Tuatha de Danaan

By Joanne Soper-Cook

There had always been these lines of power in the land. Being very young and unhappy with the way things were, she went often to her secret place, a sacred place: down along the winding forest path and past the keen eyes of dark crows hidden in the topmost branches. Drawn by an arcane force, she headed up into the hills. The white sides of fishing boats at anchor in the harbor were no longer of consequence; the stately column of the lighthouse was a marker for the shadowy veil that hung between the separate realms. Once she passed by these things, she was enveloped by another reality, where time no longer danced attendance, where another danced, He who knew the Dance.

The village in summer: cupped between the granite palms of primordial rounded hills whose tops had worn smooth with the brush of passing eons, a jumble of matchstick houses painted every shade of white, capped with the unruly fringe of bristling spruce. On windy summer days the harbor, settled like a sup of drink between the cupping hills would dance a thousand sunlit twinkles, washing off into the distance, dispersed into the bay.

Always the wind: soughing, sighing, sobbing like a child into her ear.

She was seven, the first time: awakened early in the summer morning when the sun was just rising over the ocean and bright jewels of dew sparkled wetly in the garden. She was gently summoned from her dream...

alanna

...and a low, sweet humming...

alanna

...and something tugging, pulsing in the center of her chest as if a discrete lightness lodged there, and a chuckling voice replete with ancient mirth...

wake your old soul, sure

She had followed that voice out of bed and dressed as if in a dream; her limbs were heavy and her head swarmed with as many thoughts as a flock of swirling birds. She was drawn out into the morning and the stillness of a perfect summer Sunday and shoeless, traced the path the voice showed her, away, and left the village behind.

This was a path she knew. Dad hunted down here, and Uncle Frank snared rabbits in the winter...Jim Short kept sheep just over the lip of the hill where a little patch of grass kept company with the ocean. This was the marsh where she and Mom picked berries, the soft grey sand where autumn bonfires burned into the night.

The stone stairway set into the hill seemed to know her tread, these ancient granite slabs worn smooth by the press of feet and time.

alanna

It drew her on before it, and it was pressed against her, behind her, and enfolded her as softly as wool. She was not afraid to move along like this, in its embrace. None of the old stories mattered: what harm, then, if she were fairy-led, if she heeded the summons of the Green Man, traced a step with the Lord of the Dance?

Maybe go far enough, and Dad would never find her. Maybe walk and walk until she came to the sucking lip of ocean, and then float off so Dad would never find her. What odds if it were Sunday? The sighing ocean said chuckling things, and this was enough.

Her gaze traversed the sweep of meadow, the grass sloping down to the sea, and the high, eternal sky above that lightened slowly with the advent of the dawn. The ground throbbed beneath her naked feet: your old soul then, your old soul then, your old soul then... She knew something; she knew something, but couldn't remember it: there was a hymn, something she must sing to it, but she couldn't remember it. When she tried to sing this place, her throat filled up with the songs that Dad sang in church, and her mouth seemed full of gravel.

She found her own way back.

Sunday was especially trying for her. Most difficult were the sunlit summer Sundays when, squeezed into the family pickup truck with her two small sisters, she would have to go to church.

Some things about church she liked: she liked the organ, booming through the thin wooden walls and vibrating the floor, and she liked when Margaret-Rose prayed before the service, her pale oval face tilted to the side, a stream of holy invective pouring from her mouth. Margaret-Rose reminded her of the old saints' pictures in Dad's big bible at home: pallid medieval folk with the overlarge eyes of emaciation, their heads surmounted with golden haloes, their fingers upraised in blessing, or in blame. She sometimes thought that she would like to be holy like that, as pale and colourless as wax, and to pray without ceasing. But the long sermons bored her, their meaning lost in rhetoric, and the ranting of the preacher frightened her. She remembered hearing him talk about hell and how she feared that the devil might come and get her, poke her with his prong.