The Bird Woman
The much anticipated second novel from prize-winning Irish poet and novelist, Kerry Hardie.'The Bird Woman' is a moving account of two marriages, a gift that feels like a curse, and the freedom that lies on the far side of family or group identity.Ellen McKinnon, red-haired, clairvoyant, fiercely independent, finds her marriage, her health, her sanity threatened when she 'sees' the death of a man in a bomb attack before it has really occurred. Terrified by what's happening to her, she leaves her home, her tribe, her husband, to live with a man she barely knows in Southern Ireland. There she strives to live a normal life in a different culture, to be accepted by her husband's family and friends, to learn a new way of living. Though determined to suppress her 'gift' at any cost, with the birth of her children the clairvoyance changes and broadens into a power to heal. Slowly the rumours spread and the sick seek her out, yet she turns them away from her door.Her husband and her closest friend demand that she question her right to suppress her remarkable powers. Reluctantly she accepts her fate, and begins her work as a healer. But the personal cost is high, and this work begins to damage her most intimate relationships. When news of the final illness of her long-estranged mother forces her return to her native city, everything falls apart for her and she finds there's no safe ground beneath her feet.
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The Bird Woman
Kerry Hardie
For Sean, who walked with meevery step of the way
Table of Contents
Every year in Ireland about twenty thousand people go to healers looking for cures for an extraordinary range of things: burns, brucellosis, skin cancer, bleeding. And many claim to be cured.
[These healers are not] chiropractors or homeopaths or that whole section of alternative medicine: those who have developed unorthodox skills and knowledge to put at the service of the sick…They claim neither special training, knowledge, nor skills, but a gift passed from God. Or from nature. Or from inheritance. Or passed on from someone else. Ultimately they do not know whence the gift comes…
They are not faith healers either. An infant who heals can hardly be said to have faith…Faith healers rely on prayer and faith: these do not. The phenomenon of these healers is comparable to water diviners in that they use a gift that nobody can begin to understand, yet many avail of…
The more you know of these gift healers the more baffled you become. No one seems able to offer an explanation for their extraordinary abilities. The more baffling this mystery grows, the more fascinating it becomes. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
—FROM The Gift Healers BY REBECCA MILLANE, BRANDON PRESS 1995
KILKENNY, FEBRUARY 2001
Sometimes life goes on at an even pace for months, years, the rhythm the same, one step following after the step before, so you get to thinking that it’s always going to be this way, and maybe part of you even longs for something to change.
Then all of a sudden it does. And when it does, it doesn’t change only the once. The first change comes, then the next, and before you know it the changes are at you so thick and fast that you’re running as hard as you can and still you’re not keeping up.
The phone call came from Derry, and everything changed. My brother, Brian, rang, only he didn’t—he got his wife, Anne, to phone for him. I listened until I’d got the gist; then I made her go and get Brian.
“I’m not being uncivil,” I told Anne. “But it’s his mother we’re talking about, not yours. Some things even Brian has to do for himself.”
I heard Anne put down the phone; then I heard footsteps and voices off, then footsteps again and the phone being lifted.
“Yes, Ellen,” Brian’s voice said down the line.
It was strange hearing Brian. If you’d asked me I’d have said I’d forgotten what his voice even sounded like, but the minute I heard it I knew every nuance and inflection—I even knew what his face looked like as he talked.
Only I didn’t. It was more than ten years since I’d laid eyes on Brian; he might be fat and bald for all I knew, he might have grey hair and reading glasses. He might have three toes missing from his right foot or no right foot at all.
But if he did, all that was in the future. For the moment I spoke to the brother who lived in my mind.
“Cancer,” I said to Liam, the word sounding strange, as though I was being needlessly melodramatic. “It seems she had a mastectomy two years ago, but she wouldn’t let them tell me. This is a secondary—something called ‘metastatic liver cancer.’ They’re talking containment, not cure.”
Liam stirred in his chair, but he didn’t speak; he waited for me to go on.
“Brian said she’s been living with them for the last two months. Anne’s off work, and the Macmillan nurse has been calling in. She took bad four nights ago, and now she’s in the hospital. They told him she might have as much as two months, but more likely it’ll be weeks…No one’s mentioned sending her home.”
We had ordered the children next door to do their homework, had banished them, unfed, and with no explanation. They were too surprised to object. Now Liam was searching my face, but I kept it blank and calm. Liam had never been to Derry, had never met any of my family; my life up there predated him and belonged entirely to me.
There was power in that and also safety: I could dispense information as I felt inclined, could tell him or withhold from him, I didn’t have to let him see what I didn’t want seen.
So I talked on, my voice as flat and dead as my face, and I knew as clear as I knew anything that keeping him shut out like this was dangerous and wrong. But I was a long way off from myself, and I couldn’t get back. I didn’t want to get back; I was too afraid of what might be there waiting for me if I did.
“How many hours’ drive to Derry?” Liam asked. “Five? Six? We’ll bring the children. When do you want us to leave?”
