by Sarah Tolmie
“It’s nothing. There’s nothing!” he would say. Nobody was satisfied with this but it’s all they got.
Jim, like his uncle before him, picked fights. He became expert at the kind of brief, scathing insult that keeps people up at night. He set his brothers up for feuds that would last for years. People began to avoid him. His mates slipped away and he found himself increasingly isolated. This was fine with him. People were just walking dirt, anyway.
As Jim became more and more outwardly bitter, he became more inwardly calm. At last he understood his uncle’s cold repose that had so repelled him as a boy. The elder Jim had seen that the world was empty. It seemed full but it was empty. There was an enormous amount of stuff and it was organized in different ways but it added up to nothing. People occupied themselves with the rituals of eating and praying and courtship until they were swallowed by the ground. In the world, there was nothing to be concerned with. When he left it, there would be nothing to miss.
Anyone who has ever lived in a village will know how much harm one bloody-minded person can do, even in a short life. Jim became that person. People stopped calling him “the young Jim Conneely” to distinguish him from his uncle. The two had collapsed together. In fact, it is likely that the memory of the elder Jim was poisoned by the younger one. Mary Conneely, Jim’s widow on Inis Caillte, would have been horrified to know what was going on. Neither of these Jim Conneelys had been the man she knew. That Jim’s legacy on his home island would come to this would have broken her heart. You see how it is. It is always possible to lose the lost again.
Finally, it ended for Jim as it had done for Mary. He was walking through the main street of the village with a creel of potatoes on his back. To him, the potatoes were a deadly burden. He made a mocking comment to Thomas Derrane as he passed by. And then, with Thomas still looking right at him and wondering what to say, Jim exploded. There was a muffled whump and there was nothing left of Jim but a pile of damp black earth.
You can see how this might go on, and it did go on. Jim’s mother had loved him, and feared for him, right to the end. She swept up the earth from the village street and carried it to the graveyard, where she sprinkled it on the grave of Mary Mullen. Then she began to despair.
* * *
A lot of nonsense is talked about the walking dead. As early as 1819, people began to use the Afric word zombi in English, then in Irish. To have a zombi, you must have a necromancer. There has never been a necromancer on the Aran islands, unless you want to count the priests, who do imagine themselves to be controlling the souls of the dead. Now, a necromancer, like any evil man, can create despair in others. He can torment them and make their lives not worth living. He can kill them. But if he were to bring their bodies back and have them walk around to do his bidding, what does that have to do with despair?
Despair is a condition of the living.
We are little used to the idea of despair accomplishing anything. This seems antithetical to its nature. Yet for some reason, when Meg Haylock despaired on the battlefield of Cromwell’s army, when Jim despaired in his boat or Philip Murphy at the point of a bayonet, each wound up on Inis Caillte. This is unfair. Untold millions have despaired at such moments and died. Was there something different in the quality of their despair? Maybe some infinitesimal thing, some shade akin to the bitterness or sweetness that precipitated out of the buried bodies on Inis Mór. Maybe there was a purity to it. They achieved selflessness and were given back their selves. But if we are in these deep waters and we say this, what do we say about the terror that followed? This creeping malaise that got into the ground and infected the innocent? Despair is in us. It is not supposed to be outside us.
Tit for tat. If despair is endowed with energy, energy it will have. If we want to save Meg and Jim and Philip, and keep Inis Caillte hidden as a refuge for the lost, we must pay something. Something, as it were, to recompense the souls of the despairing whom we do not intend to save. Those who disappear into invisible inertia. Momentum gathers on their behalf, building and building and building. The earth itself, the shocking amount of it, absorbs their agency as it has absorbed them. For there is no doubt that the earth we walk on, the cultivated earth, contains a dangerously high percentage of human misery. So, just for this short time, we will witness its despair in action, concentrated into the scant soil of these two small islands.
We are the necromancers here. We have made a golem of the whole earth.
* * *
Things and people went on peacefully on Inis Caillte. Nellie stayed out of boats and never returned to Inis Mór. Over time—she lived a long life—she became the most famous poet in the island’s history. The language that she composed in was Irish, for the most part, but she also composed in German, which she had learned from Werther. However, no one on the island had any trouble understanding the German poems. Or, at least, they understood them as well as they did the Irish ones. The gift of the Lost Isle gave them that much.
Nellie’s poems were hard to understand. That was the fact of it. She did not mind. Truth be told, she cultivated their difficulty. Much as she loved her new home, and her new life as a hearing person and her loving husband Philip and all the rest of it, there were times when she felt hard done by. That all this cheap and cheerful communication by mouth was just too much. She fought against it. She fought the translating nature of the island itself by composing exceedingly complicated poetry. Irish is a good language for this. It always annoyed her that Meg, for instance, must hear her poems in English, for as far as she was able to understand it from Meg and Philip, English was a simpleminded language. Not that Meg was big on poetry to begin with.
Many poets say that they write poems. That’s not what Nellie said. She composed them, completely, silently, in her head. She finished them there. Then she wrote them down, or some of them. Some she only recited, and others remembered them and wrote them down. Some she spoke aloud and they never got written down and so were lost. And a few she kept always in her own head, quiet. So those ones, too, were lost, but not to her.
She found that, for better or worse, she composed better when she could not hear external sounds. She used little pads of wool to block her ears sometimes, though these made her ears itch. She used compressed thistledown or dandelion seed when they were in season. It always amused her to think of the seeds in her ears. She used to imagine them growing into her brain, and flowers sprouting out her opposite ear. Just as, she said to Philip, the words eventually sprouted out of her mouth. Perhaps they were her co-authors. The sheep. The seeds. This was the kind of observation that kept Philip in awe of her.
Nellie and Philip had no children. Nellie suspected that her illness had burned that capacity out of her. Philip would have loved children, but he loved Nellie and that was enough for him. Almost enough, anyway. Over the years, he persuaded her to stop using the joking honorific “Father” that she came out with sometimes, as it made him sad. He was the one who kept the records of her poems. He penned a whole shelf of books and looked upon them paternally. Nellie, he thought, was careless of her gift. Or perhaps the dual nature of her gift—on the one side, the urge to express, and on the other, to occlude—too often tipped the latter way. She was content to let poems be lost. It was his duty to gather up as many of them as possible for posterity, so that future readers could wrestle with whatever was lost and found in them, whatever language they turned up in.
Philip, too, stayed on Inis Caillte and spread no poison abroad. Even if after a while he no longer wanted to be called Father, he still considered himself a priest. A servant of the deity. He read the Bible with any interested parties. He presided over the odd wedding or funeral with great reverence and gusto. Most of the other sacraments seemed to have gone by the wayside. He didn’t really miss them, though he worried from time to time about baptisms. They were considered so vitally necessary everywhere else. But it’s not like there were vast numbers of children born on the island, and those he was closest to he would never h
ave dreamt of baptizing. These were the children of Jim Conneely—whose shade would have risen up out of the ground to choke Philip at the very idea if it were not for the fact that it was unfortunately in the ground of Inis Mór choking his old compatriots at the time—and Mary, and Meg’s children.
Mary bore twins seven months after Jim’s disappearance. As it happens, Meg helped her out with the birth. She never claimed to be a midwife, but she had some experience with the whole process. Babies sprout up around armies. Her presence was very reassuring to Mary, and Mary called the girl child Meg—Margaret—after her. She felt certain that Jim would have liked this. The boy was called Conor, after her uncle. It was a family name. Meg had two children, both boys. Thomas Flaherty, with whom she kept company for a time, was the father of one of them, and of the other, she would never say. The two of them, Andrew and Christopher, lived with her on her farm and were a great help to her. Their farm prospered, and when a new variety of wheat sprang up upon it, one that they cultivated and stored and re-seeded as it was wonderfully dense and fruitful, they became quite wealthy. Meg’s son Christopher became the next miller of Inis Caillte. He was very good with ratchets and cogs and wheels. By careful examination of Philip’s pocket watch—the only other thing Philip had had with him, except his clothes and his books—Christopher was able to bring their mill into the nineteenth century. Meg was very proud of him for this, for after all, she said, he probably ought to be accounted a seventeenth-century person.
“No, no!” said Philip, and others shouted her down too. Mary. Conor MacIntosh—Old Conor, as he’d come to be called after the birth of Mary’s boy. And various others. No, they all said, some joking, some serious, he’s a man of Inis Caillte. We have no such times here.
“Bah,” said Meg.
* * *
Arthur O’Donnell heard about the deaths of Mary and young Jim, and his heart went cold within him. He was certain that it all had something to do with those lost-and-found men and their too-familiar but unknown sweater panels. Too near, yet too far. But who would believe him? Nobody. Nobody, the friend of fools and beggars.
“We should dig them up. Those strangers. Or that stranger and Jim. Throw whatever’s left in the ocean,” he insisted. But this was ridiculous and nobody listened to him. Father Anselma pointed out that such a thing would be sacrilege. “Better sacrilege than whatever’s going on here,” Arthur muttered. But nothing of the kind was done. What was the point of blaming dead men? It was bound to be some kind of sickness. Or maybe, some whispered anxiously, the judgement of God.
The priest was called on to bless this and that. He sprinkled holy water on various headstones and on various children and even on various boats. No one asked him to bless livestock, thank God, as it was obvious that only people were afflicted. By now, many people in the town were acting out of character. Soon enough, there were three more deaths. Every person is missed in a community that small. On a small, harsh island, every person works and every hour of labour is necessary. Cill Rónáin was in serious danger. Father Anselma drew the line at exorcisms, however. He had never performed one and considered them showy. Plus, he knew that if he did even one, the demand would never end. Under strain, people see devils everywhere. And he didn’t feel too solid about it doctrinally. It was convention to blame the world, the flesh and the devil. What was he to do if these categories were collapsing? If, for example, the world, the very dirt, was becoming devilish? Or the flesh worldish, turning into earth far too rapidly? He wrote a long, worried letter to the Archbishop of Dublin and one to the Carmelite Order. He never heard back from either and was left with his conundrums.
Arthur, meanwhile, got out the parchment with Mairín’s drawing on it. He pinned it to the wall of the cottage. He felt it was a talisman, like the mark over the door for the Hebrew Passover. He stared at it constantly, running over it in his mind. He was convinced that some sort of solution lay in it. What was the obvious remedy for a rebellion of the soil? For a plague of killing sadness? Should he bury the vellum in the ground? In the graveyard, perhaps, to combat those two men festering there? He was surprised at himself for this morbid turn of mind.
“Look, Mairín,” he said, “d’ye think you could knit this pattern back into a sweater?”
“No,” she replied, “I’m no great knitter. But Ma could.”
So, after some hemming and hawing, he asked his aunt, could she knit a sweater for him, with the pattern on it? She wasn’t keen. “’S bad luck, seems to me,” she said. But he persuaded her. It was going to be a long job, though. Two months at least. “See if you can knit it any faster yourself, then!” she said to him when he looked doubtful. He begged her to hurry.
Jim’s mother fell sick. She withdrew from her family and made cruel remarks. She criticized her other sons. She mocked her husband for his continual praying over the memory of Jim. “He wouldn’t have thanked you for it,” she said. “You know he was a right heathen.” Her husband wept. He feared what was coming.
Six weeks after Jim’s death, Aislinn Derrane—Jim’s mother’s cousin and best friend from girlhood—walked into her sickroom with a cup of broth to find a wet mess of earth in her bed. There was a powerful smell of seaweed and salt in the room. Aislinn screamed in horror and ran for the rest of the family. They were barely even surprised.
Arthur heard of this immediately, as everyone did. He nagged his aunt. She said she’d finished the blasted front panels, those with the pictures on, and if he wanted the rest done faster, he’d have to ask Mairín, as God knows young women had nothing to do.
So, he begged Mairín to get on with the back and sleeves. Mairín was none too pleased about this but she did it. When Mairín finished the rather lumpy sweater, he wore it. He practically snatched it off her needles and paraded it through town. He told everyone he met all about it. How he had killed the calf. How he had preserved Mairín’s picture of the pattern. How the women had made it back into a sweater for him. People thought he was mad, touched by the trouble. These quiet men, you know, they’re often weak-minded.
He wore it into the village pub and explained that it had the power to ward off evil. They told him he was drunk.
He wore it to church. Father Anselma looked at it with instant suspicion. He felt that Aoife was taunting him from beyond the grave. What nonsense was the man about to stir up in the midst of a crisis? He spoke severely against foolish superstitions and idols from the pulpit. He spoke of the duty of remorse and prayer. The cross was the only symbol in which to trust at such times of trial.
Aislinn Derrane died. She had been a dour sort of woman, really. Suddenly, in the last two weeks of her life, she was possessed of the kind of mordant gallows humour that had always characterized Jim’s mother, her much funnier cousin and best friend. She crumbled into muddy earth while pinning up the washing, and her last words were a bleak quip about it.
Arthur wore the sweater almost all the time, and draped it over his bed at night. It seemed the safest thing. It wasn’t just for himself, he told Mairín—he wanted to set an example.
The two youngest Derrane children died, those closest to their mother. They were five and nine. Timothy and Feargal. They had been perfectly healthy boys, not so much as a sniffle, and very high-spirited. In their last days, they were solemn as doorposts, and then they were gone, horribly, whump, into small twin piles of dirt.
Arthur wore the sweater to their funeral. Father Anselma’s eyes blazed at him. But a few women, all mothers, approached him after the service and asked to see the pattern.
The whole town turned out for that funeral. Thereafter, the poison began to spread like a storm tide, creeping over the land ever faster. There were brawls and beatings and possibly even a murder. Lovers and friends and family stopped talking to one another. Over the next two months, nine people from Cill Rónáin and the surrounding parish disappeared into stinking piles of wet dirt. Despair touched nearly everyone.
Just not the O’Connors. They were a large clan who lived on
a large farm with two farmhouses. There were eighteen of them all told, related in various ways. They were all untouched. People noticed. They began to show up in ones and twos, and then in droves, to see Arthur’s sweater with Mairín’s—Aoife’s—pattern on it, and to ask him about it. Arthur was its tireless advocate. He was in the grip of a powerful conviction that he could not explain. Moreover, the sweater’s warding magic seemed to be working. His household was safe. They had been passed over. He showed the pattern to everyone who wanted to see it. Many desperate women took the pattern home either in their heads or sketched out in charcoal on anything they could find. Bed linen. Potato sacks. Petticoats. The whole parish was a fury of knitting needles. Women stayed home from church, passing skeins around, spinning any scraps of wool left unspun, unpicking old—and even new—garments. Father Anselma was not impressed. His flock was straying. He searched for other metaphors, ones that did not involve sheep. But fewer and fewer people came to hear his sermons regardless.
Sheep were shorn out of season. Sheep were stolen. Soon, it seemed there was not a scrap of yarn to be had on the entire island. A few men even learned to knit. Still, as every household in Cill Rónáin and its environs got its sweater—at least one, and some got many—gradually, it seemed that the tide slowed. The black despair ceased to strike. Throughout the whole next year, people kept turning up at the O’Connors with gifts of butter and cheese. And wool. Mairín and her mother could have opened a shop with the amount of wool, raw and spun, that they were given after the next spring shearing. Though they would never have dreamed of doing such an ill-omened thing as selling a gift. Arthur became a celebrity. In under a year, he was headman of the village. He had always been a quiet sort of man until his enthusiasm for the sweater, and after that wore off, he remained one. The village council was none the worse for that.
