Wexford Folk Tales by Brendan Nolan

Author:Brendan Nolan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752491910
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-12-06T00:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

SEEING THE DEAD

Long ago, Jack Whitty, his brother and another man were on Burrow Strand supplementing their income by gathering up anything the tide brought in for salvage experts to claim, when they saw there were large casks of tallow coming in from the sea. Tallow was a hard fat derived from parts of the bodies of cattle, sheep or horses, and used to make candles, leather dressing, soap or lubricants in the days before mass manufacturing took over from the local artisan.

Jack and the others watched as casks came in whole on the waves, bobbing here and bobbing there, disappearing and then reappearing in the swell. The ones that reached the shore more or less intact were rolled away from the water’s edge to be sold to the highest bidder. Others broke open and released their tapered wooden staves to spread tallow across the water.

The men were doing well enough gathering up whatever the tide brought in to them, for they had done this before. They were all on an equal share of the profits and all were as determined as the next man to extract as much income as possible out of the day’s work. When they had amassed a decent pile of salvaged material, Jack’s brother went off to bring the jennet (the offspring of a stallion and a female donkey) and cart onto the strand to take the salvage away.

There was a tradition in some parts of Wexford that when an empty boat came ashore after a drowning, the boat was left where it touched land, as a memorial to the lost souls that were in it. But there was no boat on the strand this day; there was just flotsam and debris from the sinking. While waiting for the others to return, Jack looked along the water’s edge to see if anything more of value was come ashore.

He was startled to see what appeared to be the form of a man lying at the water’s edge a little way off from where he stood. It is not a sight you expect to see in a normal day’s work, but the sea can release its grip on bodies at any time and so it now appeared. He went to see if the man was alive but the sailor was beyond rescue; life was gone out of his body; he would sail no more.

Jack was afraid to touch the body. He could see that no amount of effort on his part would retrieve its departed soul. He went to wait beside the mound of tallow for the others to return. He sat and tried to calm his breathing, staring out to sea and deliberately avoiding the spot where the body lay. But try as he might he could not keep his eyes from straying back towards the corpse; only this time, his view of the body was obscured by the form of someone sitting beside him.

For the moment he thought it was one of his companions taking a rest on the pile of barrels and half-barrels and other gear.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.