Inishbream

by Theresa Kishkan

  I want to go deeper into the midden. I want to discover a whole elaborate system of worship, the bodies prepared for transition, food alongside, fossilized and ancient in aspect, bowls, weapons.

  I find the black and hardened peels of potatoes cast to the heap a century before and protected by the bog-earth; I find little dried cabbage stalks, pared to the quick, and a bowl, a mortar, cracked in half.

  I want to discover the secrets of the island, the unchristened children of the wayward daughters, the epileptic dogs. A grandmother.

  – Would you mind if I went to visit Shelagh?

  – For how long would ye be gone?

  – A week. I’d like to go for a week.

  – Aye. Of course I can manage. Go to her so and enjoy yerself.

  So I went with the post that Tuesday and drove up as far as Westport with the Electricity Supply Board man.

  – Thirteen moons last year, and what’s it to bring us, I ask ye? The last time we saw such a thing was the year preceding the Great Famine.

  – Oh.

  The rocks of Leenane Harbour were thick with mussels, and all along the south Mayo road there were sheep clustered close to the crumbling shoulders. On the brink of Croagh Patrick we passed a tinker camp. I knew no one but waved to the curious children, the inevitable dogs.

  – This is where I must be dropping ye.

  – Thanks for the lift. Have a good day.

  – And yerself, God willing.

  I took up my rucksack and strode through the narrow streets of Westport, watched by shapes from every window. The clock in the square spoke its constancy. A few cats darted about the shop displays. When I reached the Castlebar road, it was my luck that a car stopped almost immediately.

  – I will be going as far as Ballina.

  – Oh good. Will you drop me at Turlough?

  – I will indeed. But why, may I ask, would ye ever be wanting Turlough?

  – My friend lives there.

  – In Turlough? And has she always lived so?

  – No. She was married to a Turlough man. He died, and she went away, and now she’s come back.

  – Ah, would she ever be the ould lady in the caravan?

  – How do you know?

  – Ye cannot keep things quiet in this county.

  We drove along. The land changed as we left the sea coast, air dulling and losing its iodine sting, land acquiring trees and shrubs from the slow, ripe atmosphere. Signs, pointing firmly down side roads, suggested grand towns, though I knew I’d find only a single pub selling bread, chocolate and wrinkled apples as well as the spirits, and there would be a house or two planted alongside. Villages I knew I’d never know, pubs I knew I’d never drink in, and the stories, Oh most of all the stories I’d never hear: the Civil War hero who had single-handedly chased the English back where they came from, and God they’d stay finally with their language and their religion (Church of England, do ye mind, and not believing in the Pope!); Pats Maloney, master of poteen distillation, and there was a day he tricked the Garda; Breda Ryan with the best legs in all the counties, and didn’t yer fine Dublin man say so, and didn’t he buy her the roses which sat on the bar in Cready’s pub to prove it to all who’d see them? I sat in the tragedy of a road leading directly and never thinking to meander back into the hills beyond the bog or stopping in a momentary way to take the sun with a hamlet’s oldest farmer.

  The driver broke into my thoughts. Will ye have a pint in Castlebar?

  – Yes, I’d like that.

  We stopped in the dark, smallish public house, greeted by the red sign with its single glass of Guinness dead centre. There was the usual assortment of homey men: mended jackets, shaggy caps, gapped teeth and the startling eyes of a true lover.

  – Ah, ye pour a good pint of stout, Michael Joe.

  There was a way of drinking the pint. You cradled the glass a moment in your hands, your fingers stroking the curves and the wetness; you sniffed the creamy top, pressing your mouth ever so softly on the rim, just to have a suggestion of what you’d be knowing as the pint really settled. Then you’d lick your mouth and you’d be delighted. And the pint would be excellent. You’d never doubt that.

  As I roved out on a bright May morning,

  To view the flowers and meadows gay . . .

  Someone’s noble voice singing there at the bar, and the others listening in an honest respect.

  If I married the lassie that had the land, my love,

  It’s that I’ll rue until the day I die . . .

  Then we were on the road to Ballina, we were exclaiming at the rich green of the hayfields and the contented munching cattle, and then it was Turlough: two pubs, Mrs. Loughran’s and her mother’s; Delia’s store; and a row of houses, the one at the end crumbling to the day.

  The man hummed. I am a wee weaver . . . Then: Yer sure ye won’t come on to Ballina, just for the crack?

  A pickup if I ever saw one. No. Shelagh’s waiting.

  She was there in the caravan up from Loughran’s pub in the shadow of the round tower, there in the sunny window, waving. Her cats scattered.

  – Ah, you’re looking well. I’ve made scones and have the tea ready. You’re welcome here. Take off the rucksack and come in!

  The caravan was an enchanted place of Moroccan baskets, Wicklow weaving, a pie of Saint George’s mushrooms gathered in the cool Charlebois wood, sorrel, wild garlic keeping cool in a glass, one wall of books (Krishnamurti, Culpeper’s Herbal, the works of all the visionaries), candles in brass pots.

  – What happened to the roof?

  We were walking in the Charlebois wood and happened upon a splendid view of the old house, the hunting lodge, where Shelagh and her husband had lived in the long ago. The house, elegant though roofless, ancestral under the wry sun.

  – Ah, there was such a wind and it took the roof and didn’t it just land in a field fourteen miles away, shaking the farmer out of a year’s growth. That was just after Gerald died and myself not a true Fitzwarren (only by marriage), and so I took up a few wee things and went to live in Tunisia. For the arthritis, bad even then.

  – Oh.

  And she continued through the forest, small and graceful in her age, pausing to touch the moss of the trees her son Edward had planted in the peaceful summers before his lover drove him mad. I remained at the edge of the view. Took off my shoes. Clenched in my toes the soft grass, earth, leaves, a startled purple-backed beetle. The rare sun entered the chapel of trees through the vaulted branches. Leaned my back on a stump, my spine fitting nicely into the pungent wood. Warm. Breathless. Thought: You could stay here always. Forget the stones of Inishbream, the obsessive stories of drowning. You have always loved trees, and it is the custom in this county to offer your lover a dowry grove, planted by your father or someone as generous. Thought: You’d never be found if you built your shelter in this forest she has declared a sanctuary for birds, foxes of the hills, badgers, anything wild and fond of burrows.

  – And are you coming on, then? I’ve the tea laid out.

  I walked upright out of the forest, and we drank tea on the porch of the breezy house, ate apples and biscuits.

  – Did you like the old wood, then? I always think of it as Edward’s wood. He loved it so. I wanted to bury him here, but I hadn’t the money to bring his body back from London.

  Thought: How lovely to be buried in the Charlebois earth, the ground soft with heron feathers, the night hollow with the chanting hooves. Not hard sea and that drumming rain.

  I came away incoherent with her stories. The brother in Russia. (It was so odd in London to be handing out the anti-war pamphlets on Hyde Park Corner and to see him with his communist tracts on the opposite side, and when our father died and himself the eldest, didn’t he sign over the fortune and the home to the Dublin trade-unions?) The mother, an astrologer in the wilds of Dunkineely, and I’d spent whole mornings in a book of the planets she’d left to Shelagh, smelling of age and brittle fingers and annotated in the margins with
a faint spidery pencil. The brother in South Africa. (The young woman he lives with a widow, her husband having strangled himself with a nylon stocking in one of his queer perversions. Bind himself to the bed, he would, and then play with himself. Can you believe such a thing?) The son and the daughter, both gifted and both suicides, photographs of them as children, the full sensual lips of Edward. Years later, his arm on the tweed chest of his lover, in a suit, the casual scarf at his neck. The stories of the early Charlebois: hunters all with their feet by the fire cleaning their guns, the maids, the meals of venison and jugged hare, and good potatoes splitting their sides, all floury. And then the travelling, after her husband’s death by water, long stays in Spain, Tunisia, the Channel Islands out of season. And the immediate dream of a cottage in Donegal, her birthplace, and the bracing air her blood still longed to.

  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, childle
ss 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.