“It’s from the man in the graveyard,” said Mairín.
“I thought so,” he said.
So, that was something. What were they to do? Obviously, they ought to bury Conneely under his empty monument in the churchyard. That was the decent thing. But what of the foreign sweater? Should it go into the ground with him? They no longer had Aoife to advise. Wasn’t it asking for trouble to leave a drowned man’s garment unburied above the water line? They had kept the stranger’s sweater in the village for a year and had never learned anything further about its origins. Aoife had died in the house with it. Nellie had disappeared with it. A dead man’s garment is an ill-omened thing.
They buried Jim Conneely in his sweater with the unknown pattern. They held another funeral for good measure. At the same time, saying nothing about it to anybody, the O’Donnell who had found the body on the beach, Arthur O’Donnell, killed a calf. He scraped the hide and tanned it and prepared it and gave it to his cousin Mairín. She sketched out the pattern on it, the unknown one that seemed so curiously familiar, and he pricked it out and inked it. Then he rolled up the vellum and hid it away.
* * *
Great stone-heavers, the people of the Aran islands. Enormous stone forts are here from truly ancient days. Ramparts and earthworks and fields of huge rocks set upright in the ground to break up armies. They rear up and bite the air, huge and scattered teeth torn from the jaws of a dragon, thrown down by local kings in the manner of Cadmus. These rocks speak of constant war. What did they have to defend, these Theban lords out at the edge of the world? Something. Something that they kept behind deep concentric walls and fathoms and furlongs and funnels of stone, stone and more stone. Petrified war.
So thought Father Anselma as he looked up at the ruins of Dún Aonghasa. He had got into the habit of making an annual pilgrimage to the heathen hill fort. Not a proper, Christian pilgrimage. A pilgrimage of inquiry. Or perhaps of resentment. A pilgrimage, howbeit, of some passion. He always went alone. The fact is, he was a bit of an antiquary. He had visited Roman ruins all over the Low Countries, musing on their significance. He had even been working on a book about them. Though the ruins out on these islands were not Roman. He didn’t know what they were, except that they had been made by masters. Rulers.
From what titanic forces had these island chieftains sought to defend their wealth? The villagers of Cill Rónáin said, from the gods. The bad gods. Fomorians. Fir Bolc. No, thought Father Anselma, pacing around the monstrous walls. Nonsense. From other men.
* * *
A man who washes up on Inis Mór in a state as pristine as Jim Conneely can have hit the water no further off than Inis Oírr. He can’t have come from the mainland either in Galway or Clare. It’s too far and the seas are too rough. Or are we to believe he dropped from some monster ship out in the open ocean, heading for America, say? Such a thing is not likely. And then, who but islanders wear these particular sweaters? Now, wherever there are sheep, there are women knitting sweaters. But the fact is, they are all different. They are different in the Hebrides. In the Orkneys and Shetland. Both the women and the sheep. No doubt they are different again in the big lands, all over, in Ireland and England and so on, whatever. The fact remains that any knitter in any town on any of the isles, or on any farm, knows a sweater knit here, in the Arans. She can probably tell you who knit it. She will know the wool and the stitches and the patterns common to each district and family and parish. She can probably tell you what saint’s day it was finished on. And if she doesn’t know herself, she knows a woman who will. Run to the end of that chain and whatever it is, there’s no knowing it. So, when a woman tells you that this is undoubtedly an Aran sweater but that it was knit by a woman neither from Inis Mór nor Inis Meáin nor Inis Oírr, you are left with a riddle.
* * *
Now, Dirty Nellie understood many words but she didn’t think in them. She watched the shapes of words on people’s mouths and applied them to certain objects and situations, but in the main she got on quite well without them. A lot of what people said made no sense. Often they talked to pass the time, and time did not pass in that way for her. Generally, she preferred to be alone. After she had performed a certain act with Thomas Derrane at the age of thirteen or so, other men of the village began to come to her. She performed this act with them, too, using the parts of her body accommodated to such things. All other parts of her body had their uses. Legs for kicking and running and arms for swinging and hands for grabbing and so on. So, it seemed pretty straightforward. It wasn’t always convenient but usually they brought food. Sometimes, they would share it with her, but more often, they left it. Sometimes, they brought clothing, cast-offs from their mothers and sisters. Or maybe they stole it. She once had a man’s angry wife snatch a warm cap off her head as she passed through the village. After that, she always wore anything she was given that way far down inside any other clothes she was wearing so it couldn’t be seen. It was safer.
She knew few women and liked none of them except for old Aoife. She begged in front of the houses of some of them when she had to. She did this by standing, or sometimes kneeling, with her hands clasped, within sight of their front windows, usually on a Sunday after church. Sometimes, she did this for a long time. But almost always, the woman of the house would come out and give her eggs or bread or some cooked meat or fish. Most of her winter clothing came to her in this way also. But she still did not trust them. Only old Aoife, who never gave her anything but allowed her to sleep by the hearth whenever she wanted, which she did quite often in winter. She would share her kills—hares, pheasants, mice—with Aoife sometimes and never stole her fowls. Any other chicken or duck she would kill if she found it unsupervised, but this was rare.
For a woman who lived on a small island, she spent very little time by the sea. She hated and feared it. She hated its constant, unpredictable motion. It was always leaping and creeping up on her. She could never take her eyes off it and this was very tiring. She noticed that others spent time by the sea and got food from its margins—seaweed, shelled creatures from the rocks—but she never tried, not even when she was starving. She was afraid of the ocean’s endlessly reaching silent hands that would seize and drown her. Other people had some other resource, that sense that they all shared, the one that made the movements of their mouths meaningful to them, that offered them some protection from the sea. All those people who knew when a dog barked away behind them, they were safe. On land, she could tell when a dog, or a man, or another animal came near or went away. She could smell it. She could feel it in the ground. But the vile sea is always thrashing and its stink is constant. She kept right away from it.
This was her life until the pain began. Aoife thought that she might be with child. The pain came from deep inside her. But she did not grow and though the pains went on for months, no child came. Aoife fed her many smelly herbs. Sometimes, the pain would stop for a while but never for long. By the time of the old woman’s death, she was in constant agony. She wept and wept over the still body of Aoife by the hearth because the old woman was gone and she had loved her, and because she herself, Nellie, was still there. Death looked so restful.
After Aoife died, meaning no disrespect, she took the fisherman’s sweater that the old woman had cherished. It was precious and many women had come to talk to Aoife about it. What they talked about on these occasions, Aoife had never been able to make clear to her. A number of words that she had never seen on the mouths of anyone were involved. Aoife would get excited trying to explain it. Her eyes would glisten. In the end, though, what Nellie knew was only that the sweater was different. It did not come from the village.