The Magpies Gathered on Our Roof the Morning of the Fire

My grandmother grew up on a farm in County Mayo and she carried the old ways with her the way other people carry a wallet. Salt over the shoulder. Never new shoes on the table. And magpies, always magpies. One for sorrow, two for joy, the whole rhyme, which I thought was just something you said to children.

The morning it happened I was seventeen and home from school with a cold. I was at the kitchen window with a cup of tea when I noticed the noise. Magpies make a sound like a wooden rattle, and there were a lot of them. I went out to the yard and looked up and counted them along the ridge of the roof. Eleven. They were not fighting or feeding. They were just sitting in a row facing the same direction, chattering, shifting, settling and lifting and settling again.

I went and got my grandmother because I thought she would like it. She came to the door drying her hands and when she saw them she stopped dead. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she told me, very quietly, to go through the house and unplug everything I could reach. The telly, the toaster, the lamps. I laughed and she looked at me in a way she had never looked at me before, and I stopped laughing and did it.

She could not tell me what she was afraid of. She said the birds were sitting on a house that had trouble in it. She made us both sit in the front room, away from the kitchen, and she kept getting up to check the hall.

The fire started that afternoon in the kitchen. The official cause was an electrical fault in the old wiring behind the cooker, something that had probably been failing for months. It began while my mother was hanging washing at the far end of the garden. She smelled it before she saw it, ran in, and got the extinguisher from under the stairs. The fire brigade said if it had gone another ten minutes it would have reached the ceiling void and taken the upper floor.

The kitchen was gutted. The rest of the house was smoke and water damage. Nobody was hurt. And the magpies were gone by the time the engine arrived, all eleven, not a feather left.

Now, I have thought about this for a long time, because I am a person who likes explanations. Birds gather. It is what they do. Perhaps there was warmth building in the roof from the failing wiring, warmth that rose into those ridge tiles, and the magpies simply found a comfortable place to sit on a cold morning. Perhaps that is the whole of it, a matter of temperature, nothing more.

But then I think about my grandmother's face at the door. She did not see warm tiles. She saw something she had been taught to see her entire life, and she was right, and because she was right my mother went into that garden knowing to keep half an ear on the house. I have never been able to prove the birds knew. I have never been able to explain away that they were there.

My grandmother passed four years ago. At her funeral, as we carried her out, there was a single magpie on the gate. One for sorrow. My mother and I looked at each other and neither of us said a word, but we both saw it, and we both counted, and we both understood that some things you inherit are not furniture or money. They are a way of watching the sky.