O’Shea said he wasn’t going, and he didn’t, but everyone else on the island went, and I was almost left behind when I got down to the pier, and all the punts had departed and were crossing the sound, everyone on their way to Gortahork for the Graveyard Mass. Tom McFadden and his wife Eileen came down the path toward the pier. Tom with his big rigid inflatable and 200 horsepower engine could cross Magheraroarty Sound in less than five minutes if the water was not choppy. They took me with them. Except for O’Shea, somewhere at the back of the island collecting winkles this morning, there was no one left on the island. Though he is the most persisting of the islanders - earliest in in March, last to go ashore as days shorten in Autumn - there is something of an outsider still in John O’Shea. He was adopted into the island. He has fond memories of the people that raised him, but he is the present of an uncertain past - his parents may have been Kerry people, but “they went missing during the war”. The Colls adopted O'Shea from an orphanage in Dublin and brought him to the island. They had no children themselves and, as was common then, they needed children to help with their farm and fishing work, and to insure security for their old age. They never gave John their surname, though he did inherit their land.
At Magheraroarty, Morris Dan Coll, with Sara and the three boys in the car, found room for me to squeeze in, and gave me a lift the three miles to graveyard at Gortahork. In past times the islanders would cross the sound in their fishing yawls, and walk the distance into Gortahork each Sunday for Mass. Maggie McFadden told me that if the weather was severe, they would all gather at the Scolt n’Altaira, near the eastern end of the island, and one of the older islanders would lead theml in their prayers. Even further back in time, during Penal Times when the celebration of Mass was prohibited throughout Ireland and priests were outlaws, this place - the altar cove - hidden as it was from the mainland to the south- was a place that people from all over Cloghaneely would gather with priest for their prayer. In Gortahork, the graveyard was full of people, each family standing near the graves of their parents, grandparents, namesakes. Hundreds of people were there, and the streets were crowded with cars and more people coming in to the burial grounds. I have none before me that I know of in this place, but my friend, Joe Gallagher, does. I took it upon myself to stand for him by his predecessors. I found his cousin, Wee Jimmy Gallagher, beside the family plot and he welcomed me there. The graveyard is set back off the road, across the street from the Church of Christ the King. It has been much expanded over the generations, and rolls over hills and vales. The voices of a choir singing hymns in Irish could be heard over loudspeakers, but wherever the choir and the priest were, they were out of sight of the hundreds of people standing next to the hundreds of graves in this old section nearest the road. After a welcome in English as well as the Irish, from the priest of the loudspeaker, the hymns, and mass and prayers went on only in Irish. I visit my father’s grave in Cape May, less now as the years go by than closer to the time of his death. I drive my mother there when she asks, she always with a tear, and missing him. His body is there alone, though on the headstone, names, and in the grave plot, room for my mother and my sister. His parents are in St. Finian’s, not far from Gortahork, my mother’s parent are buried in Holy Cross cemetery outside Philadelphia. I went there once when I was a boy. Though I drive by Holy Cross Cemetery several times a year, I've not visited my grandparents’ grave since that boyhood visit. I wouldn't be able to locate it without the help of the clerk of the cemetery.
In Iraq, a grave was uncovered and studied by archeologists. It is dated to more than 50,000 years ago, and is one of the earliest finds of human remains that is a burial. There is no doubt that what was found - no random fall of bones - was a carefully accomplished placement of two children after they had died. There are the bones of two children, from the development of their teeth they were no more that 10 or 11 at the age of their death. The bones show that they were carefully arranged. The children were placed adjacent to one another, facing the same direction. On the top sides of the found skeletons, and only on the topside, is the stain of red ocher clay. The nearest site at which red ocher clay naturally occurs is more than 5 miles from the cave in which the children’s' remains were found. Pollen grains were found in the red clay. The roof of the cave protected the pollen all these thousands of years from any moisture falling on it, allowing botanists to identify the kinds of flowers that were placed over the red earth that covered the carefully placed children. It is the pollen of cornflower. The cornflower blossoms only in early summer. The children died in the time of flower blossoming, and those that mourned them, covered them with fertile soil and the possibility of a cornflower's future.
Below me, ten yards off from the Gallagher plot there is an older woman, in a folding beach chair, bereft. Beside her is ungrassed earth, as raw and close as her emotion; the loss clear. Her nearby daughter is by turns sad and stern; stern with the two small children impatient and active, seeing nothing yet to engage them; grown ups standing around amidst these stones, distant sounds and music, a loudspeaker background. The children see nothing yet compelling; their grandfather is as completely gone for them as last night’s sunset. Later they may learn how to keep his future, or maybe not. Maybe they will become like me, able to see the living just, my spirit enclosed in the time and space I possess, none other. Previous Page ~~~ Next Page
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Island
of the Bones 
At
this Gortahork graveyard mass, I am shocked by the atavism,
and the communalism: there are knots of families circling
gravestones, standing over their dead. It is here that I
am able to understand the sense of place that is held so
strongly; how it is that these people -so many of them,
like my father and mother’s parents, flung so far
around the world, grip most fiercely to this edge of earth
and ocean, this field, this very field not another, this
stone and hedge.
I
have been to many funerals, have had to arrange many for
friends, companions, and my father’s. I do it by some
kind of rote. In me, I can rest in union with those people
60,000 years off, which grieved the loss of those children,
and put cornflowers, like we send flowers atop the planted
dead - some hope that death might have a future. But funeral
and graveyard don’t grip me with the kind of strong
necessity I see here in Gortahork graveyard. I know the
rubric, I know the notes, but this music isn’t mine
anymore. I search the graveyard for the part that I understand.
I see Dan Coll, with his children and grandchildren beside
his wife’s grave. And John McGinley, who has become
grief for his son, Denis, that died at sea five years ago.
Such pains I understand. Less do I know the necessity of
the humble standing before the earth that is the dust we
were, the persons we have been, one’s life in the
past.
Joe
Ferry