The Night Swimmer (15 page)

Nell had a wooden tray set with teacups, saucers, plates, a tiered stack of cakes and cookies, juices, fruit, and a large teapot covered with a crocheted cozy that had
usmc
emblazoned across the front.

If you'll carry the tray, Nell said, we'll go up to the patio and bring the gentlemen tea.

She struggled up the steps to the high bluff, leaning on the handrail and planting each foot with diligence. I was struck by how old she seemed, and it dawned on me that either Bill was a remarkably preserved old man or he had married an older woman.

On the upper patio Fred and Bill stood facing the sea. The view was tremendous: a short grassy hill leading to sheer cliffs hundreds of feet high, jagged spires and jutting formations of black rock spreading into the booming surf. To the west was the green bowl of the Ineer, and beyond the hump of the Ballyieragh highlands, the finger of Fastnet. To the south nothing but miles of shimmering sea all the way to North America.

I stood beside Fred and squeezed his hand.

Jesus, he said. This is something you don't see every day.

If you spend any time out here, Bill said, you'll see pods of whales, right, Nell?

Nell was under Bill's arm, squinting at the sea, nodding.

And down on the rocks here, Bill said, loads of seals, puffins, and every kind of bird you can imagine. Nell's seen a killer whale pull himself up here on the rocks going after a seal pup. Got the pup in its teeth and flopped back in the water like a giant trout.

We settled into the chairs, and Nell made a fuss over serving us all. Bill told a story about a lawyer from California who bought a farm on the eastern edge of the island a few years back. He bought
it unseen, never having been to the island. Then he bought an expensive bull and had it shipped over from the mainland, perhaps with an eye on starting a new herd. But before he arrived the bull got loose and tore up several farms. A few days later it was found at the bottom of the eastern cliffs, near Douglass's Cove. The lawyer tried to make a thing of it in Cork, but it was soon clear nothing would be done. He sold the place, never having set foot on the island.

Island justice, I said.

Corrigan justice, Bill said.

We drank the tea, watching the horizon, the endless sheets of clouds, the patterned peaks of the ocean that seemed almost motionless.

This is Nell's favorite spot, Bill said. And the real reason we bought this house.

I can see why, Fred said. It is amazing. I could stay up here all day.

Nell just had to have it, Bill said. There was no stopping her.

Nell grinned and shrugged her shoulders, pleased. There were blue veins mapping her pale temples, and her hands shook.

Oh, you should see the sunsets, she said. The way the light falls over Fastnet. Sometimes the rocks glow, golden, like it's on fire.

We watched the gentle play of sunshine and water around the lone rock, the slender finger of stone. The more you watched it the more it did seem like the sea somehow revolved around the rock with purpose, like it was moved by some kind of energy from below. The sight of it filled me with contentment.

I could look at it all day, I said.

Oh, Bill said, Nell will be up here all times of the day and night. I've come out and found her in a January gale, wrapped in blankets, the wind howling around her.

I never get tired of it, Nell said.

*  *  *

It was November before I got a clear look at Kieran Corrigan. On the ferry he remained enclosed in the pilothouse, his sons, nephews, and cousins collecting the fares and off-loading the goods. I suppose
I could have gotten a decent look at him if I had tried, but I didn't really want to attract his attention.

I was waiting for the evening ferry back to Baltimore on a bitterly cold Friday, streaming with rain, looking forward to the comfort of the Nightjar, depending upon Fred's state of sobriety. A generous batch of English birders were holed up in Baltimore waiting for the rain to break, and Fred said they had run through a keg of Murphy's and were keeping the jukebox wailing. I stood under the short awning of the Siopa Beag. A few cars idled on the pier, but otherwise the harbor was empty, save one man who was standing on the edge of the outer concrete quay, looking to the mainland, hands tucked in his gray slicker, hood covering his head. I could see his profile, the wide heavy mouth of the Corrigans, large square glasses with thick lenses, dotted with rainwater. He looked like my high school algebra teacher.

*  *  *

In the alley behind the Nightjar there was a ten-year-old tan-colored Peugeot 205 hatchback, its wheel wells rimmed with rust and the rear window spidered with cracks.

Six hundred pounds, Fred said. A lotta miles but still a good deal. We have transportation.

On Monday when the pub was closed we drove up the N71 to Cork to pick up supplies and go to the library. The backseats were ripped up as if an extended knife fight had occurred there, but Fred just laid them flat for more cargo space. It was just the two of us, he argued, and the point was really to be able to pick up our own supplies for the bar. It would cut down on our costs, and as no money was coming in anything helped. The car reeked of cigarettes and fried fish, and the windows had to be cranked down with a set of pliers. Still, it felt good to be up and moving across the landscape, a thin spray of rain, the shining narrow road.

Fred played tapes he found in the glove box,
The Best of Sam Cooke,
as we drove into the city. Cork's working-class roots, even in a working-class country like Ireland, are glaringly evident everywhere you look. Some areas have a pasted-on veneer of urban sophistication,
but driving along the river that cuts through the center of the city, you can see the old bones not yet buried. Despite the new pedestrian shopping mall and gabled edifices of gastropubs, the eye is drawn to the long rows of empty warehouses and the rusty towers of manufacture gone cold.

The other day, Fred said as we searched for parking, when it was blowing real hard? I think it was Tuesday? Anyway, the boats were all knocking around in the harbor, stuff flying around, and this big gust knocks the door open. Slam! The power dimmed for a second, and out the doorway there was lightning forking into Roaringwater Bay. It was intense. Anyway, just me and Dinny there and as I go over to close the door I swear he muttered something about Highgate. The goat guy. I mean, I heard him say that name. But when I asked Dinny what he said he wouldn't repeat it. Just clammed up.

The Corrigans don't like him, I said.

They got a problem with goats?

Not sure. I think it goes deeper than that.

But what he said wasn't like that. It was almost more like a recitation? Like a prayer?

That's bizarre.

Fred dove the nose of the car into a parking spot under the looming gray edifice of a church, cranked the wheel and nestled us up to the curb, the Peugeot shuddering with effort.

I know, he said. It's a strange little world here. Library time.

We got ourselves settled with library cards at the university, and Fred went to work on his smelting research, nautical charts, and Spinoza. I wandered the literature section of the stacks for a bit and picked up a copy of Iris Murdoch's
The Sea, the Sea
and a collected Yeats for Fred. Then I did some basic searches on Cape Clear on the computer index and found a couple local histories,
Cape Clear Island: Its People and Landscape, Naomh Ciarán: Pilgrim Islander, Fastnet Rock: An Charraig Aonair,
all by éamon Lankford.
The Natural History of Cape Clear Island,
by J. T. R. Sharrock, had extensive lists of bird sightings on the island broken down by season and species. It was the kind of book I figured Sebastian Wheelhouse
and his twitchers had in their satchels. Then there were a few like
Aistí ó Chléire,
by Donnchadh ó Drisceoil, written all in Irish. Most of my searches on the history of the area directed me to one or more of the “Annals” contained in
The Chronicle of Ireland,
a remarkably succinct record of events from AD 432 to 911. Most years got only one or two sentences, often about who was slaughtered where.

According to the Annals of Innisfallen, St. Kieran of Saighir, patron of the diocese of Ossory, was born on the island in AD 325. He was consecrated a bishop in Rome and returned in AD 402 to his native district to preach, and the Scholiast of Aengus records that the islanders of Cape Clear were the first to believe in the Cross, thirty years before St. Patrick came to Ireland. Kieran is referred to as
primarius sanctorum Hiberniae,
the first of the Irish saints. The church he built, Cill Chiaráin, lies under the ruins of a succession of later churches in Clear's North Harbor, now just a weathered outline of stone with lichen-covered tombstones slanted and scattered like broken teeth, the decipherable names nearly all Corrigan.

The miracles attributed to St. Kieran include an incident when a young island girl was raped. She became pregnant and came to Kieran in desperation as she did not want to have the baby. St. Kieran prayed for a few days, then went to visit the girl in the hut she lived in with her mother. He instructed her to lie on the dirt floor and then made the sign of the cross over her belly. When the girl arose from the floor, the baby was gone.

It was St. Kieran who predicted that his clan, the Corrigans, would be chieftains of their race forever.

By the thirteenth century the Corrigans were already famous for buccaneering and terrorizing the coastal towns of Western Ireland and even England. The southwest tip of Ireland was perfect for this kind of work; the countless channels and small cays ringed by treacherous slabs of rock that, because of the intense geological pressure of the grinding European plate, rose out of the water, part of a vast fold of Old Red Sandstone and Carboniferous strata, shale on limestone, the folds at ninety to one hundred forty degrees, developing long, sharp lines,
rows of basaltic and igneous like black knives, some hundreds of feet high, others just a few feet under the surface of the water. The Corrigans were able to strike coastal towns and merchant shipping, then retreat into their maze of rock, where no one dared to follow. A good third of the eight hundred or so people living in Baltimore still bear the surname, and Corrigans occupied most of the preeminent positions on town councils and local boards, the guard, and had fingers of influence that stretched up through West Cork and into the national government.

We came back in the afternoon with the car full of paper products, canned goods, and two large sacks of organic animal supplement that Fred picked up for Patrick. Back at the Nightjar, Fred made soup while I mopped the floors and wiped down the windows. We turned up the jukebox, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music, and as the lights in the harbor winked out one by one through the window, we danced across the empty floor.

Fred held up his glass of whiskey.

To our new life, he said.

To our new life.

We both drank deeply.

It's a beautiful thing.

Yes, it is.

*  *  *

The first week of November brought Sebastian Wheelhouse back to the island. I found him standing before the graveyard in the North Harbor in his gray mackintosh, studying the plaque about St. Kieran and his journey. He had a giant cylindrical lens case with a collapsible monopod strapped to it hanging over his back. I walked past, half hoping he would turn and see me, but he remained facing the plaque, and I trudged up the hill to Nora's. Finn Cotter creaked up the hill on his bike, overtaking me as I walked, his white legs churning, mop of red hair swaying. When he reached the top he turned and came zooming down, standing on the petals, his face a grimace of seriousness, the wind snapping his clothes like sails.

Fred was spending his mornings either out in the harbor tinkering
with Bill's boat or working on his smelting project, coming in after noon to eat something and open up the pub. He drank his way through the evening, and after closing he sequestered himself in his office space and tapped away at his massive files, probing the Internet until the early morning hours, occasionally sorting through the pile of scraps on his desk. Sometimes when I returned to Baltimore I didn't see him for a whole day and night, and we began communicating with cryptic notes left for each other on the main bar. His almost invariably said “on the boat” or “Cork” or “research” while mine merely said “Clear.” Standing in our rooms above the pub, the evidence of Fred everywhere, the smell of him on the sheets in the bed, I felt the insistent longing for his presence, the rising panic that made me pace the hall and the kitchen of the pub, drinking large glasses of juice, staring out the window over the harbor. I found that when I boarded the ferry for Clear such feelings subsided to a point I began to forget about them, and upon returning again to the Nightjar, I would be surprised by the dread of such momentary and subtle isolation. I began staying most of the week out at Nora's, coming back only to get fresh clothes.

There were several groups of bird-watchers on the island, but in the Five Bells that evening Sebastian sat apart from the others, elbows on the bar, scratching away at his little bound notebook. When I went to the bar and greeted Ariel and asked for a hot whiskey with lemon he glanced over and smiled.

How are the birds? I asked.

Haven't seen much yet, he said. Though I haven't exactly been looking.

Why's that?

Can't say. Perhaps I'm not really a birder at all, just a chap who likes to take long walks. The glasses and camera just a cover.

What are you looking at then?

He shrugged. Ariel brought my drink, and I raised it to him.

Just the thing, I said, for the chill.

It was the kind of stupid thing that blow-ins or tourists said, trying to sound casual.

Sebastian nodded, and I told Ariel I'd have the pork chops and
went over to my table by the fire. He settled back into his sketchbook. It reminded me of Fred nattering away into his Moleskine notebooks or on the backs of receipts with a chewed pen. Since we'd been in Baltimore he'd taken to using the computer more. He wanted to arrange, rather than compose, he said. He already had loads of material for the novel, now he just needed to get it sorted out. I never once asked to see what he was writing. I think I was afraid of what I would find.