“She has a sad story behind her,” Caitlin said. “When she was small she lost her entire family to the Famine.”
“Sister Elizabeth, the history nun, says that that’s how the Irish language was abandoned to begin with. After the Famine it was identified with dire poverty and humiliation,” Maighread said.
“And that’s what it must be with old Sister Dymphna. Hearing the language must bring it all back to her,” said Caitlin.
“She was dreadful to me. You’d think that someone who has suffered so would be compassionate to others.”
“Pain turns some people into monsters,” Maighread said.
I looked at her in wonder. Where had she heard this, or was it her own observation?
There was a moment of silence before I said, “Sister Elizabeth sounds like quite the popular teacher!”
“Oh, she’s lovely. And fierce!” Maighread said.
“Yes!” Caitlin broke in. “She’s young and has a grand, low voice and speaks like an actress.”
“She says that the Irish are heirs to an ancient civilization,” Maighread said, “and that we should again make our own language the national language!”
“There was no such talk in the convent in my day.”
“There are great changes in the air, Mammy!” Maighread said.
They both gazed expectantly at me. An interval of thoughtful silence followed.
“Say something to us in Irish,” Caitlin said.
I thought a moment. “Tugain grá do m’iníonachta,” I said.
I could see that Maighread understood immediately. It took Caitlin a moment, and then she said, “Did you say that you love your daughters?”
“Yes,” I smiled.
“Wait until we tell Sister Elizabeth!” Caitlin said.
I felt their sudden new pride. They looked at me, marveling.
They each took a turn saying something in Irish, the other trying to translate.
“Cuir sin faoi d’fhiacail agus cogain é,” Maighread said.
“Something about smoking a pipe,” Caitlin said.
“I said, ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it,’ ” Maighread said.
“Ba cheart thú do cheann a scrudú.”
“Something about my head being painted,” Caitlin said, making a face.
“I said, ‘You ought to have your head examined.’ ” Maighread cried, and both of them burst into laughter.
I sat back listening, and for a little while they spoke only Irish, broken with laughter.
“Ta an fharraige ghlórach,” Maighread said. The sea is loud.
“Ta an fharraige chiúin.” The sea is quiet.
“Ta srón dearg ag Bean Uí Rós.” Mrs. Ross has a red nose.
“Ta srón Bean Uí Rós as alt.” Mrs. Ross’s nose is out of joint.
That night in the dark as the girls lay sleeping, I recalled the sound of them speaking the Irish. Caitlin with an odd, unpracticed cadence; and Maighread like it was her own low, ululating tongue. She could have been of the island itself. And lying there I knew that I had always associated Maighread with the Blasket. With fierce yearning and squalls of wind.
As I began to fall asleep a phrase surfaced, and I half awoke speaking it: Ise a bhí liom go deo. She who has always been with me. I seemed able to identify things; the odd patterns of connection between us like drawing lines between the stars of a constellation. I felt Maighread tuned to something of mine that I dared not look at myself. I had bequeathed to her my inconsolability. It was her legacy from me, I thought. All that I would not bear or feel, I’d left to her.
And I wondered if it was that mute pact between us that she had always bucked against.
How deeply buried the things are that drive us, I thought. How remote we each are from ourselves.
The next three days were temperate, and we walked on the strand. The girls often ran ahead of me, long gandery strides trailing their petticoats, to gather shells or look at things washed in with the tide. I’d watch them, grateful for the high winds on the shore, which could be blamed for the tearing from my eyes.
The third day there I opened the girls’ map, and looked at the Great Blasket Island. The mental picture I had always kept of it was that it was a great distance out to sea. But there it was on the map, so close to the lip of the Dingle Peninsula.
The wind blew down from the west and on it I smelled my girlhood.
The late sun shone mildly, the blue of Maighread’s black hair almost purple like the wet shells of mussels. “Uair an tréadaí,” my father had called this time of day. The Shepherd’s Hour. I saw his back, his big hand pulling mussels from the rock. I saw him walking thigh deep in the tide, where he hunted out the creatures with jellied tentacles, things with no faces, soft and quivery but with sad eyes, like humans enchanted by the hags or the faeries and biding their time in the tidepools.
And I saw my father’s face suddenly as I had not let myself remember it, his near direct gaze at the sun, the whites of his eyes red, the irises almost milky blue.
And I searched the memory for my mother’s face because I knew she was there, too. I felt her there but I could not fix her with any clarity. I could only breathe her like weather.
Our plan had been to leave Inch on the fourth day and spend a night in Killarney, where we might visit the castle, but as we sat at the depot waiting for the eastbound train, Maighread said, “Let’s not go east, Mammy.”
“Let’s spend the extra day on the Great Blasket Island,” Caitlin said.
“Oh, no,” I said. “I won’t go there.”
They badgered me a bit more, but I was firmly against the idea. They exchanged disappointed looks.
The eastbound train would be a while, we had been told. I sat on a bench looking seaward, a watery sun out, while the girls walked toward the beach and seemed to be conferring. When I heard the train arrive I felt the little child within me undulate like a fish. I waited, not breathing, not moving. A heartbeat later there was another tiny shiver. Instead of joy, my heart plummeted. I’d felt in those tiny convulsions how precariously he held to me. I told myself to calm, to bide with him.
“Sta-a-ay,” I said inwardly, drawing out the word, my senses tuning themselves, straining to catch any tiny flutter. “Sta-ay.”
The girls had turned at the sound of the train and watched me from the sand, but I made no move to get up and I did not call them over.
When the train was gone the girls remained in the distance. The wind was high and had a cold edge to it. I felt their eyes on me as I stared at the wrinkling waves.
I was thinking of my father. Of sitting on his knee by firelight while he talked about the rough justice of the Fenian warriors. What my grandmother called “the stars of irony” gleaming in his eyes. In the right mood, my father could talk a blue streak.
It was the romances I loved to hear him tell. Particularly Cuchullan’s enchantment by the faery woman, Fand; talking about the nature of love when one is under a spell, how terrible it is the way it gets into the skin and hurts: raptures and agonies by turns; fevers and shivers, a kind of illness that makes one capable of desperate feats.
“You miss the Great Blasket Island, don’t you?” Maighread asked me.
They pressed at me with questions:
“Were you really fourteen, Mammy, when you left there?”
“Yes.”
“My age!” Maighread said. “Ah, then, you weren’t such a child.”
“I was a child. You’re both children,” I said.
They wanted to know more, and I told them about my mother losing her own father to the sea when she was small, and about her first love, Macdarragh the mute boy, and how he was lost to the sea as well. And about how she met my own father and how she would come to taunt him over Macdarragh.
“And how did they die? Was it as you told us once years ago? Were they crossing the bay when their boat went down in a storm?”
I watched the light off to the west. “No,” I said. “That isn’t how
it goes.”
“Tell us.”
I looked at them both. “It’s not something I’ve ever told,” I said.
They peered at me, yearning to know.
We heard the whistle of an approaching train, soon grinding slowly to a halt. A train facing westerly.
Caitlin whispered something to Maighread, then approached one of the porters, whom she spoke with. He nodded and waved us over. “There’s room for us on this train, Mammy,” Caitlin called. “He says we get out at Dunquin and there’s passage across to the island.”
I looked with agitation into Maighread’s face.
“They were our grandparents,” she said. “It’s our own history you’ve been keeping from us.”
I felt the magnet of the sea and the wind. Where else in the world was there really to go?
The porter led us to one of the finer passenger cars, but the girls wanted to sit in the back, where we were among an older trope of people who smelled of sheep and dead fires and where we heard the bawling of calves. Each girl in her elegant clothes, reverent and quiet, taking in everything she saw.
When the afternoon sky went black with rain, the porter lit a lamp in the train car. A woman and a sallow-faced child leading two calves by ropes boarded our car. The woman bedded her child down between the two calves for their warmth. My girls stole discreet glances at the child, keeping a wide-eyed silence. Everything shimmered with the smell of seal oil, of animals and damp alfalfa. I could hear in the next car pigs in creels.
Moving west I recognized place names on the signs: Slea Head, Smerwick Harbour. The girls, familiar with the names from their map, whispered them to one another as if they were in church.
A ragged ballad singer got on when the train made a stop. He moved through the cars singing a song about English treachery and deceit.
Maighread gave him a few coins, while Caitlin offered a toffee to the sallow-faced child who had sat up from her bed between the calves to listen to the singing.
The red sky deepened to crimson. When it went dark, it was like passing through a curtain. We had moved from a lit century to a dim one. We had crossed into the past.
The train was up the gap through Croagh Martin and moving to Slea Head when we stopped and I saw the Great Blasket herself, breasting the waves, a vast, dark creature.
In Dunquin we moved toward Mrs. O’Leary’s, the nearest bed-and-breakfast to the pier and the train. It was a gray house that faced seaward. I had a terrible longing to lie down and close my eyes. I knocked and a short, bent woman let us in, squinting through cloudy glasses, sussing us up in our fine clothes.
“Have you only these bags?” she asked.
I nodded. I heard a gannet shriek, turned and saw it circling, and had a sudden wish that we had not come. “Do you have a room that does not face the sound?” I asked.
Her eyes stopped briefly on my face.
“Mammy!” Maighread said. “Don’t you want to face the sea?”
“No,” I said, feeling the sting of sudden tears.
“You’re white to the lips!” Mrs. O’Leary said.
“My mother’s with child,” Caitlin said.
“The sea makes my stomach want to rise,” I said.
The girls supported me as the old woman led us up a narrow staircase. If a room could be pitied, it was this room that she’d brought us to. A room in need of air, with curtains faded and gray. Mrs. O’Leary went straight to the casement, and a bit of dust rose as she pushed it up.
“No one ever takes this room,” she said apologetically. “It’s always the rooms over the sound they’re wanting.”
She brought us water in a basin, then said, “Breakfast is at half seven. If you’re looking to visit the island, the ferry leaves at nine. If you’re hungry, there’s a shop still open up the road.” She nodded at us and left the room.
That night while the girls slept, I went outside and found a bench near the harbor, where I looked toward the island in the darkening light, trying, for the child’s sake, to eat a currant bun we had bought earlier in the shop.
Centuries had passed and would go on passing and the water would remain as mad for that rock as ever, as crazed in love with it, attending, attending. Shamelessly throwing itself, crashing at it. And that both moved me and put a pain through me. I stayed out until I saw the dim paraffin lights quenching in the dark and distant windows.
Crunching along a gravel pathway, I made my way back to Mrs. O’Leary’s and up the creaking stairs.
“No one’ll be crossing to the island this day,” Mrs. O’Leary said to us early the next morning. “Look at the sea.”
While the girls finished their breakfast I wandered out toward the pier, where a group of fishermen were securing their boats to the dock. I recognized Seamus Fehan, my father’s crony. He looked the same but more deeply weathered, his hair gone gray. To my relief, he didn’t recognize me, and how could he have; a full-grown woman I was now, in tailored clothes and fine black boots. No one might know me for an islander. He spoke to the man he was with, and the sound of his voice for a moment confused itself with the memory of my own father’s, sounds tasting of salt and brine.
I remembered Seamus Fehan, younger and with darker hair, smelling of wind and fishing, drinking warm milk near our fire, from a cracked majolica bowl, while my grandmother boosted the fire with dried heather, the swish and gusts of her skirts causing the cinders to bloom.
I could not move. I stared at his shoes and saw them caked with the soil of the Blasket. He smelled of that peat, of those fires. I was afraid of the beautiful, dovetailing sounds from his throat and how they gored me with longing.
I kept a step behind Seamus Fehan, my head bowed, smelling the air around him, listening to him. He turned and held my eyes, but I could see he could not figure out why I looked familiar to him.
I tore my eyes from his and watched the waves indulging a chaotic mood, working themselves into a dark boil.
Wandering back into Mrs. O’Leary’s, I found my daughters sitting before her fire.
I stared into the flames. “Seamus Fehan,” I uttered, the name hurting in the craw of me. I meditated on the fire, and seeing me communing with my past, struggling under its thrall, the girls moved close to me. I felt Caitlin’s kiss on my temple.
“Tell us, Mammy,” Maighread whispered.
In my mind I moved through the details of my story, searching for the place to begin.
Eighteen
The spring I was twelve, the cottage floor was perpetually damp, muddy in places with all the rain, and my mother and I brought bag after bag of dry sand up from the beach to spread over it. But she tired of doing it one day and left it to me, dailiness wearing away at her.
My father watched her that spring. He saw her clutching the little sculpture of the centaur that Macdarragh had given her, the one she’d promised him she’d tossed into the sea.
Once I’d heard my father ask her, “How can I ever compete with the two of them, Macdarragh and your own father fused together in your heart?”
He hated the little brass centaur. How many times as a child had I heard him ask her to throw it in the sea? Wanting her back from the distances her mind went when she held it, my father prepared to go out in a curragh with Seamus Fehan and Padraig Scanlon to harvest the mackerel. This brought her focus back to him, wild as she was against the idea, for they’d be out at night with their nets. But my father set himself on it and she could not change his mind, even though she threatened to keep him from her bed so he’d have to sleep on the hard stone of the hearth.
She said he did it purposefully to rouse the suffering in her so he could see how much she needed him. He shook his head and told her that it was for food.
“I’d rather eat poorer than the rest than have the sea swallow you and keep you from me. I’ll eat the rocks and the kelp,” she pleaded.
I saw him close his eyes, gratified that she needed him so. He wanted to relent. I saw the thought move again and again across his f
ace. But for something else in him, measuring, always measuring some level of devotion in her. It wasn’t the pain in her voice that he hungered after but the intensified focus he suddenly had in her eyes, his way of switching her thoughts from Macdarragh to him. He tried to weigh her feelings like so much oats or flour. If he paid close enough attention he thought he might navigate my mother’s moods. He took terrible risks to bring her back to him.
She waited as he held his breath, considering what he might do. When he stood and took up his net again she screamed, “Then I’m on a deathwatch! I’ll get ready for your wake!” She cleared the table of plates and cups with the side of her arm, banging down the twelve long candles in bottles. And every night before he left they went through this, the candles set out in preparation each time. The twelve candles representing the disciples of Christ, eleven lit and one giving no light in memory of Judas the Betrayer.
Sometimes I thought he did want to meet up with death; that he might usurp the place her dead kept in her heart.
I felt the unbearable burden of his leaving. Some nights I woke to her keening and thought she’d received the anticipated news.
“The stars have gone missing, Deirdre,” she’d said one night, her eyes on the weather. “The way they did the night the sea took the little boat.” The two boats that had taken her father and Macdarragh down had become one boat.
She tried to draw comfort from me, holding me and rubbing her face in my hair. Such a touch always inspired in me a terrible hopelessness: I could not soothe her.
Seamus Fehan arrived at our house at dawn explaining that they’d been in the curragh and the sea had risen over them. Seamus had been able to clutch at a shelf of rock, but Liam had washed under.
Three days after, a dead man came in to shore. Three men followed by a band of women brought him up to the house, where the table was ready in preparation. “The sea is a jealous woman,” Kate Beg uttered under her breath. “She selects the best men, then takes them for herself. And just look at them when she gets through with them!”
The Marriage Bed Page 22