Ashes In the Wind (44 page)

They work six days a week, ten hours most days. James and Danny decide that their contracted hours are a minimum, and they are eager to see the building finished. At the end of the first week, Michael and James are together in the bar of The Liberator in Drimnamore, drinking pints of Guinness.

‘Not as grand as the first place we drank together,’ says Michael.

‘The Guinness is just as good.’

Michael drinks down his pint, orders two more with whiskey chasers, and says, ‘I’ve found out more about you since we first met. You’re a Burke from Derriquin, no?’

‘I am.’

‘Our two families have a shared history, not all of it good, I have to say.’

‘I know my father was at school with a Tomas Sullivan.’

‘My father. But that isn’t the half of it. My gran told me that Tomas was in the IRA, that he was at Staigue Fort, and then up on the mountain where your grandmother was shot. Your father went to see him in Kilmainham Jail before he escaped. There, now you have it.’

‘That’s enough to be getting on with.’

‘Look, we can fight the War of Independence all over again if you like. But neither of us was there.’

‘I’ve never believed you could right ancient wrongs.’

James finishes his third Guinness and whiskey, orders another round, and asks, ‘Does your father live in Kerry?’

‘He joined the army, then the Garda, went to Spain with the Bandera Irlandesa after my mother died. Killed in 1938 out there. I never knew him.’

‘My father fought in Spain.’

‘I don’t suppose he was fighting for Franco and Holy Mother Church.’

Both men are silent as they finish their drinks. As they leave the bar, James says, ‘I’m glad you told me all that. I’ll be glad to forget it.’

Michael looks at him, smiles, says, ‘Good man yourself,’ and they walk out into the night.

In nine weeks the shell of the oyster shed is up and roofed. ‘All we need now is the render,’ says Danny. ‘And the floor surface. Rubberized paint, hard-wearing, laboratory quality, easy to clean.’

‘That wasn’t in the estimate,’ says Michael.

‘No. I’ve ordered it from France. James and I will put it down. You’ll not see us for the next two days, we’re off to buy a boat.’

James and Danny drive north to County Mayo. ‘There’s a bankrupt salmon farm up there that has a likely boat. Maybe other stuff we can use.’

‘Pity they went bust.’

‘Good thing, if you ask me. They feed the salmon on fish meal. They’re full of antibiotics, dosed to make their flesh pink, and their droppings pile up under the cages on the sea floor. I’d ban the lot of them.’

‘Oh.’

The offices of the salmon farm have a defeated feeling. There is an old Land-Rover with three flat tyres parked outside, a fourteen-foot dinghy on a trailer with weed growing up through it, and a pile of green boxes marked ‘Lough Cutra Salmon – Ireland’s Finest Fish’. There is a strong smell of fish in the air, a smell that carries through into the office, where a cheerful young man is sitting at the desk.

‘I’m representing the banks,’ he says, which explains his cheerfulness. He produces a list. ‘Take a look. It’s all in there.’

Danny nudges James when he sees what’s in the shed. ‘Plenty of good stuff. It’s been on the market for months.’

They mark off a dozen pairs of thigh waders, a forty-foot conveyor belt, a steam cleaner and the dinghy and trailer outside, then the three men go down to the pier to look at the boat.

‘It’s not exactly what we wanted, but it’ll do,’ says Danny. ‘Give us a price for the two boats and everything we’ve marked. We don’t need the Land-Rover. And don’t tell me that the prices are on the list.’

‘Thirty-five thousand euros.’

‘Twenty thousand would be nearer the mark.’

‘Thirty, and you can have the smoke-house thrown in.’

‘Done. Delivered to Drimnamore.’

The young man, still cheerful, telephones Dublin and agrees the price. On the way back James asks, ‘You said the boat isn’t exactly what we want. And the smoke-house?’

‘The boat’s perfect, with that big squared-off stern and a new diesel engine. It only lacks a gantry, and we’ll build that ourselves. The smoke-house was thrown in, and smoked oysters are brilliant, fetch a good price. We’re well below budget.’

Three weeks later the building is finished, gleaming white next to the pier, ‘
DRIMNAMORE OYSTER FISHERY
’ in giant green letters down the inland wall.

‘I’m glad to be back to building,’ says Michael. ‘We’ll need a party to celebrate. Trestle tables and Guinness for anyone in Drimnamore who wants to come out here.’

Curiosity and free Guinness persuade seventy men, women and children to come to the party. The floor laid down by James and Danny looks pristine until the party-goers tramp in mud from outside.

‘It’s designed to clean easily, and that’s why there’s that little slope down to the gutter along the south side. The steam cleaner will see that off in no time,’ says Danny.

‘Where did you get the oysters?’

‘I picked them from out in front at low tide. They’re the descendants of the spats your great-grandfather laid down. And there are plenty more out there. We’ve chosen a good place all right.’

There are a hundred oysters on the table, although most of the guests are cautious about eating them. They are more interested in meeting James. One or two remember John Burke. More than half live in what used to be Derriquin properties.

At the end of the evening one man puts his face close to James’s and says, ‘Don’t think you can buy your way back in here. We got rid of you in 1919, and we could do it again.’

James moves away, but Michael notices and says, ‘That was the drink talking. Half an hour ago Tommy was asking about jobs in the fishery.’

The day after the party they bring in the Drimnamore blacksmith to build the gantry on the stern of the boat. Its cross-beam holds the pulleys that link two chain-mail purse nets to a winch driven by the boat’s engine.

‘We let out the purses, tow them open along the seabed, quite slowly, close their mouths when we haul them in, open them up to drop the oysters onto the counter. Chip them clean here, then wash and grade them in the shed.’

‘What happens if you lose a purse?’

‘Mark the spot and fish it up at low tide. We’ll lose a few, that’s why we have a dozen in stock.’

Two days later they take the boat out for a trial run in low cloud, drizzle and a choppy sea. The twin purses pay out sweetly, Danny driving the boat while James watches the taut towing wires. On the first pass on the far side of the channel they find only rocks, mud and starfish. The second pass is no better. On the third, closer to the shore, each purse has over a dozen oysters; they slap each other on the back, throw all but six of them back into the inner parc, and return, cold, wet and happy, to the shed. James produces a bottle of white wine; Danny shucks the oysters open and they drink a toast.

‘To the Drimnamore Oyster Fishery.’

‘
Sláinte
. You’ll have to open your own from now on.’

James goes back to his cottage and sleeps soundly. Late in life he has discovered the pleasures of hard manual work. And the perils – he has already sprained a wrist, lost a fingernail and badly bruised his ribs on the building site and on the boat. But his daughter’s advice, and Tolstoy’s, was good.

S
EVERAL
YEARS
LATER
, the Drimnamore Oyster Fishery is beginning to look like a business. Danny, whose caution offsets James’s optimism, is pleased.

‘We’ll sell a hundred and fifty thousand oysters this year, turn over almost ninety thousand euros, close to break even. We’ve covered my salary and we don’t need the bank for working capital any more. Our man in Cork is working out well.’

Their new distributor is based in Cork and travels to London every week to sell smoked salmon to big department stores and expensive restaurants.

‘His fifteen per cent is a bargain. All we have to do is to get the oysters to Cork once a week. And he’s a Dutchman. I wouldn’t trust a Cork man with my money or my sister.’

‘There speaks Galway.’

They employ six packers in the shed for most of the year. They cover the oysters in fresh, damp seaweed and pack them in woven baskets with a clear plastic cover and ‘Drimnamore Oyster Fishery’ stencilled on the side. The baskets are twice the price of cardboard and, Danny agrees, worth every penny. James and Danny work the dredger together and they have hired Tommy, who turns up most days, to chip the oysters clear of barnacles. They start to sell direct to the public at Oysterbed Pier after a succession of summer weekends spent turning away disappointed tourists.

‘All we need is a blackboard, a big bottle of tabasco and hundreds of lemons. We’ll make double our normal margin, and it’s all cash.’

James has become a fixture in Drimnamore. He is treated with a mixture of curiosity (‘Why would you want to come to the end of Ireland, for God’s sake?’), affection (‘You’ve brought a bit of life to the place’) and suspicion (‘What’s an Englishman doing making money out of Irish oysters?’). He works hard at the fishery, goes for long walks along the coast and up into the mountains, reads Irish history in the evenings, snug in his cottage. He is making slow progress on expanding his monograph into a longer book about the people of Dunkerron between 1840 and 1900. Once a month he goes to the public library in Tralee where there is a complete set of Kerry newspapers of the period:
The Kerryman
,
Kerry Sentinel
,
Kerry Examiner
, and
South Kerry Star
. Only
The Kerryman
survives.

‘I know more about Dunkerron in the nineteenth century than I do about the world today,’ he tells Danny. ‘It was like the Wild West.’

He goes to the Church of Ireland service every Sunday to swell its tiny congregation, never more than ten in the winter. He reads the lesson occasionally, sits in the Burke family pew, helps to weed the graveyard and joins the congregation at the Kerry Coffee Shop after the service. He likes the curious mixture around the table, even the bossy evangelical lay preacher, Sheila Perceval. There is a retired bank manager from Dublin, two Brits making their pensions go further, an elderly American hippy and the woman who started the Kerry Coffee Shop six years ago and is still holding on. Holidaymakers double the congregation and triple the collection during July and August. For the rest of the year, James feels he is part of a dying creed in a colonial outpost.

In contrast, sixty go to the big, gloomy Roman Catholic church outside the village. ‘It used to be more like a hundred until they found out what priests and the Christian Brothers had been doing to children for all those years,’ says Sheila with a certain amount of satisfaction.

James buys a boat, a Galway hooker that he finds in Roundstone and sails down the coast with Danny as his crew. He can handle the boat alone on all but the roughest days, sailing among the islands in the estuary and when the weather is good as far out as the Bull, the Cow and the Calf. He replaces the British Seagull with a reliable twenty-horsepower Yamaha to bring him home whenever the wind dies away, fishes for mackerel and sets out half a dozen lobster pots close to Rossdohan Island. Occasionally, when there’s some water, he tries for salmon in the Drimnamore River. His dog keeps him company. Mick is a Kerry Blue terrier that James acquired from Michael Sullivan.

‘That dog is a direct descendant of Michael Collins’s famous terrier, Convict 224. My father was given the dog after Collins was killed, and we’ve bred from the line ever since.’

‘He’s handsome enough, I must say. Lovely colour, and not small and yappy like a Jack Russell.’

Once a month he has dinner with Michael Sullivan and Aisling in the Great Southern Hotel. After a few attempts to introduce James to merry widows, Michael abandons his hopes of bringing James back to the altar.

‘It’s not natural,’ he grumbles. ‘It’s a waste of a good man.’

‘I’ve been married, I’ve got a daughter,’ says James. ‘I’ve a dog, a cottage, a boat and the fishery. Quite enough for one man to worry about.’

On one of these evenings Michael tells him the story of the glory days.

‘It seemed great while it lasted, and then everyone went bust. My partner Declan shoved off to America with his latest girlfriend and an offshore Ansbacher account. I owed the bank twenty million that I didn’t have, so they took Sullivan Construction, took the Mercedes and the villa, took my banjaxed investments, not that they were worth anything, and settled for that. I never pledged the house, only sensible thing I did, and Aisling stuck with me.’

‘He had soft hands under a hen, that Declan,’ says Aisling. ‘And I got carried away with it all, parties, clothes, flying at the front of the plane. I’m only glad Annie and my da weren’t alive to see it all.’

Michael takes a deep drink from his pint of Guinness and gives his wife a hug.

‘That’s all eaten bread now. I still couldn’t tell you what a Contract for Difference is, although it blew away eight million euros of money I didn’t have. I’ve done apologizing and I’m back to what I know.’

Georgia comes out to see James without Stephen and stays in the big hotel.

‘No, Dad, there’s nothing wrong, it’s just that the business is going through a rough time. Stephen’s sorting it out. And it’s lovely to have you to myself.’

James shows Georgia the oyster fishery and takes her out in the boat with Danny, dredging for oysters on a drizzling day. They pick what they need in two hours, and when they land Georgia says, ‘That was real work. Dad, I’m very impressed. You’ve built a good little business from nothing, not bad for an ex-Permanent Secretary. But aren’t you lonely?’

‘I see people every day, I read a lot of poetry, I do some writing, and I’ve always got Mick. I’m even learning Gaelic very slowly. If I want company, there’s several of them in The Liberator bar who haven’t told me their life stories yet.’

‘You know something, you’re living a different version of the last years of your father’s life. Away from home, celibate, fishing, religion...’