Nellie murmured consolingly. Clara went on. She went on for a long time. She tried to keep a stern countenance, but gradually tears spilled down her face. Nellie understood that Clara had loved her husband deeply and that she missed him constantly and silently. They had been married for such a long time that they had been like one person, and now half that person was missing. Clara felt that she was hobbling around on one leg. And the boys were joyless and lonely. Anthony, the younger one, was still hardly sleeping; he came into his mother’s bed almost every night in the wee hours with his cheeks wet. Michael, the fifteen-year-old, was laconic. He got into nasty fights with his old friends. Their mother was terribly worried about both of them. Nellie was not sure that a sweater was going to rectify these things. Still, seeing Clara’s hands stroking and stroking it as she spoke, Nellie felt that it was offering her something. She had spent hours doing exactly the same thing herself.
Nellie let Clara talk herself out. Then she rose and patted the exhausted woman’s shoulder. Clara stayed seated. She looked too weak to get up. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you, Nellie.” Nellie nodded and motioned for her to stay where she was.
“I should go now,” said Nellie. “Philip is waiting. I am sorry that I waited so long to return this precious thing to you. I couldn’t let it go. But I have now. Good luck to you, Clara O’Connor.” She left Clara sitting there, worn out.
Philip was waiting, patiently, on the garden wall. He joined her quietly and they began to walk home. “You gave it to her, Nellie,” he said. “That was brave. I have never given up my books, have I?”
Nellie smiled at him wanly. “Well,” she said, “other people use your books, don’t they? Not just you.”
“Still,” said Philip, “it was brave.”
They walked home. Nellie went to bed. She was too tired to eat, too tired to talk. Philip did not insist on either. When she walked into the bedroom, she saw that in the empty place on the shelf where the sweater had been, there was a mug of wild flowers. She gazed at it for a while and then fell asleep.
When she woke up, very early the next morning, her head was full of words. She was not sure what to make of them. They were mostly Clara O’Connor’s words about her husband, strangely changed. It was like a song, running in her mind, but without music. She let it run there for a while and then told Philip about it.
“Try writing it down,” he said.
“You and your books! Writing!” said Nellie. “What would I write it on?”
“The end-papers of Werther?” suggested Philip. “Or maybe I could make you a wax tablet, such as schoolboys use?”
“With what wax, Philip?” said Nellie.
“Yes, well,” said Philip, defeated, “perhaps you could just say the words for me?”
Nellie said the words. Philip sat very still. “Again,” he said. Philip was a literate man. He knew Irish, Latin, German, Flemish and some French and English. He had grown up with Irish poems and songs; he had learned Latin scripture and hymns. He was compassionate and he had a good ear. “Again,” he said.
Nellie spoke the words again. “Holy Ghost, Nellie,” he said. “Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve gone and composed a lament for Joseph O’Connor, and it’s the best I’ve ever heard. Jesus, Mary, and . . . Joseph . . . Nellie, it’s like the Lament for Art O’Leary. But without the horses or the fine clothes or the beaver hats. And no killer but the sea and the small house and the hunger of his sons. And even the women arguing, Nellie—is that you and Clara? Claiming the sweater while his body spins in the sea? Jesus, Nellie!”
Nellie did not entirely know what he was talking about. But soon enough she learned. Philip told her many things. He wrote poems that he recalled down for her. He spoke them. Their greatest gift in all of this was discovering a small stretch of beach covered with sand. Fine sand. So you could write on it with a stick or a rock. A clean slate, at least until the tide came in. Nellie would think of things, organize them in her head, and Philip would write them. Eventually, she herself would write them. Sometimes. Often, she preferred just to say them. Philip never preferred this. He was a scholar.
He started killing sheep. Or even calves. Or trading for their skins. Anything, everything. Teaching all kinds of lessons, just to get hold of material on which to write down Nellie’s poems.
Nellie was surprised. She did not know how to put a value on such things. Was it worth killing calves? But she found, once she had got it straight in her head—the pattern she had made out of Clara’s words—that she no longer missed the sweater. That told her. What she herself had made had gone into the place of it, filled it up. Nothing else had been able to. Not the love of Philip. Not her house, or her comfortable life. It had been seeing the relief of Clara, and letting go of the sweater herself, and all the things it had meant, and substituting for them her own words, in a tight pattern. One that stuck in her mind and held things together. So, she accepted that her first poem had been The Lament for Joseph O’Connor. She took a copy of it that Philip had made to Clara, who was rendered speechless. She went on from there.
* * *
It wasn’t the curse of the wretched widow Mary Conneely that made any difference to Inis Mór. It wasn’t the curse of Clara O’Connor, either, whose husband had washed ashore there the previous year.
It was the poison.
That’s the thing about islands. We think we’re safe on them. Separate. The sea is a cordon sanitaire. Alas, anything that washes up can bring contagion, including the bodies of men. In this case, it wasn’t typhoid or plague, as at St Kilda’s or Mingulay. It was despair. Despair is widely spoken of as poisonous, but with as little meaning as words have when we use them to describe pain. Pain is something of which we can only observe the effects. Despair is similar. One of the effects of despair was to bring people—newcomers—to Inis Caillte. Suddenly. Somehow. It opened a door for them. But some doors, once opened, are hard to close.
What did become of Nellie’s despair as she lay silently dying? Of Jim’s, as he was about to drown? Of Meg’s, or Philip’s? We might say they carried it with them. They brought it with them in their despairing flesh, and when they touched the island of Inis Caillte—when they, as it were, grounded—their despair flashed straight out of them into the earth. So they were rid of it. The island filtered it out of them. But it wasn’t gone. It was in the soil, permeating everything. The natives were used to it. Newcomers had been bringing their burdens of despair to the island for generations. If the Flahertys and the MacIntoshes and everybody else had not been able to process it, they would have long since died off. But it was quite another thing when a bodily person belonging to the island ended up somewhere else.
From the buried bodies of Jim Conneely and Joseph O’Connor despair began to spread. They were men of Inis Caillte, one by birth and one by adoption. Despair was—what?—active in them, operative? It was part of them, a factor of their lostness. As they decomposed, it leached straight into the ground, that thin layer of precious soil that, perhaps uniquely in the Arans, is already a composite of despair. After all, people had lugged the dirt of Inis Mór, spadeful by spadeful, to every inch of field and garden.