Part iii

* I transcribed the names phonetically; the proper spellings are: Maimeó, Dhún na nGall, and Niamh.