To the Sea Page 28

  But I wouldn’t go. My arguments were as they ever were; I was home and I’d fought too hard for this home to leave it. I had killed men, some of them good Irishmen who loved this country as much as I did. I could not dishonour them by abandoning the country we had all fought for.

  I dragged my parents and sisters into our arguments and, needless to say, they supported me unreservedly. My father made it clear that it would be treacherous and disrespectful to the dead sons of Ireland for his grandchildren to be taken from their homeland and heritage. Dermot, Connell and Branna were Irish. They had no desire to go to Tasmania. Getha had no hope. In our reproachful bitterness and dreadful silences during those years, I sometimes feared our marriage could not survive.

  Getha fought back, ferocious and uncompromising, reminding me of my promises to her and to her family before our marriage. She understood how I felt about Ireland but she had a home too and she needed to go back to it.

  Getha’s family did not come to visit us. I begged Getha for this compromise, it was such an easy gift to offer on my part, but she would not permit it. She didn’t have to tell me her reasons. She would not expose her mother to what she and Branna were suffering. For my own part, I felt I’d offered enough. I would offer no more than this compromise. It was no compromise at all, of course, but I wasn’t to see the damage I was causing until many years later when it was all too late. My years of suffering were still in front of me.

  By the time Branna was ten years old she had become a troubled little girl. She was terrified of the dark and falling asleep. And in time, the nights became a horror for us all. She could not be pacified. She started walking in her sleep and, on more than one occasion, we found her down on the shore or in the water. She started speaking in a language neither Getha nor I knew. She ranted. She sang the saddest songs with a cadence and melody foreign to my ears. I had not heard music like it. With the dawn came relief and Branna would fall asleep at last. But a young girl cannot suffer all night and sleep all day.

  Dermot and Connell were both at school in Dublin when the worst descended on Branna. I was glad they were away and did not have to witness the destruction of their little sister. She lived in a world of her own. Even Getha could not reach her on the worst days. Branna wandered as if lost through the house talking to herself. Getha could not silence her.

  Branna would scream at Getha and call her terrible names. She screamed that she could never forgive Getha and all the women before her. She accused Getha of failure and blamed her sadness on her. To hear her loved little daughter damn her was a blow Getha could not withstand.

  Branna’s hot anger did not extend to me in those years. With me she was cold and casually indifferent. She drew beautiful pictures, in the palest of blues and greens, overlaid with sharp black runes I did not recognise. Stylised arrows, tridents, candelabras, semaphore flags. Not Gaelic. Not Celtic. Alien but beautiful. I have since come to know them as Icelandic. The language of her father, she said. We struggled on, protecting her and loving her and watching her disappear.

  Getha understood more than me as she too was overwhelmed by the relentless call of the Atlantic. Not to the point of madness and violence, like that which gripped Branna in increasing regularity. But Getha too, struggled to stay in this world. I feared she would lose her will to live. With me. I could feel both my wife and my daughter slipping away.

  But I could not let them go. We argued and abandoned each other to long, lonely silences but we also came together in times of bliss. I knew these times were more than most people ever have and I learned to accept that, while I could not be in that wondrous state all the time, to have it at all was enough. I would not know the terrible toll these years had taken on Getha until she lay dying in my arms, her life cut short by unbearable weariness.

  Shortly after Branna’s thirteenth birthday, I woke in the night to Getha screaming. Just one scream, but it lingered in the air and echoed in my head. It came to me from far away as it woke me from a deep sleep. Before I was fully awake, I knew Getha was in Branna’s room. I ran down the long hallway. I ran as in a dream, slow-motioned as if striding through treacle. No matter how fast I ran, I got no closer. My mother was in front of me running faster than I would have thought her capable of. She outstripped me as I struggled forward.

  When I got to Branna’s room, only my mother was there. The window was open. The white embroidered curtain billowing in the night wind was the only movement in the room. My mother was frozen in the doorway, collapsed against the doorframe, unable to take another step. I don’t know how long I stood there hiding behind my mother but again I heard Getha cry out, this time from outside, below the window. She cried my name.

  At last, I moved over to the open window. In the bright moonlight I could see Branna lying white and limp, broken in Getha’s arms. I could see no movement in her soft bleeding body but I could hear her whimpering. The night was filled with the breathy hollowness of my daughter’s wounded suffering. Even so close to death, she gasped in the unintelligible language of the sea. Getha looked up at me, still standing at the second-storey nursery window.

  ‘Tom. Please,’ she sobbed.

  When all Branna’s broken bones were healed, Getha and I took our damaged daughter and left Mayo. We came to Rosetta. The boys were young men. As hard as it was for Getha and me to accede to their wishes, we did and they remained in Ireland to finish their educations.

  Finally, and only when I had lost all but the faintest remnants of my happy beautiful little daughter, did I behave as the father she deserved.

  My reduced family of three arrived in Tasmania to begin another new life. My life has been lived in distinct chapters and, like all good chapters, each was a surprise to me as it began and ended. Hobart had changed little in the almost twenty years since I had lived here as a boy. Getha and Branna settled at Rosetta while I set us up in town. I bought the house on Sandy Bay Road, joined a law firm and tried my best to begin a new life.

  Our return came at a difficult time for Getha’s family. Her father was ill and Meara was a shadow of the woman I remembered from my earlier years in Hobart. She had missed Getha more than I had credited and she had suffered knowing what Getha was enduring in Mayo. And the shock of Branna made Getha’s homecoming more of a sadness than the happy reunion I had hoped for. Meara knew more than the others but even she was not prepared for Branna’s deteriorated state. Meara would never forgive me for what I had done to Getha and Branna. She understood why I had been told the story but she did not bother to hide her disgust that, knowing it, I had stayed so long away from Tasmania and the healing safety of Rosetta. I could not defend myself to her and did not try.

  I went down to Rosetta on weekends for those first two months while I was establishing our new home in Hobart, and just before Christmas Getha’s father died. Nothing was normal. None of us could find anything outside our grief at the death and destruction within our family.

  But there was one joy to sustain us: Branna began to heal at Rosetta. She slept for the first time in years. Soft calm sleep that she awoke from in the mornings refreshed and ready to enjoy what the day might bring. The dark circles under her eyes, which had been part of her sad face for so many years, faded away. She came back to us. She stopped talking to herself, her anger faded and she looked at us, spoke to us, hugged us. She embraced Tasmania and all it had to offer. We had arrived in late spring and Branna soon had freckles on her nose from the hot Australian sun. My Irish daughter had shed her old pale worn-out skin and blossomed in her new home. And she laughed. A fresh, spontaneous young girl’s laugh. I had not heard my daughter laugh for more years than I could remember. The sound of a child’s light giggle coming down the stairs from their room or hearing them hum a familiar tune they heard on the radio are small incidentals for most parents, barely noticed in the rush of a happy life, but for Getha and me they were joys to be treasured.

  The voices stopped. They could not find her here. Within months it was almost as if she had neve
r been assailed. She had never been lost to us. She had never screamed, never ranted, never damned us with her hate. She had never jumped and never been broken.

  But the memories of her persecution hung about her. Even I could see it. She was still occasionally haunted by the echo of the voices and the calling and the uncertainty that she belonged in this world. She clung a little too desperately; she tried a little too hard to be a normal young girl. Her memories stilted her actions. They were a lens through which she carefully tried to find her bearings.

  But they were memories and I chose to believe that they would fade. By the time Branna was an eighteen-year-old woman, we dared to dream that she had almost been restored to her old healthy self.

  Branna went to school for the first time here in Hobart. Fahan was a new school then, small and close by. She attended for four years and was happy there. And Getha and I discovered during those years that Branna’s good health was all we needed to be happy.

  I returned to Ireland for a brief time. The boys were growing up without me. Dermot was already at university and in love for the first time. It was clear that neither of our sons wished to leave Ireland. Tasmania held no allure for them. They accepted our need to be here for Branna, even though they did not know the real reason, but they would not be joining us. I accepted the finality of their decision and steeled myself for a life of missing my beloved sons.

  The year after she finished school, Branna met a young fisherman, Don Harding. Don was working with a fleet out of Hobart and had plans to establish his own small fleet. He was a fine young man and, within months of Branna and Don meeting, it was clear what was happening. Getha and I did all we could to disrupt the deepening relationship. Getha in particular did not think Branna was ready to share the closeness marriage requires. Branna was well but, we all knew, not healed. I did not think it was fair to Don and I feared for Branna trying to keep such a secret. I worried that she would not cope with the pressure.

  We did what we could to deter Don and limit Branna’s ability to see him, but love will out and, shortly after Branna’s nineteenth birthday, we accepted the inevitable.

  As Don was so frequently at sea, they came to live in the Sandy Bay Road house with us after their marriage. It is a big house and we were glad to have Branna close. And of course we all spent a lot of time at Rosetta. I liked Don. It was a great pleasure to have a young man about the house again. He was so cheerful and energetic. Hard-working and ambitious. He played footy with his local club. He was light and enjoyed a laugh and the goodness of life. He was a long deep breath of fresh air for us all. He insisted on paying rent and he worked with me in the garden when he was onshore. I was happy to lend him the money to buy his first boat shortly after their marriage.

  He adored Branna and I knew my daughter to be gloriously content with her husband. She would wait for him out on the lawn when she knew he was due back in port. As his boat sailed down the Derwent, he would toot loudly and she would wave and blow him kisses. When he finally got home, he would be running through the gate and she running down the front steps. He would pick her up and they would kiss as if they had not kissed for years and may not again for many more. Don would mutter a brief hello to Getha and me, never letting Branna go, and amidst mumbled apologies, they would run up the stairs to their bedroom. We would not see them for hours. Don came back to shore for Branna and he did not waste any time away from her once he got here.

  Branna was soon pregnant and just one year after they were married, Eva was born. And she was the one. Getha knew Eva the instant she saw her.

  And although we had not known it would happen, Getha and I were not surprised when Branna started to slip away from us again. She embraced motherhood and Eva was a sweet, undemanding baby but, within months of Eva’s birth, Branna was being called again. It started quietly enough and was nothing Branna could not control but once it had started, we were back at the top of that terrible spiral. We did not know how it would spin but we would descend into it, its speed and its depths uncontrolled by us. Getha and Branna had decided not to tell Don Ornice’s story. He would not like it was all Branna said and she was not prepared to do or say anything that could darken her marriage and Don’s love for her.

  Branna and Don spent more and more time down at Rosetta with little Eva. When Branna was well, I think she had a wonderful life. But her troubled days became more frequent and more disruptive.

  By the time Eva was three, Branna was unwell as often as she was well. Don was frantic with worry and sought out medical help from everywhere. The medicos diagnosed Branna with schizophrenia, manic depression and other versions of madness. Treatments were unsuccessful and then sometimes, for no reason at all that any of us could see, Branna would be well and back to her normal happy self for months at a time.

  Don was the very best of husbands and an attentive father. He took on such a role with Eva, so much more than other fathers of the time. He would do anything for Branna. But he had a small fleet and a growing business, he was away at sea a lot. I was busy in my practice in town so Meara, Getha, Branna and Eva spent most of their time together. Branna tried hard to stay well for Don. She forced the calling down and refused to listen to it. Her grandmother and mother strengthened her. The effort fatigued them all but none of them would give in.

  On Eva’s fifth birthday, we were all at Rosetta celebrating. Don was onshore for a week. Branna was unwell. She was lifeless, lying in a deckchair on the front verandah for hours just looking out across the water. The day before Don was due to go back to sea, Branna became hysterical. She begged him not to go, she cried and screamed and hung on to him, tearing at his clothes and trying to hurt him. Perhaps she thought that if he was hurt, he could not go. Eva was terrified. I kept Eva away as the women tried to calm Branna but she could not be calmed.

  Don held his terrified wife and kissed her and stroked her and tried to soothe her with reassurances and words of love. Branna was six months pregnant at the time and he begged her, for the safety of their unborn child, to calm herself. He would return. He always returned. He could not stay away from her for longer than he must. Her torment went on through the night and I could hear her still crying when Don left before dawn the next day.

  Branna fell into a depressive trance for the next six days. She was lost to us all, speaking in the unknown language again and pleading to be left alone.

  On the evening Don was due to return, one of his skippers came to the house on Sandy Bay Road where I was by myself after work. Don had been lost at sea. They did not know how or when exactly he had disappeared. At night. In a big but not so big a swell as to take an experienced boatman like Don. The skipper had no explanation for himself or for me. It happens. It is a risk all fishermen know and accept. Don’s body was never found.

  There was no phone at Rosetta and so the news had to be delivered in person. I knew the police would go down but the old saying was right: what I am afraid to hear, I must say first myself. Branna would hear it from me. There was a strong southerly blowing that evening and it would take me a good eight to ten hours to sail down to Rosetta alone. It was a dark night and I convinced myself that I should wait until the morning. The following morning I almost convinced myself to wait another day until I had the wind but I knew I must go. I went down in the launch and the four hour trip was over before I had formed the terrible words I must say to my daughter.

  Branna miscarried two nights later and we were never to have our darling Branna with us again. She was lost to us inside her own tormented and grieving mind.

  Eva coped as small children do but her father’s death was a tragedy for her. When Eva was still very young, Getha and I despaired that she was being called as she spent so much time sitting on the jetty and looking out to sea. But she was waiting for her father to come back. For several years after Don’s death, Eva cried for her daddy at night and called out to him when she woke frightened. She drew pictures of him and talked about him as if he was at sea and would be back any
day. Getha and I stepped in to be the parents Eva needed.

  We kept Eva out of school for most of her primary years. She did not want to go. She wanted to be near Branna and Branna needed to be at Rosetta. I did not know what damage we were doing to Eva by letting her spend so much time with her mother but it felt too cruel to do anything else.

  Meara died two years after Don and I felt as if my world was shrinking in on me and would inevitably implode, taking me with it. A few years later, I returned to Ireland for a holiday. I was gone for four months and, despite missing Getha, Branna and Eva, I was glad to be back home and away from the terrible pressure of Branna’s world. Dermot and Connell were both married and I spent time with them and their families. Kindea was the balm I needed.

  When I returned to Tasmania, Getha was sick. She had been unwell most of the time I was gone but had said nothing to me in her letters. We were to find out soon after my return that she had cancer and would not be with us for long. Getha was desperate to teach Eva all she needed to know before she died but there was not enough time. Much of Eva’s learning could not happen until she was older and Getha was frantic. Who was going to teach Eva and keep her safe? Getha told me as much as she thought I needed to know but I confess I hardly listened. Watching Getha die was all I could manage. I could not learn about this other life as well. I could not imagine how I would live without Getha and I did not try and prepare myself. I would survive but it was not a life I was much interested in.

  Dermot and Connell came out to be with their mother at the end. For five short weeks, I had my whole family together again. Getha died at Rosetta with all of us with her, talking to her in our own language of love and life and the happiness she had given us all. Eva was held close. She was with Getha when she died.