Whale Fall

I was born on the island on 20th January 1920. My birth certificate read 30th January 1920, because my father could not get to the registration office on the mainland before then. There was a great winter storm and no one could leave the island. When we were finally able to cross, my mother used to tell me, the beach was covered in jellyfish, like a silver path of ice. My mother survived the birth, thank Jesus, because no one could have come to help her.

The island was three miles long and one mile wide, with a lighthouse marking the eastern point and a dark cave marking the west. There were twelve families, the minister, and Polish Lukasz who worked in the lighthouse. Our house, Rose Cottage, was set into the side of a hill, where the wind wrapped a fist around it. Tad said the army should have made tanks out of our windows, the way they stood against the weather. The glass had warped and splintered in places but still held fast to the frame. In the bedroom, at night, you could hear our neighbours’ goats calling out to their young through a crack in the pane, and sometimes you could see a candle in their house burning like a coin balanced on the top of the hill.

-

Tad always called me by the dog’s name. On the day of the whale, he passed me in the yard, calling for the dog. I was trying to clear dust from the hearth-rug, but watched as it formed a silvery layer over my clothes instead. I had to bat the midges away from my eyes.

"I’m going on the boats, Elis," Tad said.

"Manod," I said. "Not Elis. Elis is the dog’s name."

"I know, I know that."

He waved me away. He headed down the path towards the sea. His rubber boots made a sucking sound on each step.

"That’s what I said," I heard him say. "Manod. That’s what I said."

On the other side of the yard, Tad dried mackerel by stringing them up on a line. He loved the dog: there was one section of dried fish just for him. My father barely spoke to me or my sister, but at night I heard him mumble long conversations with Elis. In the yard, Elis ran circles sniffing at the lichen between the slabs of stone, barely stopping, barely looking up at me. I cut a fish down for him, and he ran into the hawthorn ungratefully, sending up a small cloud of dried dirt and leaves.

I rubbed at a smear on my dress. It was an old one of my mother’s, dark flannel with loose threads trailing at each hem. Mam made her own clothes and then taught me. She made them practically, with wide pockets and space for moving around. I liked to copy the patterns in the magazines women left behind in the chapel. Mainland trends. From them I realised most people on the island dressed ten years behind everywhere else. Sometimes suit- cases were washed up the shore and in them I found old garments to wear or take apart for the material. I found a ballgown once, with only a small tear at the hip, in anemone-red silk. It had a small pocket on one side, and out of it came a gold-plated powder compact, shaped like a scallop shell. The powder puff was still orange from contact with its owner’s skin.

-

Our neighbour appeared soon after Tad left, his clothes and hair dripping. I could see him come over the hill to where his wife was milking one of their goats. I could smell him from where I stood, the damp of his sheepskin jerkin and his soaked shirt beneath. His wife ran to him and cupped his face. I felt awkward watching them, and stood combing my fingers through my hair. I could hear snatches of what he told Leah: We thought it was a boat. Do you think it’s a bad sign? I watched Leah’s hands stiffen, the breath catch in her throat.

-

Not one person on the island knew how to swim. The men did not learn how, and so neither did the women. The sea was dangerous and I suppose we had lived with its danger too long. A popular saying amongst them: Out of the boat and into the water. Out of the frying pan into the fire. Out of the boat and God help you.

There used to be a king on the island, who wore a brass crown. When he died in the previous decade, no one wanted to do it anymore. Most of the young men had been killed in the war, or were trying to get a job on the mainland. The ones left were too busy on the fishing boats. So it goes. According to my mother, the women were not asked.

-

My sister spread butter over bread with her fingers, eating the bread and then licking her fingers one by one. You’re too old for that, I told her, and she stuck out her tongue at me. I poured tea into three cups on the table, and watched it steam.

Llinos turned the cup around in front of her, as though inspecting it from every angle. She combed her fingers through her hair. I thought of something my mother used to say about us: Ni allaf ddweud wrth un chwaer oddi wrth un arall. I can’t tell one sister from the other. There are six years between us, but only one of us is still a child, so that is no longer true.

"What’s the English word?" I asked her.

"I don’t know."

"Yes, you do."

Llinos gulped her tea, and winced. "Hot," she said.

"It’s whale."

I looked over to Tad to support me. I had been trying to improve Llinos’s English all summer but she was stubborn. Tad sat with his head hanging back, his eyes closed. One hand in his lap and the other holding Elis’s muzzle. His clothes were drying in front of the fire, mixing the smell of laundry with the smell of fish. Ours was a small front room: space for a table, chairs, fire and a small dresser. The dresser was covered in drips of candle wax. Tad had taken out his dental plate with its three pearlescent teeth, and left it in the centre.

By the door was a bucket with the lobsters he had caught that day. In the silences of our conversation, I could hear them move in the water, claws scraping against the bucket’s metal side. I watched a shadow rise and fall on the other side of the room, and realised it was my hand. I collected the plates and asked Tad if he had seen the whale.

"Out at sea," he said, rubbing a calloused patch on his knuckles, "normally you see more than one."

"Didn’t Mam used to talk about whales?" Llinos said.

Dark turn. "Surely they are bad luck."

"You sound like a mad old woman," I said.

I cleared our plates, gave the scraps to Elis on the floor. Tad held my wrist after I took his cup, then moved his hand over mine.

"Marc was asking after you today. Said how nice you looked at chapel."

"And what did you say?"

Tad shrugged.

"I told him to ask you."

"You can tell him no, I don’t want to." Tad sighed and looked at his hands.

"You should be thinking about getting married. It doesn’t have to be Marc. It could be Llew."

"I’m eighteen."

"The time goes fast." His voice softened. "I can’t have you here forever."

"Who would look after Llinos?"

Elis had reared up onto his hind legs next to Llinos’s chair, twisting his head to lick up crumbs from the table. Llinos turned and caught his front paws. She stood up next to him, so that they looked like a couple dancing. They swayed from side to side, and Elis opened his mouth wide and panted.

I looked at the bottom of my cup. The milk had formed a film over the surface and puckered, like a strange kiss.

-

In the night I dreamt of a long dinner table, with whales dressed in formal clothes laughing over their plates. I was with them, in a dress I saw in a magazine once, made of pear-green silk, and a hat with a long white feather. After- wards they danced and I could not say how they were moving, if they were on the tips of their tails or sliding from side to side, just that I was lifted from my feet and spun and spun around. The ceiling was made of lace and velvet, and slowly fell down to me.

-

I had only been a month away from school. The school was in an old farm building owned by the chapel, large enough for the ten or so children on the island to be taught in its two rooms. We had a desk each, damp wood, and mostly read the Bible. Sister Mary and Sister Gwennan came for a few months at a time, in between teaching at a school on the mainland. The books they brought us had stamps in the front cover reading Our Lady of the Wayside in faded gold lettering. We wore white on special days like St Dwynwen’s day.

I had a friend at school. Rosslyn sat next to me for ten years and then went to the mainland to marry a quarry worker in Pwllheli, a man with a pink face and an unkind mouth. Rosslyn had met him a few times before she left, visiting his town when her father rowed to the mainland market. At the back of the classroom she confided in me about his meaty breath, the things he said to her. On the day she left the island for good, her father had filled his small boat with flowers and grass. His crying could be heard from the dunes. Rosslyn had curly hair and a round face that shone always with sweat. I always thought she looked like a model I had seen once, on a small card that came with a bar of soap. She sent me a letter after she married; saying she missed me, that she lived in a house with an indoor toilet. The end of her letter asked me what I was doing, and what I planned to do. I had not replied.

I was good at school. Sister Mary called me "bright" and let me visit her on Saturdays, where she would show me large maps and let me borrow her English novels. When one of the boys applied to a university in England, he asked Sister Mary to check his application, and Sister Mary asked me to do it. I left two spelling mistakes in on purpose, but he still got a place. He said that he would write to me about it, but he never did. His mother showed me a photograph of him on a boat on the river, wearing a long black coat. I had begged to keep the photograph, not because of the boy in it but because his face was slightly washed out, meaning that I could pretend the person in the boat was me.

On the last day of school my teacher had not even said goodbye. She said, I’ll see you at the market.

-

The tide was high. Tad’s tide calendar, the one he would leave behind for us, did not say that it would be. The calen- dar was typed out on pink paper, and he was given a new one every season when he visited the mainland. He said he did not need it, judged the tide by sight like his own father had. I did not like to remind him of the times he had been incorrect, when he had come home with damp trousers and shoes filled with sand.

I walked down to the beach to see the whale for myself. When I walked alone I liked to daydream, sometimes about working for a wealthy family on the mainland as a seamstress, or being a nun somewhere in Europe, living in a tall white tower in a city square. In my head I recited Bible verses in an English accent, and made the shape of each word with my tongue.
I followed the people to find the whale. The cove was flat and I could see bodies crowded together. The sand was damp and sucked at my shoes.

In the water, where the rocks were covered in waxy black and yellow seaweed, four men were guiding a bull onto a boat to take it over to the mainland. One walked circles behind it, guiding it forwards. Another stood in the water, next to the centre of the boat, ready to grab it by the horns and hold it still. One waited inside the boat with a coil of rope around his shoulders, ready to attach the bull to an iron ring in the hull. The bull walked slowly, flicking its head. When the man on the beach came closer to it, the bull kicked up its feet. The bull was black, with a thin white stripe down its nose, a bright fissure.

When I passed the men, the one on the beach stopped and turned to face me. He took his hat from his head and did a funny little bow. I ignored him, and the other men laughed. The boat swayed, and the bull ran past them. It ran into the water, and the men cried out. I walked on faster, listening to their shouting, the waves, the bull’s snorting.

The water was pale brown, and the froth reminded me of when Tad boiled sheep heads on the stove, fleece around the rim of the pan. I watched it come closer to my feet, only inches away, and retreat back again. I hated when water got into my shoes.

As I got closer to the crowd of people around the whale, I saw that there were birds there too, flying in circles and diving at something. One flew right over my shoulder, carrying something in its beak. A boat had been left on its side in the sand, and a cat slunk out from the hull and hissed at me.

I weaved through the people. The rushing of each wave revealed the body of the whale, gigantic and curled against itself. I thought of the way I would tell my sister about it when she returned from school, committing the sight of it to memory, the dark hull of its spine and the fringe of its
mouth, bronze in the low-coming light.

-

Walking back, I turned and thought I saw my mother standing in the middle of it all. She bent down and touched something. There was fog around her hair and shoulders. Her woollen clothes looked wet. When I looked later the rocks were covered in white lichen, its fronds shaped like minuscule hands.