Inishbream (2 page)

THE GREEN FIELDS OF CANADA

THE HOUSE WHERE THE DROWNED MAN
lived has been empty four winters. Before I ever came, they nailed the door shut, boarded the windows. All the whitewash has flaked, has gone to the wind.

I am told again and again of the tragedy, its impact.

His was the only body not found. The other three washed up on strands from Clifden to Aughrusmore, carried in the current north or south. I did not see them, I lived somewhere else then, but I know where they are now: in simple pine boxes sunk deep into earth on the island's western reach. The crosses are Celtic, are granite, are engraved with their names.

But the man whose body knows no rest. He is somewhere in the passage between island and mainland. After storms I half expect to see him on the rocks below my house. I found a seal there once, cold and alone and rotting in the sun.

I have walked by his house late in the night. There are never lights, and so I know the sea keeps him even then, will not let him dry by the hearth (it has been stone cold so long), will not let him sleep (he will have circles of fatigue under his eyes).

I have been ferried across to the island at midnight. The water has been silent and black, the oars cutting deep and breaking phosphorescence. I imagined him following us, wanting only to be seen and drawn up, wanting to be washed clean of sea moss and brine.

The other three wait for him there in their beds on the western point. They wonder why he has been so long.

– Will ye never come home, never come home?

Miceal plays to the twilight, a hunched old piper. His sad notes haunt the island, and slowly doors open. We all come out to stand, hands on the stone walls, our bones echoing the tin whistle's quavering, married to wind and lyric of terns. Miceal wakes the moon from her sleep in the ocean. He brings home the night-swimming fish, the last boat of the day.

The island is a boneyard in its own way. Bullocks, in pieces on the dunes, lie hidden or else reveal themselves to walkers: a fine slab of clavicle, a fragment of tooth. What I find, I line along the mantel or upon the windowsills. All day they are silent and ornamental. At night they are given flesh and form, become populations of the dark, searching for food or a mate. Storm petrels, their beautiful claws. An otter.

And the fishermen are careful with all bones of the catch. To burn them or to allow dogs to gnaw the brittle spines would bring bad luck. I have told Sean stories about the rivers full of salmon on the northwest coast of Canada, and he does not think it strange that those fishermen bless the ribs as they toss them to the breeding streams.

– And do new ones grow from the bones so?

– I think so.

And I tell him a salmon song:
Hung-e, tunga, kwul-lo, kain-tla, ta-wit, shin-kin, is-la, the eye of your knee knows the coming of spring
. Our own knees pull us to the quay, and we lay out the mackerel nets, we mend them.

In the beginning, the other fishermen were afraid I would bring bad luck by coming to the fishing ground. Women didn't and that was that. For months I waited daily, with the other women though not one of them, for the boats to return. Sean wore a cross on his neck, blessed with holy water by the crone who lives in the final house, her windows facing west. And I waited, each day going on forever, the sea refusing the vision of return. Then two men died in a boat off Lettergesh, the boat sinking and the men drowning with their hands still holding the oars. Lettergesh, only a few women remaining, huddled back into the mountains after the wake, small with loss, unable to forget.

And so my help was needed, and nothing more was said about luck. This is the season of fruition: the mackerel running in green shoals, the lobsters filling the pots, spider crabs weaving themselves in like offerings and not refused by us or any others. Packy Conneely, the fish dealer, comes to the strand to meet the catch.

And we rise each morning before the sun has a chance (or is defeated by mist), pull out to Errislannen in the currach. The first net we bring up is alive with dogfish, and I kill them for bait. Sean pulls on his own, as I cut the raspy, speckled bodies into pieces. Then we bring up the pots in pairs, and as they break the surface of the sea, we see the mass of crabs, their claws waving in supplication.

– Grab the back legs if ye can.

I can, and I bring them out, one by blessed one, to lay in boxes, covered with shawls of sea-wet sacking to keep them cool. Sean, baiting the pots, steadies the currach from time to time with an oar. Our anchor is an island stone, falling to the bottom like a prayer.

– Will ye tell us a story, something about where ye come from?

All of them, settling around the hearth for a story, the poteen on the table, the women wary-eyed and knitting.

– Have ye a story to tell us, then, woman of Sean?

I'll tell a story about leaving and returning. It's about fishing ports and animals, it's about coming of age on an island.

– What island? Not the Great Blasket, where ye say ye've been?

– No, not the Great Blasket, that's someone else's story. But an island all the same, positioned on the rim of the Pacific, an island of rainforests and mountains, a town laying light over the Strait of Juan de Fuca all night long. North of San Juan Point, on the western coast, the open water crashes against beaches and settlements, and the sea-bottom rocks with the wrecks of galleons and trawlers.

– And have ye pukauns there?

– We haven't. But there are ghost ships off Hansen Lagoon, brigs and whaling barques that have drowned on the offshore reef, their holds full of useless blubber and pelts. There are skinless sea otters crouched by the salt-stinging tide, bleeding into the sea, saying, We will let in no others, saying, We will refuse to breed if this is our fate.

– And is that near to where ye was born?

– I was born in a later century on the southern tip, in a hospital not far from Oak Bay. I spent my early years watching for pirates, learned to navigate the seasons by a wild sea, learned tides and the fathoms of winter, all the ports of entry. I had an ordnance survey map pinned to my wall, and it read like a litany: Nootka Sound, Kyoquot Channel, Carmanah Point.

– And how would ye get there? By currach, as we do?

– No, the ferries sail every hour on the hour, and planes land every day, their wings silver as a heron's back and beaded with rain.

– Planes! Ye'd never get a plane to land on this ould rock, though once a helicopter did.

– The city I was born in is not unlike an Irish port town, Cork or Galway or even Dublin, though smaller. Gulls and tourists strut all summer on sidewalks leading to the sea, steamers blast arrivals and departures all day and night. My father, as I have told you before, was a sailor as a young man, and on Sundays he would take us to the docks where we would walk the tar-thick piers. Bright flags of the foreign ships, sickles and stars, hemp ropes, boxes of slick white-bellied halibut. My father wore a seaman's sweater from Spencer's Store, and he knew the most elaborate knots.

– Aye, being a sailor, like.

– Yes. And sometimes we went aboard the ships. I remember lockers with bare-breasted women glossing the doors . . .

At this point the women's faces flush and they frown, and I wonder if I'll ever forget that I know about anatomy, shall I ever learn to hide in the dark fear of sin like the circle of women who look from one to another and won't meet my eyes. One woman glares like a harpy at her knitting.
She
would never let me forget.

– I remember canvas kit bags shoved beneath bunks. On the deck, I stood at the prow like a skinny-kneed figurehead, and I watched to see if I could tell which man had a wooden leg, the inevitable sign of piracy. I watched the tremor of muscles under striped t-shirts. For a few years we lived close to the sea, and I slept on a captain's bunk built into the attic of our house. A telescope leaned out of the gabled window, and I watched for whales, for frigates sailing homeward. Up there, I could hear the ghostly crews of the wrecked galleons, I swear it. All night I heard the drowning song over water . . .

– Aye, ye can hear that here some nights.

– and as I grew older I heard the words of the keening, the language of grief, the rhythms of loss. Polished bones I saw through the telescope: the ghost crews parted the fogs in lifeboats, layers of algae coating their skulls.

– John Joe O'Malley over at Ballyconneely said there was an algae stuff on Mickey Keane's body when they found it after those months it spent in Mannin Bay, and that's God's truth, I tell ye.

– Waters around that island teemed with life, every sort of life. I used to pretend I was a diver, borrowed my brother's snorkel, saw kelp swaying in the undercurrent, saw plankton and the hunting fish among the weeds. I parted the weeds: Dungeness crabs scuttled off sideways. And sometimes you could see the fishermen unloading boxes of the trapped crabs, and if it was a festival or a Sunday, maybe they would boil them right on the docks in big cauldrons, cracking the claws open for the pale meat, leaving the beautiful mottled backs.

– Tell us more about yer father. The sailor.

– Well, he walked with a rolling gait, as though he could not believe he was landlocked. He took us to beaches where he sat looking to China across the sea . . .

– Fancy that!

– while we splashed under the sun. I would rise from the waves, a sea-born daughter of Venus. My father heard the mermaids singing.

– Aye, we call her Maighdean Mara here.

– And we gathered bark on these beaches for our stove at home, and soft glass and bits of shell. Rubber devices that I thought were balloons until I was smacked for trying to inflate one. No one explained. It tasted of something left long in the sea. Salt of life. Sometimes there were detergent bottles tossing through the kelp, and once I saw a walrus with its eyes plucked out. There were fish bones from the natural deaths. Waterlogged trees, limbless and smooth, escapees from the north coast booms. We cut these for firewood.

– And we've only them hollow bramble stalks, not worth the collecting. Ye'd be better off burning scraws ye can find on the back bog.

– There were car trips up the island, and I learned a kind of physiology, mountains running in a backbone down the centre of land, the matrix of granite . . .

Sean whispers to Mairtin the meaning of these strange words in the terminology of his almost-forgotten sojourn at boarding school: Well, it means natural life, living things. A science, Mairtin. And I wish to myself that I could learn to forget my vocabulary, to say the right things in the right words. Sometimes I feel as though I speak a foreign language.

– and my father taught me a secret bestiary of island animals: black bear, the salmon-poacher . . .

– I hear they've caught ould Eamon Joe Kelly poaching sea trout near Derryinver.

– whitetail, the bark-eater; elk, the star-catcher (I heard the sound of locking antlers in his words). The ark of our small boat in the mountain lakes rang loud with the syllables he taught me (vertebrate, mollusc) and the tent was haunted with fossils of another time, glacial or Jurassic.

– Now yer getting beyond us there. But thank ye all the same. Now maybe Festy'll sing us a song. I am thinking “The Green Fields of Canada,” lad.

– Aye, now let me think. That's it. Yes.