Away Read Online Free PDF Page A

his chest and then quieted. His conscience slapped him hard. He wanted to hear these songs sung by Mary’s own mouth, and she singing them for him alone. He looked down at his censer and holy-water bottle lying on the earth where he had dropped them. They lookridiculous, he thought, glinting in the sun with potato plants and weeds bobbing all around them.
    “I’ve brought some holy water,” he said absently, “in case it might help. That and some incense.”
    “She won’t be back till sundown, that’s certain,” said Mary’s mother. She picked up her apron and let it fall again, looking oddly girlish as she did so, despite her age and size. Then she turned her face away and made her confession. “I can’t help thinking, Father,” she said, “that she’s the same daughter that I gave birth to. Not a hair on her head has changed and she still calls me Mother. Is it, do you think, Father, that this is what ‘they’ would have me believing?”
    “Consider this,” the priest replied. “ ‘They’ leave an exact replica of that which they’ve taken, in its place. This girl is an exact replica. She is here but she is not. The word ‘exact’ is important. Every hair that’s on her head is an exact replica of every hair that was on her head. Do you see it, Norah? There is nothing about her would have changed except that she is changed. The question is how to get her back. Sometimes it takes seven years. Sometimes they never come back. Sometimes they waste away.”
    “Should I be turning her out of doors then, Father, if she’s not my daughter at all?”
    “Ah no, Norah, for if Mary were to come back she would need to exchange herself, and she wouldn’t be able to find herself to exchange.”
    “Oh,” said Mary’s mother, confused, “it’s like that then, is it?”
    “Yes,” Father Quinn said in a tired voice, “that’s what it’s like … exactly.” He glanced at the tooth chip where it rested in its silver-and-glass reliquary. It looked powerless and decayed. For a moment he wondered whether it had been broken from a human, never mind a divine tooth. He thought of Mary’sgleaming teeth, of her mouth. “That and her calling herself by a different name.” He was silent for a moment, thinking. “Still,” he said eventually, “it might be a good thing for her to be off the island, were she to leave it in a natural way.”
    The moment he spoke these words he experienced a feeling of loss so shattering he was forced to catch his breath. Composing himself he added, “In a natural way, as if she really were Mary, not this … Moira.” He remembered her walking the roads of the island, her hair a-fly. Then he imagined the roads without her on them. He was not fond of the island’s roads, he decided; the hills, the sea stirred his heart, but not the roads.
    “And what way would that be, Father?” Mary’s mother stood with her hands clasped piously in front of her.
    “Death or marriage,” the priest said, surprising himself with the bluntness of his answer. “Both natural, so that if Mary came back she’d know where to look for herself.”
    “But who would be marrying one who is away?”
    “One who doesn’t know,” replied Father Quinn. “One who doesn’t know,” he repeated slowly, though he believed in his heart that there were plenty who would marry her skin and hair even if they did. “Or perhaps,” he continued, a new idea striking him, “one who knows but doesn’t believe.”
    “In God!?” asked Mary’s mother, shocked.
    “Doesn’t believe,” answered the priest, “that a person can be away at all.”

 
    B RIAN O’Malley’s cottage was situated some two miles east of Ballyvoy in the collection of dwellings that went by the name of Coolanlough. Hills swept up on either side of it, rising to the cliffs a mile away. To approach these promontories you had to walk beside the still lakes known as Dhu, Faddon, and Crannog – the latter with its ancient man-made