remember the story of the Irish children at the lighthouse?”
My mother eagerly answered this question. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Indeed I do. It was Stanley’s favourite, I think, though he would only tell it when he was good and ready to.”
The first in the litany of lighthouses, or at least the first according to my not always accurate uncle, was situated on one of the two Skellig Islands that rise like temples fromthe sea off the most western tip of the south of Ireland. Everything about this lighthouse was improbable and exaggerated: its elevated position, the constant rain, the near impossibility of its construction, or of even landing boats filled with building materials on the island, the tortuous climb up the cliffs carrying cut stone, wrought iron, and glass. And then there was the monstrous wind that would pluck workers, as if they were insects, from the rising tower and throw them either onto the rocks below or into the sea from which their bodies were never recovered.
But there had been a precedent for this astounding feat of engineering. During the sixth century, on the highest peak of the landward side of the island, a small group of self-punishing monks had set up a colony. Surely, my uncle had said, the first generation of these holy men would have been entirely worn out and used up in the task of carving the steps for the three separate staircases, one of six hundred steps, out of the steep rockface that led to their monastic enclosure: a gathering of a half-dozen corbelled, beehive-shaped huts, a small medieval priory, an oratory, two wells, and some stone basins dug out of the same rockface to collect rainwater. There was also, of course, a graveyard, consisting of a half-dozen rough stone crosses.
My uncle took great pleasure at the thought of his forebear, Tim Butler, the one he named the dog after, making tea from the water he collected from the monks’ stone basins. No mention at all was made, however, of his wife,who was undoubtedly washing clothes, bathing babies, cooking or cleaning with the water he called “the heavenly gift.” To this day, when I think of the man the people of Kerry called Butler the Keeper, I imagine a family subsisting on tea while unimaginable winds roared around them. The supply boat from Port Magee would rarely, if ever, be able to land, and the ghosts of the first generation of monks would undoubtedly be blowing around the tower, sackcloths flapping and bones rattling in the gale.
Every second year, a mainland keeper would offer to take up the post so that Keeper Butler and his family could get back to Butler’s Court for Christmas, and each time the second year came around, the weather would cancel that possibility with winds of increasing velocity. And Keeper Butler would have wanted to get back, I would think, hoping to stake out at least a bit of symbolic territory in that quite possibly fictional place because, as my uncle said, only one son could inherit the land and Keeper Butler was not that son. He was the bifurcating one.
Even as a child I remember thinking that I had been genetically affected by the serial division among my ancestors. The entirety of my early life was bisected by seasons. In the autumn, winter, and spring, my mother and I lived in the city, in the modest, square brick house that my father had bought and thankfully paid for before he died. But my true sense of home and belonging was activated only in summer when my mother and I settled into this farmhouse.I wonder now whether Butler the Light (a name given to Keeper Butler by the fishermen of Kerry) would have been visited by this same sense of belonging had he been able to “get off the rock” and return, even briefly, to the green fields of Butler’s Court? Or was he fully owned by the sea and the wind and perhaps also by the phantom monks?
What eventually liberated him from this ownership, if indeed it existed, was a string of escalating tragedies of such dimension that no man
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