Nellie took over Aoife’s house when the old woman died. They found her in it when they went to burn it. The custom was to burn the thatch and all right down to the stone so it was clean. Then after a decent time, it might be rebuilt and somebody else live in the place, if it was a good one.
When they found her, Nellie was wearing the sweater. She stood silent in the doorway, defiant. The sweater hung down past her knees like a tunic. It was a man’s garment.
A sudden rain came and put the torches out. People stood wondering what to do. Nobody wanted to touch her. Eventually they let her be. They crossed themselves and went home. Father Anselma thought about objecting. Part of him wanted to see the old woman’s house burn, as an end to her recalcitrance. Then what the villagers considered a sanitary measure might also be the cremation of his secret shame. At the same time, he found himself disapproving of pisreogs such as this, which smacked of paganism. Fire made him nervous. People changed when fires were lit. He stood in silent debate with himself, looking at Nellie. It came to him that the cult of the sweater was at an end: no women would be coming to examine it now. Women had nothing to do with Nellie if they could help it. The charm was broken. He left with the crowd.
So after that, Nellie lived there, in Aoife’s house. It never became her house. It was always Aoife’s house. That’s always what a man would say who went there to visit Nellie, if he said anything. That he was going to Aoife’s house. Nellie lived there like she lived in a cave. She lit no fires. She did not mend the thatch. After dark, it was dark. She had no fuel or candles.
It was a matter of speculation in the village, whether or not she wore the dead man’s sweater when she was with men, but none of them would ever say.
* * *
And then suddenly, the sweater was gone, and Nellie with it. Nobody saw her go. Not on either road out of the village. Not over the fields. You could never sneak away over the fields, as you were forever climbing walls and could be seen for miles. She wasn’t seen on the beaches, and no body washed up. Nellie had always shunned the sea. She wouldn’t go near it even for shellfish.
Yet she was gone. So, the men had to do whatever with whatever urges they had, and the stranger’s sweater and whatever it had said about the lost man’s mysterious kinfolk were out of reach of the women, seemingly forever. Not but it had lost somewhat of its lustre latterly in belonging to Nellie. Except that it turned out, fortunately, that the youngest O’Donnell girl of the village, Mairín, who also had the sight-memory, had seen it. She could trace the pattern of it out, every cable and circle and triangle perfect as it was, with a burnt stick, or in a patch of wet sand. And this was very valuable in after days. It might even be safe to say that it saved Cill Rónáin, if not all of Inis Mór.
They burned the thatch of Aoife’s house that had been Nellie’s. It remained roofless for many years.
* * *
Life on Inis Mór has always been hard. Nobody moves to a windswept ledge of limestone at the farthest western edge of Europe, practically in the open Atlantic, for convenience. Irish people in modernity have been driven there by a series of brutal conquests of the mainland. Exactly why they lived there in the Bronze Age and Iron Age is a matter for conjecture. It is true that an island is easy to defend. Citizens of decadent Europe, of course, would question what there is in such a place that’s worth defending.
First off, there is the ground. People throughout history and prehistory have defended the ground they live on. Hunter-gatherers protected their hunting grounds. Agriculturists protect their farmland, and they pour their desperate efforts into improving it with irrigation, fertilizer, crop rotation. Few of them, however, have had to make it. Earth. It is superabundant in other places. On the Aran isles, what little topsoil there is—a few inches at most—has been created by the men who farm it. Almost every spadeful of earth on Inis Mór—like Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr—was carried to its resting place by a man or a woman as a combination of sand and seaweed, with some fish and animal dung for good measure. They carried it inland from the ocean with barrows and spades and pitchforks and creels and their bare hands. They cut black weed and red weed and dozens of other weeds from the rocks with stone tools, bronze tools, then iron and steel tools. They carried thousands of pounds of sand and washed-up wrack from the foreshores all round the island. And then they waited for it to rot. While they did this, many of them starved. The animals they had brought from the mainland waited for grass. It is almost impossible to conceive how marginal it all was. Every pinch of soil on these islands is the product of human effort. The dirt is as precious as gold because it is an admixture of their hope and their despair.
* * *
Some eight months after the disappearance of Nellie, Jim Conneely the elder, him the uncle of the younger Jim Conneely who was known to hanker after the beautiful Mary Mullen, disappeared in his currach. This could not be said to be unusual, a man lost at the fishing, yet everyone felt that it was. Jim Conneely had been such a discontented man. People whispered that he had gone and killed himself, though they never said this in the hearing of the priest, and indeed the Conneelys had a most proper funeral for him after six months had gone by, though no body had turned up, not so much as a single pampootie. There was even a bit of a monument. Father Anselma said it was a cenotaph. That meant it was empty.
“Empty, right enough. Just like Jim,” said the nephew. This was cruel, perhaps, but people agreed with him. The boy had admired his handsome uncle and namesake even though the man was always cold to him. Jim Conneely had been cold to everybody. He had been one of the best-looking men on the islands and had never made any good out of it. He left neither wife nor sons but many standing quarrels. At the time of his disappearance, he was twenty-seven years of age, well connected as to family, possessed land, boat and cattle, and had all his own teeth. He had absolutely no reason to be discontented. Yet he always had been. He was the kind of man who looked through people. Father Anselma was glad to be shot of him. He had not been a good Christian.
“He’s off picking fights in heaven,” said his sister Annie, not the only woman who had loved him with little encouragement, “Or sailing. He’d never go if there was no sailing.” She laid flowers for him on his name day, on the empty monument, trying not to think where his pitiful body might be rotting and spinning now, lost.
* * *
Then they unexpectedly found it, the corpse of Jim Conneely. A full year after he’d left, fresh from the water, not more than two days dead. Well, well, some people said, it’s not more than you could expect if he’d run off to the mainland. Say he’s been working away there all this time and then drowned and the waves brought him home. Could be that, like as not. Why not? But it made them uneasy. One of the O’Donnells gazed down at the body and said, “Fetch Mairín.” He knelt down by Jim Conneely and looked hard at the sweater the man was wearing. To his eye it looked new. Rich wool, hardly worn. Made for him by some woman who loved him, and not one from Cill Rónáin.
“Do you recognize that?” he asked Mairín when she came, gesturing to the front panels of the sweater.
“Yes,” replied the girl. She found a pointed rock and drew a pattern in the sand with her eyes closed. It was a party trick of hers. The man knew it. He compared it to Jim Conneely’s fine sweater. The two were exactly the same.