A settling back, a lighting of pipes, the brand of burning turf on the fire.
– Now yer telling us something we know, like.
– the long vowels of the natives. Then, when I was ten, we changed coasts. Pilgrims of summer, lifting our taproot from the stunted Maritime soil and beginning the journey toward the West. High tide on the Bay of Fundy, waves, certain rocks, these I remember; and from salt to fresh to salt again I collected relics: stingray cartilage on a New Brunswick beach, a smoothed Great Lake pebble, salmon ribs at the Fraser’s mouth. We began by knowing the journey’s end, a knowledge of permanence after a make-shift season.
– What about the place ye left?
– We left a city citadel, a common like Stephen’s Green in Dublin or even Phoenix Park, controlled parkland with a semblance of wildness. There were fishing villages, similar to Cleggan or Roundstone, but they were called Hubbards, Herring Cove, Prospect, names that fall like fish into nets, and fish as well, the same fish you have here because the ocean was the Atlantic. Tides opposing but the water the same.
– Ahh . . .
– In the forest near our home at Rocking Stone I had often walked the dog, and once a man pulled his trousers down in front of us. The dog wasn’t interested in the muscle hanging limp, looking like a small dead weasel. That is something I never told anyone. I’d thought he was the keeper of the forest and that he was somehow making us welcome.
Flushed faces, the men interested (So she knows what one looks like . . .), the women embarrassed (Hussy!).
– We left my grandmother’s house on Chestnut Street, a house of gables, dark wood, a piano injured in the 1917 explosion in Halifax Harbour, blue Chinese ginger jars. There was a stern sepia grandfather, there were two girls who were never young, who never smiled, twists of iron hair wrapped round their heads. My mother said, This one is your Aunty Helen, and this one is myself. I could never quite believe her.
– Aye, it is that way sometimes with the photographs.
And Sean is looking deep into the fire, remembering the first judgement of the parents above the mantelpiece.
– We left. It was not until Fredericton that I was sure we’d actually go and not turn around to return. My grandmother was too old to transplant; we left her there sitting by her photographs. We’ll come to visit, there are planes, it’s only a few hours, we said. She was weeping out of sightless eyes, rocking her pain in a carved oak chair. I used to hold her hands and trace the blackened veins into the flaps of her wrists. We’ll come to visit, we’d said. When we didn’t, she died. My mother flew back, only a few hours, to touch my grandmother’s hands, the holes where her eyes had been.
– And who did ye have to keen? asked the crone, herself a mistress of the death peal.
– We had ourselves, our relationship to her. And myself, I was the daughter of the daughter, reading of pioneer women launching their canvas wagons onto roads that all led west.
– Ah, like the tinkers then. Festy, would ye ever put another lump of the ould sod on the fire?
– I remembered the island in the West, of course, and I studied my father’s maps. The names of the places were often Spanish or Portuguese, those nations claiming a foothold on the land in the beginning; or the names were Kwagiulth, Salish, born of the older time, called into being by the land and her offspring: Qualicum, where the dog salmon run; Chu-an, facing the sea. I was the daughter, alone in my place in our station wagon, thinking of a home in the West. We had our utensils for the journey and a canvas house wrapped up in a bag. We carried our photographs with us, impressed upon our retinas. There was one I looked at for a long time: my grandmother, my mother and I, arms braiding us into a single plait, but something not quite right. My mother and I are looking into the lens of the camera, my grandmother’s empty sockets are staring wildly into space, an explorer with no sense of location.
– A plait. Fancy that! Kathleen keeps a thin plait of her dead mother’s hair inside that gold locket she wears on her neck.
– Days we travelled a grey length of road, and we stopped like the faithful at stone cairns marking battles or discoveries. My father’s voice intoned our history. In Quebec . . .
– Aye, that’s where all the Frenchmen are trying for independence. Sure and don’t we know about the struggles here.
– they spoke an unfamiliar music, the “Frère Jacques” of early school the only French we knew. Their hands were quick as light, arms trembling like a weathercock West. In the tent at night, all six of us lay in rows like cells inside a honeycomb, breathing. On the prairie, my eyes grew parched. There was no water. Rivers of mud went snaking through fields and irrigation pipes to nourish the pale crops. That gravity was a constant pull as the oceans fought for us. My mother turned to me, said, Do you remember the train trips to Wolfville for the apple festivals? And the pipers up from Cape Breton in their kilts? But Mother, that was long before my time . . . Yes, I suppose it was your grandmother I went with, but it seems like only yesterday. When you were a girl? Yes. And I wondered, could my grandmother see the blossoms in her mind? Has she always been blind? No, but she was then. Oh. And the music, of course she could feel that, running in a shiver down her spine.
Miceal the elder nods vigorously. Aye, ye can feel that stuff singing in yer bones, and that’s His truth.
– My mother’s nostalgia and excitement for a dead time made me uneasy, and I wondered at our connection. Blood, I supposed, but not our souls. But then she told me a story: that she’d dreamed as a young girl of bridling a Sable Island pony, riding the Atlantic home to Lunenburg County, and I had dreamed myself of a similar ride after seeing the ponies in a National Geographic magazine.
– Another island! And where does this one lie?
– It’s a crescent moon of a shape lying southeast off Nova Scotia. The ponies from sinking Spanish galleons swam there hundreds of years ago, have managed to survive, breeding hardy and foraging for surf grass, galloping all night over dunes and the days surrounding a lighthouse.
– What about yer father? The sailor.
– Well, he remained neutral. He’d actually been born in Drumheller, far from the Atlantic or the Pacific, and it wasn’t until he was eighteen that he went to the sea at the end of World War II. So at heart he belonged to the prairie, too, and his uncle, the oldest man I have ever known, carved for us a land-going dinosaur out of hickory root. Its mouth was open, showing teeth and tongue, and two chips of amethyst were planted in its eyes.
– Get back to the journey.
– Well, we drove through a long string of prairie grain towns, clusters of houses, elevators for the dusty crops, wheat-coloured people tight-lipped in the general stores where we drank cream soda, and everywhere the dust, the chaff, the distance. You could stand and look for miles and not see the end of your vision. In cities like Brandon or Regina, there were fountains that sprayed our faces and felt like breakers if we closed our eyes, but they did not smell of salt. All those Historic Site Ahead signs my father noticed. He told us stories of uprisings . . .
– And sure don’t we know about uprisings? Isn’t Pearse’s cottage where he learned the Irish just over in Rossmuck?
– of Riel and Dumont, and he took photographs of my brothers and myself lounging on restored wagons and mastodons.
– Not real ones, surely? Yer codding us there.
– No, I mean reconstructions. You know. Or else fossilized. I don’t remember much of the detail. I was anxious to take that ferry to Swartz Bay and to stand still at the prow until we arrived. In the past, on short trips away from Vancouver Island, we had pretended we were the first explorers watching the Gulf Islands grow out of the mist, hearing the first croaking of the ravens, seeing the original waves breaking over the backs of killer whales. But we stayed a long time in Alberta. My father was a young boy, showing us where he’d cycled miles on Sundays for ice cream. He took us to the badlands. I remember not much colour but an eerie wind. And we were taken to a game farm to be shown sleep
y-eyed animals. I was the impatient one, felt like a tiger in a page-wire field, camera-snapping tourists waiting, breathless, as she rose and stretched, then started pacing.
– A tiger! I’ve not seen even a picture of one, but in the books they tell us them tigers and such are related to the cats. My Boots and Festy’s Frisky. Striped, though, if ye can believe such a thing.
– I can, Bridie. And my father’s sisters cooked for us. The food he grew up on, the pirogy and holopcha, seemed as exotic as quail’s egg or caviar. He talked the whole journey of the Sturgeon River. A boy he knew dived from the bridge, never came up. When we went there, I imagined his corpse and the others it spawned resting among the weeds.
– Aye, the way ye think that the oars will touch the drowned man whenever we row out near Fahy.
– Yes. And when we went back to the aunts’ house that day, my father drank whiskey with an uncle, and they looked through the yearbook of their thirteenth autumn. That young man on the Sturgeon’s muddy bottom. He smiled. He will never look older than that. He never knew about the war to come that we, as children, had to learn to imagine. My brother, older though younger, showed me pictures of shaved heads and pits of bodies. I, younger though older, knew about Hitler.
– I’ve read about that monster. Like Cromwell, he was.
– It did not take long, once we left Alberta, to make our way to the coast. We camped in the Rockies, thinking only of grizzlies. In our dreams they flattened our tent and ate our dog. Then the road, stretching itself like a rattlesnake . . .
– Ye won’t find a snake in all the counties! Saint Patrick himself banished them all from the face of Ireland a very long time ago, and they’re afraid to this day of returning.
– through the Okanagan, passing stalls of peaches, early apples, jugs of cider and cherry wine. Finally through the tunnels, Devil’s Elbow and Hell’s Gate, along the highway to the ferry terminal at the mainland’s edge. The ride across took one hundred minutes . . .
– That long? Is that a fact? We can row on a fine day from the island to Eyrephort in just twenty minutes. In a currach yet.
– and we walked the decks, pretending the boat was our own, pretending we had never been away. We flung the images gathered on the journey to the Strait, where they sank down to the sea’s bleak heart. We lived, after that, in a great house of distance. My mother wept in the night for snow, wept like a rain that would not stop. My grandmother rocked all night in her dreams. My father fished the rivers for trout and steelhead. He would not fish in the Sturgeon River, I remember, but stared down from the bridge to its depths. We lived near the sea in the house with the captain’s bunk and telescope, and I took my secret vial of Atlantic Ocean there, flung it into Gonzales Bay and waited: for the explosion, for Poseidon, for a goddess to rise from the waves. Stepped back in disappointment, and as I left I looked once behind me to see the ghost of a girl coming home across the ocean, her hands resting on the weedy mane of her pony.
– Ah, I understand yer meaning, though ye’d be best off to simplify in the odd instance. But yer telling a better story now all right. Will ye have the poteen?
– I will.
And someone piles more turf on the fire, the knitters race each other through the rough wool of their days, dogs twitch, Miceal extracts a tin whistle from his pocket and summons a reel from its heart.
I am walking the island’s circumference, past the megaliths and cottages. The sea is alive with currachs, the current and her lover undertow. What I have found: blue mussels, hooked mussels, barnacles, the skeletons of sand dollars, sea snails, tube-building bristle worms, sponges, starfish, mermaid’s hair and rockweed, bladder wrack, the crystallized salt around the edges of rock. I have found curious marks on the sand. I think they must be hieroglyphs, the whole intertidal zone literal with their message. Figures, rituals, wildlife. I think I have found the language of the universe.
– Sean, who would have done this and what does it say? (trusting his knowledge of the island’s strange events and visitors).
– What are ye meaning?
– This (pointing to the intricate narrative).
– Oh, that. Well, it is only the feet of the top-shell, that spiralled lad ye may see there (pointing to a conical shell just beyond). It is that they feed upon the algae, grazing from bit to bit like a cow may.
I look. The figures decipher themselves, and I see their meaning, not as symbol or the unfolding of allegory, but as the passage of sea animals, quiet, determined and possessing no urgent need for language.
Sean goes back to the picking of carrageen, the queer gelatinous moss which he dries, then sells to the Breton at Cleggan. I follow, though not in his footsteps that imprinted themselves like fossils in the sand.
– But these, Sean? (pointing to the circular carvings on the exposed stone). We might call these petroglyphs in Canada.
– And what is a petroglyph?
– Well, the original people carved pictures directly into rock . . . daemons, monsters, gods, events, the turning of the seasons . . . and it was, I guess, their record of the world.
– Aye, like the carving on the dolmens. But these here are only the marks a limpet will make with his pull. And if ye watch long enough, ye may see them return after their feeding. They will always return to the scar they have made. It is like a home to them so.
Mist lies over the island, potent and mysterious, like God’s breath. Although there is famine in the sea and the dogfish raid our nets, tangle themselves, are trapped gaunt and anguished when we find one, something is prolific: protozoa, creating themselves out of brine and the drowned man’s sperm, creeping ashore, shaking themselves free of the sea, then splitting, multiplying. They simply exist, mindless, without the cursed memory of falling, wandering, waiting, sinking. They are flesh-eaters at the dawn of evolution, speechless but whole. Every day we are thus renewed, given freely, without pain, without cost, new life to be among us.
There are pale beaches of coral sand, strung darkly with the dead weeds. I walk them endlessly, alert for news of the world: a bottle, an explosive, a book of the saint’s voyage enacted on the edge of the Atlantic, a waterlogged crate washed from the deck of a ship.
In those windy cottages, the stories age. Outside, a well runs dry. Pots rise empty on their bleach-bottle floats, the hay rots under the rain’s assault. And they stand, all of them, on the rim of the chopping sea, straining to the tide, pulling in the nets of morning. World without end, amen.
IRISH MIST
LISTEN. There were weeks when the sun refused us. At first I thought I could never live in such a place, but then I learned the sweetness of the Irish mist, how it enveloped you and numbed you to any real action or consequence. And you wandered in it, your hair jewelled, and you let yourself drift in great imaginings, where the ruined castle on the coast was made whole and you lived there, where the beached hooker was yours and you mended it. Occasionally a stranger, even more so than yourself, came to find something out. Were there corncrakes, nearly extinct on the mainland but thought to exist on the islands, where a scything farmer would watch out for the nests? There were. Would anyone sell a house to a foreigner for a summer place? They wouldn’t.
I never knew whether to believe the tales. A feud so great the Senate was involved. A fortune hidden in the oldest man’s bedsprings. They sounded fine if you heard them wound out of a mouth around a pipe and punctuated by bird cries.
But there were days when I wanted something more to happen. I’d arrange to be left off on the strand, or I’d row myself over in an available currach, and I’d walk the northern portion of the Sky Road. It was nice to use the muscles the mist had allowed to become soft and to really stride out the few miles to the Westport road. Once there, I knew the dilemma: north to places unknown and even a friend to visit in Mayo; south to Clifden and the monotonous streets; back the way I came. I went north once. Sometimes south for an unexpected afternoon in the town, rummaging in the magazine shop for something to read and o
nce finding The Tree of Man, having tea in the lobby of the Celtic, talking to anyone who talked to me first. Often back the way I came, walking down the Sky Road’s vistas into soft rain and the fuchsias.
At home, they wanted to know about my day; you could never row away unseen or return unheralded, if only by dogs. And Sean was always a little hurt, not knowing the need to ever leave except maybe of a Sunday when the football matches were played and replayed in every Clifden pub and the beer was particularly well drawn. If you could last long enough there was a dance in the hall at half-eleven, some pop band off-key on the improvised stage. Or you could always find an after-hours, the owner peering out at you first as you knocked on the bolted door, recognizing you and squiring you downstairs, where it seemed the whole town, including the Garda, had gathered for a last drink that became another and another. Maybe someone had a fiddle or a tin whistle, maybe it was even Miceal, and there’d be good crack and all your favourite tunes in the smoky, illegal air. Coming back was spooky, the rowers miraculously sober (though you’d not support them in a court of law) and a few singing and no lights to be seen west, but you knew you’d find land and your home and with luck the last of a fire.
And listen, I want to say what I felt. Sometimes I could not believe my arrival and the subsequent stay. I’d come for a holiday, not a life. And then I was charmed by the stones, believing them holy and omnipotent. And then I felt a prisoner, chained to respectability by the watching and the talk, barred from island life in its true estate by the fact of my alien blood (three parts Romanian, one part Scot). I was happiest walking alone on the north end, where you could look for miles beyond Slyne Head and see nothing but the restless sea, maybe a boat on a lucky day, and often even the horizon was invisible. If the wind was down and your own ears good, you could hear the throaty seals on Carrickarona. There were things to be found though you could not lay claim to them: threads of rope, fishing floats (and not the magical Japanese glass ones which you had in your old home, no, these were rusted metal), a boot that made you wonder, a little piece of wood with Mandarin stencilled on it. The landscape made me sad in a bittersweet way. I was overwhelmed by the pale colours, the mists and the stones. Music, when released from Miceal’s whistle, as it was nightly, or the wireless, was obviously bred out of the land, sad with hardship and lost love, soft-edged by the weather and keening like the wind. I felt lured by it and to it, though I knew my kinship was assumed and not organic.
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