The Fourth Island

by Sarah Tolmie

  “Sure enough it’s one of ours,” Anna pronounced authoritatively. “From Inis Caillte. Like as not it was Joseph O’Connor’s, him who was lost more’n a year ago.”

  Yes, everyone agreed. Look, the ball—the rope—the cow’s hoof. Ours. Ours.

  “How did you come by this, girl?” asked Peadar, not unkindly.

  “Nellie,” said the girl. It was the first and only word she said clearly.

  “Nellie,” returned Peadar. “You are most welcome here, Nellie. Can you tell us how you came by this sweater? It’s from one of our own men. From this island. Inis Caillte.”

  * * *

  Nellie could not explain. She was not used to talking; that was clear. She touched her ears, covering them and releasing them, again and again. Finally, Philip understood. “I think she is telling us that once she could not hear. Only now she can. So, maybe she did not speak before, or very little?”

  Nellie nodded and lifted her hands in quick assent. After that, it went quicker, by question and answer. It came out that the sweater was from a dead man. He had washed up on the beach of Inis Mór, near her village. An old woman had kept it and Nellie had got it from her. The man had had a decent burial. Everyone murmured with relief. They could tell Clara O’Connor. So, that was all right. Thank heaven.

  After a little more urging by the womenfolk, Nellie accepted the bath and was led away to the wash house. The next morning, she yielded up the sweater so it also could be washed. The next time Philip saw her, she was quite transformed. She had accepted gifts of clothing from various Flaherty women. The heavy sweater, which had dwarfed her, would take several days to dry, so she was no longer wearing it. Very concerned about it, however, she went to check on it several times a day as it lay spread out in the wash house. “I thought, belike, it had belonged to her man. That maybe she had got together with O’Connor, you know, so it was a relic of his to her. Precious. But I don’t think it’s that,” said Anna to Philip.

  “It gives her security, perhaps,” said Philip. “Whatever happens to us, the ones who just find themselves here, is so strange and difficult to explain. Or to accept. Anything from home makes us feel safer. I feel like that about my books. I still carry them around,” said Philip, apologetically.

  “More’n likely it’s that sweater brought her here,” said Anna, “And you by your books. I’ve heard people say, the newcomers like yourself, it takes a talisman.”

  “So, Werther brought me here? Or the book of Revelation?”

  “That young Werther, he felt despair, seems to me. Enough that he sought a way out of his life. And St John, now, wasn’t he an exile on that island there, Patmos? If that book isn’t about escape, I don’t know what is,” said Anna.

  Nellie was used to living wild. She was better with a snare even than Thomas. She got on well with Thomas right from the start. He taught her to catch trout in the little river that ran by the house, which she had never done before. She also took right away to little Pádraig. They did a lot of talking together, which helped Nellie a lot. With the women she was cautious, though less so with Anna. As Nellie grew more confident in speech, she told Anna about Aoife. She also told her about her life before. Anna therefore had a good idea about what might be going on with Thomas in addition to fishing for trout, but she kept it to herself. Marriages with newcomers were not uncommon.

  Philip was still teaching Pádraig to read. The child’s friend Nellie started to come along to lessons, which was fine with him. Literacy is a gift that ought to be offered to all, Philip thought. Nellie learned very fast, and reading words aloud helped her pronunciation. Eventually, Philip asked her about her deafness. “Did it just disappear when you got here?” he asked. “Had you heard nothing before?”

  “I lived in a world of silence in Cill Rónáin,” said Nellie. “It was only broken when I came here. It was awful. It made me sick at first. I didn’t know what it was.”

  “Did you know what people said, who were talking around you?”

  “Some of it. Not all. When they looked right at me, and spoke to me, I could see the words on their mouths.”

  The idea of seeing words was pleasing to Philip. It was like reading. It was wonderful to think that words could be read even as they were being spoken. “Do you miss it, the silence?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes,” she replied.

  “I can see that,” he said, thinking of the bustle of the Flahertys’ house.

  “Reading is silent, though,” she added.

  “Yes, it is,” he said. They smiled at each other.

  Without thinking too much about it, Philip assumed that Nellie would form an attachment to Thomas. The lad was a bit younger than she was, perhaps, but not much. He was confident around her and joked with her. They seemed to speak a mutual language. Anna, in particular, seemed to take it as read that the two would pair off. Philip himself always felt mildly uncomfortable around her. He rather prided himself about advanced ideas that he held, or thought he held, about the emancipation of women. However, having a woman before him who was, in a variety of ways, emancipated, proved to be quite startling. Within a few months, she was able to read The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud as well as he could himself. Or, really, better. The torture and despair of Werther, his struggles with his own mood and his sense of unfreedom, came out of Nellie’s mouth with complete and unblushing conviction. It made Philip abashed.

  The Flaherty house was always very busy, so Philip began to hold lessons for Pádraig and Nellie in his own cottage. This was more convenient as winter came on and more people competed for space indoors, he told himself. They drank nettle and wild mint tea—there was no black tea to be had on the island, and Philip missed it sorely—and talked about things that were of less and less interest to Pádraig. Eventually, the boy begged off and stayed home with his brothers to help with the net-mending and so on. This left the two of them alone. Feeling more and more tense and somehow expectant whenever she was around, Philip finally said to her one day, “I don’t know that there’s anything more I can teach you, Nellie.”

  “So, maybe there’s something I can teach you,” she said. Philip started to blush at that and went on blushing for about three days. At the end of that time, they both emerged from his cottage and went to the Flaherty farm.

  Old Anna saw them come over the hill, hand in hand. “Ah,” she said. Thomas’s heart sank within him. As Philip could not figure out how to preside at his own wedding and nobody wanted to fetch the priest from the other side of the island, he and Nellie stood up before the company and declared that they were married, as the custom was. They had a big dinner with a bit of fiddle music and that was that. Thomas was sad but philosophical. He had always known that there was no way he could compete with Father Murphy if he became a contender.

  Philip would lie lazily in bed with Nellie in the morning, amazed at his lack of guilt. He had not previously realized that he had spent his days feeling guilty about almost everything. It occurred to him that this may not have been a requirement of his job as a priest, but he had urgently felt that it was. Perhaps erroneously. He did not feel any less a priest now. It is the part of a priest to guide people towards divinity, to show them the dimension of holiness in things. He continued to be capable of this, as, indeed, did Nellie. She had a rich, meditative mind, capable of deep imaginative associations. Many of the things she said about the relations of people and nature struck him as pure poetry. Perhaps she was a priest too. Of course, this was a blasphemous idea. But he felt less guilt now about blasphemous ideas. There they were. God obviously knew about them. He must have known for millennia. Yet everything carried on. The point of having a mysterious God is that he should be mysterious.

  Philip’s guilt fell away from him just as Nellie’s deafness had fallen away from her. Perhaps guilt is also a kind of deafness.

  * * *

  Mary MacIntosh knit a sweater for her husband as a wedding present. Such was the custom. She began on the day of their betrothal, and t
he day she finished it they were married. It was a bit of an incentive to knit fast, and so she did. It was just over three months. Philip Murphy married them. Nellie was there, and Meg Haylock, and the Flaherty clan, and all the MacIntosh family. It was a bigger affair than Philip and Nellie’s wedding had been.

  Mary fell pregnant within two months, and Jim, who had always believed that he hated children, was overjoyed. As summer came on and the weather got milder, he took his currach out fishing more often. As he had a grand total of one and a half cows on his land—a young cow in calf had been the couple’s wedding gift from her family—there was not a lot to do on his farm. Mary kept the kitchen garden. So, he took the boat out more, as he had to be doing something. He was not a man for idleness, even as a newlywed. And he loved his little boat. It had been the only thing that ever pleased him, back when he was a curmudgeon. Now that he was recovering from his premature curmudgeonhood, it pleased him even more. He had made it with his own hands. As he floated about on the blue, or the green, or the grey, or the black ocean, he often thought of its little round dot as the pupil of an eye. The roving eye of the sea, looking upwards. The eye, he thought, that had seen Inis Caillte when he could not.

  The sea does not care what metaphors we use. It winked one day and Jim’s boat was gone. It was once again immeasurably vast and careless and blind. Jim’s wedding sweater snagged on a rock on the north shore of Inis Mór—the shore he had never managed to reach, and rarely even managed to see, for thirteen months. That day, he reached it. His body travelled less than a mile and stretched itself out on the beach as if it were no problem at all. There he lay like a sand dollar, waiting to be claimed. Wavelets ran over him with searching fingers as he lay face up, reading the nubbly surface of his sweater like Braille. Lost. Lost. Lost.

  His wife Mary wept and mourned for him when he did not come back to her. She cursed his little boat. She cursed the coast of Inis Mór, which she could barely see through rolling fog.

  But if the curses of the lost made islands sink, there would be no islands left.

  * * *

  It took Nellie some time to get used to being a married woman. It was odd to have somebody else around all the time. She had been used to going for days without seeing anyone, especially in summer when she had spent less time at old Aoife’s. The one item she had insisted on bringing with her to Philip’s cottage was the sweater she had brought—or perhaps which had brought her—to the island.

  The Flahertys had been reluctant to give it up. It was their opinion that it ought to be given directly to Clara O’Connor, as a memento of her husband. Nellie was not ready for that. She had gotten quite wild on a number of occasions as they tried to persuade her to part with it. Once the sweater had dried from its original washing—which took upwards of a week in that climate—she had always kept it with her. She rarely wore it, except at infrequent times when she was alone, but she kept it draped over her bed, and if she was upset about anything, she would go and huddle there, wrapped in it. Before sleep, she would often lay it flat and trace over its pattern with her hands, sometimes with her eyes closed. She would try to imagine the lives of the sheep from whose wool it had been made. She would think of them wandering, eating salt grass, with their absurdly hairy bodies and thin legs. She would picture the drama of their shearing, how they were rounded up and caught and held, struggling, as their coats were cut off, and then they would bound away, feeling strangely light and small. Then their stinky fleeces would be washed and dried and carded and spun into yarn, and then knitted. Nellie pictured human hands doing this. She avoided thinking about Clara O’Connor, whose hands they must have been.

  This sweater had come to her. It had saved her. What did it have to do with Clara O’Connor? Now? Why would she even want it? After all, it had not saved her husband. No, it had saved her, Nellie. Hers was the greater claim. Life is more important than death.

  When she moved to Philip’s house with him, she kept the sweater folded neatly on a shelf in their bedroom. She would often touch it, patting it lightly, as she went in or out of the room. Philip remarked on this. “It’s a relic of yours,” he would say. “A touchstone. I’ve seen reliquaries like that, you know, with shiny patches on them from all the hands touching them over the years.” He used to joke that it would end up threadbare. Nellie did not like to think of it threadbare.

  However, as the months went on with Philip, her husband, and her new life in their cottage, her mind began to dwell on Clara O’Connor. She tried to avoid thinking about her, but her thoughts became more and more insistent. Clara had been married too. She had been married for a far longer time than Nellie, for years and years, and she had two children. They were teenage boys now, according to Anna Flaherty. So! said a triumphant voice in Nellie’s head, see! She has two sons! What would she need an old sweater for? Nellie tried to bolster up this voice, but it was slowly and steadily drowned out by a rising conviction that she had to go and see Clara O’Connor, and talk to her . . . and, finally, give her back the sweater that her husband had worn to sea. Nellie shed many tears over this conviction. She tried to make it go away but she couldn’t.

  At length, she talked to Philip about it. He agreed, gently, that they should go and talk to Clara, and at least show her the sweater. So, one autumn day, they set out. Clara lived quite far away. It was a good three hours’ walk. Nellie carried the sweater in her arms, clutched tight against her chest. Philip looked at her pityingly but was quiet. They walked all that way with very little conversation.

  When they got to the O’Connors’ door, Nellie said she would like to go in alone. Philip nodded. He went and sat on the garden wall, and waved to her to go on. Nellie released one hand from the sweater and knocked on the door.

  A tall, fair woman with a tired, lined face opened the door. “Clara O’Connor? Clara?” said Nellie. The woman gave the faintest, briefest nod at that name. Nellie, biting her lips hard, thrust the folded sweater suddenly into the woman’s hands. There were damp patches on it from her sweaty hands. The woman looked down, surprised.

  “I am Nellie,” said Nellie to Clara O’Connor. Clara looked at her quickly, shrewdly. She knew that name. She gathered the wool against her chest and turned to go in. But she did not close the door.

  “Come in,” she said. Nellie hesitated. She heard the woman’s skirts swishing across the room. She breathed deeply and went in the door. Clara had the sweater spread out on the kitchen table. She was looking down at it silently, with both palms flat on it. Her face was as pale as paper in a book. She said nothing but Nellie saw her hands trembling on the wool.

  “I know it is yours,” said Nellie. “I am sorry I kept it. I couldn’t help it.”

  “’Tis no matter,” replied the woman, though Nellie could see that, of course, it was a great matter. People say such things. Clara was silent another moment. “Thank you for bringing it,” she said. Suddenly, her knees seemed to give, and she sat down on a kitchen chair with a thump and gathered the sweater up before her on the table, pressing her face into it, clutching it with her hands. All the time, she remained so silent that Nellie thought she had been struck deaf again. But there had been the little thump as she hit the chair, and the woman’s shallow breathing. She moved tentatively forward and touched Clara O’Connor’s shoulder. Under her hand, the woman’s flesh was trembling and trembling, almost vibrating.

  “I should go now,” said Nellie.

  “No,” said Clara.

  “Where are your children?” said Nellie. “Do you want me to fetch them?”

  “Working,” replied Clara. She sat up, holding the sweater to her. “I’ll show it to them later. They’ll be amazed, amazed to have something of his. Joseph’s. Something that he touched, and wore. We’ve had nothing.”

  “But didn’t he sit on that chair, and build these walls, and everything?” asked Nellie.

  “He did. He did,” said Clara, looking around, bewildered. “But this is the thing. I’ve been waiting for it ever since I hea
rd what happened.”

  Nellie’s eyes filled with tears but her voice was steady. She felt that if she gave way, Clara would too, and that the woman would be embarrassed. “Well, here it is,” she said. “Now you have it. It saved my life, and now it’s come back to you.”

  “I’ll tell you about him, shall I?” said Clara. “Seeing as he wore it before you did?”

  “I want to know,” said Nellie, simply.

  So, Clara O’Connor talked for two hours about her husband. Nellie thought briefly about Philip waiting outside on the wall. He was a patient man. She decided to let him be patient. Clara told her that she and Joseph had known each other since childhood. They were second cousins. Cousin marriages were common on such a small island. He had been tall and fair, like her. Easygoing. Kind. An excellent father. An excellent farmer. Good with beasts and children. He rarely fished. It had not even been his boat that he had been lost in. He had borrowed it from a neighbour. Clara had been worrying about paying the neighbour back ever since for the boat, though he had told her it was unnecessary. Joseph had only gone out because there had been an unusually rich herring run. He just couldn’t let the opportunity go, he had said, what with those two boys growing so fast. “You know, I was even angry with the boys about it,” said Clara, her voice shaking. “I was cold to them, I was so angry. I’m ashamed of it now.”

  Nellie murmured consolingly. Clara went on. She went on for a long time. She tried to keep a stern countenance, but gradually tears spilled down her face. Nellie understood that Clara had loved her husband deeply and that she missed him constantly and silently. They had been married for such a long time that they had been like one person, and now half that person was missing. Clara felt that she was hobbling around on one leg. And the boys were joyless and lonely. Anthony, the younger one, was still hardly sleeping; he came into his mother’s bed almost every night in the wee hours with his cheeks wet. Michael, the fifteen-year-old, was laconic. He got into nasty fights with his old friends. Their mother was terribly worried about both of them. Nellie was not sure that a sweater was going to rectify these things. Still, seeing Clara’s hands stroking and stroking it as she spoke, Nellie felt that it was offering her something. She had spent hours doing exactly the same thing herself.