Inishbream by Theresa Kishkan

lover.
    â€“ Ah, ye pour a good pint of stout, Michael Joe.
    There was a way of drinking the pint. You cradled the glass a moment in your hands, your fingers stroking the curves and the wetness; you sniffed the creamy top, pressing your mouth ever so softly on the rim, just to have a suggestion of what you’d be knowing as the pint really settled. Then you’d lick your mouth and you’d be delighted. And the pint would be excellent. You’d never doubt that.
    As I roved out on a bright May morning,
To view the flowers and meadows gay . . .
    Someone’s noble voice singing there at the bar, and the others listening in an honest respect.
    If I married the lassie that had the land, my love,
It’s that I’ll rue until the day I die . . .
    Then we were on the road to Ballina, we were exclaiming at the rich green of the hayfields and the contented munching cattle, and then it was Turlough: two pubs, Mrs. Loughran’s and her mother’s; Delia’s store; and a row of houses, the one at the end crumbling to the day.
    The man hummed. I am a wee weaver . . . Then: Yer sure ye won’t come on to Ballina, just for the crack?
    A pickup if I ever saw one. No. Shelagh’s waiting.
    She was there in the caravan up from Loughran’s pub in the shadow of the round tower, there in the sunny window, waving. Her cats scattered.
    â€“ Ah, you’re looking well. I’ve made scones and have the tea ready. You’re welcome here. Take off the rucksack and come in!
    The caravan was an enchanted place of Moroccan baskets, Wicklow weaving, a pie of Saint George’s mushrooms gathered in the cool Charlebois wood, sorrel, wild garlic keeping cool in a glass, one wall of books (Krishnamurti, Culpeper’s Herbal , the works of all the visionaries), candles in brass pots.

    â€“ What happened to the roof?
    We were walking in the Charlebois wood and happened upon a splendid view of the old house, the hunting lodge, where Shelagh and her husband had lived in the long ago. The house, elegant though roofless, ancestral under the wry sun.
    â€“ Ah, there was such a wind and it took the roof and didn’t it just land in a field fourteen miles away, shaking the farmer out of a year’s growth. That was just after Gerald died and myself not a true Fitzwarren (only by marriage), and so I took up a few wee things and went to live in Tunisia. For the arthritis, bad even then.
    â€“ Oh.
    And she continued through the forest, small and graceful in her age, pausing to touch the moss of the trees her son Edward had planted in the peaceful summers before his lover drove him mad. I remained at the edge of the view. Took off my shoes. Clenched in my toes the soft grass, earth, leaves, a startled purple-backed beetle. The rare sun entered the chapel of trees through the vaulted branches. Leaned my back on a stump, my spine fitting nicely into the pungent wood. Warm. Breathless. Thought: You could stay here always. Forget the stones of Inishbream, the obsessive stories of drowning. You have always loved trees, and it is the custom in this county to offer your lover a dowry grove, planted by your father or someone as generous. Thought: You’d never be found if you built your shelter in this forest she has declared a sanctuary for birds, foxes of the hills, badgers, anything wild and fond of burrows.
    â€“ And are you coming on, then? I’ve the tea laid out.
    I walked upright out of the forest, and we drank tea on the porch of the breezy house, ate apples and biscuits.
    â€“ Did you like the old wood, then? I always think of it as Edward’s wood. He loved it so. I wanted to bury him here, but I hadn’t the money to bring his body back from London.
    Thought: How lovely to be buried in the Charlebois earth, the ground soft with heron feathers, the night hollow with the chanting hooves. Not hard sea and that drumming rain.
    I came away incoherent with her stories. The brother in Russia. (It