There’s a song one of his Iona ladies was singing the other night. He asked her to repeat it, slowly, committing to memory the words and melody.
An earthly nourris sits and sings,
And aye she sings, “Ba, lily wean!
Little ken I my bairn’s father,
Far less the land that he staps in.”
He figures out the chords as he goes: G F…
Then in arose he at her bed fit—
And a grumly guest I’m sure was he—
“Here am I, thy bairn’s father
Although I be not comely.
“I am a man upo’ the land
An’ I am a silkie in the sea
And when I’m far and far frae land
My dwelling is in Sule Skerry.”
Now he has ta’en a purse of gold
And he has put it upo’ her knee
Sayin’, “Gi’e to me, my little young son
An’ take thee up thy nouriss-fee.
“And it shall come on a summer’s day
When the sun shines het on evera stone
That I will take my little young son
And teach him for to swim the foam.
“And thou shall marry a proud gunner
An’ a proud gunner I’m sure he’ll be
An’ the very first shot that e’er he shoots
he’ll shoot both my young son and me.”
A cormorant pedals the sky directly overhead, throwing a flitting shadow over his face and guitar. The song itself is a darkness, rumbling with the waves of the sea, skirting its frothy surface, sinking into its opaque depths, at odds with the brilliance of the morning: the seal-like sea creature who can only mate when transformed into human form, the unsuspecting maiden who gives birth to his son, fated to be taken back to the sea by his father, then felled by his mother’s new husband, the maritime gunner. The truth of fairy tales is, they rarely have happy endings.
Something dim and spectral has sunk into his heart. Another old ballad he’s learned since arriving on the island comes to mind, about a Molly. Not his sweet, funny cousin—wherever she is and whatever she may be doing. It’s been years since he’s spoken with anyone in his family. About a Molly Bawn, who, shielding herself from the rainfall with a white apron, is taken for a swan by her lover, shot, and killed.
I shot my own true lover—alas! I’m undone
While she was in the shade by the setting of the sun…
The sea seems to be listening to him. He lays his guitar down on his knees and listens back.
“Well!” a voice says.
A young guy, with a rush of shiny dark curls framing rosy cheeks, is suddenly right there, almost at his side. “The obvious moral being never to play fast and easy with the gun.”
The guy’s accent is as posh as Georgina’s. Not many people speak like that on Iona. He clasps the neck of his guitar. “I never play with guns, period.”
“No?” The guy drops onto his haunches and sticks a hand out. “Rufus.”
Could Georgina—or her father—actually have sent someone after him? He has to have been as expendable to her as any of the beautiful objects decorating her flat. People like him and Georgina, what could they ever really know about love? After he took off, she undoubtedly spent a few nights in histrionics, drinking to excess, fucking everyone in sight, calling him names they hadn’t taught her in her string of fancy schools. But she did that most nights anyway.
Thick blue-jeaned legs tucked into galoshes. A sturdy neck and back, sporting a white scarf and a bright red Windbreaker. So healthy looking. None of Georgina’s crowd would look this square.
“No. I’m a pacifist, man,” he says, reluctantly putting his own hand out.
Rufus pumps it. “Conscientious objector?”
Here it’s not like in the US, where some people consider conscientious objectors to have been traitors and others consider them to be heroes. Few older Brits get far away from their experiences in World War II, but no Brit his age or younger could care less who fought or not in Vietnam. There’s no reason to lie. “No. Never got called up.”
“But you are American. I thought for certain from the song you’d be Irish.”
“I learned that song here, in Scotland.”
“Well, it’s originally Irish.”
He shrugs. “My father’s ancestors were Irish.”
“You look like your dad, then.” The guy picks up a stone and dances it one, two, three times across the surface of the sea. “What are you? About six foot one? One hundred and eighty pounds?”
The questions are weird, but there’s something curiously appealing about this Rufus, something strangely familiar. “My dad’s dead,” he says. “Twenty-two years.”
“Whew, young. Cancer?”
“He was a POW in the Pacific during World War II. Got to him eventually.”
Rufus hops another stone across the face of the water, bestowing tiny kisses. “My regrets, man. War is hell.”
“Yes.”
“You get seasick?”
Where is this leading? He shakes his head.
Rufus jumps to his feet and claps him on the shoulder. “Ghislaine! Eamon! We’ve found our man.”
He turns his head to discover a young man and woman, also wearing bright red jackets, standing a little ways down on the edge of the beach, tossing pebbles into the sea.
The trio from the ferry in Mull this morning.
“Hey, wait a minute—”
“We’re staying at the inn, the Argyll,” Rufus says. “Meet us in the dining room at seven p.m.”
“Right,” he says, picking up his guitar. People don’t decide things for him. That’s the one thing he has in his life.
Rufus laughs and twirls a dark curl. “Seven p.m. Dinner is on me.”
They don’t look anything alike, other than the dark curls. Rufus is the picture of health, the glowing pink cheeks, the shining eyes.
It’s that same boundless enthusiasm.
Eugene was the most cheerful son of a bitch on the planet.
He looks out to the sea, out over that huge body of water, spanning his today and his yesterday. Eugene was cheerful, that is, until that gentle evening when, with a full moon rising, having plowed through three six-packs, Eugene shot himself in the head. He himself having gone off to meet some girl.
If he could cram the memory into a bottle and throw it far out into the waves, send it back to America.
Remember when we were kids? Eugene said. They were sitting in his parents’ backyard, drinking Buds. Eugene had just gotten off from work at the lumberyard and was still wearing navy blue coveralls with GENE written in red script over his heart. And I never got picked for any teams because I had asthma?
He wasn’t wearing work coveralls. He’d just graduated from college, had a little cash in his pocket from his new job stringing guitars in a music shop and a little more from his stepfather stuffed in an envelope by his bed—It’s high time you open an account, Francis, Ronnie had said—and there was a pretty girl waiting to meet up with him. It was a fine August evening. He laughed. Back in grade school? Before smoking weed cured your asthma?
Eugene laughed, too, a bitter, dry laugh. No one knew what made Eugene’s asthma go away so suddenly at puberty, but it wasn’t smoking weed. The big joke was that it cleared up just in time for him to pass the army physical. Yeah, exactly. Well, those days when I never got picked for teams were the good days.
He popped the tab on another Bud and watched the evening star grow in the waning light, lay back to soak in the warm Southern California nightfall. Only later did he hear what Eugene was really saying: And I never got picked for any teams.
It really wasn’t a joke that asthma had kept Eugene off every team when they were growing up but not out of Vietnam. It turned out not to be funny in the slightest. The army in Vietnam: the worst team of all.
What happened? people asked afterward. Why? Why’d he do it? Eugene’s mother clung to his arm, her worn face s
wollen from crying: Eugene must have said something to you. You were best friends since forever. You were like brothers.
Eugene did say something to him, something else earlier that same last evening. But not until it was too late did he hear him.
After the funeral, he borrowed a girl’s car and drove to Patty Ann’s. It was a terrible place, where she and her kids were living. They didn’t talk about his plans or about Eugene; she talked about music, about some jewelry she was making, about her sons. They shared a joint and a bottle of cheap wine. But she knew he’d come to say good-bye. I’ll always be your big sister. I’ll always be here, she said when he left. He went from there to the TWA ticket office and bought a round-trip ticket to Paris, because it was the cheapest flight for Europe available and round-trip cost less than one way. The return half of the ticket, long expired, sits at the bottom of his pack.
Over here no one asks him, What happened? He’s almost learned how not to ask himself.
“Sure. Dinner at seven,” he says, although he has no intention of going.
* * *
The sun is still high when he heads back toward the abbey, but a hazy pink film hugs the dark blue edge of the horizon. In June, the sun sets late up here. He passes the four pale green eider eggs, still unguarded. Perhaps a gull caught their mother.
Back in his makeshift bedroom, he lies down and closes his eyes, drawing in the day’s tender, salty scent of sea, the flinty embrace of the June sun, the hours of solitude. He falls in and out of sleep, but as peace grows within him so does a hollow feeling. He has no oatcakes left and no food in his room, and he’s told the Community he won’t be eating with them tonight. Neither of the women he’s befriended on the island has invited him around this evening.
On Iona, that doesn’t leave many options. There’s the Argyll and then there’s…the Argyll.
Fuck it.
He draws himself up from his cot and pulls his jacket on.
The air is silvery with the sound of singing from within the abbey. A lone cow lopes its way down craggy Cnoc Mor, the hill behind the tiny island school. He makes his way down and around the short row of waterfront houses. Inside the Argyll, Rufus and the two others are installed around a wooden table.
“Hello!” Rufus says, waving to him. “Sit down! I’ve already ordered for everyone.”
He slips into a chair at the table, checking to see who else is in the tranquil dining room, evening sun streaking its windows. No one tonight. A plate of mutton pie appears before him.
“What’s your name?” The girl in Rufus’s group has a slight accent he can’t place. She’s dark-haired, sleek, and good-looking in an unfrivolous way. “I am Ghislaine.”
She doesn’t offer her hand. He likes her matter-of-fact manner. “Francis.”
“Ah, Francis! And this,” Rufus says, introducing the thick-necked, flat-headed boy who completes their trio, “is Eamon. Eamon from Belfast.”
Eamon nods at him.
“So, Francis,” Rufus says, “you are wondering what we are doing on Iona.”
“No, not really,” he says, cutting into his pie. “Lots of people come to Iona.”
“Last December,” Rufus says, “right after the Harrods bombings, I woke up, made a cup of coffee, and thought: this is madness. We need to reach out across the water.”
Rufus stops and looks at him expectantly.
He swallows a forkful of warm, savory pie. It’s good—better than good. Surely worth having to sit through this.
“Across the water! We’re going on a mission of conciliation,” Rufus says, “one that we hope will be heard by both Protestants and Catholics, by both Ireland and the UK—by the world, even. Next weekend is the anniversary celebration of Columba’s arrival in Scotland. We’re going to undertake his two-hundred-kilometer journey in reverse, from Iona to Northern Ireland. The twist is that half of our crew will be Catholic and the other half Protestant. You see the symbolism, I’m sure. We’re pulling together. I’ve had an old currach shipped, refitted, and kitted out here on Iona, and we’ve been training in another one off the coast of Devon. And—very important—I’ve reached out to as many newspapers and television stations as possible. Maybe you’ve even heard about us.”
He’s seen a currach. It stuck with him because it seemed such an unlikely sea vessel—something between a rowboat, sailboat, and canoe. These three red-jacketed knuckleheads are going to row all the way from Iona to Northern Ireland, over open sea, in a boat that’s little more than a wooden butter dish?
He shakes his head. “No. I haven’t heard anything.”
“The thing is,” Rufus says, unfazed—it’s hard to imagine what would faze Rufus—“we have a little problem.”
“Not so little,” Ghislaine says.
“We’ve lost one of our crew members,” Rufus says. “Our Irish Catholic.”
He lays his fork down.
“It was a bit of a freak accident. We were training in a borrowed boat in Oban yesterday. He slipped on a mound of harvested seaweed and knocked his head against a pier. He’s laid up in a hospital bed for the foreseeable future.”
Rufus stops again to look expectantly at him.
He picks his fork back up. “Must have been a nasty fall.”
Ghislaine frowns. “Rufus insisted we continue on to Iona. He said he was sure something would come up.”
“And by God, it has!” Rufus says. “Will you believe this, Francis? Our lost crew member is six foot one and weighs one hundred and eighty pounds. Exactly. You’ll fit his kit perfectly.”
He wipes his mouth with his napkin. As he inclines his head, he catches sight of Moira—or Muira?—walking into the kitchen. The one who isn’t a postmistress. She flashes him a glance before disappearing behind the kitchen door.
“You’re Irish-American,” Rufus says. “It isn’t Irish-Irish, but it’s close. You look very fit. You obviously have no commitments to keep you from stepping into the boat when we push off tomorrow morning—you wouldn’t have been sitting out there in the middle of the day playing your guitar if there was someplace you had to be.”
He takes a last bite of the mutton pie. The meat falls apart on his fork, soft and tender. He tears off a piece of bread and mops up the remains of the cheddar–mashed potato topping, gravy squeaking up over the all of it. Perhaps Moira/Muira is waiting in the kitchen, hoping he’ll leave with her. Suddenly, there isn’t anything he wants less. What’s more, for reasons he can’t quite put his finger on, the idea of Rufus seeing him leave with her turns his stomach.
“Well, that was good,” he says. “Thanks for the meal. Best of luck on your journey.” He squeezes his napkin into a ball and drops it on the table. Maybe he can sneak out before she comes back.
“I do not think he is interested,” Ghislaine says.
“Where are you from?” he asks her.
“Bordeaux, in western France,” she says. “My family has owned vineyards there for centuries. We’re Huguenot,” she adds. “That means I am Protestant. That’s how I can add the second Protestant to the crew.”
“You are a sailor?”
She smiles, catlike. “I have a wall of trophies at home.”
“Of course he’ll do it,” Rufus says. “We’d have to cancel otherwise. And look at him. Not just the right size, the right religion, and available, but beautiful. It’s like a gift dropped right down from the skies. They’ll put him on the front page of the Times, the Guardian, and the Daily Mirror. He looks like a rock star.”
“I don’t want my photo on the front page of the Times,” he says. Georgina doesn’t read the Times or the Guardian and certainly not the Daily Mirror, and no one reads any of them in the United States. But someone who does might recognize him. Not that he’s an outlaw. He just likes to live under the radar. That’s his way.
Ghislaine tilts her heart-shaped face to one side. Her hair, black and straight, cut along the length of her jaw, swings against her pointy chin. “No. Not a rock star. Jesus, maybe.”
> “Well, isn’t that what the handsome rock stars look like? Jesus Christ with a hard-on?” Rufus says.
“You’re an ass,” he says.
“Come on, man. Don’t be offended. It’s a good thing.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, show some fucking class.”
At this, Rufus and Ghislaine burst out laughing. Eamon says nothing. God only knows how Rufus bullied him into being part of this venture.
Through the kitchen door, Moira/Muira reappears. As far as he’s heard, she doesn’t work in the restaurant, but she fiddles with the salt and pepper on an empty table until she catches his eye. He shakes his head. She returns the salt and pepper to their places and slips back into the kitchen.
“Nice people on this island,” Rufus says, watching. “Friendly.”
“Nice enough.” He can’t leave, with Moira/Muira hovering. How the hell can he not even remember which one was named what? The two of them weren’t that much alike. Truth is, he decided he couldn’t be bothered and never even tried. “You know, I saw the three of you boarding in Mull this morning. I thought you were Jesus freaks.”
“You saw us all the way from Iona? You could make us out?”
He shrugs. “Yeah.”
Rufus and Ghislaine exchange looks.
“Francis,” Rufus says, “I thought you’re a pacifist. Isn’t that what you told me down at the seashore this morning? You would never hold a gun because you are a pacifist?”
Moira/Muira on one side. Rufus on the other. Eugene would have had a field day with a predicament like this. So would Georgina, for that matter—she’s the only other person he’s ever known with an equal appreciation for irony. Maybe Molly.
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