Drileu is touched by the hand of a ghost

“Mammig! Mammig!”

An instant later the door cracked against its hinges, flung open as wide as it could fly, and Drileu felt its jolt sparking down her spine. The damp wind gusted in after with a gravelly hiss of blown rain or sleet or sand, and Drileu felt it in her teeth. She was a fisherman’s wife, and this house on the shore was her body, as her husband’s boat was his on the sea.

“Mammig!”

“Shut that door!”

“I know, Mamm,” Britou panted, his voice high-​​pitched with excitement, “but Tad’s coming! And Mamm, we found a man on the rocks! Alive!”

“My God! A wreck!”

Drileu’s hand tapped and fluttered at her bare collarbone like a moth against a glass lantern, as near as it could come to making the sign of the cross over her body without the guidance of her head.

Britou had just told her his father was coming in, but Drileu was a fisherman’s wife: the grief of one was the grief of all, and death a sole net cast over the same sea.

“No, Mamm, he walked out there!” Britou squealed, his voice as shrill as a whistle.

“Boy!” Mihael thundered from the door. The door cracked again just afterward like a whip of lightning.

Britou bolted. “I’m coming!”

“No, you don’t!” his father bellowed. “You make a chair by ready the fire and close this door after!”

Britou changed course in mid-​​stride. “I’m making! I’m making!”

He swung about and hastily dragged a stool away from the table, making the floorboards sound a hollow moan like a hull run aground. Drileu felt it in her bones.

Meanwhile his father was steering the strange man through the nets and pots and flotsam of the front room, the two of them staggering and thumping together like a drunken beast with three legs of various size.

Britou dashed out to slam and bolt the door and dashed in again by the time the men had reached the stairs.

“Look, Mamm!” he demanded. “I was the one who heard him! Over the storm!”

Mihael barked, “Boy!” but he was too occupied in bearing the stranger’s weight to lift a threatening hand as he would have liked.

The man was tall – tall enough to lay an arm over Mihael’s shoulder without reaching, though Mihael stood straight-​​backed and straight-​​legged beside him, even leaning into him as men leaned against the wind.

In his excitement Britou leapt about like a little fish. “He was shouting at the sea!” he squealed.

“My God!” Drileu whispered.

At that moment the man was only making sharp wincing sounds and hissing through his teeth as he and Mihael failed to coordinate their shared middle leg between them. He was injured.

Mihael bellowed, “Get back!” though no one was in his way. He turned the man around until he stood on his own two legs again, and the stranger was left with one.

“And Mamm! Listen!” Britou begged her. “He was out so far the waves was crashing over him! He’s all salt-​​wet with the sea!”

Drileu whimpered, “Mihael?”

Mihael whipped the back of his hand at her over the stranger’s head. “Chhhik!”

Britou yanked on her belt to get her attention. “What do you think he was doing, Mammig?” he asked softly. “Do you think he was trying to drown himself?”

“No!” the man groaned.

He pitched forward on his chair and sat up and pitched forward again like a gull riding a wave.

“It’s to the end of the earth I was going!” he sobbed, shivering. “You’re calling this place Land’s End, are you no?”

Mihael knelt and snorted from the level of the man’s knee. “There’s a dozen places called Land’s End within a day’s sail from here,” he muttered.

“Which is the last?” the man begged.

Mihael said nothing, busy picking at the man’s wet laces.

“That man’s a spoon shy,” Drileu murmured dazedly.

Mihael’s head popped up behind the man’s knee. “The only spoon you need to worry about, woman, is the one you’re going to use to serve our guest his supper!” The head dropped again, and Mihael swore.

The man wiped his hands over his wet face, pushing back the hair that was pasted to his cheeks, and for the first time he looked up at her.

Briefly his face warmed and softened: the stormy redness of the chapped cheeks flushed into a sunset glow, the wild eyes calmed beneath their heavy lids, and the cold-​​pale lips turned rosy and seemed to swell and grow supple, blooming out in search of a kiss.

Drileu’s heart fluttered and her cheeks grew stinging-​​hot. It had been so many years since a man had looked on her with such a face, she had forgotten how she could be made to feel. She had been a girl then, and not even known what the feelings meant.

Now she knew, and her girlish blush trickled down into her body, too. She was blushing with her breasts, blushing with her belly, blushing with her knees and thighs. She wondered whether he knew.

By the time she peeked up at him again, that warm gaze was already drawing in and shutting itself up like a clam. The man was only wet and windburned and ragged, and his wild eyes were blind to her.

He gasped, “Ah ah ah!” as Mihael pulled open his boot.

“Hurts, does it?” Mihael muttered.

“The devil!” the man sobbed. “The curse of the cane is on me! Last time I came to Brittany to forget a woman I broke my leg, and this time I broke the other!”

“Does that hurt?”

“Does what?” he whimpered.

“I guess not,” Mihael grumbled. “Does that?”

“Aie!” The man squinted up his face and pounded his fist on his thigh.

“It isn’t broken, I don’t think,” Mihael said drearily. “Only sprained.”

“You’re not from Brittany?” Drileu murmured. In truth she wanted to ask him about the woman. The thought of the woman made her feel a little sick, a little small, a little sad.

Before he could answer, Mihael popped up, head and shoulders and body, and thundered, “He’s from wherever I’m going to send you if you don’t get supper on that table!”

Drileu sucked in her breath and bobbed her head, but she hesitated there at the tableside. She knew better than to turn her back on Mihael before he had finished being angry with her.

“Scotland,” the man said softly before Mihael had finished, before she had turned.

She peeked up at him without lifting her head.

It was not the face of desire she had seen before, but nor was it wild. His gaze was steady and strong, in spite of his shivering, and she felt it on her face like a hand cupping her chin.

Drileu knew that ghostly hand. This salt-​​wet, ragged, gray-​​bearded man was the jetsam of her girlhood’s favorite dream: the wreckage of the handsome young lad that night after night she found half-​​drowned upon the shore.

In her precious few minutes before she sank into exhausted sleep, she would help him into the house that she – through some mysterious Providence – inhabited alone, and warm him and dry him and feed him and save him. In her last instants she would finally surrender trembling to his grateful touch on her cheeks and lips and chin, and the lonely girl in her straw bed would drift into sleep, the only bliss she knew.

Of course they had only been her own stroking fingers, and they had stroked no farther down, for she had not even known what such touches meant then. But even then – and always, forever – she knew that the finding and the falling was the sweetest part of love, and night after night she would find and fall again. Always, forever she would dream of one day being loved that way.

“Where’s Scotland?” Britou demanded.

Drileu gasped and stiffened, and she turned away before she had chanced to see what Mihael might have seen. Her legs were weak and shaking as if the man had slept a while between them, and she had let him sleep.

“On an island far to the north of here, young Britou,” the man said. He had a strange, slight accent, now that he was speaking evenly, and the warm, deep, dream-​​inspiring voice of a storyteller. “Days and days of sailing on the open sea, and then days of tramping through the mountains and snow and to the bleak place where I was born: the land of the Gaels.”

“Mammig!” Britou gasped. “Did you hear?”

Drileu had heard – she was sawing slowly through the bread so that she would not miss a word – but at Britou’s invitation she risked glancing over her shoulder.

The man was smiling at her boy with the ease of men who had boys of their own. His teeth were striking – white and perfectly even – and Drileu, who had borne and buried sickly children of her own, knew at once that the man had not always been as poor and ragged as he now seemed. He had never lacked milk or meat as a boy if he could be so tall and strong and solid and have such teeth.

And surely some of that strength would go into his sons, no matter in what poverty they grew up. Drileu thought dizzily that she would like to have this man’s son, if she could not have this man.

“A thousand miles, Britou, from Land’s End!” he lamented. “But not far enough!”

“I guess you came far enough the last time,” Mihael grumbled as he stepped past him to tend the fire, “if you forgot the first woman well enough to fall in with the second.”

“There’s no helping it, friend!” the man pleaded. “She bewitched me!”

“Aye, they’ll all do that if you’re willing,” Mihael said grimly.

Drileu glanced at him through her limp veil of hair, wondering that Mihael would even say so. Certainly he had never been willing. Mihael shoved a log severely against the back of the chimney, and Drileu felt its concussion in the base of her spine.

“Not like this girl!” the man insisted. “She’s an elf girl! The magic of the moon is in her!”

“An elf girl!” Britou breathed.

The man clasped Britou’s thin shoulder. “Aye, young Britou,” he warned, “never be kissing an elf girl, unless you never care to kiss any other sort again!”

“Mamm!” Britou gasped. “Like the Korrigan!”

Mihael stood, and his shadow fell over Drileu’s table, darkening the backs of her wrists and dulling the flashing blade. He caught her eye and acted a quick pantomime of slurping soup from a spoon. His eyes were wide with disbelief and the corner of his weary mouth turned up into a slight, mocking smile, seeking a smile from hers.

Drileu turned angrily back to her cutting. She wanted none of her husband’s camaraderie now. There was nothing wrong with this man’s head: every spoon was accounted for, and knives and plates and crockery too. If this man said his love was an elf, then an elf she was.

“No…” the man said in a creaky voice. Then he pulled out a rag and took his time blowing his nose.

Mihael and Britou jerked to attention and bustled around him, dragging chairs across the dry wood to form a little circle of manhood by the fire. Drileu hurried to chop her crunchy pickle before the man spoke again.

“Not like the Korrigan, young Britou,” the man said thoughtfully.

At once the other bodies quieted, and Drileu abandoned her pickle to slice a lump of soft cheese.

“The elves of that country go about like men and women, and have families and houses… and some of them are Christian and go to church. Her brother was blind until he was baptized, and by God’s grace he got sight.”

Britou was still little boy enough to cry, “Mamm!” as though only his mother’s acknowledgment of a wonder truly made it wonderful.

Drileu would have smiled at him, but Mihael said dryly, “Is that so?” and she feared to turn just in time to meet his mocking half-​​smile.

“What do they look like?” Britou demanded. “What happens if you kiss one?”

“You get elf-​​cooties,” his father teased.

Britou was still little boy enough to grimace and groan. “No, Tad, he said you get bewitched! What kind of bewitched? Does she make you turn into animals? Or cry at the moon?”

The man stopped unlacing his boot and sat back to muse, “Mayhap she shows you you’re blind, and gives you sight.”

“Or mayhap she makes you blind,” Mihael said sourly. “If it’s the kind of bewitched that makes a man want to throw himself in the sea.”

“No!” The man yanked off his boot and dropped it onto the floorboards with a hollow stomp of the sole, like a single step. “I wasn’t trying to drown myself, I’m telling you!”

“You almost succeeded anyway,” Mihael grumbled. He twisted his head around and demanded, “Wife?”

Drileu chopped faster – loudly, so he could hear – and whimpered, “It’s coming, it’s coming…”

“Were you trying to run away from her?” Britou asked.

The man clapped him on his back with the firm hand of a man who knew well how heavy a blow a little boy could handle, and how heavy they liked them.

“I was trying to go where she could not follow,” the man said. His voice was deeper than a storyteller’s now; he seemed only to be telling some dark truth to himself. “I was trying to go far enough I could stop looking to see whether she did.”

“Land’s End!” Mihael sighed. The volume of his voice rose abruptly as he spoke, and Drileu knew he was looking at her. She imagined him rolling his eyes for her benefit, and she swore she would not look around.

She heard the man sit up and slip off his other boot. “I was a fool,” he growled. The second boot heel cracked down onto the floor beside the other, like the next step in an achingly slow dance.

“Now you’re talking sense,” Mihael agreed.

“Not for kissing her,” the man corrected. “I was a fool for asking her to follow. For now I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering why she didn’t. And wondering how it would have been if she did.”

“I reckon you made out better with your sprained ankle,” Mihael said.

“That will heal,” the man murmured.

“So will a broken heart, my good man.”

“I should have left right after I kissed her,” the man whimpered. His voice was oddly muffled, and Drileu imagined he was speaking from behind his hand.

“You see that?” Mihael asked of Britou. “That’s a bad case of elf-​​cooties right there.” He asked the man, “Are you saying you expect a girl to follow you a thousand miles because you kissed her?”

Mihael clapped his hands on his knees and laughed, he alone. Britou pointed out gravely, “But it was a magical elf-​​kiss, Tad.” Drileu could scarcely see to chop.

“If she didn’t,” the man muttered, “it means she didn’t feel anything. She didn’t feel anything. I never asked a girl to follow me away before. The devil!” The stool cracked beneath him as he sat up or leaned over. Drileu heard him spit. “I’m always praying they won’t!”

“Sounds like a wise girl,” Mihael chuckled.

The man’s stool creaked evenly as he rocked himself like a ship on the sea.

“It’s because she’s an elf,” he was muttering angrily to himself. “The glamour of her is on me.”

“She bewitched you!” Britou whispered.

“Elf-​​cooties!” his father whispered in reply.

Suddenly the man cried out, “Why didn’t she follow?”

They all fell silent with the instinct of animals at the howl of pain of one of their kind. The storm outside held its breath for a moment, and the fire flared up brightly behind him, as though the storm and fire were his body, as this house was hers.

Mihael moved first, rocking himself with harsh laughter. “Sounds like you think you’re mighty bewitching yourself!”

To her shock Drileu blurted, “How old is she?”

Mihael’s laughter choked short. Drileu laid her knife down on the board and wiped her hands on her apron in preparation for her husband’s fury, for she had interrupted the conversation of men. Still, she dared not turn until she was commanded.

“Sixteen,” the man said softly, interrupting Mihael’s anger.

“Sixteen!” Mihael laughed. “That’s a baby girl, old man. They’re all fatal at that age when you’re our age.”

“Maybe she doesn’t understand,” Drileu blurted again.

She winced and balled up her fists until her fingernails bit into her palms. She could feel Mihael’s piercing eyes on her, but she felt the stranger’s too, warm and wondering.

“Maybe she – she felt something but she didn’t understand what she was feeling,” she gabbled. “When you’re that age you don’t know what those feelings mean…”

“What were you feeling at that age?” Mihael demanded in a broadly teasing tone that nevertheless had a hidden sharpness she had learned to hear. At sixteen Drileu had been caressing her own face in the dark, as Mihael never had.

“Nothing, Mihael – I – I mean, that’s how I know. It’s awfully confusing at first for a girl. Feelings,” she tittered, trying to make herself seem harmless and foolish and small. “She might have felt everything you did, friend, but she didn’t know what it was.”

Mihael sat back and twisted his entire body around to stare at her.

The stranger muttered warmly, “I don’t know what it was either.”

Mihael humphed and turned back around. The circle of manhood closed up again against her.

“I know what it was,” Mihael declared. “It… was… elf cooties! Sixteen-​​year-​​old elf cooties – the clingiest kind!”

Britou giggled and squirmed and squealed – Drileu supposed his father was tickling him – but he managed to insist breathlessly, “No, Tadig, no, it was the elf magic he felt!”

The man simply rocked himself like a gull on the waves and said nothing at all, but his storm howled for him over their heads, and over the little stone house that was Drileu’s body. She felt the wind of him like ghostly fingers in her hair, like a ghostly breath on her cheek.

She bent her head, and beneath the racket she made with her scraping spoon, whispered, “It was love.”