He would get about this far down any mental track and become embarrassed with himself. Then he would roll the leather carefully back up and put it away. He would have felt better about it had it been a map. A map is a manly thing. But things woven out of wool ought to be women’s business. We kill an animal and take its skin, or we crop its living hair like grass, and that makes all the difference.
* * *
On Inis Caillte, Meg had stayed for some time with the MacIntoshes, and then, to her amazement, they helped to build her a cottage. It wasn’t a very big one, just one room and a hearth, but it was hers. It may be said that she was a lot more useful in the building of hers than either Jim Conneely or Philip Murphy were in the building of theirs. For one thing, she had seen houses framed with timber before—there are plenty of trees in East Anglia—unlike Jim, and she was a much sturdier worker than Philip, who was vague and easily distracted.
“There’s a woman with a lot of sense, now,” said Conor MacIntosh. He was a widower and looked at Meg with a bit of a glad eye. She kept herself to herself, however, and showed no inclination to settle down with anyone. She did accept an ewe and a ram lamb from Conor, though. At first, she had suggested a very frank way for herself to earn the sheep from him. Conor was aghast but that’s not to say he wasn’t tempted. But he up and gave her the animals outright in the end. He examined his feelings and concluded that he was a marrying kind of man and that was the end of it. If Meg Haylock was not a marrying woman, so be it.
Meg started a kitchen garden. She walled it to keep out the sheep. Her ram lamb, Werther, was a feisty one. He leapt her walls continually, so she had to keep building them higher. She drafted in help from children and any other willing hands for miles around. Werther nearly killed himself trying to climb the walls when they got too tall to jump. Meg spent a goodly amount of time cleaning out wounds in his spindly legs. He was a determined cabbage fancier.
Jim Conneely helped her out a lot with the garden walls. He also showed her a few things about handling sheep. Meg had experience with poultry and cows—their farm in Huntington had had a dairy once—but not sheep. They were even stupider than she had expected. Werther was endearing, though. “Little idiot,” said Jim one day, slinging the lamb across his back and carrying him out of the garden for the fourth time as the walls were building. “He could break his neck. Sheep are actually capable of dying of stupidity.”
Meg laughed, but then she said, “So are men. I saw many do just that. It was horrible, really.”
“In the war?’ asked Jim, startled.
“There’s nothing stupider than men at war,” said Meg, “or nothing that I’ve seen, at least. Everybody’s witless most of the time. Drunk or terrified. Sick half to death, or raving. Following orders that make no sense. Or giving them.”
“Sure and that’s not very dignified,” said Jim, feeling affronted on behalf of his sex in their martial endeavours and then remembering that she was talking about Englishmen, for whose dignity he was not supposed to care.
“Dignity’s the first thing to go on a campaign,” said Meg, “what with people so jammed up together. Sleeping in tents and haystacks. Food always too hot or too cold and never anything to carry it in. Crowded latrines. Finding a peaceful place to take a shit was enough to thank God on.”
“Not very heroic,” said Jim.
“Not very,” agreed Meg.
* * *
Nellie’s disease, whatever it was that had caused her such killing pain, vanished on Inis Caillte. So did the disease of her deafness. She did not miss the one but often she missed the other. She had not thought of deafness as a disease, anyway. It was simply how she was, and correspondingly how the world was. Occasionally, she longed for that world again. The bellowing of cattle, the fierce sound of the wind at night, and, truth be told, the nattering of some of the Flaherty women, made her wish for the world of unhearing. That world is very vivid but it comes at you in different ways and at differing rates. She remembered it, overall, as slower. But it could be that it was the slowness of memory she recalled rather than slow experience. She remembered being able to watch things unfold with a tremendous attention—a beetle traversing a leaf, say—that she now found hard to recapture. The endless bath of sound was distracting. She wondered how people bore it. How, for example, had they been able to stand it when they were babies? Maybe that was why babies spent so much of their time crying. But then they had to listen to themselves cry, too. It was a puzzle.
The murderous pain she did not miss at all. But where had it gone? Would it ever come back? Once you have had pain like that, you dread its onslaught ever after. The fear of it never leaves you alone. Just as the pain itself once was, it becomes your constant companion. Nellie was haunted by that fear. So, it cannot be said that her transition to Inis Caillte was a transition to perfection. It was an improvement, a place of safety. That was also how it seemed to the other newcomers she talked to. The one thing she dwelt on was the loss of her deafness—it was a loss, the loss of the person she had been before—and its meaning. Meg and Jim and Philip had been saved from death, as she had been. Yet none of them had been changed to the extent that she had. They all talked about it.
“It seems to me it’s akin to this ability we all have now to understand each other’s languages. I mean, God only knows what language it is that we’re speaking now,” said Philip.
Nellie agreed with him. “I believe you,” she said. “But I have to tell you, I do feel a bit interfered with. If it’s God who did this, he’s a bossy fellow.”
“God’s got nothing to do with it,” said Jim. Meg nodded. They were both cheerful atheists. But Philip was not, and Nellie was not sure what she was.
“We’re miles off any scripture I know,” admitted Philip, “or any prophecy or vision. Unless they’re all a lot more metaphorical than I thought. But I’m just so accustomed to the idea of God running things—the world, you know, the universe—that I can’t let go of it. I don’t insist that any of you go along with me. I feel I’ve lost my foothold for insistence.”
“You’re a sly one, Father,” said Jim, “being so nice about it but keeping God’s card on the table. He’s always been there to explain the mysterious things, and here we are in the midst of one—”
“But you could have said that before! About your life back home. Any of us could!” interrupted Philip.
“More slyness,” said Jim, shortly. “We’re not in heaven and we’re not in hell. I don’t think any of us died. We’re here somehow, still living. The whole business isn’t like any Christian promise I ever heard of, and it blows the whole idea out of the water.”
“Purgatory?” said Philip.
Meg looked at Philip. “That’s nonsensical popish superstition, Father.”
“It is a bit old-fashioned,” said Philip. “Besides, it seems selfish to suggest that this whole island exists just to test us, or to allow us to work off our sins.”
“I don’t know that I’d need so much ground for that,” said Jim. “And what about the other people here? The Flahertys? Mary?”
“Has it occurred to you that in being a good husband to Mary, you might be answering for being the hard man that you were before?” said Philip.