Inishbream (5 page)

– Nineteen.

– A good lot?

– Aye, and there's some big ray and a black sole from the bottom net.

– Good. Let's have our tea.

We walked up the boreen, over the hard earth and the stone wall. As we passed the cottages, I delivered letters, tea and the pension cheques. Twilight, and the turf fires were catching nicely, the sweet smoke blooming out of chimneys. Miceal and his tin whistle mourned the death of the day.

– Someone saw ye with the tinker.

That, as we came near our house.

– Who?

– It does not matter.

– What does not matter? Who saw me, or the fact that I drank with a tinker?

– I do not know.

And his eyes looked confused, his shoulders hunched to guard himself.

– Sean, why does everyone dislike the tinkers? They've made me tea, have treated me with civility, and today Christy King bought me a drink. These are things any of the islanders would do for a stranger.

– Aye, but ye cannot trust a tinker.

– What have they ever done to you?

– It is not what they have done to meself, it is what ye hear: that they steal cattle, milk the cows of honest men on the sly, make friendly with the wives of others, camp where they are not wanted. They are always moving on so they do not take the blame for their sins.

– Don't you think God punishes the wicked, whether they have a cottage or a caravan? You always talk about His justice. Do you not think the tinkers are under His eyes?

He did not know how to reply. Then: Ye always take the side of the others, the fish or the tinkers. Ye are always wanting to leave the sharks alone when they come to tear our nets, and where would we get the money for another? And ye will defend a tinker who is known in these parts for his crafty ways. Have ye not allegiance with the honest folk?

– What do you think?

– I do not know any more.

– Well, until I came to Inishbream, I was very like the tinkers, wasn't I?

– Brigid of the miracles, I cannot compete with the wind in a wild man's heart, and I ask to be forgiven, to be allowed to cast my lot to the stone soul of this island.

– Child, I will teach you the sign of the blessing, the sign of all devotion.

Sean visited the crone, telling of a distance. She said, Take the stone which the English call lodestone. You will know it by its sad blue colour. Lay this stone under the head of thy wife, and if she be chaste, she will embrace her husband.

I did not see the tinkers leave, uprooting the bright blossoming of their residence and leaving the hills barren as before their coming.

Sometimes I dream of a garden behind a broken hedge, I dream of caravans, all the beauty of the long road before them.

And I did embrace.

A GALE FROM THE WEST

DEATH COMES ON A GALE
from the west, sly at first, then pummelling down on the house of the ailing. Or, unloosed at sea, turns currachs mouthdown in the water, and the fishermen sink with their emptied lungs.

– Can you swim?

– We cannot. If the sea wants ye, she will have ye, and it is better to go easy so.

The cemetery is locked against casual entry, walled in stone and gated with a rusted bed frame, four great boulders preventing its fall to an interested cow or God knows what. Crosses, watermarked and sprouting an assortment of lichens, indicate the ancestors, the mounds themselves indistinguishable under cowslips or sea thrift.

– When was the last burial?

– Wasn't it only last year when the child of Mairtin died of the fever. That'll be the little cross ye may see there (pointing). And the drowned three of four years back, and I think meself that the fourth one who never washed up ought to be given a cross, too. Didn't we keen for him, same as the other lads, and didn't we board up his house? Ah, tis a shame and that's the truth that he was never given a deal box and put to earth.

– And no one ever found anything of him?

– Not even his jumper or least one Wellington, and didn't yer man on the Arans write a play that said, as we say, that you can tell who a drowned man is by the pattern of his woman on the gansey, and wouldn't we know if he ever washed up? There are the telephones now. Ye cannot keep things quiet in this ould county. And there are suicides of which ye must not talk. They are buried where the two boreens cross; tis the place of no arrival.

Death comes on a gale from the west, leaving a carnage of birds, seals, the trapped fish in the loosened nets.

– What do you suppose that mound is (pointing out the door to a swelling of earth behind the house)?

– Tis the midden from the other days.

– The midden?

– Aye, where they tossed the leavings of the kitchen, the broken crocks and whatever else.

– Do you mean your parents?

– I do not. They burned and buried their refuse, same as we do. I mean the original islanders, the oldest ones, older even than the crone or Miceal the elder, the ones Cromwell drove to Connacht so many years ago.

I don't think the midden looks any different than the grave mounds. They have their bleak, composed stones; the midden has an empty whiskey bottle; but the length and bulk are nearly identical. I say nothing and wait for a good moon.

Candles. A small trowel. The dog and my man bedded down for the sleeping. A nightjar calls from Inishturk, is answered. I begin to scrape away soil from the side of the midden. The trowel clangs softly on the edge of a discovery. Bones, I think — the sound very like enamel. I dig down. I imagine the earth enriched by marrow and flesh; I imagine the beauty of ribs against dark loam. And I unearth a piece of pottery, in no way vertebral but chunky and solid, wonderfully soft, the glaze dulled and shattered by the years and smelling of earthworms.

I want to go deeper into the midden. I want to discover a whole elaborate system of worship, the bodies prepared for transition, food alongside, fossilized and ancient in aspect, bowls, weapons.

I find the black and hardened peels of potatoes cast to the heap a century before and protected by the bog-earth; I find little dried cabbage stalks, pared to the quick, and a bowl, a mortar, cracked in half.

I want to discover the secrets of the island, the unchristened children of the wayward daughters, the epileptic dogs. A grandmother.

– Would you mind if I went to visit Shelagh?

– For how long would ye be gone?

– A week. I'd like to go for a week.

– Aye. Of course I can manage. Go to her so and enjoy yerself.

So I went with the post that Tuesday and drove up as far as Westport with the Electricity Supply Board man.

– Thirteen moons last year, and what's it to bring us, I ask ye? The last time we saw such a thing was the year preceding the Great Famine.

– Oh.

The rocks of Leenane Harbour were thick with mussels, and all along the south Mayo road there were sheep clustered close to the crumbling shoulders. On the brink of Croagh Patrick we passed a tinker camp. I knew no one but waved to the curious children, the inevitable dogs.

– This is where I must be dropping ye.

– Thanks for the lift. Have a good day.

– And yerself, God willing.

I took up my rucksack and strode through the narrow streets of Westport, watched by shapes from every window. The clock in the square spoke its constancy. A few cats darted about the shop displays. When I reached the Castlebar road, it was my luck that a car stopped almost immediately.

– I will be going as far as Ballina.

– Oh good. Will you drop me at Turlough?

– I will indeed. But why, may I ask, would ye ever be wanting Turlough?

– My friend lives there.

– In Turlough? And has she always lived so?

– No. She was married to a Turlough man. He died, and she went away, and now she's come back.

– Ah, would she ever be the ould lady in the caravan?

– How do you know?

– Ye cannot keep things quiet in this county.

We drove along. The land changed as we left the sea coast, air dulling and losing its iodine sting, land acquiring trees and shrubs from the slow, ripe atmosphere. Signs, pointing firmly down side roads, suggested grand towns, though I knew I'd find only a single pub selling bread, chocolate and wrinkled apples as well as the spirits, and there would be a house or two planted alongside. Villages I knew I'd never know, pubs I knew I'd never drink in, and the stories, Oh most of all the stories I'd never hear: the Civil War hero who had single-handedly chased the English back where they came from, and God they'd stay finally with their language and their religion (
Church of England, do ye mind, and not believing in the Pope!
); Pats Maloney, master of poteen distillation, and there was a day he tricked the Garda; Breda Ryan with the best legs in all the counties, and didn't yer fine Dublin man say so, and didn't he buy her the roses which sat on the bar in Cready's pub to prove it to all who'd see them? I sat in the tragedy of a road leading directly and never thinking to meander back into the hills beyond the bog or stopping in a momentary way to take the sun with a hamlet's oldest farmer.

The driver broke into my thoughts. Will ye have a pint in Castlebar?

– Yes, I'd like that.

We stopped in the dark, smallish public house, greeted by the red sign with its single glass of Guinness dead centre. There was the usual assortment of homey men: mended jackets, shaggy caps, gapped teeth and the startling eyes of a true lover.

– Ah, ye pour a good pint of stout, Michael Joe.

There was a way of drinking the pint. You cradled the glass a moment in your hands, your fingers stroking the curves and the wetness; you sniffed the creamy top, pressing your mouth ever so softly on the rim, just to have a suggestion of what you'd be knowing as the pint really settled. Then you'd lick your mouth and you'd be delighted. And the pint would be excellent. You'd never doubt that.

As I roved out on a bright May morning,
To view the flowers and meadows gay . . .

Someone's noble voice singing there at the bar, and the others listening in an honest respect.

If I married the lassie that had the land, my love,
It's that I'll rue until the day I die . . .

Then we were on the road to Ballina, we were exclaiming at the rich green of the hayfields and the contented munching cattle, and then it was Turlough: two pubs, Mrs. Loughran's and her mother's; Delia's store; and a row of houses, the one at the end crumbling to the day.

The man hummed.
I am a wee weaver . . .
Then: Yer sure ye won't come on to Ballina, just for the crack?

A pickup if I ever saw one. No. Shelagh's waiting.

She was there in the caravan up from Loughran's pub in the shadow of the round tower, there in the sunny window, waving. Her cats scattered.

– Ah, you're looking well. I've made scones and have the tea ready. You're welcome here. Take off the rucksack and come in!

The caravan was an enchanted place of Moroccan baskets, Wicklow weaving, a pie of Saint George's mushrooms gathered in the cool Charlebois wood, sorrel, wild garlic keeping cool in a glass, one wall of books (Krishnamurti,
Culpeper's Herbal
, the works of all the visionaries), candles in brass pots.

– What happened to the roof?

We were walking in the Charlebois wood and happened upon a splendid view of the old house, the hunting lodge, where Shelagh and her husband had lived in the long ago. The house, elegant though roofless, ancestral under the wry sun.

– Ah, there was such a wind and it took the roof and didn't it just land in a field fourteen miles away, shaking the farmer out of a year's growth. That was just after Gerald died and myself not a true Fitzwarren (only by marriage), and so I took up a few wee things and went to live in Tunisia. For the arthritis, bad even then.

– Oh.

And she continued through the forest, small and graceful in her age, pausing to touch the moss of the trees her son Edward had planted in the peaceful summers before his lover drove him mad. I remained at the edge of the view. Took off my shoes. Clenched in my toes the soft grass, earth, leaves, a startled purple-backed beetle. The rare sun entered the chapel of trees through the vaulted branches. Leaned my back on a stump, my spine fitting nicely into the pungent wood. Warm. Breathless. Thought: You could stay here always. Forget the stones of Inishbream, the obsessive stories of drowning. You have always loved trees, and it is the custom in this county to offer your lover a dowry grove, planted by your father or someone as generous. Thought: You'd never be found if you built your shelter in this forest she has declared a sanctuary for birds, foxes of the hills, badgers, anything wild and fond of burrows.

– And are you coming on, then? I've the tea laid out.

I walked upright out of the forest, and we drank tea on the porch of the breezy house, ate apples and biscuits.

– Did you like the old wood, then? I always think of it as Edward's wood. He loved it so. I wanted to bury him here, but I hadn't the money to bring his body back from London.

Thought: How lovely to be buried in the Charlebois earth, the ground soft with heron feathers, the night hollow with the chanting hooves. Not hard sea and that drumming rain.

I came away incoherent with her stories. The brother in Russia. (It was so odd in London to be handing out the anti-war pamphlets on Hyde Park Corner and to see him with his communist tracts on the opposite side, and when our father died and himself the eldest, didn't he sign over the fortune and the home to the Dublin trade-unions?) The mother, an astrologer in the wilds of Dunkineely, and I'd spent whole mornings in a book of the planets she'd left to Shelagh, smelling of age and brittle fingers and annotated in the margins with a faint spidery pencil. The brother in South Africa. (The young woman he lives with a widow, her husband having strangled himself with a nylon stocking in one of his queer perversions. Bind himself to the bed, he would, and then play with himself. Can you believe such a thing?) The son and the daughter, both gifted and both suicides, photographs of them as children, the full sensual lips of Edward. Years later, his arm on the tweed chest of his lover, in a suit, the casual scarf at his neck. The stories of the early Charlebois: hunters all with their feet by the fire cleaning their guns, the maids, the meals of venison and jugged hare, and good potatoes splitting their sides, all floury. And then the travelling, after her husband's death by water, long stays in Spain, Tunisia, the Channel Islands out of season. And the immediate dream of a cottage in Donegal, her birthplace, and the bracing air her blood still longed to.