Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series)

by Cindy Brandner

  Brian shivered a little. It was more than damp clothes causing him to do so. The claustrophobic nature of the storm and the thought of the watery grave they had both nearly occupied made talk of ghosts seem both natural and somewhat undesirable at the same time, as if they might summon a sepulchral merrow from the depths and bring it ashore to their doom.

  “I don’t know that I do entirely, but I’ve had some odd experiences that I don’t know how to explain, still I’m not certain that adds up to a belief in ghosts. My da told me about bein’ down the shore on Inis Mor one night, an’ hearin’ the soft grunt an’ swish of seaweed bein’ thrown. He wondered who would be out at such a late hour, workin’ the blackweed beds. He came up over a wee rise, into the light of the moon, an’ he said that just for a moment he saw an old man outlined against the shore and the glimmer of the sea, throwin’ wrack the way it’s always been done on those shores. When he walked down to offer him help, the man disappeared, an’ there weren’t any blackweed piles upon the land. My da was never one to exaggerate, an’ was a skeptic about most things, so I gave credence to his story. What about yerself, do ye believe in ghosts?”

  The boy took a few seconds before he answered, his eyes on the fire but looking well beyond it, the way wild animals sometimes looked into the far distance as though seeing something man could not.

  “Sometimes I believe in ghosts and sometimes I think we make our own ghosts.”

  “Aye, lad, there’s a deal of truth in that idea.” He considered that the child was a fairly sophisticated thinker for one of such tender years.

  “My grandfather told me a story that he had heard about this man who was digging a cellar in England, and saw several Roman soldiers trudge through wearing plumed helmets, leather jerkins and all. Odd thing was that he could only see them from the knees up. They simply walked through one wall and out the other. Later, they dug down in that cellar only to find an old Roman road, buried right at knee depth. To me that speaks not so much to ghosts maybe, as to time being nothing like what we believe it is.”

  Brian gave this statement a bit of time to digest within his own mind. “Aye, I see yer point there, if there is no real past, present or future, and if time is merely a construct of the human mind, somethin’ we need in order to stay sane, then it does speak to time, more than ghosts. Though, to be sure, we’ve no notion of how the afterlife operates. Are ye bein’ educated by Jesuits, by any chance?”

  He felt the boy flick him a look. “Yes, is it that obvious?”

  “Well, perhaps not to a non-Catholic.”

  “I think about becoming a priest sometimes.”

  “Why?”

  “To live a life in service to something larger than myself, to be consumed in that love of God, but then I rather like girls, as it turns out, and that’s where I stumble.”

  “It’s not, all things considered, a bad place to stumble. There’s a deal of fulfillment to be found with a woman you love.”

  “You’ve found it so?”

  Brian considered that a lie might be kindest, but the look on the boy’s face said untruths weren’t going to pass muster with him. How to explain to a boy this young though, that love could enmesh you in so many threads that it hurt as much as it gave pleasure, and yet you wouldn’t change any of those threads, for fear of changing the very net of your world. It didn’t make sense to him, surely he could not make sense of it through stumbling words, only he knew it in his bones and in the swish of his blood—his blood that knew the shore of his heart as the waves knew this kelp, this shingle, these abandoned cottages.

  “Aye, I have found it so,” he said and knew it was not a lie, and yet not the truth in its entirety either. “What of yerself, laddie? Why were ye out on the Island alone?”

  “I ran away for the day—well, two actually. I do that sometimes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know, I just need to every now and again. I like to be away.”

  “Aye, I can understand that.”

  “I walk on the cliffs and I feel—I just feel alive there, as if I am part of it all—the sky, the sea, the cliffs, the birds and I am not anyone’s son or grandson, I am just an element out there, no more important than any other, and definitely less so than the wind and water.”

  “An’ ye like that, bein’ a part of those things?”

  “Yes,” the green eyes turned toward his for a moment, “don’t you?”

  “Aye, I do. I just don’t know that I’ve heard one so young express the feeling so clearly.”

  “The Germans have a word for it—sehnsucht—it’s close to yearning or longing; it’s that feeling that there’s a home that you’ll never know, one that would fit you perfectly. It’s not quite how I feel when I’m there, but it’s close.”

  “An’ in the other parts of yer life, ye don’t feel as though ye fit?”

  The boy shrugged, an eloquent gesture. “My home is not as yours is, and maybe that’s as much as I can explain, because there’s nothing wrong with it, only something not quite right. I know yours isn’t perfect either, only it sounds like there’s a great deal of love in it.”

  Brian took a moment before he replied. He was jarred by the boy’s statement of his own home life not being perfect, the child was too canny by far.

  “It seems to me that ye are a well-loved boy, an’ no doubt yer family is upset an’ missin’ ye right now, only that sometimes, those that love us best don’t necessarily understand us best—they mean well, but they are so accustomed to us, that maybe they don’t always pay attention in the ways that are needed, aye?”

  “Your sons are lucky,” he said.

  Brian felt sad for the boy, for there was a certain loneliness in his words that said he wasn’t so sure anyone was missing him during these ‘away’ days.

  “Aye, that’s as may be or no, let’s see how they feel when they’re in their teens.”

  The boy fell asleep some short time after that, curled up on the sand in front of the hearth. He looked heartbreakingly young in sleep, not the preternaturally confident child he had seemed while awake, excepting his brief moment of confession before sleep.

  He lay down to sleep himself not long after, sheltering the boy from the gusting drafts that came through the cracked windows and the warped door. Before sleep he said a silent prayer of gratitude for his deliverance from the storm, for his boys—a prayer he carried with him all day, every day, the cadences of it in his very cells—and he prayed for his wife and his foundering marriage. Lastly, he prayed for the boy who slept beside him, the lonely child who feared that no one missed him.

  It was the sound of the seals that woke him. They were barking, a great chorus of them. He stood slowly, as sore as if he had boxed a gorilla. The clothes he wore had dried stiff to his body, and felt only marginally better than burlap against his skin. The clothes that they had spread to dry were still damp, but wearable, if only just.

  Outside, the seals covered the shingle, sleek greys and blacks, shimmering in the pale dawn. The barking increased to a cacophony as they spied him on the small grassy outcrop above the strand.

  Beyond the sound of the seals though, the morning was still as a pearl held in glass, the air itself grey and soft, without a hint of the screaming gales that had scoured the land the night before. The cottage where they had found shelter was one of a string of long abandoned homes, side by side, most roofless and filled with great drifts of white sand, high enough that it spilled out over the old stone sills and formed snowy mounds in the doorways.

  “Do you know which island this is?” The boy emerged at his side into the pale still light, wiping sleep from his eyes.

  “No, we couldn’t have drifted up Mayo way, so it’s not the Inishkeas, and we couldn’t have drifted far enough south to be off the coast of Kerry, at least I don’t think we could have. I’m just that wee bit mystified to tell you the truth.”

  “Maybe we’ve fetched up on Tir Na Nog.”

  “Let’s hope not.
I’d like to get home before one hundred years pass.”

  “You can sense them, can’t you?” It seemed more of a rhetorical question than one that required a response, but he answered nevertheless.

  “Aye, I can.”

  Places held an energy all their own, but they also held remnants of that which had passed through them and the people as well. He had found that to be so in the haunts of his own youth, as though the land held echoes of his younger self. In such a place as this both time and the people who had once lived here were ghosts, even if they lived now elsewhere. For their lives here had been cut short, most likely by tragedy. Suddenly the boy’s comment about Tir na Nog didn’t seem funny. He had an odd sense of being dislocated in time and space, as if this island were a place that could not be escaped, just like those poor Roman soldiers condemned to walk their ancient road forever.

  They began to walk toward the north end of the island. It was a short walk and sand all the way, a mercy to their bootless feet. Here, the land fell sharply away to black rock and red weed, thick as a man’s arm, waving like bloody banners in the sea of morning. Far in the distance, to the northeast, a mountain rose on the rim of the world, wrapped soft and alluring in the mists.

  “Strange to think,” he said, “of all the drama that took place here, all the births and deaths and marriages and the men lost to the sea, the moments in life that seem so large and yet in the end, there is only sand and sea and these abandoned stones and all the lives long vanished.”

  He could see it in his own mind’s eye suddenly, the twilight sifting slow between the rows of cottages, the silhouettes etched against the freshly lit oil lamps, the scents of dinner drawing men in from their work to walk through the sandy laneways, smoking a pipe, speaking in the half quiet, half rough tones of men at the end of day. Then night coming in over the land, turning the sea to a great void, so that it was necessary to gather together by hearths, to stave off the night with fiddles and stories and the warmth of another’s breath and flesh.

  Full fathom five thy father lies.

  Of his bones are coral made.

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

  The boy’s voice was soft as he spoke the quote, almost like an echo come from another time, the verse itself all too apt, Brian thought, especially being that this headland appeared to be the island cemetery. It lay to the west, as a graveyard should, sheltered a bit by a bowl in the land, so that a sand shoulder, white as the moon, curved around the dead. The old headstones were crumbled by salt and time, their crevices filled soft with lichen and brilliant green mosses. An old black boat was turned over, its rotting skeleton barely more than a lacework of tarred wood. He wondered where all the people had gone. Some islands had been emptied out by tragedy, the Inishkeas which he thought were to the north of them, had lost ten of their young men in a freak storm, much like the one that had nearly killed them last night. After that the spirit of the island had been crushed, and all the inhabitants had moved to the mainland, leaving the islands to the seals and the birds and the lonely storm winds that whistled and wove through the ghosts that remained.

  The waves this morning were low and quiet, flowing up upon the land, freezing for a moment like a skein of silver silk, before retreating back upon themselves, becoming once again part of the flood, seeking other shores, far distant, where warriors vanished for a hundred years and more and the golden hair of the women faded neither through time, nor tide.

  A head broke the water, skimmed slick and shimmering toward them, and then disappeared like quicksilver beneath the waves.

  “Seal,” Brian said to break the quiet, the island was no less eerie in the pale dawn than it had been in the bewitched night.

  “Or maybe a mermaid,” the boy said fancifully.

  “Well, we’re all right then,” Brian said, “bein’ that she’s swimmin’ toward us. For they say if she’s swimmin’ toward ye, all will be well, but if she’s swimmin’ away, some day ye’ll be compelled to follow her an’ the sea will be yer grave.”

  They heard the noise at the same time, more of a disturbance upon the air at first, a soft thrum that vibrated along the edges of the flesh and echoed through to the blood.

  “It’s a boat,” the boy said excitedly, his eyes scanning the horizon.

  “It’s coming down from the north, we’ll see him in a few minutes,” Brian said, a quiver of hope running along his skin. Please let it pass close enough to see them, for he didn’t think there was time to build a fire of any sort to attract attention.

  The boat came over the horizon five minutes later, a small black dot, made shapeless by the grey light that still clung to the face of the sea. The tension fairly sang from the both of them, as they edged as close as they dared to where the rocks dropped abruptly to the water. They waved frantically, the boy taking off his sweater and swirling it in the air around their heads. A hand emerged and waved back. They had been seen.

  The boat came in close enough that the man could yell up at them.

  “I’m out lookin’ for two boats that were lost in the storm. Would ye gentlemen have been on one of them?”

  “Aye,” Brian said, “we were. Captain went down with the boat, not certain where though. We were about an hour out of Kilronan, but the wind took us hard to the south—or so we think, we’ve not a notion where we are.”

  The man nodded, but didn’t enlighten them as to their current location.

  “There’s a wee inlet just up that way, maybe a twenty minute walk for ye. The water’s deep enough I can come close to shore an’ pick ye up.” He nodded to the south and the two of them set out along the rocky shore.

  The inlet was steep-sided, but the climb was easy enough with footholds aplenty, and they were in the boat within minutes.

  “Ye were in with the luck then, for there were a few young men caught off the cliffs on the west side of Inis Mor yesterday, they were headed for land when the swells came in an’ dashed them against the cliffs. ‘Twas a dreadful night to be out, ye both must have angels sittin’ on yer shoulders.”

  Brian shared a look with the boy, they were both barefoot, clothes a wretched mess of salt-crusted cloth. But he had to agree with the man, they’d had angels upon their shoulders last night.

  “Here, boy,” the captain said, “here’s a coat for ye, it’s chilly this morning an’ ye don’t want to be catchin’ pneumonia.” He settled an oilskin coat round about the boy’s shoulders, which reached near to his knees. For Brian there was a rough sweater, smelling strongly of tobacco and fish, but it was warm and cut the wind in half.

  The sea was placid this morning, and the boat slid across it, cutting through the waves—waves tinged crimson with the edge of the rising sun.

  The man fished a flask out of his pocket and tossed it to Brian. “Warm yer insides, man. Best give some to the boy as well.”

  Brian passed the flask to the boy and watched with amused alarm as he took three hearty swallows. The child didn’t even flinch, just swallowed it smooth as if it were honeyed milk.

  The boy took in the look on his face and raised a gull-winged eyebrow.

  “I’ve had whiskey before,” he said, mischief lighting his face. “I was pretty much weaned on the stuff.”

  Brian raised his own eyebrow at this statement.

  “It’s true, my family has a still of sorts.”

  “Well generally speakin’, I don’t believe in contributin’ to the corruption of the young, but this mornin’ I think it’s a necessity.” Brian took another swallow and passed the flask back again. He looked at the boy, who was gazing out over the sea as if it had never given him a moment’s cause for concern. The rising sun caught the boy’s profile, limning it in the fire of morning. It spilled in shimmering strands through his hair, coruscating it into threads of living gold, a
nd the child blazed against the morning like an angel freshly fallen to earth.

  The rest of the trip passed in quiet, as they watched the land rise slow from the deeps, like a brontosaurus, ponderous and heavy with the rise and fall of ages. He felt a relief to be headed home, safe, with the whiskey still a small glow in his belly. He thought of Deirdre and how she felt in his arms, and how he simply wanted to hold her and fall to sleep the way they used to when they were first married. He would read to Casey and Pat tonight, as long as they wanted, any story they cared to hear. He would hold the solid warmth of them for hours, even if the truth was, Casey would start to fidget the minute he’d been pulled up on his father’s lap. The boy could not sit still for the life of him. His own brother Daniel had been just the same.

  “Your family will be glad to see you home,” the boy said, as though he had read Brian’s thoughts. He stood, slightly pensive in the breeze, hands deep in his pockets and the collar of the too large coat turned up around his chin.

  “Aye, they will be,” Deirdre’s face flashed across his mind, “for the most part.”

  The mainland smelled different than the islands did, it was a scent of something large and solid in its bones, that did not have the sea soaked in its every atom.

  He felt oddly sad that he wasn’t likely to ever encounter this young man again. He was singular, and someone Brian felt, worth the knowing.

  They landed in Galway some short time later, still without a soul having told them the name of the island they had fetched up upon.

  There was a man waiting for the boy in the Galway harbor, standing beside a dark green Bentley, his eyes dark with worry and what Brian imagined had been a very long sleepless few days. The boy looked a great deal like him, or would one day if his genes held true. But he would be something more, for even now Brian saw there was something about him that set him apart from the people around him, as though he walked in a light that emanated from his core. A light that was as likely, Brian knew, to curse him as it was to bless him.

  Brian hugged him, not a thing he normally did to people outside his family, but he thought the dire conditions they had emerged from together, erased society’s usual rules. The boy hugged him back, holding on for the briefest time, so that Brian wished he could fix for him whatever was taking place in his home. But at least the man who was here waiting, appeared worried sick over the lad. He was loved, that much was clear.