Inishbream by Theresa Kishkan Page B

more of “Donal Og”: I’ll do your milking and nurse your baby . . .
    Peter hastily declared himself at odds with the malt, and we began to make our slow descent to the currach. We were riding the current home to Inishbream, the air stinging and a music to our ears.
    What greeted me upon the event of my return: the children of Mairtin; the elderly dog, dusty and soft in the tooth; the calves, anxious to take my fingers in their mouths for the familiar feeling of a mother if not the taste; the wind rasping through the elephant grass about the stark, cliff-hanging cottage of my marriage; and my man, a startling tangle of sun-bleached hair and arms full of nets, which were dropped. And the arms filled with myself.

    One of the old men died, the eldest man in the house of brothers. They had been expecting it for years but finding him cold and blue in the bed was a shock. Overnight. No one heard a sound from him, although they all slept in the same room. One brother said, Sure and how can ye expect to hear anything, even yer own heart, when the gales blow and beat on the doors, shaking every pane of the windows.
    What I knew of him: that he was simple, that he walked with two sticks, and sometimes I’d see him at the far end of the island, bent in the wind like a thorn tree. I knew that as a young man he’d gone to America and had come back for his father’s funeral, never to leave again. Some said he wanted to marry Kathleen long ago, before she was bearded, and her refusal was his reason for leaving in the first place.
    There was the all-night vigil by the body, the watchers fortified by poteen, and then the priest came, and the boulders were rolled away from the gate of the cemetery. The mourners entered and stood in the rain as the priest invoked God and angels, and then the coffin was lowered into the grave men had carved out of the difficult earth. Covered it. A few heart-shaped boxes of artificial roses, wrapped in plastic, lay upon the mound, the ink of the sympathy cards running thin. There was a hymn and prayer. The crone was audibly hoarse from the keening she’d performed during the long wake. The brothers were grim-faced and silent.
    A gale from the west, pummelling down on the house of the ailing.

SEA AREA FORECAST
    IT WILL SEEM, IN THIS TELLING , that my days followed one upon the other actively, like flights of geese or shoals of breeding mackerel. Never tiresome or moth-eaten. And there were moths, soft-winged buggers that made a quick lacy work of shirts and a favourite woollen shawl.
    Yet I remember whole weeks of lethargy, whole compositions of boredom when I dreamed of going to Paris. Street theatre, the white-faced mimes, jugglers, dark coffee in the Deux Magots. I dreamed of Greece and the night-dancing, the supple men and their unbearable swaying pelvises. Letters arrived from friends: “We are going to Portugal (you’d like the fish-cobbled streets), to Afghanistan. Oh, we’d love to have you with us.” I wrote back: “I fish. My bread goes pale blue with mould because I have no fridge or damp-free box.”
    There was a man who went away, and often I dreamed of following, of hunting the roadside camps for a blue-eyed devil. There were meals of potatoes and anaemic cabbages, washed out and sour. Trips to town, a nineteenth-century opus of two streets and fifteen pubs. Nights illuminated by a cool moon, the shy crackle of a candle’s flame.
    Then the butcher offered me a young mare to break and train as my own.
    â€“ She’s a flighty filly, pure Connemara, but too small for me, so ye could manage her, I’m thinking. Come and see her. If ye like her, she’s yers so.
    She was grey as smoke and fourteen hands, a fine Araby head, and long-legged. Her nostrils against my palm were the softest on earth as I fed her a scrawny carrot. Warm, too, and her flanks rippled as I ran my hand across her back.
    â€“ Rising three, she is, and ready for the