Himself(56)

And she saw, with great confusion, that the egg was gone and the hen was dead.

She felt the hen all over. Its belly was bloated hard and it was heavy in her hands. She put the bird back into the box and stared at it. All of a sudden, the hen’s neck flopped backward, showing the gullet.

The woman watched, riveted in horror, as something began to move inside the dead bird’s throat. Now drawing it taut, now laying it loose.

A bloody beak began to tear through the neck of the dead hen. The woman hardly had the wits to scream. The beak was followed by a head, which poked obscenely out of the dead bird’s carcass smeared in gore and blinking its eyes. And so the woman realised that the poor hen had hatched a chick so monstrous that it had eaten her from the inside out.

The woman fought against the repulsion rising in her as she carried the box outside with shaking hands. The chick, halfway out of the dead hen, was as soft and naked as an earthworm. It squinted up at her with its swollen eyelids half-closed against the sun. The woman tried not to look at the terrible chick as she banked dry wood around the body of the hen. The chick opened its beak and sang quietly. The woman tried not to hear its small song as she added newspaper to make the fire burn quicker. The chick tried the stumps of its wings, flapping about in the box as the woman added turf to make the fire burn deeper.

The woman lit the fire she had set and watched it burn with her heart sickened over the poor dead hen and the monstrous chick. Then, no longer able to stand it, she returned to her cottage and shut the door and sat by the range looking at the empty space on the ground where the box had been.

The next day the woman went to the scorched smear in the courtyard and began to sweep up the ashes.

As she did so, something moved beneath her brush.

Before her eyes a blackened ball was collecting itself, rolling over the ground and drawing itself upward. The graphite dust whirled tighter and tighter to become more and more densely packed and sparkling. It grew bigger, blacker, sharper, until it formed an undeniable shape, not unlike a swan, only bigger. It opened its wings and rushed up into the air.

The ashes fell away, so that the bird was revealed as it circled above the woman. Its body was the colour of copper lit from the inside. Its tail feathers were a fierce orange that flashed and burnt as the bird flew around the roof of the cottage. It landed on a chimneystack from where it looked down the length of its beak at the woman with long almond eyes the colour of hot iron.

And the woman finally saw that what is terrible can also be beautiful and she lifted up her arms to the bird as it flew away into the west.

The woman cried for a long time, then she wiped her face on her apron and got up from her knees. As she walked back to the hen house to shut her hens away from the hungry foxes, something caught her eye.

It was a gift from the firebird.

A feather lay smouldering in the mud. It was the rich red of a velvet-lined trinket box, a deep, secret red. It was longer than her forearm and curved from root to tip, like a foxglove. The woman picked it up and found that it was warm to the touch and soft against her lips. She took it into her house and heated a candle. Then she carefully pushed the quill of the firebird’s feather into the softened wax. For the rest of her life the feather glowed. She set it at the window, in case the bird ever flew her way again.





Chapter 26


May 1976


In the parochial library Father Eugene Quinn and the Widow Annie Farelly are sitting pious and silent, clad in rubber boots and a rain bonnet respectively, and stalwartly ignoring the holy spring that spurts and babbles at their feet with pagan enthusiasm. Their conversation has been temporarily halted whilst Róisín sets down the tea things.

‘Will I take some of the frogs out with me, Father?’

Róisín nods towards the bucket at the door, which she fills to the brim with writhing amphibians at least six times a day. But however far away she takes them the creatures always seem to find their way home again.

Yesterday she packed a crowd of them in a picnic hamper and took them on the bus all the way to Ennismore. Yet she swore the exact same frogs were waiting for her in the hallway by the time she got back again.

Róisín doesn’t have the heart to kill them. As long as they keep out of the kitchen she doesn’t mind them. They’re even a bit of company about the place. So when Father Quinn enquires as to whether she’s destroying them as he asked her to, she bursts into song, or pretends not to hear, so that Father Quinn begins to think that Mrs Munnelly is a little touched.

‘No, that will be all, thank you, Róisín.’

Now Róisín will tell you that she’s not at all the type of individual usually given to listening at doors. But there’s something in the way that the priest looks at her as she leaves the room. Or maybe it’s the cat-cream way in which Annie Farelly raises her teacup to her mouth. Or perhaps it’s a certain bitter smugness on both their faces.

So that when Róisín closes the library door, God forgive her, she kneels down on the hall runner and puts her ear to the gap under the door to listen.

‘As I said, I support you, Father, one hundred and ten per cent. For if the late Father Hennessy (God rest his soul and reward him in heaven) had helped us to control the mother before she even had her issue we would not be experiencing the infestation of Mahony himself now. As you well know, Father Hennessy advocated tolerance and forgiveness, of all things, when there she was running wild and sticking her fingers up at the lot of us. I can say that it angered a great many people. They simply did not understand why Father Hennessy wouldn’t act to remove Orla Sweeney from the village.’