“He’s still a priest,” said Nellie.
“Is he a Protestant man?”
“No,” said Nellie.
“It’s beyond me, then,” said Jim, firmly.
“Yes,” said Nellie.
Jim was amazed at her assurance. But then, he thought, if whatever had happened to her on this island was as odd as had happened to him, there wasn’t much point in clinging to the old certainties. “But he’s not from Inis Mór, your husband, is he?” he asked.
“No, he’s from the mainland. The funny thing is, he knew Father Anselma. They met in Brussels, in seminary there. He got caught up in politics in ’30. So did Father Anselma, he says, though he had a different name then.”
“Bad politics?” said Jim.
“Bad,” nodded Nellie.
This was the last conversation he could have imagined himself having with Dirty Nellie, the village whore. Not that he could have had a conversation with her at all in Cill Rónáin. He thought of his conversations with Meg, who spoke no Irish. It came to him in a kind of grim flash that the deaf and illiterate girl from his own village had been as lost to him as an English woman from the seventeenth century. For that was what this was, the lost speaking to each other. It made him want to sit down and reckon up the ways in which he himself was lost, and even—the thought made him uncomfortable—to whom.
He walked back with Nellie to a very pleasant cottage in a glen and met her husband, Philip Murphy from County Clare. He was a slight, quick-witted, talkative man with brown hair and a long nose, and he and Nellie seemed most domestic. He had three books in his house, from which he had taught Nellie to read. “I chanced to have them with me when I met the bayonet that brought me here,” he said, but did not elaborate. Philip spoke Irish, but a number of other languages, too. For the sake of simplicity, Jim assumed that they all spoke Irish together—he heard it as Irish—but he couldn’t be sure. He heard Irish when Meg spoke, as well.
“There’s good land around here,” remarked Jim, “Do you know who owns it? Do you?”
“I feel I own the cottage. I helped to build it. The land, I don’t know. I farm a little of it, though God knows I’m no great farmer,” said Philip. “No one else lives too close.”
“I might claim some of it, a ways off, if you’ve no objection,” said Jim, “I’ve a mind to get married as soon as possible. Though it seems an odd way of going about it. I’ll never know if it’s mine or not.”
“It’s not like you owned your land at home,” said Philip, with a gleam in his eye.
“Didn’t I?” said Jim.
“No,” said Philip, “Not in the law, you didn’t. It’s a sin and a crime, but you never did, as you well know.”
“I’ve never met a radical priest,” Jim couldn’t help saying.
“Well, you have now,” said Philip.
Jim walked slowly home to the MacIntosh farm, thinking of Philip Murphy. If you lose, are you lost? He asked Mary to marry him and she said yes.
So. That’s how it came that Jim Conneely was found washed up on Inis Mór in a sweater that nobody knew but that was nonetheless an Aran sweater. His wife Mary of Inis Caillte knit it for him. The ball, the rope, the grass, the cow’s hoof: the pattern that women on the MacIntosh farm had been knitting with the wool of their own sheep for generations. The death of Jim was a terrible thing. He was a new-married man with a pregnant wife and a cottage barely built. He was a man just learning to sleep soundly in his own skin. He went out in his currach to fish and he never came back.
The death of any person is a terrible thing. But the lost are as mortal as anyone.
* * *
Now, you might be wanting to know a bit more about Inis Caillte. There’s not a great deal that we do know. One is that the island has a lot more timber than the other islands. So, the cottages of Nellie and Philip, and of Mary and Jim, had a lot more wood in them than the stone cottages of Inis Mór or the western mainland. They went up the quicker for it, which is why Jim had a cottage all built before he died. He only helped the MacIntosh men to build it, as he wasn’t accustomed to building in wood. He found that embarrassing, but the work got on fast for all that. Also, on Inis Caillte, there are no potatoes. Jim had been horrified at this.
“But you’ll starve!” he said.
The fact is, on Inis Caillte they grew more grain. Not a great deal, so flour was precious. It was used a lot in barter, as a matter of fact. It was the island’s own gold. The soil was deeper and richer near the trees, and by careful cultivation of small, irregular plots they could get good wheat, up to three crops a year. You’d think it might be a matter of stone querns and hand milling and all that nightmare after that, but as it happens, they had a windmill. Yes. It had been built by a Fleming in 1713. He had been on the wrong side of the War of the Spanish Succession. Sometimes, the lost are of great use to each other.
“But potatoes!” said Jim. He couldn’t believe it. “There really aren’t any here? Why not, I wonder?” he said to Mary.
“Well, you didn’t have any on you when you landed, did you?” said Mary, reasonably, “And I guess nobody else did either. They’re great heavy roots, you say? A pocket full of seed’s a lot easier. And maybe they’re more of a found thing than a lost thing. They’re not from here, anyway.” And that was that.
Jim missed potatoes. This surprised him, as he had hated them back home. The Jim Conneely of Cill Rónáin had been a fisherman who hated fish and a herdsman who hated cows and a farmer who hated potatoes. But Inis Caillte was softening him somehow. Heaven knows the man he might have become had he not drowned.
In other respects, the island was much like the other islands. The weather was temperate, the winds were high, and the people ate more seaweed than they do in other lands. However, there were no big towns, and no churches, and people lived scattered all over on farms and homesteads. It wasn’t a very populous place. You’d have thought it would be, as there are an awful lot of the lost. But it wasn’t.
* * *
On Inis Mór, things went on much as they had before. Mairín O’Donnell was called on from time to time at this gathering or that to sketch out the mysterious panels from the unknown sweaters, and everybody would muse on them and make various suggestions. But gradually, the reappearance of Jim and the disappearance of Nellie moved to the back of people’s minds and there they stayed.
Only Arthur O’Donnell, who had inked out the pattern on vellum, remained fascinated by it. As it was, in the end, a piece of knitting, it seemed a bit of a girlie fascination, so he didn’t say much about it. But from time to time, he would draw it out of the chest where he kept it and pore over it a while. There was a round form he hadn’t seen in knit patterns before. Knitters on Inis Mór didn’t go in for circles. What was it? He assumed it was something. A hurley ball? A clochán seen from the top? The turd of a hare? A fish’s roe? What else is round? There was a pair of triangles side by side like hills with a valley between them. Or maybe more like a rectangle with a triangular bite out of the top, like a notched bonnet ribbon. Or like the cloven hoof of a deer or a cow. And then there were cables and textured bits that he’d seen before, each of which was supposed to have a different meaning. He couldn’t make any kind of sense out of it. Not that he’d ever got much meaning out of the sweater patterns people had explained to him, the ones supposedly associated with this or that name, or parish, or woman. They didn’t tell stories. They were like the markings on flags or the emblems of noblemen: signs of a clan or a tribe. What could they really say, except maybe how people made their living? Well, he could see that a living could be made out of cows. Or cables, if they were fishermen’s ropes. But he couldn’t for the life of him think what living could be made out of a ball. Perhaps it was a basket—a creel, say? A buoy? Then it struck him that maybe it was the sun, like on old pagan things. But that wasn’t much use. Everyone has an equal claim on the sun. It lights everybody. Why would you want that mixed up with your profession, or your family? It doesn’t make much of a distinction. The moon? And the moon would mean what, then? Tides? The bleeds of women? Any number of foolish pisreogs?