Life Sentences by Billy O'Callaghan

Author:Billy O'Callaghan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: David R. Godine, Publisher
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

When I was a child, my mother often told me that we’d been a hundred generations on Clear Island, one branch or another of us, and on the day the last one of us left, the island would sink out of grief to the bottom of the sea. And at sixteen, as I sat in the prow of the Sullivan brothers’ boat, wanting more than anything to risk a backward glance, those words kept me afraid. For the entire crossing, my mother’s voice sang loud inside me and so truthful-sounding that, had I turned my head, I felt sure I’d see the cliffs crumbling in on themselves and their blankets of gorse and heather flushing the stony-grey water with shades of purple and pink and gold. And worse still, that there’d be scatterings of my dead watching after me from the strand, thin-shouldered and forlorn, knowing I’d never return, that this was the end. On Clear I knew the faces in every doorway and the family names that occupied every plot of graveyard earth, I knew the slopes and climbs of the fields, where the best berries grew and where the ground birds nested, and I never slept a single night without the sighing of the running waves.

By the time I was born the worst of the starvation had passed, though few enough would have known it.

The blight had been at its most widespread two or three years earlier, when those who still had strength enough, or who’d already lost what for them had been most worth losing, got themselves away, and too many among the ones who stayed ended up gasping their last in fields or roadside dikes, or on the sandy shorelines that they’d already stripped of kelp and carrion.

It’s only dying. That’s what my mother used to say. This was the late sixties, and I was in my teens and she was reaching towards her own end. But while we were a sight better off than we’d been, a lot remained unchanged. For most of my childhood we fed on scraps. Everyone did, everyone I knew. Potatoes again, since the tubers had stopped rotting to black pus in their pits, and fish when we could get it, herring or mackerel, depending on the time of year, when one or another of the men came back following a day and a night on the water with catch enough to be able to share a bite. My mother made soup from the heads and bones, and from seaweed, too, whatever we could rake from the shallows, and I’d spend a couple of hours every morning down among the rocks collecting mussels, crabs and periwinkles, in defiance of the priest—a stern, long-faced man from Baltimore whose green, half-hooded eyes kept looking for something out over the shoulders of the people he was speaking to—who’d tried drumming into us that the flesh of any shellfish was detestable, and to eat of it an abomination against God. He was heard but mostly ignored, because he wasn’t one of us and wasn’t of our world.

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