THE VALIANT MAN

THE VALIANT MAN

It all happened a long time ago, in the village of Trí Ghaoth, or Three Winds, not far from the town of Ballybunion, where the River Shannon disgorges its muddy torrent into the North Atlantic. I used to spend my summer holidays there, in a whitewashed cottage surrounded by a stone wall, with Grandad Liam, Grandma Rosin, and six bleeping sheep. Sharkie, the dog, kept us company for some years until he died in his sleep at the grand age of eighteen.

Trí Ghaoth certainly lives up to its name. If anything, it is swept by twenty gales that play tug-of-war with people’s hair, knock tiles off roofs, and, when extra furious, uproot bushes and overturn fishing boats. Sculpted over the millennia by rain and storms, the Trí Ghaoth coast is jagged and rocky, with hardly a tree in sight. But towards the interior, the land is lush, with streams full of trout and salmon and grasslands teeming with wildlife.

The sea near the village is ravaged by whirlpools, currents, and powerful channels that drag the unsuspecting swimmer away from the coast. The people who have lived along those shores for centuries are mainly fishermen, shellfish catchers, and small farmers. Winter or summer, when they don’t plant potatoes, cabbages, or carrots, they drag their little dinghies to the harbor and let them plow the furious swells while praying for a catch. Sometimes, they come back with nets full of fish. Sometimes, they return empty-handed. But whatever the result, the next day they start all over again, trying to eek a meager living for their families.

Because the ocean around Trí Ghaoth is so stormy and unpredictable, many local women have lost a husband or a son to the cold embrace of the water. Among them was my grandfather Liam, who had told me the story of O’Shea, who was a valiant man.

I must have been fifteen that summer, but even now, forty years later, I remember Grandma Rosin setting off for the shore armed with only a pair of binoculars and her hopes. She’d sit on the beach for hours, looking at the horizon, wishing for the boat to appear with all her might, heralding her husband’s safe return. But the boat never came back, and neither did we find his body; the sea swallowed him along with the rest of the crew. The only thing that remained were his stories, which I keep cherishing and storing like loose rosary beads in my memory.

“It’s Pooka’s fault,” Granma said after she had shed a river of tears, exhausted acres of hope, and put away the binoculars with reluctant resignation.

“Pooka?”

“Yes. Grandad said he’d seen a dark, sleek horse with a long, wild, flowing mane and luminescent eyes galloping along the shore, but I knew it was a Pooka. They are shapeshifters, you know, and pure evil. They can turn into anything they want—a dog, a stallion, or whatever they fancy.”

She was convinced Grandad drowned because he had met one of those malevolent beings.

"They are devilish creatures—they always bring bad luck. I warned him not to sail for a while, but you know what he was like – stubborn like a mule. He never listened, and now….”

She did not finish, and her voice trailed into utter sadness.

Daideó Liam, as I used to call him, was a great narrator, an inexhaustible fountain of tales. He said he had learned the art of storytelling from his athair baistí or godfather.

In the evenings, after dinner, he would first take out his fiddle and tin whistle and flood the cottage with “Drops of Brandy," “Bonnie Kate," or “Kelly of Killanne." And when his hands and fingers got tired, when all that could be expressed by music had been said, he told me tales.

On a cold August evening, with the wind howling and slamming a veil of rain against the roof, I heard the story of O’Shea of Kerry for the first time. We sat in the kitchen by the fire when Daideó Liam began weaving his tale.

“O’Shea of Kerry was a valiant man and not an eejit,” he started.

“Handsome as a prince, he was also the wealthiest fisherman in the village, and his boat was so big that it could easily hold ten people and still keep afloat. With black hair and blue eyes, he could have married any girl he fancied. They all followed him whenever he boarded the boat and waved their handkerchiefs until he was well out of sight.

But they did not do for O’Shea, not a single one. His pride was too great to choose a local girl. Many came and went, turned away by his unreasonable expectations. People said that girls flocked from far and near, from towns and villages, on horseback and by train. There was even one who came on a big steamship from the Great Country across the ocean, where yellow-haired men ate buffalo meat, wore wide-brimmed hats, carried pistols and bullet-studded belts around their waists, and called themselves cowboys.”

O'Shea's eyes were set on someone entirely different—no simple mortal for him. One day, casting his nets, he caught a glimpse of the most beautiful creature—a mermaid, no less—with a river of green hair and a glimmering fishtail.

“She will be mine—mermaid or not!” he said, and, not a man to surrender, he decided that no matter what, she would live with him as his wife.

Sparks crackled and spat in the stove, the lid on the boiling kettle tinkled, and steam puffed while I listened to Grandad’s story.

“Many a night, he sailed deep into the sea, waiting for the mermaid to appear. Whenever a flicker of a tail split the water nearby, he threw the nets, each time coming up empty-handed or, at most, with a handful of sardines and mackerel. Until one day, by chance, sailing past an outcrop of rocks close to the shore, he spotted a green mantle spread on the stones like seaweed curls. He knew the mantle belonged to the mermaid and that without it, she would become a simple mortal, indistinguishable from the girls waving their goodbyes. She would never be able to return to her underwater kingdom.”

“This is my only opportunity; there will be no more. It is now or never,” O’Shea whispered, and, despite the danger of crashing against the rocks, he edged closer to the shore. Water made lapping sounds against the boat's sides, which dipped dangerously in the choppy sea as if pulled by invisible but powerful hands from underneath. But O’Shea would not give up. He had only one thing in mind: to snatch the mantle.

“One more try, and it will be mine. If I get it, she must follow,” he thought.

And indeed, trying a little harder, he grabbed the mantle, got into the boat, and quickly sailed back to the harbor.

He didn’t have to wait long. The mermaid appeared the same night; her tail was gone, replaced by a pair of long and shapely legs. She was incredibly beautiful, with a mop of russet hair, an icing of freckles, and introspective black eyes.

She entered O’Shea’s house as if it were the most natural thing to do, stirred the embers in the hearth, filled a pot with water, and busied herself with dinner, all without uttering a single word.

O’Shea stored the mantle in a trunk and locked it with a key, which he always wore on a string around his neck.

“Out of sight, out of mind, what she cannot see, she’ll surely not miss,” he said, settling into his old routine.

As year after year passed, O’Shea and the mermaid lived as man and wife. At first, the local people feared that something evil might befall the village, but they gradually got used to the strange couple and accepted the mermaid as one of their own.

Throughout that time, the sea creature never showed any signs of discontent, nor did she express her longing for water. She seemed, if not happy, at least resigned. Confident that she’d forgotten her origins, O’Shea didn’t bother to ask her about her feelings, convinced that she had long abandoned her past.
But although she didn’t openly neglect her duties as a wife, she never told him she loved him or made the little tender approaches one would expect in a relationship born out of affection.
 

In the evenings, when the sun had bled ruby red on the ocean, people assembled in the houses to pluck goose down for feather beds, shred cabbage, or churn butter and talk. And as he joined them, with a glass of beer in front of him, O'Shea would boast about his mermaid wife.

“Not only is she the most beautiful woman for miles around, but she is also the best wife—house-proud, quiet, and a wonderful mother. I could not have asked for a better woman to keep me company,” he told everyone.

One day, when O’Shea’s hair had already turned white, and the furrows of age plowed his forehead, O’Shea relaxed his guard, took off the string with the key, and left it lying on the table among kitchen utensils, in plain view of his wife. She seemed to take no notice, and just as she did every day, she peeled more potatoes and carrots for stew. But when night crept in, and O’Shea’s rhythmical breathing and gentle snoring indicated he was asleep, she picked up the key and opened the trunk. The mantle was there, a little dusty and faded, smelling of mothballs and frustrated dreams, but otherwise the same as on the day her husband had put it there.

She spread the mantle around her shoulders and quietly slipped out of the house, returning to the sea without looking at her home, her sleeping husband, or all her past life. O’Shea awaited her return, but needless to say, she never came back.

“And that, my darling, is the end of the story as we know it,” Daideó Liam said, pulling me closer to his chest and smoothing my hair.

“But there is much more to it than you might think,” he continued after a while.

“I couldn’t call meself an Irishman if at least a part of me didn’t believe that O’Shea was wrong in trying to reach something that was not meant to be. I reckon that somewhere, someone's got a grand plan for us. Perhaps in heaven, then. Or maybe in hell. But rest assured, my dear, that no matter how long and winding the journey may be, it is our destined path that we must follow.”

“I believe that paths in life are circular, with some just starting, others halfway through, and some, like my own, nearing their end. My star has reached its peak and is gradually descending. It will eventually fade away completely, and I will complete the circle of life.”

A spark of light burst forth from the hearth, bringing us back from the fantastic to the real world.

Now, forty years later, as I am back in Trí Ghaoth, standing on the shore and watching the River Shannon disgorge its muddy waters into the Atlantic, I’m convinced that Daideó Liam was right. Because, like O’Shea, he was a valiant man and not an eejit. That summer, when he failed to return, I thought about O’Shea and the paths that someone, somewhere, had traced for us. And even though Grandma Rosin blamed her husband’s death on the Pooka, I was no longer sad because I knew his circle had suddenly ended. There was nothing anyone could have done to change it. His star had simply gone off like a burnt-out candle.

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