The Fourth Island

by Sarah Tolmie

  Nellie let Clara talk herself out. Then she rose and patted the exhausted woman’s shoulder. Clara stayed seated. She looked too weak to get up. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Nellie.” Nellie nodded and motioned for her to stay where she was.

  “I should go now,” said Nellie. “Philip is waiting. I am sorry that I waited so long to return this precious thing to you. I couldn’t let it go. But I have now. Good luck to you, Clara O’Connor.” She left Clara sitting there, worn out.

  Philip was waiting, patiently, on the garden wall. He joined her quietly and they began to walk home. “You gave it to her, Nellie,” he said. “That was brave. I have never given up my books, have I?”

  Nellie smiled at him wanly. “Well,” she said, “other people use your books, don’t they? Not just you.”

  “Still,” said Philip, “it was brave.”

  They walked home. Nellie went to bed. She was too tired to eat, too tired to talk. Philip did not insist on either. When she walked into the bedroom, she saw that in the empty place on the shelf where the sweater had been, there was a mug of wild flowers. She gazed at it for a while and then fell asleep.

  When she woke up, very early the next morning, her head was full of words. She was not sure what to make of them. They were mostly Clara O’Connor’s words about her husband, strangely changed. It was like a song, running in her mind, but without music. She let it run there for a while and then told Philip about it.

  “Try writing it down,” he said.

  “You and your books! Writing!” said Nellie. “What would I write it on?”

  “The end-papers of Werther?” suggested Philip. “Or maybe I could make you a wax tablet, such as schoolboys use?”

  “With what wax, Philip?” said Nellie.

  “Yes, well,” said Philip, defeated, “perhaps you could just say the words for me?”

  Nellie said the words. Philip sat very still. “Again,” he said. Philip was a literate man. He knew Irish, Latin, German, Flemish and some French and English. He had grown up with Irish poems and songs; he had learned Latin scripture and hymns. He was compassionate and he had a good ear. “Again,” he said.

  Nellie spoke the words again. “Holy Ghost, Nellie,” he said. “Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve gone and composed a lament for Joseph O’Connor, and it’s the best I’ve ever heard. Jesus, Mary, and . . . Joseph . . . Nellie, it’s like the Lament for Art O’Leary. But without the horses or the fine clothes or the beaver hats. And no killer but the sea and the small house and the hunger of his sons. And even the women arguing, Nellie—is that you and Clara? Claiming the sweater while his body spins in the sea? Jesus, Nellie!”

  Nellie did not entirely know what he was talking about. But soon enough she learned. Philip told her many things. He wrote poems that he recalled down for her. He spoke them. Their greatest gift in all of this was discovering a small stretch of beach covered with sand. Fine sand. So you could write on it with a stick or a rock. A clean slate, at least until the tide came in. Nellie would think of things, organize them in her head, and Philip would write them. Eventually, she herself would write them. Sometimes. Often, she preferred just to say them. Philip never preferred this. He was a scholar.

  He started killing sheep. Or even calves. Or trading for their skins. Anything, everything. Teaching all kinds of lessons, just to get hold of material on which to write down Nellie’s poems.

  Nellie was surprised. She did not know how to put a value on such things. Was it worth killing calves? But she found, once she had got it straight in her head—the pattern she had made out of Clara’s words—that she no longer missed the sweater. That told her. What she herself had made had gone into the place of it, filled it up. Nothing else had been able to. Not the love of Philip. Not her house, or her comfortable life. It had been seeing the relief of Clara, and letting go of the sweater herself, and all the things it had meant, and substituting for them her own words, in a tight pattern. One that stuck in her mind and held things together. So, she accepted that her first poem had been The Lament for Joseph O’Connor. She took a copy of it that Philip had made to Clara, who was rendered speechless. She went on from there.

  * * *

  It wasn’t the curse of the wretched widow Mary Conneely that made any difference to Inis Mór. It wasn’t the curse of Clara O’Connor, either, whose husband had washed ashore there the previous year.

  It was the poison.

  That’s the thing about islands. We think we’re safe on them. Separate. The sea is a cordon sanitaire. Alas, anything that washes up can bring contagion, including the bodies of men. In this case, it wasn’t typhoid or plague, as at St Kilda’s or Mingulay. It was despair. Despair is widely spoken of as poisonous, but with as little meaning as words have when we use them to describe pain. Pain is something of which we can only observe the effects. Despair is similar. One of the effects of despair was to bring people—newcomers—to Inis Caillte. Suddenly. Somehow. It opened a door for them. But some doors, once opened, are hard to close.

  What did become of Nellie’s despair as she lay silently dying? Of Jim’s, as he was about to drown? Of Meg’s, or Philip’s? We might say they carried it with them. They brought it with them in their despairing flesh, and when they touched the island of Inis Caillte—when they, as it were, grounded—their despair flashed straight out of them into the earth. So they were rid of it. The island filtered it out of them. But it wasn’t gone. It was in the soil, permeating everything. The natives were used to it. Newcomers had been bringing their burdens of despair to the island for generations. If the Flahertys and the MacIntoshes and everybody else had not been able to process it, they would have long since died off. But it was quite another thing when a bodily person belonging to the island ended up somewhere else.

  From the buried bodies of Jim Conneely and Joseph O’Connor despair began to spread. They were men of Inis Caillte, one by birth and one by adoption. Despair was—what?—active in them, operative? It was part of them, a factor of their lostness. As they decomposed, it leached straight into the ground, that thin layer of precious soil that, perhaps uniquely in the Arans, is already a composite of despair. After all, people had lugged the dirt of Inis Mór, spadeful by spadeful, to every inch of field and garden.

  At the same time, the earth of the Aran islands was made out of things from the margins of the sea, even directly from the sea itself. Sand. Seaweed. Fish. We might call that unnatural. It was at once a great triumph and a great risk. The first victim of the resulting poison was Mary Mullen.

  The beautiful, light-stepping Mary Mullen was known to visit the grave of the unknown fisherman—Joseph O’Connor—from time to time when she was feeling sentimental. She also laid a posy or two on Jim Conneely’s grave. Like everyone else, she had thought Jim handsome and cold. Bitter. There wasn’t much to miss about him, but he was dead, and the dead do deserve some looking after.

  Mary wasn’t exactly commended for this, though a few people when either prayerful or drunk said that it spoke to her sense of religion. This was not the view taken by Jim Conneely the younger, however. “It’s like she’s practicin’ to be a widow,” he said. He was jealous, pure and simple.

  Mary also kept up her interest in the mystery of the sweater pattern that had appeared twice among them in such sad circumstances. In this she was like Arthur O’Donnell, and it’s a shame that neither of them knew about the other. It might have led to some mitigation. Mary even talked to Mairín about it, and saw the copy that Arthur had made. Mairín, however, neglected to mention this to Arthur, who was out fishing that day. The baby choked and drove it clean out of her head. Mary didn’t have a memory like Mairín’s, but she did recall a few big things. A round ball. Something that looked like the letter M. And a lot of cable or cord, which she knew from other women was supposed to be fishermen’s rope. She made up many a grand tale about them. She could almost bring herself to tears. The ball was a pomander of sweet spices such as noblewomen carry in French stories. God k
nows it would be a wonderful thing on these islands with their smell of cow shit and herring. The letter M would sometimes stand for Mary, though she fought against that temptation. If it seemed too selfish, she could always remind herself how many Marys there are on the islands. A heroic fisherman with a rope could do practically anything, not least rescue either Mary or the lady with the pomander from drowning. Or fish, of course. This was overwhelmingly likely to be the most important meaning, as she well knew, given that the purpose of the patterns was to attest to the way of life of the men who wore them. As a clue, though, it left much to be desired. Fishing was not likely to narrow things down.

  Mary steadily turned down a variety of offers of marriage, some realistic and others not. Jim Conneely the younger was one of the latter. He was only fifteen and should have known better. He took a lot of ribbing for it. He apologized to his mates for losing his head. He even apologized to Mary. She was very gracious about it.

  Mary was very gracious in everything. Graciously, she began to withdraw. Graciously, she let people down. She missed appointments. She missed church. She missed the baptism of her sister’s child. She was sweet. She was apologetic. She was never, ever rude. She absolutely had not meant to do it. Had not meant to hurt anyone. She wouldn’t. She would never.

  She became the girl who would never. For the younger Jim Conneely, it was terrible to watch. She was four years older than he was. He saw her go from a lovely girl of nineteen to a creature that seemed sometimes a crone, sometimes an infant. She slipped out of time. It was not so very drastic, not to other people’s eyes, but he would catch an old woman, exhausted, careworn, peering out of her eyes, or see the smug, placid gaze of a child much younger than either of them fleetingly occupy her face. She talked about the usual things but without conviction. She lost weight but could not be said to be wasting away like a doomed sweetheart in a ballad. It wasn’t like that. It was subtle and deep and horrible. Something had infected her. That was how Jim thought of it. She was like a dog whose master has died. Those dogs are weird. They go on living but something goes out of them.

  It’s hard to say how much other people noticed. They saw her make more and more of her visits to the graveyard. Always to the unknown man now. She had abandoned the deceased Jim Conneely. He had kin. The younger Jim Conneely almost wished it was his dead uncle she was visiting. He would have been able to dig him up and fight a duel with him, or something. With this unknown fellow, there was nothing to get hold of.

  He watched Mary making her visits from time to time. She did not appear to care, though he thought she did notice. It was not that she fell swooning and weeping on the man’s grave. She just stood there quietly, wrapped in a billowing private silence. Sometimes, Jim fancied he saw it blowing and swirling around her like rags or tatters. Perhaps she would wipe away a tear. Occasionally, he saw her lips move. But he could not rid himself of the notion that she was being filled up with something, taking it in, perhaps through the soles of her feet on the earth, or through the pores of her skin. Infection. Decay. Death. A few times, driven to desperation, he went over to her, tried to get her to come away. They would talk of this and that, politely, but she would not go with him. Graciously, she would refuse. She would only be there for a few more minutes. The poor man. The poor man.

  Jim saw her do these things. He knew that she was suffering, perhaps suffering greatly. He was not able to understand why. Nor could Mary, in truth. Despair is befuddling. Her feelings were strangely elongated and slow. The circumstances of her life had not changed, yet she, in herself, was completely different. Everyone and everything seemed sad to her. People might look superficially happy but she saw through to their dark cores. What was there, after all, to be happy about? All things were impermanent. Death was everywhere. People hardly ever got what they wanted. What she wanted was to meet and know this man whose grave she haunted, and he was unmeetable and unknowable. There was no way whatsoever around this problem. Not in life. Not in death. She still would not meet him if she were dead, would she? It is commonly said that despair drives people towards death. In fact, it renders death worthless. The despairing may stumble upon death, perhaps, but it is an event without meaning. Meaninglessness welled up out of the ground and spread as a vapour in the damp air, and Mary drank it in. It took up residence in every cell of her body. It displaced her and destroyed her. Her will failed. All contest, all risk, all chance, all change became nothing. There was a dull uniformity within and without her. A nullity without distinction.

  As this went on, she remained curiously cheerful and sweet-tempered, outwardly. She did not blame or rant or curse. She withdrew from people, but when she chanced to meet them, she seemed the kind and considerate girl she had been. It was as if her body remembered the forms and words and attitudes of politeness, compassion, interest. Mary was, in fact, a good and strong person. Good at being a person. Well brought up. Virtuous habit kept her together, right to the end. Even after a year, when she was merely a void in the shape of a girl, when Mary spoke to people in the street, she spoke decently. She spoke pleasantly when she could no longer even hear herself speak, when there was no difference between speaking and not speaking. When all difference had disappeared.

  There was a reason for this, and that reason was the nature of Joseph O’Connor. He had been a sweet-tempered man. His body rotted into the ground, and the despair that grew out of him was tinged with sweetness. Every kind of person can produce despair, not just the proud or the cold or the black-hearted. Despair is an element in humans. Perhaps it is acid, perhaps alkaline. There is something about living on Inis Caillte that renders it volatile. In these strange days that came over Inis Mór—when a force usually passive became active, and despair burst its human bonds to spread into the earth itself—people learned that individuals decay into differing varieties of despair. All despair is poison and its essence is undifferentiation, so how different could they be? Not very. Just a little. Just enough that the lingering touch of sweetness belonging to Joseph O’Connor, native of Inis Caillte, combined with the last faltering sweetness of Mary Mullen to allow her to be gracious to her last breath, though eaten up entirely from the inside.

  Jim Conneely the younger, just turned sixteen, saw Mary Mullen die. She had gone to lay flowers on the unknown fisherman’s grave, as on any other day. She stood there quietly. As the lad looked at her, her outline blurred and shifted. It suddenly sagged and collapsed in on itself. Mary was gone. Jim ran forward with a cry to find a scattering of black earth, smelling of seaweed and fish and dung. It was as if the grave had turned itself inside out. But when Jim looked at the plot with its modest stone, it was undisturbed. The dirt was Mary. She had not been able to retain her own shape any longer. The despairing earth had rendered her into itself. It knew no difference.

  Jim did not touch the spilled earth. He did not touch the grave. He gave a great keening scream and ran sobbing home. No one wanted to believe his story, but eventually they had to.

  * * *

  Some people are far more dangerous dead than alive, and Jim Conneely was one of them. He had lived his whole life as a malcontent and was only just beginning to turn into something else when he met his end. His friends and family were not wrong when they identified him as cold and bitter. Bitter he had been. Bitterness prevailed in him, and it rotted out of him as he returned to the earth.

  Young Jim, his nephew, had spent a lot of time spying on Mary in the churchyard. He took her death very hard. He had a hard time persuading those in the village, particularly Father Anselma, to grant Mary a proper funeral. Nellie had had no funeral in Cill Rónáin either. When women are lost, it is less likely that monuments will be erected to their memories. Jim had finally yelled at the priest, “Earth to earth, Father! Earth to earth, like you say in the service! So you might as well put your blessing on it!” Father Anselma had reluctantly agreed. He did not accept Jim’s story. It was not the line of country in which he was prepared to believe. He thought Mary had run off, but
as she turned up nowhere on a small island, he considered it at least very possible that she was dead. There was pressure from the family. So, he conceded and held a service. He reflected as he did so that the whole question of funerals in Cill Rónáin was a vexed one.

  Jim had shown Mary’s parents, and others, the scattered black earth. No one was willing to touch it. They left it be, and eventually green grass grew over it. It became indistinguishable from the rest of the churchyard soil, which consisted, after all, mostly of decomposed humans. Jim thought of this more and more acutely as he went about his business in the village and on the farm. The only time these thoughts would leave him was when he was out in a boat. The earth was deadly. It was made up of dead things. Dead plants. Dead fish. Dead people. Potatoes lay nestled in the ground, feeding on death. Grass stems grew out of it. It was horrific.

  Jim decided that he was the enemy of all dirt. He was at war with the ground. He was glad to see cattle trample it. He rejoiced to see it cut up by ploughs and wounded by spades. He walked on it only by sufferance. He took to stealing out at night and sleeping in the family boat. Mary was in the ground, was part of the ground. He hated her, too. She had abandoned him for a dead man.

  Gradually, people noticed that the young Jim Conneely was becoming a lot like his uncle. Taciturn. Standoffish. Harsh. He had always been an easygoing boy. His mother and father and three brothers began to feel that they were living with a different person. “Whatever’s wrong, Jim?” his mother kept asking.