Inishbream (3 page)

My mother is ould and my father quite feeble,
To leave their own country it grieves them full sore,
And the tears down their cheeks in great drops are falling,
To think they must die upon a foreign soil.

And after a few more songs in Festy's low, peculiar whining voice, we leave to go back to our houses, the dogs following and the stars alive on the island for light.

The black bull did not want to enter the water. Three men in a currach, two rowing, one holding the halter rope and pulling, a dog urging the heels of the bull to go forward, the watchers tossing seaweed at the big rump and shouting at him, Go on, go on, ye ould thing.

I watch, myself, from the house on the cliff. Our three calves bawl to the morning, to a long-gone mother and this great bull who might have been their father as bulls are that way. A morning alive with this one's reluctance, the frenzied multitude of dogs who gather to assist the first brave mongrel, who has by now been kicked in the ribs by a winging hoof and who has retreated in humiliation.

When the bull finally swims, urged by God knows how many shouters, he goes with the tide. The men are at the mercy of his strength, and he draws them toward the island quay. He rises out of the water and up onto the ramp. The men are shouting, the one with the rope is pulling hard, pulling harder, and that bull is slipping back down the weedy ramp and into the sea.

This time he swims behind them, bellowing. It is a half-mile to the low tide mark of the mainland, and he swims behind the black currach, herding it into the land.

We all row over later. The day is only barely defined in the mist, close and grey and ideal for bartering, as Peter remarks. We gather our shopping baskets together. The men are wearing the mended jackets, smelling strongly of mothballs, that they save for town and Mass at the Kingstone Chapel. The women have flattened their heads with kerchiefs, the patterns having not a thing to do with their dresses, and black shawls. The men pull caps flat to their own skulls, and everyone is in Wellingtons, town shoes in precious bundles beneath their arms.

On fair day, the town is always a hive of cattle and drivers, and this one is no exception. The streets are thick with the excited shit of the cattle, the heated language of the buyers, the exultation of the sellers. And stout floats out of the public-room doors, sweetish and encouraging to any deal or contract. The shops are full of island and mainland women, alike red-faced with vodka (
For the arthritis, ye know
) and defensive of their purchases (
It's a soggy ould cabbage, God knows, but it'll do for the soup, and who's fussy at these prices?
). In Kelly's pub a ceili band is hard at reels in a corner, the fiddler's bow slicing the air wildly and threatening the crowd who move too close; the uillean piper is pumping hard as he's worth, pausing between sets for a drain of his Harp. A drunk farmer, pleased as a tinker with his transactions, sings of the transportation of the boys of Mullaghbawn in the opposite corner.

Some island cows, previously brought to the mainland ahead of the amorous bull, are standing among the townies, fat and proud as the devil, bringing a good price and they know it. The islandmen are thrilled with the Christmas of ten-pound notes.

The afternoon fills itself easily with the generosity of drink, sweets, the finest meal Eamon Kelly can produce. (Turkey, mind ye, whispers Agnes, and he usen't to serve but the finest of sea trout.)

By twilight we are ready to make our way to the strand, to ferry ourselves back to Inishbream. Our feet are weary with the accomplishment of strutting and jigs in unfamiliar shoes; we are bound for the island, our blood homing and keen for the bed.

A web of life, spun from the sea's fine silk, sargasso, mist and the sheaves of barley knotted by Himself and mended yearly by the fishermen.

That ugly basking shark. It was such a quarrel to bring him in, the sea sulky and unwilling to help, the currach small in a tower of waves, and the thing itself crowding against the boat, crowding, battering, bleeding into the sea, a misery of red, and the sea sympathetic to its creature. The towing out to open water, much stronger he was than the bull, even dying. Bringing him back was no triumph but a blessing.

– We thank ye, Lord, for what ye have given.

And his liver, when opened, yielded gold in the form of precious oil.

A web of life. Tentacles. The foot of a gannet.

The stones were not dolmens or cromlechs but cyclopean, bald, and the chanters themselves. The island was ringed by them, protective, irrefutable. The houses were built of their offspring, the fields' grey crops were inspired by their image. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken. Ringed with stone, stunted by stone, made barren by stone, buried in stone (the graves a passage through the stone heart of Inishbream). And the rain, strangely mineral in its own falling. A knot of stone toads at the bottom of the well.

A web of life. The wintered nets hanging over a cliff, anchored by a megalith, the incarnation of His mystery.

– If I made ye a cap, would ye wear it? That ould one of Sean's does not become ye.

– Of course I'd wear it. The mornings are cold enough, that's true.

So the aunt made me a hat, pale oily wool that she had spun, then knitted, neutral cables and paradigms, row upon row of her memory.

– Ah, I cannot give ye the pattern (when I asked). Ye cannot do it by pattern. Ye just know when to make a cable, when to make a knot.

– I'd never know.

– Aye, but ye was not born here.

The mail comes one day only, on Tuesdays, and the island tenses, is restless all the morning, waiting.

Sean expects nothing. And so he rows out to the lobsters alone, armed with baits and his mended pots.

Not many boats will go out on a Tuesday. Things get done in the homes: a dusting of the eaves, smoothing of thatch. (
Ah, ye cannot leave it bunched up like that. I will stay to fix it so.
) Floors are scrubbed with rough salt, bread is made in a low bastable. And I am busy to pass the time, tending to the calves, bringing sacks of turf up from the quay with the dubious help of an aged and stubborn donkey. The shore is dark with mouthdown currachs, humped into the sun like slugs.

– Don't expect it before two at least.

I hang the quilt out in the rare sun to air. We shall sleep in a fragrance of wind.

– That's only Mairtin you hear, not the mail boat.

I set pans of bread in the coals to bake.

Voices at the quay. Peter, back from a moment's fishing, talks to Festy about the possibility of crayfish in such weather at Carrickarona.

Two o'clock takes its own sweet time arriving.

Messages come from another world. My father writes to me about a trip to Alberta, at one time his home: “We buried my last brother yesterday in the family plot in Edmonton. I drove to Drumheller after the funeral and discovered that nothing much had changed there since we left in 1934. Saw dinosaur displays in the museum. I often looked for remains myself when I walked back in those hills as a young boy, but I suppose you'd have to dig a long way or be awfully lucky to find anything worth keeping. They'd all be buried deep. The wind is constantly changing the topography. And I visited Julia's grave. My sister. You never knew her. She died before even I was born and they buried her in the Drumheller cemetery. I went to the Sturgeon River where my school friend drowned so long ago. They never did find his body.”

My father's archaeology. Burials, bones, the prairie wind. I write by return post of my new life on an island: “Father, I found a long curving bone, a dolphin rib, green with the sea, quite pitted by exposure. And a rudder from a sailing ship. These waters are wild, you'd want a sturdy craft. There are always dead birds on the shores, terns, petrels, and once an albatross, the claws neatly folded, the eyes pecked out. And Father, I've dreamed twice of an ocean voyage, a great ship surrounded by a host of birds and the dolphin following, silver-backed in the green grave of the sea.”

The mail comes one day only. After the boat departs, having left its sack of post and carrying our epistles away, the bachelors gather in groups on the quay, toothless and talking about boats and disasters, politics and potato blight.

And they watch at the edge of the sea, the copulating sea (someone's old genitals, the rough white foam); they watch for a goddess, a hag, they wait for a salvation.

THE BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES

THE BOOK OF THE CHRONICLES
, illuminated as it was by the endless and inbred families of fisherfolk, with the rough boats, the curious fish, marginal decoration of thatching days and the ricks of corn, the most common embellishment a curling, vine-drawn I:
iota
(gk.), from
yodh
(Semitic), meaning “hand”, and now an abbreviated form for incisor, a variety of titles, the chemical iodine or inactive, the mathematical symbol for imaginary quantity, for island, for Inishbream. I, the quaifying noun.

And I am to remain childless. Something about biology, genetics (
a science, Mairtin
), though once there was a hope but then an ending of late bright blood. I knew about cycles and seasons, the way of a woman with a man, the rooted mandrake. Knew about the necessity of binding oneself to earth and stone with the young, their thin limbs forever bound to the island of their birth.

– It is because she will go out in boats with the men. Not right for a woman, and in trousers yet, with the cap of Seaneen and her hair underneath. Ye'd never know she was a woman. It's unnatural, like.

– And ye've heard, of course . . .

The tongues forever knitting the stories over tea. When I sit among the harpies with my clumsy cables and impure wool, I am always given the china cup of the guest. Never crockery, like themselves, homely and plain brown, but always the china cup of the stranger, my name engraved in the common-room silence. Readable, though in another dialect.

But I am learning the art of storytelling, of simplicity, the necessity of kennings and the harp-shaped caesura.

– What will ye tell tonight? Something about, let's say, a journey, something about Canada.

– Well, I could tell you a story about leaving and returning. My father's job took us away from that island I told you about earlier, away to Nova Scotia for several years. I remember it as a time of snow, and then summers spent exploring the East. A hole in a cliff in Gaspésie where a seabird crouched from the wind, a gannet or a gull. The great trapped lobsters waving their claws in restaurant aquariums . . .

A settling back, a lighting of pipes, the brand of burning turf on the fire.

– Now yer telling us something we know, like.

– the long vowels of the natives. Then, when I was ten, we changed coasts. Pilgrims of summer, lifting our taproot from the stunted Maritime soil and beginning the journey toward the West. High tide on the Bay of Fundy, waves, certain rocks, these I remember; and from salt to fresh to salt again I collected relics: stingray cartilage on a New Brunswick beach, a smoothed Great Lake pebble, salmon ribs at the Fraser's mouth. We began by knowing the journey's end, a knowledge of permanence after a make-shift season.

– What about the place ye left?

– We left a city citadel, a common like Stephen's Green in Dublin or even Phoenix Park, controlled parkland with a semblance of wildness. There were fishing villages, similar to Cleggan or Roundstone, but they were called Hubbards, Herring Cove, Prospect, names that fall like fish into nets, and fish as well, the same fish you have here because the ocean was the Atlantic. Tides opposing but the water the same.

– Ahh . . .

– In the forest near our home at Rocking Stone I had often walked the dog, and once a man pulled his trousers down in front of us. The dog wasn't interested in the muscle hanging limp, looking like a small dead weasel. That is something I never told anyone. I'd thought he was the keeper of the forest and that he was somehow making us welcome.

Flushed faces, the men interested (
So she knows what one looks like . . .
), the women embarrassed (
Hussy!
).

– We left my grandmother's house on Chestnut Street, a house of gables, dark wood, a piano injured in the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbour, blue Chinese ginger jars. There was a stern sepia grandfather, there were two girls who were never young, who never smiled, twists of iron hair wrapped round their heads. My mother said, This one is your Aunty Helen, and this one is myself. I could never quite believe her.

– Aye, it is that way sometimes with the photographs.

And Sean is looking deep into the fire, remembering the first judgement of the parents above the mantelpiece.

– We left. It was not until Fredericton that I was sure we'd actually go and not turn around to return. My grandmother was too old to transplant; we left her there sitting by her photographs. We'll come to visit, there are planes, it's only a few hours, we said. She was weeping out of sightless eyes, rocking her pain in a carved oak chair. I used to hold her hands and trace the blackened veins into the flaps of her wrists. We'll come to visit, we'd said. When we didn't, she died. My mother flew back, only a few hours, to touch my grandmother's hands, the holes where her eyes had been.

– And who did ye have to keen? asked the crone, herself a mistress of the death peal.

– We had ourselves, our relationship to her. And myself, I was the daughter of the daughter, reading of pioneer women launching their canvas wagons onto roads that all led west.

– Ah, like the tinkers then. Festy, would ye ever put another lump of the ould sod on the fire?

– I remembered the island in the West, of course, and I studied my father's maps. The names of the places were often Spanish or Portuguese, those nations claiming a foothold on the land in the beginning; or the names were Kwagiulth, Salish, born of the older time, called into being by the land and her offspring: Qualicum, where the dog salmon run; Chu-an, facing the sea. I was the daughter, alone in my place in our station wagon, thinking of a home in the West. We had our utensils for the journey and a canvas house wrapped up in a bag. We carried our photographs with us, impressed upon our retinas. There was one I looked at for a long time: my grandmother, my mother and I, arms braiding us into a single plait, but something not quite right. My mother and I are looking into the lens of the camera, my grandmother's empty sockets are staring wildly into space, an explorer with no sense of location.

– A plait. Fancy that! Kathleen keeps a thin plait of her dead mother's hair inside that gold locket she wears on her neck.

– Days we travelled a grey length of road, and we stopped like the faithful at stone cairns marking battles or discoveries. My father's voice intoned our history. In Quebec . . .

– Aye, that's where all the Frenchmen are trying for independence. Sure and don't we know about the struggles here.

– they spoke an unfamiliar music, the “Frère Jacques” of early school the only French we knew. Their hands were quick as light, arms trembling like a weathercock West. In the tent at night, all six of us lay in rows like cells inside a honeycomb, breathing. On the prairie, my eyes grew parched. There was no water. Rivers of mud went snaking through fields and irrigation pipes to nourish the pale crops. That gravity was a constant pull as the oceans fought for us. My mother turned to me, said, Do you remember the train trips to Wolfville for the apple festivals? And the pipers up from Cape Breton in their kilts? But Mother, that was long before my time . . . Yes, I suppose it was your grandmother I went with, but it seems like only yesterday. When you were a girl? Yes. And I wondered, could my grandmother see the blossoms in her mind? Has she always been blind? No, but she was then. Oh. And the music, of course she could feel that, running in a shiver down her spine.

Miceal the elder nods vigorously. Aye, ye can feel that stuff singing in yer bones, and that's His truth.

– My mother's nostalgia and excitement for a dead time made me uneasy, and I wondered at our connection. Blood, I supposed, but not our souls. But then she told me a story: that she'd dreamed as a young girl of bridling a Sable Island pony, riding the Atlantic home to Lunenburg County, and I had dreamed myself of a similar ride after seeing the ponies in a
National Geographic
magazine.

– Another island! And where does this one lie?

– It's a crescent moon of a shape lying southeast off Nova Scotia. The ponies from sinking Spanish galleons swam there hundreds of years ago, have managed to survive, breeding hardy and foraging for surf grass, galloping all night over dunes and the days surrounding a lighthouse.

– What about yer father? The sailor.

– Well, he remained neutral. He'd actually been born in Drumheller, far from the Atlantic or the Pacific, and it wasn't until he was eighteen that he went to the sea at the end of World War II. So at heart he belonged to the prairie, too, and his uncle, the oldest man I have ever known, carved for us a land-going dinosaur out of hickory root. Its mouth was open, showing teeth and tongue, and two chips of amethyst were planted in its eyes.

– Get back to the journey.

– Well, we drove through a long string of prairie grain towns, clusters of houses, elevators for the dusty crops, wheat-coloured people tight-lipped in the general stores where we drank cream soda, and everywhere the dust, the chaff, the distance. You could stand and look for miles and not see the end of your vision. In cities like Brandon or Regina, there were fountains that sprayed our faces and felt like breakers if we closed our eyes, but they did not smell of salt. All those Historic Site Ahead signs my father noticed. He told us stories of uprisings . . .

– And sure don't we know about uprisings? Isn't Pearse's cottage where he learned the Irish just over in Rossmuck?

– of Riel and Dumont, and he took photographs of my brothers and myself lounging on restored wagons and mastodons.

– Not real ones, surely? Yer codding us there.

– No, I mean reconstructions. You know. Or else fossilized. I don't remember much of the detail. I was anxious to take that ferry to Swartz Bay and to stand still at the prow until we arrived. In the past, on short trips away from Vancouver Island, we had pretended we were the first explorers watching the Gulf Islands grow out of the mist, hearing the first croaking of the ravens, seeing the original waves breaking over the backs of killer whales. But we stayed a long time in Alberta. My father was a young boy, showing us where he'd cycled miles on Sundays for ice cream. He took us to the badlands. I remember not much colour but an eerie wind. And we were taken to a game farm to be shown sleepy-eyed animals. I was the impatient one, felt like a tiger in a page-wire field, camera-snapping tourists waiting, breathless, as she rose and stretched, then started pacing.

– A tiger! I've not seen even a picture of one, but in the books they tell us them tigers and such are related to the cats. My Boots and Festy's Frisky. Striped, though, if ye can believe such a thing.

– I can, Bridie. And my father's sisters cooked for us. The food he grew up on, the pirogy and holopcha, seemed as exotic as quail's egg or caviar. He talked the whole journey of the Sturgeon River. A boy he knew dived from the bridge, never came up. When we went there, I imagined his corpse and the others it spawned resting among the weeds.

– Aye, the way ye think that the oars will touch the drowned man whenever we row out near Fahy.

– Yes. And when we went back to the aunts' house that day, my father drank whiskey with an uncle, and they looked through the yearbook of their thirteenth autumn. That young man on the Sturgeon's muddy bottom. He smiled. He will never look older than that. He never knew about the war to come that we, as children, had to learn to imagine. My brother, older though younger, showed me pictures of shaved heads and pits of bodies. I, younger though older, knew about Hitler.

– I've read about that monster. Like Cromwell, he was.

– It did not take long, once we left Alberta, to make our way to the coast. We camped in the Rockies, thinking only of grizzlies. In our dreams they flattened our tent and ate our dog. Then the road, stretching itself like a rattlesnake . . .

– Ye won't find a snake in all the counties! Saint Patrick himself banished them all from the face of Ireland a very long time ago, and they're afraid to this day of returning.

– through the Okanagan, passing stalls of peaches, early apples, jugs of cider and cherry wine. Finally through the tunnels, Devil's Elbow and Hell's Gate, along the highway to the ferry terminal at the mainland's edge. The ride across took one hundred minutes . . .

– That long? Is that a fact? We can row on a fine day from the island to Eyrephort in just twenty minutes. In a currach yet.

– and we walked the decks, pretending the boat was our own, pretending we had never been away. We flung the images gathered on the journey to the Strait, where they sank down to the sea's bleak heart. We lived, after that, in a great house of distance. My mother wept in the night for snow, wept like a rain that would not stop. My grandmother rocked all night in her dreams. My father fished the rivers for trout and steelhead. He would not fish in the Sturgeon River, I remember, but stared down from the bridge to its depths. We lived near the sea in the house with the captain's bunk and telescope, and I took my secret vial of Atlantic Ocean there, flung it into Gonzales Bay and waited: for the explosion, for Poseidon, for a goddess to rise from the waves. Stepped back in disappointment, and as I left I looked once behind me to see the ghost of a girl coming home across the ocean, her hands resting on the weedy mane of her pony.