In Exile

by Billy O'Callaghan

  The flesh of his hands was red and scarred from hauling rope and nets, burned from the wind and gritted raw. The nail of his left thumb was three quarters consumed by a black bubble that was slowly working its way out, and the top two joints of his right index finger were missing, long since amputated by a running line. ‘I was staying with one of the lads who go on the tanker. He’s English, but he has a small flat out in Crumlin. He was putting me up, because it’s only a fortnight. We’re heading over in a few days, on the ferry to Liverpool.’ He didn’t explain why he was in the Phoenix Park, and I didn’t want to embarrass him, or catch him out in a lie.

  ‘Well,’ Jenny said. She looked at me, but decided to press ahead anyway. ‘You can call him up, this friend of yours, and tell him you’re staying with us. I’ll get a bath running and find some of Peter’s clothes for you. That way I can get your things washed.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ Pádraig said once she had left the room, and he braced himself to rise.

  But I raised a hand to him and he stopped. ‘You won’t go,’ I said, feeling bigger than I deserved. ‘You’re my brother. If you’re staying in Dublin then you should be here, in my house.’ He stared at me, his mouth shifting, but no words came and after a moment I gave up waiting for them.

  On the island, everybody lived and died with the tides. The sea took my father. I was a child not much older than Luke is now, but the magnitude of the tragedy was such that fragments have remained ingrained with me. I can remember standing with Sheila out on the last bluff of land, hunched against the battering wind and then the great icy stones of hail as the storm that beat the sea inched slowly in over the island. Sheila held my hand so that I wouldn’t stray too close to the land’s edge, and we stared out at the churning bilge, watching for the trace of the boat coming home. I could feel her beside me whispering prayers to Our Lady to bring them safely back to us, but I didn’t want to pray, and instead I watched how the waves crashed and foamed across the jagged coastal rocks, how they roared as they hit and seemed to draw an answering crack of thunder from the distance. Spikes of lightning slashed at the dusk and made it brilliant, and after they had faded I could still see them alive for full seconds, my mind’s eye scarred with them. We waited, but there was no sign of the boat coming home, just the turgid blanket of the sea and the low pulsing sky made a thing alive by the storm, and at last the hail grew so thick and hard that we were forced to go inside. Then we sat by the fireside and listened to the wind crying in the chimney, already lamenting the lost, and Bríd cut and buttered soda bread for us to eat, because she couldn’t just sit, couldn’t even bring herself to talk about it. She was the eldest in our family, and the kind who had to be busy or she’d just break.

  Eventually, late into the night, the wind died. Over the hours, we had become so accustomed to its sound that the gaping hole which yawned in its absence seemed profound. Anxiety swept through us then, stirred awake by the irresis­tible sense of anticipation. While the hail beat against the roof’s thatch we knew that the wait would continue, but now that the worst of the storm had passed, any boats that survived could dare to come ashore, dare to risk the rocky coastline.

  I went to the window and there was nothing to see but darkness, but I knelt there anyway and watched, knowing that I’d probably hear any approach before I saw them. Until that moment in my life, the dark had held no fear for me. Now though, its secrets and threats felt infinite.

  There should have been two sets of footsteps on the road instead of one. I ran to the door but couldn’t bring myself to step outside. The steps came slowly, scratching wearily up the incline. The wind had dropped completely, and in the silent night their sound carried a long way. Sheila and Bríd sat at the empty fireside and their whispered prayers found full sound, a singsong cadence of words that held such sweetness I couldn’t help but be carried along.

  ‘Sé do bheatha a Mhuire, atá lán de ghrásta, tá an tiarna leat …’

  For an hour, Pádraig couldn’t speak, and by then a hiss of light had broken in the east, just the smallest ugliest line of white beneath the lumbering bank of night’s blackness. He shivered from a cold which had penetrated down into his bones and there was little comfort even after the fire finally took hold and began to blaze, or from the warm blankets wrapped around his shoulders.

  ‘The waves were running twenty feet,’ he said, and he had to close his eyes to speak because details of the room kept trying to distract him from the facts. ‘We were drawing in the nets for home when the hail came down, and I thought we’d all just die then because they were like chunks of rock just punching at the boat. Tomás took one to the temple and it split him open to the bone and stunned him so that he couldn’t even speak his own name. We had to put him under the tarpaulin with the herring to stop him from wandering overboard, and we tried our best to ride it out. It was so dark that we could make nothing out at all except when the lightning hit. There was no horizon, no direction. Christ, the sea never felt so big to me.’

  Nobody had actually seen it happen. Tomás, my father’s brother, was out of action, cleaved open and concussed by the hail, and Pádraig was down below, trying to bail out the flooded hold. The hull was contracting against the pressure, he said, the water booming against the walls. I would come to know that sound myself when it was my turn to go to sea, and I weathered storms so I can at least begin to imagine the fear and the sounds of this one.

  My father was gone. Presumably swept overboard, either he lost his footing on the violently pitching deck or else had been taken by a broadside wave. By the time Pádraig became aware of his absence there was nothing that could be done, no way to tell how much time had passed since he had fallen in, or how far the swell had carried him, or in what direction. Pádraig managed to revive Tomás, and together they flailed around the boat, linking arms at the elbow, not wanting to separate, too afraid to be left alone, even for a minute, with the raging sea and all the rising ghosts that storms can bring. But only the pale glow of breaking crowns tempered the darkness, the scudded peaks of the waves like rolling mountains, and finally they retreated below. Outside and all around, the wind roared and the sea built and surged and threatened to capsize them, and they stood chest-deep in oily bilge taking turns to work the pump. Tomás, still bearing the brunt of his concussion, waded through his nightmares, but his body seemed to carry on of its own accord and the tendons of his strong back and huge arms worked the lever in relentless fashion while Pádraig braced himself against the hose, too exhausted to even think, but crying over what had happened.

  I can remember the fear of my brother and my sisters, but not my own. Our mother had passed some three years before, taken by the scarlet fever epidemic which had swept the island, and now a storm had come to make orphans of us, but I was too young to really understand that and my thoughts instead were with the firelight and the shadows leaping layers of drama across the walls, and with all the faery stories I had ever heard.

  Three days after the storm, fishermen from the mainland found my father. From the shore we watched one man steer while the other four stood at the stern, tall and silent, guarding the covered body from further harm. When they made the harbour, Tomás took the tossed rope, lashed it to the small jetty and helped them ashore. He thanked them in Irish and then in English when they hauled my father’s body out of the boat, and pressed flagons of poiteen on each of them, all we had to give. The men didn’t want to take our offerings, but finally they did, to appease us. They loaded the illicit flagons into the hold, concealing them beneath a pile of nets, but returned unannounced the following day with cakes and barrels of stout and a whole boiled ham. For the wake, they said, and the islanders welcomed them in gratitude.

  Pádraig stayed three nights with my wife and I. He bit at his lip until it began to bleed and the trembling across his shoulders grew worse with every passing hour, and it was clear that he was in pretty bad shape. When I pressed a glass of whiskey into his hand he looked at me with a mixture of gratitude
and embarrassment, and his breath bristled around the edges with a buzz that threatened worse. But it relaxed him, and caused him to open up to us. A little, anyway. He shrugged quite a bit, a gesture which seemed to be apologetic until it became so over-used and began to look like something else, and he talked of how in the boiler-room of an oil tanker it was possible to feel the sea right beneath your feet, and it got so that a man never knew whether it was day or night. Nova Scotia had been a lot like home, he said, especially on that cusp coming out of summer when it was not too cold yet but not too hot either. He’d shown men in a bar some fiddle tunes from the island; they spoke a dialect of Gaelic that was oddly similar to his own and they’d been able to communicate without having to resort more than two or three times to English.

  It astonished me to think that I could have forgotten about the fiddle, because there had not been an evening passed on the island that didn’t see him take up his place by the fireside, his boots tapping to the lead of his fingers on the neck and the bow ripping across the strings, and the sound of it so sweet as it was joined by my sisters’ voices in sung lament. I knew how to play too, had learned from watching Pádraig and my sisters, but I haven’t touched a bow in years. Dublin just doesn’t move to the same rhythms, and there are other things now for me to make than music. Easier things.

  ‘What was Peter like?’ he repeated, smiling in answer to one of Jenny’s questions.

  ‘Well, he was never Peter to us, only Peadar. And sometimes he’d get to singing something and he’d forget the world was even there. He was always getting lost in songs, could always catch a melody in an instant, and he had the voice of a bird.’ He looked at me. ‘We always knew he’d go, just as soon as he had the chance. Sheila used to grow hoarse from calling him, but he’d be away down on the shore or else over in the fields trying to ride Callum’s horse. Callum had the farm over from us; we’d help him in the fields at harvest time and he’d pay us in meat. He kept pigs and cows, and he’d slaughter them himself and sell them off to the other islanders. He had this old skewbald mare that he used to ride bareback around the island, and I swear the ould nag could nearly talk. What was it that she was called again, Peadar?’

  ‘Róisín Rua,’ I answered, and he chuckled.

  ‘So, you haven’t forgotten everything then.’

  ‘There’s still a few things I remember,’ I said. I know that I only imagined the bitterness in his teasing, that I was hearing nothing more than the voice of my own guilt at having abandoned them all for education and other things that even now probably seem like poor excuses in their minds. As poor as they sometimes seem in my own mind.

  ‘Ah,’ he sighed, sensing my discomfort. ‘The isl­and’s a poor hand to a gambler. You did right to get off, boy. Else it would only have finished you, same as it did the rest of us.’

  ‘I miss it sometimes,’ I said, not really believing it until that very moment.

  ‘Of course you miss it. Isn’t it your home? But it asks too much of a man. Or a woman, for that matter. You did right, getting off.’

  This small absolution was all that he could offer in exchange for my efforts at hospitality. And maybe he even understood, because, after all, he was running too. He had an increasing problem with drink, yes, but he didn’t really need the six-month trips to sea to ensure his survival, because a man of his capabilities would always find work in one of the other island boats. He was running, just as I had; it was simply more difficult for him to break the binds.

  As soon as it could, the bottle took hold, but in a relatively harmless way. He’d begin a train of thought and then leave it hanging there unfinished, and he’d watch us with those pale eyes, not understanding that we were waiting for more. Or he’d slip from English into Irish and back again until what he was saying became utterly nonsensical. Jenny had some Irish, but not the free-based dialect of our island tongue. Still, she didn’t seem to mind; maybe the single glass of whiskey was enough to do for her what it took a whole bottle to do for Pádraig. She clapped her hands in time when my brother finally began to sing, the music flowing from him as he leaned back with his eyes held softly shut. I realised with some surprise that I had been waiting all night long for this, for him to be done with words alone because they could never really tell the whole truth of who he was.

  His voice had aged from the strong baritone I remembered. Everything had conspired against that lovely timbre, and what remained now was the sound of a life lived in all wrong ways, the stories pouring forth on scraping, wizened breaths. All in Irish, but better for that, because the way that the echoes of the words melded with the melodies somehow carried a connection with all that I had ever known, with the rocks and dirt, with the sea and the great sky. Pádraig’s voice ached with every joy and element of sorrow. Eventually, I was drawn in, helpless to resist, and I put my own voice with his. Mine sounded far less assured, but I found the way forward by instinct, all of this too deeply ingrained in me to ever be fully forgotten. When I glanced at Jenny, she was watching me hard, and I sensed a little hurt, I think, because this was something new to her, something at which she had never even guessed. I had lived my lie too well, I suppose, but I put that aside, closed my eyes and held fast to my brother’s voice just as I had once grasped his hand and made a broken promise to myself that I would never let go. In my mind I heard our voices dance together and then soar, and the stories of the songs unfolded, long narratives twenty and thirty verses in length that I could not have remembered if I tried but still somehow knew. Tales of tragedy on the sea, and tales of lost love and exile. In the darkness I had made, I was home again, back on the island. I could feel the comfort of my family around me, and I could breathe the clean free air and just sing follow-the-leader games with old ballads that our ancestors had known and maybe written.

  When it came time to part, he insisted that I let him off at the bus station. He’d meet up there with that friend of his, he said, and they’d get a bus out to the ferry terminal. In a few days he’d be on the high seas. We talked about small things that we pretended were important, but we didn’t talk about the wine bottle, or the cut on his head, and I think we both excused ourselves the Saturday.

  The clothes he wore were mine. Grey denims and a still-good shirt, my second overcoat, the knee-length navy wool. That, at least, would keep him warm if there had to be other nights spent in other parks. ‘Well, Peadar,’ he said, and grinned. ‘I’ll drop you a line from Buenos Aires. Look after that young fella of yours, and that lovely wife. And look after yourself, too.’ Then he patted the roof and drifted off into the crowd that had swelled around the bus station. I watched him go, and wondered if I’d ever see him again. He slipped between lines of people, that big heavy frame wrapped shoulder to knee in navy wool, and in a minute he was gone. On the way back out to Dún Laoghaire I told myself that I had done right by him and said a prayer, and the words came to my lips in Irish because that was how I had learned to pray. If nothing else, it helped to pass the time.

  Things will get back to the way they had been before. I’ll go about my daily business, an exile in search of acceptance, some­body trying hard to change. And time will have its way. Jenny and I will press on, our son will grow, becoming more like me every day and even more like who he should be. He will want the things that children of the city want.

  I promised myself that I’d write home more often, but already I am late with my Easter letters. They are half written, tossed in a drawer, and they’re becoming increasingly difficult to finish. Everything I say about Dublin seems boastful to me, and I don’t like to bring up the island.

  A couple of weeks ago, we were walking along O’Connell Street when Jenny thought she saw Pádraig in the distance. For a moment, I thought it was him too. The man had his build, and his red hair, and he wore what looked like my second best overcoat, the knee-length navy wool. But the Saturday crowd was large, and in an instant the figure was gone. I said that there had to be more than one red-haired man in Dublin with a coa
t like that. Besides, Pádraig was somewhere out across the Atlantic by now, deep in the bowels of a tanker on its way to Argentina. Jenny still looked unsure, but finally she nodded. These days, we both understand that certain shackles are best shaken off, and that selective perception is an essential character trait if a person is going to adapt to the ever-changing world.

  Waiting

  It seems that I am always standing here when the snow comes, taking shelter on the back porch of my ­grandmother’s house. The flakes fall hypnotically, sluicing through the blackness, raking the air. The island has a way of holding its breath so that the only sound to be heard is the easy rush of the low tide lapping against the shore, somewhere out in the night.

  The boundaries of our world here on the island of Cape Clear once seemed defined by rolling seas and oppressive sky, but now a migration has begun. The city lights of Cork or Dublin lure many away with the promise of a life that seems better because it is easier. The O’Briens from across the island, the Riordans and the Murphy twins have all abandoned home to forge other lives, but there was a time when we would play together in the snow until the flesh of our hands turned blue and pinched, and our fingers bled from the cold.

  When I was a child – one of twelve in our family – I’d steal away from the others to stand out here on my grandmother’s back porch, and my heart would beat fast with the anticipation of tomorrow, of the fun we’d have, building snowmen, sledding, playing games of war. Now I am twenty-eight, and that sense of excitement remains, even though I can no longer act on it.