Why the Water Turns White

At 9:37 AM a wayward sea wind floods the town and dislodges a pebble from between two slates of a wooden shutter. This pebble had been placed there by a child named James twenty seven years ago when the pub, of which the shutter is part was still a cottage lived in by the O’Connell’s. The pebble sits trembling on window sill until the same wind circles again and knocks it forward four inches.  It teeters at the edge and then falls through the air until it meets the edge of an empty pint glass hanging precipitously half on half off the window sill directly below, the pint glass cracks and a millisecond later is fractured and shatters into tiny shards.  Several shards land on the sidewalk where the foot of Niall Mooney, the Town drunk, steps a blink of the eye later.  The feeling of the razor teeth entering through a layer of callous, and into soft, tender flesh elicits a guttural roar, a raised fist, and a curse of God above.

A passing barman returning from the toilet shakes his head and kicks open the door ahead of him.  He thinks to himself, 9:37 AM is far too early for any man to be at the pub even if he is the barman.  As he’s fairly well booking it back to the bar he notices a Spanish couple waving for his attention in his peripheral vision.  The man wears a suspiciously curled moustache and the woman must wax.  The barman decides to keep walking.

The walls are crowded with all sorts of clocks, frames, and old advertisements.  A peculiar clock sits over an ancient granite fireplace where flames lick up nervously.  The clocks many faces looking out like unblinking eyes.  The unornamented black hands move rhythmically but time doesn’t seem to go anywhere in this place as if it were closed off inside the clocks themselves.  Low wooden beams arch up from the corners of every room.

The grumpy barman reaches the bar and ducks behind the counter.  He feels more comfortable here behind the counter, walled away from the people without.  He runs his hand through his thick salt and pepper beard and looks out over the cavernous main hall.  The wooden floor beams are well trodden and the tables are like small islands lost at sea.  He is remembering something. 

He thinks silently to himself.  How long has it been since O’Connell’s was filled with Irishmen, fishermen in from the sea, or farmers in from the fields, and before that how long since it was just a cottage in the village?  He pulls a pint and thinks, It’s good for business anyways.  He sets the pint down to rest and gazes back into the gloomiest corner where two foggy figures sit.  One chews a wooden pipe.  The faint clicking of his teeth on wood is the only sound between them.  Neither of them look at each other.  The man with the pipe is much older.  The younger man is a very tall.  Tall enough that he looks awkward sitting on the worn barstool; almost like a grown man sitting on a child’s chair.  One can’t be sure of exactly what either of the men is thinking.  For they both seem to be staring at something far off that they can’t quite make out.  The young man begins to tap his foot on the edge of his stool.  The old man clears his throat, and there is an interminable moment in which both sit, but say nothing.

A light flickers and a fly lands at table’s edge.  The younger man speaks quickly and all of the sudden.  He rushes as if he’ll forget what he’s meant to say before he finishes, or maybe he’s nervous or even scared, yes he does seem frightened of something, as if what he says will have some grave consequence.  “Father, I’d like to write a story about Jim.”  The old man flinches, but doesn’t seem to hear him as his eyes dart after the fly’s buzzing.  His hand thunders down against the table and the buzzing is gone.  The young man repeats himself, his voice quivering, “Father, I’d like to write a story about Jim.”  The old man’s hooded eyes close and open.  They seem to focus for the first time.  “Jim.”  Their voices are very different.  The young man’s voice tremors and his accent is hard to pick out.  It is flat and high-pitched while the old man speaks with a gruff rasping voice.  “Jim,”  He says it again as if this word has been ripped from some hidden place.  His voice holds some ancient flavour and as he speaks it’s as if some window to past is opened. 

“Yes, Jim.”  The young man is leaning forward and there is some titanic pull between them, something dangerous that promises to tear the entire pub asunder.  For this tide would bring them together or apart dependent on the impulses of man’s heart, and as they sit swallowed by this moment, outside the pub and down the road the sea clashes endlessly against the shore and explodes into white mist.  A squall comes into view and a man with leathery, salt stained skin raises a flag to signal the small village port.  The sky so blue stretches down to the horizon growing darker with each inch until it reaches the sea somewhere far beyond. 

“I know you promised mother.”  The young man’s voice snaps us back from the earth’s edge, but not to a pub.  No, we are now carried to a small bedside table were a candle flame flickers as if it will go out.  The man with the pipe kneels beside the bed, but there is no pipe in his mouth.  A woman is wrapped thickly in layers of blankets.  He is reading her a book.  Suddenly, her shrivelled hand shoots from out of the blankets and catches his.  He strokes her palm softly and whispers, “yes, my darling.”  His voice is weak and different than before.  It hangs in the room limply, bereft of life.  Her mouth is clenching and she speaks in rushed and jumbled sentences, punctuated by gasping breathes.  The room is cold now.  It wasn’t a moment ago, but it is absolutely frigid, a cold that can’t be kept out has descended.  The fire on the other side of the room is blazing, but the heat of the flames is kept only there in the fireplace by the strange presence, cooped up and held off by the dark, and cold.   He begs her not to speak, but she persist, “promise me… you will… not teach them… to write…” She is silent.  There is a great hush that comes over the room.  It is not the absence of voices and sound.  No, it is so complete, silence so deep that it could swallow the world, and when he groans and screams everything is shattered and we fly out to sea to escape one man’s grief. 

--

Years of wondering give us no answers to our questions and we are carried back through time and into land by an albatross.  Who lands on a rock where a little girl has thrown bread crumbs.  The little girl watches as the bird scarfs up the crumbs and hops over.  His head bobs quizzically and before the girl can step away his beak snatches the heel of bread she grips in her hands.  All she can do is yell after him as his wings beat the air and he rises up above the harbour.  He glides back against the wind over the Irish sea and then banks and turns in towards land.  To his right the cliffs of Moher stand stoically against the oceans advance, warding off wave after wave of attack.  Craggy rock towers stand out away from the cliffs as if they are running out to the sea, trying to catch their lost brothers the islands that inhabit the bay, but the cliffs themselves sleep as giants waiting one day to wake again. 

The cliffs edge undulates as far as the birds eye can see and at certain points towers of men rise as beacons of presence not to be forgotten in this battle of land and ocean.  Towers were many men, who would have deemed themselves important, have stood and thought of their power, wealth, and petty schemes and then withered in rocky tomb and decomposed into nothingness in what would be a day to the sea.  Beyond the cliffs cattle and sheep graze and horses frolic unassumingly more at peace in their place than any human mind will ever be.

The albatross swoops down and hard to left, away from the cliffs and towards a collection of weather bitten rock structures.  They stand on a slender finger of land that stretches out into the ocean as if pointing out, a harbinger of some going or coming, that has happened or will.  The buildings are few, and they are cuddled together around each other as if to stay warm.  As if their only respite from the temperamental, mood swings of nature is the presence of the others gathered around the main road, which is the only road in the town.  The bird circles from above.  Soaring over the steeple of the town church and eventually coming down to land on the same sill from which our pebble fell minutes before.  Niall Mooney, his back leaned against O’Connell’s front wall, calls up to him as if an old friend has returned, “Ah, well there you are Janey.  Come back to me ye have.  Why don’t ye come down here?  His beard is yellow and face pinched and gaunt.  A family crosses the road to avoid the odd pair, and he talks up to the bird, “It’s like I’m not human Janey.  Maybe we could go out to sea, you and me.  Away from all these odd birds”, as he chatters away the door to the pub creaks and tall, young man steps out.  The old man with the pipe, who now with clearer eye we perceive not as hard and cold, but weary and care worn, stays holding the door.  He retrieves his pipe from his mouth and standing there framed by the doorway looks almost as if he is attached to structure, as if he is an extension of the building, as if his arm resting against the door frame is connected, an outcropping, as if the life force of this places flows into him and he into it.  He does not step out.  “Go and write your story boy.  I’ve finished writing mine and I’ve finished trying to stop you writing yours.  God and your mother forgive me.”  He steps back into the place and the door slowly cuts him in half and then covers him completely, and the tall man is left alone on the step.

Beside him Niall Mooney still leans heavily against the wall.  He is humming some old tune to himself, but grows quiet at the sight of the man waiting at the door.  He addresses him with a sarcastic bow,  “Is that… John… John O’Connell…  Where have ye been old boy.  The tall man, who we’ve found to be named John, doesn’t respond.  He glares at the door with a harsh light in his eye, as if he would like to walk back in and have another word.  The harsh light leaves and his demeanour quickly changes, his facial features relax in a resigned almost tragic way as he stands there, having the entire discussion again in the four walls of his mind.  Niall’s voice scraps and pries its way into his consciousness and suddenly he turns his head.  His mouth widens in surprise.  “Oh, Niall.  Hello, how are you doing these days?”  Niall tosses his head back and lets out a mighty chuckle, his laughter reveals his rotting and missing teeth but somehow at the same time pulls his face tighter hiding deep crevices, lines and wrinkles and stealing years that have found a home on Niall’s face.  “Well, you’re a right American these days John.  Why have you decided to come back to us?  Couldn’t be to see your old man.  He’s as sour as salt water he is…”  Niall makes every impression that he could carry on talking forever, he has that peculiar ability, that gift of the gab, that he could keep talking till the sun went down and his grave is dug.  John mumbles something and crosses the road.  He turns and stands still gazing at the pub for a long time.

His mind is thinking furiously.  Pictures, sounds, voices, smells, memories whirl through his mind like thrown out spools of film.  A family standing in front of the pub, but it is not a pub.  It is a house, a cottage, but maybe the biggest cottage in the town.  A man and woman are shoulder to shoulder and in front of them three small children.

He speaks softly to himself, “Is this how I should feel seeing it again for the first time?  This feeling of nothing, of emptiness, of dullness.  Should I have come?  Did I expect to feel something... I don’t know…  What did you think you would feel John?  You’ve made a mess of it all, sure you have.  You can’t go back.  You can never go back… homesick for places and things that cannot be anymore… What did you really want from it all.”  His brow is tensed, but his whole body rests in a listless, drooping fashion.  His arms hanging at his sides.  His shoulders slumped as if at any moment they could run smoothly off his torso.  As he concentrates, he feels that he is on the cusp of something and this is what frustrates him so.  He is trying so hard to will it all back again, to feel what it felt like, to see through a child’s eyes, to peer through that hazy, soot covered window that has now been covered over by brick on the other side, and at first he rubs at it with his sleeve, but it doesn’t come clean, and suddenly he notices the latch isn’t locked and his heart leaps.  His fingers pry and pull the window open but behind it his view is obscured, and in frustration and lost hope he pounds his head against the wall that has been erected, and he knows that behind the wall there are places he can no longer go, and it is this feeling of loss that numbs him.  That covers the anger, sadness, joy and multitude of other feelings that flow freely in his subconscious self, another ocean of myriad currents.  He is held there by these tides on the edge of this inexplicable something and the unknown burden promises to crush him.  For as a child feels homesick an adult can no longer feel.  He is lost in this ocean on land.