Inishbream

  Other books by Theresa Kishkan

  FICTION

  Sisters of Grass

  POETRY

  Arranging the Gallery

  Ikons of the Hunt

  I Thought I Could See Africa

  Morning Glory

  Black Cup

  ESSAYS

  Red Laredo Boots

  Copyright © Theresa Kishkan, 1999, 2001.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any requests for photocopying of any part of this book should be directed in writing to the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published in 1999 in a special limited edition by Barbarian Press.

  Inishbream is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

  Edited by Crispin Elsted and Laurel Boone.

  Wood engravings by John DePol.

  Book design by Ryan Astle.

  Printed in Canada by Transcontinental

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Kishkan, Theresa, 1955-

  Inishbream (electronic resource)

  Electronic monograph in ePub format.

  Issued also in print format, 2nd ed.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-715-6

  I. Title.

  PS8571.I7516 2001 C813’.54 C2001-900132

  Published with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program, and the New Brunswick Culture and Sports Secretariat.

  Goose Lane Editions

  Suite 330, 500 Beaverbrook Court

  Fredericton, NB

  Canada E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For Jeremy Shanahan

  CONTENTS

  An Invocation to Saint Brendan

  The Book of the Generations

  The Green Fields of Canada

  The Book of the Chronicles

  Irish Mist

  The Brand

  A Gale From the West

  Sea Area Forecast

  Remembering Winter

  Patterns of Evolution

  Lament for Christy King

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  AN INVOCATION TO SAINT BRENDAN

  THEY EXIST ON THE ROUTE of great migrations. From high points on their island they can observe the plants, fish, birds and the human wanderers, all moving westward to some dreamed land. The northern diver, tired of flight, rests on the waves; the currents carry kelp aloft. These will all arrive on some far shore, a clump of themselves in a weary tangle.

  And Brendan, you desired to leave parents and motherland, you set forth in a skin-covered craft, the hull formed and measured by your body, length of your forearms, distances between your knuckles, width of your palms. Notched sticks were employed. Your boatswain, a seabird, a black-footed albatross; your guide and your god, the polestar.

  And the fishermen, Brendan, they were excited, unable to contain themselves. They relayed the following information: It was a greatish currach, flying two sails as they did long ago, and by God it was a sight to behold, them ladeens aboard talking of a journey over the wild ould Atlantic, past the Faeroes and Greenland, and with luck they’ll arrive at a new land, if ye can believe such a thing!

  You have shown them the guidance of the Great Bear and Orion (beloved of moony Artemis and the brightest constellation). These fishermen are your fair sons, fathered by your outpouring love for the old whore-sea and all skills of navigation.

  THE BOOK OF GENERATIONS

  I HAD NOT KNOWN about the islands. I’d thought the land ended suddenly and completely, the way land will, losing itself to the sea, and then only cold water and swimming things travelling the long miles to the banks of Newfoundland.

  So I’d no thoughts of staying. The coast itself welcomed those on journeys, provided meals of brown bread and stout, but it did not gladly entertain the idea of settlers and refused growth of any nature. And it offered no empty houses, just shells of granite rock, roofless and claimed by birds, a few renegade badgers, some travelling folk who could stretch canvas temporarily over the tops to keep out a disapproving sky, a rain that would never stop. For no one approved in heart of the tinkers, nor of a wayfarer, stooped with a pack and a storyteller in my own small right.

  No one told me that off the coastline existed a riddle of landforms, mysterious with oratories, old boats you’d dream to fix, protected species of birds, beasts, and sometimes poets who incanted through the days in stone houses of the ancestors.

  It was a vet who’d given me a ride, his destination the smug town at the extremity of Connemara.

  – You’re looking for somewhere to live? Mostly you’ll find only holiday rentals, and you’ll pay very dear. But why don’t you try the islands, or at least try Inishbream. It’s close.

  It was. You could see it from the Sky Road when you knew where to look. Just a few visible houses, the lichen-growers, and not a lighthouse to be seen, only a lanky protective Mother of Jesus, whitewashed yearly by a fool who’d go, and the rocks. There is a legend told of the Children of Lir: they rested on those rocks in the form of swans. And years before or later, Saint Brendan the Navigator sailed past in a currach of skins, smeared with animal grease to keep out a threatening sea because everyone knows a duck will not be cold or pulled under when the oil is still on its feathers.

  I remember there was not a ferry, the island too small for a regular schedule and a dock of large proportions, the necessity of a hired captain and a Bord Failte office with maps and brochures (though you’d find one in the town, with a telex that never functioned). The vet drove me to the strand, and I waited where the land ended, on the edge of a typical field defined by stone walls, no sense of geometry, shapes awry and scandalous.

  And where the field ended, the stones began an untidy descent to the sea. The man who was Festy Kenneally (for Fechian, saint of the buried chapel on Omey Strand) was riding the tide in, the bottom of the currach scraping. I went to meet him, and I helped him pull the craft across the strand, anchoring it finally with heavy rocks, laying the oars to rest.

  – May I ride across with you?

  – I must first be bringing the turf down.

  We did that, brought down sacks of sweet fuel, the fruits of several weeks’ labour on the bog and delivered by Miceal O’Gorman, an Eyrephort farmer with a van. Smelling the turf, I remembered riding down the Westport road past the acres of acrid earth, wondering at the crops of such a place.

  – Do you burn the earth?

  – We do.

  My arrival startled no one. There was the house of someone’s dead mother, was there not, and it should be lived in, with the roof a new one. A woman yet! — but a lover of boats and sea, and she can pull the ould currach like a man, Festy assured them after we’d rowed in tandem to the quay, myself hiding the blisters. We made the boat fast, and then I was shown the house.

  It faced north, the northern sea, marred only by lichens and the slow passage of snails over the damp wall. There were dead ashes on the hearth. Three calves who lived permanently out the door. An elderly, confused dog who smelled the special smell of burning turf in an abandoned chimney, who was lured by it, and who claimed me. A broom of broken corn 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 who’d told me as I gathered my rucksack f
rom Festy’s boat: Ye’ll 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.

  – What is your work, I asked.

  – 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.

  – What will I eat?

  – He has given us herbs of the field.

  And they were there, if you’d 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.

  – Would you like tea?

  – 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.

  – Long as she works, that’s 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 he’d 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.

  – 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. They’d 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 island.

  I spent a good long time walking the shore. I wanted to discover something. Mairtin O’Malley found an explosive on the west beach, and there was a notice on it saying: do not touch. notify authorities immediately. He phoned from the post office, all the others there and listening, speculating about the possibility of the IRA. Was there not a car hidden in a turf pile on the wild boreen across the bog linking Oughterard to the Westport road, and didn’t yer woman send something from every pint to the boys in the north? The Garda came by special launch and took the thing away. He wore gloves and touched it first with a broom. Mairtin felt cheated, and his children were angry.

  – Ye mean ye let him just take it?

  – Aye.

  I saw things I could not carry: a boulder pale green with algae and scrolled with lichen; a pool so small you could cover it with your hands, but filled to the brim with little weeds and no doubt amoebas; the long path of sunlight leading to the mainland. But I’ve never found anything worth keeping in my life. The pebbles I take become dry and dull (Whatever did ye choose that one for?), the grey thing a distant cousin of a jewel seen in wet sand. The sticks must be burned, no matter that they lie on the shore like reptiles sniffing the wind. Once, when I lived near the Pacific, I saw the whales go by, enormous and dignified. No one else was there to see them. But you cannot display or prove a memory.

  This is the way the generations begin. There weren’t trees to link a family to, you could say they were all forced from the crevices of stone like crabs brought to the light. Miceal Walsh the elder, possessor of a tin whistle, a head full of airs, “Finnegan’s Wake” and “Flanagan’s Ball.” Miceal the younger, husband to Margaret so long in the grave (barren-wombed as she was), husband to Bridie. Bridie Walsh, mother of six named for the saints, bare-footed, the youngest still in the red petticoats of the islands.

  – It is so the faeries will not know whether they are male child or female and will be too confused to take one so.

  – Oh.

  And there was Sean, son of Padraig and Moragh, brother to the seven. Padraig, deceased but alive in the twilight memories; Moragh, deceased; the seven now departed to the marriage beds of a southerner, a northerner, a traitor and a slut. That accounts for four, and no one talked about the remainder.

  Mairtin the father. Mairtin the son, half-witted but a visionary. Brother to Triona, Declan, Paddy Joe. Hawk-nosed brother to the petrel, the grey goose.

  – Does Mairtin Og ever talk?

  – And sure what would he say? Where he’s been to tell us or done to spin to a tale worth our listening?

  Festy Kenneally, a trammel-netter, a drifter on tides, a distiller, with bones for the weather and a taste for the poteen. Kathleen Clancy, a bearded virgin, possessive of a butter churn, a wireless. Her competition, the crone, professional keener and something of an oracle. And the sundry, an assortment of sainted children, men of the sea’s kin, the dogs, the knitters, a healer, the quiet breeding seals.

  THE GREEN FIELDS OF CANADA

  THE HOUSE WHERE THE DROWNED MAN lived has been empty four winters. Before I ever came, they nailed the door shut, boarded the windows. All the whitewash has flaked, has gone to the wind.

  I am told again and again of the tragedy, its impact.

  His was the only body not found. The other three washed up on strands from Clifden to Aughrusmore, carried in the current north or south. I did not see them, I lived somewhere else then, but I know where they are now: in simple pine boxes sunk deep into earth on the island’s western reach. The crosses are Celtic, are granite, are engraved with their names.

  But the man whose body knows no rest. He is somewhere in the passage between island and mainland. After storms I half expect to see him on the rocks below my house. I found a seal there once, cold and alone and rotting in the sun.

  I have walked by his house late in the night. There are never lights, and so I know the sea keeps him even then, will not let him dry by the hearth (it has been stone cold so long), will not let him sleep (he will have circles of fatigue under his eyes).

  I have been ferried across to the island at midnight. The water has been silent and black, the oars cutting deep and breaking phosphorescence. I imagined him following us, wanting only to be seen and drawn up, wanting to be washed clean of sea moss and brine.

  The other three wait for him there in their beds on the western point. They wonder why he has been so long.

&nbs
p; – Will ye never come home, never come home?

  Miceal plays to the twilight, a hunched old piper. His sad notes haunt the island, and slowly doors open. We all come out to stand, hands on the stone walls, our bones echoing the tin whistle’s quavering, married to wind and lyric of terns. Miceal wakes the moon from her sleep in the ocean. He brings home the night-swimming fish, the last boat of the day.

  The island is a boneyard in its own way. Bullocks, in pieces on the dunes, lie hidden or else reveal themselves to walkers: a fine slab of clavicle, a fragment of tooth. What I find, I line along the mantel or upon the windowsills. All day they are silent and ornamental. At night they are given flesh and form, become populations of the dark, searching for food or a mate. Storm petrels, their beautiful claws. An otter.

  And the fishermen are careful with all bones of the catch. To burn them or to allow dogs to gnaw the brittle spines would bring bad luck. I have told Sean stories about the rivers full of salmon on the northwest coast of Canada, and he does not think it strange that those fishermen bless the ribs as they toss them to the breeding streams.

  – And do new ones grow from the bones so?

  – I think so.

  And I tell him a salmon song: Hung-e, tunga, kwul-lo, kain-tla, ta-wit, shin-kin, is-la, the eye of your knee knows the coming of spring. Our own knees pull us to the quay, and we lay out the mackerel nets, we mend them.

  In the beginning, the other fishermen were afraid I would bring bad luck by coming to the fishing ground. Women didn’t and that was that. For months I waited daily, with the other women though not one of them, for the boats to return. Sean wore a cross on his neck, blessed with holy water by the crone who lives in the final house, her windows facing west. And I waited, each day going on forever, the sea refusing the vision of return. Then two men died in a boat off Lettergesh, the boat sinking and the men drowning with their hands still holding the oars. Lettergesh, only a few women remaining, huddled back into the mountains after the wake, small with loss, unable to forget.