Open Writing

The Healer

Aoife was actually my second wife. Earlier I had married an island girl, Hilda, having traded five sheep and a pig for her. I needed a woman to run my household and Hilda, the eldest daughter in a family of six girls on the other side of the island seemed a perfect choice. She died in childbirth within a twelvemonth. The babe was born dead. I thought my heart would break, and threw myself into my farmwork to escape my grief.

Some eight months later, Uncle Erik gave me a slave – Aoife.

It took all my courage to tell Erik that I had decided to take Aoife to wife.
I had expected the sternest reprimand. Erik just laughed. “Thine was a cold bed without a woman in it,” he said. “She’s a comely lass, though but a slave.”

“There’s a good brain behind that pretty face,” I said. “Some days I feel that Aoife and Boris are both smarter than me. Did you realize you had presented me with a healer, as well as a wife?”

Erik was fascinated. “Will she take a look at my sore leg? I tore the skin on a briar in the woods and it’s turned worse than any wound I ever took when viking.”

I took him into the kitchen to see Aoife. She rinsed her hands and wiped them on a clean rag.

“Outside into the sunlight and let me see,” she said.

Erik rolled up his trews and showed her an angry, swollen wound.

“There is a mischief at work here. The wound is dirty and needs to be treated immediately. I’m glad you showed it to me.”

She looked directly into his eyes. “A lot of men think it’s a weakness to seek treatment but that’s just being silly.”

She told Erik she’d heard of a case where a man’s jaw had locked and he’d died when he’d scratched himself with a fork while mucking out a stable.
She had seen part of an arm severed and cauterized with fire after a knife cut had soured.

Erik turned quite pale beneath his weathered tan.

“Relax. It’s easy to fix,” Aoife told him. “You might as well make yourself useful while I treat it.”

She made him remove his trews and showed him a foul mark on the inside where the trews had been reinfecting the wound.

“I’ll wash them, freshen them up for you,” she told him.

She took down from the wall her osier fishing spear and handed Erik a large wooden bucket.

“You’re staying for tea. We’re off to catch it.”

And that’s how Erik and I, with Aoife and Boris my hunting dog went down to the seaside to fix Erik’s sore leg.

We walked knee deep through the water for about two hours while Aoife collected clams which she prodded for in the sand.

She also speared half a dozen small sand dabs at the mouth of the burn where the little flatfish had been waiting to prey on shrimp.

“How do you know they’re good to eat?” asked Erik, who normally would eat nothing smaller than a young seal or a large salmon.

“Look at the marks on the head of the dabs,” said Aoife.

“Those are Christ’s fingerprints, where he took the little fishes and broke them, and with some barley loaves fed the multitudes who came to hear him.”

“But what do they taste like?” said Erik.

“Sweet and delicious. I’ll fry them in a little lard with a pinch of salt. The shellfish I’ll serve with turnip, cress, spring onions and herbs, and some cream as a soup fit for a prince.”

We waded back to the beach. The sea water had rinsed Erik’s leg wound open and clean. The evil humor had gone and it looked quite wholesome.

“Sit in the sun and have a mug of ale with Rik. Keep the wound dry. Into the sea again tomorrow and don’t be surprised if it heals within about four days.”

And that was the start of Aoife’s reputation as a gifted healer.

Three days later my neighbor Callum’s wife, Rose, came with her son Ban, not the brightest of lads. Somebody had given him a copper coin for running an errand. He had been tossing it into the air and catching it in his mouth when, gulp, he swallowed it.

The anxious mother brought him to see Aoife. “We can’t go in after the coin,” Aoife told Rose. “It will have to work its own way out but we can speed this up.”

She sent the lad into the back garden with a wooden bowl and instructions to fill it with gooseberries.

When he returned, she placed a cupful of them on a plate with a dash of cream and told him to eat them. Then she told him to run up the hill to the wood and pick a bowl of hazelnuts, which were just coming into season.

On his return, she made him crack and eat a large handful of nuts.

“No meat and no bread for him, Rose,” she said. “He can have an apple or a pear for his supper, or a piece of turnip, and he should drink four large beakers of water.”

“Is this magic? Are you a witch?” asked Ban.

“No, laddie,” she said. “It’s good Christian sense. These are foods which, unlike meat and bread, will not linger on your inside. When you empty yourself, do so in a clay pot then look for the coin. It will show in a couple of days. You must then wash it. As a penance, I want you to give it to Father Cuthbert as an offering to his new chapel. He will bless you and you will have learnt an important lesson – keep your money in your pocket or you will lose it.”

The boy looked at her and nodded. Behind his back he made the protective sign of the hammer. Not quite yet a Christian, this lad.