“He has a point. Don’t get angry with me, but he does.”
“You’re supposed to be on my side, Milly.”
“I’m supposed to be a neutral witness, my dear. You don’t need a cheerleader. You need a friend who can tell you what she sees in any given situation.”
“Fair enough.”
We signed off a little later. I finished my tea and rinsed out my cup. I reviewed the conversation while my hands remained under the stream of water. Did I really see things the way I had told Milly? Was that a fair assessment? Did I expect too much from Ozzie? Were we sufficiently different to be doomed from the start? I wondered. I wondered about it all.
And what about me? Was I some sort of coward who gave up at the first struggle? But it wasn’t the first struggle, I reminded myself. If I was honest about things, if I could be clear for a moment about things, I had always had reservations about Ozzie’s suitability. He was a man who jumped on the back of a donkey for the hell of it. He drank.
And when he wanted to, he turned me inside out.
I went back to my desert. I worked. I began taking long, wandering walks along the River Shannon in the afternoon. It was good to walk. It was orderly. Work, walk, work. My dissertation had taken on greater strength. I felt solid in all ways except one.
At night, though, I thought of Ozzie. I thought of him on the Ferriter by himself. I thought of him heading into the north seas around the top of the island. Donald had said the seas were rougher there. From the tip of Ireland, the currents rolled into the Arctic. Ozzie would like the wildness. He would like testing himself against the sea. And if the crack in his base withstood that, if he did not break apart like pottery, then maybe he never would. Maybe that was why he went to sea.
24
When I had been off the boat for a week—with no sign or word from Ozzie—Bertie Janes contacted me out of the blue and invited me on a fortnight archeological dig on the Great Blasket Island.
“We have a mind to explore the site of the Rinn an Chaisleáin, or Castle Point. It was the castle owned by your husband’s people.”
“Ferriter Castle?”
“Yes, what’s left of it. There are no physical remains to speak of. The stones were carried away to build a Protestant soup kitchen and school in 1840. But you know all this, I imagine?”
“I know most of it.”
“Well, we don’t expect much to come of it, but it’s probably worth investigating to be certain. People have dug there before, but you’ll have the best of the island’s weather, so it should be pleasant at any rate. It’s a camping situation, so I don’t know how you feel about that.”
“I’m fine with that. I’d love it. It’s a dream for me.”
“The dig, if you can call it that, is being run by a Swede named Sixten. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s his first or last name. He’s a linguist primarily, from what I can gather. A large man, a veritable Viking. He’s bringing with him a team of volunteers, some Irish, some Swedish. It’s a hodgepodge of researchers, but he has permission to be out there for two weeks and I immediately thought of you.”
“Thank you, Bertie.”
“Ozzie is welcome to come as well. His boat might be of use.”
“We’re not seeing eye to eye at the moment, I’m afraid. Think we might need a little time apart.”
Bertie made no comment; he let it pass. After a moment to take stock, he filled me in on the details of the expedition. I had three days to get ready. The permit had just gone through. That was the reason for the short notice. I needed to bring my own sleeping bag and tent. We would prepare our own meals, taking turns on kitchen detail; the island canteen had recently started up its summer schedule for the tourist trade and the staff had enough to do without feeding our team. We had to be independent. Sixten had already engaged a local company to resupply us with food. The Irish government had given him a permit for two weeks. Bertie, as the Blasket Island museum curator, would visit several times through the weeks to supervise our findings. That was nonnegotiable.
“The government is touchy on the subject of a Swede coming to dig for artifacts on Irish soil,” Bertie concluded after we had talked for some time. “But I was only half joking about the Viking part. The Vikings likely attacked the Blaskets as they attacked nearly everywhere. They were greedy, adventuresome folks. They especially liked to plunder churches. I gather Sixten has money from the Swedish government to look for traces of Viking monkey-business. They plundered Skellig Michael, but they may have visited here as well.”
“It all sounds exciting.”
He fed me more details, then paused for a moment before commenting on Ozzie.
“I’ve known Ozzie all his life, Kate,” he said softly. “Since he was a boy. Do you know the Irish expression of a man having a wind inside him? It means he has difficulty settling beside a fire. Ozzie has a wind inside him, Kate. He always has. I feared for you when I saw you with him, not because he’s not loveable and kind, but because he has a wind inside him. Those kinds of men are difficult for the women who love them.”
“Thank you for saying that, Bertie.”
“Some might say a man with a wind inside him is the only kind of man worth having.”
“Do you have a wind inside you, Bertie?”
He laughed. Then he laughed harder.
“Afraid not. I’m couch-sitter, an observer. I wish I were a little bit more of a Viking, but I’m not. I read about the exploits of others. How about you, Kate? Do you have a wind inside you?”
“I thought I did. Now I’m not sure. I feel rather timid these days.”
“You two seemed well matched. Well, it’s a long life, Kate, so you never know what will happen. Give it time. Where is Ozzie, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. He might still be circumnavigating Ireland.”
“Well, he has always been an intrepid lad. Good for him. Now, if I’ve answered all your questions, and you mine, I should let you go. Say hello for me if you speak to your husband. It’s difficult not to love him in spite of himself.”
He said he would email me final instructions. Meanwhile, he repeated that I should arrange to borrow a tent and a sleeping bag if I didn’t have one. Bring work clothes. Prepare to work in the soil, he said. Camping.
It was a lovely and needed distraction. It turned out that Daijeet had everything I required. He was a veritable outfitter for outdoor adventures. In fact, he pressed on me more equipment than I needed; I began to feel like the neophyte Girl Scout who wanders off into the hills with a backpack too stuffed and loaded to carry properly. But it was okay. I took pleasure in packing my backpack with the necessities of a two-week camping trip. I cooked Daijeet a salmon—that he caught and filleted—as a thank you for his generosity. We had a wonderful dinner together.
Twenty-four hours later, I found myself standing at the Dingle dock, the same dock where I had first met Ozzie and Gran and Seamus. The day came up foggy and overcast, but it was summer now and warm. Mid-June. The sea looked gray and calm. My instructions mentioned that we would board the tourist boat, the one that made a regular circuit to the island. It had been commissioned for our party.
Fifteen minutes after I had arrived, three white vans pulled up beside the dock. It would have been impossible to miss Sixten. As soon as he swung out of the van, he began calling out orders. He was at least six and a half feet, with a large curly beard and a wild head of hair that barely stayed contained under a ridiculous rain hat. The rain hat had a large brim with a blue ribbon tied above it. It was a horrible hat, a woman’s hat, really, and it made him look like a grandmother who had slipped into the garden to cut some roses. The hat was impossibly at odds with his size and gender. It protected him from the sun, I supposed. He possessed reddish-blond coloring, auburn and freckled, and was probably prone, as I was, to burning. His belly was spectacular, a large cliff of flesh that he carried before him like a mother chimpanzee carrying a mature baby, but it did not look fat so much as formidable. Everything abo
ut him spoke to food and consumption and appetite, a Scandinavian King Henry VIII, and his energy in those first moments nearly bowled me over. But he beamed a happy, bright smile at anyone who caught his attention, and he seemed to be always on the verge of laughing at a good joke.
“Summer camps, boys and girls, summer camps!” he called, getting the word camps a little wrong. “Let’s go, time is wasting. Let’s be at it.”
The crew was already at it. In no time, they unloaded one of the vans and started on a second one. They stacked everything on the deck in the slot allocated for the tourist boat. Once the boat arrived, it would be a simple matter to put it on board. Gas stoves, shovels, picks, buckets, coolers, all new. Seeing the newness of the purchases, I felt slightly less intimidated. I stepped forward when Sixten had a moment and introduced myself.
“Ah, the American lady. Bertie’s friend,” Sixten said. “Welcome, welcome. The more the merrier. Isn’t that the saying?”
His voice came up as if from a barrel.
“Yes, I’m Kate Moreton.”
“Nice to meet you, Kate. Time not to make formal introductions now. Just lend a hand when you can. The boat should be here any moment. Yes, I can see it now. It’s make the traverse.”
Transit? It didn’t matter. I went and helped the crew unload the remaining equipment. I introduced myself when appropriate. We were all too busy to make full connections.
A half hour later, the boat was packed and we pushed away from the dock. As easy as that. I sat on the starboard gunwale and watched Dingle drop slowly into the sea behind us. It was difficult to talk over the engine sounds, and the raucous shout of the gulls, so the crew contented itself with smiling and nodding at one another. I nodded, too. Someone passed around a plate of sliced apples and cheese. I took a piece and ate it. It was my fourth time across Dingle Bay. The first three had been with Ozzie, but now he was no longer beside me. I forced myself to go to my self-imposed desert. Clear thinking, I told myself. Deep breaths.
* * *
I pitched my tent on the green slope of a hillside overlooking the lower village, where years and years ago, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Ferriter family had leased lands from the Earls of Desmond and Sir Richard Boyle after the dispossession of the Desmond Geraldines. I only had the history fresh because I had read it the night before to prepare for our undertaking. Besides, in a way I was a Ferriter, though only through marriage. I had kept my own name, Moreton, though at the bank and in the grocery stores occasionally someone called me Mrs. Ferriter. It was a proud name, as purely Irish as I could have it. I wasn’t sure, honestly, whether Sixten knew my connection to the Ferriter castle or not. It didn’t matter in any case.
A pup tent. Again, I sent a silent thank-you to my father and to Daijeet for teaching me how to set up my tent. In fact, I was skilled enough to lend a hand with other peoples’ tents, and I even proved somewhat useful when we came together to set up the community tent. This was a larger canvas affair, with stakes and poles, that we were told would be our meeting place, our place to review any artifacts we found, and the place where we would eat our dinners, such as they were. Little by little, I got to know some of the team. Most were affiliated with a university in Ireland or Sweden; two linguists, one male, one female; one ethnographer, female; a weapons expert—he said he expected to recover Viking ax heads; a male grad student who seemed to be a boy of all work, and Sixten and his second-hand man, Grover. Grover, who looked like a smaller version of Sixten, but thinner and more streamlined, was the techie. While the crew set up the large tent, Grover and Sixten launched a drone and spent a good hour circling it around the dig site, happy as boys, both of them taking turns piloting the buzzing helicopter.
“Ya, ya, ya,” Sixteen said, calling to Grover when Grover checked the returning images on his laptop. “Good, good, good.”
“Bigger circles,” Grover called back. “Bigger and bigger.”
And it was right at that moment, right when the sun had grown weaker in the western sky, and the drone buzzed above us, and the male grad student hammered stakes into the ground to support the large, central tent, that I saw Ozzie’s boat.
It was too far off for me to recognize it at first, but then my eyes adjusted to the softening light and I finally claimed it from the western glow. I recognized its shape and the way it sat in the water. I felt my heart begin to thump in my chest, and I couldn’t help walking away from the settlement we made. I climbed the hills—the same hills women had climbed for centuries to regard the sea and watch for boats—and put my hand like a visor over my eye ridge. Yes, it was the Ferriter. Watching it, I felt a wild mixture of emotions: fear and anxiety, joy, pleasure, anticipation, defensiveness, shame and lust. Part of me wished his boat would go away; another part of me wished he would throttle forward and arrive at the island dock as quickly as possible. My legs trembled. I felt light-headed and absurd, a high school girl seeing her crush coming down the hallway from chemistry class.
My desert place didn’t help. Nothing helped.
I waited until I saw what Ozzie intended. He seemed not to be certain what he wanted to do, either. But then the Ferriter bent its wake toward the Great Blasket Island, and Ozzie came forward at a good pace. I raised my hand to wave, then withdrew it and put it against my throat. I watched the Ferriter and waited until it had come within a quarter of a mile before I began walking down the hill to meet him.
25
The timing could not have been worse.
The day-trippers, the tourists who had taken the ferry out to the island, had assembled on the dock, waiting for the ferry to fetch them. They looked tired and wind-burned, most of them ready to be back on the mainland, back to food and comfort and a soft bed. Two boys pointed at Ozzie’s boat, thinking it was the ferry, and that caused a small undulation in the crowd. Then people realized it was the wrong boat, and they went back to their impatient waiting. The ferry, someone said, was late.
The day’s quiet was almost upon us. I had to ask for space a dozen times as I made my way through the crowd. A few people regarded me with annoyance; they assumed I was angling for a better spot for boarding. I pointed at Ozzie’s boat, telling anyone who would listen that I was meeting that boat, not their boat, but they were mostly too tired to care about my excuses. A little girl even held out her foot to trip me. I gave her devil eyes and stepped past.
Ozzie brought the Ferriter around to the shallower side of the dock. He backed the engines expertly, then softly swung the tail into the pilings. He handled the boat masterfully. He always had. He stepped onto the gunwale, then onto the dock. He tied the boat off before it could drift even a foot away. He left the proper amount of slack for the tide. Then he stepped back on the boat and helped Gottfried climb onto dry land.
For a moment or two, neither of them saw me. Maybe the crowd on the other side of the dock distracted them; maybe Ozzie needed to give Gottfried a chance to do his business. Either way, they seemed preoccupied. Then, finally, Gottfried saw me, and he came forward wagging his tail, crouching a little as was his habit, his soft manner making him ready to turn over to expose his belly.
“There’s my boy,” I whispered to him, gathering him in my arms. “That’s my good, good boy.”
I didn’t dare raise my eyes to Ozzie. The glimpse I caught of him told me that he looked off to seaward. Fortunately, we were saved by the ferry blowing its horn. The crowd bunched together, and the ferry slowly rounded the piers and came into docking position.
“Could we walk him, Kate? He’s been on the boat a while.”
I nodded and stood. I took the leash from Ozzie. I needed something to do with my hands. I could barely catch my breath.
We didn’t say anything. We walked Gottfried and concentrated too much of our energy on him. For his part, he behaved as he always did. Once he spotted a roaming donkey and shied away, slanting his body comically to escape and woofing under his breath.
When the ferry finally tied off, we turned and watched t
he crowd board her. It didn’t take long. It was the last run of the ferry for that day. I guessed the crew was ready to be home to their suppers as well.
The ferry tooted its horn and then backed its engines. In no time, it passed through the secluded harbor and headed in a straight line for Dingle. We watched it go.
“They say you can get pregnant on the Dingle ferry if all else fails,” Ozzie said, his eyes lingering on the boat. “It’s tried and true.”
“That sounds like a convenient wives’ tale for men.”
“You have little faith, Kate.”
Our eyes still hadn’t met. We might have been strangers discussing a sunset.
We walked slowly back to the Ferriter. It was a fine evening, soft and warm. A few minnows darted around the dock pilings. Ozzie stepped down into the boat and coaxed Gottfried to join him. Given the height difference of the pier and the boat deck, I had to look down to see him.
“I’ve come to apologize, Kate. I behaved badly.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
He smiled up at me and squinted a little at the last sunlight.
“I don’t think I’m like that, honestly, but then I have the proof of what I did to weigh against it. I have thought a lot about that. About everything. I’m not as good a man as I’d like to be. As I’d like to be for you. I’m afraid you saw a side of me that makes me ashamed.”
“I’m sorry, Ozzie.”
“I tried to love you, Kate, as I know how.”
“I know you did. I believe you.”
“I love you still, but I feel we’ve stepped out of the spell, haven’t we?”
“I don’t know, Ozzie. I’m not sure.”
He smiled and then handed me a box. I knew what it was: my books, a few clothes, odds and ends. It was heavy and I put it down on the dock.
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