Read Online Inishbream by Theresa Kishkan - Free Book Online Page B

Or else you tried to untangle the cat’s cradle your knitting had become, your numb fingers twisting at the knots and counting the stitches, only to discover the knots were permanent and most of the stitches had fallen. You tried to read the library books you’d choose on the one day in a fortnight that boats would venture to the mainland, and you wept at the descriptions of an island the October ferry was sailing to, the driftwood of its shores bleached and huge as dinosaur bones, an island which you knew well. The newspapers promised nothing but cutbacks and strikes and colder temperatures than had ever been known. You made soup. What else could you do? But you could barely stand to use potatoes that had begun to sprout or carrots that had gone tasteless in their box. And the redeeming summer nettles had been trimmed to the roots or else were rotten with rain. So everything you made was flavoured strongly with onions and the secrecy of herbs you kept in a dark cupboard, reminding you of an earlier island where you had lived on a hill of wild rosemary and sage, their blossoms bright and pungent even in the depths of December. And there was never enough turf to make a really hot fire, and you had to ration it, never knowing from one day to the next whether you could go to the mainland for another load.
    You wondered about the tinker, imagined him in the swarthy light of a winter caravan, maybe playing a tin whistle to the melancholy night. The man you thought you knew became more silent in winter, and he joined the other men in a kitchen you were not invited to, nor were any other women. You knew they warmed themselves with poteen. You could smell it when he returned. But what they talked of, or knew in their collective silence, God kept to Himself.
    You despaired at the sight of the other women knitting their jerseys and mittens and caps, unfolding them like magic from the chanting needles. You did not have a child to scold or to wrap in your arms. The elderly dog slept. The calves, moved to a far field, grown large and red-eyed (and one dead), munched the mouldy hay you trundled to them and no longer welcomed your fingers.
    You sat damply in a chair pulled as close to the tiny mound of smouldery turf as you dared, you thought of the rest of the winters of your life spent like this in the bitter cold, your fingers arthritic before their time and your nose sniffly, and you knew you could not bear it.

    I gave my own names to things that winter. The seals had all fled Carrickarona, and there were only ever a few scraggy seabirds who happened to land on their way somewhere else: I name thee the Rocks of Desolation.
    Or the cliffs of Ardmore, with their echoes of a house I had known in a milder winter on Vancouver Island, now stony-faced, no gentle covering of heather or pale thrift: I name thee the Cliffs of Peril.
    And the man whom I had taken as a lover, as a husband: I name thee Stranger.
    They were long months made longer by the refusal of spring. Festy’s cow, deceived by one warmish day, calved on the next, and when they found the calf, it was opaque with frost and quite dead. The children shed coats that same day and were bronchial for months.
    â€“ This is likely to be the last winter we shall spend here. The new houses are promised us so.
    I said nothing. Christmas, too, had been a promise, and when it came I was lonely for another family; their phone call did not bridge the continents but widened all oceans unspeakably. It did not help that Sean got drunk as a lord and had to be walked in the wind to sober him. (Christmas. I had thought of presents, naturally, and wreaths on doors and trees blooming in the corners of kitchens, bright with candles and tinsel. I imagined sweetmeats and shortbread, plum pudding and wassail. But no. Where would a tree come from? Finland? Or heaven? There was a horrible lardy cake, and we ate a scrawny chicken from the brothers’ flock. And we ate potatoes. Someone brought