How Heaven Gained the Stars

            I listen to my professor drone on about how hydrogen and helium form a complex energy system in which stars and fusion reactions are born. Basic, physical chemistry, I reflect, yet as I listen I am also thinking of another story concerning the birth of stars. I sit in this dank auditorium, a good two weeks into October, while the leaves outside are aflame with color and the air seems to hold a crisp sense of adventure. My mind wanders with the old tale my grandmother once unraveled before me. When I was only five, she had told me the truth behind the stars and their constellations. To this day, it still holds me warmly as if I have a key to knowledge that others could never understand.
         -----
         My paternal grandmother, Morgaine, or Morma as I called her, had come to stay while my father was ill. She helped my mother with all the domestic duties so Mom could work and assist my father with his weekly doctor visits. The days she filled that house were complete with laughter over lemonade on a summer’s day or hot chocolate on a brisk winter’s night before the first snowfall. My father’s cancer seemed to improve each day her voice could be heard resounding through the hallways. My mother’s face slowly lost the threat of strain and wrinkles that had appeared during the first few months of my father’s diagnosis. Nowadays, most doctors agree that laughter and family support is just as powerful as any chemotherapy or radiation they could summon.          
         
         My Morma already knew this. When I was only a small child, wondering at the bold alto tones that issued from her mouth, so unlike my Mother’s soft soprano, my grandmother mesmerized me. She wore her hair in a thick, black bun, on the top of her head. While she worked, not a strand would dare stray from its appointed position. But, at night...at night, she would let her hair down and tell me stories. All kinds of old Irish folk tales, filled with fairies and nocturnal spells. Sometimes, she would give me strict recitation on how to make herbal medicines telling me how the Good Lord had put everything we needed in the dark, rich soil of the earth. I could listen endlessly. My Mother finally would summon me to bed yet she always had to sing me a lullaby before I could sleep.
         
         One night, after a stormy fall afternoon, Morma and I sat on the porch gazing at the stars. My mother and father were watching a movie together and every now and again you could hear them giggling. The sound lilted on the breeze like fairy dust. My grandmother had a way of making everything seem magical, dreamlike. As if she radiated some energy others did not have or simply did not know how to use. When I think back on those days, they were softer than the present, still new and changeable at every moment. Perhaps it was because I was only a child. However, when Morma finally had to leave, the mist of illusion seemed to fade, trailing behind her on their way back to Ireland.
         
         The story she told me that night was about my great-great-great-great-great, and on it went, Grandmother. Her name was Lillthien Elaine Callahan. She had married when she was only seventeen. He was a beautiful yet reserved Irish boy from a village two counties away from where she had grown up. His name was Ryan O’Shaunessy, and from that birth line was I eventually to come.
         
         Ryan, like many of my ancestors, was a fisherman. Every morning the men of the village would meet before the sun rose, their noses sniffing the sea air while their eyes scanned the horizon as they calculated what type of day it would be. A small squall could never keep the boats at the dock. However, if the air held the threat of a true storm, heavy with angry clouds, the women could be seen in the doorways, in the background. They watched the men silently, yet their eyes screamed out, “Do not go out today, my love. The sea is taking no prisoners this morn.”
         
         Ryan would always stand off to the side of the group. He would raise his fingers to the air and make a small grabbing motion. Then he would smell his hand, as if that alone would tell him whether the fish were ripe or the weather foul. Lillthien had her own strange ritual; she would slowly draw her hands through the wind chimes that hovered above their door. She swore that the sound they made would tell her the fate of those who would go off to sea. She never told anyone which sound meant danger and which sound meant profit. Ryan and she were alike in that way, they kept their magic to themselves. Perhaps, only sharing with each other, by the fire each night after their long days of work.
         
         Morma smiled and laughed towards the stars then turned to me with a serious look and said, “Their romance came straight from heaven.”
         
         Lillthien loved Ryan so much that his friends and work mates were constantly ribbing him. They would tease him about the over-sized lunch she packed or the tightly sown clothes she made him for the cold days on the sea. At the same time, the town was in awe of them. Their beauty complimented each other perfectly and they were never far apart.  No harsh words could ever be heard streaming from their cottage at night. The people remarked that the match must have been blessed by the fairy folk, from which Ryan was oft said to be descended.
         
         This was a time of mushroom rings and changeling babies, Morma told me. A time when people were well aware of the magic and danger that arose in the night. Yet, at that time, the skies were pitch black except for the moon. The stars, as we know them, did not exist. I remember looking at Morma as she spoke, waving her hand to the starlit sky, as if to show it off for the first time. Her eyes glinted with their familiar humor and I remained enchanted by her voice. I gazed up at the magnificent Orion and counted the three stars of his belt. I wondered what it must have been like, so long ago, when there were no stars for people to dream upon, or enjoy on a crisp night such as this. I looked back at Morma and she was smiling at me, a hint of sadness in her eyes. She told me that I took my looks from the O’Shaunessey’s. I was dark like them. The Callahans were all fair with blond curls and sparkling blue eyes. My father had those characteristics, while I had the dark eyes of a seal and the thick, straight ebony hair of my grandmother.
         
         Morma put her arm around my shoulders and we turned back to the stars, gasping when one of them plunged towards the earth leaving a fiery trail in its wake.
         “Katelin,” she said, “You remind me so much of my own grandmother. You have the same solemn way about you. I wonder if I child needs to laugh more to be happy. But, you seem to do just fine with your calm, reserved ways.
         
         “Much like Ryan you are. He always kept his reserve around the town’s folk. Yet at night, many could hear his thick laugh wafting through the air, accompanied by Lillthien’s high pitched giggle. Those two were rare. I see some of their love in your mother and father. But, the stories of Ryan and Lillthien hold the truest love anyone could ever know.”
         
         I listened to her, waiting patiently, as I knew there was so much more to this tale. I could sense the sadness that lay behind all that love. I could almost hear the sorrowful cries of the gulls, after a hurricane had swept a rocky, Irish shore.  After a few moments, I asked her, “So how did they sail at night without the stars?”
         
         I knew that fishermen in the past used the stars to navigate. Morma laughed softly and simply replied that they did not EVER sail at night in those times. At night the humans closed their doors and let the first born of the earth have their parties. It was commonly known that many a man and woman had disappeared from the Irish fields at night, seduced into the fairy world from which you could never escape. Although she meant it to sound foreboding, I couldn’t help but wonder, what marvels existed in that other world? And maybe it wasn’t that the lost people couldn’t escape. Maybe they never wanted to? Morma watched me for a few more minutes. Then took a deep breath.
         
         One day, she resumed, the morning was heavy and the wind whipped through the village giving an icy prick to the skin. The men stood at the shoreline, their faces scrunched against the cold straining to see into the horizon. Ryan stood off to the side, as usual, but he did not raise his hand to the air. He kept them tucked into his jacket and simply stared down at the frantic waves that swept the harbor. The women had closed their doors, as if to signal their disapproval of anyone fishing on a day like this. Only Lillthien remained. The clanging of the wind chimes barely audible over the strong gusts of wind. She stared intensely at Ryan, as if willing him to return home immediately and spend the day huddled together by a cozy fire. The rest of the men were shouting to one another, arguing over whether the day would remain ugly or if the storm would suddenly pass. Ryan turned towards them and watched, silently.

         One of the elder fisherman walked over towards him and they consulted. Ryan kept shaking his head and motioning with his hands that he was against venturing out. He then turned and looked back at Lillthien. Their eyes meeting with the same gaze, an unwillingness to tempt the sea with any of their lives that day.  The older man still shouted at him, trying to continue their debate.
         
         And then, as if the fairies themselves pulled back a dark curtain, the sun broke through and the wind dropped to a soft breeze. All of the men looked at one another in bewilderment and then they started to laugh and pat each other on the back. All except Ryan, he turned back to the sea and stared darkly at her waves. Lillthien felt his discomfort; neither of them trusted this sudden change in temperament. The men called out to Ryan as they started to busy themselves with untying the lines and hosting their gear into the boats.
         
         As Morma told the tale, her eyes glistened with tears and I sat forward clutching myself. I could feel it, the trick that the sea had in store for those poor men. I did not interrupt but sat in suspense hoping I was wrong. Morma wiped her eyes quickly with the back of her left hand and continued.
         
         Ryan turned back to Lillthien and still their gaze was the same. She didn’t move and Ryan temporarily ignored the other men’s calls. It was his decision to make. He finally turned away from his wife and watched a gull circle his head. Crying out as if to say, “All is well, come out, come out and see.”
         Lillthien watched as Ryan grasped the air in his right hand and took a deep whiff. Then he lowered his head, took his hands out of his pockets and moved forward to help with the boats.
         
         When he was finished and standing in the boat, he looked back to his wife. She clutched her hands over her belly, her eyes pleading with him to come back, to stay just that one day with her. No one ever really knew if he was aware that she was with child. It had not been revealed to the village as yet. Lillthien’s body language tried to tell him, far back on the land by their cottage. Ryan smiled to her, a big white gleam trying to comfort his terrified bride. And then he hoisted off the main line and they drifted into the calm lilt of the sea.
         
         Lillthien broke from her stance and ran towards the shore. She yelled out, “Ryan, dear one, do not go.”
         But he could not hear her; he simply waved as he drifted farther into the horizon. When she reached the shore, they were too far away to be anything but small figures on a dark blue ocean. She fell to her knees and sobbed with dismay. She remained there until the sea returned to its former anger, its countenance growing meaner and uglier with every increasing gust of wind. Eventually, some of the other wives had to pry her from the shore. She would have stayed there and drowned if not for their care.
         
         Ryan and the others never returned that day. The sea had played her hand, had seduced them in calm and then consumed them in one of the worst storms of the season. The mass funeral was held without a single body, just some of the men’s favorite clothes and as many flowers as the women could find. Fifteen were lost that day, fifteen widows made by the ocean.
         
         Like most Irish women, the wives went on about their lives and raised their sons and daughters to become fisherman or the wives of such. But Lillthien did not recover as well. She bore her son in the early hours of the morning, alone, crying and wailing to the sea. The midwife found her in time to save the babe from the high tide. Lillthien would not budge, her tears fell for so long that by nightfall they had turned to crystal and lay all about her in the sand. Angrily, she picked up one of her tears and flung it to the heavens.
         
         “Ryan!” she yelled over and over and then suddenly stopped in amazement. The crystal ascended until it was a bright fire in the sky. It twinkled above her, giving new companionship to the nearly full moon. She cried on and picked up each of the crystal tears and flung them into the night sky. The women watched in fear and astonishment as Lillthien created great, glowing pictures in the sky. Her tears are now what we call the constellations and the stars of the heavenly sky. It is said that even to this day; new stars are born when the wives of lost fisherman hurl their lonely tears into the night.
         
         Morma stopped and sighed deeply. I could see the glint of her fallen tears close upon her cheeks. I looked up into the stars and thought of poor Lillthien and how her grief had birthed something so magnificent.
         -----
         Now, so many years later as I sit in this logical man’s college, I still remember Lillthien and Ryan and that terrible tale of the sea. As my professor passes out our second test, I see that one of the essay questions asks us to give all the details of how a star is formed. I smile as I imagine what my professor would think if he read such an explanation. That is, if I choose to enlighten him as to how a star is really born.