Inishbream (6 page)

I came away stirred and a little mad for her past myself, her filled and tangled years. I would be the archaeologist of her old age, carefully brushing the dust off the artifacts as they unearthed themselves from a living ground. A book, the only one of Edward's she kept; a piece of mountain pottery from Spain.

It was a long route home, first through the sultry air, sky thick with the fattened Mayo birds, then to the coast road, the rain and clutter of small boats populating the fjord of Leenane.

When I arrived in Clifden, it was to discover that half the island population had come over to shop, taking advantage of a high enough tide to be able to go right into Clifden Bay in the currachs.

You could tell the islanders from the townspeople easily enough, though the differences seem nearly nonexistent in the telling. Well, it's the way they dress, warmly, and the women are always carrying several loaded bags, are never without a head scarf. Or their accents are broader, they use odd expressions. But an islander would tell you the accents differ from farm to farm on the mainland and from rock to rock off it. And on a rainy day, not a soul would be found bareheaded on earth. Perhaps I mean that it was the atmosphere they moved in that made them different. And the way the men made their effortless perfect knots when they tied the boats at the town quay, the way their respect for the sea brightened their very flesh and eyes, the way even their skeletons seemed an almanac of the world they knew in a language difficult in the learning but natural to the born initiate. The careful movement of feet on town cobbles, as though they were walking over algae-slick shore stone or in the belly of a pukaun, bracing themselves for the bringing in of nets.

– Ah, so yer back. And had ye a good small holiday?

– Yes, Peter. But Mayo is so different, isn't it? Even the air.

– Aye, tis so, but it seems we have not lost ye to it. Now. Sean has not come to the town this day and so ye may go back with meself, but first I will be proceeding to Eamon's for a bit of a drink. Will ye join me?

– I will.

We took our whiskey neat in the smoky, familiar dark. The drunken woman from Ballyconneely was singing at the bar:

If you are going across the water,
Take me with you to be your partner . . .

– Ah, Peggy, yerra girl. Eamon, would ye ever give the lady another vodka?

How could she have known “Donal Og” was his favourite song, and why did she sing so directly to him?

– Thank ye, Peter.

Then more of “Donal Og”:
I'll do your milking and nurse your baby . . .

Peter hastily declared himself at odds with the malt, and we began to make our slow descent to the currach. We were riding the current home to Inishbream, the air stinging and a music to our ears.

What greeted me upon the event of my return: the children of Mairtin; the elderly dog, dusty and soft in the tooth; the calves, anxious to take my fingers in their mouths for the familiar feeling of a mother if not the taste; the wind rasping through the elephant grass about the stark, cliff-hanging cottage of my marriage; and my man, a startling tangle of sun-bleached hair and arms full of nets, which were dropped. And the arms filled with myself.

One of the old men died, the eldest man in the house of brothers. They had been expecting it for years but finding him cold and blue in the bed was a shock. Overnight. No one heard a sound from him, although they all slept in the same room. One brother said, Sure and how can ye expect to hear anything, even yer own heart, when the gales blow and beat on the doors, shaking every pane of the windows.

What I knew of him: that he was simple, that he walked with two sticks, and sometimes I'd see him at the far end of the island, bent in the wind like a thorn tree. I knew that as a young man he'd gone to America and had come back for his father's funeral, never to leave again. Some said he wanted to marry Kathleen long ago, before she was bearded, and her refusal was his reason for leaving in the first place.

There was the all-night vigil by the body, the watchers fortified by poteen, and then the priest came, and the boulders were rolled away from the gate of the cemetery. The mourners entered and stood in the rain as the priest invoked God and angels, and then the coffin was lowered into the grave men had carved out of the difficult earth. Covered it. A few heart-shaped boxes of artificial roses, wrapped in plastic, lay upon the mound, the ink of the sympathy cards running thin. There was a hymn and prayer. The crone was audibly hoarse from the keening she'd performed during the long wake. The brothers were grim-faced and silent.

A gale from the west, pummelling down on the house of the ailing.

SEA AREA FORECAST

IT WILL SEEM, IN THIS TELLING
, that my days followed one upon the other actively, like flights of geese or shoals of breeding mackerel. Never tiresome or moth-eaten. And there were moths, soft-winged buggers that made a quick lacy work of shirts and a favourite woollen shawl.

Yet I remember whole weeks of lethargy, whole compositions of boredom when I dreamed of going to Paris. Street theatre, the white-faced mimes, jugglers, dark coffee in the Deux Magots. I dreamed of Greece and the night-dancing, the supple men and their unbearable swaying pelvises. Letters arrived from friends: “We are going to Portugal (you'd like the fish-cobbled streets), to Afghanistan. Oh, we'd love to have you with us.” I wrote back: “I fish. My bread goes pale blue with mould because I have no fridge or damp-free box.”

There was a man who went away, and often I dreamed of following, of hunting the roadside camps for a blue-eyed devil. There were meals of potatoes and anaemic cabbages, washed out and sour. Trips to town, a nineteenth-century opus of two streets and fifteen pubs. Nights illuminated by a cool moon, the shy crackle of a candle's flame.

Then the butcher offered me a young mare to break and train as my own.

– She's a flighty filly, pure Connemara, but too small for me, so ye could manage her, I'm thinking. Come and see her. If ye like her, she's yers so.

She was grey as smoke and fourteen hands, a fine Araby head, and long-legged. Her nostrils against my palm were the softest on earth as I fed her a scrawny carrot. Warm, too, and her flanks rippled as I ran my hand across her back.

– Rising three, she is, and ready for the saddle.

But there was a problem: how to get her to the island and where to ride her once she got there. She could swim, of course. I remembered the Sable Island ponies swimming a far greater distance. But no man could touch them, and they ran for centuries in their wrath and solitude for such an abandonment. And this mare would arrive furious and terrified and would never trust the mistress who led her there. Once on the island, there was not one level area fit for the schooling of a green horse. The cows trod the rocks on their cloven hooves. One mile by one mile. I knew the mare would splinter her hooves on the flinty lane.

– No, Malachy, I guess I'd better not have her.

My calves were growing too large to keep by the house; you could not open a door without them barging head-long into the kitchen, upsetting the churn and the teacups.

– I'll move 'em so to the far field.

They showed the whites of their eyes as they left. Horseless, childless and now without cattle, I was a sorry excuse for an islandwoman.

The colour of those weeks was grey. Grey as far as you could see or feel. I remembered a joke I'd heard in Canada: Baffin Island wanted its independence from the provinces and territories, and its flag would be a polar bear standing against a snowdrift. White on white. I bought a colour box to make paintings of Inishbream. I kept mixing black with white to make grey. Never used the crimson or the aquamarine. Never used purple or the spring green. Grey on grey. Those were my paintings.

The bright moments do not sound bright in a truthful accounting. The sea thrift, when picked, lost its shell-pink flowers, and you could not expect a jug of them to last more than an afternoon. But they had their quick splendour, gracing the table in a handleless blue-willow cup. And if I lay stomach-down in the meadow by my house, I could see a brilliance of wild cowslips that lost their sun underneath the tall dullish grass. Oh, and I tell you, there were brief, shuddering, brilliant marriages under the quilt, accompanied by the static poem of the night.

Here is the sea area forecast. Meteorological situation at 21 hours: a moist westerly airflow covers Ireland. A frontal trough lies over the north of the country . . .

And the husband's stuttering hands.

. . . all Irish coastal waters and Irish sea. Wind: west or southwest force 3 or 4, backing southwest to south force 3 to 5 tomorrow.

There was the intimacy of the announcer's voice in the dark room, recognizing the correspondence of bodies fronting and backing and the holiness of fingers laced or woven into hair.

Visibility: 1 to 3 miles in rain or drizzle. Less than 400 yards in fog. Otherwise over 10 miles. Further outlook . . .

The part I waited for like an oracle's prediction.

. . . light to moderate south or southwest winds. Occasional rain showers, especially in the west.

And then there was the chant of reports from coastal stations, the litany for boats and men.

Malin Head: southwest, 10 kts, drizzle, 6 mls, 1016 mbs, rising slowly. Valentia: south, 10 kts, cloudy, 11 mls, 1018 mbs, steady. Belmullet: south, 9 kts, recent drizzle, 11 mls, 1016 mbs, steady.

Yes, especially in the west, Valentia, Belmullet, our own Slyne Head. You could look on any atlas precipitation chart, and according to the legend, the fraction of paper that was the Connemara coast would be the wettest in all Ireland. The chart colour for rainfall was green. And I remembered the first day greening on the island of my home, the deep growth of salal and bright-berried kinni-kinnick, the ferns. The patron saint of all life was green-fingered, the rising sea wrack shot with green light, and I saw the rabbits of Eyrephort stricken with myxomatosis that summer, dying a green young death.

REMEMBERING WINTER

I REMEMBER FIELDS OF STONE
and a harrowing, men dragging chains behind them, a burden on their backs. Earth separated itself from stones, silting through the links, finally furrowing on the slight rise of the garden.

– If ye can, just toss them big ladeens off to the side, then we can trowel the rest of ‘em under so.

And there were buckets of musty seed potatoes, eyes sprouting in darkness, there were fleshy cabbages, and little else to go into the ground. Maybe the occasional row of carrots that would emerge from the loam when pulled fiercely by their tops, and they'd be burrowy with worms and woody to the taste. Parsnips, two-forked and convoluted like ancient fertility charms. Or else parsley to brighten the first pan of new potatoes, then left to dry in any sun that might occur.

In another area, lovely grainy rye for thatch, for fodder, for the secret stills of the island evenings.

I remember the rains of summer and the green shoots. After the harvest there was nothing. Dark earth and the shorn fields. The fatted calf hanging skinless from a beam.

– We will be given the Council houses next summer. That is the promise.

– How do you know?

– Some of the others, Festy and Peter, have been inquiring. They have told of the fierce cold, the old with their rheumatism, the shortage of turf and the drowning. This is not a new promise. They have been telling us we'll have the houses all right, but they are not so quick with the making of them.

The new houses, held in the future like a bright flower to make the coming winter bearable. I walked the various roads where the allocated ground held the foundations, saw the design in the one finished bungalow: square, white, and the trim a bright yellow; a barren, treeless yard; no more a part of the landscape than the power boats of the summer people seemed a part of the sea. Transplants, grafts, utterly unnatural.

– Will you be glad to move?

– Ah, when ye have spent a winter here, ye will not ask such a question.

The lanes seemed strangely empty when I walked them. The small shy children were now confined to the school-house, though still barefooted and with sun-bleached hair. And the currachs were in, black beetles in the fall days, shiny with new tar and patchy with the mending. The pots were anchored with rocks along the quay top or else were stacked in various sculleries to be restrung. Tangly nets, filling the outbuildings, reeked of fish guts and were littered with the broken legs of crabs and the dried scales of mackerel.

You will not say you were lonely. If it was conversation you wanted, then it could be found on the lane by the quay any evening. You could find your way to it by the thin smoke rising from the pipes, even in rain; you could follow the low music of voices. Or, in the kitchen of the house that was the post office (stamps in a tin box, letters bound with string), the women would be at the knitting, pausing now and then to reprimand a child. And there was the man in the narrow marriage bed, the smell of salt in his hair. In a purely simple way, you could say you were happy with your tasks.

But then you'd walk and could only pace the single mile of island ground before retracing your steps or stopping in the face of the sea. You'd wait for a change in the shape of the land, a seasonal turning of tides. They'd turn and change quickly, unnoticed out the window. Spring tide, neap tide, a minimal wearing of stone under the force of the elements: mostly rain. At harvest, you'd expected riches, not the perfunctory pulling of onions from the unrewarding earth.

What you did not expect: winter. You did not expect the terrible frosts and the sly damp that filled every inch of the cottage and found its way into your bones, making the old fractures of wrist and pelvis ache under the layers of clothing you had naively believed to be a protection. Your bed was clammy and smelled of mildew. There was no fishing. The days you spent listening to weather reports on the wireless, hoping for a reprieve and drinking tea from a pot you would not allow to be empty. Or else you tried to untangle the cat's cradle your knitting had become, your numb fingers twisting at the knots and counting the stitches, only to discover the knots were permanent and most of the stitches had fallen. You tried to read the library books you'd choose on the one day in a fortnight that boats would venture to the mainland, and you wept at the descriptions of an island the October ferry was sailing to, the driftwood of its shores bleached and huge as dinosaur bones, an island which you knew well. The newspapers promised nothing but cutbacks and strikes and colder temperatures than had ever been known. You made soup. What else could you do? But you could barely stand to use potatoes that had begun to sprout or carrots that had gone tasteless in their box. And the redeeming summer nettles had been trimmed to the roots or else were rotten with rain. So everything you made was flavoured strongly with onions and the secrecy of herbs you kept in a dark cupboard, reminding you of an earlier island where you had lived on a hill of wild rosemary and sage, their blossoms bright and pungent even in the depths of December. And there was never enough turf to make a really hot fire, and you had to ration it, never knowing from one day to the next whether you could go to the mainland for another load.

You wondered about the tinker, imagined him in the swarthy light of a winter caravan, maybe playing a tin whistle to the melancholy night. The man you thought you knew became more silent in winter, and he joined the other men in a kitchen you were not invited to, nor were any other women. You knew they warmed themselves with poteen. You could smell it when he returned. But what they talked of, or knew in their collective silence, God kept to Himself.

You despaired at the sight of the other women knitting their jerseys and mittens and caps, unfolding them like magic from the chanting needles. You did not have a child to scold or to wrap in your arms. The elderly dog slept. The calves, moved to a far field, grown large and red-eyed (and one dead), munched the mouldy hay you trundled to them and no longer welcomed your fingers.

You sat damply in a chair pulled as close to the tiny mound of smouldery turf as you dared, you thought of the rest of the winters of your life spent like this in the bitter cold, your fingers arthritic before their time and your nose sniffly, and you knew you could not bear it.

I gave my own names to things that winter. The seals had all fled Carrickarona, and there were only ever a few scraggy seabirds who happened to land on their way somewhere else:
I name thee the Rocks of Desolation.

Or the cliffs of Ardmore, with their echoes of a house I had known in a milder winter on Vancouver Island, now stony-faced, no gentle covering of heather or pale thrift:
I name thee the Cliffs of Peril.

And the man whom I had taken as a lover, as a husband:
I name thee Stranger.

They were long months made longer by the refusal of spring. Festy's cow, deceived by one warmish day, calved on the next, and when they found the calf, it was opaque with frost and quite dead. The children shed coats that same day and were bronchial for months.

– This is likely to be the last winter we shall spend here. The new houses are promised us so.

I said nothing. Christmas, too, had been a promise, and when it came I was lonely for another family; their phone call did not bridge the continents but widened all oceans unspeakably. It did not help that Sean got drunk as a lord and had to be walked in the wind to sober him. (Christmas. I had thought of presents, naturally, and wreaths on doors and trees blooming in the corners of kitchens, bright with candles and tinsel. I imagined sweetmeats and shortbread, plum pudding and wassail. But no. Where would a tree come from? Finland? Or heaven? There was a horrible lardy cake, and we ate a scrawny chicken from the brothers' flock. And we ate potatoes. Someone brought poteen. That was Sean's present. I had nothing.)

If Saint Paul's Day be fair and clear,
It does betide a happy year.
If clouds or mist do dark the sky,
Great stores of birds and beasts shall die.

And January twenty-fifth, the feast of Saint Paul, was a grim day, dark as night, mottled with mist and followed by a series of identical twins.

Agnes O'Keefe had a baby that March, a blasted crier of all hours and terrible with wrinkles. Her husband, father of at least five that he'd claim, was proud and used the birth as occasion for what was probably the worst drunk of his life. Or the best, depending on your perspective. Mine, from the scullery window, saw him up to his knees in the wintry sea, singing “The Mountain Streams Where the Moorcocks Crow” in a monotone. And this, three days after. A kind of baptism, a kind of impossible joy, for I knew the child would not be special or gifted with a talent for much. There was too much inbreeding in the O'Keefe family, and the children all had the heavy brows of the simple. They drooled. I don't remember if the new baby was a girl or a boy.

The point is, despite my notations of stone works and thin soil, the island possessed its own queer fecundity, and not only in March. Children were born with an astonishing regularity, which meant that the winters were not completely fruitless and without warmth under the damp bedclothes. People bred, animals bred. There was a rhythm, instinctive for life, that must have resounded deep in the body of the island. And I did not often hear it.

In April I caught a fever of purification, and I mixed lime and water, passing a brush over the dull lichens and the sooty fireplace wall. I painted the window sashes brilliant green and bought geraniums on a trip to town to brighten the stone wall and cover the bird shit. Then, done with it all, I crouched near the fire; the frosts recognized no calendar or polite seasonal order, and I'd been mittenless all through the painting. The next week, I cursed myself for not bringing the geraniums in overnight because they were brown and limp in the morning air, crisp with frost, and I threw them as far as I could to the sea. The first wind claimed its share of whitewash, leaving the cottage bruised under its fine assault.

All the oratories were in ruin, the chapels of stone falling, and the communities drawn together by love of God and need of man were breaking apart and scattering. We are always sailing to islands, lured by the thought of sleeping above the waters of birth and death. And we may be born on islands, forever drawn back to them all our lives just as the white horses of waves are drawn to the shore, and we will be broken when we arrive.

If I'd been Brendan, I'd never have stopped for long on the Island of Sheep and the Island of Birds, I'd never have drifted, I'd have sailed right on until I arrived on the coast of Newfoundland. And if I'd been with the fishermen of Inishbream who'd greeted his successor, I'd have begged on my knees in the bottom of the currach, I'd have begged to be taken along.