husks.
The first wind whistling down the chimney, dropping a blackened bird on the hearth, frightened me, and I began to see the wisdom in the words of a man whoâd told me as I gathered my rucksack from Festyâs boat: Yeâll be wanting a man to keep ye busy in that house when the storms come . The dog, uneasy as if the wind were a banshee, began a moaning as unearthly in its own way. That night we walked, the dog and I, under the cold moon and through the weaving gazes of the islanders. The dog ran fitfully, cautiously indicating his route and possessions, and it came to pass that the sand at morning tide was a calligraphy of his prints, that the stones of Inishbream were rank with his urine.
â What is your work, I asked.
â We are farmers of the sea and thin earth that covers these island stones.
I looked and saw only thistles and nettles, a few potatoes, no trees of corruptible fruit. I saw only thorns and a sea full of eels.
â What will I eat?
â He has given us herbs of the field.
And they were there, if youâd only notice, a funny weed you could chop as a salad, nettles for soup, wild garlic, a small secret bed of cress in the marshy ground of the long-ago bog.
Though I came wanting only the isolation of tides, it seemed inevitable to wed. He was the someone with the dead mother, his parents had lived in my house, coupled silently in the bed I slept in under the Sacred Heart, producing their eight and a few washed away. His mother swept the same floors with a similar broom, leaning partway through her work to watch the terns on the rocks; the door frame where I stood with binoculars was worn soft with her watching. Sean came, a dog or two winding around his feet, bringing gifts of turf or potatoes, as his father had and as his father had, all the days of the island since Cromwell. The dogs joined the elderly keener (silent in company); the front of the fire was a twitching complexity, a grunting tribe of sleepers. We did not talk much or well. Instead, he brought willow pots to mend, smelling sharply of lobsters and dogfish guts. Sat, twining nylon string through and around the woven wood, mending and renewing. I learned to knit the oily wool of the southern islands, making rough cables and designs in the silence. And a photograph of the parents hung stern-faced above the mantel.
â Would you like tea?
â I would.
A ceremony of necessity. His mother wept from her grave, expecting a cousin or local colour at least, and this one will never stay, O my grief! The father stared to sea from his grave. But the others were agreeable enough.
â Long as she works, thatâs all we could ask.
At first I dreamed of whales, heard them circling in the hollow of the sea. I saw grey whales, I remember, at Wickaninnish, a whole pod of them heading south to calve off Baja in the Sea of Cortez; there was only me on the beach to see. I woke and wanted to tell Sean, but heâd gone out to his lobster pots at dawn. When he came back, I told him, Sean, there were whales, I dreamed a host of them circling the island, it was lovely, as though they were telling us something important.
â Why would ye dream such a thing? Tis a quare business all right. We never see whales, though yer man with the fish van says a frame was found on the sands near Claddaghduff, all white it was in the sun, unskinned like an ancient currach. And that is all I know of the whales.
Case closed, shut tight as a cockle. Then he gravitated in the usual way to the shore to fill a bucket with sea water to store the lobsters in until collection day. Theyâd wait in the scullery, rattling their claws against the metal. I have never known such a world in all my life, where the caged sea frets and cannot bear to be absent from any part or thought of the day, where the boat remembers the living beast it took its skeleton from, the shape of leviathan locked at its core, where the megaliths brood and claim
The first wind whistling down the chimney, dropping a blackened bird on the hearth, frightened me, and I began to see the wisdom in the words of a man whoâd told me as I gathered my rucksack from Festyâs boat: Yeâll be wanting a man to keep ye busy in that house when the storms come . The dog, uneasy as if the wind were a banshee, began a moaning as unearthly in its own way. That night we walked, the dog and I, under the cold moon and through the weaving gazes of the islanders. The dog ran fitfully, cautiously indicating his route and possessions, and it came to pass that the sand at morning tide was a calligraphy of his prints, that the stones of Inishbream were rank with his urine.
â What is your work, I asked.
â We are farmers of the sea and thin earth that covers these island stones.
I looked and saw only thistles and nettles, a few potatoes, no trees of corruptible fruit. I saw only thorns and a sea full of eels.
â What will I eat?
â He has given us herbs of the field.
And they were there, if youâd only notice, a funny weed you could chop as a salad, nettles for soup, wild garlic, a small secret bed of cress in the marshy ground of the long-ago bog.
Though I came wanting only the isolation of tides, it seemed inevitable to wed. He was the someone with the dead mother, his parents had lived in my house, coupled silently in the bed I slept in under the Sacred Heart, producing their eight and a few washed away. His mother swept the same floors with a similar broom, leaning partway through her work to watch the terns on the rocks; the door frame where I stood with binoculars was worn soft with her watching. Sean came, a dog or two winding around his feet, bringing gifts of turf or potatoes, as his father had and as his father had, all the days of the island since Cromwell. The dogs joined the elderly keener (silent in company); the front of the fire was a twitching complexity, a grunting tribe of sleepers. We did not talk much or well. Instead, he brought willow pots to mend, smelling sharply of lobsters and dogfish guts. Sat, twining nylon string through and around the woven wood, mending and renewing. I learned to knit the oily wool of the southern islands, making rough cables and designs in the silence. And a photograph of the parents hung stern-faced above the mantel.
â Would you like tea?
â I would.
A ceremony of necessity. His mother wept from her grave, expecting a cousin or local colour at least, and this one will never stay, O my grief! The father stared to sea from his grave. But the others were agreeable enough.
â Long as she works, thatâs all we could ask.
At first I dreamed of whales, heard them circling in the hollow of the sea. I saw grey whales, I remember, at Wickaninnish, a whole pod of them heading south to calve off Baja in the Sea of Cortez; there was only me on the beach to see. I woke and wanted to tell Sean, but heâd gone out to his lobster pots at dawn. When he came back, I told him, Sean, there were whales, I dreamed a host of them circling the island, it was lovely, as though they were telling us something important.
â Why would ye dream such a thing? Tis a quare business all right. We never see whales, though yer man with the fish van says a frame was found on the sands near Claddaghduff, all white it was in the sun, unskinned like an ancient currach. And that is all I know of the whales.
Case closed, shut tight as a cockle. Then he gravitated in the usual way to the shore to fill a bucket with sea water to store the lobsters in until collection day. Theyâd wait in the scullery, rattling their claws against the metal. I have never known such a world in all my life, where the caged sea frets and cannot bear to be absent from any part or thought of the day, where the boat remembers the living beast it took its skeleton from, the shape of leviathan locked at its core, where the megaliths brood and claim
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