Inishbream (7 page)

It is written that when the grey geese fly over the promised grave of a man, he will shiver. During that winter on Inishbream, the world's entire population of geese, all colours, moved in constant untiring circles over my grave.

Yet milder weather finally came. Not quickly or with a tremendous rising of the temperatures, so that you'd forget in a moment all the hours of ice and the beginnings of chilblains. No. But there'd be a day when all the layers seemed too many, and you'd remove one accordingly. Never the oilskin; you were never trusting enough for that, but maybe one jersey. Then another day, another layer, and so on. And there you were, a simple shirt and trousers and pale sun fine on your face and maybe your toes if you'd gone that far.

The seals returned to Carrickarona, an alchemy of air, water and grey rock creating them in such great numbers that the twilight was filled with their barking. The island cows began to drop their calves one by one in the lengthening days, and their milk was rich with the abundance of clover and buttercups they'd been feeding on.

The mended nets and pots were ready for any goers. The weather was still too cool to be worth the trying for lobsters, but on a windy night you could put out nets and be sure of a few fat salmon. It was good to be on the water. I'd forgotten the way the seabirds called the morning alive like a craggy hymn, I'd forgotten the beauty of green mesh shoaling through the water as the nets were lowered and the stone weights led them far below.

The island was a softer home now that the flowers were out and the business of fishing was underway. The calves capered on their stilty legs behind the crumbling walls and the cows were proud in their aspect, all but Festy's cow with her terrible loss, the calf in its bag of blue membrane left coldly for the dogs.

PATTERNS OF EVOLUTION

LISTEN
. I want to say that everything was all right in the spring, that the brown geraniums floated in on the tide, miraculously blooming, that the bruised cottage healed white in the sun. I want to tell you that the drowned man washed up, maybe as a changeling or a merman but himself inside.

But miracles happen in their own way, are not willed or dreamed in the hard hours. They come out of the sky or the heart, unexpected and awesome as the will of God.

The truth is, I'd have left with the tinker if I thought it would help, desire the halter and a setting free. I'd have migrated with the geese if I'd had the supple wings. Now I wanted to leave alone, forever and completely.

Everyone was excited about the new houses.
Running water, indoor toilets! Can ye imagine . . . And we'll not be cut off in the winter, we can shop whenever we fancy . . .

– Well, yer man in charge promises them for September.

– Ah, then the children can start the year in the town school so.

They imagined a future behind an elegance of sheer curtains (
from Galway, mind ye, and three quid a pair!
), each window identical, and inside, hot water, not the blessed nuisance of running to the well and heating kettles for the washing. There'd be clotheslines, too, and there'd not be the bother of drying on the stone walls, sleeves and hems anchored by island granite. The children would learn their lessons as was proper, inside, and they'd not be at the whim of a first-year trainee who would lead them down the lane to the tidal pools or along the dunes to identify each bloom, the Gaelic names falling from their tongues like water.

I worried about the old men, the ones who never left the island, not even for the cattle fair. I wondered how the future would treat them when they were settled into the bungalows miles from each other and a couple in plain view of Inishbream. I wanted to believe that they'd be lonely off the rock they'd been born on and rooted to over the centuries in a long hereditary way. I hoped they'd find the loss too unbearable to live with, that they'd return unceremoniously, perhaps in the night, rowing home over the mussel-black sea. But probably they'd survive and would grow even older without the distorting knots to their joints that the island arthritis bequeathed them.

And I will say, although I wanted to leave sometimes so badly my throat ached and my heart tugged at its contrary tethers, I did want the islanders to remain, selfish as it may be. I wanted to know that somewhere a place existed outside the rhythm of life as we know it, peculiar to its geography, dependent on weather and moving in time to an unheard bodrhan. I read books about islands, needing to clarify or confirm my belief in the holiness of isolated land:

The patterns of evolution on islands usually dictate that insular organisms be overtaken. A strong atmosphere of vulnerability broods over them. The fact that island beings are not weedy, do not predominate, and are not in the grist of commerce and domestication does not mean that they are mere curiosities. They are part of the entire pattern of life on earth, and without them, the entire pattern would be incomplete, even meaningless.

Yes, I said, yes. And I was afraid.

That summer had a temporary holiday feeling to it. There was no need to make fodder for the coming winter out of sparse dry grass, scything it down, raking it, pulling net over the mounds finally in deference to the wind and planting a ring of stones around each to hold it. It was likely most of the cattle would be sold in the summer sales because the Council plots were too small to provide much graze. The school was not whitewashed, the family sequence of duty broken that once, then forever. And the turf was brought over in small quantities, most of it waiting on the bog to be brought to the new houses.

One night on the wireless there was a documentary about an island to the south that was slowly losing its inhabitants to the mainland. One or two families were left. They were interviewed, the announcer asking questions about island life, individual histories, and in the silences between words, the sound was of wind incanting, terns mewing, breaking waves on the rocky perimeter.

– I'd say their plight was very like ours now. Did ye hear yer man telling about the turf shortages and the terrible problems they had getting a doctor for the sick, a priest for the dying, so that they may go to earth settled, like?

– Aye, and trying to grow yer potatoes in a soil God cursed from the beginning.

I remembered lonely birds in a gale, knew inside the brutality of wind when you were at its horrid, belligerent mercy, but I thought how silent life on any earth would be without its constant punctuation of the day.

– Have ye a story this night that ye can tell to pass the hours?

– I haven't. You tell one.

– Well, now. All I can think for the telling is yer man in Mweenish who trains the sheepdogs, and didn't a Mayo man arrange to buy one. So he collects the beast and brings it home, I don't know, to Achill or Newport. That evening, he takes it out to bring in the sheep. Here's the dog, looking at the man like he's an eejit, waiting for orders, and yer man is telling the beast over and over what he wants him to do. The dog, he thinks, is deaf. So he takes him all the way back to Mweenish and tells the breeder. And do ye know what was wrong?

– No, what?

– The dog knew only the Irish, coming from Mweenish like, and yer man was giving out to him in English.

– Couldn't the man speak Irish then?

– Not a word, or maybe just one. But there. Someone else got the dog who could speak Irish and would, and the Mayo lad got another beast trained to the English.

But what if he liked the dog, I thought to myself.

There were always stories. I liked to hear about the time the lads climbed the cliffs of High Island to shoot a Christmas goose, though it wasn't
my
year. Or about Joe Mulloy on Inishturk, whose hands were so large they spanned the width of an accordion. Or the building of the film star's house above Eyrephort, out of rock, and himself bringing beer to the workers. I liked to think of Stephen Clancy painting the navigational Mother of Jesus each spring so she'd stand out for the safety of all sailors.
Mother of Christ, star of the sea, pray for the wanderer, pray for me.
And there were tales of the children now departed, their letters shared in the evenings and their occasional visits, from London or Boston or even Dublin, anticipated for months. Years, some of them.

I liked the story about the seal who came up in the trammel net, dead of course, but his feasting mouth still full of the brilliant back of a salmon. Of the swans on Omey Strand who'd walk the sand like holidaymakers. And then the same strand under the harvest moon, shadowed by the twisting embrace of the silverfish diggers, and then a smell all over Connemara of the frying catch. Then there were the ghosts seen by one at a time and sworn to in the names of the Father and Son (the moaning of the drowned man down by the shore). There were the wakes and the weddings, made spectacular by poteen.

The crone remembered the days when the turf was known all over the west for the fine burning you could expect of it.
Those hookers would come in to the quay from Galway or Barna, and they'd load the turf in. Ye could never cut and foot enough, they'd be wanting so much. Now yer lucky to find an ould scraw wedged there where once was the finest bog ever. Ah, tis a pity and a sorrow to ourselves that we cannot provide our own turf any longer.

There'd be a story at any hour when you could locate two or more people together and at leisure, on the boreen, in a kitchen or enjoying a comfortable pipe after the last net had been untangled and laid to rest over the wall. My favourite time of the day was twilight, when Miceal would play his tin whistle to the stones and the sea and whoever would listen.

– Would you please play the Breton piece?

– Aye.

It seemed that even the stupid blind wind would subside when Miceal's bent fingers jigged over the length of the whistle, and instead of its hollow, monotonous tones there'd be the sweet, sad airs of the Celtic heart.

Someone else wanted reels or “The Raggle Taggle Gypsies.” We listened till the cows came home. When it darkened, you could see the frail lights begin to bloom on Bream and Turk and the occasional headlamps of evening cars on the Sky Road. The summer people would drive to the mainland viewpoint and would park, casting their beams over Mannin Bay and out to the islands. They'd see the pale gaslight or candlelight smudging the dark of the archipelago and the long piercing flash of Slyne Head, the keepers over each season attentive to craft warnings and the forecasting of gales. And if they stepped out of their cars, they'd hear the mourning donkeys and the last notes of “The Woman of the House.”

The islanders said they'd never known a wetter summer, and wet it was, the sun only showing its face once in a blue moon and a weak sun at that, waterlogged in an earth-bound sky.

It rained for days at a time. The nettles flourished. The roof leaked in a place or two, and you could not sleep some nights for the steady drumming of rain on the slates, then the water ringing into tin pans underneath. It was a seven days' wonder that the turf burned at all.

When it didn't rain, there was mist, grey and soft on your face and so thick you would swear if need be that there was no mainland at all, only the edges of the island and the image of your own hand in front of your face.

A strange bird on the byre one morning. I asked, What kind of bird is that?