She was still looking at the clock on the wall. She said nothing.
Strangely, that was the word my uncle had used. Naufragio, he had whispered, his voice broken. And though it had been several years since Teo and I had stood at Little Point folding my other uncle’s auction posters into ephemeral water-craft, and though I had heard no one, neither my uncle nor Teo, utter the word since, I knew it was, at that moment, the only thing that anyone could or should say. The word naufragio uttered inside a temporary room, a half-finished bottle of wine resting on the kitchen table.
Since I have begun to read some of Mandy’s poetry books, I have come across a translation of the Chilean poet Neruda’s poem “La Canción Desesperada” In it the noun naufragio is used in such an angry, sorrowful way it becomes almost a verb. The poem itself is so full of blazing lighthouses and wharfs, islands and shorelines, departures and abandonment, it defines both our family and the geography of that night for me so precisely, that it tore into me and remained inside me, fully memorized almost the first time that I read it in English. I know, also, the dark, inevitability of that truthful line: “Todo en ti fue naufragio” In the book on Mandy’s shelf it is translated as “In you everything sank.” But I prefer my own translation: “In you everything shipwrecked.”
Our uncle told us stories of shipwrecks and other nautical miracles and disasters; tales of drowned sailors, men turning into seals, and mermaids emerging from the sea. He told these stories over and over on this farm until we half believed that all of these tragedies and transformations had taken place at the end of the lawn in the great lake water that shone there. The landscape of childhood is so limited and, in our case, was so beautiful we could think of no better combination of water and land where these tales should unfold. He told us stories of howling gales during which the courageous Butler keepers would successfully light the thousands of candles in the huge glass jewel-like lamp on the top of their towers. He told us about treasures coming in with the tide after such gales: diamonds and dubloons, leg irons minus the legs, a complete guillotine, intact, ballgowns without the dancers, canisters filled with tea, the leaves still dry, a cat and her kittens (alive!), and barrels of rum, whiskey, sherry, absinthe, port, Madeira, red, white, and rosé wine. After these sessions we would scramble down to the beach, returning later with pails of lake-worn glass, so colourful, but, like his stories, in the end so useless. Yet we instinctively knew, I suspect, that they were all that remained, years later, after an event where everything shatters: harmless, softened shards of cargo smashed and then smoothed by storms, they were forgotten evidence of a spectacular series of wrecks.
But there was one seminal Butler story, which was dark and seldom told and all the more fascinating to us. My uncle was adamant in his refusal to tell the tale on demand, yet could not be dissuaded from insisting that we all listen when he felt the moment was right for the telling, that moment almost always occurring at a Butler funeral after which he had consumed a fair quantity of alcohol. The older Butler relatives, you see, were scattered like wildflowers all over the fields on both sides of the lake, living out their declining years in frame houses that, like the elders themselves, were in various states of dignified decay. After their funerals, all of the Butlers would gather either at this farm or at its double across the water, depending on the citizenship of the deceased. I don’t remember hearing the tale on the American farm, however, so it must have only occurred to my uncle in the wake of Canadian Butler deaths.
It was the kind of story that moved steadily toward its conclusion, then paused and circled back to begin again in the manner of certain gloomy sonatas. And it was a story that, because of its references to steep rocks and ancient history and magnificent weather and strange architecture, we were unable to place in our own calm landscape. It seemed therefore quite reasonable to us that the setting for the narrative should be Ireland, the country the Butlers had abandoned. Also, it involved the death of children. Not one of us believed that a young life could be violently severed in a place as safe and settled as ours. Though our graveyards were filled with nineteenth-century girls and boys, we in the twentieth were, or at least we thought we were, exempt from catastrophic surprises. The Butlers we were familiar with aged quietly along with their houses, then died sedately and politely just before harvest.
“Do you remember the story of the Irish children at the lighthouse?”
My mother eagerly answered this question. “Oh, yes,” she said. “Indeed I do. It was Stanley’s favourite, I think, though he would only tell it when he was good and ready to.”
The first in the litany of lighthouses, or at least the first according to my not always accurate uncle, was situated on one of the two Skellig Islands that rise like temples from the sea off the most western tip of the south of Ireland. Everything about this lighthouse was improbable and exaggerated: its elevated position, the constant rain, the near impossibility of its construction, or of even landing boats filled with building materials on the island, the tortuous climb up the cliffs carrying cut stone, wrought iron, and glass. And then there was the monstrous wind that would pluck workers, as if they were insects, from the rising tower and throw them either onto the rocks below or into the sea from which their bodies were never recovered.
But there had been a precedent for this astounding feat of engineering. During the sixth century, on the highest peak of the landward side of the island, a small group of self-punishing monks had set up a colony. Surely, my uncle had said, the first generation of these holy men would have been entirely worn out and used up in the task of carving the steps for the three separate staircases, one of six hundred steps, out of the steep rockface that led to their monastic enclosure: a gathering of a half-dozen corbelled, beehive-shaped huts, a small medieval priory, an oratory, two wells, and some stone basins dug out of the same rockface to collect rainwater. There was also, of course, a graveyard, consisting of a half-dozen rough stone crosses.
My uncle took great pleasure at the thought of his forebear, Tim Butler, the one he named the dog after, making tea from the water he collected from the monks’ stone basins. No mention at all was made, however, of his wife, who was undoubtedly washing clothes, bathing babies, cooking or cleaning with the water he called “the heavenly gift.” To this day, when I think of the man the people of Kerry called Butler the Keeper, I imagine a family subsisting on tea while unimaginable winds roared around them. The supply boat from Port Magee would rarely, if ever, be able to land, and the ghosts of the first generation of monks would undoubtedly be blowing around the tower, sackcloths flapping and bones rattling in the gale.
Every second year, a mainland keeper would offer to take up the post so that Keeper Butler and his family could get back to Butler’s Court for Christmas, and each time the second year came around, the weather would cancel that possibility with winds of increasing velocity. And Keeper Butler would have wanted to get back, I would think, hoping to stake out at least a bit of symbolic territory in that quite possibly fictional place because, as my uncle said, only one son could inherit the land and Keeper Butler was not that son. He was the bifurcating one.
Even as a child I remember thinking that I had been genetically affected by the serial division among my ancestors. The entirety of my early life was bisected by seasons. In the autumn, winter, and spring, my mother and I lived in the city, in the modest, square brick house that my father had bought and thankfully paid for before he died. But my true sense of home and belonging was activated only in summer when my mother and I settled into this farmhouse. I wonder now whether Butler the Light (a name given to Keeper Butler by the fishermen of Kerry) would have been visited by this same sense of belonging had he been able to “get off the rock” and return, even briefly, to the green fields of Butler’s Court? Or was he fully owned by the sea and the wind and perhaps also by the phantom monks?
What eventually liberated him from this ownership, if indeed it existed, was a string of escalating tragedies of such dimen
sion that no man or woman could possibly retain a sense of duty, never mind a fondness for the environment that was responsible for causing them.
First, the light that Keeper Butler had so faithfully kept burning was smashed by a two-hundred-foot rogue wave just at the moment when he had finished climbing the tower’s hundred steps to inspect it. A hailstorm of glass shards descended on him and entered his flesh wherever it could, as well as his hair, his tongue and gums, and one bright eye from which he was never able to see again. Fortunately, the layers of wool and oilcloth that were required for warmth, or even for survival, on the island prevented the penetration of vital organs, and he was able to stumble back down the stairs and into the arms of his terrified wife, who spent the next two days plucking splinters from his head and mouth and hands.
A new light was duly and without doubt riskily delivered and installed, and Butler the Eye, as the mainlanders now called him, returned to his duties. By now he had two sons, children so frequently storm-stayed inside the keeper’s cottage that they would cry to be outdoors the minute the wind abated even marginally or when a stray shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds. Six and eight years old, they played most often in the one small startlingly green meadow called Christ’s Saddle, which the monks a thousand years before had probably made by hand with layers and layers of seaweed in order to support a cow, a donkey, and a goat, and which, surrounded by sloping rock, provided as much outdoor shelter as could be hoped for on the island. How did they play? What kind of island games were invented by them? These were the kinds of questions my uncle would ask us when we were bored or whining for some new toy or for the television. “C’mon,” he would say, “those kids out on the Skelligs had absolutely no toys, and weather was their only television.” The weather indeed! What kind of unusual games did absorb them, I wonder, before they heard the extreme howl of the fatal wind that tossed them both out of that man-made meadow and into the waves below? “Like coins into a fountain,” my uncle said, relishing the metaphor.
But they were not tossed so far that their bodies were unrecoverable, and poor Butler the Eye found his sons bumping up against the shore the following day as he made a frantic tour of the island. First one – the eight-year-old, my uncle said, making the story more precise than it needed to be – and then the other. Only a hundred yards apart, they seemed unharmed, their bodies free of mutilation, their eyes staring.
Both children were buried in the monks’ graveyard, the ground of which had not been opened for centuries, and after the burial Keeper Butler wrote a letter to the Commissioners of Irish Lights, requesting a transfer to the mainland. This transfer was accomplished and Butler the Eye lived long enough to father two more sons, who, like their father, became lighthouse-keepers: one on the tamer and much larger Kerry Island of Valentia, the other on the relatively serene east coast of Ireland. The son of the Valentia resident would, in turn, become the American keeper who eventually migrated far enough north to staff the lighthouse at what is now called Sanctuary Point.
But for me, the story, thrilling as it was, really began with the burial of those island boys in the monks’ graveyard. As a child I developed the theory, though this was never suggested by my uncle, that those children would have become ghosts almost immediately in such surroundings and that they would have been instructed in the rights and obligations of the spirit world by their neighbours, the shades of the monks. I imagined, or tried to imagine, what shape their conversations might take and whether as ghosts the whole company might be affected by the wind. Sometimes I still dream of flapping sackcloth and shards of glass.
Once, during that last summer, I told Teo the story of Keeper Butler. He listened intently, then said that, although he couldn’t remember hearing it, he somehow already knew the story of the two drowned boys and the community of monks who had settled there so long ago. At the time I wondered if there might have been a Mexican lighthouse with a similar story attached to it. But now I realize that my uncle’s stories took paths we never knew about and were repeated in rooms we would never see, heard like a dream whispered uncertainly on the edge of sleep, used, perhaps, to buy time or affection. Is there anyone alive who remembers these tales, I now wonder? Shane and Don and I have never spoken of them. Is this recounting to be their eventual destination? Perhaps you will tell them to someone, sometime, and they, in turn, will tell someone else.
My uncle, I have now come to understand, rehearsed his own final desertion almost every year. At the end of summer, when the final bushels of harvested apples had been shipped and the last of the Mexicans had been bussed to the cargo terminal at the airport, my uncle would simply disappear – sometimes for two or three days, sometimes for a week – with no one telling us where he had gone or why – if they knew themselves. My aunt would call my mother, and we would return to the farm for a subdued weekend, the mothers talking quietly just out of earshot and completely silent when we, the children, were in their midst. Anxious telephone calls would be made. Sometimes my aunt, always so intractable, would alarm us with utterly uncharacteristic weeping, more, it seemed, in anger than in sorrow.
It was always a disturbing and transitional time. The birds from the sanctuary were beginning to migrate; chevron after chevron appeared over the lake, heading south. The only crop that remained to be harvested was the faintly ridiculous yet fascinating pumpkin. I had already begun my life of school and after-school lessons. Teo was gone. His mother and the other Mexicans were gone. And then my uncle was gone as well, though, until that last time, he would always make a dramatic reappearance, after which my mother and I returned once again to the city.
Once, when we had all become teenagers (I was about fourteen at the time), my uncle stunned us by driving the Volvo at full speed into the quiet warmth and slanting light of the autumn afternoon. He motored straight into the white wooden garage and out the other side. The tasteful board-and-batten construction, with its period windows and flower boxes full of chrysanthemums, snapped apart, became airborne, some of it landing on the veranda roof, the rest of it scattering all over the yard. And then there was the lacerated car steaming near the lake, and my uncle sitting calmly in the driver’s seat. To our amazement, delight, and relief, he kicked open the metal door, struggled to his feet, and walked out onto the beach. There he sat quite carefully down on the rocks, removed his jacket, folded it into a pillow, and, placing it behind his head, lay down and went to sleep. To my mind, this was a brilliant re-entry, and my impulse was to run to his side to both minister to him and to congratulate him.
But my aunt swept by me and got to him first, so I knew better than to make an approach. I stood watching as she pulled him up to a seated position by his hair, using words I wouldn’t have thought an adult had any knowledge of, and then shook him by the shoulders – all this going on while his head jerked back and forth on his neck. He was completely unresponsive; everything about him was so absent from the physicality of the argument it was as if he were a bundle of loose cloth, a puppet rather than a human being. After only a few seconds, she abruptly stopped, let go of him, stood, and walked back toward the house, where my mother waited on the other side of the screen door. My uncle fell back on the beach stones like a dropped rag, and for a moment or two, until he moved one leg, I was worried that he might actually be dead. A few hours later, once it was dark, my mother went out to him. I could hear the sound of their voices through the open window of the room I shared with Mandy but not what they said. Soon we would go back to the city. But for now my mother was once again coaxing my uncle down from his ladder of anxiety and despair.
“Poor Stanley,” she said that winter day, looking out the window as if she might catch a glimpse of him wandering aimlessly near the convenience store. “I’m sure he never meant –” The lunch bell rang then, interrupting her sentence. I walked with her as far as the dining room and continued down the hall and out the door.
During the course of that period I’ve already told you about, when my mother and
my aunt occasionally lived alone together in this farmhouse, they were not, I now realize, nearly as old as I thought they were. I was an undergraduate, then graduate student, and eventually a lecturer at the university in the city during this time, so almost everyone in my daily life – professors notwithstanding – was young and walking steadily toward some eventual future or other. My mother was only just emerging from her fifties, and my aunt, her second cousin, as you remember, was in her early sixties, but it was simply impossible to envisage any kind of changed future for them. Day after day, they occupied this house like two elderly ladies from a previous era: thin, prim, sedately dressed in tweeds and sensible shoes, using the good family china and silverware at each meal, preoccupied by the cleaning and polishing of objects from the past, the same objects, as you can see, that surround me now.
They had few callers. The people in the town didn’t quite know what to make of them, and Aunt Sadie’s boys, professionals by now, had drifted to the coasts of this country and rarely visited. Instead of visitors, the women we called “the mothers” had their little tours of duty. My own mother worked two days a week in a charity shop, and, until it became impossible for her to do so, my aunt sometimes drove elderly people to medical appointments. But they made no real connections this way. My other uncle and aunt would ask them for Sunday dinner now and then, until that uncle stepped down for the last time from his auctioneer’s box, sold his collection of tin toys and cigar-store Indians for a good price, and moved with his wife to Florida.
Mandy, who was enrolled at the Royal Military College and was later posted to Petawawa, was not so far away, and very occasionally would stop by for the afternoon – though she never stayed the night. She once told me she hated going home. I didn’t ask why because we both knew the answer to that question, and it wasn’t something we could easily speak of the way that, a few years later, we could talk about the man she had met and the anguish he was causing her. So, in the early years, I was put in the position of making the obligatory visits, arriving three or four weekends a year – sometimes with a boyfriend in tow – and dutifully appearing, alone, at holiday time. During these occasions we would sit right here at this beautiful old dining-room table and talk about nothing at all except my work as an entomologist, which my mother could never completely understand but was nevertheless curious about. My uncle’s name came up very rarely, and when it did, my aunt, who by then had completely lost her intractability, would begin a sentence and then trail off as if there were nothing at all she could state with any certainty. “Stanley always said that there were more insects near the … oh, I don’t know,” or “When Stanley and I were first married, we would sometimes, well, not often, no, not even sometimes … there was one time, perhaps.” Then she would look through the window and out over the lake or rise and start to clear dishes from the table. Sometimes my uncle figured as the subject of a question that was never completed, never mind answered. “I wonder why Stanley built those fences so far from …?” I refused to utter his name during those years because I was still convinced that I hated him. My mother, on the other hand, kept a framed picture of him as a very young man on her bedside table, along with a photo of my father, a fact I noted but never commented on.
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