Blow-in in the Wind

I say I am alone on this bog, but that is not strictly true. From out of the changing populations of farm animals people often emerge. Horses and cows, ponies and donkeys: of course there would have to be ownership upon them as there is upon every scrap of this bog. Even the commonage is tugged at in covetous directions by a whole handful of wary families. But the people here are not obvious. They appear suddenly as figures from a mist in the morning. They rise silently from the reeds. They move slowly along bog tracks, emerging unobtrusively out of rocks and scraw. They are sleight of hand beings. First you do not see them and then you do. They invest the loneliness of the bog with a loneliness of another kind.

These people are not casually in place on the land. They are rooted. When they show they occupy themselves intently with this task or that one as if the survival of the very earth gods depended upon it. Perhaps it does. To fill a gap in a ditch with an iron bedstead could be considered either an act of vandalism or a piece of planned recycling. But then again, their ancestor cast iron blades into sacred pools and propitiated gods who in all probability still lurk today in the blackthorn thicket among the bitter sloes. To me this smacks if not of worship then at least of divine appeasement.

In this corner it is hard to discover what lies behind any action. Life goes on, and I suppose it must seem to have a purpose. I am told there is no profit in cattle. I am also told, in a rhetorical kind of way, for I do not know the answer and am certainly not expected to know it: -but if there is no profit in cattle where does the money come from for a hundred and fifty thousand euros worth of truck and trailer? Don’t ask me. I use a spade and grow beans and potatoes.

To me they are mysterious characters, these emergents from the mist. I know nothing of the social structure in which they are embedded and I am ignorant of their personal histories. Scraps of gossip reach me blown in on the bog wind and shredded and distorted by the journey. But it is I who am the blow-in here and probably I could not even imagine their true stories.
Until only recently they lived far far back in time while I was gallivanting the world and witnessing what has become history.

They lived without electricity, water, telephone. They had an earth floor to walk on, an open fire to warm by, an iron pot to cook in and they shat in the barn. Perhaps. Why should they tell me the truth? Why should they? I myself travelled from far away 35 years ago to kiss the Blarney Stone. Ever since it has stood me in very good stead. You might or might not call me a liar but Truth like any saleable commodity needs to be pampered and arranged to the best advantage if someone is to buy it at all at all. Oh I know! Truth is not for sale! But do you buy that? Do you really buy that? Everything has a price, and so does everyone. It is the Market Economy. So what has a price must be for sale. Market my words. On this island blarney is in the water supply and as endemic as coliform bacteria. Words are alive inside.Children, working their fingers raw and their muscles sore. I see them grown to adulthood and standing before me and sometimes they may speak. About the weather. About their cattle. About their tastes or lack of in vegetables, in shopping, in.....who knows? I am limited in my way and they are limited in theirs. The world is narrow if you want it to be. Narrow is a safe place. Straight and narrow, well that is something else about me and my life. Veiled of course, as everybody veils their life here.

Among these wraiths is Attracta McCabe. Her land is scattered all around the bog like a torn up document. In the same way she scatters her ten cows, moving them daily the way a farmer might scatter his seeds at planting time, from one inherited bog field to another, as if the Land Registry had never bothered to clump them together into usable sizes. She is a strong and handsome woman, beautiful one might say, with a sad faraway look as if she suspects there is a world out there away from the bog, snippets of news of which reach her from time to time, and which she knows she will never experience. She does not drive. She has a large almost grown family who are becoming of the outside world, of college and job and the internet. She cares for them and her husband and her ten coweens.

I see her at evening bringing the cows home, walking along the bóithrín, she and they silhouetted against the evening sky, light stick in her hand, walking with them gently but with the majesty of Queen Maedbh. Sometimes, later, in my headlights, returning from a gathering I come across her lit up in her reflective jacket by my beam like a sudden lighthouse, cowering blinded back into the drain as we meet, she returning from putting them away for the night or checking a broken ditch. Beautiful and sad.

Schwantz has encountered her too. His eyes glitter when they meet.
–How is my sweet honeysuckle of the lane, he whispers, listening to be sure his voice does not carry over the bog amphitheatre to her family house or the conch-eared neighbours tuned to every variation in a frequency that scarcely changes from one moment to another.
– The Queen of the Bogland with her prize bulls! The divil is in him then. I hear him. He is on his way here and a whisper is louder than the wind down my slope.
I do not know her thoughts. She moves with the cows year in year out like the swaying of the ash branches, in tune with the place, but not unmoved by the wind. She balances on a fine edge. It would be cruel to tip her. To set her wobbling.