Blasket Spirit (5 page)

‘You must be either a nun or a hermit. Are you a member of one of those cults?’ he continued. I was getting desperate. Why couldn’t I think of an answer to deflect this interrogation? Why could I never come up with the kind of witty, clever jibes that seemed to skip effortlessly off other peoples’ tongues? Páidí came to my rescue several times by changing the conversation.

‘Ah, Sue, I forgot,’ Páidí interrupted as he delved into a small haversack on the floor and produced a bottle of wine, a present from his wife who worked in the craft shop in Ballyferriter on the Dingle Peninsula. Talk turned to Páidí’s work. Like Páid, he too had a craft. He was a master potter with Louis Mulcahy.

‘So, you are both fishermen, sheep farmers and craftsmen!’ I was fascinated and envious.

‘Everyone has to be involved in the tourist industry here – bed and breakfasts, restaurants, crafts. What else is there on the peninsula? The bit of fishing and sheep farming we do wouldn’t keep anybody alive. Sure that’s why they all had to emigrate in the past,’ Páidí explained.

‘Not like the wealthy farmers and nuns in County Kilkenny, eh?’ laughed Donncha. Maybe agreeing with him might help to stop the teasing. I pretended to laugh with him. Sue offered me a glass of wine. I declined. It was time to leave.

‘I knew it. She’s in a cult. She doesn’t drink either.’ I thanked Sue, ignoring the ribbing. As politely as I could, I edged towards the door.

‘I wouldn’t like to be going up there in the dark on my own. Ray’s place is haunted, isn’t it, Páidí?’ laughed Donncha.

‘It isn’t. It’s outside that’s haunted,’ I said quietly, looking him in the eye. For the first time, I had managed to stop his banter stone dead. Instantly, I was sorry that I had said anything. I had exposed myself to ridicule, yet I was anxious for confirmation. Confirmation that I wasn’t going mad. Sue and each of the three men had heard various accounts of haunting over the years. Up around the cafe, they all agreed, was one area on the island that was definitely haunted. Each of the men had stories to tell but most were disregarded with the addendum ‘sure he had a skinful that night.’ Páidí mentioned voices in the darkness heard up at Tobar na Croise, the well outside my hut.

It was then that I told the men and Sue of the chatter and laughter each night at the beginning of my stay. I told them about the two little girls and about how it had never crossed my mind that they were anybody other then the children of the ferrymen or the couple in the cafe. After discussing my story, they concluded that the voices heard at the well by others must have been the spirits of the children I had seen.

‘But why should a stranger on the island be the first to see them?’ Donncha asked. I began to feel that I was on trial.

‘Well, you’re a teacher, aren’t you?’ Páidí said. ‘You’re obviously good with kids. They wanted you to see them, and maybe they wanted you to go into the old school with them.’

Sue and the men were surprised at my certainty that I would not see the children again. As I said it aloud, I knew how true it was. When layers of one’s being are shaken and stripped to the core, perhaps the spirit is exposed. I knew that it was on that deeper level that I had met the spirits of the two girls. If other people had been with me on those nights, perhaps they would have seen nothing, being physically stronger and more spiritually fortified than I was. I began to realise that it was with my soul’s eyes and not my physical eyes that I had seen the girls on those tortured nights. That desperate time had now passed for me, and I knew that I had become physically and emotionally stronger. If the two little girls were a symptom of my distress, they were also a remedy for that distress. As I left, Sue and the men were still discussing what I had seen.

The following morning, the men began shearing the sheep in the wooden pen. Páid waded into the bleating sea of wool, selecting the next fleece. In seconds, the terrified ewe was upended and her fleece peeled off her as easily as fleshy skin is peeled off an orange. Exposed in her velvety white under-flesh, she hobbled back into the flock for cover. Her woolly companions wheeled around and around in the enclosure as Páid lunged after new victims. The young dogs barked excitedly, but after one sharp command in Irish, they dropped to the ground like stones. As a mountain of fleeces piled up out on the grass, in the pen the flock became skinnier and whiter by the hour.

The noise and the activity were so reminiscent of my childhood that I lingered around the hut all morning. After cleaning the floor with my improvised heather broom, I heated water on the stove and washed some clothes in a basin while sitting against the wall of the
Dáil
, protected from the north wind. Then it was time for a cup of tea. I negotiated the banks and rabbit holes down to the sheep pen, gripping four steaming mugs. The men leaned back on the bleached wooden fence against a backdrop of brilliant blue sea and sky. ‘Well, she still has no Irish but she makes a great cup of tea,’ Páidí announced.

‘At least that’s one tradition these wealthy Kilkenny farmers haven’t thrown out the window along with everything else,’ Donncha teased.

Startled by the loud talk and sudden bursts of laughter, the sheep huddled against the far side of the pen.

That evening, after the sun had gone down, the stories continued at Sue’s fireside. Donncha had gone back out to the mainland and his place had been taken by a quiet, gentle, weather-beaten man called Séamus.

The shearing took four days. The wool was gathered and stored in the dry
clochán
in front of Páidí Dunleavy’s. On the final afternoon, Sue and I were roped in to help. We herded the sheep down the cliff to the slipway where Páid manoeuvred the small boat so that Séamus and Páidí could catch each animal, haul it into the boat and tie its legs together. When the cargo of twelve sheep was finally aboard, they set off for Beiginis, where the grazing was rich and they could be fattened for a couple of weeks before their final journey across the Blasket Sound and into Dingle, to be sold as organic Blasket lamb to upmarket restaurants.

As the day passed, the flock got smaller on the slipway. I made several pots of tea and took turns blocking the flock’s escape route back up the cliff. The task of lifting each animal was arduous and physically exhausting. As the little boat returned from Beiginis, another ewe would be unceremoniously upended, and her legs tied as she bleated pitifully. ‘Why do you have to tie their legs together?’ I asked.

‘Because they’d jump overboard,’ Páidí explained.

‘Sure, they huddle in the middle of the boat, terrified the whole way over,’ Páid argued. ‘When did you ever hear of a ewe diving in for a swim?’ The two men stood up in the boat debating the question.

Séamus with his sheepdogs at the slipway
.

After a time, Séamus, the quietest of the three, spoke. ‘It’s to stop them putting their hooves through the canvas and sinking the currach.’ There was silence for a time.

‘Sure we have solid floors wit’ years, we’re not shifting them in currachs any more,’ Páid said.

The rhythm of the work was interrupted as we all silently contemplated the bound ewe on the solid floor of the boat.

Then Páidí spoke. ‘I suppose some of the old ways don’t make sense any more.’

With that, we watched Páidí untie the ewe that cowered in the bottom of the boat.

At dusk, I sat with Séamus and the sheepdogs on the rocks watching the last boat of unbound sheep crossing to Beiginis. As I watched, I felt guilty.

‘With one question I’ve just destroyed an age-old, vibrant Blasket tradition.’

Séamus continued to look out to sea as he nodded, then turned to me smiling, ‘Sure, with a cup of tea from an island house, didn’t you revive another?’

T
he stories told at Sue’s fireside filled my imagination and became my salvation. The obsessive replaying of memories in all their forensic detail lessened as I walked the island living these new tales. Much of the folklore related to the fishermen and seals of the islands. The story of Muiris and the seal is one such Blasket legend.

A fisherman on the Great Blasket Island, Muiris was renowned as far away as Dingle for the heavy catches he netted. When hauls were meagre for everyone else, Muiris’s nets were always guaranteed to be full. Some said it was because he had been born on the Feast Day of Saints Peter and Paul. Others said that it was the old seal that had followed his boat constantly since the night his father had drowned which brought him luck. Whatever the reason, islanders said it was lucky to run your hand along the bow of Muiris’s boat: that hand would be promised plenty. It was said that a Dingle woman who had no children ran her hands along the boat and, nine months later, she was cradling a son in her arms. Muiris himself knew the secret of his laden nets, but he also knew that to speak about that secret would break the spell forever.

Muiris had been a rival, along with his friend Tomás, for the affections of a young island girl called Úna. Eighteen years old, with long auburn hair to her waist, she had sparkling eyes of liquid sea blue. Muiris and Tomás approached her father, seeking her hand in marriage, within days of each other. Úna, who had strong views of her own, favoured Muiris. The wedding took place in Ballyferriter and then Úna moved into the neat little house of Muiris and his widowed mother on the Great Blasket Island. The couple were as happy as larks and the two women got on famously.

Tomás, on the other hand, was anything but happy, and could not let go of his bitterness and jealousy, which festered like an infected sore. One calm evening, as the boats were gliding through the sea back home to the island, Tomás had only a few mackerel to show for his full day’s fishing. In contrast, Muiris’s boat was low in the water, such was the weight of his catch. Tomás was consumed with resentment. He thought of Úna, and his knuckles clenched white on the oars.

It was just as Tomás was approaching the head of
An Fear Marbh
that he caught sight of the old seal gliding back through the waves, having left Muiris at the Great Blasket Island. In an instant the young man took his revenge. As the old seal passed by, he brought down the oar on its head with all the anger and hate he could muster, cracking open the creature’s skull. It rolled over in the water, limp and dead. Tomás towed the seal back to the island where he stowed it out of sight, below the slipway.

It was late and dark when he returned to the hiding place and hauled the shiny black body back to his cottage. He rolled it into the turf shed and covered it with sods. He would make use of every ounce of meat, blubber and skin. In cold and frosty weather, it would hold well.

The next day the boats went out again. Muiris waited in vain for the sleek black head to bob up beside him. He fished all day and, for the first time in ten years, came home with an empty boat. The village was wild with talk. ‘The seal has deserted Muiris and so has his luck.’

‘Nothing will go right for him now, Lord bless the lad!’

Muiris felt as bereft as when his father had died all those years before. He went out in the boat the next day and the one after that, waiting, watching and scanning the tide desperately for the seal. On the third day, the weather broke and the wind scuffed white peaks across the water. The other men worked at hauling turf and mending nets, instead of putting out to sea. But Muiris had other plans. Too late, Úna discovered those plans: Muiris was already pushing the boat out into the waves. She pleaded with him not to go. He ignored her and shouted that he had to find the seal.

All day Úna stood on the cliffs above the seal cove, waiting for Muiris to return. She stared at the waves crashing against the rocky head of
An Fear Marbh
, praying to the Virgin to send him home safely. When darkness fell, her mother-in-law continued the vigil with her. She understood the pain of waiting. For ten years she had watched for her own husband to return from the sea and now she would have to watch for her son. The two women never moved until dawn, when neighbours came to take them home. The search of the shoreline began because it was still too rough for a boat to risk venturing out. All day the islanders watched, waited and searched. There was no trace of Muiris or his boat.

As darkness fell, a storm raged over the island. The waves dashed themselves against the rocks, shattering into plumes of spray. Doors and windows were shuttered against the wind and the driving rain. The whole village lay awake listening to the voices of a hundred seals wailing and crying in the darkness. Their howling reverberated throughout the village: nothing like it has been heard on the island before or since.

In his cottage Tomás and his two sisters, Máire and Cáit, sat up beside the fire for comfort. The wind blew smoke back down the chimney until it eventually put out the fire. The wailing of the seals was relentless. Tomás was uneasy. Beads of sweat shone on his upper lip. He began pacing incessantly between the window and the hearth.

‘For the love of God, Tomás, will you sit down and stop yer fidgeting!’

‘Can’t ye hear that?’ he snapped.