Hollow of St. Brigid's Well

The wall was wrong again. Padraig knelt in the wet grass and set his palm against the top stone, a lump of grey limestone the size of a lamb, and felt the give before he saw it. A half-inch of daylight between the stone and its neighbor. He had laid this course in March, after the ground thawed, and now October had shifted it. Frost heave, or the weight of the hill settling, or something else. He told himself frost heave.

He worked the stone free and set it on the grass beside his knee. The hollow opened below him, a bowl of shadow even at midday, the quarry water black and still at the bottom. St. Brigid's Hollow. The well sat at the eastern lip, a low stone ring with an iron grate, and someone had left bread on the wellhead again. A heel of soda bread, already green with mould. He would have to clear it before the dark nights proper began, because the parish would leave more, and the crows would come, and the crows made a mess of the field.

He had rebuilt this wall four times since Róisín drowned. Not the whole wall. Just the stretch that ran along the upper boundary of the hollow, where the ground sloped and the stones wanted to roll. Each time he told himself it was the land. Each time he tore it down anyway, course by course, and laid it new, because the work kept his hands busy and his head quiet. Dry-stone walling was a discipline. No mortar, no shortcuts. Every stone had to find its seat by weight and friction. A wall like this could stand a hundred years if a man took the time to read the stones.

He did not look at the water. He looked at the wall, at the gap where the stone had shifted, at the dark soil under the grass. His fingers were cold. The morning had a smell of wet wool and woodsmoke, and the fog sat on the hills across the Corrib, and the light was the colour of old pewter. October 28. The dark half of the year began tonight, or tomorrow, depending on which version of the custom you kept.

A sound came up from the hollow. Not a splash. A sound like cloth dragged over stone. Padraig's hand stopped on the next stone. He did not raise his head for a count of five. Then he looked.

She stood in the quarry water up to her waist, at the far edge where the reeds grew thick. Facing the rock wall. Away from him. Her hair hung down her back, dark and wet, and her arms floated at her sides, and the water around her did not move.

Padraig got to his feet. His knee cracked. The sound was small and human in the quiet, and she did not turn.

He knew the shape of her. He had known the shape of her since she was a baby in a basket by the range, since she was nine and climbing the hawthorn at the end of the lane, since she was twenty-six and standing in the rain at their mother's funeral with a black umbrella she kept tilting toward him. He knew the shape of her the way he knew the weight of a stone before he lifted it.

But Róisín was dead. Róisín had gone into the quarry on the night of October 30 last year, and the divers had found nothing, and the Gardaí had dragged the water for three days, and the priest had said a Mass with no body to bury. Róisín was gone.

The woman in the water turned her head a little. Not enough to see him. Enough to show the line of her jaw, the pale shell of her ear.

Padraig stepped over the wall. He did not decide to. His left boot came down on the far side, and then his right, and he was walking down the slope through the wet grass, and the stones of the wall he had been rebuilding sat behind him, half-laid, already wrong.

The ground near the quarry was soft. His boots sank an inch with each step. The reeds whispered against his thighs. The water lapped at the limestone ledge where the old quarrymen had cut blocks a century ago, and the sound was small and regular, like a dog breathing.

She was ten feet out now. The water held her waist. Her dress floated around her, a dark blue thing he remembered, a dress their mother had bought her for a wedding in Clifden, and the hem moved in a slow circle, and the cold came off the water in a way he could feel on his teeth.

"Róisín," he