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To L. Timmel Duchamp, with thanks
The man was not from the island. No one recognized him, though his face was well preserved. He had been in the water a while. There he lay, just as dead as any Conneely or Mullen or Derrane. But he was not a man of Inis Mór. Nor was he from the other Aran islands, the middle or the east. No. The women knew this. He lay face up. The pattern on the sweater was as clear as day and not one of them knew who had knitted it. They even brought out old Aoife, who had the sight-memory. She came hobbling out to the beach and fingered it with her swollen hands.
“Keep it,” she said, “when you bury him. Get it off him. May come that we learn of it, but not if it’s in the ground.”
That made a scandal. To keep the things of a dead man, unburied or unburned. Bad luck, bad luck, may it be kept off. The men carried him into the village and asked Father Anselma. He said best to keep the body intact, as it was found; it was more seemly. Aoife said no and limped back to her fireside. There was a debate. Favour went with Aoife and not the priest. That happened sometimes.
“How you going to pray for him if you don’t know his name?” she asked. “No other way to learn it. It’s writ there plain as plain if we find the woman who knit it.”
“God knows his name,” said Father Anselma.
“Bully for God,” said Aoife.
They buried the stranger in consecrated ground, which was kind, as they hadn’t much of it. The joke on the islands is that all men there are gods, as they’ve made the earth they walk on. From seaweed, sand, shit and time, on the face of the bare rock. Fiat. But it’s not a joke for church. The stranger lay quiet in his plot, marked by a stone with a cross on it. From time to time, an unmarried woman, filled with sentiment, would lay a posy on it. Mary Mullen, in particular, was known to do this. She was a fine girl and it made the young men quite jealous. The dead have a pull to them.
No one wanted the dead man’s sweater in the house. They had saved it but it was an uneasy object, not safe to keep. Aoife ended up keeping it. She was close to death anyway. Women came in ones and twos to talk it over. A few thought it looked O’Donnell, as if Tall Mary had made it, or one of her family on Inis Meáin. Some said maybe the Flahertys from the east island. Word went out to them over the months, as it always does. Fishermen’s wives from the other islands even came to see it. Nobody claimed it. The funny thing was, though, everybody said it looked familiar.
The beautiful Mary Mullen came to see it. Two young men loitering over the net-mending saw her go in Aoife’s door. No one with sense does that work outdoors when there’s a fire inside. Yet a lot of men stood about outside with objects in their hands when Mary was out of a morning. Mary looked at the sweater thoughtfully. “It’s like it comes from a family whose name I’ve just forgotten. Like long-lost relatives,” she said.
“D’ye think if I put that damn sweater on, Mary’d recognize me as a long-lost relative? A relative of the marrying kind?” asked the younger Jim Conneely, plaintively. He spoke for many.
A bit of a war sprang up between Aoife and Father Anselma. Or a new skirmish in an old war. No one would expect the village wise woman, half a witch herself seemingly, and a learned man and a priest who had studied away on the continent for years and years to get on. People were none too certain that Aoife had ever been baptized. She was a law unto herself. And not, many respectable voices said, a good law. She was simply so old that the present generations in the town knew nothing about her origins, though there were many competing stories, none flattering. There had been a husband for a very short time—he who had built the cottage for her and cleared a field—but he had died. For all the years after, she had lived alone. The man was buried in the churchyard and she never visited his grave. She had little to do with the village, as a rule, except when people needed a cure. In that line, she was the authority for miles around. The money and gifts she earned for her remedies kept her in seed potatoes and kept her thatch mended. And in this way, of course, she also learned many of the town’s secrets. People blab when they are ill. Women need certain cures. Men need other cures. She was the one who could provide them. Father Anselma might be the one who could mend souls, but she was the one who could mend bodies.
Aoife kept the dead man’s sweater and women kept going to see it. Father Anselma considered this grotesque, verging on idolatry. “There are relics all over these islands, and that isn’t one of them,” he was known to say. He sensed a cabal forming. It made him uneasy. Aoife herself dismissed his opinion. She dismissed Father Anselma entirely. This fact caused the priest considerable pain, and he knew exactly why it was.
Eight years before, when he was newly arrived on Inis Mór, he, too, had fallen sick. In pain and trouble, he went to Aoife for a stomach remedy. She gave it to him. She was sly but civil. They briefly discussed his travels, and his reasons for coming to the island. He had made the terrible mistake of admitting to her that he had fled in the face of war. A hardness entered her eyes as he said this to her, and it never left. Father Anselma was ashamed. He upbraided himself for confessing such a thing to her. It had just been a moment of weakness because he had been feeling so poorly. But the damage was done. In a competition of shame, she would always have the upper hand of him. Shame is a vital weapon of priests. After all, they cannot use violence.
Moreover, Aoife had never passed a word of it on. No breath of rumour ever reached him from the parish. She might speak slightingly of him, but that was all. That was bearable. The upshot of it was that he owed her. She spared him, for her own reasons, whatever they were.
So, this war over the sweater and the impropriety of keeping it was a quiet one. It was confined to mutual sniping. But as it is with wars of this kind, people tended to take sides. Quietly. A certain coldness showed itself in the postures of some wives and mothers towards Father Anselma, even in church. Certain elders and men who considered themselves pillars of the community muttered more darkly than usual about Aoife and took care to be seen standing with Father Anselma on the church steps.
* * *
Every village has its whore. In Cill Rónáin at that time it was Nellie. Dirty Nellie. She was nobody’s widow. She had never been married at all. She lived rough and was filthy, out in all weather. She never spoke. People didn’t know if she was deaf or touched. She had run out of her parents’ house when she was eleven. Soon after, they died. People said, of the shame. Some said, of the pox. However it was, she was alone after that. She would stay in no houses, but she would beg. People gave her enough to get by. She was one of their own.