“A soldier?”
“He’s American, dear. As American as you are, although he has dual citizenship. He returned to Ireland only a little over a year ago. He served in the Navy. He was one of those exclusive ones.”
“A Navy SEAL?”
“You’ll have to ask him. I honestly don’t know. It’s the one benefit of growing older. We don’t have to remember all the details. We’re forgiven more than we should be.”
“I’m sorry he feels put-upon.”
“It’s good for a man to be put-upon now and then. They have things their way too often. Besides, he’s been slow coming back from the war.”
About at that moment, we cleared the harbor and entered the open sea. Seamus turned to me and crooked his finger.
“You can see them now,” he said, “come take a look.”
I did. I deliberately stood on the side away from Ozzie, keeping Seamus between us. The islands appeared as dark spots on the horizon; a joke moustache painted across the lip of the sea. I knew from reading that the crossing could be rough. I also knew the Blasket Sound was famous for mist. It gave rise to myths and fairy tales of all sorts, and at times the islands themselves were thought to be merely a fantasy that came and went with the fog and sea air.
“It’s true,” Seamus said to me.
“The islands?”
“No, that your hair grew redder by the sea.”
“You’re an old flirt, Seamus.”
“It’s flirting that keeps me young.”
Ozzie asked a question without looking in my direction.
“Where are you from?”
“Originally, Springfield, Mass. Now I live in Hanover, New Hampshire.”
“Dartmouth?”
“Yes.”
“And you’re doing graduate work?”
“I am.”
I wondered how he knew even that much. I tried to recollect if I had explained my presence to Gran, but I couldn’t recall doing so. In any case, I didn’t want to give him any strings to pull or worry. I was aware of him. I had been aware of him since he walked into the cabin. He was too good-looking not to notice. Obviously, we were about the same age. In addition to giving me a picnic on Great Blasket, Gran, I suspected, was playing matchmaker. I could have saved her the trouble. I was on sabbatical when it came to men. The truth was, I was tired of the whole dating ritual. So when I spoke again, I tried to keep my language flat and orderly. We were acquaintances, I wanted him to know, and that’s how we would remain.
“And you’re a fisherman?”
Seamus went to sit back at the table.
“Some days I am.”
“Mackerel?”
“Whatever swims.”
He kept his eyes forward. His hat, truly, was ridiculous.
“Do you always wear that hat?” I couldn’t help asking.
“You don’t like it?”
“I’m not sure it likes itself. I see a lot of self-loathing in that hat.”
“Is that so?”
“That hat needs therapy. Many sessions, in fact.”
He turned his head. He had half a smile on his face.
“Gran said you had red hair.”
“And that means I am ill-mannered and brash?”
“It means that your brain is on fire. It means that you have to speak through the smoke of it.”
“That’s a new one.”
“You could be a seal. It means that, too. You’re not to be trusted with small fish around. If you have the impulse to dive overboard, I wouldn’t stop you.”
“A selkie?”
He nodded. He was damn good-looking, I realized for the twentieth time. I had to resist the impulse to take his picture. Milly would want to see him. She would dissect him. But before I could take a picture or say anything else, he raised his hand and pointed to the south.
“There’s a whale,” he said. “Do you see it?”
“What kind?”
“Oh, an Irish, magical whale. One that plays a banjo and sings.”
“I’m an American who romanticizes Ireland, is that it?”
He turned and smiled. It was a mean, obnoxious smile, but I couldn’t help smiling back.
“Not a realist like you,” I said.
He smiled more.
By then the Blaskets had risen from the sea.
* * *
I reached out a hand and held on to what would be called the dashboard in a car. I didn’t know what it would be called on a boat. For a long time, I didn’t chance speaking. To his credit, Ozzie said nothing. These are the Blasket Islands, I told myself. How many times had I listened to stories about these islands? About the life there, the cottages roofed with felt and rushes, the chickens who lived in the rafters, clucking as if they prayed on behalf of the souls below? How many times had I heard described the trips to the height of the island where the sod could be cut and piled into squares so that they might melt and burn upon a hearth? Here was the taste of seal, I knew. Of mother-cod and gulls that careened sideways in the misty mornings. This was my father’s land, and my land, and tears rose and I could not dare speak for fear all about me would guess my heart.
“An easy passage,” Ozzie said to Gran and Seamus. “We must have a selkie aboard.”
“Mind your manners, Ozzie,” Gran scolded. “Bring us in slowly so she can see it as we know it to be.”
“As you say, Gran.”
He backed off the engines. The islands grew. I knew the names as I knew the beads of a rosary: Tiaracht to the west, Inis Tuaisceart to the north, Inis na Bró and Inis Icileain to the south, and Beiginis nearest the mainland. The Great Blasket Island sat in the center, a continuation, geologically, of the Slieve Mish Mountains that ran down the center of the Dingle Peninsula. I felt myself choked with emotion. My father would have given anything to have stood where I now stood, but he was gone and dead four years in August. He had told me many stories of the passage between the island and Dingle, of the seas rising up to tip their hats as the boat plunged deep into the oncoming waves. Now we came slowly toward the land on placid seas. Ozzie nodded to Seamus and then left the cuddy. He climbed forward to ready the lines while Seamus took over the helm.
“You can pilot a boat?” I asked Seamus. “Should we fear for our lives?”
“I’m at home on water,” he replied, watching Ozzie signal him to move starboard. “It’s on the roads that I feel at sea.”
“Did you live here once?”
“My father’s father did. We might be kin, Katie. Half the people of Ireland are related to the other half.”
“I’m happy to think of you as a cousin, Seamus.”
“As distant as that?”
He smiled and moved his hand against the throttle. The boat swung around a large pier and suddenly we were ready to moor against the creosoted pilings. I had read about this small cove. Except for a white strand, An Trá Bhán, that ran away from it, it was the only place fit for landing a boat. The Blasket Islanders had fished from canoes called naomhógs, nimble crafts made doubly valuable because the Irish government could not tax them. But there were no naomhógs on this morning. The tiny harbor, if it could be called that, stood empty and still.
Ozzie jumped from the boat onto the small pier and tied her off. Seamus cut the engine. Nora spoke from behind the tiny table.
“We thought we’d have a picnic,” she said. “I’ve asked Seamus and Ozzie to give you a tour. My legs won’t let me tag along. But they know their history. Then when you’re finished, perhaps you’ll have a bite with me. The island isn’t large, when all is said and done. You’ll see the better part of it in an hour.”
“Thank you. I’d love that.”
“Which hat would you like me to wear, Nora?” Seamus asked. “What does the well-turned-out tour guide wear?”
“Be off with you, Seamus, and treat this young lady properly. She doesn’t need your wagging tongue.”
We climbed out the way we had climbed in. In a count of ten, I stood on the B
lasket Islands for the first time.
7
The wind was everywhere. That was the first thing that struck me.
Gulls called and the sea broke, but otherwise everything was wind and silence. My hair pushed and pulled around my head and I had an odd moment of understanding why the actress in any old Irish movie spent a good deal of her time trying to keep her hair from her face. I did the same. Put an apron on me and send a man out to sea, and I could have fallen into the life among the quiet remnants that formed what used to be a village. It was ghostly, but not frightening. It felt more as if someone had thrown a party, a long, long party, and then, at the stroke of an appointed hour, all the guests had paraded from the rooms and banquet halls, leaving everything where they stood. Years had passed and the food had been consumed by birds and ants, the walls slicing away in winter gales, and only the round rocks of the foundations, mortared with a white paste of ground ash, remained to hold the secrets of what had passed. For all of that, the past felt near, felt as if it could be lifted, like a tent pole, and made to stand again. I had never experienced a sensation like it.
We walked for a time without talking. Seamus held his tongue, which was remarkable. Ozzie lagged behind, bored and likely tired of witnessing an American’s wide-eyed wonder at the Blaskets. It turned out my friend Gerry from the bus had been correct: Ireland was the bedtime story the world told itself. It was, at least in my romantic mind, the place of rushes and wattle, of peat fires and canoes that struck out in terrible swells to hunt for mackerel and cod, chased seals into the caves around the island and killed them with bright harpoons. At Christmas, the families bled a sheep to death inside their cottages and made all manner of food from the animal, each cottage putting a candle in the window to guide the infant Jesus to the manger. Yet within the story, too, lived privation. Nearly anything of any luxury had to be carried across Blasket Sound on trawlers. The sick died without a doctor’s attention if the sea worked against the village. Even marriages and burials waited on the tides to calm so that a priest might visit the small church and preside over the rites. A Blasket Islander lived on top of the sea, beside the sea, inside the sea. I felt its overwhelming presence before I had walked a quarter mile.
“It’s a long way to come to see a graveyard,” Ozzie said when we had cleared the pier. “All the way from America.”
“Is it a graveyard? It doesn’t feel that way to me.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s a graveyard,” Seamus said. “It’s an empty dance hall, it seems to my mind.”
“That’s exactly how it felt to me,” I told him. “Exactly.”
“This life is gone,” Ozzie said. “I bet they were glad to leave this island when the day finally arrived.”
“You look as if you could step into one of these cottages and cook a proper cod stew, Katie,” Seamus said, stopping to turn and throw a look at Ozzie. “Don’t mind him. Unlike most Irishmen, he fancies himself a forward thinker. That’s his American side. He should know we Irish live in the past as easily as the present. We’re not even sure the past is gone to us.”
“It brings everything to life,” I said, my eyes casting everywhere to see the details of life on the island. “All my research. And my father’s stories. I see now where they came from.”
“The dead have things to tell us, whatever Ozzie thinks about the subject. You see now plainly enough that the island is mountainous, with little arable land. It couldn’t support the population. I suppose we’re all at peace with the government’s decision to vacate the island, but you can’t rid the land of what the people rubbed into it.”
“Did anyone resist?”
“Oh, I imagine a few hung on, but it wasn’t an easy life, now was it? No electricity, no running water, leaky roofs. And the smoke! One old gent, his name was Micheal Carney, did you know him, Ozzie?”
Ozzie shook his head. He wasn’t being petulant, I saw. Maybe he wasn’t bored, but felt, instead, the poignancy of the loss. He manifested the silence that some people exhibit in a church or synagogue or mosque. Perhaps, I realized, he wanted to be certain that I took the lives buried in the Blaskets’ soil to heart as he did. If I were merely a nosy tourist, he seemed to suggest, then I could go hang. From what I could tell in his attitude, his verdict still teetered in the balance. He watched and waited and listened.
“Well,” Seamus continued, “he died in his eighties and he lived his boyhood here. Right there by the schoolhouse. He told me once over a pint that the single worst thing about life in these cottages was the smoke. The chimneys never drew worth a penny. They were made of mud and daub, and you couldn’t chase the smoke up the stack with a pitchfork. He said his people crouched like cavemen most of the time, all of them glimmering by the hazy firelight. He said his eyes continued to burn for five years after he left the island. People thought he was a drinker for his red eyes, but it was merely the smoke that turned them fiery.”
“Maybe they should have brought electricity over for them,” Ozzie said, a branch in his hand that he slapped against the stone foundations. “Maybe the government should have done something for them.”
“There’s some that think so, it’s true. But it would have been carried through at great cost and all to the benefit of twenty souls? It made no practical sense. You know it yourself if you would take a step backward, Ozzie.”
“Did Gran spend time here?”
“She did as a girl. She came to visit her grandmother during the summer season. She never lived here as you think of it. But she will fill your ears with stories if you care to listen. She is a great one for words.”
Ozzie made a raspberry buzz with his lips. He produced the sound, I thought, to remind us all that Seamus was the talker not Gran. To save us from sorting it out, three donkeys suddenly appeared. They ambled down the main thoroughfare at their leisure. They were wild-looking creatures, with fur that collected in dreadlocks and whirls of weathered hair. They constituted the only permanent residents of the Blaskets remaining, I knew from my research.
“Beware the donkeys,” Seamus said. “They have gone back to the wild. They’ll bite you if you try to handle them.”
“You’re talking foolishness now,” Ozzie said. “Those donkeys are as wild as I am.”
“Why don’t you try to jump on the back of one if you’re so certain?” Seamus asked, obviously enjoying the prospect of seeing Ozzie bucked off the back of a donkey. “You can test how domestic they are easily enough.”
Ozzie slapped the stick against the stone foundations again. We stepped back and watched the donkeys pass by. From the accounts I had read, donkeys played an important role in collecting sod for fires back in the day. They would be outfitted with panniers that held blocks of peat, both sides of the animals bulging with fuel. The women tended to that work, walking miles up into the highlands to bring back blocks of peat that they would burn to cook and heat. For light they burned scraws, or top-sods of turf, and sometimes the women harvested great sheaves of heather to boost the fire when the year came wet. They carried the heather on their backs and walked beneath the weight of the grasses.
“All Jacks,” Seamus said when we resumed our tour. “If they brought Sallys onto the islands, the Jacks fought and shoved one another off the cliffs when the females came into season. It was a terrible business.”
“Not much fun to be a donkey on An Blascaod Mór,” Ozzie said, deadpan. “A bunch of monks living together.”
“Not much fun to be a donkey anywhere,” Seamus agreed. “As you know as well as anyone. Although I suppose it’s better to be a donkey now than it was in the day. At least they’re free. There was one a time back that became quite a celebrity. He was known as Bob Marley. He had his own fan club.”
A pair of donkeys came past us, following the first group. I turned to watch them go, and in that moment, Ozzie leaped on the back of the one nearest to him. He did it lightly and landed without making the donkey break its stride. But the poor creature’s posture changed in an instant
. What had been a quiet, sleepy animal, suddenly felt attacked. It began bucking wildly, kicking its hind legs up and back. It made a terrifying braying sound, then began to run. The other donkeys shied to one side, and I caught a glimpse of Ozzie as he clung to the donkey’s mane. Whether it was more than he had bargained for, I couldn’t say. Delight touched his features and he looked thrilled and happy, his own impulsivity possibly rising up to surprise him. I wondered in the seconds it took to see the donkey jolt and stop, kick and paw, whether Ozzie had known a blink before that he had intended to mount the animal. It was possible, it seemed to me, that he had sprung onto the donkey out of a crazy notion, one not fully formed in his head. It was like the irresistible impulse to touch an electric horse fence: one knew better, but one did it anyway.
At the same time, I saw him for the first time. Of course, I had had glimpses of him before, but now he was unaware of what he revealed to the world, unware of who was near him, and he rode the donkey with an expression of genuine pleasure. He was too big for the animal, too physical, and yet they were evenly matched at least for a few rambunctious moments. The donkey’s strength surged beneath him and rubbed Ozzie against a stone wall, trying to scrape him off. But then Ozzie put his hands on the animal’s shoulders and vaulted off, cleanly escaping the donkey’s thrashing hooves. Whatever else he was, I noted, he was a fine athlete. With his long arm and hand, he slapped the donkey on the rear end and sent it on the way.
“You next,” he said to Seamus. “Just as I said, they’re not a bit wild.”
* * *
It was a perfect picnic. The sun came out to warm us. It was an October sun; the wind beneath it pestered the leaves and tucked the grass back to prepare for winter. We ate on the strand, the narrow beach that ran across the front of the island. As Seamus set up the table and toted the basket out to the beach, I wondered how Gran could navigate the walk. I needn’t have worried. Ozzie swept her up and carried her easily. She did not protest or pretend she could manage it. He set her down at the head of the small table and fetched a blanket to cover her knees. Whatever else he was—and I was still deciding what to make of him—he was gentle and thoughtful toward his grandmother.
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