“Wasn’t it nice of Mrs. O’Hanlon to try to warn me? he thought to himself, but God love her, the woman was wasting her breath. If older people chose to believe she was a wise woman, then no harm to them, but this was 1922. The Great War was over—hadn’t he fought in it?—and the world had moved along. There were motor cars, electricity, wireless telegraph, moving pictures, aeroplanes, and all the other marvels of the modern age.
“Now don’t you look surprised, Dermot Fogarty. It wasn’t the Stone Age when I was a little girl. Hadn’t Lilian Bland from near Belfast built her own aeroplane called Moth and flown it in 1910?”
Kinky smiled to see Dermot blush.
“And didn’t she keep the engine going by feeding it whiskey—through her aunt’s old ear trumpet?”
“Whiskey? Honest?” Colin asked.
“Honest.”
Kinky waited for the laughter to die down, then continued. “Connor knew that things his grandparents would have thought magical were modern science in action now. Folks could choose to believe that the voice coming out of the loudspeaker was a spirit if they wished. But he knew it wasn’t.
“ ‘There’s not much room for the little people now, is there, Tess?’ says Connor to the dog by his side. ‘Faeries? Sure it’s hard, having grown up here, not to believe in them a bit. But to be scared of them?’ He shook his head and looked around. It was a grand crisp day.
“A great time to be striding along in County Cork leading the little donkey along the familiar road among the whins and the rowan trees, listening to the cries of a flock of curlew. There were no bright flowers in the grassy banks, but in the summer the road’s edges would be alive with buttercups and thistles, honeysuckle and teasles. The white and red dead nettles had only stopped blooming a month ago.
“There was a gentle wind blowing from the direction of the O’Hanlons’ farm behind him, and the scent of burning turf was borne on the breeze.”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Kincaid,” Dorothy said. “Is Cork like County Down?”
Kinky shook her head. “It is not. For a start it’s about twice as big. The fields are bigger than the ones up here, and although there do be drystone walls, most meadows are divided by hedges of hawthorn and gorse. There are trees in the hedgerows and growing in woods of ash and sycamore, oak and beech. Cork is a very green place.” She felt a lump in her throat, for she missed it yet.
Kinky swallowed, then continued. “It has a great long coastline and fine harbours like Cobh and Bantry, but we lived about ten miles inland from the sea, not on a loughside the way Ballybucklebo is, and our hills rolled down to the faraway shore. There were no drumlins the way there are here in County Down.”
“What’s a drumlin?” Hazel wanted to know.
Kinky smiled. “I once heard someone say County Down was like a basket of green eggs. You know how there are shmall little rounded hills all over the place?”
“Yes, Mrs. Kincaid.”
“Those are drumlins. They were sculpted by the Ice Age, so, but Connor wasn’t walking among anything like that. He was covering the mile between our place and his along a flat road that curved around the shoulder of a hill, and as he walked he thought he’d be glad to get home because it wasn’t just a great day. No, it was a grand day for felling a tree.
“When he arrived at his cottage at the end of a short lane, Connor took the baskets off the donkey and pastured the little animal. He stacked the turf from the one basket, muttering to himself that there’d not be enough there for many fires, went into his shed, picked up his axe, and headed off.
“He wasted no time walking the hundred yards to the stile in the drystone wall around the field where the tree stood. He clambered straight over, the rough rocks cold against his hand. Tess followed after, her claws making a scrabbling sound.
“It was a clear winter afternoon with the bracken brown and the grass rimed with frost that crunched under his boots as he strode along. Tess startled a rabbit from a clump of yellow-flowered whins, and it scampered away with its ears aflop, its scut a white, bouncing button.
“Connor paused and looked up into cloudless sky so blue and so bright that he had to shade his eyes with his hand. Overhead a murder of crows flew east, and a flock of lapwing, green and crested, flapped along to the west, crying their sad pee-wit, pee-wit.
“ ‘Begod,’ says Connor to himself, ‘but it’s a fine day to be alive.’
“You’d have thought he was wearing seven-league boots by the length of the strides of him, and in no time he was standing under the tree. Its main trunk was fifteen feet tall and the other four trunks not much shorter. They were gnarled black, and their branches twisted, naked, and lifeless-looking. He lent his axe against a trunk, took off his jacket and waistcoat, and spat on his hands.
“He bent to pick up his axe, but from behind him he heard a whimpering . . .”
“The Shee . . . the faeries,” Colin whispered.
“No,” said Kinky, “it was Tess. Connor turned to see that his sheepdog, who normally came and sat at his feet, was still a good ten yards away. She lay with her belly pressed to the grass. Her porcelain blue eyes were fixed on him, and she made a high-pitched whining. ‘Come, Tess,’ says Connor, but divil the bit does she. Tess puts her tail between her legs and slinks away, looking over her shoulder at him and whimpering.
“ ‘Come here, Tess.’ Connor put an edge into his voice.
“She turned, edged sideways back toward him, but still ten yards away she lowered herself to the ground again and refused to budge.
“Connor was puzzled. He’d reared her from a pup. She was such a well-trained, obedient dog he might have entered her in a sheepdog trial, but those events didn’t interest him. And here she was misbehaving? Och, well, never mind. ‘Bad cess to you then,’ Connor says, with a smile. ‘I’ve no time to scold you today.’ He spits again and picks up his axe.
“He hoisted it above his shoulder and eyed the first trunk, calculating where to strike. But before he could, he heard a voice. It was the voice of a woman, and it was as harsh as the sound of cinders under a door. ‘Go you to your own place, Connor MacTaggart. Go you to your home.’ Connor lowered his axe. He put a finger first in his left ear, then in his right. He shook his head. ‘I’m hearing things,’ says he. He laughed his deep booming laugh. ‘I’d better go easy on the poitín for a night or two. I knew it could upset your eyes, but I never knew that whiskey could make you hear things too.’
“Connor, without thinking, for the act was so ingrained from his childhood, made the sign to ward off the evil eye and hefted the axe.
“ ‘Connor MacTaggart,’ comes the voice again. ‘Stay your hand. This is a Shee tree.’
“ ‘And if I don’t?’ asks he. ‘I know the lore. You’ll suck my cows dry of their milk, the milk’ll go sour in the churn, the calves will be stillborn, and I’ll have bad luck for a year and a day. Well, away you go. I don’t keep cows and I’m not going to try to churn ewe’s milk.’ Connor laughed. ‘And anyway we know now that it’s germs in milk that make it go sour on a hot day, and Mr. McLoughlin, the veterinarian, told me that there’s a program on now to vaccinate the cattle against brucellosis, and that’s a germ too—it makes cows lose their calves.’
“Connor paused for a minute. He thought to himself that maybe he’d been a bit cruel. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘I’m not saying you don’t exist. I simply don’t believe you have the power to hurt me. I’m sorry.’ And then what do you think he did?”
“You thaid he was thcared of nothing, didn’t you, Mithis Kincaid? He thertainly dothen’t thound thcared.”
Billy Cadogan’s lisp didn’t stop him joining in. She liked that. “I did say that, Billy,” she said. “And he wasn’t.”
“I think he chopped away.”
Kinky saw heads nodding in serious agreement with Billy.
“He did, but not just then. Connor lowered the axe, took two paces back, and walked slowly right round the tree. He looked at every branch, he peered among the ro
ots, and then he stopped. Dead. ‘So there you are,’ says he, very quietly.
“He was looking at a hole between two roots; a hole such as might have been made by a badger. He bent down and breathed in three times through his nose. There was a faint scent of fox. Well, if the faeries were sharing a den with a fox, didn’t he have the answer to both of them?
“He was absolutely convinced he was safe from any powers the Shee might have. But in case, just in case now, he might be wrong about that, only to be on the safe side, that was all, he was going to contain them.
“He walked a few paces into the field. If Connor could have made a harvest out of rocks on the MacTaggart farm, he’d have been a rich man indeed. He put down his axe and picked up a boulder, a boulder that it would have taken two ordinary men to lift, so.
“He was panting when he got back to the tree. The cords in his neck stood out like taut hemp ropes. He stood with legs braced apart over the hole and dropped the rock into its mouth. Says he, ‘If you’re for trying to give me a curse, I’ll be long gone before you get that stone out.’ Connor had to bend over and put his hands on his knees he was laughing so much. Faeries! Well, maybe he’d allow that they existed, but to be scared of them? Never. ‘Unless you’ve got Jesus there with you—he was good at shifting boulders,’ Connor yelled, ‘you’ll be down there for a while.’”
“Oooh.” Jeannie Kennedy clapped one hand over her mouth, then said, “That’s an awful thing to say. If your man MacTaggart gets punished, it might not be just the faeries after him.”
“You’re right, Jeannie.” For a second Kinky regretted having embellished the story thus. “And all of you remember, you mustn’t take the name of the Lord in vain.”
“I won’t,” said Eddie Jingles. “Honest to God, Mrs. Kincaid.”
The other children laughed, and Kinky could not hide her smile.
“See you don’t,” she said, and wagged her finger at him.
“Now,” she said, “with the entrance blocked, Connor reckoned it was safe to go to work, but the voice was still saying something. It was muffled by the boulder. He had to bend over to hear.
“The voice had a strange, echoey sound to it. ‘Connor MacTaggart, beware of the raven, the fox, and the spider. Beware when the snow flies.’
“ ‘Och, I will so,’ says Connor. ‘Thanks for the hint.’ And he shook his head. By what force could these beings harm a big, strong, modern man like him? Maybe they could influence superstitious folk by the power of suggestion, but not, not by all that was holy, Connor MacTaggart.
“He got his axe, took his stance, hoisted the axe above his shoulder, and swung.”
5
“The blade bit into the trunk and the wood chips flew. One just missed hitting Connor in the eye. Sap oozed from the wound.
“ ‘By the wee man,’ says Connor, ‘no sap should be flowing at this time of the year. And would you look at the way it’s reflecting the light of the sun? It’s as red as blood, so.’
“He heard a noise, a toc-toc-toc. It was long, loud, and harsh. He turned and saw a black bird strutting toward him. Black as jet it was, with a heavy beak and shaggy throat feathers. Its eyes were small, dark brown, and piercing. It fixed Connor with its gaze, and it croaked, ‘Toc.’ ”
“Excuse me, Mrs. Kincaid, but was it a raven?” Jeannie Kennedy asked. “My mammy says faeries like ravens, so they do.”
“They do indeed, especially the queen of the dark faeries, the Doov Shee, the faeries who live under blackthorn trees.”
Colin frowned, then asked, “So the crakey woman’s voice that telt Connor to leave the tree alone was the voice of their queen. She’s sent the bird to warn Connor off, so she has. Sure hadn’t she just told him to beware of ravens?”
“She had,” Kinky said, “but I don’t think Connor was one bit fazed by the bird. He bent over, picked up a stone, and chucked it. He missed, but the bird didn’t fly away. It fluttered up into the air over him, flapped its wings at his head, and darted its beak at his eyes.
“Connor threw up an arm to protect himself. He’d heard of mother crows swooping on intruders to protect their nests, but it wasn’t nesting time. He felt the bird’s beak stabbing at his bare arm. It broke the skin and he felt the hot blood. ‘Enough!’ he yelled, and he stepped back.
“Now, remember, Connor was a great hurling player. He grasped his axe as he’d hold his camán, his hurley. Then he swung and just managed to strike the raven a glancing blow with the flat of the blade, not enough to hurt it, but enough to make it fly to the ground and run around behind the tree.
“ ‘So,’ says he, ‘I’ve to beware of ravens, have I? If they’ve any sense, they’ll beware of me.’ He took a quick look at his arm. The wound was only a scratch. He’d had worse at the football.
“He stepped back to his work. ‘I’ll be as well hanged for stealing a sheep as stealing a lamb,’ says he. ‘I’ve started, so I’ll finish.’ He looked up to where dark clouds were rolling in from the north. ‘I’ll surely founder tonight for it’s going to be even colder than last night. I will be needing a fire to keep me warm, so.’
“He swung again and again, and at every blow the axe bit more deeply, wood chips flew, and the sap flowed red.”
She looked from child to child. Hazel Arbuthnot had both hands clasped in front of her like a pietà. Micky Corry was chewing a fingernail. All wide eyes were on Kinky.
“The trunk began to lean to one side. Connor knew a few more strokes would have it down. He paused to catch his breath before finishing the job. He ran his thumb over the axe blade. Dull. Very dull.
“Well, no matter. He had a whetstone in his jacket pocket. He walked away from the tree, got out the stone, spat on it, and sharpened the blade. As he worked and heard the rough scraping of stone on steel, he noticed an animal scent.
“He glimpsed something russet-red moving on the far side of the tree. Connor tested the blade. It was sharp enough, so he put the stone away and went round to see what it was that had moved.
“The raven had disappeared, but in its place stood a vixen. She stared at Connor and did not seem bothered by the presence of a man. Her eyes were sharp, her muzzle pointed, and her mouth was curled into what looked very like a sneer. And the animal wasn’t as browny red as he had first thought. It was more the blood red of the tree’s sap—”
“It is the faeries, not crows and foxes,” Micky interrupted. “It is! It is!” The boy was shaking with excitement. “I think they sent the raven, but the fox is the queen of the Doov Shee herself, that’s what I think, so I do.”
“So why would you think that? The queen of the faeries is a woman, not a fox.” Kinky knew the answer, but she wanted to hear Micky’s explanation.
“It doesn’t matter because faeries can take on any shape they like, so they can, or change people into things. My Da told me about a fellah called Tuan Mac Cairill, and he was around here in Ireland way before Cúchulain. Your man Tuan got changed into a stag, then a boar, then an eagle, and then a salmon, so he did.”
“I know the story,” Kinky said, “and I’m sure Connor did too, but he wasn’t the kind of man to pay much attention to Irish legends. Sure we know that already. He laughed at the fox, and he turned to Tess, who hadn’t budged an inch. ‘Get that fox,’ he ordered, but Tess, who would have chased anything that moved once he’d told her to, stayed rooted to the ground. So did the fox, its gaze never leaving Connor’s eyes.
“ ‘Suit yourself then,’ says Connor to Tess. What the blazes had got into the dog today? he wondered. She wouldn’t come to him. She’d not hunt. Maybe she needed worming.”
“If you ask me,” said Carolyn, “I think Tess had more wit than Connor. I’d have run away by now, so I would.”
“I think you’re right, Carolyn, but there’s nothing more stubborn than an Irishman with his mind made up. And to tell the truth, the trunk was beyond help now anyway, and I’m sure the Shee knew it. That was why the vixen had come only to watch. She knew it was too lat
e to try to save her home. She might only want to know how to get revenge on the destroyer.
“ ‘Shoo away, fox,’ Connor says, and went at it once more.
“Four more axe strokes and the blackthorn started to topple, and as it did, Connor heard a sound that set his teeth on edge. It was a shrieking like the cry of a wounded hare. It rose to a crescendo, hovered, then died away as the trunk crashed to the ground.
“ ‘It always makes an awful noise,’ says he, ‘the last fibres tearing apart as a tree falls. It’s nothing unusual.’
“The howling stopped. The crashing of breaking branches stopped. There was silence. Tess made not as much as a yip. No birds sang. The air was lifeless and did not whisper through the grasses. It was a stillness that Connor could hear, could feel.
“He shrugged and went back to work on the rest of the tree still standing. It took him very little time to fell the remaining, smaller trunks.
“He picked up his waistcoat and jacket. Although he’d been sweating from his exertions only a moment ago, Connor felt chilled. The stillness had passed and clouds covered the sky. They were so low they seemed to be growing out of the crests of the hills. A damp, raw wind blew, and a dank mist crept down the slope where Connor stood. The skin of his forearms was pimpled with gooseflesh. He slipped into his outer clothes.
“Connor went to the fallen tree. Taking great care to avoid the long sharp thorns, he pulled one trunk free enough to give him room to work. In twenty minutes he had it chopped into manageable-sized logs. He laid them alongside each other in a bundle. He’d brought a piece of rope, and he lashed it round the bundle, then went back for his axe. ‘Right,’ says he to himself. ‘I’ve turf enough for a fire tonight to make my supper and keep me warm, and heat my stirabout tomorrow—’ ”