“And Mary’s just a prop, then, in my salvation, is she?” asked Jim.
“No, of course not,” said Philip. “She’s her own person with her own soul. But it does make me wonder how much we are all implicated in each other’s salvation.”
“You go on wondering, Father, and leave me and Mary out of it,” responded Jim.
Meg and Nellie watched this exchange with impatience and indulgence, perhaps with a slyness of their own: the slyness of women observing the tiltyard men must make out of everything. Nellie felt that they had strayed a considerable distance from the topic of her deafness.
“Well, we might say, then, that we were all cured of deafness, in suddenly understanding all these languages,” said Nellie. “It wasn’t that God just poked holes in my ears and let the world in. It happened to all of us.”
Everyone blinked a few times and focused on Nellie. “Yes,” said Philip. “Language is an instrument for revealing the world. The world of other people, at least. I guess we all needed more of that world. Maybe that’s why we’re here.”
“And maybe it isn’t,” said Jim, “And we just need to let the world get on with the job, eh?”
* * *
Now, there are no ruined hill forts or monasteries on Inis Caillte. It is a place of lost people but not lost things. Our world is the world of the lost things. It’s the only way we know about the lost people. You can see that on the Lost Isle, there would be no need. The people are there. But not many of them.
Why would they not be there in their hundreds and thousands, in their millions? The lost? Now, let us hope that it is as many wise people have theorized: that they are there. Perhaps we just can’t see them. We can’t account for them. Not so many at a time. Would you want to be lost with three billion others, for example? Or just with a few? That story would be easier to tell. It would be cruel to suggest that there is a quota of the lost—let us say, only, that on Inis Caillte we are dealing with one of many, perhaps infinitely many, overlapping planes or interweaving tales. We are dealing with just so many as we can hold in our sympathies at one time. Those are the limits of the island. There are no others.
Father Anselma, who looked up at the huge broken fortress of Dún Aonghasa on Inis Mór with his heart full of rage against the overlords and hoarders and murdering usurpers of the earth, surely might have been counted as one of the lost. Authoritarian war had swept him right to the edge of the map of Europe. He thought he had left Ireland to help bring God’s peace and the message of the poor to a radicalized continent, and he was driven straight back to Ireland to poorer people than ever. He died of typhoid in 1847 working among his starving parishioners. He was not a bad man. But he would never have gone to Inis Caillte.
Father Anselma considered it a miracle that he had once survived a riot in Brussels, a miracle that he did not deserve. The riot had been brutally put down by an army of the United Netherlands. Almost everybody around him had died. He had been there in good conscience, in what had begun as a peaceful protest against a heedless empire. Men had marched and carried signs in French and Flemish. He had marched among them, supporting his new parishioners. The archbishop had just granted him a tiny but populous parish near Aarschot. He had been very proud of himself, to get such a post even though he was a foreigner. Anselma had been a rising star at the seminary. When the Dutch had started shooting into the crowd, incredibly, amid the surge of desperate people, he had found a way out, dropping and crawling into a side street. In terror, he had walked and begged rides in farm wagons all the way to a distant port and got the first boat he could to England, and then on to Ireland. He had let his bishop think he was dead. He had abandoned his post. He had seen all those people dying and assumed that the cause of freedom was lost. He was lost. The independent kingdom of Belgium was founded the next year, and Anselma, hating himself, had nothing to do with it. He took vows as a Carmelite—and with them his new name—and determined to give his life meaning by serving in the remotest Irish parish he could find. He would never have traded that meaning for some kind of new start on a pagan island.
There are so many ways of being lost.
* * *
Take Meg now. You might say she was lost the moment she took ship to Ireland in 1649, or even before. How many women have you ever heard of being part of that army? Yet they were there, the women. They always are. But never entering the record, they do not fall out of it. No one missed Meg, because the men on her side died all around her. And hers was the side that won in that conflict. Fat lot of good that did Meg and her brother. They were lost. Meg’s brother—his name was Richard—died and was left unburied on that moor in Connacht. But he could still be in heaven now. He was a Puritan. Such men don’t need priests and rites when they die. They expect to meet their God, and to be chosen or not chosen. That is the deal they’ve struck. Meg was born a Puritan but she didn’t die one. It wasn’t the deal she struck.
Meg was well tired of striking deals by the time she’d been in Ireland two months. This was after the siege of Wexford, when she was no longer a washerwoman. She struck deals in tents and ditches and haystacks. Standing, sitting, lying. Sometimes they were to her advantage, sometimes to the advantage of her clients and adversaries. Many of the men were sick and desperate and terrified like she was. Quite a few were wounded, so if it came to a fight with her, it might end in a draw. Meg was a whore but she wasn’t an easy one.
She also saw a lot of people die. Soldiers on both sides, women, even some children. Her regiment lost their surgeon early on. Whatever doctoring went on was done by the men themselves and their friends and followers. Cooks. Farriers. Laundresses. Meg stanched many wounds following shouted directions. She also delivered a few babies though she was no midwife. Any serious wound always killed a man eventually. Often, quicker was better. Meg found herself, as time went on, doing rounds at night to the wounded like some kind of reverend mother. Odd sort of work for a whore, she thought. Sometimes, these visits of whispered consolation would become fucking: some men were horny right to the very end and died with dirty words on their lips. But more often, Meg found herself just talking to men who were afraid and in pain in the last minutes of their lives. Some talked about God and their expectations of heaven or hell. Some joked. Some reminisced or repeated camp gossip. A surprising number asked her to marry them. They would talk and then they would stop talking; breathe and then stop breathing. In a fragment of a second, time after time, she would go from beholding a person to beholding a body. There was no way to get used to it. It was the same leering absence every time. Something, then nothing. It wore away her faith. Nothing that she witnessed looked like transcendence. It looked like loss. The problem with the afterlife is that it’s invisible from life.
So, Meg was confounded to end up on Inis Caillte. But she was relieved. She did not have to deal with choirs of angels or fire and brimstone. She didn’t have to wait around until Judgement Day wondering what had become of her body. She was, as far as she could tell, still herself. Exhausted and despairing, expecting nothing, she received everything, insofar as the contents of consciousness constitute everything.
* * *
Philip Murphy also got to Inis Caillte. He was staring along the length of a bayonet inches from his chest, held by a twenty-year-old soldier named Jacobus De Jong, when he, as it were, melted away. Philip was surprised, as was the soldier. Both were thankful, though perhaps not equally. De Jong still had to go straight on to the next man in the crowd. It was Brussels in 1830 and he had been called out to quash a rebellion against William I. There was another Irishman in that same crowd named Declan O’Brien, one who in taking monastic orders two years later took the name Anselma. He was only a few ranks away from Philip, almost directly behind him. It may even be that the hesitation Philip’s disappearance caused De Jong gave O’Brien enough time to get away. De Jong worried about the lost man later, wondering what had happened to him—but what’s one rebel more or less?