The End of Its Course

There’s an island on estuary that used to be inhabited.
Not many families. Just enough.

They guided ships through the channel. They survived hardship. They never left.

People said it was skill.
Older people said it was a bargain.

Now the island is empty.
The last man from that line still works the river.

And on certain nights, when the weather turns and no pilot boats go out, ships are told to wait.

Because if the payments stopped…
something else may have started.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:39

I'll tell you a story now from the Shannon estuary, out nearing the end of its course. You'll have seen him yourself, I'd say. You ever walk by the pier at odd hours. You might not have noticed him, mind you, although he's not a man the eye slides off easily. Pale and slender looking man, the kind of skin that freckles easily when it isn't burnt by the wind, a sturdy head on him, and a receding inferno of impossibly red hair crowning it all. Aging, but like salt and paprika rather than pepper. Brown jacket, maybe a cap. A face he'd have drawn for you if you told a particularly unimaginative child, man from here, and given no further instructions. Maybe you know his sort. For his own reasons he never married. He lived with his mother until she died, and the house settled into the comfortable shape of his habits. Of dirt that goes unseen, but never mounts to squalor. He waits his shift out with the pilot house, tacitly plying his trade, whatever the tide or weather brings, leaving to steer the enormous freighters and comes back just as quietly. Sits at the counter. One pint, I've never seen him take more than two, never in the snug where strangers sit, always taking that place at the bar which only welcomes men to him who can hold company in silence, or don't dare fathom beyond a comment on the weather or the price has got in the mart this season. First name you hear once and forget because it suits him too well. He is, they say, the last child ever born on the island. The other one, the one that sits in the estuary of the river like a stone in a throat. You can see it from most places in the town. Though the view by the crypts of the old graveyard at sunset is the one I would most commend to you. Low and long with the tower standing up like an accusatory thing. And the old church walls and the scatter of other ruins. You know the one I mean, and I don't need to name it. Is people came from there? That said openly enough. In the parish here they'll point at a recessed chin and say Island stock and leave it at that. As if they were that much better. On the far bank they're less kind. They talk about inbreeding. Cousins marrying cousins, heads a bit inuscu, old blood gone stagnant. They'll tell you that's why the family never thinned out in bad years. Because they'd plenty of children, and they all stayed in the one puddle. I've never heard or read any truth to it. I think it's purely grown out of old and jealous lies. It's mainland talk, and it doesn't try to understand. The real truth is much different, and much older, and makes much less sense. Which is why no one is saying it. You know the old story about the island. Every child that ever so much has passed through a national school desk in the area will have heard some take on it. The monk saying to Kem with his bell and staff and set up his little kingdom there, mitered and metered. You'll be told he was holy. You'll be told he was fierce, you'll be told he forbade females of any kind on the island. No women, no cows, no hens, not even a she cat. It was always taught as a kind of quaint extremity, a joke to show how serious they were in those days. No one ever asks what he was afraid of. You can look in the old books if you can find them. The annals talk of a monster in that part of the river. They call it by different names a great beast, a serpent, a thing in the water that troubled the boats. In one story the saint rings his bell and the monster goes away. In another, an older one, less repeated. He doesn't get rid of it, he only settles. He gives it a place, he gives it a time, he gives it its portion. That's how deals are made on islands and coasts. The monks there once were not just praying, they were negotiating. Later on, when the monasteries were pulled down and plundered, and the lands divided and the new churches planted themselves on the old roots and called themselves eternal, they didn't give up that place. It stayed a bishopric on paper long after there was no point. No people living there all year. No real parish to speak of. Only ruins and the odd summer pilgrimage and the bones of saints in the stories. Yet still, up the line, far off on another island, in the New World, there's a bishop with a title drawn from a rock in the middle of this river. You think that's an accident, or some mysterious quirk of the canon courts. It isn't. There were families on that island right into the last century. Not many, three or four names. They had rights older than the state, maybe older than states. They had the right to pilot ships in and out, the right to property, to collect and carry, the right to be the sole ones who knew the sandbanks like their own fingers. In the worst of the famine when the rest of the country was being eaten alive or leaving to avoid it, they did neither. That is on there in black and white, between the lines on the records. They were short and hungry and scared, but they didn't get wiped out. People said it was because of the pilots' wages, or their fishing, or smuggling, or some secret English favour, the usual soup drinking canards. People always reach for the smallest explanation that will cover most of their own discomforts, have you ever noticed? There's another way of understanding. The island families were bound by an oath, older than any charter, older than any old bull from Rome and Plumund, Normandy or London. They were the ones who kept the bargain with the thing in the water. They gave it what it needed, so that it would not take down what it wanted. Grain at first, then beasts, then in hard years, something that wouldn't be counted in livestock records. Human sacrifice is a word that sounds like a bad film if you say it out loud. So we don't say it. We say there were drownings. We say people were lost in the river. We say he fell in and leave it at that. The currents are wicked there. The sands shift. The fog comes down like a curtain. A person could be ten feet from the bank and gone, the river has its conveniences. Our man, the last child, was born into that line. His father was of the island, his mother too, though from another of the families. Because even when you're party to an ancient covenant with a thing that moves under the tide, you still have to worry about what the neighbors will say. He was the last because by the time he was of age to be asking questions the island was emptied. They say his father drank, and had more than the usual hardness in him. They say his uncle didn't. They say it was the uncle did the real work on the river. And the father was kept for certain nights. Once or twice a year there'd be a bell rung from the old church. Not the saint's bell. That was gone centuries. Filed away in some sub basement shelf in the British Museum. What the Vikings couldn't find would be often taken away in the name of archaeology. A newer bell in the same shape though, and the sound of it was not like other bells. It was lower, thicker, like someone speaking through your bones. On those nights no one from the mainland went near the shore if they could help it. They knew to stay away by their own instincts. On the mainland, they like to snidly spread their rumors. They don't talk about the way the tide ran wrong those nights. The boy grew up between the island and the town, school on the mainland, summers back on the rock, he would have seen the bones of Naby spun around by nettles. He would have run his hand over the old carved stones where monsters curl like river eels around saints. He would have watched his uncle stand at the end of the jetty and stare out to a point in the channel as if waiting for a reply. When the island was finally utterly emptied, the families took those mainland houses they'd been eyeing up for years. Some went up the river, some down, some scattered across the world by the usual means. A couple of them went across the sea altogether, to England and further, where the rivers have their own monsters and no one cares who you are. Our man's family settled on this side, a small house, a bit of a yard. Oddly, one of the few places in the town you can't see the river, even if you stood in the wall. The father didn't last long away from the island. Some men need a particular wind in their lungs. He took to the bottle and well, the bottle took to him and that was it. The mother abided. The uncle stayed close to the river. He took the boy out with the pilots, as the law allowed, and the boy learnt the river the way his people always had. He grew up quiet, not shy, just careful with speech, the reservation of island people run aground. You'll see him now sometimes on the pilot boat, standing in that favourite pose of men who work on water, hand on the rail, knees a little bent, weight reading the waves more than his eyes. He goes out even in rotten weather. The captains know and trust him. He knows every part of the river like it's his own fingers, because his fingers are the rivers in a sense. A bargain is a two way thing. The gossip, of course, has not stopped. New versions of old sneers. If you go up to the town across the river from here, there's a lad who'll tell you after three pints that they're all mad into each other over there, which he thinks is a joke, and moreover, he thinks is the whole story. The lad has never been further out in the estuary than the car ferry. He thinks the middle of the river is the same as its banks. The old ones, if you get them on their own, they'll tell you something different. They'll say the island folk kept us safe from it. They'll make a face when they say the name, like a taste of iron and salt. If you ask them what it is, they'll answer in images. A black back rolling just under the surface on a calm day, a patch of water that slows and quickens. A wake with no boat, a shadow that moves against the tide, things like that. They'll tell you there were fewer wrecks in the old times than there might have been, fewer drownings, fewer unexplained disappearances. It got what it was owed, one woman told me, from them, not from us. What she didn't say was what she meant by what it was owed. She didn't need to. If you say, as some clever ones do now, that human sacrifice is an invention, that the monks made it up to scare people, that Rome would never tolerate such a thing, that the church kept the island as a bishopric only for reasons of paperwork and tradition. An auxiliary bishop to the Archdiocese of New York City, would you mind? And the old ones will nod and not argue. There's no point, they'll say, in convincing someone who has never heard the dint of a bell on a dark, moonless night with a spring tide. People who have never watched the river lift like a back under a blanket will think the world is as flat as their own imaginations. So there it is. An island with a bargain, a family that kept the bargain, a line that held through hunger when the other lines broke. A child born of that line, the last cradled in a house where the wind never stopped. Grown now into an aging lone man with a steady hand on a tiller. And here is the part that sits with me and doesn't settle. He has no children, nor has his uncle who is older again. There are no younger cousins coming up or down the river. No more babies from the isle. The cottages out there stand empty except in summer when tourists come and walk the monastery, trample the weeds and mud over the monastic and insular parish graves and remark that it's peaceful. Peace is sometimes only absence of alarm to people who are never warned of anything. You'd say that's good. No more dark pacts, no more special estuarian knights, no more families carrying a weight that's not of their making or their taking. Let it all stop. Let the river be just a river and the island be just a ruin for postcard. But I'm not sure it will. A bargain is a two way thing. When one side stops paying, the other side is free. What happens if it looks up some night and realizes the old bell isn't being rung? The old words are not being spoken, the small offerings have not come for a generation. Does it curl back into whatever dark gods made it? Or does it start looking along the banks again for its due? Not just the island back. All of them. You'd think you'd notice from here if the middle of the channel rose up one dark winter evening and moved against the tide. You'd think there would be warnings and sirens and a line on the news. You'd think they'd close the ports and call the coast guard and maybe even the navy. You'd think the big ships would turn around and wait outside until someone explained. I think about the last child of the island, standing on the pilot boat, watching the voys swing and needing no instruments to track his river. Knowing to an inch where the safe water is and where the drop comes. I think about his uncle in the little house, listening in his sleep for a bell that hasn't rung for years. I think about how small they are against the black weight of the river, how small we all are. Maybe nothing will happen. Maybe the thing in the water has forgotten us. Maybe it's content with seals and salmon and lost containers off foreign ships. Maybe the stories were always a way of saying the tide is dangerous and we must respect it. Maybe. There are nights, mind you. Wild nights. The kind that tear slates and set cattle bawling. When the fog comes in low and thick, and even the lights in the far bank look like they've been drowned and hung up again. On those nights you will see no pilot boat out. Even when a foreign ship edges in close and calls for one on the radio, the office will say the pilots can't go. Conditions are bad. Anchor where you are and wait for morning. If you stand on the pier in that weather, and no one in their right mind does, you might see a shape move where no boat is. Something long and smooth and patient, passing below the surface, where the current is not water where it ought to be. You might hear underneath the howl of the wind a sound not unlike a bell. A very old one. Rung slowly, not by human hand. Or you might see nothing at all. Which is the more frightening? I sometimes wonder that the bargain is still in force, or that it's not. Either way, it's at the end of its course.