by Ann Claycomb
Harry has the middle seat on a row of three. I sit beside her, reach out after a minute and hold her hand. It is much warmer than mine, and feels drier, though I don’t know how that could be true.
“Ugh,” the woman on Harry’s other side says, “I’m wet through and we’ve only just gotten here. I don’t know how these people stand it.” She raises her voice to address Sean in the driver’s seat in front of her.
“Do the Irish get depressed from the weather sometimes, from all this rain?”
“Depressed, is it?” Sean steers us sharply to the left to let a slatted truck full of sheep go by. “No. No, we don’t get depressed by the rain. Bit moldy, maybe, around the edges, but not depressed.” He darts a glance over his shoulder and winks at me. I realize too late that he is flirting with me in the harmless way that old and oldish men have always flirted with me. I try to smile at him, but he has already turned back to the road.
“Now then,” he says. “We’ll be coming up into Kilmurvey in a few minutes now, where you can get a bit of lunch, walk up to the ruins if you’ve a mind to.”
Harry leans forward. “Isn’t there a visitor’s center there?” she asks.
Sean shakes his head. “There is,” he says, “but it’s closed this week and next. They’re installing an ‘interactive exhibit hall’ is what they’re calling it, with computer touch screens and videos and the like.”
“Oh.” Harry sits back. Even I—queen of the self-centered—can’t help but notice how pale and bedraggled she is, only buoyed up by her need to take care of me and her certainty that there was going to be something to find on Inis Mór, or maybe even just something to try. She bites her lip and turns to the window. So now it’s officially been a wasted trip—worse than wasted, since we’ve discovered that the suicides probably go back further even than Robin thought they did. And though I know why, I can’t tell anyone because it’s not an explanation, not the kind Harry was hoping for, not the kind Robin sent us here for. Not the kind that’s going to get the doctors back in Boston to change their minds: Oh, so it’s the sea in Ireland that’s the problem? It actually calls to you—called to all these women, you say—and makes you want to drown yourself in it? Let’s try that electroshock therapy we recommended, shall we? That and staying away from Ireland. We recommend that too.
“Ah,” Sean says from the front, “here’s a true Irish sight for you . . . Do you see?”
He brakes gently as he steers off onto the grass alongside the road and gestures up yet another steep, rocky hill to a house just being built, all shining sheets of glass and long white beams, in stark contrast to the closely piled rocks of the fences around it. There are horses grazing in the pasture in front of the house, several brown ones and one white, off to himself. He swings his head in our direction as Sean points him out.
“There’s a good bit of new construction going on here,” Sean says. “But this house always brings to my mind the old Irish proverb”—he swings around in his seat—“maybe you know it then? About the three unluckiest things in the world?”
No one does. From the corner of my eye I can see Harry shaking her head.
“Well then, you’ll see what I mean here.” Sean gestures to the house once more. “The three unluckiest things in the world are a house on a hill, a bàn capall—a white horse, that is—and a good-looking woman. So I’m thinking that here we sit in clear view of all three things at once—I’m hoping none of you is superstitious then.”
His eyes have flicked to me again just long enough to include me in his proverb, compliment and curse all in the same breath.
“Well now,” says a man from the backseat of the van, “I don’t know that we all need to be worried for ourselves, do we? Who are these things unlucky for is what I’d want to know—for those who have them or for the things themselves?”
“Ah!” Sean grins back at the man. “You’d have to ask them yourself, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, that poor horse certainly seems unlucky,” says the woman beside us, “out in that rain every day.”
“There you go then,” says Sean. He turns back to the wheel and maneuvers the van onto the road.
Unlucky. There’s one word for it. I choke back a laugh as I think about telling Harry that this is the answer we’ve come all this way to find: that I’m just one of the three unluckiest things in the world, according to an old Irish proverb, and so were all the other women in my family. Can we go home now?
I glance over my shoulder to see the man who spoke earlier. He is staring at me, was clearly staring at me already before I turned my head. He’s redheaded and lean in jeans and a sleek brown pony-skin jacket. The dense hairs on his coat are beaded with rain, making him gleam faintly in the gray light inside the van, but there is nothing striking about the man himself except for his eyes. They are too big for his face, the way children’s eyes sometimes are. They are thickly lashed and a very deep brown without any visible whites at all, more like an animal’s eyes than a man’s. I turn away.
KILMURVEY IS A group of houses and a slate courtyard surrounded by shops. I drink more tea and crumble a piece of brown bread in my fingers while Harry eats.
“The soup is really good, Kath,” she says. “Have a spoonful.”
I shake my head. Harry frowns as she puts her spoon in her mouth and for a minute I’m afraid she’s going to argue with me again about how much weight I need to gain back and how hard that is to do when you don’t eat anything, dammit.
But her eyes shift to something over my shoulder.
“That man is staring at you,” she says.
“The guy from the bus?”
“Yes. Sort of a smallish guy with red hair.”
I glance back and try to smile at him, a nice neutral, non-inviting smile. My face doesn’t feel like it’s shaped itself into a smile properly, but after a moment he smiles back, only one side of his mouth lifting, and his eyes flicker over my head and then back to me. It’s the signal you give someone when you are trying to tell them something private or potentially embarrassing without attracting attention. I automatically look in the direction he has indicated, but all I see is the mural on the café wall at my back. It’s clearly labeled as the work of the high school art class here on the island. I twist in my seat to see it more clearly.
“What are you doing?” Harry asks.
“Checking out the mural. I didn’t notice it before.”
Harry turns around to see. “Nice mermaid,” she says. “Especially those breasts. I’m betting the boys in the art class were fighting over who got to paint those.”
It is an awful mermaid, blond and perky as a cheerleader who just happens to have forgotten to put on a shirt or a bra. Clearly she got distracted braiding all those seashells and flowers and—yes, even a seahorse—into her hair. And her tail is ridiculous, too small for the rest of her body, curving up like a smile, green with little sparkles in it. Ugh.
NEXT SEAN TAKES us to a graveyard so old the slabs are crumbling, inscriptions obliterated by wind and lichen. Other slabs are new and smooth, the words that have been carved into them still chalk-white against the gray stone.
We read about Patrick Hernon and Nora Kelly and Seamus Durrane who was only nine years old when he died. Harry draws in her breath sharply at that one.
It is raining again, but it’s as if we are all just resigned to being wet now. All around us people from our van are climbing over the slick wet stones, bending to take pictures of the inscriptions. Several people have made their way over to the ruins of the old church and one man has gone up the road a ways to take a picture that will capture the whole scene all at once. No one has even bothered to put their hood up against the rain. It runs through my hair and down my face, cool and soothing as water always is to me, but not what it could be. Not like a drug. Through a hole in the stone wall of the church, where a window might once have been—though maybe it was only ever a hole and never a stained-glass window as I imagine—I can see the sea.
; “This is unbelievably morbid,” I say, “not to mention depressing. I’m going back to the van to wait until everyone’s ready to leave.”
I don’t wait for Harry. I wade through unmown grass and clamber over a sloping flat slab on my way out of the cemetery. Close to the gate the dark-eyed man stands with his hands in his pockets in front of an upright granite marker.
“Come see this one,” he says, no inflection in his voice.
I do, almost without meaning to, but then the name on the bottom registers and I read the whole thing.
PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF MUIRIN BRUICH DIED AGED 22.
ERECTED BY HER HUSBAND, EAMON.
PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF CEARA LINNANE,
HER DAUGHTER, DIED AGED 24.
PRAY FOR THE SOUL OF CAOLINN LINNANE,
HER DAUGHTER, DIED AGED 23.
“You see, what they did was, the first one to die in a family, they’d raise a marker here, like this one,” the man says. “Then when the others died they’d simply add their names as they could, so long as there was room on the stone and family left on the island to remember. That’s why they didn’t bother with dates, to save space for names.” He takes one hand from his pocket and gestures at the stone. “Caolinn didn’t even live here by the time she died, but her grandfather was still alive and he had her name put on.”
He looks over at me, pinning me with those deep soft eyes.
“Her daughter, Deirdre, is buried over on the mainland, I’m thinking,” he says. “And Moira too.”
He turns his head sharply then, as if he’s heard a sudden noise. Harry has come up to stand beside me. The man nods at her and walks away.
“What was that about?” Harry asks.
“This.”
She reads the marker.
“He stopped me to show it to me.”
“He was probably just in the pub the other night,” Harry says, though she has stiffened and glanced around for him, angry and suspicious now. “He probably saw the names and made the connection.”
No, he knew already. But I don’t care about that right now.
“Harry, do you notice how old they are—were? All of them. Twenty-two, twenty-three years old, all of them, and Deirdre and Moira too.” I can feel the shifting of panic inside my stomach. I’m older than most of them were when they died. When they killed themselves, which, of course, they did. All of them. Five of them before me, and maybe more before them.
Harry is still staring at the stone. Her face is set, as though she is trying to push the ages, the repetition, away with the force of her will.
“They didn’t all kill themselves,” she says. “They couldn’t have. They wouldn’t have been buried here if they had, not in a Catholic cemetery, not, what, a hundred years ago? You couldn’t be buried in a Catholic cemetery if you killed yourself.”
I let her lead me back to the tour bus, to Sean leaning against the open door and ushering us all in with a sweep of his hand.
“Back there in the cemetery,” Harry says to him, not yet ducking her head to climb in, “we noticed the gravestones and I was wondering about them. This island has always been Catholic, hasn’t it?”
“What do you mean, lass?”
“A lot of the people died so young . . .”
“That they did.” Sean looks like he feels sorry for her. I bet he’s used to this, to the American tourists exclaiming over all the babies and children in that graveyard. “There were a lot of illnesses that took the little ones first, especially in the wet and cold, and before we had the health clinic here or an air strip, just a doctor as likely to be short of supplies from the mainland as anyone else.”
“Yes, I know,” Harry says, “I know that. But what about suicide?”
“What?”
“Well, they wouldn’t have buried someone in a church graveyard who had committed suicide. They would have buried those people somewhere else, wouldn’t they?”
Sean has bright blue eyes, vivid against his white hair and wind-reddened cheeks. He has been using his eyes to charm us all, but now he doesn’t meet Harry’s gaze.
“Well now,” he says. “We know a good deal here of déine an tsaoil, of how hard the world can be. It’s a different life, don’t you know, different from being back on the mainland. In the winter sometimes, especially years back, we’d not see a single soul from the mainland for a month or more. Lost three of our teachers at sea just last year, all of them on a boat coming back from their Christmas vacations they were, from seeing their families for a bit. My own brother was lost at sea, don’t you know, just a few years back.”
His voice rises at the end of his sentences, just an inflection, a trick of his accent, I know, but all the same it sounds like he’s asking for something. Understanding maybe. Still, he hasn’t answered the question.
“But the Church . . .” Harry says.
Sean adjusts his cap. “It’s a hard life here,” he says again. “It’s easier now, but there were times it were a hard, bleak life, and harder even for some who lost a child of fever or a man to the sea. I don’t know that we’ve ever had a priest here who didn’t know that, who didn’t see how it was here, how it could be.”
He turns back to Harry then, offers her his winningest smile.
“Come on then, a amadáin,” he says, “and watch your head. We’ll be needing to get you all back to the pier before the ferry comes, now won’t we?”
She climbs into the van and I follow her, while Sean goes around the front to get back into the driver’s seat. The man in the leather jacket leans forward and touches Harry on the shoulder.
“You might be wanting to know what he called you just now,” he says softly. “Though I don’t think he meant any meanness by it. A amadáin, wasn’t it?”
Harry doesn’t acknowledge him.
“He called you a fool,” the man says. “Just so you know.”
We take a road along the coast back to the pier where we’ll pick up the ferry. Sean points out the beach, which is lovely, an almost perfect semicircle scooped out of the cliffs and sprinkled with white sand. Then farther down, at another spot where the land seems to go down gracefully to meet the sea rather than plunging into it, he stops and gestures at a cluster of black blobs a few hundred yards out.
“There’s our seal colony, now, you see it? We’ve got about thirty, maybe thirty-five seals.”
The woman sitting against the window on the opposite side of the van, past Harry, puts her hand on our backs to push us forward as she snaps a picture.
“You got it then, love?” Sean asks, ever solicitous of photo-ops, before he puts the car in gear again and pulls away. “That’s a fine sign, seeing the seals,” he says, “for all that you’ve not had good weather to be touring the island today. And of course you know that some of our seals are Selkies, can’t say how many, but a few, always a few.” He turns back to give us all his most mischievous smile, his most twinkling glance. “Inis Mór has always been home to the Selkies, along with the coast of Connemara ’cross the water.”
“What are you saying?” asks a man sitting up front with his wife. He’s an older man, hard-of-hearing. He’s had to ask Sean to repeat himself a number of times already. “Selkies?” he echoes now.
“That’s right!” Sean nods. “Selkies, the seal-people.”
“Oh.” The man sits back. “Of course. A myth.”
WE ARE AMONG the first back on the ferry. A lot of people are still milling in and out of the shops that line the pier. I can’t think of anything I’d want to buy right now, and Harry doesn’t even suggest it. She fishes our return ticket out of her jacket and smooths it out. It is sodden and starting to tear.
“I feel like I’ll never be dry again,” she says as we board. Several people behind us chuckle in agreement. If anything, the weather is even worse than before, the wind so strong that the boat is already bucking in the water as if impatient to be away. Or maybe it’s the sea that’s impatient, to have us all to itself, small and unmoored on the sweeping da
rk waves.
I manage to keep my feet dry on our way onto the boat. I follow Harry into the cabin and let her take the window seat. From the middle seat in the row I have to lean forward to see the small window. My damp clothes are heavy and clammy against my skin.
“I’m sorry I made us do this,” Harry says. “It wasn’t exactly a fun trip.”
“You didn’t make it rain all day, silly.”
“But the trip over was so hard for you. I should have thought—”
“You couldn’t possibly have had any idea I was going to react that way, Harry.” I can hear a warning edge creeping into my voice. What do I even mean “that way”? The way I did react or the way she thinks I reacted? The only way not to think about the water or about my lie is to not talk about it.
At least she takes the hint. “I guess it will make for a good vacation story when we get back,” she says, “between this awful weather and the tour guide straight out of central casting.”
“I kept expecting him to claim leprechaun ancestry,” I say, and she laughs, but not for long. She is too full of the wrongs she’s done me to let herself off the hook that easily. I hate that I know this about her and that right now it only makes me irritated. I am struggling not to ask to switch places so I can press my face against the window to see the water. I sit rigid and cold in my chair, my hands flat under my thighs as though by imprisoning some part of my body I can control the rest of it. I don’t have the energy to assuage Harry’s guilt.
“Kath, that grave marker on the island . . . seeing that—all those poor women—it changes things, don’t you think?”
No, because it doesn’t change anything for me. I’m not even sure how surprised I really was when I saw the new names to add to the tally: five that we know of now, dead before they were twenty-five. They must have all left babies behind in cradles, and grieving husbands, grieving lovers.
I think of the man in the graveyard. His eyes were dark with a kind of pity that I recognize now. You see it on the faces in the audience when they realize that the heroine is going to have to kill herself at the end. Pity and compassion, but no surprise.