The Witches of Slievenamon

The kids are supposed to be limited to a certain amount of online time each day, I think it's six hours a day, but a long time ago when I noticed she was still using it at home during a long lockdown day without having to pause its use for hours at a time, she explained that when her time expired, she was offered a 15-minute extension, which she accepted and, fiddling with the set-up she discovered she could force it to give her unlimited 15-minute extensions ... so much for parental controls!

Towards Caoimhe's Friday bedtime, extended by an hour to nine o'clock, the tablet has been put away and the girls' talk is about bee hives, with Etain promising to show my daughter how to weave a traditional Irish skep in the morning.

While I watch the news I half-listen to their conversation which is interesting. I never knew that the Patron Saint of Bees was an Irishman called St Modomnóc.

"I've never heard of him," I say.

"He was the missionary that first brought bees to Ireland," Caoimhe says with confidence, looking at me with the chin-up superiority of a youngster speaking to an idiot adult, but she wavers when glancing at Etain's raised left eyebrow, she rallies with, "we learned that at school."

Etain smiles gently, quite sweetly, "To be sure, Dominic O'Neill did bring Welsh bees over with him on his return to Ireland, after training as a missionary with St David, but bees were here for at least a hundred bliain before him. And St Gobnait was also patron saint of bees before Modomnóc. No wonder Gobnait was spending so much time talking to bees, though, she was the ugliest woman you ever saw, or so people have said about her; her nose was so sharp Caoimhe, your father could have used her face to shave every morning as her nose was a blade as sharp as the rest of her looks were dull. Becoming an abbess of a convent was a necessity for her, it was not by choice."

With Caoimhe off to bed at nine, Etain wants to retire too, so I look out a new tooth brush for her. While finding that in my bathroom, I quietly remind Caoimhe to lock her bedroom door, with a stranger in the house, which she does without any complaint. We both have our own bathrooms, although her electric pump shower was inside the bathtub.

The downstairs bathroom is where the old scullery used to be on the back of the house, behind the sitting room. Once Etain goes to bed in the room on the other side of the sitting room, I retire to my bedroom to sleep. It would've felt uncomfortable staying in the sitting room watching TV. Besides I am tired, I haven't entertained anyone at home since at least six months before Covid changed everything.

***

I wake early in the morning to the delicious smell of fresh baked bread. We've never made bread in the house before. I am up before Caoimhe, but then I'm always up before her. I rub the sleep from my eyes and throw on a tee and shorts.

Etain is in the kitchen, plating up three plates with chopped runny eggs, bacon, sausages, mushrooms, and hot buttered toast. I look at the cooker, none of the electric rings are showing hot which is odd. She looks up and smiles.

"Good morning, Richard, our break fast meal is nearly ready. Would you rouse Caoimhe, please?"

"Yeah sure," I say.

As I turn I see the three place settings are laid with tea already poured in the mugs. I don't want to spoil it by saying I always have coffee, but, hey, I could put up with drinking hot mud every morning if it means a traditional cooked breakfast that I haven't cooked for myself.

"Keev, you up yet, honey?" I hiss through her bedroom door.

It unlocks immediately, she knows it's me, as if she's waited for me to knock. She's washed, dressed and almost jumping up and down excited as all out.

"Hi, Daddy," she greets me, kissing me lightly on the cheek with her hands on my shoulders. "I kept my door locked all night and we're both still alive. Guess we can be a little more cool tomorrow night, huh?"

"Sure, honey," I chuckle, "I guess she checks out. Breakfast is ready and Etain's done the whole nine yards."

We get downstairs and Etain is sitting at the table where she sat last night, we take the same seats as before.

"Good morning, Etain," I say with a smile, "I must thank you for this fantastic spread. I hope you slept well, you must've got up at the crack of dawn to do all this magnificent spread."

"I always wake at dawn," she smiles in return, "I found the eggs, bacon and sausages in the pantry, the buttermilk for the bread I got from the farm and I can usually sniff out mushrooms in the wood, even this early."

"Er, wild mushrooms, er, are you sure?" I ask tentatively, knowing I wouldn't know a mushroom from a toadstool and I'd poison us for sure.

"Daddy, Etain knows an edible mushroom when she sees one," Caoimhe's eyes roll back in her head. She's been doing that to me a lot recently.

"Aye, of course," ships in Etain, "and I must get some chickens as soon as possible, so we can have our own eggs."

'Our own eggs?' I think to myself a little worriedly. It's been just me and Caoimhe against the world like, forever.

"So where did you cook all this, the kitchen's virtually spotless?" I ask.

"After checking what breakfast foods you had in the pantry, the one with the light in it, there were none of the fixings needed for soda bread. Sure, the bacon and sausage was there, but no blood pudding, so I checked er, Aunt Katie's kitchen and found some plain flour still sound, lots of dried herbs and of course the soda, so I took a can over to the farm behind us for some buttermilk, which was no problem as they were up just as early with fresh milk to spare and were happy to oblige. Then I passed back homewards through the woods and found the mushrooms. Oh! Guess what else I found?"

"A faerie ring?" Caoimhe suggested rather hopefully.

"Almost. I spotted a faerie rath deep in the wood, completely overgrown. And to think Aunt Katie never let on it was there. If I'd known, it would've saved me a walk."

"What's a 'fairy rath', Etain?" asks Caoimhe quickly.

"It could be a number of things," Etain replies, "It could be a doras na sióg, a faerie door into the Otherworld, or a burial ground, or even a place where a defensive fort was built. This one is big, on a very slight rise, with fallen stones quite far apart, with hawthorn, blackthorn, whitethorn and hazel planted there, both inside and out, growing so thick that the rath's well hid."

"Well," I say, "I've not heard any fairy music or seen naked cavorting going on around here. I might've been interested in visiting otherwise."

"And have you been in the woods, deep into the two acres of woods, Richard, all alone, and precisely at the middle point of the dark night?"

"No fear, I really don't believe in fairies, but I know what would put the fear up me, and it's being in dark woods at night. I'm a city boy and those woods behind your place are dark, with slippery deep green moss everywhere. I'd instantly lose my sense of direction and if I slipped over and broke something I'd end up probably haunting the place for the next thousand years."

"That doesn't sound so bad, Richard," Etain smirks, "you'd get used to it, I'm sure."

"But who would look after the munchkin here, while I rattle chains, shelter under a white sheet and howl at the moon like a werewolf?"

"We girls would be all right, we could stick together, couldn't we, Caoimhe?"

"Yes, Daddy, we'd cope," Caoimhe grins at me, "just think, I could have cooked breakfast with toast every Saturday."

"Every day," Etain says, "gotta start every day right you know. The most important meal of the day."

"And that, young lady, brings me back to cooking this breakfast," I jump in, "You must've used Katie's cooker. Did you manage to get the power turned on next door?"

"Power? Only the power of kindling and tinder, Richard. I lit the fire next door, filled the kettle using the spigot like thing in your kitchen, and hooked the kettle on the chains in the fireplace to boil. I mixed the flour, salt and soda with the buttermilk—"

"From the farm, yes. You know, I've never found Farmer Cormack very helpful. I don't think he likes Americans much."

"Oh, Carrick's a pussycat," Etain scoffed.

'So, she knows the farmer and is on first name terms already' I think.

"He was getting the cows in ready to milk and I asked nicely and he gave me all the milk I needed. When I mentioned straw, he even pointed out where I could help myself to straw for my skeps, because he usually uses shredded paper in the horse stalls nowadays. Carrick was interested in seeing the finished skeps. Anyway, I'll keep the fire going next door which means we'll always have hot water for tea."

"So you boiled the kettle for the tea on the fire?"

"Yes. And I put the lid of the oven on the fire to heat up, so after I mixed the soda bread dough I formed it into a ball, the size of a football, cut a deep cross in the top, and popped it into the oven and hung it over the fire and put the heated lid on, covered it in coals, so it cooks quickly, takes about 20 minutes. In the other oven—"

"Also on the fire?"

"Aye, there's one iron bar across over the fire and three chains hanging down, one for the kettle that's always on, one for the bread and one for everything else. You see, Richard, I don't need electrickery when it's daylight and anyone who keeps bees always has candles at night and I have the fire for cooking."

"The eggs and the toast?" I ask,

"Soft boiled them in their shells with hot water from the kettle long enough to cook the white but leave the yolk runny. Plated it all up in here, shelled and cut the eggs to release the yolk and toasted the bread on your living room fire which I had lit before I left. I used Kaetlynn's toasting forks, you don't seem to have any."

"I can't believe how you managed all that," I shake my head in disbelief.

"I can believe it, Daddy," chimed up Caoimhe.

"Not only that, Richard, but I also made a start on the first of my skeps, after I found Kaetlynn had set out some blackberry fibres she had already spun into thread. She was always better at spinning than me, and Bebhinn makes better skeps than me but they'll be grand when they're done."

"Well, I think this breakfast is fantastic, thank you," I say, credit due where it's due, but a young girl taking the old spinster cat lady lifestyle a bit too seriously was worrying to a shallow guy like me.

***

The fairy fort thing is disappointing.

We visit it mid-morning after I finally managed to get through to the power company to get them to switch it on remotely, but they had to do it from their local junction box and that would not be until Monday.

So I invite Etain to stay with us Saturday and Sunday nights, which she accepts.

As for the fairy fort, honestly, it is all moss-covered stones here and there, lots of dense undergrowth and dark trees completely blanking out the sunlight. If there were ever naked cavorting fairies dancing, I wouldn't even be able to see much of them even in broad daylight. As I said, disappointing.

I warm up the Chinese left-overs in the microwave and we eat more of Etain's wonderful buttery soda bread for a simple lunch.

I try to tell Caoimhe how Etain's soda bread is a traditional Irish method of making bread which does away with laborious kneading the dough and using yeast to aerate the dough before cooking, the addition of acid in the buttermilk reacting with the alkaline of the soda creates the bubbles in the dough and the heat of cooking enlarges those bubbles. "A traditional Irish tradition that has probably lasted thousands of years," I add.

"It's not an Irish method at all, to be sure," Etain points out in correcting me, "it's from the American Indians. They've been using soda for centuries. It was Irish settlers returning home to Ireland that brought the recipe here, around 1830 I think. But we have made it our own ever since."

I have online work to do in the early afternoon after our lunch, so Etain offers to show Caoimhe how to make skeps. My daughter is keen, so I agree to leave Etain in charge.

I'm finished checking servers remotely by half four in the afternoon so, before starting our evening meal, steak, corn cobs and hot dogs on the BBQ, I check on Caoimhe. She's in the next door back yard and I'm amazed, they've woven a dozen bee hives between them and set them into the garden wall.

I just thought it was simply decoration in the dry walling behind the house but there were spaces in the walls in which the funny, round-topped straw bee hives are fitted into. I went over to the nearest to check it out and I can hear buzzing and then I see bees flying out and off to find nectar for the nest.

"How the hell," I ask, "did you not only weave these hives today, but manage to attract swarms of bees each with a queen?"

"Oh, we had help from the faeries," Caoimhe says with a know-it-all smirk on her face.

'Really?" I say, turning away to sort out the evening meal, "and how many of them were dancing naked?"

"Not a one," Etain replies, with a matching female smirk, "but patience, Richard, it's nowhere near the middle of the night yet."

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Chapter Five THE BBQ

It is a lovely sunny afternoon on Saturday, after so much rain on Friday, that it is warm and humid and too nice a summer day to cook indoors, so I offer to have a BBQ in the evening.

Caoimhe always enjoys BBQ food and Etain says she also loves food cooked outside. I get steaks and sausages out of the freezer and put them in the frig, intending to completely defrost them in boiling water in five or six hours' time. I have the fixings for salad and I make a mental note to go and get some more ice cream before the evening.

However, Etain offers to make hot apple hand pies with Caoimhe's help instead of ice cream.

"We don't have any cooking apples," I point out.

"True," Etain replies, "but I have dessert apple trees with small unripe fruits in the garden,. They can be slow cooked in a pie which will soften the fruit, and sweetened with cinnamon sugar and honey in a simple short crust pastry. I'll cook them in an oven over an open fire. They'll be delicious."

"Daddy, they sound perfect," Caoimhe says, "Etain, can I help make them?"

"Of course you can," Etain replies, squeezing Caoimhe with a hug, "you can help me pick, peel and slice them, then soak them in water with some lemon juice to prevent browning. We'll make and roll the pastry, fill up the pies with scoops of sliced apple, fold over the pastry and crimp them. That's 14 crimps we'll make for each pie, which is traditionally for luck. We'll make and cook six pies, one each for tonight which we'll eat hot, and one each cold for dinner tomorrow."

"Mmm, sounds great," I say.

I remove the still-frozen steaks from the frig. They've been supplied individually cello-wrapped, bought from farmer Carrick Cormack some months ago. He often slaughters a couple of cows every few months and offers various cuts to the neighbors beforehand at prices far too good to pass up. I've always found the ruddy-faced farmer, a solid built man about my age, rather taciturn, but his meat distribution was a tradition and everyone around benefited. I've known him, very slightly, for a decade but never exchanged more than a dozen words maybe six times a year in all that time and didn't even know his first name until Etain met him just this morning.

Maybe I'm too much of a self-centred computer nerd for my own good and, by extension, to Caoimhe too, who clearly misses female company. That's probably why she has hung out with Etain most of the day.

I guess you're wondering whether I'm missing female company too?

Sure, I miss Ella, my wife, I miss her like mad. At High School and College I was a complete nerd, and a little overweight for most of my teen years, so I wasn't much in demand when it came to dating. The only sports I indulged in was softball and wrestling, but never made the college team at baseball and, although I did letter through the wrestling team for two years I never set any records or any co-eds' pulses race.

Ella was my one shining light, we just connected almost as soon as we started our courses at Cork, me in computers, while she majored in financial accounting. When she was gone, I had my hands full with caring for Caoimhe and working to pay the bills. If it wasn't for Katie, Etain's aunt, living next door I would have been lost. I really miss her and I know Caoimhe does even more.

Katie may have been in her 70s or 80s (I'm hopeless guessing ages, especially regarding women) but she did babysit for the very few dates I went on, starting about two years after I lost Ella. And she was alwys available to collect Caoimhe from the bus stop, give her tea and look after her if I had to work late to fix a system or install a new server.

Katie encouraged me to go out with girls I met on the road visiting clients' facilities, but my heart wasn't really in it and I knew it would have to be someone really special to take on Caoimhe as a stand-in Mom, even though my daughter had never experienced having a mother around her before.

Maybe, I used to think, once Caoimhe went to college, I could find some divorcee or widow prepared to settle down with someone set in their bachelor ways. I was in no hurry.

Back to thinking about dinner. Normally I would defrost frozen steaks in the frig overnight, but there isn't time for that, with me intending to start cooking at about 6pm, in about four hours' time, so I soak the wrapped steaks spread out in a pan of hot water to start them off on a gentle defrost.

I have a very good marinade recipe for steaks, that my father's always used on our BBQs back home, which involves some hot chilis. We used to have a lot of BBQs at home and all-year round. Here in Ireland the window of opportunity, or rather my personal primeval urge to cook outdoors, is restricted to a couple of months a year.

I make up my Dad's marinade from ingredients I have at hand and set it to one side. Once I was sure the steaks were defrosted I would soak them in the marinade and pop them back in the frig.

I made sure we had the makings of a salad and selected three potatoes that I would part-cook in the microwave and finish off in the oven nearer the time, aiming for a 6pm dinner.

I said BBQs are rare for my little family of two and the inconsistency of the weather means that the table and half a dozen folding chairs were never left out in the elements but stored in the garden shed, so I look the table and three chairs out and give them a dusting over to remove the many cobwebs. Was it really that long ago that we last ate outside? Come to think of it, this was certainly the first time we'd BBQ'd this year.

We have a stock of old glasses stored in the shed, ones El and I picked up from yard sales or jumble sales and put candles inside that when lit help keep the insects away, so I look those out too, polish off the dust and replace the candles that are burned down too low to reuse. We get a lot more insects in the evening than we ever used to get at home, where we have BBQs all year round on permanent and more substantial garden furniture.

The fence between our two properties is low enough to see over, between three or four feet high. It is an ancient fence of woven osier sticks and each panel seems a different age, as if the fence had been there forever and each panel regularly replaced or repaired as it rotten away from the bottom up. The uprights are a different beast, thick and solid wrought iron bars, not steel or wood as we tend to use back home. These sturdy posts are set in concrete and I do paint them with black exterior paint every couple of years and so they look pretty solid; again they look as though a blacksmith hammered them into shape when the cottages were originally built.