Chapter 8 #11
She brings out the fiddle into the sea air, fits it under her chin, lifts the bow in her hand, tests the strings, adjusts the pegs.
Both instrument and bow feel almost weightless in her hands, utterly familiar.
Her fingertips rest on the strings, awaiting instruction, the horsehairs of the bow are poised above the bridge.
Enda takes in a breath, glances around: the man at the rail is watching, and a couple of others are gazing at her, without curiosity.
She doesn’t know what to play, how to begin, she doesn’t know how to start, and yet she does, or her fingers do, and they move themselves into position without her, and her other hand comes down, and the strings seem to leap eagerly towards the bow, and music surges out, notes following notes, and she somehow finds the rhythm of it, or it finds her, and she plays there, standing by the ship’s rail, her foot in her straw-stuffed boots keeping time, people sitting up and taking notice, some moving closer, others clapping along, and at one point she hears a singer find the melody and the voice—a woman’s—dips below and then above the fiddle, inserting words and phrases into the sound, twining around it like ivy, and Enda smiles in acknowledgement, slowing her fingers so that the singer can add her own embellishments, the voice turning on a note, like a child playing hopscotch, skipping over another.
The singer’s face is blank, her eyes shut, turned away from the blast of the wind, her back against the scuttlebutt; her child stares at her, open-mouthed; an older woman, next to her, listens intently, tears spreading through the creases of her cheeks.
An obscure part of Enda wants to go to her and speak her secret, to say, I’m not a man, I’m a woman, like you, but she, too, shuts her eyes, and plays.
She plays a song about rushes, an air about a battle; she plays a sea-faring melody, which the sailors up in the rigging sing along to, a ballad about a man and his lass, a long song about fish in a river, and another about green hills.
She plays until her fingertips are sore, until the instrument is warm under her chin, and the horizon is drinking down the red orb of the sun.
That night, she dreams not about water but about the old widow on the peninsula.
She is standing in the doorway of her cottage, beckoning to Enda as she passes by.
At her feet is the cedar chest and she opens its lid and says, Why don’t you get in?
and Enda says, I can’t, I’ll never fit. The widow shakes her head and says, You must get in or you’ll be lost. Enda, wretched, says, But I am lost, I am.
Then she wakes and the ship is as before: creaking its way across the blue-green-grey-stormy ocean, and she must go with it.
A week at sea, then another, then another.
They are blown off-course, a sailor tells Enda, his lips cracked and split from the weather, by a north-easterly wind, which might add another week to their journey.
Enda stops keeping count of the days. She surrenders herself to the crossing, her life at home becoming as unreal and insubstantial as the life she is heading towards.
This vessel is her world now: she wakes, she douses her face, she accepts her water ration, her porridge, she eats the dry biscuits and hardtack, she plays the fiddle, she walks up and down the deck, she goes to her bunk, she sleeps for as long as she can, trying to ignore the sharp elbows and knees of the restless child next to her.
Water rations are reduced. A storm keeps them all below for three days, and Enda tries to move about the aisles in the darkness so that her joints don’t seize with stiffness, while people all around her have lowered themselves to pray.
A woman takes sick, then another, then some children.
A baby dies, and the hatches are opened, and they are all ordered on deck, to empty their buckets, to air themselves, to sluice out the hold, to shake the lice and filth from bedding.
The wrapped parcel of the baby’s small body is committed to the waves; a priest holds mass on deck.
Enda regards him with dull curiosity: his worn soutane, the rise and fall of his Adam’s apple, the pallid scalp visible as the wind parts his thinning hair.
She wants to ask him what made him want to be a priest; what was it that drove him to it?
The baby’s mother, a young woman with a blue-black plait reaching down to her waist, wails inconsolably, and continues to do so for days.
No one tells her to hush, even at night.
Her husband pats her hand, in a numb and helpless daze.
An elderly man who, it has been noticed by some, possesses a good and thick coat, also passes, and the priest once again prays as the sailors, their caps stuffed into their pockets, slide the body into the water.
Nothing is said when, a few days later, one of his sons is seen wearing the coat: the crossing is cold, colder than any had imagined.
A boy falls ill with a fever and a rash, but recovers.
Another child succumbs, then a third. The sailors, Enda notices, wear their scarves up and over their noses and mouths, so she does the same.
Three children die, and then two women, and five men.
Several groups of people elect to remain on deck at all times, even throughout the night.
Enda decides to do the same, bedding down on her bundle, still with her fiddle clasped in her arms. Whenever she wakes, she presses her fingertips to her forehead to check for fever, just as her mother used to do.
She doesn’t want to die here, for her body to be dropped from a plank and swallowed by the restless, shifting waves, to be devoured by sea creatures, and her family never to hear of her again.
The boards are unyielding, pressing up into the joints of her hips and the bones of her shoulders, but above her are the scatterings of stars, and Enda thinks about how she once had to explain to Liam that they were not holes in the dark fabric of the sky, through which the light of God was showing, but distant forms, and he had refused to believe it.
They have to be something more than that, he’d said.
As she lies there, under constellations brighter and more perfect than any she has ever seen, Enda wishes she could say to him that she sees what he means: they cannot be mundane matter—they must be celestial illuminations beaming down.
The next day, in a grey and damp dawn, the cry goes up that land has been sighted, and everyone comes up on deck to jostle at the rails and watch the promontory of Nova Scotia, at first no more than a wavering graphite line on the horizon, but then gathering itself together from the veils of mist, acquiring form and dimension.
Rose stands beneath the clock tower, hands wedged in her apron pocket, her gaze directed upwards, beyond the rooftops of the town, towards the sky.
This is always her place on market day, just as it was the widow’s, before Rose took on the task of selling their goods.
The clock tower is placed where the road splits in two, and several lanes converge.
It is, Rose knows, the best position for a stall: many others have tried to take it, but the widow has always been fierce in seeing them off.
The eggs are arranged in two baskets on the ground in front of Rose, with the widow’s dried dulse in a creel beside her.
The market is busy today, the streets thronged with people, chickens, pigs, carts, horses.
There are farmers from up-country, some of the gentry from a big house, with their tweed shooting suits and silk cravats and their loud voices; there are children running between stalls, and women bartering for goods.
On the other side of the clock tower a man is selling heads of cabbage; Rose is able, through the heavy mire that clouds her mind, to form the thought that she should use the egg-money to buy one before she takes the road home.
She could fry it in butter with slices of potato.
It would make Eugene happy, for he loves fried cabbage.
Maybe their father would agree to take a plateful or—
Rose sighs, the vague thought of cabbages detaching itself and trailing off into the air, like a piece of cut thread.
Her head is like that, these days. It cannot hold an idea or a notion for long.
She has become a leaky vessel, a frayed garment, a bucket with a hole, a sack eaten away by mice, and everything trickles out of her, gone for ever.
During the crisis of Tomás’s accident, she was too preoccupied to think or dwell, but lately she has felt herself to be weighed down by cares, or stranded in a mist.
What it comes down to is plain: if anyone else leaves her, she feels she may dissolve, like soft rock in water.
Her mother, taken too soon, too suddenly.
Her father, who walked out one day to do some work, and was returned to them insensible, his hand gone.
Liam, who warned and warned them that he would leave, and then, appallingly, did so.
And Enda? Rose finds herself more and more angry with her sister as the days go by; she cannot think about Enda’s treachery, her deceit, without working herself into a pure and righteous fury.
Tomás’s accident kept these thoughts in abeyance for a while, or perhaps Rose wondered if Enda might come back to them somehow, might change her mind and return from the dockside, saying, I thought I would go but in the end I couldn’t do it.