Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  In late morning, we separated. I pulled my books around me, plugged in my laptop, and I did the research I needed to complete. For long hours, I lived inside the books, lived on the islands I had come to love, my thoughts and musings teased by the wind and smell of salt. We left the door cracked open so that Gottfried could come and go, and I listened with half my attention to the sound of Ozzie’s hammer as he worked on the cottage he built stone by stone, board by board. Later, depending on the day, I worked beside him, taking pleasure in the rock labor, the hoisting and twisting and sizing. Ozzie buried his hands in the building; he gave it everything. He worked quietly and orderly, moving carefully as if he knew such things cannot be hurried. He had in his head an Irish cottage, white-washed, with thick walls to take advantage of solar gain, and twelve windows all on one floor. He called the windows the apostles. The stones he gathered around his own land, Crow Point, pulling up rocks with a bright yellow spade and a rock sledge that he unsheathed from a harness on his back. He needed no real plans on paper. The design of the cottage had been in his head for a decade, he said, and it was only the letting it out that caused him any hesitation. Now and then he talked as he built, and sometimes he forced me to sing “Frère Jacques,” and occasionally we had to ride to town to get lumber, or a bag of mortar, or a pack of metal pins he wanted for the walls. We rode with Gottfried between us, his size nearly doubling in those days, and frequently I treated Ozzie to a dinner, bangers and mash, shepherd’s pie, a pale red Smithwick’s or a black, foaming Guinness on the side. But we had lost the habit of being with other people, and we preferred, instead, to gather the groceries along with the building supplies and head back to Crow Point. Then we cooked something long and lingering on the wood stove, chili or stew, and when the weather came up foul we returned to bed and listened to the storm, rising only to stir the food.

  Every third day, if the weather cooperated, Ozzie fished. He went for mackerel, but he went for much more. I have to say this now: he had a coiled spring inside him that tightened gradually until it needed to go off to the sea, needed to get away from everything, even away from me. I knew that need came from something that had happened in the war, or many things that had happened in the war, but I didn’t ask him about it. I was not his confessor. I listened to anything he had to say about his time in Afghanistan, which was little, and I saw the spring inside him tighten and close and then I knew to leave him alone. He did not take it out on me; he took it out on himself, and twice, when he returned from being on the sea all night, I spotted liquor bottles on the deck of the Ferriter. He did not attempt to hide them, nor did he speak of them. It was as if he went away to a clinic, to a specialist only he could visit, and when he returned he appeared weak and still, exorcised of a demon that began to take life in him again the moment he set foot on land. I did not ask him about his drinking, or his time at sea, and I knew, instinctively, that I was not invited on these journeys. I did occasionally go with him to hand-line for a few mackerels, drifting off Crow Point’s shore, but those trips were light and fun, picnics that he invited me to join. Sometimes we lay in the sun as the boat floated anywhere it liked, and we kissed until we had to either go back to land or have each other in the shade of the cuddy, our skin wild for one another, our eyes half sleepy from the sun.

  Sometimes, late at night, I asked myself what I was doing in this man’s bed, where I expected things to go, but I tamped those questions down as quickly as they appeared. What did it matter? I was drunk on him. I was drunk on the land and the sea and our lovely bed. And if he had to disappear now and then to turn a mirror inside on himself, well, what was the worry with that? Besides, my research went well. I wrote in a mindful haze, drifting in my note-taking and in my own prose. I knew the pleasure of scholarship and I sank into it, receiving joy from a well-turned phrase or a particularly sharp insight. I did not share my work with Ozzie; it was as separate as his nights on the ocean. I believed that living next to the water informed my work. It would be deeper, I imagined, because of it, and I was grateful to Ozzie for letting me stay with him in our secret hideaway. I wrote in sustained chunks and lay in bed with the stove going to reread my work. I sent it to no one, not even to Milly, for fear that letting another voice speak on top of it would sap the poignancy of the women’s narratives I sought to represent.

  On those days when Ozzie went to sea, I took the truck and traveled where I liked. I haunted the Dingle Peninsula, stopping twice to take a cup of tea with Bertie, who proved to be a dear, dear man and a formidable scholar. But I also slipped over to Kerry and Kinsale and Killarney, to Waterford and Cashel. I made up itineraries for myself and charted out my travel fastidiously, taking Gottfried with me as a traveling companion. The truth is, I welcomed Ozzie’s departures just as I welcomed his returns. We defied the stuffy notion of two people having to be constantly next to one another. When we reunited, our passion had been stoked by absence, and for days at a time we stayed near the yurt and cottage as if it returned a strength we dissipated when away from it. From the library in Dingle, I borrowed discs of old movies and we lay in bed to watch them, my laptop propped on his belly, my head on his shoulder, the actors dancing on his body. He played with my hair and at times we kissed and put the movie aside, but oftener we fell asleep and woke to a white screen staring at us like a sea creature’s pale dead eye.

  Time passed. It ceased to matter as it once had. I returned to Limerick to check my apartment, to gather books, and to answer emails. I Skyped with Milly, and spoke with my mother, but their voices sounded far away and small. Away from Crow Point, I felt incomplete. Away from Ozzie, I missed a part of myself. When I returned and met him at the door, he greeted me and kissed me and told me he could put his hands through me, so desperately had he missed me. We fell back into the bed and back into our holiday from the world, and Gottfried watched us and came with us in the mornings when we swam and washed the night’s lovemaking from our skin.

  * * *

  “I want to take you somewhere,” Ozzie said one morning after standing by the door to look out at the sea. “The weather looks promising. Would you care to take a short trip?”

  “Do I get to know where you’re taking me?”

  “Not right away. I want it to be a surprise.”

  I was in bed, lounging, a cup of black coffee burning a welcome hole in the center of my belly. Gottfried lay in the doorway, looking out at the sea. He seemed to want to do whatever Ozzie decided to do. It was calm and bright, a day stolen from the usual autumn weather for better purposes.

  “What do I need to bring?”

  “We may sleep on the boat one night. Bring a change of clothes and some warm things. You’ll like it, I promise. Are you up for it?”

  “I could use a break from my books.”

  “Don’t bring any books unless you want to read them aloud. We’re traveling back in time today. How does that sound?”

  He turned and faced me. He smiled. It was kind, gentle smile.

  “It sounds fine,” I said.

  “You may fall in love with me too much if you come with me today.”

  “I’m already too much in love with you, Ozzie. I thought you knew.”

  “And I with you, Kate. I’m great with you,” he said, employing an Irish phrase.

  He stood and looked at me. I couldn’t take my eyes back from him. I wondered if he felt what I felt. I wondered if any human could know in the end what her love thought when their eyes were locked. I didn’t think so.

  We packed everything into the truck. Ozzie made us swing by the small grocery store on the road to Dingle to get supplies. He bought champagne and red wine and grapes and cheese. We stored them in a cooler, which we carried onto the boat. We lashed the cooler to the starboard gunwale. Then Ozzie pushed off. In less than an hour, we had gone from our bed to the open sea.

  If I could take one picture and hold it forever of Ozzie, of Ozzie in our splendid isolation, then it would be from that morning on the sea. He stood at the whee
l, happy, content, his old gray-green sweater hanging comfortably around him. He needed a haircut, but the unruliness of his hair made him even more attractive. He looked wild and free, the finest version of his many editions, and when he called me over and made me stand between his legs so that we could be one body steering the ship, I agreed happily. I was so in love with him, so lost to him at that moment, that I could have denied him nothing.

  We traveled south. We passed Slea Head and kept the land on our port side. The sea had a mild chop, but that was all. I liked feeling Ozzie’s alertness to the sea and its moods. He watched the birds to signal fish, and he watched the waves and the landmarks for signs of treachery. But it was not a day for anything to go wrong.

  We traveled to Skellig Michael, or, in the Irish, Sceilg Mhichíl. I knew it by reputation; anyone who visited Ireland knew it. Obnoxiously, it had also been used in the final scene of a recent Star Wars movie, and the rumor was that it had now become too crowded to enjoy in season. It was a UNESCO World Heritage site, a place of surpassing beauty and historical importance. It had been built between the sixth and eighth centuries as a Gaelic Christian monastery. It was a stone needle in the sea, a place of such severe beauty that the monks had finally abandoned it in the twelfth century. For centuries, the monks had lived off the provisions from a vegetable garden supplemented by fish and birds’ eggs.

  “Thank you,” I said when he revealed his plan to me. “It’s a place I’ve dreamed of going, but I thought it was too late in the season.”

  “Not when you know a fisherman.”

  “Have you been to it before?”

  He nodded.

  “What’s it like?”

  “You’ll see for yourself soon enough. You can’t explain it. Nothing I could say would do it justice.”

  “It’s such an extreme way to live. Incomprehensible, really. I almost envy their fixed belief.”

  “It could never sustain more than a dozen monks and an abbot. There’s a hermitage at the back of the island where single monks lived for years at a time in silence.”

  “Except for the sea,” I said.

  “Yes, except for that.”

  It was not a long journey. Ozzie kept the Ferriter moving at a steady pace through the chop. For a while, I asked him more questions about the monastery, until he finally turned me into his body and kissed me. I knew what the kiss meant: it was not a moment to worry about research and knowing the historical context. It was, instead, a moment to witness something powerfully human. He was right about that, I knew, and when our kiss broke off, I felt myself ease into a comfort that claimed me.

  At last the islands rose from the sea. They were rockier than the Blaskets, more severe and lonesome. Ozzie knew the landmarks. The Great Skellig supported a lighthouse. He brought the Ferriter around and in no time approached the dock. Clearly, the attraction had been shut down for the season. The slips that jutted out from the docks had been roped off. A steel gate stood across the walkway that ran, in summer, from the dock to the land. Someone had hung a CLOSED sign on the gate.

  I looked at him. He didn’t seem to give it a thought.

  “We’ll have to climb around the gate,” he said, shutting down the engine as he backwashed it halfway into a slip. “Might be hard to bring Gottfried. Jump up to the bow and tie her up, would you?”

  “Are you sure about this?”

  “What could happen?”

  “Maybe a fine. I don’t know. You tell me.”

  “I’m a Catholic. They can’t keep me away from a place of worship.”

  “Oh, you’re that much of a Catholic, are you?”

  “I am today.”

  I tied her off as he had taught me to do. Ozzie whistled as he shut down the boat. I stood for a moment staring up at the steps to the monastery. The steps were its most famous feature, I knew. People sometimes slipped and died on the steps when they tried to climb them in bad weather. I found it difficult to imagine the labor that went into building such a staircase. Perhaps they had used donkeys, but much of the work, I imagined, had been done by human hand. Digging and pulling, pulling and digging.

  “The Vikings attacked here in the 800s. Bloody intrepid bastards they were, too,” Ozzie said, coming forward. “I’ve always admired the Vikings. Greatest navigators of their time.”

  “Are we going to climb it?”

  “We didn’t come all this way to be locked out by a gate, Kate. If the Vikings can attack, the least we can do is slip around a few metal bars.”

  “It’s a UNESCO site.”

  “It’s a rock in the middle of the sea where a bunch of crazy religious men lived in filth and prayer. It’s both more and less than what people say.”

  He had set his jaw. I had never quite seen this aspect of his personality. He seemed to take it personally that the authorities had closed the attraction for the season. I wasn’t sure how to read the situation. I didn’t doubt that he would get us to the top of the island. I wondered, though, if anyone would be waiting when we came down, ready to impound our boat or hand us a ticket. Ozzie didn’t appear to care.

  I decided I didn’t care, either. I didn’t come to Ireland to be timid.

  “Okay, let’s go. What about Gottfried?”

  “We’ll have to lift him around the gate. I think we can do it.”

  “Is Gottfried a Catholic, too?”

  “As a matter of fact, he is.”

  We kissed. Perhaps it was my fault, but a little of the pleasure of the day had seeped away. I hated that I had asked so many questions and paused so noticeably at the closed gate that it had cooled the adventurousness of the moment. He had gone out of his way to bring me here, a place I dearly wanted to visit, and I had been overcautious and tentative. I felt his irritation running a thin line through his blood. We were different in that way: he jumped and then thought of the consequences, while I considered the consequence before jumping.

  Gottfried salvaged things. It was a comical piece of business to hand him around the end of the gate. Neither one of us, I suppose, had quite taken into account how large he had grown. It was one thing to see him grow larger day by day; it was another thing to hoist him up in our arms and hand him around the outmost post of a fence, dangling over the water, only one hand free to cradle him. If Ozzie hadn’t been massively strong, we never would have accomplished it. As it was, Gottfried perceived the danger and struggled more than necessary in our arms. Finally, Ozzie lowered him to the ground and he ran off, happy to be free, while Ozzie helped me swing past the gate post.

  “Up we go,” Ozzie said.

  “Thank you. Thank you, Ozzie, for bringing me here.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “It’s magnificent already.”

  “It’s a remarkable place.”

  And it was. It was penetratingly beautiful, especially in this quiet season without tourists running everywhere. The famous steps ran up through the valley and went almost to the clouds. Oddly, I felt an almost overpowering need to kneel, or to show some outward sign of respect. It was not obeisance to a mysterious god, but to the human part of us that strived so urgently, and so doggedly, for connection to something greater than our mortal bodies.

  Fortunately, Gottfried kept us from becoming too serious about our undertaking. He scouted ahead and then turned back to us over and over. He covered three times the trail that we did.

  “There are no toilets,” Ozzie said after we had started. “I mean, even in the summer. They have no toilets on the boats and no toilets on the island. I’ve always thought that was the strangest feature of the whole shebang.”

  “Why don’t they? And don’t talk about it or I will have to go for sure.”

  “I guess because it’s a religious site. I don’t know, honestly.”

  “How many steps?”

  “Six hundred,” he said without pause.

  It took us a little over an hour to climb to the top. We could have made better time, but the scenery, the gain at each level of elevat
ion, staggered us. It was more beautiful, and more austere, than anything I had ever experienced. In the summer, perhaps, with thousands of people climbing beside us, their cameras out, their kids running ahead, we would have missed something essential. But on this day, in the cool gray of November, alone as we were, the sense of something sacred was palpable. Except for the sea, it was silent. I found my eyes clouding a dozen times as we hiked.

  We stopped at Christ’s Saddle to rest, and for a long time we sat without saying anything. What was there to say? The labor of the monks humbled us.

  At the top, we had the place to ourselves. The sea reached everywhere around us. The monks had built large stone structures, corbelling them so that each stone leaned inches inward from the stone beneath it. By building that way, the structures stood up and leaned inward, rising without mortar or anything to hold them except gravity. They had beehive shapes. The living, or residential, cells led to the larger oratory and to St. Michael’s Church, the only building on the island to use lime mortar.

  “Do you like it?” Ozzie whispered to me.

  He had come up behind me and put his arms around me. The wind blew ceaselessly from the north. I felt if I closed my eyes I could be lost in the wind, lost in the vision of the sea. Gannets and puffins lived on the stony cliffs, but it was not the season for them. Still, seabirds flew and banked in the air, their calls echoing slightly as we stood and looked out.