REMEMBERING WINTER

I REMEMBER FIELDS OF STONE and a harrowing, men dragging chains behind them, a burden on their backs. Earth separated itself from stones, silting through the links, finally furrowing on the slight rise of the garden.

– If ye can, just toss them big ladeens off to the side, then we can trowel the rest of ‘em under so.

And there were buckets of musty seed potatoes, eyes sprouting in darkness, there were fleshy cabbages, and little else to go into the ground. Maybe the occasional row of carrots that would emerge from the loam when pulled fiercely by their tops, and they’d be burrowy with worms and woody to the taste. Parsnips, two-forked and convoluted like ancient fertility charms. Or else parsley to brighten the first pan of new potatoes, then left to dry in any sun that might occur.

In another area, lovely grainy rye for thatch, for fodder, for the secret stills of the island evenings.

I remember the rains of summer and the green shoots. After the harvest there was nothing. Dark earth and the shorn fields. The fatted calf hanging skinless from a beam.

– We will be given the Council houses next summer. That is the promise.

– How do you know?

– Some of the others, Festy and Peter, have been inquiring. They have told of the fierce cold, the old with their rheumatism, the shortage of turf and the drowning. This is not a new promise. They have been telling us we’ll have the houses all right, but they are not so quick with the making of them.

The new houses, held in the future like a bright flower to make the coming winter bearable. I walked the various roads where the allocated ground held the foundations, saw the design in the one finished bungalow: square, white, and the trim a bright yellow; a barren, treeless yard; no more a part of the landscape than the power boats of the summer people seemed a part of the sea. Transplants, grafts, utterly unnatural.

– Will you be glad to move?

– Ah, when ye have spent a winter here, ye will not ask such a question.

The lanes seemed strangely empty when I walked them. The small shy children were now confined to the school-house, though still barefooted and with sun-bleached hair. And the currachs were in, black beetles in the fall days, shiny with new tar and patchy with the mending. The pots were anchored with rocks along the quay top or else were stacked in various sculleries to be restrung. Tangly nets, filling the outbuildings, reeked of fish guts and were littered with the broken legs of crabs and the dried scales of mackerel.

You will not say you were lonely. If it was conversation you wanted, then it could be found on the lane by the quay any evening. You could find your way to it by the thin smoke rising from the pipes, even in rain; you could follow the low music of voices. Or, in the kitchen of the house that was the post office (stamps in a tin box, letters bound with string), the women would be at the knitting, pausing now and then to reprimand a child. And there was the man in the narrow marriage bed, the smell of salt in his hair. In a purely simple way, you could say you were happy with your tasks.

But then you’d walk and could only pace the single mile of island ground before retracing your steps or stopping in the face of the sea. You’d wait for a change in the shape of the land, a seasonal turning of tides. They’d turn and change quickly, unnoticed out the window. Spring tide, neap tide, a minimal wearing of stone under the force of the elements: mostly rain. At harvest, you’d expected riches, not the perfunctory pulling of onions from the unrewarding earth.

What you did not expect: winter. You did not expect the terrible frosts and the sly damp that filled every inch of the cottage and found its way into your bones, making the old fractures of wrist and pelvis ache under the layers of clothing you had naively believed to be a protection. Your bed was clammy and smelled of mildew. There was no fishing. The days you spent listening to weather reports on the wireless, hoping for a reprieve and drinking tea from a pot you would not allow to be empty. Or else you tried to untangle the cat’s cradle your knitting had become, your numb fingers twisting at the knots and counting the stitches, only to discover the knots were permanent and most of the stitches had fallen. You tried to read the library books you’d choose on the one day in a fortnight that boats would venture to the mainland, and you wept at the descriptions of an island the October ferry was sailing to, the driftwood of its shores bleached and huge as dinosaur bones, an island which you knew well. The newspapers promised nothing but cutbacks and strikes and colder temperatures than had ever been known. You made soup. What else could you do? But you could barely stand to use potatoes that had begun to sprout or carrots that had gone tasteless in their box. And the redeeming summer nettles had been trimmed to the roots or else were rotten with rain. So everything you made was flavoured strongly with onions and the secrecy of herbs you kept in a dark cupboard, reminding you of an earlier island where you had lived on a hill of wild rosemary and sage, their blossoms bright and pungent even in the depths of December. And there was never enough turf to make a really hot fire, and you had to ration it, never knowing from one day to the next whether you could go to the mainland for another load.

You wondered about the tinker, imagined him in the swarthy light of a winter caravan, maybe playing a tin whistle to the melancholy night. The man you thought you knew became more silent in winter, and he joined the other men in a kitchen you were not invited to, nor were any other women. You knew they warmed themselves with poteen. You could smell it when he returned. But what they talked of, or knew in their collective silence, God kept to Himself.

You despaired at the sight of the other women knitting their jerseys and mittens and caps, unfolding them like magic from the chanting needles. You did not have a child to scold or to wrap in your arms. The elderly dog slept. The calves, moved to a far field, grown large and red-eyed (and one dead), munched the mouldy hay you trundled to them and no longer welcomed your fingers.

You sat damply in a chair pulled as close to the tiny mound of smouldery turf as you dared, you thought of the rest of the winters of your life spent like this in the bitter cold, your fingers arthritic before their time and your nose sniffly, and you knew you could not bear it.

I gave my own names to things that winter. The seals had all fled Carrickarona, and there were only ever a few scraggy seabirds who happened to land on their way somewhere else: I name thee the Rocks of Desolation.

Or the cliffs of Ardmore, with their echoes of a house I had known in a milder winter on Vancouver Island, now stony-faced, no gentle covering of heather or pale thrift: I name thee the Cliffs of Peril.

And the man whom I had taken as a lover, as a husband: I name thee Stranger.

They were long months made longer by the refusal of spring. Festy’s cow, deceived by one warmish day, calved on the next, and when they found the calf, it was opaque with frost and quite dead. The children shed coats that same day and were bronchial for months.

– This is likely to be the last winter we shall spend here. The new houses are promised us so.

I said nothing. Christmas, too, had been a promise, and when it came I was lonely for another family; their phone call did not bridge the continents but widened all oceans unspeakably. It did not help that Sean got drunk as a lord and had to be walked in the wind to sober him. (Christmas. I had thought of presents, naturally, and wreaths on doors and trees blooming in the corners of kitchens, bright with candles and tinsel. I imagined sweetmeats and shortbread, plum pudding and wassail. But no. Where would a tree come from? Finland? Or heaven? There was a horrible lardy cake, and we ate a scrawny chicken from the brothers’ flock. And we ate potatoes. Someone brought poteen. That was Sean’s present. I had nothing.)

If Saint Paul’s Day be fair and clear,
It does betide a happy year.
If clouds or mist do dark the sky,
Great stores of birds and beasts shall die.

And January twenty-fifth, the feast of Saint Paul, was a grim day, dark as night, mottled with mist and followed by a series of identical twins.

Agnes O’Keefe had a baby that March, a blasted crier of all hours and terrible with wrinkles. Her husband, father of at least five that he’d claim, was proud and used the birth as occasion for what was probably the worst drunk of his life. Or the best, depending on your perspective. Mine, from the scullery window, saw him up to his knees in the wintry sea, singing “The Mountain Streams Where the Moorcocks Crow” in a monotone. And this, three days after. A kind of baptism, a kind of impossible joy, for I knew the child would not be special or gifted with a talent for much. There was too much inbreeding in the O’Keefe family, and the children all had the heavy brows of the simple. They drooled. I don’t remember if the new baby was a girl or a boy.

The point is, despite my notations of stone works and thin soil, the island possessed its own queer fecundity, and not only in March. Children were born with an astonishing regularity, which meant that the winters were not completely fruitless and without warmth under the damp bedclothes. People bred, animals bred. There was a rhythm, instinctive for life, that must have resounded deep in the body of the island. And I did not often hear it.

In April I caught a fever of purification, and I mixed lime and water, passing a brush over the dull lichens and the sooty fireplace wall. I painted the window sashes brilliant green and bought geraniums on a trip to town to brighten the stone wall and cover the bird shit. Then, done with it all, I crouched near the fire; the frosts recognized no calendar or polite seasonal order, and I’d been mittenless all through the painting. The next week, I cursed myself for not bringing the geraniums in overnight because they were brown and limp in the morning air, crisp with frost, and I threw them as far as I could to the sea. The first wind claimed its share of whitewash, leaving the cottage bruised under its fine assault.

All the oratories were in ruin, the chapels of stone falling, and the communities drawn together by love of God and need of man were breaking apart and scattering. We are always sailing to islands, lured by the thought of sleeping above the waters of birth and death. And we may be born on islands, forever drawn back to them all our lives just as the white horses of waves are drawn to the shore, and we will be broken when we arrive.

If I’d been Brendan, I’d never have stopped for long on the Island of Sheep and the Island of Birds, I’d never have drifted, I’d have sailed right on until I arrived on the coast of Newfoundland. And if I’d been with the fishermen of Inishbream who’d greeted his successor, I’d have begged on my knees in the bottom of the currach, I’d have begged to be taken along.

It is written that when the grey geese fly over the promised grave of a man, he will shiver. During that winter on Inishbream, the world’s entire population of geese, all colours, moved in constant untiring circles over my grave.

Yet milder weather finally came. Not quickly or with a tremendous rising of the temperatures, so that you’d forget in a moment all the hours of ice and the beginnings of chilblains. No. But there’d be a day when all the layers seemed too many, and you’d remove one accordingly. Never the oilskin; you were never trusting enough for that, but maybe one jersey. Then another day, another layer, and so on. And there you were, a simple shirt and trousers and pale sun fine on your face and maybe your toes if you’d gone that far.

The seals returned to Carrickarona, an alchemy of air, water and grey rock creating them in such great numbers that the twilight was filled with their barking. The island cows began to drop their calves one by one in the lengthening days, and their milk was rich with the abundance of clover and buttercups they’d been feeding on.

The mended nets and pots were ready for any goers. The weather was still too cool to be worth the trying for lobsters, but on a windy night you could put out nets and be sure of a few fat salmon. It was good to be on the water. I’d forgotten the way the seabirds called the morning alive like a craggy hymn, I’d forgotten the beauty of green mesh shoaling through the water as the nets were lowered and the stone weights led them far below.

The island was a softer home now that the flowers were out and the business of fishing was underway. The calves capered on their stilty legs behind the crumbling walls and the cows were proud in their aspect, all but Festy’s cow with her terrible loss, the calf in its bag of blue membrane left coldly for the dogs.