Blasket Spirit (22 page)

That was it, for many of the islanders. The stark reality of not being able to reach a doctor or a priest hit them deeply. A consensus was taken to leave the Great Blasket Island and so, in November 1953, the island was evacuated. Many people obviously wonder why it had taken so long to resettle such a small number of ageing families on the mainland. It has been suggested that Éamon de Valera’s government deliberately delayed the relocation to ensure that the problem would emigrate or die off naturally. So the islanders had to wait for seven long years after the death of Seán Kearney, during which time the population of the Great Blasket Island dropped from fifty to twenty-two before the government conceded to the expense of buying four cottages on the mainland in Dún Chaoin.

The story finished, and Micheál sat onto the bank once more. The congregation remained silent, reluctant to break its link with the past. After the final blessing, the herring gull swooped out to sea, and the tie was broken.

As people stirred and began to trickle back down through the ruins, I took the opportunity to approach Father Tom. He agreed to come up to the hut. I raced up ahead of him, lit a candle and an incense stick, and straightened the old chair in under the shelf. There was no other piece of furniture to tidy. Then Father Tom’s black-suited legs appeared outside the low doorway. I invited him in, warning him about the low lintel. Once inside, I noted his eyes lingering on the ferns and plants growing from the stone walls. I offered him a seat on my one sheepskin-clad chair. He preferred to stand, his back to the hillside, facing the tiny window, set between the bunk and the chair. As he blessed the dwelling, he sprinkled holy water on the four walls. He prayed in Irish and English, for the owner of the dwelling, Ray Stagles, and his late wife, Joan. He prayed for the past inhabitants, and the future inhabitants. As the candles flickered, and the surf roared below on the White Strand, I said a silent prayer of thanks to the Island Spirit.

Father Tom finished his blessing. Then he slowly replaced the top on the bottle of holy water. Neither of us spoke. The smell of incense and the sound of the sea filled the air. Suddenly I wondered how I could thank him. Before I could offer a cup of tea or of water, he shook my hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It’s a long time since a priest has been of service to an island house.’ I protested that it was I who owed him thanks. He smiled, saying that it was an honour to be welcomed into an island home. He wrote a short note in Irish, for me to pass on to Ray Stagles. Suddenly he noticed through the tiny window that the island was once more deserted, and his flock was aboard the ferry.

Again, he shook my hand. ‘
Slán agus beannacht
.’ He bent low under the lintel and was gone.

A rainbow bridging the Blasket Sound, viewed from outside the hut
.

N
ext morning as I woke to the robin’s noisy pecking, I became aware of a faint smell of incense in the air. I did not stir, relishing the scent, the only trace of the previous evening. The smell triggered a stream of fragmented images in my drowsy mind: white vestments under a black umbrella, a herring gull, Seán Kearney’s remains on the kitchen table, Maria shouting at a black calf, and Charlie Haughey gazing at the ancient stones. All had become yesterday’s memories, as short-lived as seaspray in the wind. With my fingers, I traced the delicate filigree of the fern that grew from the hut wall and overhung my pillow. Soon that too would be a memory, washed away by a new tide. I recalled Charlie Haughey’s idea of keeping an island log, and all at once it was vital to record the island mass. I had not mentioned it in the previous night’s story. I sat up, startling the robin that ducked out under the eaves. I reached for my journal and pen, returned to the warmth of my bed and began to write about the people and events of the previous day.

By half past eight, I was finished. Four pages of words that would form the sequence of a day’s events in the lives of these people, long after the Island Spirit had reclaimed their souls. I lay, listening to the rollers crashing on the White Strand. Their rhythm had become my heartbeat. I wriggled out of my sleeping bag, pulling a shirt around me, and opened my little green door to the sea and the sky. A shiver of excitement ran through me. Over the previous few weeks, everything had begun to change. I was no longer observing my life from outside a window, but I was actually in there, and was sensing each moment. The grass was wet and cold underfoot as I climbed up to the well. I drank and splashed my face with fresh water.

Below, the dolphin played around the buoys, ducking, diving and launching himself into mid-air, with a shudder rippling through his whole body. Seizing the moment, as a memory in the making, I decided to go to the cove, instead of the beach, for my dip. The dolphin ignored me on the beach, and I had never had the nerve to go to the cove until that day.

There was no sign of Seán over at the cafe, or of Sue, below at her house, where her yellow door remained closed. Sigrid had gone out on the previous evening’s ferry, to book her return flight to Germany. All was quiet. I ran down the wet path. The ruin of the schoolhouse was empty but for the stonechat, bobbing in and out of his nest in the wall. The mass had melted into the island’s past.

The cove was deserted, save for Fergal’s inflatable dinghy, pulled up on the slipway, clear of the tide. The water was deep and so very cold. I gasped, treading water furiously, to catch my breath. Several times I had watched the Irish College students stroking the dolphin from the dinghy. One girl had jumped in, and he swam around her as she tried to touch him. I had been fascinated.

Suddenly I was nervous. I had no idea what 13 feet of solid dolphin would look like in the water. Methodically, I began my morning routine of front crawl, backstroke and floating on my back. Below me, a meadow of oarweed drifted in the tide. Just as I decided to get out, there he was. A huge dorsal fin circled me and then it dived. I looked frantically but I could see nothing. I ducked under, just in time to see the shape of a beautiful bottlenose dolphin swim past me. My heart pounded. He had been within a foot of me, but I had not dared to touch him. I waited. Nothing. I duck-dived, kicking hard, down to the oarweed. There was no sign of him. I gripped a couple of tough stems, anchoring myself. Back on the surface, the sun sparkled. Shafts of light filtered down, glinting off the swaying of the seaweed. Then from the hazy distance, a silhouette glided towards me. The dolphin’s beak was inches from my face. He turned his head to the left, so his right eye looked straight into mine. For those few seconds, the ache in my lungs disappeared. I reached out, stroking along the side of the dolphin’s head. His eye closed and he pushed against my hand. I touched him once more before shooting back up, my lungs bursting.

I gasped at the surface, my whole body tingling. I laughed aloud, as the dolphin circled me, and leaped clear over my head. Each time I duck-dived and swam, he shadowed me, inches from my right side. The more I rubbed and tickled him, the closer he swam.

After a short time, I was exhausted. I trod water, labouring for breath. What strange, helpless creatures they must think we are. Despite his huge weight and size, he was unconditionally protective and gentle, as if I was a baby in the water. Suddenly I felt his beak nuzzle the soles of my feet from below. I couldn’t oblige him with a reaction. He then swam to my side and stopped. As I ran my hands down his flanks, he began to move forward, gently, towing me a few feet. I was very cautious, afraid that he would feel trapped, but each time I let him go, he returned, offering another piggyback. I avoided his blowhole carefully, stroking from head to tail, as I was towed in circles around the cove. I began to wonder if it was my laughter that kept bringing him back. I felt sheer delight pulsing in every cell of my body. Maybe my voice was familiar to him at that stage. For over six weeks, I had called to him from the beach every morning.

As I swam towards the slipway, the dolphin kept swimming between the shore and me, but there wasn’t an ounce of energy left in my body to play any more. I felt a rock under the water, and found my balance. I could stand with my head and shoulders out of the water. The dolphin glided over to me, stopping, with his beak tipping my chin. He never moved while I chatted and scratched his throat. Each time I rubbed him, he allowed me to lift his beak farther and farther up out of the water, until his head rested on my shoulder. Once again his eye held my gaze.

As his head slid gently back down my arm into the water, he opened his beak wide, making chatty clicking sounds. I stroked the side of his head and the inside of his beak before he closed his mouth gently on my hand, as softly as velvet.

Finally, as I scrambled out onto the slipway, he circled the cove. My feet had absolutely no feeling and I couldn’t stand. Hugging my knees in an effort to get warm, I pulled my shirt around me. All the while, I continued to talk to him through chattering teeth. Only as I disappeared over the clifftop did he swim out to sea.

Back at the hut, I made a hot pot of rice porridge and drank huge amounts of tea to warm up. I sat on a stone, leaning back against the warm wall, looking across to the mainland, cradling the warm saucepan in my freezing hands. Blue sky and blue sea mirrored one another in all directions. The Three Sisters stretched out into the sea, side by side, leaning on their green elbows, their toes interlaced somewhere back at Brandon Creek. A cow bawled from Firtear’s farm on Slea Head. Cars glinted in the sunshine on the clifftop above Dún Chaoin pier, but there was still no sign of the ferry. The mainland was a world away.

Half a metre from my elbow, a young rabbit nibbled the grass. The donkeys ambled up the path. The mare was so heavily in foal, her belly was inches above the grass. They stopped below me. ‘No joy today, sorry.’ I called. ‘The cupboard is bare – no apples, no carrots, no donkey food, no rabbit food, no robin food.’ The stallion was having none of it and seized his opportunity to stage a coup. He had cantered up the bank into the hut before I could struggle on to my numb feet. There was barely room for the two of us in there. As he chewed up a page of my journal, I attempted to push him backwards through the door. Turning him around was not an option, unless he was going to clamber over the bunk. In the middle of the struggle, Sue arrived and lent a hand, pulling him back by the tail.

She shooed the two donkeys down past
Teach an Rí
, while I made some more tea. ‘No ferry today,’ she announced. ‘Fergal is in Dingle with engine trouble.’ She was delighted with the break. Things had been hectic lately. ‘I’ll get to relax and do a few jobs around the house, catch up on some weaving, and you know what? I might even go to the beach for an hour this afternoon.’

I handed her a mug of tea, and we settled back against the warm wall once more. It had started and was continuing to be a wonderful day on the island. ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘I won’t go to the back of the island. It’ll be bliss to stay around the village in the sunshine and read.’ We sat quietly, watching the chough family flying along the cliff line below Páidí’s house. Already the chicks seemed to be as big and as fast as their parents. Down on the White Strand, the Beverley Sisters were hauling out into the sunshine, at the far end of the beach. ‘They must have heard the news too.’

The whole island seemed set for a peaceful day.

‘So tell me about Donie.’ I had no idea that Sue had seen me swimming with the dolphin that morning. Just as I began to tell her, it started. It began with the deep, gravelly scraping. Then there was the creaky swivelling, followed by the heavy thud. The whole pattern of noise was underpinned by an incessant whining. Sue looked in disbelief at me, saying nothing for a while. Then she held her hands over her ears. ‘I don’t believe it. He’s obviously got word that there’s no visitors coming in. He’ll be at that all day. I can’t stick it.’

I knew what she meant. Each evening, as the last tourist ferry left the tranquillity of the Great Blasket Island, the yellow digger emerged from behind the cafe. Since it was a tourist-free day, Sue was probably right. We were in for it! For some reason the noise resounded through the stone village, and was twice as loud at her house.

‘That’s the end of my weaving for the day. I’ll go out of my mind listening to that.’

‘What is he doing anyway?’

I had seen quite a difference since my first school visit to the island. Peig Sayers’s house had become a 22-bed hostel. Next door to that, the Buffer Keane’s house had become the cafe, while his old cowshed boasted flush toilets and a rather ripe septic tank. I dreaded further development of the island, yet it seemed inevitable. Since I had arrived, the piles of concrete blocks, white aeroboard insulation and areas cordoned off by yards of yellow fluorescent tape had increased dramatically. Sue still sat with her hands firmly over her ears.

The ownership battle had been waged for as long as she could remember. Did the Great Blasket Island belong to the nation, the Office of Public Works, the wealthy American, the islanders’ descendants or the local entrepreneur? In poorer economic times, some islanders’ descendants had sold their holdings to the wealthy American who had, in turn, sold the few holdings to a local buyer. The government had failed to make the island a National Monument as the hand of justice ruled in favour of the purchaser, and so the Great Blasket Island entered the era of Ireland’s construction boom. In recent weeks, things had been happening quickly, as the powerboat zoomed in and out to the beach, loaded with building materials.