This
countryside, known for its emptiness, was,
after the hours of daylight,
filled
with a
darkness so
impenetrable we viewed it with
fear and wonder.
And
when the wind streamed
into the night, it brought
with it all
manner
of
creatures, monsters, ghosts
who
guffawed, screeched,
clanked and
roared
in
the hedgerows, the
trees, took possession of
outhouses, clambered over
roofs,
slithered
under doors, howled down
chimneys, loitered along
the roadsides.
Few
had the
gift of
seeing
into
that dark,
but
old James
Guihan saw.
In our kitchen,
he
told us of
the mad woman who
walked the cur wolf on the
end of a rope,
came
into
our garden on September
nights to steal our apples,
and
the Pooka’s
red
eyes that
sometimes flashed
in at a window, so children must stay in their beds
because
those
eyes lured
boys and girls to the
undergound homes
of fairies
from which
they
never
returned. He told us
about the banshee whose
wails presaged
a death,
and
the lowlifes
whose
trade entailed their poking
in
the hedges for strays
and runaways,
and
his warning that
only our night
prayers kept
us safe in
our beds.
Still,
night after night, we braved the bedroom window, the thinness of its
glass,
to
gaze into the pitch-blackness
that chased our
days away. We
looked
out
to
where the familiar
fields had
been, trees we climbed, the
sheds that
were our forts,
saw
nothing, and were terrorized
by the uncertainty
of the
world we
thought was ours.
