by Sarah Tolmie
Meg started a kitchen garden. She walled it to keep out the sheep. Her ram lamb, Werther, was a feisty one. He leapt her walls continually, so she had to keep building them higher. She drafted in help from children and any other willing hands for miles around. Werther nearly killed himself trying to climb the walls when they got too tall to jump. Meg spent a goodly amount of time cleaning out wounds in his spindly legs. He was a determined cabbage fancier.
Jim Conneely helped her out a lot with the garden walls. He also showed her a few things about handling sheep. Meg had experience with poultry and cows—their farm in Huntington had had a dairy once—but not sheep. They were even stupider than she had expected. Werther was endearing, though. “Little idiot,” said Jim one day, slinging the lamb across his back and carrying him out of the garden for the fourth time as the walls were building. “He could break his neck. Sheep are actually capable of dying of stupidity.”
Meg laughed, but then she said, “So are men. I saw many do just that. It was horrible, really.”
“In the war?’ asked Jim, startled.
“There’s nothing stupider than men at war,” said Meg, “or nothing that I’ve seen, at least. Everybody’s witless most of the time. Drunk or terrified. Sick half to death, or raving. Following orders that make no sense. Or giving them.”
“Sure and that’s not very dignified,” said Jim, feeling affronted on behalf of his sex in their martial endeavours and then remembering that she was talking about Englishmen, for whose dignity he was not supposed to care.
“Dignity’s the first thing to go on a campaign,” said Meg, “what with people so jammed up together. Sleeping in tents and haystacks. Food always too hot or too cold and never anything to carry it in. Crowded latrines. Finding a peaceful place to take a shit was enough to thank God on.”
“Not very heroic,” said Jim.
“Not very,” agreed Meg.
* * *
Nellie’s disease, whatever it was that had caused her such killing pain, vanished on Inis Caillte. So did the disease of her deafness. She did not miss the one but often she missed the other. She had not thought of deafness as a disease, anyway. It was simply how she was, and correspondingly how the world was. Occasionally, she longed for that world again. The bellowing of cattle, the fierce sound of the wind at night, and, truth be told, the nattering of some of the Flaherty women, made her wish for the world of unhearing. That world is very vivid but it comes at you in different ways and at differing rates. She remembered it, overall, as slower. But it could be that it was the slowness of memory she recalled rather than slow experience. She remembered being able to watch things unfold with a tremendous attention—a beetle traversing a leaf, say—that she now found hard to recapture. The endless bath of sound was distracting. She wondered how people bore it. How, for example, had they been able to stand it when they were babies? Maybe that was why babies spent so much of their time crying. But then they had to listen to themselves cry, too. It was a puzzle.
The murderous pain she did not miss at all. But where had it gone? Would it ever come back? Once you have had pain like that, you dread its onslaught ever after. The fear of it never leaves you alone. Just as the pain itself once was, it becomes your constant companion. Nellie was haunted by that fear. So, it cannot be said that her transition to Inis Caillte was a transition to perfection. It was an improvement, a place of safety. That was also how it seemed to the other newcomers she talked to. The one thing she dwelt on was the loss of her deafness—it was a loss, the loss of the person she had been before—and its meaning. Meg and Jim and Philip had been saved from death, as she had been. Yet none of them had been changed to the extent that she had. They all talked about it.
“It seems to me it’s akin to this ability we all have now to understand each other’s languages. I mean, God only knows what language it is that we’re speaking now,” said Philip.
Nellie agreed with him. “I believe you,” she said. “But I have to tell you, I do feel a bit interfered with. If it’s God who did this, he’s a bossy fellow.”
“God’s got nothing to do with it,” said Jim. Meg nodded. They were both cheerful atheists. But Philip was not, and Nellie was not sure what she was.
“We’re miles off any scripture I know,” admitted Philip, “or any prophecy or vision. Unless they’re all a lot more metaphorical than I thought. But I’m just so accustomed to the idea of God running things—the world, you know, the universe—that I can’t let go of it. I don’t insist that any of you go along with me. I feel I’ve lost my foothold for insistence.”
“You’re a sly one, Father,” said Jim, “being so nice about it but keeping God’s card on the table. He’s always been there to explain the mysterious things, and here we are in the midst of one—”
“But you could have said that before! About your life back home. Any of us could!” interrupted Philip.
“More slyness,” said Jim, shortly. “We’re not in heaven and we’re not in hell. I don’t think any of us died. We’re here somehow, still living. The whole business isn’t like any Christian promise I ever heard of, and it blows the whole idea out of the water.”
“Purgatory?” said Philip.
Meg looked at Philip. “That’s nonsensical popish superstition, Father.”
“It is a bit old-fashioned,” said Philip. “Besides, it seems selfish to suggest that this whole island exists just to test us, or to allow us to work off our sins.”
“I don’t know that I’d need so much ground for that,” said Jim. “And what about the other people here? The Flahertys? Mary?”
“Has it occurred to you that in being a good husband to Mary, you might be answering for being the hard man that you were before?” said Philip.
“And Mary’s just a prop, then, in my salvation, is she?” asked Jim.
“No, of course not,” said Philip. “She’s her own person with her own soul. But it does make me wonder how much we are all implicated in each other’s salvation.”
“You go on wondering, Father, and leave me and Mary out of it,” responded Jim.
Meg and Nellie watched this exchange with impatience and indulgence, perhaps with a slyness of their own: the slyness of women observing the tiltyard men must make out of everything. Nellie felt that they had strayed a considerable distance from the topic of her deafness.
“Well, we might say, then, that we were all cured of deafness, in suddenly understanding all these languages,” said Nellie. “It wasn’t that God just poked holes in my ears and let the world in. It happened to all of us.”
Everyone blinked a few times and focused on Nellie. “Yes,” said Philip. “Language is an instrument for revealing the world. The world of other people, at least. I guess we all needed more of that world. Maybe that’s why we’re here.”
“And maybe it isn’t,” said Jim, “And we just need to let the world get on with the job, eh?”
* * *
Now, there are no ruined hill forts or monasteries on Inis Caillte. It is a place of lost people but not lost things. Our world is the world of the lost things. It’s the only way we know about the lost people. You can see that on the Lost Isle, there would be no need. The people are there. But not many of them.
Why would they not be there in their hundreds and thousands, in their millions? The lost? Now, let us hope that it is as many wise people have theorized: that they are there. Perhaps we just can’t see them. We can’t account for them. Not so many at a time. Would you want to be lost with three billion others, for example? Or just with a few? That story would be easier to tell. It would be cruel to suggest that there is a quota of the lost—let us say, only, that on Inis Caillte we are dealing with one of many, perhaps infinitely many, overlapping planes or interweaving tales. We are dealing with just so many as we can hold in our sympathies at one time. Those are the limits of the island. There are no others.
Father Anselma, who looked up at the huge broken fortress of Dún Aonghasa on Inis Mór with his heart ful
l of rage against the overlords and hoarders and murdering usurpers of the earth, surely might have been counted as one of the lost. Authoritarian war had swept him right to the edge of the map of Europe. He thought he had left Ireland to help bring God’s peace and the message of the poor to a radicalized continent, and he was driven straight back to Ireland to poorer people than ever. He died of typhoid in 1847 working among his starving parishioners. He was not a bad man. But he would never have gone to Inis Caillte.
Father Anselma considered it a miracle that he had once survived a riot in Brussels, a miracle that he did not deserve. The riot had been brutally put down by an army of the United Netherlands. Almost everybody around him had died. He had been there in good conscience, in what had begun as a peaceful protest against a heedless empire. Men had marched and carried signs in French and Flemish. He had marched among them, supporting his new parishioners. The archbishop had just granted him a tiny but populous parish near Aarschot. He had been very proud of himself, to get such a post even though he was a foreigner. Anselma had been a rising star at the seminary. When the Dutch had started shooting into the crowd, incredibly, amid the surge of desperate people, he had found a way out, dropping and crawling into a side street. In terror, he had walked and begged rides in farm wagons all the way to a distant port and got the first boat he could to England, and then on to Ireland. He had let his bishop think he was dead. He had abandoned his post. He had seen all those people dying and assumed that the cause of freedom was lost. He was lost. The independent kingdom of Belgium was founded the next year, and Anselma, hating himself, had nothing to do with it. He took vows as a Carmelite—and with them his new name—and determined to give his life meaning by serving in the remotest Irish parish he could find. He would never have traded that meaning for some kind of new start on a pagan island.
There are so many ways of being lost.
* * *
Take Meg now. You might say she was lost the moment she took ship to Ireland in 1649, or even before. How many women have you ever heard of being part of that army? Yet they were there, the women. They always are. But never entering the record, they do not fall out of it. No one missed Meg, because the men on her side died all around her. And hers was the side that won in that conflict. Fat lot of good that did Meg and her brother. They were lost. Meg’s brother—his name was Richard—died and was left unburied on that moor in Connacht. But he could still be in heaven now. He was a Puritan. Such men don’t need priests and rites when they die. They expect to meet their God, and to be chosen or not chosen. That is the deal they’ve struck. Meg was born a Puritan but she didn’t die one. It wasn’t the deal she struck.
Meg was well tired of striking deals by the time she’d been in Ireland two months. This was after the siege of Wexford, when she was no longer a washerwoman. She struck deals in tents and ditches and haystacks. Standing, sitting, lying. Sometimes they were to her advantage, sometimes to the advantage of her clients and adversaries. Many of the men were sick and desperate and terrified like she was. Quite a few were wounded, so if it came to a fight with her, it might end in a draw. Meg was a whore but she wasn’t an easy one.
She also saw a lot of people die. Soldiers on both sides, women, even some children. Her regiment lost their surgeon early on. Whatever doctoring went on was done by the men themselves and their friends and followers. Cooks. Farriers. Laundresses. Meg stanched many wounds following shouted directions. She also delivered a few babies though she was no midwife. Any serious wound always killed a man eventually. Often, quicker was better. Meg found herself, as time went on, doing rounds at night to the wounded like some kind of reverend mother. Odd sort of work for a whore, she thought. Sometimes, these visits of whispered consolation would become fucking: some men were horny right to the very end and died with dirty words on their lips. But more often, Meg found herself just talking to men who were afraid and in pain in the last minutes of their lives. Some talked about God and their expectations of heaven or hell. Some joked. Some reminisced or repeated camp gossip. A surprising number asked her to marry them. They would talk and then they would stop talking; breathe and then stop breathing. In a fragment of a second, time after time, she would go from beholding a person to beholding a body. There was no way to get used to it. It was the same leering absence every time. Something, then nothing. It wore away her faith. Nothing that she witnessed looked like transcendence. It looked like loss. The problem with the afterlife is that it’s invisible from life.
So, Meg was confounded to end up on Inis Caillte. But she was relieved. She did not have to deal with choirs of angels or fire and brimstone. She didn’t have to wait around until Judgement Day wondering what had become of her body. She was, as far as she could tell, still herself. Exhausted and despairing, expecting nothing, she received everything, insofar as the contents of consciousness constitute everything.
* * *
Philip Murphy also got to Inis Caillte. He was staring along the length of a bayonet inches from his chest, held by a twenty-year-old soldier named Jacobus De Jong, when he, as it were, melted away. Philip was surprised, as was the soldier. Both were thankful, though perhaps not equally. De Jong still had to go straight on to the next man in the crowd. It was Brussels in 1830 and he had been called out to quash a rebellion against William I. There was another Irishman in that same crowd named Declan O’Brien, one who in taking monastic orders two years later took the name Anselma. He was only a few ranks away from Philip, almost directly behind him. It may even be that the hesitation Philip’s disappearance caused De Jong gave O’Brien enough time to get away. De Jong worried about the lost man later, wondering what had happened to him—but what’s one rebel more or less?
Philip, on the other hand, was left worrying about whether he had been involved in a miracle or not. He was not in heaven. The landscape did not answer to the heavenly Jerusalem, and, fresh from his terror, the first thing he had to do was squat down and crap before he ruined his breeches. Surely, we do not need to shit in heaven. He certainly was still possessed of his flesh. He wandered on some distance before it occurred to him to stop and pray. This he did but it seemed inconclusive. Whatever had occurred had been so extreme that he felt he was within his rights to expect a bit of a gloss from the divine—even a hint as to how, or why, he had been so suddenly translated. But it did not come.
Philip drifted on until he came to a rocky shore and it occurred to him that he could be on an island. Anxiety rose within him. There are many stories told of islands that Irishmen end up on, and few of them are appropriate for a priest. He might run into a temptress like Circe. Or giants. If he came across a hero who could spurt blood from his ears while one eye grew as round as a plate and the other shrank to the size of a raisin, he, Father Murphy, was not going to know what to say. A nice peaceful little monastery, now, that would fall within his compass. Those were often found on Irish islands too.
He found none of these things. After three days of wandering, very hungry and getting increasingly frail, he found a farmer. An Irish farmer by the name of Peadar Flaherty. Philip had been encountering the man’s sheep for the past two days. He had left them strictly alone. He was the last man on earth—if he was on earth—to steal another man’s sheep, though he was a radical. He was probably too feeble to kill one, anyway. Nor was it out of the question that he was undergoing some sort of religious trial, in which case slaughtering a lamb seemed unpropitious. He greeted the farmer and collapsed at his feet. Peadar Flaherty gave him some water and got him into his family’s house, where they looked after him for some time. The Flahertys were natives of the island and did their best to explain its peculiarities to him. They were delighted to see a priest, as they hadn’t seen one on that side of the island for thirty years, they said. They were happy to hear him read from the Gospels. He had a tiny printed Vulgate with him. Without thinking—his brains were still a bit scrambled—he began to read from John straight off in Latin. In principio erat verbum. The whole family followed him
apparently with no problem at all, right down to the four-year-old. It was the same with The Sorrows of Young Werther, which he happened to have in his other pocket. In German. That gave him pause indeed. He began to wonder if it might not be heaven after all.
The Flahertys helped him to build his cottage. That is, they built it and he carried a few things around, truth be told. They were very hospitable people. He taught the four-year-old, Pádraig, his letters. He presided over one family wedding. Other than that, though, they never asked him to do anything. No blessings. No confessions. No sacraments of any kind. It was odd. “What did you do for marriages before?” he asked Peadar.
“Oh, there’s the one priest over on t’ other side of the island, if we feel we need him. But more often than not, the two just stand up and plight their troth in the house here, you know. Then we build them a cottage, like we did for you,” he replied. And it was true that they were just as interested in Werther as in the Bible, if not more so.
“It’s a grand book, that one,” said Anna, Peadar’s mother, the matriarch. “You’d better read it all again.”
Philip read the Goethe to them all again. He tried to picture reading a Romantic book about a German suicide to a grandmother of his previous experience—say, one from County Clare. The picture would not form in his mind.
Then he found Nellie.
He smelled rabbit roasting over a hill and walked over, thinking it was likely to be Thomas, Peadar’s teenage son, good with a snare. A rabbit of any size is enough for two. Squatting in front of the fire he found a filthy and emaciated girl wearing a fisherman’s sweater. When he spoke to her, she understood and tried to reply, but her voice wavered and cracked like a boy undergoing the change. She formed words no better than a toddler might. Yet her understanding was exceedingly quick. She was a mystery.
Nor was her mystery quickly solved when he led her back over the hill to the Flahertys’ farm. They took one look at her too-big sweater and called a family council. Not but they fed her first and offered the poor girl a bath, which she refused. Soon the whole twelve of them, including the two hired men, were all crammed into the main room of the cottage, examining the sweater, which was stinking in the heat of the fire. She refused to relinquish it.
