A Tale Before Departure

Some time ago, while researching material for my novel ‘Return to Islamorada’, I was returning to Long Island aboard a flight from Miami to Islip with a scheduled stop at Jacksonville International Airport for change of Aircraft. Upon arrival in Jacksonville, passengers were advised there would be a delay caused by a line of severe thunderstorms passing through the area. I found an empty cafeteria table and was studying my notes when approached by a casually dressed gentleman, slightly older than myself. The trench coat draped over his deeply tanned right forearm, partly covered a most unusual cloth handbag bearing the equal vertical tricolor green, white and orange of the Irish Flag.

“May I?” he asked indicating one of the vacant seats.

Once he had settled, we engaged in conversation and before long I commented on the bag. Although I couldn’t detect emotion behind his dark sunglasses, I did notice an uptake of breath and quick contractions of the muscles of his long face. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on the laminate tabletop and tightly clasped his hands. His mouth tightened then relaxed and he asked, “May I tell you a story?”

Without waiting for a response, the man moved back in his seat. “I want you to know every word is true,” he said and immediately began to unburden himself in the same manner as I am relieving myself by telling you.

You should be forewarned that it is not a happy tale.

The story began before the turn of 19th century on one of those dismal days in the outskirts of a tiny village in Southern Ireland not far from Dublin. A cold dampness wrapped like a wet cloak about those venturing outdoors. Late in the day the heavens crashed and released a flashing bolt of energy on a crooked path to hell before crashing with a deafening snap and charring the area beneath the flaking bark of a large Yew Tree. The occurrence propelled a sleepy bull grazing peacefully nearby into a mad charge. The following morning the mangled body of a young man was found in the pasture. The hide of a bull grazing nearby was soiled with splotches of blood. The discovery of charred earth at the base of the tree and the fact lightning strikes being not uncommon to the area reinforced the conclusion that the animal, probably spooked by the crash of lightning, blindly galloped over the young man killing him instantly.

An unusual locket bearing the likeness of a teenage girl linked the young man to the body of a girl found unconscious five-days later in the bottom of a stone-laddered ravine. The body was identified as fifteen year-old Kate Michael who, since her father‘s suicide a year earlier, lived alone in a tiny cottage on the outskirts of the village. She had been severely beaten and raped before being discarded head-first onto the stones where she lay hidden by the dirt and brush that followed her into the pit.

An already exhausted medical profession, fighting mass starvation and disease brought about by a potato blight, all but ignored the barely alive waif. Had they been able, it is doubtful 19th century medical techniques would have been unable to correct the deformations that gained permanence while she lay unattended.

Somehow, almost totally neglected, she did survive. She also survived having been impregnated by her attacker. Consequently, in the crisp air of a December morning the loud cry of a newborn shattered the stillness about the tiny cottage and Kate Michael gave birth to a perfectly normal son she named Liam.

It wasn’t long after Liam’s birth that tales began to circulate about the amazing young girl that defied death. Rumors that she possessed mystical powers and commanded a bolt of lightning from the heavens to strike vengeance on her attacker gained momentum and spread throughout Ireland. Soon, troubled minds sought her intercession with the supernatural.

Many were horrified upon encountering the woman with the long unkempt white hair hanging before her face while shuffling along her twisted path clutching a separated tree branch as crooked as her spine. Her hideous face was so deformed it lacked any degree of symmetry. There was a deep indentation on one side where a smooth cheekbone had once extended. A bulbous mucus covered orb bulged from a contorted purple eye socket buried within the indentation. The adjoining red rimmed socket contained an unseeing milky spheroid. Her nasal structure was damaged to the extent it had lost all sense of smell and greatly reduced the function of her respiratory track. She was almost totally deaf, a condition that resulted with her speaking in a loud, piecing voice frequently interrupted by wheezing attempts to fill her lungs through a continually ajar mouth assisted by air forced through a small hole off the side of her lower lip —the result of a tooth forcefully ejected through the skin—that constantly seeped saliva. The fight for breath accompanying her shill voice conferred an emphasis that made her most unexceptional inferences appear miraculous.

Although horrified, the people returned and their numbers grew. Kate Michael—initially frightened by the attention— came to welcome the adulation and associated compensation from those seeking her counsel after recognizing a source to support the purchase of alcohol and nicotine that she craved for relief from her excruciating pain. Soon, Kate also came to believe she possessed supernatural powers concluding, “I wasn’t made to suffer for no reason.”