A Whispered Name (44 page)

And so
one evening Herbert went to the lake where Sylvester was working. A railway
official had donated some sleepers to the community and the young monk had spent
weeks sinking them into the ground in unusual places, creating benches for
those who wandered while they prayed. One such was by the lake, and so it was
here that Herbert met Sylvester and led him away, to a copse of aspen trees.
There, beneath the shivering leaves, he talked simply about sacrifice and
shame; about Joseph Flanagan’s execution and Herbert’s breaking of regimental
crockery.

Colonel
Maude would have been proud of him.

Chapter Fifty-Six

1

Anselm sat by a murmuring
fire near a hotel window that looked on to the beach of Brandon Bay. A strong
wind swept off the Atlantic, tugging at a line of trees crouched like men with
their collars turned up. Beyond the white crests, concealed by the mist.’ was
Inisdúr. Sitting beside him, dressed in jeans, Wellingtons and a thick woollen
jumper, her hair tied in a rough, reddish knot, was Kate Seymour, the only
niece of Seosamh Ó Flannagáin. Her father was Brendan.’ Seosamh’s only brother.

This
friendship of immediate significance; this meeting.’ a preamble for what would
happen that evening; this strange anticipation of some-thing good: all these
swift developments had been driven by a kind of relentless inevitability. It
was a final ordering of events, the doing of what ought to be done. After Anselm
had rung Kate to explain the meaning of the trial, she had told Brendan; and he
had wanted to meet John Lindsay who, in his turn, had wanted to come to
Inisdúr. ‘Want’ was not the right word. This was a new experience, of yearning.’
demand and obedience to history. There was no term for it.

‘This
is not just a gathering,’ Kate had stressed. ‘My father’s going to hold a
leanúint
… it’s an island custom. It means “following”. On Inisdúr, when someone
died, the body was laid on a table. The family kept watch … to follow the
dead to their awakening. Throughout the night anyone could visit to speak a
word of memory. Then they’d leave. Only the family saw the sun rise upon the
body. Then the burial took place. It’s one ceremony from dark to light:

And so
Anselm had come to follow Seosamh Ó Flannagáin to his awakening. He’d come in
Herbert’s name.

Anselm gazed across the
ruffled fields that drifted without boundary on to the sand. To the south,
heavy clouds were banked like grey mountains sinking into the sea. Cattle
mooched by the surf.

‘The Ó
Flannagáins left Inisdúr during the “great evacuation” of nineteen fifty-four,’
said Kate. She had a natural smile that vanished when she spoke. Tiny lines
gathered round her mouth, seeming to show sudden seriousness. ‘We were, in
fact, the very last to leave.’

Her
grandmother, Róisín, refused to move. Brendan literally carried her down the
slip to the waiting boat and a new life on the mainland, with a house provided
by the Land Board. She never recovered from the displacement and would stare
out to sea, when the island was in view ‘Muiris is still there,’ she often
whimpered. ‘We left him behind..’ He’d died thirty years previously.

For
Kate’s parents, Brendan and Myriam, this subsidised existence was almost
equally disorientating. They’d lived off the land. Now they lived off the
State. It was an incomprehensible state of affairs: they got something for
nothing. Brendan set up a shop near Brandon harbour, to serve the fishing
boats, and Myriam knitted sweaters for the men — like the one Kate was wearing
now — and socks. Once they could make ends meet, they found a house of their
own and cut themselves free from those heavy grants.

For
Kate.’ aged twelve, the leaving was the foundation of her future.

Inisdúr
had been a dying world. Hence the ‘great evacuation’. All the young men and
women, bar ‘the loyal’ few, had gone — to the factories, the wages and the
electric lights. There’d only been four other children in the school, where old
Mr Drennan, the teacher, had long ago abandoned any pretence to structured
education. He’d romped through poetry that caught his mood, taught them wild
songs, or lambasted the air itself on the sins of Coffins and De Valera. His
thumping obsessions had all been way above their little heads. Kate had thought
him an injured man; a man of strange and private rituals … for as long as
anyone could remember, he’d kept a glass of wine-vinegar beneath a writing
slate. He’d kept a map facing the wall.

On the
mainland, however, all that changed for Kate. With conventional though less
interesting teachers, she flourished. Another world of limitless possibilities
opened. She duly chased some of them to ground, beginning at the gates of
Trinity College, Dublin, and ending at the University of Philadelphia. She
returned to Ireland a forensic anthropologist, two words her parents couldn’t
begin to pronounce or understand, and a career they found vaguely deviant: the
scientific examination of human remains.

‘We
never spoke of Inisdúr at home,’ said Kate. The sprinkling of freckles on her
nose and cheeks were a stronger characteristic than Anselm remembered. They
showed emotion through a slight increase in colour. ‘For my parents it was a
kind of grief. For me it was part of my escape. Even Gaelic seemed a retrograde
language.’ a way of speaking for a world that no longer existed. For a long
while I wouldn’t speak it.’ except at home where it was the means of intimacy.
On leaving the farm, the currachs and a whole
craft
of living, the
island was cut loose from me, and it drifted free into the Atlantic and almost
disappeared … except that I knew my father went back … frequently.’ For a
fleeting moment the faint smile returned. ‘He’d stay out there, all alone, for
a week at a time. Year after year he crossed over. I thought it was because he
missed the sounds of his infancy. In one way I was right. In another.’ I was
wrong. Very wrong.

Kate
had just come back from Bosnia where she’d been helping UN investigators
prepare forensic evidence for prosecutions at The Hague. Exhausted by her work,
she’d returned to a very different manner of trial — a third and possibly final
separation from her husband of sixteen years. She went home to Brandon Bay to
ponder the meaning of divorce. And then, one fine morning, when a mist had
cleared off the sea, she decided to go back to that simplest of places, where
the Matchmaker would have been brought to book for getting it so badly wrong.

‘I
walked up the slip towards the farm,’ said Kate. She’d planned to camp out for
a few days in the house. ‘But when I got there, I saw a beautiful, tended
field.’

‘A
field?’ repeated Anselm.

‘Yes.
Only I’d never seen it before. The surrounding wall was typical Inisdúr …
huge rocks and small stones laid to an inimitable pattern, created through a
deep attachment to the land. It was in perfect condition. Not a single boulder
had slipped out of place. When I got back to the mainland.’ I’d barely walked
through the door when my father said, much too quietly. “It’s Seosamh’s Field.’.”

Kate
had never heard of Seosamh in her life.

‘Now.’
come meet my father,’ she said, rising. ‘He’ll tell you what else was hidden
from me and this mainland life:

They walked south along
the beach through a tearing wind, their feet crunching upon a vast scattering
of blue and pink shells. Ahead.’ beneath clouds that seemed to suck up the
distant hills, was Kate’s childhood home.’ a white cottage on a promontory.
Small flags fluttered on a crowd of mast heads, their main lines tinkling like
millions of tiny bells. The Ó Flannagáins had left Inisdúr but they’d never got
further than the harbour where they’d landed.

2

All the furnishings in the
small sitting room huddled together. Even the walls seemed to lean in towards
the plump armchairs, the low table and another murmuring fire. Heavy
condensation ran down the windows. The walls were bare and whitewash clean.
Roughly cut timbers like spars ran across a dipped ceiling.

‘You’ll
have tea,’ ordered Brendan. ‘And bread to build your strength. We don’t give
stone in this house:

Despite
his age, he was an imposing man and filled his chair completely. His thick
beard grew high on weathered cheeks. The blue-green jacket carried the warmth
of the hills, his hazy blue eyes the immeasurable distance of the sea. He
regarded Anselm closely weighing him up. He wasn’t altogether sure.

Myriam
laid bread and butter on the table.’ poured tea from the pot and then slipped
out. An island way. thought Anselm. He’d barely seen her. But she.’ too, had a
strong presence: in slow, decisive movements, with that firm hand of welcome.
He’d seen delicacy. too.’ in the pale skin sprinkled with freckles; like Kate,
who sat close to her father like a protecting angel.

The men
from Inisdúr needed no invitation to speak, no preamble to set the scene. Brendan
simply started talking, his aching eyes on the fire, a remembered island fire.
He chose his words carefully as if there was no rush, as if he was building one
of those strange walls to a pattern no one could summon in their dreams.

‘I was
twelve years of age when Seosamh stepped on that boat and off the memory of the
land,’ he said. ‘With these arms I rowed him to the lee. From then on, his name
was only ever whispered. And spoken once out loud.’

He
nodded solemnly at his daughter and then returned his gaze to the low flames.
Rituals ran within his blood. They were a way of understanding experience. Each
person had their place, including the educated Kate. At the nod, she went out
of the room and came back with an envelope. Anselm took out a flimsy sheet of
paper, folded in two. Dated 18th September 1917, it was more distressing to
handle than anything he’d touched on this, his long journey to a sharing of
bread, not stone.

Dear Mr and Mrs Flanagan,

You will no doubt have heard from persons in Authority as to the
unfortunate manner of your son’s death. He was held in great esteem by his
comrades. None of us believed he was a deserter. I hope it is of some
consolation when I tell you that he rests now in a place of considerable
beauty, among trees untouched by war.

If there is ever anything I can do to be of assistance.’ please
remember, Sir, Madam, that I remain,

Your humble and obedient servant,

RSM Francis P
Joyce, 8th (Service) Btn. NLI.

Feeling
a swell of tears, Anselm put the letter on the table, grateful that it was his
place to listen.

‘My
mother and father didn’t utter a word for a week,’ said Brendan. ‘We hadn’t
known Seosamh had joined the ranks of the British Army. Now we knew he’d been
executed by them. We didn’t know why. We didn’t know where. And we didn’t have
his
body.’

Brendan
let the last word escape through his breath so quietly that Anselm shivered. It
was as though Seosamh’s flesh — all human flesh — was intrinsically holy and
had to be handled with fear and reverence. But Seosamh’s had been heaped on straw
…

‘My
father slowly died,’ resumed Brendan, still looking towards that island fire. ‘He
worked the fields but there was no will left in him, no desire. The passion
that had made them, that had brought up the weed and sand, had gone. He willed
himself to death. We buried him two years later. As for my mother —’ emotion
came heavy upon Brendan’s face, he thrust out his jaw in silent pain; mastering
himself through inner violence, he continued — ‘she’d always wanted to leave
the island, to travel to Boston, that mysterious place of opportunity and
enchantment, to find her sister, Úna … but after Seosamh’s death she wouldn’t
even go to Inismin. She was cursed. Cursed because she looked upon devils and
would not turn away.

Anselm
wholly understood Brendan’s meaning. He meant regret and remorse, and their
tormenting, mesmerising power.

‘For
the next thirty-six years she never mentioned Seosamh, though I knew she
thought of him every day. And then we left the island. She was to die within nine
months. There was no illness to come, no accident. She made a decision, like my
father. That was when she spoke of Seosamh once again, though she didn’t utter
his name.

Brendan
took his eyes off the hearth. Leaning forward, he compressed all his age and
remembrance into one, alarming expression, fixed on Anselm. ‘Before she went to
bed to start the dying, she said, “Brendan, bring your brother home. Hold the
Following. And bury him on Inisdúr.”‘

Brendan
relaxed, releasing Anselm from his stare. Possessed by the same force that had
mesmerised his mother, he turned inward, a massive physical presence, somehow
absent.

Kate explained that
Brendan tried to find out why Seosamh had been condemned and where he’d been
buried. He wrote to the army and government offices in Dublin and London. No
one could tell him anything, save that the trial papers had been retained in
the War Office archives. A Whitehall official observed that the Army Act was quite
clear on the issue: such papers could only be released to the subject of the
court martial; and since that person had not made the application, the matter
could not be taken any further.