or woman could possibly retain a sense of duty, never mind a fondness for the environment that was responsible for causing them.
First, the light that Keeper Butler had so faithfully kept burning was smashed by a two-hundred-foot rogue wave just at the moment when he had finished climbing the tower’s hundred steps to inspect it. A hailstorm of glass shards descended on him and entered his flesh wherever it could, as well as his hair, his tongue and gums, and one bright eye from which he was never able to see again. Fortunately, the layers of wool and oilcloth that were required for warmth, or even for survival, on the island prevented the penetration of vital organs, and he was able to stumble back down the stairs and into the arms of his terrified wife, who spent the next two days plucking splinters from his head and mouth and hands.
A new light was duly and without doubt riskily delivered and installed, and Butler the Eye, as the mainlanders now called him, returned to his duties. By now he had twosons, children so frequently storm-stayed inside the keeper’s cottage that they would cry to be outdoors the minute the wind abated even marginally or when a stray shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds. Six and eight years old, they played most often in the one small startlingly green meadow called Christ’s Saddle, which the monks a thousand years before had probably made by hand with layers and layers of seaweed in order to support a cow, a donkey, and a goat, and which, surrounded by sloping rock, provided as much outdoor shelter as could be hoped for on the island. How did they play? What kind of island games were invented by them? These were the kinds of questions my uncle would ask us when we were bored or whining for some new toy or for the television. “C’mon,” he would say, “those kids out on the Skelligs had absolutely no toys, and weather was their only television.” The weather indeed! What kind of unusual games did absorb them, I wonder, before they heard the extreme howl of the fatal wind that tossed them both out of that man-made meadow and into the waves below? “Like coins into a fountain,” my uncle said, relishing the metaphor.
But they were not tossed so far that their bodies were unrecoverable, and poor Butler the Eye found his sons bumping up against the shore the following day as he made a frantic tour of the island. First one – the eight-year-old, my uncle said, making the story more precise than it needed to be – and then the other. Only a hundred yardsapart, they seemed unharmed, their bodies free of mutilation, their eyes staring.
Both children were buried in the monks’ graveyard, the ground of which had not been opened for centuries, and after the burial Keeper Butler wrote a letter to the Commissioners of Irish Lights, requesting a transfer to the mainland. This transfer was accomplished and Butler the Eye lived long enough to father two more sons, who, like their father, became lighthouse-keepers: one on the tamer and much larger Kerry Island of Valentia, the other on the relatively serene east coast of Ireland. The son of the Valentia resident would, in turn, become the American keeper who eventually migrated far enough north to staff the lighthouse at what is now called Sanctuary Point.
But for me, the story, thrilling as it was, really began with the burial of those island boys in the monks’ graveyard. As a child I developed the theory, though this was never suggested by my uncle, that those children would have become ghosts almost immediately in such surroundings and that they would have been instructed in the rights and obligations of the spirit world by their neighbours, the shades of the monks. I imagined, or tried to imagine, what shape their conversations might take and whether as ghosts the whole company might be affected by the wind. Sometimes I still dream of flapping sackcloth and shards of glass.
Once, during that last summer, I told Teo the story
First, the light that Keeper Butler had so faithfully kept burning was smashed by a two-hundred-foot rogue wave just at the moment when he had finished climbing the tower’s hundred steps to inspect it. A hailstorm of glass shards descended on him and entered his flesh wherever it could, as well as his hair, his tongue and gums, and one bright eye from which he was never able to see again. Fortunately, the layers of wool and oilcloth that were required for warmth, or even for survival, on the island prevented the penetration of vital organs, and he was able to stumble back down the stairs and into the arms of his terrified wife, who spent the next two days plucking splinters from his head and mouth and hands.
A new light was duly and without doubt riskily delivered and installed, and Butler the Eye, as the mainlanders now called him, returned to his duties. By now he had twosons, children so frequently storm-stayed inside the keeper’s cottage that they would cry to be outdoors the minute the wind abated even marginally or when a stray shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds. Six and eight years old, they played most often in the one small startlingly green meadow called Christ’s Saddle, which the monks a thousand years before had probably made by hand with layers and layers of seaweed in order to support a cow, a donkey, and a goat, and which, surrounded by sloping rock, provided as much outdoor shelter as could be hoped for on the island. How did they play? What kind of island games were invented by them? These were the kinds of questions my uncle would ask us when we were bored or whining for some new toy or for the television. “C’mon,” he would say, “those kids out on the Skelligs had absolutely no toys, and weather was their only television.” The weather indeed! What kind of unusual games did absorb them, I wonder, before they heard the extreme howl of the fatal wind that tossed them both out of that man-made meadow and into the waves below? “Like coins into a fountain,” my uncle said, relishing the metaphor.
But they were not tossed so far that their bodies were unrecoverable, and poor Butler the Eye found his sons bumping up against the shore the following day as he made a frantic tour of the island. First one – the eight-year-old, my uncle said, making the story more precise than it needed to be – and then the other. Only a hundred yardsapart, they seemed unharmed, their bodies free of mutilation, their eyes staring.
Both children were buried in the monks’ graveyard, the ground of which had not been opened for centuries, and after the burial Keeper Butler wrote a letter to the Commissioners of Irish Lights, requesting a transfer to the mainland. This transfer was accomplished and Butler the Eye lived long enough to father two more sons, who, like their father, became lighthouse-keepers: one on the tamer and much larger Kerry Island of Valentia, the other on the relatively serene east coast of Ireland. The son of the Valentia resident would, in turn, become the American keeper who eventually migrated far enough north to staff the lighthouse at what is now called Sanctuary Point.
But for me, the story, thrilling as it was, really began with the burial of those island boys in the monks’ graveyard. As a child I developed the theory, though this was never suggested by my uncle, that those children would have become ghosts almost immediately in such surroundings and that they would have been instructed in the rights and obligations of the spirit world by their neighbours, the shades of the monks. I imagined, or tried to imagine, what shape their conversations might take and whether as ghosts the whole company might be affected by the wind. Sometimes I still dream of flapping sackcloth and shards of glass.
Once, during that last summer, I told Teo the story
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