Maire's something stirs

Maire did not want to be angry at her girls, but she wanted to be something. Angry was the easiest thing to be. Mama had a headache: she had warned them. Mama needed quiet; they were squealing. Anger was the easiest thing to feel.

She had stepped nearly into the hall before she heard the other voices: deep chuckling, like a laugh creaking and ragged from disuse… then her young brother’s scoffing at someone’s antics from the heights of his adolescent dignity… and finally, finally the boyish peals of Aengus’s own laughter.

Maire felt something then: a stirring of something limp and mangy from neglect, but faintly alive. As it had years before in Lord Colban’s dreary, dark-​​timbered hall, it pricked up its ears, wrinkled its brow, stirred the dust with the flopping of its moth-​​eaten tail…

But Ete saw her before the thing had quite lifted its head, quite awoken.

“Mama, look who’s here! It’s our real grandfather!”

No no no… She did not want him to turn yet… She had never wanted him to know she was watching…

“What were you expecting?” Aengus demanded of their daughter, still laughing. “A counterfeit grand-​​da?”

“A what?” Aileann squeaked.

He looked up, and his laughter contracted into a grin of sheepish but kind-​​hearted confusion. Maire felt something then: the stirring of stiff limbs, the scraping of long claws seeking purchase on a slippery floor…

It was the very face he used to make when he had first noticed he had only to turn his head when he laughed, and he would find Malcolm’s wife watching him. Insignificant him!

Maire squeezed out a choking, faltering laugh of her own. Could they start over again in that way?

“How are you, Maire?” he asked gravely.

“God bless you, Maire!” his father called out from behind him. “If I’d known I had such beautiful granddaughters, I would have come years ago!”

Ete protested, “Aileann wasn’t even born years ago!” and laughed scornfully at his stupidity. At six she already had her mother’s laugh.

“Maire, get the baby!” Aengus begged. His face lit up like a boy’s at the thought of this boy of his own.

“The baby!” Maire repeated. Her mouth felt strangely strained. She realized she was smiling.

“I hope you’re remembering where I left him,” Aengus laughed, “for he never did turn up in my bags.”

She giggled, “The baby!” and went out, staggering and shuffling at first, and loping by the time she reached the nursery door.

Though in her mind she knew quite plainly she should, Maire had never felt much motherly affection for her baby boy. He had been born too late; she no longer had the strength to feel anything as unwieldy as love.

Now, however, with his giggling little head bobbing against her breast as she trotted back into the hall…

“God bless me, Maire!” Colin bellowed in mock outrage. “Who’s this big man? Aengus told me it’s a babe he was leaving – ”

“It is a baby!” Ete groaned. “What does it look like?”

“If that’s a baby, you’re a tadpole!” Colin countered.

Maire looked dazedly to Aengus and with her free arm lifted an imaginary cup to her lips. Aengus grinned at her and shrugged, matching his dazed expression to her own.

Maire felt something then: stiff legs finally squaring beneath stiff haunches, a springing-​​up. She thought it was the first time in a year they had shared any identical glance but an angry.

At last Ete overcame her stupefaction at being so rudely and so absurdly answered. “And you’re a big – big fat ugly bear!” she spluttered.

Colin growled savagely at her, and both girls squealed and scattered before him like geese.

“Grandchildren!” Aengus squeaked. “Who would have guessed?”

“Grand–children!” Colin echoed. “God bless me! You had to have some first, Aengus! And you would be running off and hiding yourself like a carter’s bitch to have them, and you would be waiting till the old man was fifty and too wretched to ride! Give me that baby, Maire, before I keel over dead!”

“Give me that baby?” Aengus laughed. “What about that fine speech I prepared – O my father, behold the heir I have made you – ”

“Shut up, Aengus!” Colin growled. “The heir you made me! If all the work you did could make babies, I would have had fifty grandchildren by the time you were fifteen, out of your God-​​blessed right hand!”

Aengus laughed heartily, as few men could laugh about themselves. He reached out over the baby’s head and pointed warningly at Domnall: “Don’t you laugh just because you’re left-​​handed! It counts too!”

“I’m supposed to be counting?” Domnall asked.

Maire choked. Her sheepish, serious brother! Joking about such matters!

But it was all due to Aengus, she knew. It was Aengus’s great gift to teach his easy laughter to others. He had saved her brother Murchad from the morbid self-​​doubt that was crippling her brother Diarmait. He was saving her brother Domnall from soul-​​withering shyness. He had once saved her.

She leaned into the slight space between them until her arm brushed his warm arm. Oh, she felt something then! Something inside of her found the strength for a stiff-​​legged, loll-​​tongued loping towards its unforgotten love, and it waved its moth-​​eaten tail like a banner in the breeze it made. This good man would teach her how to laugh like him again, as he had taught her once before. She had only to let him.

“Maire, Maire…” Colin whispered reverently, calling her back from the giddy brink of laughing aloud. “God bless you, Maire. I never thought to see that dimpled chin again in this life.”

“Did your wife have it?” she asked.

“The very same, God bless her!”

Maire felt a little dizzy at the thought of some part of that beloved woman coming down through Aengus, passing through her, and blooming out in the face of their only son, just in time to be seen by the eyes of the long-​​bereaved husband. It made such love seem eternal. She had only to reach out, and it would still be there.

“It could be from Maire’s side,” Aengus teased. “Nobody knows what Old Aed has beneath his beard!”

“God bless you, boy! But I’m surely remembering what my darling had beneath hers!”

“Did our grandmother have a beard?” Aileann cried.

“Our grandmother did not have a beard!” Ete pouted.

“No, but I wager you will someday, bless it!” Colin threatened.

Ete screeched, and the baby led them all in a laugh. At seven months little Aed already had his father’s laughter.

“God bless you, child,” Colin said to Ete, “you’ve your mother’s face and your mother’s temper too… and Penedict is looking just like his father with pointed ears… and this baby boy is looking like his grandmother… which means the only one left to look like me is you!” he said triumphantly to Aileann. “God bless you! You’ll be needing it!”

At last Colin had found something to make Aileann shriek and Ete laugh, but at that moment Maire felt only anger.

“He’s seen Benedict?” she whispered to Aengus.

At last she had found something to make Aengus stop laughing, as abruptly as a door slamming shut.

“Not now, Maire…” he muttered out of the side of his mouth.

“You took him to see Benedict first?” she gasped. “You went to see her first? Her? Her?” she panted.

Aengus growled, “Not now!”

Maire felt something then: a kick in the teeth, a boot toe slamming into the ribs – yelping, flying, falling. Her anger flared up hotter then ever – she almost managed to hate Aengus more than she had hated any other man – and then it went out.

She gasped. Anger, anger…

Ete was taunting, Aileann was whining, the baby was squealing, Colin and Domnall were laughing… There was that cacophony in her house that she hated: in her mind she knew quite plainly that she should feel anger.

Her husband had first taken his father to meet the bastard mongrel infant of his mistress: she knew she ought to feel fury.

She blew on the smoking tinder; she cupped it lovingly in her hand and nursed the dimming spark. She wanted to feel something – anything. When there had been nothing else there had always been anger. Anger was the easiest, safest thing.

She felt nothing. The something that had stirred inside her lay in a heap of mangy gray fur. A trickle of bright blood dripped from its nose.

Soon, she realized with an alarm that was already fading, she would no longer even care that she no longer cared. The something that had once stirred inside her would be dead.