Casting Off

by Nicole R Dickson

  “Row, Becky!” he yelled, pulling on his left oar.

  “Rowan.” Rebecca leaned forward, ignoring Fionn’s command as she reached for her little girl.

  “We need to get the curragh perpendicular to that wave or we’ll all be in the water and there won’t be a curragh! Row, Becky!”

  Fionn’s eyes were imperative, staring over his shoulder at her. They widened as he looked past her. Following his gaze, Rebecca saw a huge wave coming toward them.

  “Shit!” she yelled and quickly landed on the front bench. With Fionn at the back, Rebecca followed his moves as she had learned just hours before. The curragh was just barely straight on to the wave as it rolled beneath them, slapping their little boat with a great watery hand.

  “Row!” Fionn yelled.

  Rebecca laid on the oars. Siobhan lay next to Rowan, holding her tightly with her eyes closed. Rebecca wanted to reach down to her daughter, to touch her and see if she still lived, but if they didn’t get to land, death would engulf them all. Rebecca knew that without being told. Struggling with her own mind and the sea, she willed herself to think only of rowing. There was no cold. There was no wind or worry. There was only breath and oars and the sea.

  As they battled the ocean, rowing south, Rebecca looked to the east. Paddy was listing, as was Iollan, but together they were turning around, heading toward either Iollan’s mooring or Paddy’s, Rebecca supposed. She gazed at Fionn’s back, pulling with him. She was warming beneath the gansey and when she glanced down, she saw Rowan’s eyes open, shadowed by the lantern. She gasped.

  “Rowan,” she whispered, tears falling with the rain down her cheeks.

  “I lost my pipe,” she mumbled.

  Siobhan started crying.

  “We’ll get you another,” Sean said.

  Rebecca saw Sean staring at her from the bottom of the boat. She had saved his life—cruel man though he was. But as she gazed at him, she felt that burning need in her chest again. She sought the word for it, but none came to her as she rowed. The heat of her heart tightened her chest.

  “Need to breathe,” Sean said. “Breathe to row and live.”

  “Aye,” Rebecca replied.

  “I’m cold,” Rowan said, and she crawled over to Sean and lay down in the crook of his body. She pulled Siobhan over with her, and as Rebecca and Fionn fought the southern wind, the girls cuddled against Sean for warmth.

  It felt as though they had rowed for hours, but finally Fionn lifted his left oar and navigated the curragh onto a flat, smooth shore. It was raining and black as Rebecca jumped from the boat, having no trouble this time pulling it ashore. She lifted Rowan and then Siobhan from the boat, holding both girls in her arms. Fionn helped Sean up.

  “Where are we?” Rebecca asked Fionn.

  But Sean answered, “My house. Can’t get to anywhere else on the island in a gale.”

  When they came around the front of his house, Sean and Fionn opened the door. Rebecca followed them inside, out of the wind. Sean let go of Fionn, steadying himself by placing his hand on the wall. He flicked the switch.

  “There’s no electricity,” he said.

  “You make the fire, Becky, and get those girls out of their clothes. I need to tie down the curragh,” Fionn said in the darkness as he headed back out into the storm, shutting the door behind him.

  “Matches are on the mantel,” Sean said. “Peat’s on the hearth.” The old man shuffled through his house, holding on to his wall for support, and disappeared through a doorway on the right.

  Carefully, Rebecca made her way to the sofa and set Rowan and Siobhan down upon it. She kissed her daughter on the head and breathed deeply of her child’s scent. She had nearly lost her.

  “I love you, Rowan,” Rebecca choked.

  “I love you, Mama,” Rowan replied.

  Pulling back, Rebecca held Rowan’s face in her hands, but she could not see it in the darkness. Siobhan was weeping next to them.

  “Everything’s fine,” Rebecca whispered, kissing Siobhan on the head. She felt the little girl shivering. “You’re cold. I need to make a fire.”

  Picking her way through the darkness to the fireplace, Rebecca found the matches on the mantel just as Sean had said. She lit one and discovered a small pile of peat and a bag of dried grass on the hearth. Making a tepee of peat, she lit the tuft of grass beneath it. It smoldered as she fed the fire.

  She turned around, looking at her daughter. How close had she been to losing her tonight?

  “Mrs. Moray?” Sean said. She turned and found him dripping in the doorway to the right. He held a tiny shell in which a small wick was lit.

  “If the fire’s going, I have beds for them to climb into. I just need help moving a few things.”

  “We need to get them dry first. Do you have any clothing that they can put on?” Rebecca asked.

  Sean nodded and turned to the kitchen.

  “I’ll be right back,” she said to the girls. She stepped carefully onto the stone floor of the kitchen, which was made wet by Sean and now herself as the sea dripped from their soaking clothes.

  Over the old man’s shoulder and just off the kitchen, Rebecca could see light emanating from another room. Sean stepped into it. Rebecca followed, and when she entered she gasped.

  The room was lit with old oil lanterns, some made from glass and metal, others from nothing more than a shell with a wick dancing in a small pool of oil. Wool lay upon the floor in great piles of fluffy white, and a spinning wheel stood in the corner, a spool of yarn upon its spindle. Hanging on the walls, driftwood rods held many skeins of colored yarn. A great wooden table directly to Rebecca’s right had canisters and packets of dye sitting upon its scratched and stained surface. But mostly she gazed in wonder at the four huge mounds of knitted textiles that lined the far wall, piles tipping over like an avalanche and scattering about. A small chair stood next to a hearth, with many, many brown swatches tossed around its feet.

  Sean turned, meeting Rebecca’s wide eyes.

  “These”—he motioned to the ganseys—“are my sons.”

  Slowly, silently, Rebecca surveyed the room, turning around in place.

  “Rowan and Siobhan need something dry,” she whispered.

  “Aye,” Sean replied. From a pile nearest him, he pulled out a yellow sweater. He handed it to Rebecca. It was as bright as any summer’s day, with small circles like the halos on Byzantine saints and a pattern that looked like windowpanes. Knitted in neat rows beside the windows were tiny rounded stitches. Rebecca held the gansey closer to a candle.

  “Those are toes. That was the day Brendan, my youngest, took his first step.”

  Rebecca’s heart pounded as Sean went to the next pile. From it he lifted an apricot gansey and offered it to her. She took it and rubbed the fabric between her fingers. It was the color of a coming sunrise. In the main panel were fuzzy bobbles knitted into the interior of three large braids. A Tree of Life was stitched on either side of the main panel and next to those she found waves, large and curving, flowing down the length of the jumper.

  “That is Liam’s first lesson of the sea: Never turn your back to the ocean. You take those and change the girls from their wet things. I’ll make tea,” Sean said.

  Rebecca backed out the door. Sean followed. Turning around, she walked through the kitchen and into the living room. There she found Rowan and Siobhan sitting close to the fire.

  “I want my ma,” Siobhan choked, looking up at Rebecca with terrified eyes as the storm howled beyond the walls of the cottage.

  “It’s all right now,” Rebecca said, kneeling next to them. She took both of the girls in her arms, rocking back and forth to comfort them. The gale screamed outside and she could hear Dennis’s voice again—she was stupid; she couldn’t raise Rowan alone. His voice told Rebecca her daughter had nearly died. But even in his accusation, Rebecca held on to Rowan. Her daughter was here in her arms, alive, and she had saved her. In a gale on the ocean, Rebecca had protected her daughter, and
she had also saved Sean—she had reached down and pulled the unredeemable from death. The girls shivered.

  “It’s still blowing outside, Siobhan, my love. We have to wait. Here, take off those wet things and you’ll feel better,” Rebecca said quietly.

  “I want my da,” Siobhan whispered. Paddy was out in the water, his boat injured and listing.

  “I know,” was all Rebecca could say as she helped the little girls out of their wet clothes. Sean came into the living room with two cups of hot tea just when Fionn blew in the front door.

  “We need to clear the bed,” Sean told him, handing the tea to Rebecca. “You’ll help me. Rowan’s ma should stay with the girls.”

  Rebecca passed the cups of tea to Siobhan and Rowan and, after taking off her soaking gansey, she slid between them, wrapping her arms around their shoulders. As she sat staring at the flames, she could hear the whistling wind through the thatch above and a mistle thrush upon the gale.

  Sean came through the kitchen door, his hands full of brightly colored ganseys. He dumped them onto the chair next to the hearth. As he turned back, Fionn came in kind, and when she looked up into his face, his eyes were wide in surprise.

  “He knits?” Fionn whispered.

  Rebecca nodded.

  “Who would’ve known?” Fionn said quietly.

  “You think no one knew?” Rebecca asked.

  “He doesn’t talk to anybody—or didn’t anyway, until Rowan here,” Fionn replied, and as Sean showed up again with his arms laden, Fionn stepped away.

  Looking down at the ganseys, which now tumbled off the chair, Rebecca spotted a dark gray jumper with large crisscrossing oars as the main panel. On either side of the oars were single zigzags, and next to those were semicircular shapes rising above diagonal lines made of stocking stitches. She reached forward and picked up the gansey. Holding the sweater before the peat fire, she could see a small hole at the top of each semicircle.

  “Whales,” said Sean, dumping another handful on the pile. “Took me a long time to figure out that stitch.”

  “And what’s that one?” Rebecca asked, pointing to a gansey of the most amazing periwinkle blue.

  “The day my eldest learned to ride his bike,” Sean replied, staring at it distantly as Fionn came around and gently laid his armful of sweaters to the side. “He fell off.”

  Sean looked into Rebecca’s eyes, his gaze black and deep and cold. In that icy abyss, Rebecca caught her breath, seeing Dennis in the darkness.

  “I made him get up,” Sean whispered. “His arm was broken and I made him get back on.”

  Dennis fell away, disappearing into the ocean.

  Sean turned and with a heavy step walked back into his sons’ room.

  “How are the girls?” Fionn asked.

  Rebecca didn’t look at him. She gazed down at Liam’s Lesson enveloping Rowan with warmth, seeing the black abyss of Dennis’s death in her mind’s eye.

  “Everything’s fine,” she replied distantly.

  “Let’s get them to bed, then,” Fionn said, reaching down and brushing her hair with his hand.

  “Can you take Siobhan?” she asked.

  Fionn lifted Siobhan into his arms as Rebecca stood. Picking Rowan up from the hearth, Rebecca hugged her daughter as she watched herself drop Dennis from the bridge. She followed Fionn through the kitchen and into Sean’s sons’ room. The old man was leaning over the fireplace, tossing another brick of peat onto what was the beginning of a fire.

  “That should keep going for a while,” he said, and with a reticent glance over at Rebecca, he smiled a small smile and shuffled out the door.

  Two little beds had been cleared, each of them with three knitted afghans of various colors folded neatly at their ends. Fionn laid Siobhan on one of the beds and tucked an afghan around her. As Rebecca set Rowan onto the other bed, her little girl shook her head. She hopped off that bed and climbed in next to Siobhan.

  Rebecca’s chest tightened, a crushing vise squeezing her heart. She needed to hold her daughter—needed to feel something besides the guilt of Dennis’s death. Crawling into bed with Rowan curled up safely next to her always dissipated that darkness.

  You’re too stupid to raise her by yourself.

  Her little girl and Siobhan had almost become a story of these islands this night—a tale to be passed from one generation to the next over peat fires. Two little girls had fallen asleep in a shanachie’s boat, which was picked up by the southern wind and floated over the sea into the land of the fairies, never to be seen again. An Irish tale with a tragically magical end. It could have happened, and as Rebecca rolled the story through her mind, she also realized she was losing her daughter altogether. Rowan didn’t want to lie down with her. She wanted to lie down with Siobhan.

  “Becky,” Fionn said softly, “there’s no need to cry now.”

  Rebecca looked over at him, touching her cheeks. There, surprisingly, she found tears.

  “I’m losing her,” Rebecca whispered.

  “You’re her mum, Becky. Mums never lose their children.” Gently he lifted Rebecca’s soaked gansey over her head.

  “They do if they die,” Rebecca sobbed.

  “She didn’t die,” Fionn said, lowering Rebecca to the bed. He helped her off with her shoes.

  “She could have,” she replied as she slipped out of her wet pants.

  Lying down, she thought about how great the ocean’s swells were and how little the boat was that had brought them safely ashore. Her tears wet the pillow on which she lay as she replayed in her mind the picture of Rowan’s baby body on the gurney in the ambulance. She saw her daughter and Siobhan clinging to each other in Old Man Dirane’s dinghy. How had Rowan not fallen off of Highway 1? How had she and Siobhan gotten so far out in that broken boat?

  “Rowan didn’t die, Becky. Why do you get stuck on that possibility instead of seeing the reality?”

  Rebecca looked up into Fionn’s face. His red hair danced like flames in the shadows of the peat fire.

  “What reality?”

  “That you—Becky—you jumped off a boat in a gale. I never met anyone who’s ever done that. You swam through the ocean in a storm, saved Sean, climbed into a curragh, and rowed it to safety.”

  Rebecca stared at him. Pulling herself closer to him, she laid her head upon his chest. She had jumped into an ocean gale. How had she done that? If she could do such a thing, how was it, then, that Dennis had died? She buried her face in Fionn’s chest—hiding from the truth of Thanksgiving Day. She hadn’t wanted to save Dennis. She had wanted him dead. That must be the difference. Thinking back to the sea and the gale—she had jumped into the sea. She had felt differently about Sean, seeing him as he sank beneath the waves. She wondered at her own bravery as she lifted her head.

  “I couldn’t have done that on my own. I jumped off the boat by myself, but you followed. We did the rest of that together, Fionn.”

  “That we did.”

  Rebecca watched the light of the fire flicker across Fionn’s red chest hair. Soon she closed her eyes, thinking about what she had done that night—what she and Fionn had done.

  “We work good together,” she whispered sleepily.

  “Aye, that we do.”

  Rebecca finally fell asleep, wrapped in the warmth of his arms, listening to the beat of his heart—and for the first time she felt her darkness dissipating without Rowan.

  CHAPTER 40

  Ladder/Moss Within

  Ladder/Moss Within. 1. Jacob’s ladder with Moss stitch knitted within the ladder’s rungs. 2. Grace.

  —R. Dirane, A Binding Love

  Sean left Fionn and Rowan, her mother, and Siobhan in his boys’ room and walked through his kitchen to his living room, where he lifted Rowan’s untouched tea from the hearth and took a sip. He was soaking wet and chilled. This used to be where he’d sit and warm his feet as his boys played their pipes after a long day of fishing. It was where Claire would bring them supper on cold winter nights so they al
l could be warm as they ate. It had been a long time since Sean sat in the warmth of his family’s fire, and doing so now made his heart ache.

  Staring down into the cup of tea, Sean ran the night through his head—his battle with the gale, his curragh over the swells, putting his own life aside to save his children.

  “If only I had known then,” he whispered to the glowing embers. But he’d had no idea forty years before that his sons were even in trouble that night. Not until Padrig Blake showed up with Matthew’s gansey did he know.

  “I thought I had fixed the engine,” he mumbled. For years he’d been hearing Joe in his head, telling him that Matthew knew engines. It was one of the last things Joe had said to him before he died, and all this time Sean had believed it had been the engine that had failed that night. That was a truth to him, as sure as there were mackerel in the sea. But suddenly, sitting before this fire, remembering Rowan and Siobhan standing in the tattered dinghy so far north of the rocks from which their boat was lifted, he was not so sure. That dinghy should have gone down. In such a storm it should have sunk long before it even reached where Sean found it. But it hadn’t. As he slipped his wet shoes off, he wondered at his sons, fishermen all, dying in a gale when two little girls in a broken boat survived.

  His body ached. His spine cried out. It wanted to lie down—to have all the weight removed from it.

  “Men carry the weight of the world,” he whispered. So he had told his boys. Have to be strong to do such a thing, and as that thought passed through his mind, he heard Joe’s voice.

  Will you never let go of us to see that we have become the men you raised us to be?

  Shakily setting his teacup down, Sean looked into his son’s angry eyes sitting across from him even now. Sean had sent them out. Sean had made the decision and forced it on his boys, and not for the first time the old man buried his head in his hands, hiding from that truth. Engine or no, storm or no, his boys went out because he made them go.