"My Name is
Maureen O' Coakley"
"The
Brown Lady", famous ghost image from website Proof Paranormal.
My name is Maureen O' Coakley
and I know love. It is love that leads me
to the road night after night, and love that keeps keeps my feet skimming over earth
they can no longer feel. It is love that has driven me from the eternal
embrace of our Lord Jesus Christ. I am as a snake now, to be driven
from the land as all unclean and unholy, but there can be no regret.
Yes, I knew love in life-- and that is why I know it in death.
As
I continue drifting past scattered, neatly tended houses of old
neighbors, I
gaze upon the dimly flickering lights in a distant window. The glow of
the candle grows ever closer, until it is so close that I find I am
able to see the shadows it casts on the cloudy glass of the window
sill. I was wedded, bedded and birthed my first child in this place. I
told my Paddy we were going to have a baby here. On the ground, frost
has caused the flowers I planted by the stoop last spring to shrivel.
There is mud on the stoop, dust on the floor as I step through the door
and past the iron horseshoe nailed above the wooden door frame. Paddy
is asleep in his grandmother's old rocking chair by the window, the
family cat at his feet and our boy in his arms.
These are the two men I
love
most in this world; my husband and my baby. Who will take care of them
now that I'm gone? Who
will sing to the baby when Paddy is weary from working or sick from the
drink?
The cat's eyes snap
open, yellow, round, and glowing like foxfire.
Ginger fur stands on end as it leaps to its feet and disappears into
the next room with a yowl, no doubt driven by the intangible swish of
the good, white linen burial dress as the skirt moves about my ankles.
The candle flickers one last time, snuffs itself out and curtains
flutter, stirring up small clouds of dust in their wake. The baby stirs
and I lean forward to stare at the downy hair on his head- brown and
curly as his father's. My Mickey. Who will be his mother, now that I
can't be with him? Who will rock him now that I've died?
I know love- and
because I know it, I cannot accept death.
There is milk on the
floor where the bottle has slipped from Paddy's
large hand. He snores and I know without looking that his crutch is
propped up on the table alongside the chair. His foot is swollen and
his toes stick out from the holes in his socks. There is no money for a
seamstress and no kinfolk to darn the worn-out cloth. Mickey's face is
scrunched up from the dust floating through the air- ready to sneeze. I
watch the way his cheeks go red and his nose wrinkles. I want to weep,
but if I could, I'm afraid I wouldn't remember how. So I sit and I
watch
the chair rock back and forth as curtains waft and the cat huddles in
some dark corner of the room.
My name is Maureen O' Coakley
and come heaven or hell, this is my home.
Author's Note: "My Name is Maureen"
is based on "Ellen O' Leary".
"Ellen O' Leary" can be considered an Irish ghost story, as well as a
ballad. It is attributed to the area of Tyrone in Ireland. In the late
nineteenth-century, W. B. Yeats released his "Fairy and Folk Tales of
the Irish Peasantry"- which is fairly self-explanatory in title. "Ellen
O' Leary" was included in this collection. However, the focus of the
ballad was not the recently dead Ellen. Rather, her three children were
the main characters. While Ellen's children were neglected
by a scoundrel father and the baby of the household suffered, Ellen
descended from heaven every night to care for the three of them. Every
morning when their father stumbled home, she would return.
The "Ellen O' Leary" legend
appealed to me because it so clearly
indicated the need for one responsible caretaker in the home, be it
mother or father, and how the love of a parent could drive the dead
back to the land of the living. In my story, Maureen has turned away
from God by choosing
to linger in the land of the dead. Granted, this concept relies heavily
on knowledge of how religion may have been viewed in earlier centuries.
Since I set this story in the late 1800s, I think Maureen would
consider herself damned to hell by refusing to go to Heaven. I
also changed the character of the drunkard father, because stories
about undead women usually involve a man who mistreated them in some
way. I wanted to show Paddy, the equivalent of Ellen's husband
trying his best (unlike Ellen's husband in the ballad), but struggling
with grief and being a new widower- not
to mention a potentially lamed leg.
"Ellen O'Leary" from Fairy
and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, by W.B. Yeats (1888). Sacred
Texts.