Nell stayed on with Mamo, waiting for her slate-eyed Pony to return in the night, his mouth whiskey hot, his heels sparking in the wind that hissed through the hut stones. Mornings she waited at the cliff’s edge, scanning the west, where the scythe-colored sky gathered, a curve of damp air, indistinguishable from the sea. Nell waited all through the winter, pacing the places of waiting, faithful as Peigeen in her field of black potatoes.

Waiting was the only thing left between love and grief.

And as she waited, she combed the world for evidence of Jim Pat’s love.  She exhumed from her mouth the taste of his skin, from her breasts his touch, rough and smooth, his hard-labor scent from her shoulder, graze of cheek stubble from her chin, tack of seed from her thigh. She inhaled him in the ash of the turf he’d cut, and traced the shape of his fingers on the hen that he’d lifted to feel for readiness to lay. And she saw his absence everywhere, the shape of him not there, not leaning in the doorway, not lying on the straw, not rambling up from the shadows of the Burren or down in the distance from atop Mullagh More.

He’ll come back, she thought, because she was his wife and this was his home. And, because she was young and she loved, she could not imagine that his every reconstructed touch was not positive proof that he loved too, with a passion equal to her own, for she was her own best evidence that such passion had no limit.

She walked the desolate plain of rock he’d grown up on, content to put her two feet where his two had once walked, beneath the cries of the godwits and gulls that had circled above his boyhood, living on the rockcress and stone lettuce that had nurtured him, lashed by his wind and stung by his frost and washed in the rain of his place. She walked as a pilgrim walks the stations of the Purgatory to face down the devil’s mother on Lough Derg, in absolute faith and terror, every footfall a prayer, a litany upon her lips – Jim Pat, Jim Paddy, My Jimmy;  Jim Pony, Pony Jim, Jimmy Rourke.

And, when at last the days began to lengthen and she saw the first purple bud of bloody crane’s bill rising from grey limestone bold as Patrick up from the slick mouth of hell, crozier and miter thrust through the teeth of the eel, she rejoiced.  Her prayers, she thought, had been answered.  She had walked her husband’s barren land back to life.       

She could almost see him again then, in a patch of lemon sky his hair, his whistle in the throat of a thrush. In the foraging of a badger, the carefree the drag of his heel in the night. And for a moment she smiled as she waited.

But Jim Pat never came back to Black Head. So, he never learned that it was already too late for him to leave. Nell would never now be without him. 

Unsuspected, the third heart grew, caught in the gnarl of the airless womb, budding fingers and tiny elbows, toes, knees, tailbone and skull pushing outward against mother flesh that would not stretch so immutable was it, so fixed in the waiting state. So the babe stayed small, waiting too, growing silently, curving back around itself like a snake until at last, when there was no longer room for so much as a toenail, the condensed little body uncoiled, snapped open, and the unyielding frame that encased her cracked like a shell of glass blown from kelp slag.

Waking in the night, Nell gasped, startled, found herself alone, Mamo nowhere to be seen. Panting, she staggered from the smoky hut, blood running down her thighs. 

She opened her mouth in the dark then stopped, silent, heard the cracking, distant, then near, as if it were something outside of herself – the sundering of skin, of bone, of all that could not bend. She heard, as if it were the roar of earth opening, her own flesh disintegrate as Jim Pat returned at last, erupting inside of her, this time from within, her body breaking against the yellow shore of his child’s hair.

Then. She screamed.

The babe was birthed on the plain of the Burren, dropped onto rock as the mother bayed at the night, hunkered among the wild goats, hiding from the eyes of the hares.  The child came early, too small, skin curdly, blue as lupin. A billykid nuzzled her first, dipping his horn-nubbed head toward the tiny blood-bundle, his lip lifting, quivering, his dark nose, soft with new fur, ruffling the naked length of the small still body. He blinked, nudged, hooved toward the baby’s head, and lopped a lacy tongue across the tiny face. 

The baby shuddered. Her mouth opened and she gulped in a first breath, a lungful of milky goat warmth in the predawn rain. And Nell chewed through the cord, separating the babe from herself, and she bled quietly onto the rock and the young goats licked up the birth blood.

The baby suckled first at a nannygoat, her mother curled next to her, suckling too. And days passed, and the babe grew, from the size of a hand to the size of a foot, nestled among horn and hoof and snuffling baaaa’s. Her hair sprouted, yellow, her skin a shiny bronze, and her eyes opened, green, ringed with dark blue, and spoked with streaks of amber.

When Nell could at last speak, she named the baby for the under-rock folk who danced with the goats. Shealagh, she whispered, so the folk would hear.  And when she was strong enough, she wrapped the babe to her back and climbed through the bearberry to the tip of Black Head and looked out over Galway Bay. She saw the wide water, the shade of Jim Pat’s scythe. She heard the wheeling cack of gulls, and smelled the sea-singe of kelp fire. But Mamo was nowhere to be seen. Then, out near the greenish rocks, rising through sea-wrack and foam, Nell saw the seals, diving, dancing, slipping in and out of their skins quick as sparkle off the waves. And Nell turned from the ocean, and with the goats grazing the cloven rock behind her and Shealagh bleating at her ear, she began the long walk back north to Ballycarrick.