Nellie was used to living wild. She was better with a snare even than Thomas. She got on well with Thomas right from the start. He taught her to catch trout in the little river that ran by the house, which she had never done before. She also took right away to little Pádraig. They did a lot of talking together, which helped Nellie a lot. With the women she was cautious, though less so with Anna. As Nellie grew more confident in speech, she told Anna about Aoife. She also told her about her life before. Anna therefore had a good idea about what might be going on with Thomas in addition to fishing for trout, but she kept it to herself. Marriages with newcomers were not uncommon.
Philip was still teaching Pádraig to read. The child’s friend Nellie started to come along to lessons, which was fine with him. Literacy is a gift that ought to be offered to all, Philip thought. Nellie learned very fast, and reading words aloud helped her pronunciation. Eventually, Philip asked her about her deafness. “Did it just disappear when you got here?” he asked. “Had you heard nothing before?”
“I lived in a world of silence in Cill Rónáin,” said Nellie. “It was only broken when I came here. It was awful. It made me sick at first. I didn’t know what it was.”
“Did you know what people said, who were talking around you?”
“Some of it. Not all. When they looked right at me, and spoke to me, I could see the words on their mouths.”
The idea of seeing words was pleasing to Philip. It was like reading. It was wonderful to think that words could be read even as they were being spoken. “Do you miss it, the silence?” he asked her.
“Sometimes,” she replied.
“I can see that,” he said, thinking of the bustle of the Flahertys’ house.
“Reading is silent, though,” she added.
“Yes, it is,” he said. They smiled at each other.
Without thinking too much about it, Philip assumed that Nellie would form an attachment to Thomas. The lad was a bit younger than she was, perhaps, but not much. He was confident around her and joked with her. They seemed to speak a mutual language. Anna, in particular, seemed to take it as read that the two would pair off. Philip himself always felt mildly uncomfortable around her. He rather prided himself about advanced ideas that he held, or thought he held, about the emancipation of women. However, having a woman before him who was, in a variety of ways, emancipated, proved to be quite startling. Within a few months, she was able to read The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud as well as he could himself. Or, really, better. The torture and despair of Werther, his struggles with his own mood and his sense of unfreedom, came out of Nellie’s mouth with complete and unblushing conviction. It made Philip abashed.
The Flaherty house was always very busy, so Philip began to hold lessons for Pádraig and Nellie in his own cottage. This was more convenient as winter came on and more people competed for space indoors, he told himself. They drank nettle and wild mint tea—there was no black tea to be had on the island, and Philip missed it sorely—and talked about things that were of less and less interest to Pádraig. Eventually, the boy begged off and stayed home with his brothers to help with the net-mending and so on. This left the two of them alone. Feeling more and more tense and somehow expectant whenever she was around, Philip finally said to her one day, “I don’t know that there’s anything more I can teach you, Nellie.”
“So, maybe there’s something I can teach you,” she said. Philip started to blush at that and went on blushing for about three days. At the end of that time, they both emerged from his cottage and went to the Flaherty farm.
Old Anna saw them come over the hill, hand in hand. “Ah,” she said. Thomas’s heart sank within him. As Philip could not figure out how to preside at his own wedding and nobody wanted to fetch the priest from the other side of the island, he and Nellie stood up before the company and declared that they were married, as the custom was. They had a big dinner with a bit of fiddle music and that was that. Thomas was sad but philosophical. He had always known that there was no way he could compete with Father Murphy if he became a contender.
Philip would lie lazily in bed with Nellie in the morning, amazed at his lack of guilt. He had not previously realized that he had spent his days feeling guilty about almost everything. It occurred to him that this may not have been a requirement of his job as a priest, but he had urgently felt that it was. Perhaps erroneously. He did not feel any less a priest now. It is the part of a priest to guide people towards divinity, to show them the dimension of holiness in things. He continued to be capable of this, as, indeed, did Nellie. She had a rich, meditative mind, capable of deep imaginative associations. Many of the things she said about the relations of people and nature struck him as pure poetry. Perhaps she was a priest too. Of course, this was a blasphemous idea. But he felt less guilt now about blasphemous ideas. There they were. God obviously knew about them. He must have known for millennia. Yet everything carried on. The point of having a mysterious God is that he should be mysterious.
Philip’s guilt fell away from him just as Nellie’s deafness had fallen away from her. Perhaps guilt is also a kind of deafness.
* * *
Mary MacIntosh knit a sweater for her husband as a wedding present. Such was the custom. She began on the day of their betrothal, and the day she finished it they were married. It was a bit of an incentive to knit fast, and so she did. It was just over three months. Philip Murphy married them. Nellie was there, and Meg Haylock, and the Flaherty clan, and all the MacIntosh family. It was a bigger affair than Philip and Nellie’s wedding had been.
Mary fell pregnant within two months, and Jim, who had always believed that he hated children, was overjoyed. As summer came on and the weather got milder, he took his currach out fishing more often. As he had a grand total of one and a half cows on his land—a young cow in calf had been the couple’s wedding gift from her family—there was not a lot to do on his farm. Mary kept the kitchen garden. So, he took the boat out more, as he had to be doing something. He was not a man for idleness, even as a newlywed. And he loved his little boat. It had been the only thing that ever pleased him, back when he was a curmudgeon. Now that he was recovering from his premature curmudgeonhood, it pleased him even more. He had made it with his own hands. As he floated about on the blue, or the green, or the grey, or the black ocean, he often thought of its little round dot as the pupil of an eye. The roving eye of the sea, looking upwards. The eye, he thought, that had seen Inis Caillte when he could not.
The sea does not care what metaphors we use. It winked one day and Jim’s boat was gone. It was once again immeasurably vast and careless and blind. Jim’s wedding sweater snagged on a rock on the north shore of Inis Mór—the shore he had never managed to reach, and rarely even managed to see, for thirteen months. That day, he reached it. His body travelled less than a mile and stretched itself out on the beach as if it were no problem at all. There he lay like a sand dollar, waiting to be claimed. Wavelets ran over him with searching fingers as he lay face up, reading the nubbly surface of his sweater like Braille. Lost. Lost. Lost.
His wife Mary wept and mourned for him when he did not come back to her. She cursed his little boat. She cursed the coast of Inis Mór, which she could barely see through rolling fog.