GRANDMA | RETELLING IRISH MYTH | MACHA'S CURSE | Prologue

Grandma | Retelling Irish Myth | Macha's Curse
Excerpt from "Modern Legend."

"The next day, Dad went back on the road, Laine stayed with Grandma and Grandpa and her cousin Josie at the farm. Josie was Aunt Sue’s daughter but lived at the farm. Josie had to go to school that day, and Laine went with Grandma to the store she owned in the small town, called The Store. Grandma could not leave without her lipstick and offered a piece of peppermint gum to Josie and her. Later they would shut the store with too many gallons of milk lent out on credit to poor ranch families. Everyone wanted to go into Billings where the cheaper groceries were. But at that time, it was up and running. Grandma gave Laine a pair of unicorn earrings and Laine flipped through the coloring books with a pretty native American girl on the cover. Outside, on the glass was a picture of animals smoking that said, Looks Just as Stupid When You Do It.
Laine imagined Grandpa, who was probably smoking at that moment as he drove to Lion’s Flying Service. They differed on many levels. Grandma Mariella was born from a wealthy family, who owned horses and her uncles started Lion’s Flying Service in the 1930s, but Grandpa Bob was more laid back—he liked Irish whiskey and sausages and smoked like a steam vent to his last day, even while carrying his oxygen tank. He always kept a Styrofoam cup of coffee on the dash of his truck as he drove to work, which sometimes wobbled but never seemed to fall over. They married at nineteen and were in the same class at St. Francis’s Catholic School.

When Grandpa got home that night, they were all sitting around the dining room table. Grandma said, “Here’s your steak Bob,” slamming it down in front of him. Laine looked at the overhang where fifty years of birthday and anniversary cards stuck out like chipped teeth. She looked out the window at the spot underneath the clothesline where Patches had chased his own tail so many times it became a dugout. In that house, they raised six children, Dad being the oldest.
In undergrad, Laine took a class called Pre-Norman Irish Literature and fell in love with the story of “Macha’s Curse.” She saw so many similarities between it and family. In the story, the Ulstermen were cursed with labor pains in the height of battle, so that when Mebd’s army invaded Ulster to capture the brown bull, the Ulstermen were as useless as a bunch of drunks, leaving the lone hero Cuchulain to defend Ulster single-handedly.
In Laine’s family, there was the curse of alcoholism. Grandpa’s Dad owned the Shamrock Bar in Billings and was one of the founders of the Billings’ chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous. He even had a crawl space in his garage attic where he let drunks come to sleep off their stupor. Josie’s Mom, Aunt Sue had ten D.U.I.s and still rode her scooter to Denny’s where she worked. But she was a nice person and seemed more real.
“Don’t let that animal in this house,” Grandma said when Josie tried to sneak in one of the kittens around the farm. At the time, Laine thought Grandma was mean but later she realized she was strong and assertive, the way she had to be to survive. She raised all her children and a grandkid on the side. Even though it seemed like everyone was going in different directions, Grandma provided this nexus for the family unit, which kept them in a semi-orbit. When Laine was younger, Grandma led her around on the horse's back, but they didn’t own the horse anymore and Laine wasn’t sure what happened to it.
Laine thought of Grandma as Macha because in the tale the woman Macha had to suffer for the man she loved after he made the terrible mistake of telling the men at court about her secret.
Dare not tell a soul, she told him. about my secret
But the next day, he boasted “My wife can run faster than the horses.”
They laughed. “Men run faster than women,” they said. “It’s a proven fact.” But Macha was not an ordinary woman, but an otherworldly creature who came to her husband and started to cook and clean for him and eventually lay down as his wife and made him promise not to tell her secret.
“Really she can,” her husband said.
“Prove it,” they said, tying him to a tree and fetching the pregnant Macha from her shelter.
“Do it or else we’ll kill him,” they said.
She did as they said, outracing the horses, but in the end, she died in labor giving birth to twins. Her last breath was a curse on the Ulstermen that they may feel labor pains in the heights of battle. (Was this an early tale of the two spheres—of men at court and women in the domestic? And the collision that happened when breached?
Men in labor was a little too hard to imagine, so Laine just imagined them as drunks.
Grandma seemed like Macha then, for her sacrifice for the family unit. In that way, Macha also seemed to represent mother earth, who bears humankind so graciously even when she’s often not tread so lightly upon. She bears the labor of love like a long-suffering grandmother.