my cheek.
'Lady—I have done it. I claim my reward. I claim you—'
My own grasp tightened on his. I wanted that. Feeling the spark as skin touched skin I knew that my body wanted it as well as my soul. But I had been trained too well. My eyes pricked with new tears.
'Michael, this boy has his own
'I was a poor priest,' he answered. 'The Christian god would not have me now.'
'Seek rebirth then, as the Druids, like the Hindus, believe, or perhaps the old gods will release you from the Wheel.'
'Do you not love me?'
I nodded, swallowing. 'Too well, my love, to hold you here.'
He nodded, and the mockery left his smile. 'Pray for me.' He gave a little sigh and his eyes closed.
'What is it? Is he dead?' I heard a step and McMurtry's voice behind me.
'He is exhausted.' I tried to stand, feeling as if I had fought the battle myself, and the old man reached out to help me. 'Your son will come back to you, as will the other one. They need rest, that is all.' I moved aside, and he followed me.
'You were here,' I held his gray gaze, 'when they fought fourteen years ago.' I saw in his eyes the flicker of recognition, and of fear, but he could not look away, and I thought that some of the goddess must be in me still. 'Where is Father Roderic's body, McMurtry? Is it in the cave?'
Sweat beaded on his brow, but he nodded. 'How could we have explained it, him coming up here on this day? He fought one of Lord Skein's farmhands, and hit his head when he fell. We panicked and hid the body, and nothing has gone right for us since that day!'
'It will be all right now,' I said, looking around me. Already the clouds were blowing eastward and the world was suddenly full of sunshine, refracting back from grass and leaves in a crystal dazzle of light. A great peace began to fill me, and I realized that I had spoken truly. This harvest would be a good one, and not only for the village. I had come home.
Note: For more information on the traditional folklore of Lughnasa I recommend
Before
Gael Baudino
All this happened before you were born.
The intersection of Jefferson and DeWitt, unpaved from the beginning and not likely to see brick or even common concrete in the near future, sent up a haze of dust in the late July heat, though it would have sent it up even in the first blush of April, when everyone knew that spring was coming, and the women and girls were looking at Easter dresses and hats, and there had been rain maybe—not ice, not sleet, but real rain—the kind that made the tautness of one's skin let go not so much from humidity as from simple relief that winter was past and soon there would be flowers: bulbs coming up, and apple and peach and dogwood blooming outside of town in the forest that Vinty White had never been able to develop for that mill he had wanted (though his son, working more nocturnally, had been much more successful when he had showed up at her bedroom window and scratched just like her cat wanting in).
But this was July, and when old Mrs. Gavin (childless throughout her sixty years, and everyone thought that she should have had at least one in there somewhere, seeing as how Clinton Gavin, her husband, dead and gone now ten years, was known to have been as randy as a stoat) pulled her old DeSoto somberly along the street, stopping at the stop sign more out of condescension to than fear of the law, then driving on through as though she were steering not a heavy green car but a black-clad and sable-bedecked hearse, she left behind her a white pall that must have cloaked the intersection, stop sign and storefront alike, for five minutes or more, and it made Greta turn away from the big plate glass window that Willie McCoy, the owner's son, had spent twenty minutes cleaning that morning because his father had thought that a clean window might attract more customers to the soda shop than a dirty one, even though, in her opinion, the heat would bring customers enough whether the window was clean or not.
She turned away because the whiteness of the dust outside the window reminded her of the whiteness in her mind that she had struggled to maintain for considerably longer than five minutes, struggled to maintain, in fact, for almost four months now, being partly but mostly successful, save for times like this when she was reminded not so much of the presence as of the maintenance of the whiteness by some external event, in this case old Mrs. Gavin's DeSoto and the pall of dust it raised.
No. And something else, too.
Out of that pall, appearing gradually, as he had appeared out of the silver of that moonlit April night, came Jimmy White, cruising up Jefferson in his Ford pickup, slowing down hardly at all at the stop sign and then, swinging left on DeWitt with a scratch of rubber on dirt without even waiting for the car coming the other way (which had the right of way), and it was a good thing for Jimmy that Sheriff Wallace was not around that day, but then again it really did not matter whether he was around or not, for Sheriff Wallace was a first cousin of Vinty White, Jimmy's father, and Sheriff Wallace would have had no more luck writing Jimmy a traffic citation than Greta would have had convincing anyone that Jimmy had come to her bedroom window scratching like her cat wanting to be let in. But she had not tried in any case.
But with another scratch of rubber on dirt and another cloud of white that reminded her of a different white, Jimmy slewed his truck around like the flap of a hand so that it faced in the opposite direction and in the opposite lane; and then he pulled over, parked, and came into the soda shop where he lounged up against the wall by the
