by Darby Harn
In his book, he goes back to an ancient night thousands of years ago. The day our ancestors marked the turn of the year from light to dark. Summer to winter. Life to death.
I can see them. People press together in concentric rings around the altar. The night alive with anticipation. A nervous heat. A bonfire rages from a basin atop the altar, making a shadow of the woman standing before it. Nude except for the paint of mud. The echo of the old tongue swirls around the compressed space of the fort.
The woman calls home the spirits of the dead, free to roam the hills and roads this one night of the year when the veil between the world of the living and dead is lifted. Now the veil must be dropped again, and the two worlds separated.
Ach ní anocht, she says. But not tonight.
The crowd stunned. This is not the way. This is not the script. All the living and dead forever and all time are here, in this limbo, wondering what she’s up to.
Tonight, we douse the fire. As the dead disguise themselves among us, we disguise ourselves among them and we will not know each other, nor death, nor despair.
The woman sinks her hands into the smoldering ash and smears the dead soot on the faces of the gathered. Warm and cool at once. Everyone gets their dark and a more bountiful darkness replaces the light she consumed, one candle at a time.
Gavin takes my hand. “What are you thinking about?”
You take my hand. Palm my ashen cheeks. Kiss the inherent fire. Your life the flare of an ember, cooling forever, a mote of dust on the cheek of God.
“Nothing,” I say.
The sky swirls with the ejecta of constant waves. Comets in the mist. Up here, as high as you can go, you see the bend in the island. The strain of such a long war with the sea. Only a few inches of packed seaweed separates you from stone that has denied an ocean for ages. The landscape all around us is emaciated, the skin of the island sunk to veins of piled stone. Its endurance impresses.
Mystifies.
The same passion that spurred men to search for the fountain of youth draws people here like honey. On the surface they think they’ve come for the language; the antiquity; the remove from the civilized world you both love and hate. Yet all those things represent the one thing, the unnamed thing, the primal desire to connect to the beginning. To Eden. Xanadu. Tír na nÓg.
Life as it was then and always is. The Irish soul is eternal and gentle, and never more so than in Aran. But here you discover the true nature of eternity: haggard, scarred, and existing. To live forever is to do so at the expense of life.
An tús.
We cuddle up on what had been altar. I know he’s not giving the ashes to the sea. This wandering of his is as much for me as it is him. Or maybe this is how he’s letting go. Sewing up the space his Da left with me, a stitch at a time. A day at a time.
“There was an Italian girl looking for you today,” I say.
He makes this face. “Busted.”
“She was young for you. Just.”
“They come up to me in the pub. I don’t mind, but… their parents send them, I think. They want to know when the plane is coming back. How much money it will take.”
“How much?”
“It was twenty-five hundred for me.”
“Lord God. Round trip?”
He rubs his neck. “Not exactly.”
I say nothing. What is there to say.
He sits forward, his arms on his knees. How far America must seem now. How hopeless.
“I talked to my mom this morning,” he says.
“Wasn’t it the middle of the night for her?”
“She’s always up late. I told her I was still here, and… she started talking about my dad. She never does. He came back from Vietnam, and he was… he had a really bad time of it over there. They met at a bar. She said she thought she could sort him out. She thought she could help him.”
“Some people can’t be helped,” I say.
He tries a smile. “I guess that’s all of us now.”
“She wants you home, your Ma.”
“She never really says what she wants.”
“Maybe she’s trying to tell you something, but she’s too polite to come out and say it.”
He takes a long look at me. “I think she should just tell me.”
What does she do, his Ma, up all night? Watch television? Reruns, I imagine. Infomericals. The bleeding news. She sits and she watches the same shows over and I don’t know why he needs to make some peace with this man he barely knew. Men invest so much in reaching some understanding with their fathers. Mothers an afterthought. They are all just boys, off on their own journeys, looking for the same thing but rarely intersecting. And the mothers. The mothers sit on the shore, and wait.
“The party is next week,” I say. “Samhain.”
He goes tense, as he does any time this comes up. Now I think about it, he played a bit dumb talking about Samhain with me before. He had to have known about it, to write his book.
“You’ve been here to the fort before.”
“When I first came to the island,” he says.
“And the monastery.”
He nods.
“You acted like you didn’t know what it was.”
“I just wanted to talk to you.”
“Did you know who I was?”
“I’d seen you. I asked Colm about you. He didn’t really say, you know. He acted like he didn’t want to talk about it.”
No wonder they get on. Two men sitting at the bar pretending not to know what they know. Don’t we all pretend. Here we are acting like a couple teenagers, and the world is ending. The sea closing in. The future washing away.
I look out to sea. “There’ll be no landing here at all soon.”
He lets go of me. “Yeah.”
My fingers caress the back of his neck. “Long swim.”
“Doable.”
“But you’re ancient.”
He rests an arm inside my leg. “I don’t feel old. I don’t feel ready to… I feel like I can do anything.”
Almost. “You could build a plane from scrap.”
“If you’ve got one lying around, I could fly it.”
“You could not.”
“I took flying lessons a while back. It’s been years, but I remember most of it. I never got my license. It was one of those things that seemed important for a minute.”
“What else can you do?”
He shrugs. “There’s like, some sexual stuff.”
“Hmm.”
“Plus – don’t tell anyone, but – I’m CIA.”
“Are you now?”
“I’m developing you,” he says, leaning into me.
“For what?”
“I can’t say. Triple Double Top Secret.”
“Have I been selected? For the rocket, like? There’s a rocket, isn’t there? You’re picking one girl out of all the countries in the world to go and repopulate humanity somewhere else in the universe.”
“You figured me out.”
“Are there men from all over as well?”
“Nah, it’s just me.”
I pinch his ear. “Lucky you.”
He rests his head in my lap. “It’s my burden.”
“I’ll have to learn to share you, then.”
He brushes my cheek. “You’ll be my wife, though.”
“The others are just your concubine?”
“Everybody has their place.”
I kiss his hand. “You have one seat. On the rocket now. Who do you send? Me or your Ma?”
“Um. Bono.”
“I’ll throw you off the cliff.”
“Is this like Bono anger, or…”
I give him a little push. “I’ll do it.”
“Why do you hate Bono?”
“And I was going to let you do your sexual stuff tonight.”
He sits up. “I’d pick you.”
“Too late.”
“You know I would. You’d be queen of the new order.”
&nb
sp; I shrug. “I can’t be bothered, really.”
“Are you negotiating a better position? You’re queen.”
“You had it. You lost it.”
“I would,” he says. “Marry you.”
“Don’t be daft.”
“I love you, Mairead.”
“Listen to you.”
He kisses me. “I do.”
I squirm out of his arms. Some black leech thing stuck to my pant leg. It comes away in this string of mucus, like. I throw it to the sea. Gavin sits there, a lump of defeat. I tell myself it’s going to be like this. These dead ends. These potholes. He doesn’t mean anything by it. No one does.
But then I know it’s not going to be like this.
It isn’t going to be anything at all, because he’s leaving. This is just us walking together for this bit of our lives. This is just the mercy we allow ourselves.
For now.
Chapter Eight
Birds peep out the slats of the old post box Colm converted to a feeder out the front of his house. Always tinkering, him. Trying to take something broken and make something better of it. I find him in the garage, as you do. The boot up on the car.
I must be a ghost, the way he stares. “How’s herself?”
“Do you know I checked the furnace?”
“And?”
“Probably does need some care.”
“I’ll have a look at it today, if you like.”
I start down the drive, but then I stop. “And don’t be bringing Gavin with you when you do. Don’t be bringing me up with him again. It’s none of your business.”
Pipits orbit the feeder, each waiting their turn. Colm built that for me. He meant it for me.
Grease streaks Colm’s chin. “I meant nothing by it.”
“I don’t need any looking after.”
“Could be I was thinking of the both of you.” Colm scrapes the grime off his hands with a cloth looking like he’s been using it all my life. “Could be I was thinking of myself.”
“What’s it to you, anyways?”
“He’s a bit like I was, Gavin. In my younger days. Or my more recent days, but when I had his legs. Men search, you know. You understand. We have to have some purpose. Some mission.”
“I’m no one’s mission.”
“Which is why I told him. You’re not Superman, come down from on high. And she’s not your salvation.”
How could I be anybody’s salvation? Why would Gavin ever think so? “He’s leaving, so. He’s going back.”
Colm scratches his chin. “Is he?”
“What does he tell you?”
“He doesn’t tell me anything. He doesn’t need to. He loves you. That’s plain. And you seem… better, Mairead. You seem like you’re doing better.”
I claw the hair out my eyes. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You’ve gone back to work, haven’t you?”
“They need me.”
“We all have needs. None of this changes that. You deserve love in your life. You deserve happiness.”
What do I deserve. Do you know.
“Do you love him?” Colm says.
My heart doesn’t flutter at the thought of him. My heart chews through my rib cage to get its teeth in him. I want the fire between us to consume us both. I want love to be what destroys me. Not God. A dead star. I want there to be love enough left in me to kindle fire. We don’t have any time. There’s no other way it could have happened.
This is our time, and that’s that.
“He’s leaving,” I say.
“Your Da came here on a weekend. He stayed the rest of his life. So many have. Terrence. The German woman. There’s something here, we don’t see. It’s born in us. You have to leave to know it. This bounty. This privilege.”
“We live on a rock in the bleeding ocean.”
“That’s all the world is. An island lost at sea. Anyways. Your Da found what he was looking for here. Didn’t keep him from drinking, but it kept him from walking out into the bloody water. So we got on, Gerry and me. Your man was a master in the art of the drink. Your man was Yoda. I was but Luke Skywalker. He trained me, that man. And I learned well. He got where he couldn’t keep up with me. I couldn’t keep up with myself.”
Colm puts the hatch down on the car.
“You were his joy in life. If he had any idea of your suffering now… he asked me. Gerry. There at the end. ‘You’ll be looking after her for me, Colm.’ You’ll forgive me.”
Tiny puffs of gray clouds race across the veil of others, like pilot fish. “You’re assuming.”
“I’m asking.”
“You’re talking about bleeding Star Wars.”
“I was thinking of you, earlier. It was a day like today, the day you were born. The sea was excited that day. The sky was anxious. They dragged your Ma kicking and screaming onto the helicopter down the airstrip. You could hear her across the island. Your man called me from the hospital in Galway and said she’d delivered you on the way over. In mid-air.”
“In limbo, from the start.”
“You were too good for the world, even then.”
The birds twist around the feeder in confusion. “I just came here for the furnace, like.”
His hand touches my elbow. “You did nothing wrong, Mairead.”
I step back. “I have to go.”
“You’re angry. You’re hurt. You’re punishing those you love to punish yourself. I understand.”
“I have to.”
I walk back to the road. The air clings with rain. A haggard, hungry pant funnels down the stone sluice of the high road. The dog scampers out of the mist. I look ahead, expecting Gavin. For once, it’s just the dog. It’s just me.
“Go on now,” I say. “Away with you.”
He trots to the mouth of a boreen off the high road, leading down to the eastern shore. The vanishing headstones. Ireland, ghosting in and out of fleeting clouds.
There is something here we don’t see.
Rain scours the roof. Wind nips at the flimsy plywood covering the windows. The apartment erodes around us, and the night, down to the soft recoil of our hearts in the mattress.
“You do this thing when you’re not sure,” Gavin says. “Your nose goes one way and your lips the other.”
He chases my lips with his. My nose. He kisses my eyes. I love your eyes. What does he see in them. A shrinking universe. The tiny, rocky world of the girl who grew up on the island, too small for her. The glittering giant of New York, ringed with light, its surface covered in an ocean of alcohol and I’ve never experienced this with anyone, this existing, naked of thought or fear. We shed our inhibition, our clothes as we are drawn into the slow, inevitable dance of two bodies caught in their respective gravity, colliding, drifting apart and then back, always falling back into impact.
On the way back from the home, I find Ma half naked in the road. She weaves circles around me, the sleeves of her sweater flapping in the breeze like little penguin wings.
“Inside,” I say.
“Caoimhe,” Ma says. “My father’s not home.”
“I said inside.”
“Not home. Not home. Not home.”
I pull her along with me into the yard. The front door half open again. Lord God. This anger. I’m going to scream. I can’t scream. She dances around me, like a bleeding loon.
“You’ll catch your death.”
“Not home.”
“Lord God, I can’t do this. I can’t. Not home not home not home and nobody’s fucking home.”
“Caoimhe!”
“There’s no Caoimhe, Ma.”
She twirls back out into the road.
“Go on, then. Go on and leave me.”
I slam the door behind me. Ma corkscrews back through the yard, singing this song about some woman I don’t know.
I want to scream.
I hear this scratching. I go to the door. The dog outside.
I find her in the yard. “Ma.”
�
��Caoimhe.”
“Ma, come inside.”
I sit her down in front of the telly. A snowstorm of fear. I place a blanket over her and start to go make some tea and she grabs my hand. Shh, she says, her finger hooking at her lips. She pulls me into the recliner with her. Shh. I’m on top of her and there’s nothing to her but she holds on to me like I’m the last bit of dry land in the ocean. I wiggle in a bit so we’re both kind of in the chair together and we’re holding each other, Ma and I, watching the news as the day dies in the west. The night goes on. Gavin comes after dark, but I don’t want to move so I let him knock. I let the dog scratch and we sit there all night, laughing at fucking reruns and shite commercials.
Tomorrow will be different.
For a long stretch, his mother wrote bad cheques to get them by. Gavin tells me this in bed as rain falls mad on the island. The two of us comparing scars. War stories. This was back in the 80s, when people still wrote cheques. They never had money. Something called food stamps came at the first of the month, but if it fell on a Saturday or Sunday or worse yet a holiday and you missed the postman, it was days, he says; days of piecing together meals from boxes of stale cereal from the food bank. Expired Mars bars. Powdered milk.
“But you have everything in America,” I say.
“Including poor people.”
We were comfortable. No real money, but Da did fine and Ma has his pension. Or she did, until they closed the banks. She wouldn’t notice, even if she were well. When the lights go, she’ll not be bothered. There was no electricity in the house until 1981 and to hear her tell it, the lights are an inconvenience. There was no bloody phone until the 90s. The world beyond and all its convenience couldn’t reach us until it came all at once in the new millennium and I think she thinks I was swept away by it. How could I not be.
I am not my mother. I am not made of harshness and determination. My father was a wandering soul, fitful and wanting and there is something here I do not see. The island was relentless in its wonder, he told me so. The snowflake sunrises. The reed of a single flower growing in the shelter of a deep crack in limestone. The salt fringed hair of a young girl with a pocketful of birds. Life flourishes here, despite all its inhibitions. Ma was the island to him. The remoteness. The desolation. The beauty. The strength.
