The Fourth Island

by Sarah Tolmie

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  To L. Timmel Duchamp, with thanks

  The man was not from the island. No one recognized him, though his face was well preserved. He had been in the water a while. There he lay, just as dead as any Conneely or Mullen or Derrane. But he was not a man of Inis Mór. Nor was he from the other Aran islands, the middle or the east. No. The women knew this. He lay face up. The pattern on the sweater was as clear as day and not one of them knew who had knitted it. They even brought out old Aoife, who had the sight-memory. She came hobbling out to the beach and fingered it with her swollen hands.

  “Keep it,” she said, “when you bury him. Get it off him. May come that we learn of it, but not if it’s in the ground.”

  That made a scandal. To keep the things of a dead man, unburied or unburned. Bad luck, bad luck, may it be kept off. The men carried him into the village and asked Father Anselma. He said best to keep the body intact, as it was found; it was more seemly. Aoife said no and limped back to her fireside. There was a debate. Favour went with Aoife and not the priest. That happened sometimes.

  “How you going to pray for him if you don’t know his name?” she asked. “No other way to learn it. It’s writ there plain as plain if we find the woman who knit it.”

  “God knows his name,” said Father Anselma.

  “Bully for God,” said Aoife.

  They buried the stranger in consecrated ground, which was kind, as they hadn’t much of it. The joke on the islands is that all men there are gods, as they’ve made the earth they walk on. From seaweed, sand, shit and time, on the face of the bare rock. Fiat. But it’s not a joke for church. The stranger lay quiet in his plot, marked by a stone with a cross on it. From time to time, an unmarried woman, filled with sentiment, would lay a posy on it. Mary Mullen, in particular, was known to do this. She was a fine girl and it made the young men quite jealous. The dead have a pull to them.

  No one wanted the dead man’s sweater in the house. They had saved it but it was an uneasy object, not safe to keep. Aoife ended up keeping it. She was close to death anyway. Women came in ones and twos to talk it over. A few thought it looked O’Donnell, as if Tall Mary had made it, or one of her family on Inis Meáin. Some said maybe the Flahertys from the east island. Word went out to them over the months, as it always does. Fishermen’s wives from the other islands even came to see it. Nobody claimed it. The funny thing was, though, everybody said it looked familiar.

  The beautiful Mary Mullen came to see it. Two young men loitering over the net-mending saw her go in Aoife’s door. No one with sense does that work outdoors when there’s a fire inside. Yet a lot of men stood about outside with objects in their hands when Mary was out of a morning. Mary looked at the sweater thoughtfully. “It’s like it comes from a family whose name I’ve just forgotten. Like long-lost relatives,” she said.

  “D’ye think if I put that damn sweater on, Mary’d recognize me as a long-lost relative? A relative of the marrying kind?” asked the younger Jim Conneely, plaintively. He spoke for many.

  A bit of a war sprang up between Aoife and Father Anselma. Or a new skirmish in an old war. No one would expect the village wise woman, half a witch herself seemingly, and a learned man and a priest who had studied away on the continent for years and years to get on. People were none too certain that Aoife had ever been baptized. She was a law unto herself. And not, many respectable voices said, a good law. She was simply so old that the present generations in the town knew nothing about her origins, though there were many competing stories, none flattering. There had been a husband for a very short time—he who had built the cottage for her and cleared a field—but he had died. For all the years after, she had lived alone. The man was buried in the churchyard and she never visited his grave. She had little to do with the village, as a rule, except when people needed a cure. In that line, she was the authority for miles around. The money and gifts she earned for her remedies kept her in seed potatoes and kept her thatch mended. And in this way, of course, she also learned many of the town’s secrets. People blab when they are ill. Women need certain cures. Men need other cures. She was the one who could provide them. Father Anselma might be the one who could mend souls, but she was the one who could mend bodies.

  Aoife kept the dead man’s sweater and women kept going to see it. Father Anselma considered this grotesque, verging on idolatry. “There are relics all over these islands, and that isn’t one of them,” he was known to say. He sensed a cabal forming. It made him uneasy. Aoife herself dismissed his opinion. She dismissed Father Anselma entirely. This fact caused the priest considerable pain, and he knew exactly why it was.

  Eight years before, when he was newly arrived on Inis Mór, he, too, had fallen sick. In pain and trouble, he went to Aoife for a stomach remedy. She gave it to him. She was sly but civil. They briefly discussed his travels, and his reasons for coming to the island. He had made the terrible mistake of admitting to her that he had fled in the face of war. A hardness entered her eyes as he said this to her, and it never left. Father Anselma was ashamed. He upbraided himself for confessing such a thing to her. It had just been a moment of weakness because he had been feeling so poorly. But the damage was done. In a competition of shame, she would always have the upper hand of him. Shame is a vital weapon of priests. After all, they cannot use violence.

  Moreover, Aoife had never passed a word of it on. No breath of rumour ever reached him from the parish. She might speak slightingly of him, but that was all. That was bearable. The upshot of it was that he owed her. She spared him, for her own reasons, whatever they were.

  So, this war over the sweater and the impropriety of keeping it was a quiet one. It was confined to mutual sniping. But as it is with wars of this kind, people tended to take sides. Quietly. A certain coldness showed itself in the postures of some wives and mothers towards Father Anselma, even in church. Certain elders and men who considered themselves pillars of the community muttered more darkly than usual about Aoife and took care to be seen standing with Father Anselma on the church steps.

  * * *

  Every village has its whore. In Cill Rónáin at that time it was Nellie. Dirty Nellie. She was nobody’s widow. She had never been married at all. She lived rough and was filthy, out in all weather. She never spoke. People didn’t know if she was deaf or touched. She had run out of her parents’ house when she was eleven. Soon after, they died. People said, of the shame. Some said, of the pox. However it was, she was alone after that. She would stay in no houses, but she would beg. People gave her enough to get by. She was one of their own.

  Nellie took over Aoife’s house when the old woman died. They found her in it when they went to burn it. The custom was to burn the thatch and all right down to the stone so it was clean. Then after a decent time, it might be rebuilt and somebody else live in the place, if it was a good one.

  When they found her, Nellie was wearing the sweater. She stood silent in the doorway, defiant. The sweater hung down past her knees like a tunic. It was a man’s garment.

  A sudden rain came and put the torches
out. People stood wondering what to do. Nobody wanted to touch her. Eventually they let her be. They crossed themselves and went home. Father Anselma thought about objecting. Part of him wanted to see the old woman’s house burn, as an end to her recalcitrance. Then what the villagers considered a sanitary measure might also be the cremation of his secret shame. At the same time, he found himself disapproving of pisreogs such as this, which smacked of paganism. Fire made him nervous. People changed when fires were lit. He stood in silent debate with himself, looking at Nellie. It came to him that the cult of the sweater was at an end: no women would be coming to examine it now. Women had nothing to do with Nellie if they could help it. The charm was broken. He left with the crowd.

  So after that, Nellie lived there, in Aoife’s house. It never became her house. It was always Aoife’s house. That’s always what a man would say who went there to visit Nellie, if he said anything. That he was going to Aoife’s house. Nellie lived there like she lived in a cave. She lit no fires. She did not mend the thatch. After dark, it was dark. She had no fuel or candles.

  It was a matter of speculation in the village, whether or not she wore the dead man’s sweater when she was with men, but none of them would ever say.

  * * *

  And then suddenly, the sweater was gone, and Nellie with it. Nobody saw her go. Not on either road out of the village. Not over the fields. You could never sneak away over the fields, as you were forever climbing walls and could be seen for miles. She wasn’t seen on the beaches, and no body washed up. Nellie had always shunned the sea. She wouldn’t go near it even for shellfish.

  Yet she was gone. So, the men had to do whatever with whatever urges they had, and the stranger’s sweater and whatever it had said about the lost man’s mysterious kinfolk were out of reach of the women, seemingly forever. Not but it had lost somewhat of its lustre latterly in belonging to Nellie. Except that it turned out, fortunately, that the youngest O’Donnell girl of the village, Mairín, who also had the sight-memory, had seen it. She could trace the pattern of it out, every cable and circle and triangle perfect as it was, with a burnt stick, or in a patch of wet sand. And this was very valuable in after days. It might even be safe to say that it saved Cill Rónáin, if not all of Inis Mór.

  They burned the thatch of Aoife’s house that had been Nellie’s. It remained roofless for many years.

  * * *

  Life on Inis Mór has always been hard. Nobody moves to a windswept ledge of limestone at the farthest western edge of Europe, practically in the open Atlantic, for convenience. Irish people in modernity have been driven there by a series of brutal conquests of the mainland. Exactly why they lived there in the Bronze Age and Iron Age is a matter for conjecture. It is true that an island is easy to defend. Citizens of decadent Europe, of course, would question what there is in such a place that’s worth defending.

  First off, there is the ground. People throughout history and prehistory have defended the ground they live on. Hunter-gatherers protected their hunting grounds. Agriculturists protect their farmland, and they pour their desperate efforts into improving it with irrigation, fertilizer, crop rotation. Few of them, however, have had to make it. Earth. It is superabundant in other places. On the Aran isles, what little topsoil there is—a few inches at most—has been created by the men who farm it. Almost every spadeful of earth on Inis Mór—like Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr—was carried to its resting place by a man or a woman as a combination of sand and seaweed, with some fish and animal dung for good measure. They carried it inland from the ocean with barrows and spades and pitchforks and creels and their bare hands. They cut black weed and red weed and dozens of other weeds from the rocks with stone tools, bronze tools, then iron and steel tools. They carried thousands of pounds of sand and washed-up wrack from the foreshores all round the island. And then they waited for it to rot. While they did this, many of them starved. The animals they had brought from the mainland waited for grass. It is almost impossible to conceive how marginal it all was. Every pinch of soil on these islands is the product of human effort. The dirt is as precious as gold because it is an admixture of their hope and their despair.

  * * *

  Some eight months after the disappearance of Nellie, Jim Conneely the elder, him the uncle of the younger Jim Conneely who was known to hanker after the beautiful Mary Mullen, disappeared in his currach. This could not be said to be unusual, a man lost at the fishing, yet everyone felt that it was. Jim Conneely had been such a discontented man. People whispered that he had gone and killed himself, though they never said this in the hearing of the priest, and indeed the Conneelys had a most proper funeral for him after six months had gone by, though no body had turned up, not so much as a single pampootie. There was even a bit of a monument. Father Anselma said it was a cenotaph. That meant it was empty.

  “Empty, right enough. Just like Jim,” said the nephew. This was cruel, perhaps, but people agreed with him. The boy had admired his handsome uncle and namesake even though the man was always cold to him. Jim Conneely had been cold to everybody. He had been one of the best-looking men on the islands and had never made any good out of it. He left neither wife nor sons but many standing quarrels. At the time of his disappearance, he was twenty-seven years of age, well connected as to family, possessed land, boat and cattle, and had all his own teeth. He had absolutely no reason to be discontented. Yet he always had been. He was the kind of man who looked through people. Father Anselma was glad to be shot of him. He had not been a good Christian.

  “He’s off picking fights in heaven,” said his sister Annie, not the only woman who had loved him with little encouragement, “Or sailing. He’d never go if there was no sailing.” She laid flowers for him on his name day, on the empty monument, trying not to think where his pitiful body might be rotting and spinning now, lost.

  * * *

  Then they unexpectedly found it, the corpse of Jim Conneely. A full year after he’d left, fresh from the water, not more than two days dead. Well, well, some people said, it’s not more than you could expect if he’d run off to the mainland. Say he’s been working away there all this time and then drowned and the waves brought him home. Could be that, like as not. Why not? But it made them uneasy. One of the O’Donnells gazed down at the body and said, “Fetch Mairín.” He knelt down by Jim Conneely and looked hard at the sweater the man was wearing. To his eye it looked new. Rich wool, hardly worn. Made for him by some woman who loved him, and not one from Cill Rónáin.

  “Do you recognize that?” he asked Mairín when she came, gesturing to the front panels of the sweater.

  “Yes,” replied the girl. She found a pointed rock and drew a pattern in the sand with her eyes closed. It was a party trick of hers. The man knew it. He compared it to Jim Conneely’s fine sweater. The two were exactly the same.

  “It’s from the man in the graveyard,” said Mairín.

  “I thought so,” he said.

  So, that was something. What were they to do? Obviously, they ought to bury Conneely under his empty monument in the churchyard. That was the decent thing. But what of the foreign sweater? Should it go into the ground with him? They no longer had Aoife to advise. Wasn’t it asking for trouble to leave a drowned man’s garment unburied above the water line? They had kept the stranger’s sweater in the village for a year and had never learned anything further about its origins. Aoife had died in the house with it. Nellie had disappeared with it. A dead man’s garment is an ill-omened thing.

  They buried Jim Conneely in his sweater with the unknown pattern. They held another funeral for good measure. At the same time, saying nothing about it to anybody, the O’Donnell who had found the body on the beach, Arthur O’Donnell, killed a calf. He scraped the hide and tanned it and prepared it and gave it to his cousin Mairín. She sketched out the pattern on it, the unknown one that seemed so curiously familiar, and he pricked it out and inked it. Then he rolled up the vellum and hid it away.

  * * *

  Great stone-
heavers, the people of the Aran islands. Enormous stone forts are here from truly ancient days. Ramparts and earthworks and fields of huge rocks set upright in the ground to break up armies. They rear up and bite the air, huge and scattered teeth torn from the jaws of a dragon, thrown down by local kings in the manner of Cadmus. These rocks speak of constant war. What did they have to defend, these Theban lords out at the edge of the world? Something. Something that they kept behind deep concentric walls and fathoms and furlongs and funnels of stone, stone and more stone. Petrified war.

  So thought Father Anselma as he looked up at the ruins of Dún Aonghasa. He had got into the habit of making an annual pilgrimage to the heathen hill fort. Not a proper, Christian pilgrimage. A pilgrimage of inquiry. Or perhaps of resentment. A pilgrimage, howbeit, of some passion. He always went alone. The fact is, he was a bit of an antiquary. He had visited Roman ruins all over the Low Countries, musing on their significance. He had even been working on a book about them. Though the ruins out on these islands were not Roman. He didn’t know what they were, except that they had been made by masters. Rulers.

  From what titanic forces had these island chieftains sought to defend their wealth? The villagers of Cill Rónáin said, from the gods. The bad gods. Fomorians. Fir Bolc. No, thought Father Anselma, pacing around the monstrous walls. Nonsense. From other men.

  * * *

  A man who washes up on Inis Mór in a state as pristine as Jim Conneely can have hit the water no further off than Inis Oírr. He can’t have come from the mainland either in Galway or Clare. It’s too far and the seas are too rough. Or are we to believe he dropped from some monster ship out in the open ocean, heading for America, say? Such a thing is not likely. And then, who but islanders wear these particular sweaters? Now, wherever there are sheep, there are women knitting sweaters. But the fact is, they are all different. They are different in the Hebrides. In the Orkneys and Shetland. Both the women and the sheep. No doubt they are different again in the big lands, all over, in Ireland and England and so on, whatever. The fact remains that any knitter in any town on any of the isles, or on any farm, knows a sweater knit here, in the Arans. She can probably tell you who knit it. She will know the wool and the stitches and the patterns common to each district and family and parish. She can probably tell you what saint’s day it was finished on. And if she doesn’t know herself, she knows a woman who will. Run to the end of that chain and whatever it is, there’s no knowing it. So, when a woman tells you that this is undoubtedly an Aran sweater but that it was knit by a woman neither from Inis Mór nor Inis Meáin nor Inis Oírr, you are left with a riddle.