Mayo is the heart of the Gaeltacht. The heart of old Ireland. The old ones never left. Foreign rule was never more than a loose cloak tossed carelessly across the hardened shoulders of Mayomen. Perhaps foreigners did not want to live in this strange and surly place. Catholicism came and sent down roots, but it did not displace the old ways. Protestantism slipped aside unnoticed.
Mayo remained Irish when the rest of Ireland became a large English estate. Soft Englishmen did not know what to do with the coldness and hard-heartedness of Mayo. Even today in the modern world that smothers everything into sameness, it is still a place where worlds coexist. Mayomen are not afraid of their world or the otherworldly souls of that remote coast.
Come only if you are ready. Stay away if you are not. That’s what Mayomen would say.
When my family’s story starts, Ornice had lived her whole short life close to the shore in South Mayo. The men in her family had been sealers and fishermen for generations.
Not many families were sealers even back then. Bad luck followed a seal killer. But seal skins and blubber brought in a good livelihood and allowed a man to support his family through even the coldest of winters.
Seals stayed alert and away from the shore, then as now. For a few days each breeding season, they were forced onto the rocks closer to shore to deliver their pups, but as the centuries passed they tried to distance themselves further and further away as if daring the sealers to cross the treacherous water to capture them.
And so, sooner or later a sealer would have to go to sea. A small currach in the hands of strong and experienced men is a stable vessel, but in the storms that blow in from the north, even a Belderrig currach can be swamped, capsized or blown too far out to sea to ever see the shore again. And so it was that few sealers died quietly in their beds or in old age. They died younger and in far greater numbers than fishermen.
The people of Mayo knew sealers were cursed. They knew that a seal that had seen their pup or mate trapped in a net or clubbed to death on the rocks would never forget the face of the killer. Some even said a seal’s memory could pass through the generations. When the sea and a storm offered grieving seals the opportunity to avenge a life lost to a seal killer, they took it.
For all that seals know the risks of the fishermen’s shore, still they are drawn to it like a drunk to the drink. And so, sometimes, they come. The old tales tell of the loneliness of seals, their need of people. They love us, are mesmerised by our beauty, our laughter, our music. It is a deadly enchantment but that is the nature of enchantment. The dance with beauty and love must also have its lethal steps. The steps on which we trip and suffer and die at the hand of the beloved. Ornice’s grandfather had disappeared at sea while she was still a young girl. Her own father did not go to sea often. He would wait for seals to come into one of the shallow coves along the shore or onto the rocks exposed in the low sweeping tides. In summer, he would travel to one of the large islands and camp there, waiting for the female seals and their pups. Ornice’s family lived a mean life from these meagre pickings. Her father was afraid to sail out to the smaller offshore islands where the seal colonies lived. He believed the old stories of a seal’s retribution, and he would only go out when seaweed soup or mussels and periwinkles scraped from the rocks near their cabin would sustain his family no longer.
Ornice’s family owned just their small cabin, some chickens, one milch cow, a pig, a few straggly sheep and two currachs. Her father joined other fishermen when he could, but it was unlucky to have a sealer in your fleet, and his fishing trips were rare events.
Ornice’s older brother, Gerrgend, was not a sealer. He wanted to end the family’s curse and he fished with the other fishermen in the little cove and other coves and bays up and down the coast. On his first trip out alone he had taken a bucket of fish with him and tipped them into the sea for the seals. He had spoken to them and told them that he was not a seal killer like his father and grandfather. He was a fisherman and he would give a portion of every catch to the seals in the cove if they would protect him and not drag him to the bottom of the sea to wander interminably with all the seal killers who had gone before him.
At the time my story begins, Gerrgend had been fishing for nearly ten years and his currach came back with a catch on most trips. He never forgot to pay his tithe, no matter how small his catch or how great the need for food for his family. He had made a pact and he would keep it.
When Ornice was fifteen years old, her father gave her to another sealer as a wife. Maybe a currach changed hands. Maybe she was a gift. Nobody told her or asked her permission. She knew Lorcan. He was as old as her father but seemed older. He lived by himself at the far end of the cove in the smallest cabin along that bit of coast. He had had a wife years earlier. Ornice barely remembered her. She had died when Ornice was not much more than a baby.
Ornice did not know much of marriage and perhaps it was just as well. The only marriage she knew close-up was that of her parents. She watched as her mother worked herself to old age. Grey-haired and loose-toothed, she still bore a new baby every year. Many died but enough survived to fill their small one-room stone cabin. On too many nights, she heard her father whispering the tenderest words he knew, and rustling the shallow rushes of their bed as he crawled on top of her mother and rode her hard before a loud grunt announced the end of his simple pleasure. Ornice had seen the bulls mount the cows in the paddocks over the rise and so recognised her father’s acts in the night. Her mother told her little about being a wife but, in this one aspect at least, Ornice knew what to expect.
Her married life was worse than she had imagined it would be. Lorcan came at her like a man starved and she endured. It went on for months, every night without rest, until she thought she would die of the horror of it. Her skin shrank under his hands, blackened from skinning seals. She gagged on the smell of dried blood and the rich oily scent of the seal flesh mingled with his fetid sweat. The act itself was over quickly enough but, unlike what she had witnessed of her parents, after it was finished Lorcan still wanted to leer at her and touch her and plant his mouth all over her. Soon he would have worked himself into a stinking lather and his endless want of her body would need to be satisfied again. She learned to wake before the sun and be up and out of the cabin with her chores before Lorcan stirred. Ornice lived in dread of the night and the awful deeds Lorcan inflicted on her in their dark hovel.
She could not eat the seal meat her husband brought home for her to cook. She cooked it for him, because she must, but she could not put the greasy flesh to her mouth. She had eaten her life’s fill as a child and could stomach no more. She refused to wear the soft sealskin cloak he made for her. He blackened her eye and cracked a rib for her ingratitude. Still, she would not wear it. He gave it to her mother and Ornice had to make do with her threadbare shawls through that first dark winter as a married woman. He dragged the warm sealskin blanket off her in the night and wrapped it around himself after he had finished with her. She shivered and waited for morning.
After a year of marriage, Ornice was still not with child. Lorcan beat her for this too. He threatened to return her to her parents and Ornice prayed that he would. She knew her father did not want another mouth to feed but he would take her in if her husband abandoned her. But Lorcan did not. He wanted sons, but even if this was to be denied him with Ornice, he would never give up her warm body in his bed at night. For her own part, Ornice accepted that her life with Lorcan was to be the only life she would have. There would not even be the small joy of a baby.
Ornice learned to fill her days with what happiness was available to her. She had found the pattern of her married life. She spent the days doing chores, tending her small garden of cabbages and turnips and herbs, and passing the time with her friend Ailish and other women in the settlement. Lorcan would sometimes go out to the outer islands for days at a time. These were the best times. When he was home they hardly ever spoke. At night she let Lorcan have her body. She surprised herself wi
th her power to take her mind and wander with it far from their bed. Always she was moving through the deep blue ocean. Away from Lorcan. Towards joy. But morning always brought her back from the blue to her miserable life. Lorcan would grow old and die or he would die the death of most sealers. And then Ornice would be a widow until death took her too. It was all she could expect.
Running up from the cove between the sea and the boggy moors were the gently sloping green fields used as pasture land. They were broken up with low stone walls. Lorcan’s field was small and unkempt, the walls falling down in parts. There was bad feeling between Lorcan and the fishermen who owned the neighbouring land, who were forced to maintain and repair the boundaries. Most of the fishermen in the cove kept at least one cow and a few black-faced shaggy white sheep. Everyone kept at least one pig. Lorcan’s field was empty when he married Ornice. He did not use it or tend it, but he would not give it up.
Ornice had never before lived without fresh milk, but Lorcan did not keep a cow. She could not spin wool as he kept no sheep. There were not even any chickens. In their second year of marriage Ornice’s mother offered her a clutch of baby chicks, and Lorcan allowed her to take them, but only under his rules. They could not be kept in the cabin and if they got into the thatch roof, making holes, he would wring their necks. Ornice had her hands full keeping them out of the roof.
In the second spring of her marriage, her brother Gerrgend gave her a weaning calf. Ornice was still not with child but she enjoyed her chickens and her calf and her garden and the physical work of looking after them.
In the still cold days of spring, the sea swelled with a Perigean tide. It had been many years since there had been a flood tide. Not in Ornice’s lifetime. The fishermen knew it was coming a week before it was due and had dragged their currachs high up onto the grassy slopes above the cove and then as far inland as they could, before burying them under sods of turf. Gales would accompany the giant sea. If the flood waters did not reach them, the winds could carry precious currachs far inland or smash them to pieces.
Some of the old fishermen remembered a Perigean tide that had washed away all the cabins in the cove and salted the fields for years. The cabins there now had been built higher up the rise and further away from the shore. Animals in the high paddocks were led far inland to neighbouring fields and sheltered in temporary byres built in the lee of stone walls. Everything that could be dragged away from the sea was moved.
The swell had been building for days and even in the sheltered cove the grey waves heaved themselves more slowly and higher than was natural. The tide crept further and further up the sand over five days. The sea birds screeched and flew away. Some of the small black islands outside the mouth of the cove were covered by the sea, the seals gone, along with their rocky homes. With no islands to break the horizon line, the cove was now part of the ocean. The peninsula narrowed to no more than a jutting outcrop surrounded by deep water. The land was being slowly swallowed. Waves dropped heavily onto the sandy shore and the soft bottom fell away before the storm ever arrived. Some fishermen and their families had moved away to stay with others inland. Those who remained kept a watchful eye on the surging grey sea. If it came too high, they had to be ready to run. If it came too fast, they would only have time to die.
Ornice could not bear it. During the days of the building tide, Lorcan was home day and night. Like the fishermen, he had been driven indoors by the wind, the hard rain and the eerie atmosphere of the coming storm. Ornice’s nights became her days. With nothing else to occupy him, Lorcan had her at his mercy.
He was not a normal man. She knew something of marriages now. Ailish had married Etain a year ago and she was happy. Etain was gentle and kind and treated her like a husband should treat a wife, and Ailish loved him. Ailish was expecting a child and Etain delighted in her growing belly. Ornice knew that Ailish’s nights were not like her nights with Lorcan. Something was broken in her husband, and Ornice wondered how long she could survive his base obsessions and cruelty. Two days before the tide, she decided to go to her mother and beg her to let her leave this unbearable marriage. Her mother would understand.
But Lorcan would not let her go. Her mother could get by without her, he said. He could not. Luck was with her that day, however, as he started drinking early, and save one vile but brief encounter, he was too drunk to do anything other than drink. His voice poured all around her loud with threats, but he left her alone.
On Perigean Eve, Ornice was not so lucky. She knew she would die of shame if anyone came to the cabin. They rarely had visitors and it was not likely on such a day but her mother might come, or her brother and his wife, just to check that she had plenty of dry turf and enough fish and milk for the next week. They knew Lorcan was a poor provider. She dreaded Gerrgend seeing her shame and the way she lived. She prayed that she would be left alone with Lorcan even though she knew what that would mean for her.
Lorcan finally lost interest late in the afternoon, and let her fully dress and prepare the evening meal. He ate his dinner and went to bed soon after. He slept heavily that night. Ornice treasured the peace of her loneliness. If he touched her again, she felt she would kill him.
She crept outside in the middle of the wild night and screamed into the howling wind and roaring sea for want of love and kindness and all that she would never have. Somehow it calmed her. She washed herself clean in the heavy cold rain with the sweet-smelling lye and camomile soap she had made with Ailish last summer. She gulped at the fresh water before cleaning her teeth thoroughly with a dogwood twig. The relief of a clean mouth and the taste of the sweet cold rainwater revived her. She washed her long black hair, letting it fall down her back in wet ringlets while she scrubbed her pale aching body with a fresh sponge to remove the taint of Lorcan. She wept as she cleaned herself.
Lorcan was still sleeping when she came back into the cabin. She quietly stoked the fire back to life and sat in the small chair while she sipped her warm milk. She sat awake all that night thinking of the ways she could kill Lorcan. She could cut his throat with one of his sharp seal knives or she could stave his head in with one of the many heavy objects in the cabin while he slept. It would be shockingly easy. And she knew the herbs. Poison could be quick or she could drag it out and watch him die a slow painful death before her eyes – for she would ensure his death was painful. She could push him from the rocks into the heaving sea as he leaned over the edge of a rocky outcrop to pull in his nets. He was a weak swimmer. No one would question the drowning death of a sealer.
More than anything, she wanted to slice his organ from him. She would feed the hated flesh to the gulls and laugh as they flew away with it. She knew she could do it. She was afraid she would do it.
Before dawn, she draped herself in her threadbare cloak and left the dark cabin. She would not stay indoors with Lorcan. Any beating and violations she received when she returned would be worth a day away from him.
She walked along the now narrow beach towards the long headland at the far end of the cove. The wind had dropped and the quiet thick air and smell of the Perigean tide filled the cove, which was lost in a thick grey mist. This was not the cove that Ornice had been born into and where she had lived her entire life. She did not know this place. All around her was still but the quiet was ominous rather than peaceful. It felt like the end of the world, and Ornice the only one left in it.
She reached the rocky headland and continued to walk out along its slippery wet surface towards the sound of the churning sea. The water was surely higher than it was possible to rise. She could feel its presence and her face was wet with its spray. The headland was now a thin arrow of rock surrounded on three sides by the swelling grey surge of the ocean. The smooth rocky outcrop narrowed to the width of her foot. She knew she was in danger from the rising water but her fear had left her. Being washed out to sea was a clean and fast death when seen against the years of suffering her marriage to Lorcan promised her.
Then her tiny bare foot
found the water. The sea had risen above the headland. The cove would surely disappear into the sea at the height of the flood tide. She was strangely excited by the thought of the cove being washed clean. She was walking into the sea now, and just a few more steps would take her beyond the rocks and into the depths. She could not come back from there.
She stopped and held out her arms. The water had risen to her ankles. If she wanted to live, she must turn back now. She must try and retrace her steps before the headland was submerged. But she did not turn. She could hear the sea all around her and she was not afraid. The ocean beckoned her. This was not the sparkling ocean of her bluewater dreams but the remembered exhilaration of those dreams still drew her on. The cold water rose quickly to her calves and her woollen skirt dragged against her legs. She took another step forward and was gone.
The water was cold and clear. Her soaking clothes dragged her into the depths faster than she would have believed. This was how her grandfather and two of her uncles had spent their last moments. It was calm in the depths, just as it had been on the surface, and Ornice did not disturb the quiet stillness by struggling against her fall. The only surprise was that she was falling through glimmering green. The grey of the surface was replaced by a brightness that dazzled her eyes. She was the only thing moving in the iridescent green enveloping her. She did not close her eyes. She wanted to see her end. But an aching tiredness filled her body and the water darkened into the shiny dark green of the kelp floating and winding around her in the glittering cold.
To the Sea Page 17