– I haven’t. You tell one.
– Well, now. All I can think for the telling is yer man in Mweenish who trains the sheepdogs, and didn’t a Mayo man arrange to buy one. So he collects the beast and brings it home, I don’t know, to Achill or Newport. That evening, he takes it out to bring in the sheep. Here’s the dog, looking at the man like he’s an eejit, waiting for orders, and yer man is telling the beast over and over what he wants him to do. The dog, he thinks, is deaf. So he takes him all the way back to Mweenish and tells the breeder. And do ye know what was wrong?
– No, what?
– The dog knew only the Irish, coming from Mweenish like, and yer man was giving out to him in English.
– Couldn’t the man speak Irish then?
– Not a word, or maybe just one. But there. Someone else got the dog who could speak Irish and would, and the Mayo lad got another beast trained to the English.
But what if he liked the dog, I thought to myself.
There were always stories. I liked to hear about the time the lads climbed the cliffs of High Island to shoot a Christmas goose, though it wasn’t my year. Or about Joe Mulloy on Inishturk, whose hands were so large they spanned the width of an accordion. Or the building of the film star’s house above Eyrephort, out of rock, and himself bringing beer to the workers. I liked to think of Stephen Clancy painting the navigational Mother of Jesus each spring so she’d stand out for the safety of all sailors. Mother of Christ, star of the sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me. And there were tales of the children now departed, their letters shared in the evenings and their occasional visits, from London or Boston or even Dublin, anticipated for months. Years, some of them.
I liked the story about the seal who came up in the trammel net, dead of course, but his feasting mouth still full of the brilliant back of a salmon. Of the swans on Omey Strand who’d walk the sand like holidaymakers. And then the same strand under the harvest moon, shadowed by the twisting embrace of the silverfish diggers, and then a smell all over Connemara of the frying catch. Then there were the ghosts seen by one at a time and sworn to in the names of the Father and Son (the moaning of the drowned man down by the shore). There were the wakes and the weddings, made spectacular by poteen.
The crone remembered the days when the turf was known all over the west for the fine burning you could expect of it. Those hookers would come in to the quay from Galway or Barna, and they’d load the turf in. Ye could never cut and foot enough, they’d be wanting so much. Now yer lucky to find an ould scraw wedged there where once was the finest bog ever. Ah, tis a pity and a sorrow to ourselves that we cannot provide our own turf any longer.
There’d be a story at any hour when you could locate two or more people together and at leisure, on the boreen, in a kitchen or enjoying a comfortable pipe after the last net had been untangled and laid to rest over the wall. My favourite time of the day was twilight, when Miceal would play his tin whistle to the stones and the sea and whoever would listen.
– Would you please play the Breton piece?
– Aye.
It seemed that even the stupid blind wind would subside when Miceal’s bent fingers jigged over the length of the whistle, and instead of its hollow, monotonous tones there’d be the sweet, sad airs of the Celtic heart.
Someone else wanted reels or “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies.” We listened till the cows came home. When it darkened, you could see the frail lights begin to bloom on Bream and Turk and the occasional headlamps of evening cars on the Sky Road. The summer people would drive to the mainland viewpoint and would park, casting their beams over Mannin Bay and out to the islands. They’d see the pale gaslight or candlelight smudging the dark of the archipelago and the long piercing flash of Slyne Head, the keepers over each season attentive to craft warnings and the forecasting of gales. And if they stepped out of their cars, they’d hear the mourning donkeys and the last notes of “The Woman of the House.”
The islanders said they’d never known a wetter summer, and wet it was, the sun only showing its face once in a blue moon and a weak sun at that, waterlogged in an earth-bound sky.
It rained for days at a time. The nettles flourished. The roof leaked in a place or two, and you could not sleep some nights for the steady drumming of rain on the slates, then the water ringing into tin pans underneath. It was a seven days’ wonder that the turf burned at all.
When it didn’t rain, there was mist, grey and soft on your face and so thick you would swear if need be that there was no mainland at all, only the edges of the island and the image of your own hand in front of your face.
A strange bird on the byre one morning. I asked, What kind of bird is that?
– Oh, save us! This is a bad sign. Did ye never hear the rhyme . . . I don’t know, is it Irish? . . . one magpie sorrow, two stand for joy . . . well, we can be taking it to mean that someone will die within the year.
– Yes, we have that verse, but we say “crow.” I’ve never seen a magpie before. He’s a big bird.
– Sure and wicked as sin. Only last year Paddy Bourke saw one of them ladeens on his roof and a month later didn’t his brother Tom at Aillebrack die.
– Do you believe it?
– Oh, you must. Because it happens, you see.
The magpie stayed several hours on the roof of the byre, grooming himself and looking about curiously. Without the white, I’d have thought him a rook. He hunched further into his feathers, blinked. It was odd the way the morning seemed empty of other birds: fulmars, petrels, and especially the starlings whose shadows would haunt the garden for seeds, the porch for crumbs, and even a bold one coming into the scullery, bumping into windows until it stunned itself and I removed the quivery body to the outside sill. I remember it was warm as a hand in my curving palm; I remember the sweet, dazed smell of it.
Sean was troubled by the magpie’s presence. After he’d had his tea, he went down to the rocks to fish up a gurnard for the dinner. I could see his bright hair there on the dull shore and his repeated glances back. When he returned with a cold red fish hooked to his finger by its gill, the magpie had vanished, leaving only the darkness of its occurrence in our heads.
And that was the last summer before the exodus. Frenchmen and Germans came by launch to negotiate for the houses, drawn by the future emptiness like vultures to a kill.
– No, we’ll keep our houses so. We’ll come back in the summers for the fishing.
Someone added: Sure and won’t ye only want to build hotels and fancy roads. On our land, do ye mind.
I had my own idea of what would happen. In my mind’s sad eye, I saw the fishermen return for one summer’s work before they realized it was a dying vocation to farm the sea in the small boats of their ancestors. I saw the low houses lying empty and windbeaten year after year, windows breaking and the wind entering. There were curtains moving in the violated rooms and mice scuttling to their nests in the stuffing of chairs. I could smell the musty books still on the shelves and the mildewed linoleum curling from the floors. Barnacles claimed the quay. Stone byres lost their thatch and fell back to earth, in time only mounds of shore rock dislocated on the bony land. But I could say nothing, of course, having not even the tenuous right of a lichen to the island’s geography or future.
The old men spent most of their waking hours staring to sea. Which changed, as seas do, almost hourly. It was as though they were committing to memory the physiology of their own cells and blood and the lost dream of Venus. There was the azure that a fine day could produce, and the coral strand of Ballyconneely, seen in the distance, made you think of the South Pacific you knew from the pages of National Geographic. Then there was the muddy cold that could only be the North Atlantic. And a deep glittery blue, waves white-capped and treacherous, and some days there was a horizon clearly delineated past Slyne Head.
– Now would ye not expect that to be the very end of the world?
– Aye, ye’d expect it all right. But tis a mirage, they say, and ye could go
on for miles beyond that.
Cold water, and swimming things travelling the long miles to the banks of Newfoundland.
LAMENT FOR CHRISTY KING
THERE WAS A WEEK that summer when four men from Roundstone were lost on the water, practically waked in the days of their actual loss, then they were found afloat but dead-engined off the coast of Clare.
So of course there was great partying to be found in every pub at any hour of the day or night for two weeks after. One Sunday, after a hard week’s fishing, we went to Clifden for the evening, ten or twelve islanders and myself rowing over to Eyrephort, bright-eyed in anticipation of good talk and drink.
– Oy, said the crippled man in Joyce’s pub. The Round-stone people are blessed for this miracle (tipping back a pint of good stout). But tis the lifeboat people I’m in wonder of, looking for four days as they did and never finding a sight of the boatmen, though Patsy Joe will tell ye that the lifeboat passed within an arm’s length of them. Makes a man think, does it not? They’ve put sailing boats into the air, made them fly. They’ve put people in them, good men like ourselves, lads, they’ve landed them on planets, brought ‘em back again. But they couldn’t find four men lost on the sea. Oy, as yer Aran man said, the world’s a wonder, and a terror to our hearts.
We thought about that all right, sitting there in the big chairs your body could mould into, looking out at a few cars gliding down the wet street like whales. A murmur of voices at the bar, a clink of bottles, someone humming, the smell of porter and wet wool, pipe smoke; and the utter loveliness of whiskey whirling in glasses and reflecting off hands, deep gold and shot with light.
We rowed home that night, made lonely by the drink, and the oars were quietly creaking on their pins.
And then there was the week when the tinkers returned. I was riding Seamus’s bicycle over the Sky Road, and there, like a weird and colourful apparition, was the same group of travellers, the same mare, and I’d not swear about the dogs but they looked the same, too, and if they were not (but cousins, no doubt), well, it really makes no difference.
– Ah, lass. Ye’re still riding the same bicycle, I see, and we’ve the kettle on for the tea. Will ye have a cup?
– I took one. Thick as tar, and black this time, because Paddy Bourke had moved his herd to his brother’s land at Aillebrack, and no one within miles had a freshened cow.
I looked as discreetly as I could at the various men of the menagerie to catch the eye of Christy. But he was not there.
– Did you have a good time in Sligo? Christy said you’d be going to the ceilis.
A few of the women looked at one another, then down. A youngish girl, twelve or thirteen and beautifully dark-eyed, hair the colour of wild furze honey, said, Well, Sligo is all right now, but sure didn’t Christy fall into a ditch on the way home from a dance, he’d many pints taken, and he slept in the reeds until dawn. When he woke, he’d a terrible cough, all raspy it was, and a few days later he died of the pneumonia.
An older woman, his mother I supposed, suddenly wailed to the sky for this wild son of the devil, her son, now cold and wormy in the ground: Oh, my grief! I’ve lost him surely. The other women silently blessed themselves, and one led the stricken wailer away.
I put down my cup, returned to my bicycle, moved away in the tarnished morning. Christy, you wretch, you leaver. Now that you’ve died, I wish I’d gone with you. What good are you to me or any woman now, you with your beautiful, breathtaking hands. How could anyone say: I’ve fallen in love with a tinker in his absence, I’ve killed him far away with my stupid infidelity. How could anyone say: I wanted the caravans, imagined the eerie paraffin lights and the twining limbs of the children, the wrath of a drunken father; I wanted to travel all the days of my life. Now I am stuck like a thorn in the pure body of a fisherman, my various lingering sadnesses a confusion to his soul.
At night when I go to my bed of slumber,
With thoughts of my true love running in my mind,
Well, I turn around to embrace my darling,
Instead of gold sure tis brass I find . . .
In the fairytale of my childhood, the ruined maiden went forth from her father’s house into the woodlands to live amongst the animals. In a dream, she’d be taught to make a cloak of stinging nettles, pounding and twisting the roots till she had lengths of a terrible fibre which she wove into a rough garment. She’d learn to feed all winter off berries with the partridges and deer. And in the spring a good prince would discover her hidden in an oak bole, and he’d fall in love with her swarthy religious face (she’d acquired a love for God through His creatures), her nettle-blistered hands (he’d kiss them), and he’d take her away on his white steed to a castle gorgeous with hangings and heraldry. Her sins would have been purified by cold, the penance of twigs in her wild hair and the rasping cloak on her arms. She’d have learned the mortification of wormwood, bitter and sorrowful, and she’d have learned patience in the cramped burrow of her woody home.
But where would I go, and who would have me? I’d wear my failures sheer as silk upon my shoulders, both an elegance and a falsity. The work of worms or of serpents.
The government was taking its own sweet time in the completion of the houses, and the islanders were beginning to worry.
– T’would be a desperate winter if we were to have to spend it here. We’re without doing the preparations that we usually know are for doing come summer.
– Aye, and isn’t yer man to be found in Kelly’s pub day and night, Flaherty, the one they say is in charge of the building?
I was always surprised at their thorough knowledge of the individual doings of the county, as isolated as they were. Who said what, owned what, married whom, had connections with the IRA.
A few literate men wrote to the councils and the newspapers, stating their cause in a terse, unnatural prose. The reply was a launch full of photographers and a journalist or two and even a documentary filmmaker; the result, pages of photographs in the nation’s newspapers (men beaching a currach, the cottages, thin cattle, a few of the children peering big-eyed) and inspired paragraphs about the stark beauty of Inishbream and the betrayal of the islanders. Miceal would have not a thing to do with them, and they printed accounts of his reticence and his single statement: Would ye ever leave Heaven for Hell, I ask ye now?
For this was what it had come to mean. The promised land of the council plots, nearly a reality, seemed remote in the soft air of an island summer, however rainy, a tiny harbour all gentle with boats and fields lush with wild flowers hidden in the sharp sand-formed grass.
– But if we are to leave, we’d best to go soon. We do not fancy rowing load after load of belongings over the rough seas of November, do ye follow me? And there’s no fodder for them ladeens to be eating (pointing to the remaining bullocks).
And in my own northern cottage, there were silent evenings in front of the fire. The wireless had worn down to a static drone, so we left it switched off except for the sea-area forecast, now unaccompanied by the dark bed of the night.
I cleared my throat. Sean, can we talk?
– What is it yer wanting to say?
– It’s all different now, isn’t it? Us, I mean. I’d like to leave, to go back to Canada where I belong. I’m not happy, and I think I must make you unhappy, too.
– Woman, I was expecting ye to bring that up. Do ye think I am blind and do not see ye pacing the island like a paddocked horse? And there is the talk I have heard. Ye was seen with that tinker. Some think that is why ye don’t have a child. It is hard for a man to know he has not made his woman content, that she has had to go looking for another man and a tinker at that, a sly milk-stealing cur.
How could I begin to explain: It was never you, I never looked for him, he was there one day, and I was taken by his eyes, his mountainy smell. Or: It is that I am always watched when I walk, when I row out alone. I am expected to fail. There is always the shadow of a face behind those curtains or a figure in a doorway.
– Ah, I am thinking our marrying was a bad thing, a cursed thing from the beginning. And ye not a true Catholic, how could ye know the bonds we expect? I think ye want to be at the fishing more than ye want to be a wife so. Ye must go back to Canada all right, but could ye wait until the move? It would seem more natural, like.
So the other women prepared for the move, lining trunks with newspaper and packing the china carefully, dusting the awful Kennedy glasses (resplendent with stars and stripes forever). They could be seen any time of the day wringing out linen, airing quilts and apprehensions over the stone walls. It seemed a lorry would meet the currachs on the beach and would deliver the things to the new houses, the lorry driver a cousin of someone, a man who would oblige for a night of pints in the town. The government provided money to buy large furnishings to replace what would never fit in the currachs: beds, dressers, etc. The few cattle that weren’t sold in the summer fairs would swim across, towed on ropes behind the ark of possessions. The nets and pots would stay, piled in byres and unused rooms, waiting for the return of the fishermen, growing dry and warped with the salt of their exile.
There was a week when Peter conducted the sale of his pukaun, sailing to the town quay as weather or tides permitted, showing his boat silently to the sporty sailors who coveted the last of the island pukauns, the boat Peter’s grandfather had built in the old way: laced ribs, measurements of body (length of an arm, distance between knuckles). Then he drank himself to a grim oblivion from his secret and nearly depleted supply of poteen, wailing a dirge to his lady boat on the rocks in front of his cottage. No one called to him to shut up or tried to prevent his drinking.
And I walked longer hours on the north end or gathered shells to keep: limpets (they will always return to the scar they have made. It is like a home to them), cockles, the night-coloured mussels.
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