Thomas Murphy Read Free

wisdom, in my young experience. Everyone on Inishmaan was crazy as a loon, myself not excluded, and that was true, perhaps especially, of the times they seemed stable. It helped to remember when you were holding a normal conversation with Big Head Flaherty, for instance, that normality was an anomaly, a break in Flaherty’s regular weather, and that this was the same guy who shot his cow because, as Flaherty explained it, the cow had made a joke about the size of his head. I started to tell Ms. Hellman that she should visit Inishmaan to prove her point in spades. But I didn’t have the nerve to interrupt her, as she was chatting away with John Berryman, who looked okay to me.
    I WASN’T CRAZY. I just wanted to be alone, which may have seemed crazy on an island where most everyone was alone already, and that itself was alone. In school I failed every subject except solitude. Straight As in solitude. Since my school provided no teacher for that course, I had to award the grades to myself. I wrote no papers or exams, but I created some oral myths involving monks, tigers, lilac milk, and a magical three-legged stool. And another whopper about a day they dropped a giant turfon the island. All my stories were well thought of in my set, if I say so myself. Of course, I was the only person in my set, which necessitated my saying everything myself. I was a good listener, though. At night (most of the solitude classes were taught in night school), I would go down to the beach and listen to the shifts of the tides. Then I would rhyme the stars. Stars rhyme, if you give them half a chance.
    One day, I took a walk toward no destination. The Atlantic unraveled in welts in the just-risen sun, and gravel glittered in the road, on which there was no one but nine-year-old me. I kept walking, past rain pools and speckled birds and flimsy weeds, blowing slightly. Everything was still. My breath was still. At a peak in the road, I came upon a fox, bright red and alert, stopped in his tracks. I too stopped, twenty feet or so from the fox. The redness of his nose merged with the white fur around his mouth. The points of his ears were tan, his eyes black and steady. And there we stood for who knows how long. A minute? A year? Our face-off, begun in apprehension, settled into a kind of understanding upon which no other creature intruded—not the cows in the rocky fields below us, or the sheepdog on the threshold of Doyle’s cottage, or the terns. I recall no thought, no decision. I cannot speak for the fox. Then, at what seemed an agreed-upon moment, we turned away from each other, each proceeding in the direction whence we’d come. I did not turn tolook at him again. But that night, in my bed close to the turf fire, I dreamed of a red bruise disappearing into the hills, and the furnace of his tail.
    OONA SPOKE OF CREMATION . She preferred it to rotting in the ground, she said. Many do. And you? she said. What will it be, Murph. Earth or flames? Flames, I said. Like you, I’d rather be ash than Donne’s bracelet of bright hair about the bone. And besides, I said, cremation won’t require much of a transition. You’ve already given me the fire, darlin’. You too, said my hot little number.
    SINCE THERE WERE ONLY 160 people living on the island, I used to count them. Every month or so. I would walk from house to house, completing the job in a day, or sometimes in a morning, if no one had died or was born after I got past his house, or was missing at sea. I made my tally in a spiral notebook, recording the names of every islander as neatly as I could, and writing the first and last names of everyone, including those in the same family. I’m not sure why I undertook this project, but taking my little census gave me a feel for the whole island. I hated the place, but I didn’t want to lose anything about it either.
    Afterward I’d climb down the escarpment to the beach with my notebook, and read the