Free Irish Journal by Heinrich Böll Page B

rocks, covered with sheep dung at the places where the old sheep trails cross the road—suddenly the fingernail halts: here the road descends steeply into a little bay, rises again on the other side: the sea roars into a canyonlike gorge; it is millions of years old, this rage that has eaten deep in under the rocks—again the finger halts: here there used to be a little cemetery for unbaptized children; a single grave is still to be seen, bordered with pieces of quartz: all the other bones have been carried away by the sea—the car now carefully crosses anold bridge that has lost its railing, it turns, and the glare of the headlights reveals the waving arms of waiting women: in this remote corner lives Aedan McNamara, whose wife is expecting a child tonight.
    The doctor’s young wife shivers, shakes her head, walks slowly back to the living room, piles on more peat, pokes the glowing embers till the flames leap up; the woman reaches for her knitting bundle, throws it back into the corner of the sofa, gets up, goes over to the mirror, stands there for half a minute in thought, head lowered, suddenly throws back her head and looks into her face: with the heavy make-up her child’s face looks even more childlike, almost like a doll’s, but this doll has four children. Dublin is so far away—Grafton Street—O’Connell Bridge—the wharves; movies and dances—the Abbey Theatre—every weekday morning at eleven, Mass at St. Theresa’s, where you have to arrive early to find a seat—with a sigh the young woman goes back to the fireplace. Must Aedan McNamara’s wife always have her children at night and always in September? But Aedan McNamara works from March to December in England, comes home only at Christmas, for three months, to cut his peat, repaint the house, repair the roof, do a bit of furtive fishing along this rugged stretch of coast, to look for jetsam—and to beget the next child: so Aedan McNamara’s children always come in September, around the twenty-third: nine months after Christmas, when the great storms come, and the angry foam makes the sea snow-white for miles. Aedan is probably now standing at a bar in Birmingham, anxious like all expectant fathers, cursing the obstinacy of his wife, who refuses to budge from this solitude: a dark-haired, defiant beauty, whose children are all September children; among the dilapidated houses in the village, she lives in the only one that has not yet been abandoned. At this spot on the coast, whose beauty hurts because on sunny days you can see for twenty, thirty miles without a human habitation: only azure, islands that are not real, and the sea. Behind thehouse rises the bare hillside, four hundred feet high, and three hundred paces from the house the coast falls a sheer three hundred feet; black, naked rocks, gorges, caves penetrating fifty, seventy yards into the rocks; from which on stormy days the foam rises up threateningly, like a white finger, the storm carrying the joints away one by one.
    From here, Nuala McNamara went to New York to sell nylons at Woolworth’s, John became a teacher in Dublin, Tommy a Jesuit in Rome, Brigid married and went to live in London—but Mary clung doggedly to this hopeless, lonely spot, where every September for four years she has borne a child.
    “Come on the twenty-fourth, Doctor, around eleven, and I guarantee you’ll not come in vain.”
    In ten days she will be walking with her father’s old knobbed stick along the edge of the steep cliffs, watching out for her sheep and for those articles which for coast-dwellers are a substitute for the sweepstake (in which of course they also have a ticket), with the sharp eye of the coast-dweller she will be looking for jetsam, reaching for the binoculars when her predatory eye detects from the outline and color of an object that it is not a rock. Does she not know every boulder, every chunk of rock, along these six miles of coast—does she not know every cliff at every tide? In