Kingston by Starlight Read online

From up ahead, I heard a laugh, followed hard by guffaws. There were smiles on the faces of the spectators as they watched me bent over in pain, my ball lost among the trees. Even beer-headed Aidan, still leading the field, stopped in his paces and threw me back a smirk. Then I saw Da; lowering the brim of his cap, he turned his attention to the leaders, looking away from me and riding forward. Soon he was gone along with his horse, and all the spectators and all the racers with them.

  Tears running down my cheeks, I went off the path to look for my ball. If only Da hadn’t forced me to do my chores! The other racers, I knew, were excused, by long-standing tradition, from all their tasks on the day of competition in order to be fully rested and prepared for the event. Already exhausted from all I had to do around the house, the injury from the cow’s kick was more than I could overcome. Now the sobs came— but I continued to search for my ball. If I could only find it, I could rejoin the race. I had lost the lead, that was certain, but I could, at the very least, finish the course.

  My fingers closed ’round the ball. But by now, darkness had come. The brambles had been thick, and my injury had made the search more difficult. The sound of the crowd had faded into silence; the crickets were louder than the cheers. Returning to the path, I could see not a soul on the next hill, or the one after it. Looking back, perhaps I should have simply left the ball and gone home. I should have returned to my bed, and the safety of my house, and the certainty that the next day, I would once again tend to the fields, and the laundry and the cows. I should have set aside any thoughts of the race, and my da, and of winning or even finishing. But I was set on completing what I had begun. I was filled with rage— at the laughter, at the cow that kicked me, at fate itself for betraying me so cruelly. So I threw my ball into the darkness.

  A howl split the shadows. It ripped through the quiet of night. I should have left then, but again, I made my way forward, swept my hands in front of me, secured my ball, and hurled it down the path. I was determined to finish, or perhaps I was in some way addled by the wolf’s howl and thus unable to focus my thought onto a more reasonable course of action. Now was not the time for balls or sport— it was a time to seek safety and shelter! And yet I pressed on, throw after throw into the blackness. The creature’s howls seemed all around me now, sounding and resounding through the black columns of the tree trunks, winding down the path, arching over the ebon sky. There’s a child’s game one can play, where if a word is repeated many times in succession, it loses its mooring to meaning— it becomes syllables without sense. With the wolf’s incessant howl, the very opposite was taking place. What had been just a base noise now became, to my ears, a kind of wordless shout— amorphous in form, perhaps, but not without meaning. I heard hunger in that voice, not just for meat, but for other unnamed things, and I heard anger, no, more than that— rage, and perhaps a bit of loneliness, and a sadness as well. The roars entered my ears and rattled my chest and mingled with the thoughts in my own head.

  Two stars from the starless night had fallen to earth. No, they were eyes, peering at me through the night. They were the color of moonlight, I could see that now. This was not the beast himself, but something else— a wolf pup? Now there was another pair beside the first. I thought I could almost discern the outlines of their forms— the small snouts, the pointed ears, the stubby legs. The eyes did not move but held their positions in the shadows, fixed like constellations.

  There was another eye, but this one I did not see. I rather felt this one on my back. I did not hear the wolf’s approach, so stealthy a hunter was he, but instead, in the cool of the just-fallen night, I could feel his hot breath and smell the murder on his blood-soaked tongue, and now feel the gaze of his single good eye boring into my back. But he did not move, he did not leap forward out of the shadows. Why? I had no weapon, no gun, no sword, no knife. Surely my ball was not what kept him at bay. Why didn’t he spring at me, jaws wide, claws slashing? His gaze held steady as Polaris. Leaving my ball behind, I left him and the cubs there in the darkness of the forest.

  * * *

  Why didn’t he kill me?

  I was in Zed’s cabin. Da had locked the gates that led to my house; when I shouted for him to open them, he parted a curtain, looked out the front window, met me with eyes as hard as two knots on an oak, and would not come down the path. He held out his right hand and bade me to halt.

  “You have disgraced me,” he shouted. “You were not to have run that race. You were not to have been out. Now you can stay out there. Let the wolf have at you!”

  I wondered if his losses in his wagers on the race upset him more than my attempts to join it. I hoped against hope that froth-faced Aidan had failed to live up to Da’s faith in him, and so had squandered his wagers. In any case, wiping away tears, I went to the old Moor instead, and he took me in and made me a bowl of soup to warm me up.

  “It’s pepperpot soup,” he said. “It’s spicy— drink it slowly.”

  The race was long over. By the time I crossed it, there were only shadows on the finish line. The crowds had dissipated and the runners had all walked home. The festivities, I was sure, had been boisterous. The winner had no doubt sung his traditional song of victory, the spectators chanting the chorus. The losers had performed, as was customary, the dance of the defeated, laughing as they stomped their feet in a patch of mud and pelted one another with spoiled food that would be collected later, rinsed, and fed to hogs. After the dance, the winner would be escorted by the three loveliest ladies in the village to the foot of Kelly’s Peak; up above, a crier would call out his name seven times, and then the number of throws it took for him to secure his victory. I had heard the cry. One hundred and seventeen! I had been on a pace to break a hundred.

  I sipped my soup and told my tale to Zed. He laughed when I told him about the wolf.

  “He is a she. The wolf did not kill you because she was a mother afraid for her cubs.”

  “He is a she?”

  “He is a she.”

  “I still don’t understand why he or she didn’t . . .”

  He laughed again and pulled a quilt over me.

  “Ceasair, the granddaughter of Noah of the Ark, was the first person to settle Ireland,” he said. “Your elders rarely speak of it, but your legends confirm it. She sailed from Egypt and landed at Dun na mBarc, right here in County Cork. But the first people to make war on this land were also from Africa— the Formorians.”

  “Who?”

  “They were sea-pyrates, and descendants of Ham, son of Noah. They made their base on islands off the coast. They demanded that all Irish pay them, in tribute, half of their children, cattle, butter, and wheat. The Formorians were as strong and fearsome as any wolf. I see all these things in you: the spirit of the daughters of Noah, who nurtured the land, and the fire of the sons of Noah, who ravaged it. There is something special about you. There always has been.”

  “What? What will I ever do that’s special?”

  Zed leaned in close.

  “You ask the wrong question. We never know our fate. We only know our selves.”

  But who was I? I could not find myself in the cold face of my da or the pale eye of the wolf. My father’s right hand blocked my vision. Halt. Go no farther. Do not go down the path. The ire within me was so great it had become a kind of sadness, because it could not be satisfied. I felt as if I needed to say my own name, to shout it, to scream it, but I had no mouth. The great wolf had shown a strength and tenderness that I had longed for but never experienced. As sleep took me, I thought of those cubs snuggled up to their mother, and wondered if my bedding— or any bed in Ireland— was as soft and safe as the great wolf’s fur.

  chapter 4.

  My da, being pursued by creditors and having a Commission of Bankrupt issued in his name, decided to transfer his affairs from the Old World to the New and continue his life in the Americas. His gambling debts had crushed his reputation as an attorney at law. Routinely, he owed his clients more money than they were scheduled to
pay him for his services. More than infrequently, he would be unable to enter his place of work, his office having been surrounded by small parties of men looking for him to either make good on his wagers in pieces of eight or in pieces of his hide. The high walls of reputation that had set our family apart had been breached and, in fact, had utterly crumbled. We were no longer godlike gentry, but mere men, and even worse, men who owed other men money, which may be the very opposite of divinity. So, after witnessing his name soiled in his original profession, Da decided to adjust his geography and focus his attentions entirely on dirt, becoming a farmer. He left word that he was bound for the Americas— if leaving a note buried under a rock in a cabbage patch can properly be called leaving word— but word was all that he left, except for debts. He booked us, his family, no passage; passed on no specific address where he might be found, other than a region, Carolina, and a city, Charles Town. I thought I felt him kiss my forehead before he crept out the door on cat’s paws, but it may have simply been a breeze, tho’ the wind, at that period of year, carries with it a little more warmth. It was autumn.

  Around that time, our neighbor Zed also vanished. Ma had shown little emotion until this event. It seemed, to me, she was suddenly all too aware of the fact that there is an impermanence to people; they can rule one’s life entirely and yet still slip away as if they were mere yesterdays. People are morning mist, they are clouds, they are weather. The full import of Da leaving the house had finally been brought home. She threw herself into work, performing her chores as well as mine, plowing the fields, slopping the pigs, milking the cow, remaining out of doors all day and returning only when the dark of evening ensured her eyes and my eyes wouldn’t meet. But I could see her pain across the shadows; the anguish of abandonment is darker than any night. Ma and I, at the time, knew little of the details of why Da left. I did, however, have a clear sense of his absence. In a short time, I found it difficult to bring to mind the shape of his face, the touch of his hand, or even the sound of his voice, but I did see, in the corridors of my remembrance, the spot in the corner where a chair he fancied once was, the sad rectangles on the wall where paintings he purchased once hung, and there was a certain manly aroma that would come wafting from his skin after a long hot day that was now missing from the air. Every mirror in our house bound the void of his image, the silence in every corner gave mute testimony to the former echoes of his footfalls. His absence filled the house.

  Ma sat me down for a talk.

  “Your father is gone,” she said, “and— curse them all— we have many creditors.”

  “Doesn’t the Lord teach us to forgive our creditors?”

  “He teaches us to forgive our debtors,” Ma said. “As for creditors, there’s no hell deep enough for them.”

  “What must we do?”

  “The truth of the matter is,” Ma said, “many of our neighbors believe that I married above my station. Money protected us from such charges, but that protection is now gone. Things will be said about our family, and many of these words may hurt, because some of them will be true. Our life has been far from hard, but now things will be harder, and we will have wants. Many things will have to go.”

  The first thing that went was us. We sold the house and traveled to Cork, moving into a small, damp room that was rented out by the employer of a friend of a cousin. I cried as we left our home, but my ma told me to save my tears, for, given the trajectory of our lives, I would surely have need of them later. And besides, she added, when my da had slinked from the house, he had left a pillow that was cool and dry, having shed no tears of his own. He gave my ma not even a fare-thee-well. We sold almost all that we owned that my da had not taken with him— clothes, livestock, tools, and the like. But I managed, unbeknownst to Ma, to retain one thing— at least for a few nights. There was a dress coat of my father’s that I loved. It was brown and trimmed with fur and hung down past my ankles when I wore it. I kept it folded beneath my covers and each evening, after saying my prayers, I would hold the coat to my face and think of my father. The coat smelled of him; I drew whiffs of his scent into my nose and thus fell asleep until the sun, and my mother, woke me up in the morning.

  “This one thing you can keep,” she said. “But all else must go.”

  * * *

  I have always been taller and more mature than my years, even when I was very young, and it encouraged adults to share with me adult burdens and concerns which they may have imagined, given my seeming maturity, that I was ready and willing to bear. My precociousness, on the other hand, seem’d to confuse and anger those of my own generation, and as a result I spent many a day alone, wandering the streets or the hills or my own thoughts, heedless of the goings-on around me. When the children played Bee-Up in the alleyways, pitching half-farthings heads or harps, their light laughter sounding like chimes in the wind, I would not be there. When the girls, with wide innocent eyes, thronged to watch the older boys at the bowl matches, I was not in the watchers’ company. When the other young’uns gathered behind the bakeshop for donkey’s gudge, which is cheap cake made from the crust of unsold cheap cake, or when children congregated at the market off Princes Street for drisheen, which is a sausage made from dried pig’s blood, I was always elsewhere, somewhere, and usually wearing my da’s fur-trimmed coat.

  “Hey, joulter!” called out Liam, a lanky lad, several years older, who fancied me, I think, but nonetheless treated me only with hostility, because, for boys that age, enmity is a less troubling feeling than affection. “Why’re you wearing a man’s coat?”

  “Leave her alone,” said Cormac, a neighborhood boy whom I myself fancied. He had long black hair like a girl’s and thin fingers like twigs, and he would always stick up for me with the others. Cormac cried out to me: “How you doing there?”

  “Stawkhawlin’!” I said, which is Cork-speak for “I’m doing fantastic,” and continued on my way wherever.

  “That lass is septic,” I heard Liam growl to his fellow. “Her family fancied themselves so high, and now look at ’em. I’d like to cut the tripes out of her.”

  Our reputation had followed us. But I was already off. I recall wading in the River Lee wearing my da’s coat, holding the sides of it high and spread out like a bird’s wings so that my precious garment would not be soaked by the current running cold and strong around my calves and between my legs. I remember the brawny, broad-shouldered hills, green and mossy, laying like lazy giants around the edges of Cork. It was a small village, but there was much to explore. Streams and waterways ran through town winding this way and that; neighbors and strangers, some scolding, some waving hail-well-mets, peek’d their heads out of the windows of the short brown buildings constructed along the banks of the water. In the early morn, I would skip through the lanes and passageways, north down the steep and narrow byways of Barrow Street or south up the wide embrace of Barrock Place. I was looking for nothing in particular and nearly always finding amusement or misadventure or both. In the late afternoons, before the day became evening, I would run and play on the murky fields just outside of town; the ground there was soft and wet and spongy beneath my blithesome wriggling toes.

  At the foot of the sloping hills and in the shadow of a grove of broad-leaved alder trees, there was a field to which I would often come, where the sod was wet and the light was silver. I loved this place, because this is where the dragonflies would alight after daylight had dimmed. Between the mud patches were tangles of long grass and the winged insects would alight on the tips of the slender green stems. There were hundreds of the creatures, and, when the dying light caught their wings, the whole field shimmered and rolled like green waves of the sea.

  “Hey, joulter!”

  It was Liam and Cormac again, with a pack of lads and lasses besides.

  “Leave her alone then,” said Cormac to Liam.

  “She’s septic, this one is,” said Liam. “How grand m’lady once was! Now she needs to be put in her place. You know who your ma is, lass? A maid, w
hom your da took up with when he tired of his first wife. The whole county knows the tale. She’s nothing but a common strumpet, she is.”

  Of course I knew it was true. The stories had been only murmurs when I was growing up; our money and status had shielded us against all scandal. Now the whispers were shouts and they found my ears. I could not move. I stood in the bog, gripping the sides of my coat in my hands to keep them from touching the ground. I watched as Liam and his gang scooped up balls of mud. The bog mud was thick and warm and tan, like handfuls of flesh.

  “It’s near dinnertime,” Cormac said to the others. “Let’s head back for some milk and odds. C’mon then!”

  Liam ignored him. Now his gang faced me, a dozen of them, hands dripping mud.

  A single dragonfly floated down, in search of a landing place. Liam stuck out his tongue as if he were catching a snowflake. The dragonfly landed on the tip and Liam quickly pulled it into his mouth. Baring his teeth, he chewed the creature to shreds, wings and all, and spat the parts into the air.

  “C’mon then, you’ve had your fun,” said Cormac. “Let’s head back.”

  “Are you with all of us, or with that one?” said Liam.