Inishbream Read Online Free PDF Page B

world.
    â€“ Aye, like the carving on the dolmens. But these here are only the marks a limpet will make with his pull. And if ye watch long enough, ye may see them return after their feeding. They will always return to the scar they have made. It is like a home to them so.
    Mist lies over the island, potent and mysterious, like God’s breath. Although there is famine in the sea and the dogfish raid our nets, tangle themselves, are trapped gaunt and anguished when we find one, something is prolific: protozoa, creating themselves out of brine and the drowned man’s sperm, creeping ashore, shaking themselves free of the sea, then splitting, multiplying. They simply exist, mindless, without the cursed memory of falling, wandering, waiting, sinking. They are flesh-eaters at the dawn of evolution, speechless but whole. Every day we are thus renewed, given freely, without pain, without cost, new life to be among us.
    There are pale beaches of coral sand, strung darkly with the dead weeds. I walk them endlessly, alert for news of the world: a bottle, an explosive, a book of the saint’s voyage enacted on the edge of the Atlantic, a waterlogged crate washed from the deck of a ship.
    In those windy cottages, the stories age. Outside, a well runs dry. Pots rise empty on their bleach-bottle floats, the hay rots under the rain’s assault. And they stand, all of them, on the rim of the chopping sea, straining to the tide, pulling in the nets of morning. World without end, amen.

IRISH MIST
    LISTEN . There were weeks when the sun refused us. At first I thought I could never live in such a place, but then I learned the sweetness of the Irish mist, how it enveloped you and numbed you to any real action or consequence. And you wandered in it, your hair jewelled, and you let yourself drift in great imaginings, where the ruined castle on the coast was made whole and you lived there, where the beached hooker was yours and you mended it. Occasionally a stranger, even more so than yourself, came to find something out. Were there corncrakes, nearly extinct on the mainland but thought to exist on the islands, where a scything farmer would watch out for the nests? There were. Would anyone sell a house to a foreigner for a summer place? They wouldn’t.
    I never knew whether to believe the tales. A feud so great the Senate was involved. A fortune hidden in the oldest man’s bedsprings. They sounded fine if you heard them wound out of a mouth around a pipe and punctuated by bird cries.
    But there were days when I wanted something more to happen. I’d arrange to be left off on the strand, or I’d row myself over in an available currach, and I’d walk the northern portion of the Sky Road. It was nice to use the muscles the mist had allowed to become soft and to really stride out the few miles to the Westport road. Once there, I knew the dilemma: north to places unknown and even a friend to visit in Mayo; south to Clifden and the monotonous streets; back the way I came. I went north once. Sometimes south for an unexpected afternoon in the town, rummaging in the magazine shop for something to read and once finding The Tree of Man , having tea in the lobby of the Celtic, talking to anyone who talked to me first. Often back the way I came, walking down the Sky Road’s vistas into soft rain and the fuchsias.
    At home, they wanted to know about my day; you could never row away unseen or return unheralded, if only by dogs. And Sean was always a little hurt, not knowing the need to ever leave except maybe of a Sunday when the football matches were played and replayed in every Clifden pub and the beer was particularly well drawn. If you could last long enough there was a dance in the hall at half-eleven, some pop band off-key on the improvised stage. Or you could always find an after-hours, the owner peering out at you first as you knocked on the bolted door, recognizing you and squiring you downstairs, where it seemed the