Casting Off

by Nicole R Dickson

  Rebecca took the plate and walked out into the pub. She made her way through the tables to a middle-aged man with salt-and-pepper hair who was sitting alone at one of the window tables.

  “Eggs, bacon, and tomatoes?” Rebecca inquired.

  “Yes, please, and can I have some coffee?” He was Scottish by his accent.

  “Here ya go,” Annie said, sliding a cup onto the table.

  “Excuse me,” called a young woman seated with two young men. Rebecca walked over to the table, which was near the fireplace.

  “We’d like bangers and mash all around—and can you light the fire? It’s cold in here.”

  Rebecca nodded and headed back into the kitchen.

  “Three bangers and mash,” she said. “Where’s the matches?”

  “Over by the coffeepots,” Maggie replied. “You should go to Dublin, Becky. See Sharon.”

  “I don’t have time, Mags. I’ve been here ten days and only have two ganseys.”

  Rebecca left the kitchen with the box of matches. Next to the fireplace she found a small stack of peat and a basket of dried grass. Pulling three bricks of peat from the pile, she created a tepee with them in the fireplace. Just as she had watched Sheila do her first morning on the island, she slid a small wad of dried grass beneath the peat, struck a match, and lit the grass. It glowed softly, quickly burning away. But before the flame went out, she added more dried grass until the peat smoldered gently at its edges.

  “It’ll take a minute, but the fire should get going shortly,” Rebecca said to the young woman. She made her way back to the kitchen.

  “Here’s your bangers and mash,” Maggie said.

  “I have a doctorate in archaeology and somehow, in less than two weeks here, I’ve become a waitress again.”

  Maggie laughed as she handed Rebecca the plates.

  “I can tell by the way you carry those plates that you’re a good one. Sharon always said you were.”

  “Sure,” Rebecca said under her breath as she took the plates into the pub, where the fire was now flickering happily.

  “Three bangers and mash,” she said, slipping the plates onto the table.

  “Can I get more coffee?” the young woman asked.

  “Just a sec,” Rebecca replied. She walked back into the kitchen. Annie stood with the coffeepot, smiling. On the table was a thermos and a brown paper sack.

  “We put some scones in the sack and poured you some tea, Becky,” Annie said. “Go have breakfast somewhere. Take a day to yourself.”

  “Maggie needs help,” Rebecca said.

  “I’m here. Why don’t you go see the big fort before the tourists get out of bed?” Annie said.

  “You like old places, Becks,” Maggie said.

  “But there’ll be more tourists. I should stay and help.”

  “It was only gonna be me and you today, Becks. Now, it’s me and Annie. Maybe you’ll find something helpful for your book.”

  “Are you sure?” Rebecca replied.

  “Take the day, Becks. When’s the last time you were alone without anyone or anything to take care of?”

  Rebecca looked from Maggie to Annie.

  “We’ll be fine,” Annie said, lifting the brown bag and thermos from the table and pushing them into Rebecca’s hands.

  “Paddy’ll take care of Rowan. Go on,” Maggie pressed her. “Take the road past Rose’s house—like you’re going to Mairead’s.”

  “I remember,” Rebecca replied, and with a small smile she took the thermos and sack from Annie and stepped out into the morning mist. It had lifted a bit and dawn sat gray on the horizon. After placing the thermos and the bag of scones into her side baskets, Rebecca pedaled off toward the church.

  The wind was soft and gentle, brushing the mist before her, making small white ghosts for her to ride through. There were no people out on the road, and the gray solitude filled her mind with quiet. It had been so long since she was still; her life in the States was constantly filled with work and worry. This quiet was what she’d come here to find. Every now and then Rowan and Sean would pass through her mind and she’d slow down, thinking perhaps she should return to town. But then she reminded herself that Rowan was with Paddy. Paddy had a little girl. He knew how to keep little girls safe. So Rebecca pedaled on until she saw a great blackness far away in the mist.

  Straight ahead, the island rolled off in the distance, rocky and flat. Huge waves crashed against sheer cliffs as hundreds of seabirds circled in their wake, their keening songs soaring to the Irish heaven. Slightly to her left, three concentric semicircles of black stones rose out of the rock and grass. The convex curvature of the semicircles’ wall faced where Rebecca stood, the tips of its crescent-moon shape ending where the land fell steeply into the sea. She climbed down from her bike and walked it off the asphalt, leaning it against a stone wall, as there was no way to take it farther.

  With her thermos and paper bag in hand, Rebecca approached the first wall. As she had learned from Fionn, she hurtled herself over it, walking with surety across the rocky land. Here, at island’s end, the wind blew fiercely. The grass peeked warily from its tiny dirt crevices, shuddering as though afraid to grow too tall lest it be picked up and blown out to sea. The wind whipped her hair, flailing her cheeks and stinging her eyes as she climbed over another wall. The fort grew larger as she got closer to it. She estimated that its inner parapet was near twenty feet high, made of stones stacked one atop another. Jagged, irregular rocks like giant shards of black stone tumbled away at the base of the outer wall, and she carefully picked her way through them.

  Walking toward the cliff’s edge, she came around the end of the second wall and climbed up on the top of the inner parapet. Her heart beat against her chest like the waves crashing below. There was no sound but the pounding drumbeat of the tide. Its violent impact on the island sent little drops of salt water floating through the air.

  Rebecca stood alone, watching the sea to the southwest, thinking of Sharon, John, and Fionn sitting here beneath the stars. How many times had Sharon told that story? It was the tale she repeated most. Rebecca’s mind had made the scene a quiet one—soft murmurs and laughter of three teenagers lying head to head as they watched the Milky Way overhead. But that could not have been how it was. There was no silence here. There would have been no soft, sleepy conversation on tufts of green Irish grass. This place was hard and solid and eternal, tenaciously standing against the beating ocean—its roaring call daring all who heard it to stay and live. It would never give up nor would it allow any who lived upon its rocky shores to relent.

  As Rebecca lowered herself to the ground in the wind, making herself small like the grass so as not to be blown away, she heard what Sharon had heard her whole life. She pulled a scone from her bag, a solitary person within an ancient black open fortress. She felt calm and still, and she poured herself a cup of tea and had breakfast with the great crashing voice of the island.

  CHAPTER 18

  Chevron

  Chevron. 1. A pattern of stitches meeting at an angle, like the sleeve insignia worn in the military to designate rank. 2. A moment where there is an abrupt change in direction.

  —R. Dirane, A Binding Love

  Sean tottered toward the church. The little shell by his door was empty; that was the only reason he ever bothered the priest. The fog was thinning, and Sean could tell the periwinkle sky would still haunt him another day. He knew it was above the mist, burning and beating and glaring, and with it the memory of Matthew’s bike hung just out of sight but always threatening.

  “Good day, Morahan!”

  Sean looked about, wondering how he had ended up at the rocks south of town. He found Paddy holding a fishing rod, balancing on a rock with his daughter beside him.

  “Getting the child ready to take after you, Blake?”

  Paddy nodded with a grin.

  Sean spied Rowan playing in Old Man Dirane’s ancient dinghy—the white and blue paint chipped and peeling from decades of ga
les and children’s play. It was the first boat the children of the island stepped into, pretending to be great fisherfolk catching giant shoals of fish out on Galway Bay.

  “Would you do me a favor there, Morahan? I think the wee ones would like tea and something to eat. Could ya stay while I go back home and fetch breakfast?”

  Sean smiled like the sun at the invitation. How long had it been since he’d been fishing with a child?

  “That would be fine.”

  “Good, good,” Paddy replied, handing the old man his fishing rod.

  “Good day, Rowan,” Sean said in greeting as Paddy walked away.

  Rowan didn’t reply. Instead she stared at him, stone-faced, and offered him but a little wave. Anger flashed through his mind, for this was not what he had expected from her. He was about to say—to say he was hurt. It wasn’t anger; it was hurt. He swallowed.

  “Everything all right, there?” he asked of her.

  Rowan nodded and turned her back to him.

  “I’ll be back shortly, Siobhan. Listen to Mr. Morahan and do as he says,” Paddy called over his shoulder.

  “Aye, Da.”

  “You, too, there, Rowan.”

  “Okay,” Rowan replied without turning around.

  Sean stood still, listening to the waves gently kiss the rocks on which he stood. A buoy sounded in the distance to the south, its lonely bell tolling in the fog that lay upon the waves farther out. Sean did not usually come this way, partial as he was to the west. It was not a place to row to except in summer anyway, as the currents to the north and south of the island were, at any other time of year, strong. It was like rowing in mud; no matter how hard you pulled on the oars, you wouldn’t move an inch. Only when Sean had had his own fishing boat with an engine did he venture on this side of the island, as the only docks were in town and the town was east. But forty years it had been since he’d had a boat with an engine. With no sons and no wife—no family to keep—and with no desire to partner with anyone else on the island, Sean went his solitary way, fishing from his curragh alone, and as that thought passed through his head, he reeled his line in a little bit.

  He thought back on his last encounter with Rowan. He had not been mean or short. He thought he had left her in a happy mood, and as he ran all their conversations through his head from the moment he had seen her in O’Flaherty’s Pub to the time he walked away from her followed by the sound of her whistle, a tug on his sleeve brought his attention to his left. There he found Rowan looking up at him with a frown.

  “Did I do something to hurt your feelings again?” he asked softly, not sure if he had or hadn’t.

  “Are you pretending to be nice to me, Sean?” she whispered.

  Sean peered down into her eyes and found—found—what was that look? “Did someone say I was pretending to be nice to you?”

  Rowan didn’t answer.

  “If I don’t like somebody, ya think they know?”

  She nodded emphatically.

  “Well, knowing that, ya think if I didn’t like somebody, would it be like me to pretend to be nice to them?”

  The little girl shook her head slowly.

  “No, Rowan. I don’t pretend to like anybody.”

  “So, you do like me?”

  “Aye, Rowan. You’re a good—friend.”

  She smiled with a little nod and when she did, a reflection of pink shined across her face. Sean turned to the horizon and found the sun rising in a fluorescent blaze as the fog cleared. Hundreds of puffy little clouds dotted the pink-apricot sky. Matthew’s bicycle memory vanished. Replacing it was the thought of Liam and the little boy’s first try at fishing.

  “See those clouds there, Rowan?”

  “Aye?”

  “They look like hundreds of tiny sheep, don’t they? My da used to say when the sky appears so, ’tis the Almighty gathering his flock.”

  So he had told Matthew and Joe and Liam and Brendan, and as he thought of his four sons he felt Rowan’s tiny, soft hand slide into his rough palm. He squeezed it, holding on as gently as he could, and the great pain that welled up in his heart formed a single tear that rolled from his eye.

  Sean looked down to his right and found Siobhan sliding closer to him. “Will we catch fish, Mr. Morahan?” she asked.

  “I think it likely.” He coughed, trying to control another tear that rested precariously in the corner of his right eye. Swallowing, he bent down and secured his fishing pole in a crevice between rocks. Then he removed Siobhan’s rod from her hands and shimmied it between two rocks. The lines reached out, disappearing into the pink water that reflected the sunrise to the east.

  “All right. When the lines are all laid and settled still in the water, now’s the time to play a tune.”

  “Won’t that scare the fish away?” Siobhan asked.

  “Watch,” he said, balancing his weight forward as he squatted down until his eyes were level with Siobhan’s and Rowan’s. He pulled his pipe from his sleeve and played a tune. He made it sound pink and gold, like sunrise; he called to the swimming creatures below to come and see the glittering light upon the surface. They heard him, of course. They always did, and suddenly both lines of the fishing rods began to shake. He stopped playing, winking at the girls with a crinkled smile.

  “Rowan, you take this line,” he said, handing Rowan the fishing rod Paddy had held. “Siobhan, you take the other. Careful now, as you pull it from the rocks.”

  Siobhan tugged the rod from its secure crevice. Sean held his hand to her back, steadying her on the rock.

  “We don’t pull the fish in too fast. We let the line out a little, then pull it back. Don’t want it to snap and lose our supper, now, do we?”

  “No,” Rowan said, gritting her teeth as her rod bent down from the weight and fight of the fish.

  “Reel yours in a bit, Siobhan,” Sean said. “Slowly, slowly. Almost there. Watch it, Rowan!”

  Rowan spun her reel sharply and from the little waves below the rock on which she stood, a mackerel popped out of the ocean, attached to her line.

  “I got one! I got one!” she yelled triumphantly.

  Sean lifted Paddy’s net and quickly surrounded Rowan’s fish. Siobhan leaned back, pulling a bigger mackerel from the water. It hit the rocks, flapping about the stones.

  “I can’t hold it!” Siobhan hollered. “It’s too heavy!”

  Quickly Sean skittered forward on the rocks and placed the net beneath Siobhan’s fish.

  “Your fish is bigger, Siobhan!” Rowan laughed.

  Sean carefully picked his way across the rocks. He lifted each fish from the net, pulled the hook from its mouth, and dropped both into Paddy’s fishing basket.

  “Won’t your da be surprised, Siobhan?” he asked with a grin. He took his cap off and wiped his brow.

  “Aye.” Siobhan smiled proudly. “Did your da teach you that song?”

  “No,” Sean replied, walking toward Old Man Dirane’s dinghy. “ ’Twas my son Joe that knew such things. I was a good fisherman. He was a grea—” A lump formed in Sean’s throat and he coughed instead of finishing the sentence.

  Climbing into the tattered little boat, Sean sat down. The sky was bright and clear above him.

  “You know whose boat this is?” he asked, changing the subject. Siobhan and Rowan crawled into it and sat down on the bench in front of him.

  “Old Man Dirane’s,” Siobhan replied.

  “Who was he?” Sean asked.

  “The shanachie.”

  “What’s ‘shawnashee’?” Rowan asked.

  “A storyteller. For the Irish, they keep the history, traveling from town to town, island to island, telling the wee ones the great deeds of the past so no one forgets.”

  “This was his boat?” Rowan asked, running her hand across the edge of the dinghy.

  “Aye. The Diranes were great fisherfolk,” Sean replied.

  “My da says a gale blew through when his da was a boy,” Siobhan said. “He told me Old Man Dirane was out in
this very boat, coming back from telling tales on the big island. He had lost his way—couldn’t see anything through the rain and the wind, and suddenly, he felt a bump. The boat just up and landed right here.”

  “That it did,” Sean confirmed.

  “Were you alive then, Sean?” Rowan asked.

  “Aye. I was just back from war. No one has moved this boat since.”

  “My da says that all the children of the island play in it ’cause it calls to them. It’s magic,” Siobhan said.

  “Magic?” Rowan asked, looking down at the splintered bottom of the dinghy.

  “It’s where we learn to go out in the water. The boat teaches us secrets,” Siobhan said, leaning over to Rowan as if passing a secret herself.

  “Some’s as say it’s Old Man Dirane himself whispering to ya,” Sean added.

  Rowan looked at Sean with wide eyes—mahogany surprise.

  “Can ya teach me to play that tune that calls the fish, Mr. Morahan?” Siobhan asked.

  “Aye, but it’s not just the tune. ’Tis the Irish in your head with the song that gets the fish to come. That’s what Joe taught me. You speak Irish?”

  “Of course!” Rowan exclaimed. “Can’t you hear her?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Her speaking Irish?”

  Sean and Siobhan looked at each other and laughed. Rowan’s brow furrowed.

  “Sorry, darlin’. We’re not speakin’ Irish. We’re speakin’ English with an Irish accent—to you.”

  “There’s an Irish language?”

  “Tell ya what. Siobhan and I’ll teach you Irish and I’ll teach you two some fishing tunes for the whistle. And we’ll all sit here and listen to what Old Man Dirane has ta say while we wait for your breakfast.”

  “Okay!”

  “Where shall we start with the Irish, Siobhan?”

  “How about the ocean?”

  “All right, then. What’s the word for water?”

  “Uisce.”

  “ISH-kyuh,” Rowan repeated.

  “Fish?” Sean asked.

  “Iasc,” Siobhan replied.

  “EE-uhsk.”

  Sean listened to Siobhan correct Rowan’s pronunciation. As he sat there, he watched Rowan’s eyes and began to focus on their color. Though he knew the sky was periwinkle blue above him, all he saw was mahogany.