Away (12 page)

On the way home in the carriage, with the pail of sea water sloshing at his feet, he remembered the look in her eyes when she spoke the word “undisturbed” and he let the horse stop and stand completely still for ten minutes, though his driver was not with him and he sat outside the vehicle in the icy wind with the sky threatening rain. Then he flicked his whip and tugged on the left-hand rein so that the animal would retrace its steps. When he arrived at the pool for the second time he angrily tossed the contents of the pail back into the water and strode quickly away, guilty and miserable. He saw his footsteps and the woman’s and he could tell by the shape of hers that the soles of both her boots had holes. He was becoming confused, irritated, and sad. He would tell his brother, he decided, absolutely nothing about the events of the afternoon.

The next morning at breakfast, however, he made an announcement. He would no longer collect sea anemones. Instead, he intended to paint the tidepools in their entirety.

When Granville looked surprised, Osbert explained that everything in the tidepools was connected, and that to remove life from them would be like tearing gold out of the earth.

Later that afternoon Granville began to compose a poem entitled “Lament for an Empty Aquarium.”

Back by her hearthside she told her husband of the meeting with the landlord from the Big House. Liam sat on Brian’s lap, saying over and over all the new words he had learned. “Table,” he said, or “stone.” “Are we not to be speaking some Irish?” she had asked as the list continued. But Brian answered, simply, that it was no use to be talking a language fit only for a Godforsaken place such as this.

“But you said –”

“What does it matter, now, what I said?”

“It matters to me.”

“It won’t soon.”

She told him about the tidepool – its colours and creatures, but he interrupted her. “Them and their tidepools,” he said with contempt. “We’re to be starving and they’re to be collecting refuse from tidepools. Christ, is there no end to blindness and stupidity?!”

The child slid down from his father’s lap and ran across the room to fetch the rag doll his mother had made for him. When he had it, he edged over to his mother’s knees where he stood silently fingering its button eyes.

“But,” she said quietly, “it’s lovely they are when you look at them closely. There’s colours there you’d only dream of and things that are alive – creatures – though its flowers that they –”

“Mary,” Brian interrupted, “Mary, come back from wherever it is that you spend your time and let me tell you the news from Skibereen. Quinn says they are dying there like flies. That the ditches and hedges and gutters and streets are full of them – the corpses. And the workhouses packed with disease and thousands of people dying on the country roads that lead to them. There’s nothing to be had and shiploads of grain leaving the ports every day for England. Great God!” he shouted towards the sky framed by the window. “What will they do to us next?!
They’ll do nothing is what they’ll do, for there will be none of us left. Even Quinn admits there’s no amount of prayers will save a single one of us. And he, himself, showing his haggard face in this room with his clothes hanging on him like grave clothes on a skeleton, the hardship being so severe out there on your own island.”

“But the fishing.”

“It’s all gone terribly wrong. Quinn says the English and all the other Protestants have stolen the souls of the men so they haven’t the strength or the heart to fish. Young lads, he said, sit daily down by the water, staring at the sea as if it were a stranger, and the children, he says, impossible to coax from the cabins into the sun. All of the people coming together listlessly, even for wakes, and recently, he said, not coming together at all.”

“And Mother always said –”

“Your own mother, Mary, weakening on her bed and me without passage money for the ferry. You’ll not see her again, that’s one thing certain.”

“No,” she said fiercely, “it’s not as bad as that! There’s been scarcity before. We’ve all had the winters, and many’s the time there’s been fevers …”

Brian clutched the curls on his head with his hand. “Not like this,” he said quietly, and the tone of his voice frightened Mary more than it would have had he been shouting. “This is the end of us. Even though we’re better off here than in the rest of the country, it’s the end of us, too.” He kicked over the basket that she had brought with her so that the dulse lay scattered between them. “Surely you don’t expect your child to live on that forever,” he said.

“Not forever, just until –”

“Until what, Mary? There’ll never be a healthy crop again.
It’s the very ground we were raised on gone bad … turned to poison. We’re finished.” He raised his other arm towards his head and ran the heels of his hands across his forehead, cupping his skull finally in the curve of his fingers. “Finished,” he said again to the floor or to his knees on which his elbows rested.

The child began to cry and Mary drew his head to her lap and stroked his hair and his soft cheek. When he was comforted she stood up and bent down to retrieve the dulse from the floor, over and over again until she had made a dark hill of it on the table. Then she took the pail from beside the fire and headed towards the door. We still have water, she thought, water to wash and to cook. But the memory of the black slippery mass on the plates made her throat dry and her ears ring. Outdoors, the stone wall of the well pressing into her hipbones, she looked down into the circular depth. Her own thin face gazed back at her, practically unrecognizable, and farther away, it seemed, than it ever had been before.

Returning to the cabin with the water spilling in silver beads over the edges of the pail, she suddenly dropped her burden on the flat stone in front of the door and snatched the last scrawny hen from the thatch by its rough yellow ankles. With the bird flapping and screaming at the end of her right arm, she turned and walked towards the small stone barn to find the axe, which she used, not as a blade, but as a club until her skirt was covered with feathers and blood. Then she folded to a kneeling position on the dirt floor and wept into the remaining down of the creature’s still warm, pliant breast.

Her husband looked at her when she entered the cabin, her face streaked with blood and tears, dark stains and feathers on her clothing, but he said nothing – just dipped the pen he was holding into his last bottle of ink. Mary pulled the feathers
from the bird’s meagre body, letting them fall, like snow, to the floor while the child picked them up in handfuls and hurled them into the air.

After a long while Brian spoke. “There’ll be no eggs now,” he said. But by then the calming smell of roasting meat was draining the anger out of the air.

Mary washed her face and hands in the remaining water from the pail and asked her husband what he was writing.

Just a diary of the weather, he told her, there being nothing else to report. A summary of the conditions of the month of November, 1846. Then, tilting the notebook up from the table, he read it aloud to her.

“Great quantity of fine, thin-clouded days,” he had written, “with only three storms. West wind nine days, south wind eleven days, north wind eight days, east wind two days. Seventeen days of soft, cold rain, one day of ice and several of hoarfrost. Moonlight three nights, the others entirely dark.”

M
ARY
was alone by Lough Crannog on a grey day, her basket filled with limpets and the smaller edible seaweeds she had picked from the rocks near the ocean, the wind in all her worn and ragged clothes. Everything about her was torn, flapping, as if she had been transformed into a bundle of ancient banners blackened by time. It had been a day of stone, she thought; stone being the only property to hold still in the face of the icy wind. And it was the property that she knew best, these cold days; each detail of the wet rocks from which she picked nourishment for her child, her husband, and herself being what she saw when she was seeing with her outer eyes.

She, standing in the wind, looked at her two thin hands, the nails cracked where she had scratched them over basalt, the knuckles raw. Then she lifted her skirt and looked at her bruised shins and the skin of her legs which had turned red and purple with cold, and she wondered how love could still beat its insistent wings in the heart of a body so altered and twisted by the labour of moving two miles back and forth to the sea, each day, in search of sustenance.

It was this fierce desire of the heart in her that she was beginning to confuse in her mind with the bodily hunger that was creeping, by inches, each week, a little further into their cabin.

The skin of the lake was wrinkled by wind, making it appear impenetrable, and she wanted to gaze into its depths, believing that a world like that of the tidepool waited there – its colours and unique geography. But even on calm days this lake would
reveal its beloved secret only when it chose, and showed her now a shield made of light and a plenitude of reflections from the world of the actual.

He came, sometimes, when she had given up hope altogether that he would touch her, and often, it was true, he did not approach her at all. How strange the stir in the air that was not wind and the slant of the light that was neither moon nor sun, and both these things signalling his arrival. Something already broken in her opened further, and he came in and showed her sights she had never known about and spoke an understood language that she had never heard.

Today, with everything in the world thrashing around her and the brutal noise of the sea still in her head, it was the sudden absence of cold that heralded him, and she opened her arms as if to embrace a warm morning. Today he was bright water with the flash of sun in it and the tumbling shadows of leaves. Now he taught her a history that she saw behind her eyes.

Coming from the island and living, as she now did, on the high, open land that led from her door to the cliffs, she had never seen a forest but, as he touched her, one grew over her head. He showed her the sapling that would grow to be a great tree. And then the great tree being cut down for the timber that would build the ship that killed him. He showed her the forest in which the sapling had flourished. She was surrounded by shivering green, by light glancing from leaves and nuzzling bark. Small butterflies burst from dark places, their wings illuminated and extinguished, and moved by the way the breeze tossed light. He was the touch of this light. Then he was the evaporating drops of moisture that shone like stars on the forest floor before entering air. All was fragmentation – notes of birdsong scattering through the atmosphere, the way the foliage dispersed rays of sun until the voices of the birds were
the voices of a million moving shadows. “Life,” she heard herself say, and “green.”

“I lived here, once,” he told her with the voice he had put in her brain and in her heart, “but I did not know the roots of the sapling, and the sapling, itself, did not anticipate the axe.” Shimmering light was thrown from all surfaces and rested nowhere.

The woods suggested, in their uncertainties of space, transparencies of light – their rumours of entities glimpsed, then lost – that some magnificent event was always on the edge of taking place, and Mary knew her own presence in the forest, or the forest’s presence in her, was such an event. He, the illusive light, the drop of water, even now disappearing from the blade of grass, the fallen leaf.

There was another voice that belonged only to her and she used it beside the lake to make a song for him.
“Oh soft, sweet voiced one
,“ she sang,
“thin clouded as a moonlit dusk, you put pictures beside me in the grass and there is the long stretch of you at my side. Washing over me, you are cities, forests, bright bursts of birdsong. You bring as gifts to me all that murdered you. Gentle drowned one, heart’s darling of the storm, I remember you when the pot is empty and hunger kicks its boots against the door.”

S
OME
of the winged specimens in the Puffin Court collection were so old they fell to pieces in Osbert’s fingers as he removed them from their hinged boxes, causing the floor around him to be covered with colourful, if faded, detritus. All morning he had been studying the wings of butterflies under the microscope, watching a fragment of their patterns come into startling focus – slashes of orange or lavender, edged in black. He imagined, as he gazed, his father as a small boy, chasing these baroque beauties when they were alive, netting them, killing them, mounting them. A child’s faded printing identified each specimen. It had been three or four months since his encounter with the woman at the tidepool. Osbert had captured nothing since that time.

Granville, greatly pleased by his own cleverness, was writing a lament for Ireland in which he compared the country to a butterfly who, having hatched gorgeously from the cocoon, was captured, killed, and confined in an Englishman’s cabinet where, “She glowed like other beautiful things, but stirred no more her ancient wings.”

Streaks of moisture were drying on the windows, leaving faint grey paths, and outside in the courtyard scores of puddles were beginning to shrink in diameter. The brothers could hear the maid clanking about in the scullery and the hounds yapping in the kennel. The wind shook the sashes in the frames. Under his eye Osbert saw a thundercloud of dust on an insect’s wing and several filaments on a black leg. He wondered where
the creature had flown fifty years before.

“Isn’t it marvellous,” said Granville, finishing his poem with a flourish, “that as brothers we are so like-minded?”

“Hmmm,” replied Osbert as yet another ancient wing came apart in his hands. A few aborted attempts at sketching huge wing fragments rested by his right elbow.

Outside, a flowerpot was pushed by the wind from the edge of a stone bench.

“What was that?” both brothers asked nervously and in unison.

Engaged in their usual employments, they had, nevertheless, been listening all morning for sounds outside the walls. It was rent day. In previous years the cottiers had arrived promptly at 10:00 a.m., caps in hand, money in fist, and had humbly paid their dues. The smell of the coffee and buns that were generously given in return ever since Puffin Court was born, permeated the air. It was now 11:06 a.m., and though neither brother had commented upon the phenomenon, not a single tenant had appeared.