Da, I called. Do you hear the seals out there? Beyond Grandfather’s boat.
Father paused, and the trap rattled to a stop. He cocked his head toward the north, lee of the wind, and waited. It began to rain. There was the sigh of sea, a feeble baa from sheep rutting in the thicket, and the jangle of the donkey as it shook its blind. Then the song came again, louder than before, from the farthest end of the promontory where a great gray seal rose itself and called out, and then was answered by every seal along the skerry’s length. It brought the hair up on my arms with the pleasure and the unexpected joy of it. I grinned when I saw Father smile. He nodded with the sound and then urged the donkey on again and I followed, glancing back at the skerries and the seals until they were gone from sight.
On the horizon clouds swirled in perpetual circles and rain fell through soft-tonsured sunlight. There was a quality to it that suggested prayer, worship of the sky and the sea and earth, and I thought of people praying here once, coming up from the bogs or the dense woodlands that would become bogs to light fires on the high ground during the feasts of Samhain and Bealtaine, a thousand years ago.
As we came down the lane to the house, the dog caught sight of us and barked, crouched to the ground, tail thumping the muck furiously. Her coat was matted and her shanks were crusted with hard black shit. Father called her Maúr na Caoirigh, which meant Shepherd of the Sheep—which I liked best—or An Sean Mada Salach or An Gruaimín and sometimes just Spota, as if he’d forgotten her real name or put all the dogs he ever knew as a child together into this one. It didn’t seem to matter what my father called her; the dog greeted him and knew him in the way that it seems only some dogs can know some people.
Father flexed his right hand and grimaced. By God, that dog’s been alive forever, he said. He patted his thigh and the dog came running, her rear swinging out behind her through the rain. He shook his head and squatted on his haunches when she came up to him, pushing her trembling snout into his cupped hands. Her teeth were worn and blackened. One of her eyes simmered soupily with a cataract. He cradled her head and ran his fingers from muzzle to stop and then back again. She closed her eyes.
The rain fell harder and the donkey shook its bridle. I moved from foot to foot. When Father looked up, he was smiling. He squinted into rain falling in silver crescents across his face and climbed to his feet. I held the donkey as he unhitched the trap; the torn wrap of jumper around his hand was sodden with blood and the rain sprayed it across the worn leather-and-metal tack and then washed it clean again. The donkey pushed quickly past me as I opened the gate, the barrel of its stomach knocking me aside as it hurried to its foal, a small, barely discernible shape huddled at the bottom of the field.
Come here, Father said, I have something to show you. He followed the narrow, rutted cow path down past the drinking well and the dung heaps to the old sunken byre and then glanced back over his shoulder. You made me think of it back there, he said, with the seals and their singing.
What is it? I asked. The light was fading quickly. He opened the latch and pushed against the door. The timbers were rotted and he had to lift and push it across the stone with his injured hand. Standing next to him, I took hold of the door and lifted and pushed when he did, still thinking of how I’d let Rory’s headstone fall. Gradually, the dark interior of the barn opened itself to us. The smell of cow shit still present, glints of blue-green phosphorescence alight on the rotted dung and straw.
I stood at the threshold as Father made his way through the barn, hands sweeping the darkness and tentatively guiding the way.
Where are you? I asked. I searched for him but could find nothing.
Hold on, he grunted. We used leave the lamp here. There it is.
I heard the sound of paraffin sloshing as he shook the lamp, the scrape of glass as he removed the lens. His face was suddenly illuminated by the flare of a match, an orange oval flickering in black space. He ignited the wick, and when he’d placed the glass around it, he raised the lamp so that his corner of the barn was filled with warm light. Father reached down and pulled back several burlap sheets that were laid against the wall between ashen stacks of turf. Rain tapped upon the roof. The dog sniffed the air and then nosed the old straw beddings.
I took in the room slowly, in the small glimpses that the lamp allowed: the beams and rafters that rose to a second tier where hooks and pulleys dangled amongst thick spiderwebs, the metal rusted, the wood cracked and brittle. The bowed roof, sunken like a galley across its nave. Stalls that once contained animals. A hoofing anvil, a cracked metal gambrel, dented milking buckets. An urn for turning milk. And then the light fell upon the wide black eyes of a seal staring out of the darkness at me. I cried out and stumbled backward.
Michael, Father called, it’s me, it’s me. I looked again and Father was holding the body aloft as if it was still swimming yet, swimming toward me through the darkness of a deep undisturbed sea. Jaysus, I whispered. The lamp flickered across its unwavering sloe-colored eyes, its small flared nostrils that were once moist, on the dull, slightly shriveled skin. Yet I could clearly see the life that it once possessed. At first it seemed so small, barely more than a pup, but as Father lay it back down within the burlap, its sunken length stretching across his extended forearms, I realized that it was an adult fully preserved by the bog.
Father looked at me, unmoving. It is something, isn’t it. You’d think it was still alive, honest to God.
The dog sniffed at an end of the seal and my father belted her lightly. Go away!
How long has it been here? I asked.
The seal? Oh God, years and years. I don’t know why in God’s name Rory held on to it but he did. Father stroked the skin of the seal almost tenderly and then looked up—They say if you have a Selkie’s sealskin it can never go back to the sea.
Father pulled back the other tarps, and I saw how, over the long time that Rory had waited, the bog had slowly given up all manner of long-dead things: a fully preserved cat, the small shriveled remains of a curlew, fetters and bindings of a horse trap, a woman’s ragged red shawl turned black, a doll’s head, parts of a hurley, and a slane, a cast-iron ladle, knotted remnants of fishing line, the strange hard shell of a bone corset—all arranged on the old stone.
I looked at the red-black shawl curled like hemp rope. It glittered reddish-gold, mica or mineral from the bog, I assumed. Father pursed his lips, the way he did when he was about to conduct business or when he had a story to tell. He said that the shawl belonged to a woman who’d come across the bogs at night to meet her secret love but who’d fallen and, like everything else, it seemed, been lost in the bogs.
I don’t believe you, I said.
He smiled and shrugged, squeezed the knees of his trousers. I swear to God, it was the truth according to Rory.
Who was she?
Her name was Gráinne. She was from a small village on the other side of the lough. Father straightened and placed his hands on his lower back. They never found her body, he said, and when I looked at him, he added, only the seal’s.
I stared at him and then at the garment, threads of its buried color highlighted by the low paraffin flame now sliding down the turf stacks as it began to flicker and ebb, so that for a moment the shawl resembled something golden and then something as hard as twisted black metal.
I saw the woman making her way from her village, rushing down the mountainside to be with her love, hurrying across the soft slough with thoughts only of him, then her feet slipping and the muck pulling her down and only time for one desperate scream before the bog rushed in and filled her open mouth, her hands clawing uselessly at the crumbling banks, the red shawl sliding from atop her head and spreading upon the dark surface before sinking as well. Then gone and only bog, blacker than the starless night, remaining.
The dog waited beyond the door and peered in, rain lashing her face so that she looked as if she were frowning. I curled the shawl into a pocket of my anorak. Father rolled up and covered Rory’s arti
facts, and then let the lamp extinguish itself. For a moment we stood in the square of gray light from the door, staring at the dog squatting in the rain.
Up the lane, the dog barking, we raced through the rusted wrought-metal gate. Rain rattled on the tin roofs and I smelled the metal of the sea. The shed door was flung open and banged loudly with a sudden gust of wind. My shirt whipped at my back. Fog moved in from the narrow tree line and sound filtered across the bogs seemingly without origin: trees splintering and falling into the sphagnum, birds crying, cattle and sheep moaning, men and women’s voices as they worked the peat—all commingled in distant echo.
From the kitchen window I watched as the storm came in off the Atlantic. Someone had better bring the dog in, I thought, and I looked beyond the road to the north fields in the distance. Through the gloom I could see that one of the gates was swinging free and I went to move but then realized there was no longer anything left to care for there—those fields were empty but for the gate clanging against the cement posts and ringing for what seemed an eternity.
Father struggled from the outhouse. The door rocked with the wind as he entered the scullery. After he had pulled off his cap and jumper and hung them on the peg to dry, he rummaged beneath the sink for the bottle of Dettol, then slouched toward the living room, coughing harshly.
I looked at his hand. Da, that must hurt, so it must.
No. No, not at all.
Should we not go to a doctor?
Not at all. It’s fine, he said and wiggled his fingers to prove it.
He eased himself into the chair by the fire, its embers still bright and glowing from the turf we’d stacked upon it earlier in the morning. He stoked the fire, added more turf, and then began to arrange the basin of water and disinfectant, but he seemed distracted.
How is your mother? he asked.
She’s well, I lied. I was surprised he’d asked at all; it meant that he was thinking of her and, I hoped, of Molly and me. Perhaps this meant that he was considering not returning to America after all.
She’s looking forward to seeing you, I said but paused when I sounded too eager. That is, if you’re coming down before you leave. I shrugged.
He stared for a long moment at his boots.
That is, if you are. You might not be.
Musha, musha, he sighed, and began to undo his laces. I knelt before the fire to help him with his boots but he waved me away. It’s been a long day, Michael. It’s time you were in bed.
I rose to go fill the buckets with water from the well when Father called me back to him, and for a moment I thought he was still angry at me. He loosened phlegm in his throat before he spoke. You were a great help to me today, he said. You worked as hard as any man.
Outside, the storm front had passed. The air was cold and the fog turned to threads with the chill. The buckets were large and heavy and I thought of the weight of Rory’s headstone. I stumbled but would not let go. I staggered to the door, water sloshing cold on my jeans, and finally put the buckets down.
When I returned Father had begun to clean the wound. I placed the black cast-iron kettle over the hob and sat back on the settle. Father unraveled the dark sodden cloth and stared at his hand. He wiped at the hardened blood, poked at the wound to ascertain the damage. Again I had to look away from the shock of exposed bone, but he seemed unconcerned. His jaw was set, his eyes narrowed in deliberation of the work as if he were sewing a wool jumper or repairing fishing line. When he threw the bloody rag into the fire, it blackened and curled into itself, and with a spit of sparks the fire flared up. He reached for the Dettol and bared clenched teeth when he poured it over his hand. Exhaling slowly, he leant his head back, exposing the pale stubble on the underside of his neck.
After he had bound his hand in fresh bandaging, he worked his stockinged feet before the embers and sleepily watched the fire die out. He pulled a rag from his trousers and blew his nose into it, opened the rag, looked at the snot there, rolled it all up, put it back in his pocket, and closed his eyes.
Good night, Da, I said.
Good night, son. Try and get some sleep.
The Angelus sounded on Radio Éireann and we blessed ourselves. I counted the slow bells, smelled the muck on Father’s Wellingtons, and listened to it dropping off his boots in the heat of the fire.
There seemed to be little keeping us here now, but Father was reluctant to leave, to return to America the way his brothers and sisters had done a week before. He spread the dung heaps around the stone walls at the farthest edges of the courtyard for fertilizer and planted seeds for beautiful flowers. Mounds and mounds of them so that it would take him days. I looked at the colored photographs. I read the wonderful descriptions of Araceae, Amorphophallus, Cruciferae, and Caladium, and I wrote them down, said them aloud, practicing my spelling and my pronunciation. And then there were their common names: Chinese evergreen, Devil’s tongue, Resurrection plant, Angel wings, Peace lily, Jericho rose, Sleeping mother. The Hanging Jesus’s tears that would grow like a vine, up surrounding trees and walls, and shelter everything within it. I read about the conditions needed for their survival: none of the seeds Father planted here would survive. All that would grow were of the family Bryaceae and Caliciaceae—moss and lichen. We took two trips into Galway City in the rented car to buy more seed, and then more and more seed, until all the silage was spread and every space of two inches within the dung was planted a suspension of exigent exotic bloom.
Father banged the buckets in the scullery and checked on the stew brewing over the fire. He’d already put the dog in the shed for the night although it was still yet early; he must have been awfully tired.
He took the accordion down off the shelf and sat before the fire. It was the first time I’d seen him touch it. He rested it in his lap and immediately drew his hands away. He held them out at his side as if he did not know what to do with them. Together we stared at the music box, at the way the fire played in gold on the red and black and silver. Gradually Father’s hands returned to him. Carefully, he unhooked the clasps, slid a thumb into the thumb strap, and paused with his large hands cradling the cherrywood sides.
He looked at me. Rory was my twin, you know, he said.
I nodded. This was his, he said. I gave it to him when we were twelve. He was always better at it than me. Daddy was proud that I’d done that. I think it made Rory very happy. He nodded to himself. Daddy bought it from a Carraroe man who needed passage to America. I’d done well at the Board Exams, and he was very proud of that, he was, thought one of his sons would be something. He laughed. He probably wouldn’t have bought it if he’d known it was to be my last year. Had to work on the farm after that and then took off to England and became a laborer, a feckin laborer. Oh ho, Daddy with his stories.
I don’t know if the man ever got to America, he said. We never heard from him again, so. Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t. Father gazed at the accordion, his eyes lost in some distant memory as they roved across its lacquered surface. The tendons in his hands rose up as he clutched the accordion to him. I think it made Rory happy, he said.
Father removed his thumb from the strap, fastened the clips so that the bellows was bound once more, rose slowly, and, without a word, carefully placed Rory’s accordion back upon its high shelf. Then he stepped out into the courtyard, closing the door behind him. His feet sounded on the cobblestone, and long after he was gone, I continued to hear his footfalls on the path, and then returning again, as if he were merely traveling in circles.
I heard Father’s whistling before anything else, and when he came in with the dog and stamped his feet on the mat in the scullery, I tried to joke. Ah, I said, would you whisht with that awful racket—you’ll even drive the poor old dog away. I grinned.
He looked at me and then at the dog. He was slow hanging his jacket on its hook. It’s not the dog that minds it, he said, and peeled off his Wellingtons. Didn’t think you were so bleedin sensitive. Just like your mother.
My throat was su
ddenly tight. Sure I was joking, I said. Whistle all you want for all I care. I felt the heat of blood in my face.
Do you need a hand with your boots? I asked, but he didn’t respond. The dog followed him to the fireplace. That’s a grand fire, Father said, and I nodded.
I suppose we’ll be going soon, I said. Now that everything’s set.
Soon, he agreed, soon enough.
What about the dog, what about the furniture and beds, what about Rory’s old accordion?
He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. I must go put the dog away for the night, he said.
I’ll do it.
No, the dog doesn’t know you. It’s hard enough me putting her in. He rose from the chair with a grunt and slapped his thigh, calling the dog to him.
I’m not like my mother, I said, and he looked at me but said nothing.
After the door closed I took a towel and lifted the kettle off the hob. I’m like you, I said to the empty room. I’m like you. She always says so.
I heard Father talking to the dog as they made their way to the cow shed, of things only the two of them knew; it was a tender sound full of caring and intimacy. I pulled the curtains closed and stood there in waning light sensing rather than noticing the room growing dark. I looked at the red accordion and imagined its sound in this dark, dim-lit house, down through the final years of Uncle Rory’s life: the hiss of the paraffin lamps as the oil ran low, a meager fire crackling in the hearth because all the turf had been sold off, and nothing beyond the windows but the sea and the promise of a wet day just the same as the last.
The room grew darker, and I didn’t bother to light the lamps. I pictured the accordion’s solid cherrywood, and the running board of keys, sleek melodeon black. I heard its handmade Italian reeds, its distinct Irish tuning. When I was younger, I was told that the buttons of Rory’s accordion were made of Basking-shark bone, the gold flake that burnt in the red lacquer smelt from rock, and the marble patina rubbed and daubed and buffed to a high polished sheen with Father and Rory’s own birthing caul. The way everyone talked about it, you’d think it was magic.
In the Province of Saints Page 10