Inishbream by Theresa Kishkan Page A

was so odd in London to be handing out the anti-war pamphlets on Hyde Park Corner and to see him with his communist tracts on the opposite side, and when our father died and himself the eldest, didn’t he sign over the fortune and the home to the Dublin trade-unions?) The mother, an astrologer in the wilds of Dunkineely, and I’d spent whole mornings in a book of the planets she’d left to Shelagh, smelling of age and brittle fingers and annotated in the margins with a faint spidery pencil. The brother in South Africa. (The young woman he lives with a widow, her husband having strangled himself with a nylon stocking in one of his queer perversions. Bind himself to the bed, he would, and then play with himself. Can you believe such a thing?) The son and the daughter, both gifted and both suicides, photographs of them as children, the full sensual lips of Edward. Years later, his arm on the tweed chest of his lover, in a suit, the casual scarf at his neck. The stories of the early Charlebois: hunters all with their feet by the fire cleaning their guns, the maids, the meals of venison and jugged hare, and good potatoes splitting their sides, all floury. And then the travelling, after her husband’s death by water, long stays in Spain, Tunisia, the Channel Islands out of season. And the immediate dream of a cottage in Donegal, her birthplace, and the bracing air her blood still longed to.
    I came away stirred and a little mad for her past myself, her filled and tangled years. I would be the archaeologist of her old age, carefully brushing the dust off the artifacts as they unearthed themselves from a living ground. A book, the only one of Edward’s she kept; a piece of mountain pottery from Spain.
    It was a long route home, first through the sultry air, sky thick with the fattened Mayo birds, then to the coast road, the rain and clutter of small boats populating the fjord of Leenane.
    When I arrived in Clifden, it was to discover that half the island population had come over to shop, taking advantage of a high enough tide to be able to go right into Clifden Bay in the currachs.
    You could tell the islanders from the townspeople easily enough, though the differences seem nearly nonexistent in the telling. Well, it’s the way they dress, warmly, and the women are always carrying several loaded bags, are never without a head scarf. Or their accents are broader, they use odd expressions. But an islander would tell you the accents differ from farm to farm on the mainland and from rock to rock off it. And on a rainy day, not a soul would be found bareheaded on earth. Perhaps I mean that it was the atmosphere they moved in that made them different. And the way the men made their effortless perfect knots when they tied the boats at the town quay, the way their respect for the sea brightened their very flesh and eyes, the way even their skeletons seemed an almanac of the world they knew in a language difficult in the learning but natural to the born initiate. The careful movement of feet on town cobbles, as though they were walking over algae-slick shore stone or in the belly of a pukaun, bracing themselves for the bringing in of nets.
    â€“ Ah, so yer back. And had ye a good small holiday?
    â€“ Yes, Peter. But Mayo is so different, isn’t it? Even the air.
    â€“ Aye, tis so, but it seems we have not lost ye to it. Now. Sean has not come to the town this day and so ye may go back with meself, but first I will be proceeding to Eamon’s for a bit of a drink. Will ye join me?
    â€“ I will.
    We took our whiskey neat in the smoky, familiar dark. The drunken woman from Ballyconneely was singing at the bar:
    If you are going across the water,
Take me with you to be your partner . . .
    â€“ Ah, Peggy, yerra girl. Eamon, would ye ever give the lady another vodka?
    How could she have known “Donal Og” was his favourite song, and why did she sing so directly to him?
    â€“ Thank ye, Peter.
    Then