Free Inishbream by Theresa Kishkan

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