The men and women of the family standing
round beating it, and keening over it, in a great crowd of people. A
little later every one knelt down and a last prayer was said. Then
the cousins of the dead man got ready two oars and some pieces of
rope - the men of his own family seemed too broken with grief to know
what they were doing - the coffin was tied up, and the procession
began. The old woman walked close behind the coffin, and I happened
to take a place just after them, among the first of the men. The
rough lane to the graveyard slopes away towards the east, and the
crowd of women going down before me in their red dresses, cloaked
with red pethcoats, with the waistband that is held round the head
just seen from behind, had a strange effect, to which the white
coffin and the unity of colour gave a nearly cloistral quietness.
This time the graveyard was filled with withered grass and bracken
instead of the early ferns that were to be seen everywhere at the
other funeral I have spoken of, and the grief of the people was of a
different kind, as they had come to bury a young man who had died in
his first manhood, instead of an old woman of eighty. For this
reason the keen lost a part of its formal nature, and was recited as
the expression of intense personal grief by the young men and women
of the man's own family.
When the coffin had been laid down, near the grave that was to be
opened, two long switches were cut out from the brambles among the
rocks, and the length and breadth of the coffin were marked on them.
Then the men began their work, clearing off stones and thin layers
of earth, and breaking up an old coffin that was in the place into
which the new one had to be lowered. When a number of blackened
boards and pieces of bone had been thrown up with the clay, a skull
was lifted out, and placed upon a gravestone. Immediately the old
woman, the mother of the dead man, took it up in her hands, and
carried it away by herself. Then she sat down and put it in her
lap - it was the skull of her own mother - and began keening and
shrieking over it with the wildest lamentation.
As the pile of mouldering clay got higher beside the grave a heavy
smell began to rise from it, and the men hurried with their work,
measuring the hole repeatedly with the two rods of bramble. When it
was nearly deep enough the old woman got up and came back to the
coffin, and began to beat on it, holding the skull in her left hand.
This last moment of grief was the most terrible of all. The young
women were nearly lying among the stones, worn out with their
passion of grief, yet raising themselves every few moments to beat
with magnificent gestures on the boards of the coffin. The young men
were worn out also, and their voices cracked continually in the wail
of the keen.
When everything was ready the sheet was unpinned from the coffin,
and it was lowered into its place. Then an old man took a wooden
vessel with holy water in it, and a wisp of bracken, and the people
crowded round him while he splashed the water over them. They seemed
eager to get as much of it as possible, more than one old woman
crying out with a humorous voice -
'Tabhair dham braon eile, a Mhourteen.' ('Give me another drop,
Martin.')
When the grave was half filled in, I wandered round towards the
north watching two seals that were chasing each other near the surf.
I reached the Sandy Head as the light began to fail, and found some
of the men I knew best fishing there with a sort of dragnet. It is a
tedious process, and I sat for a long time on the sand watching the
net being put out, and then drawn in again by eight men working
together with a slow rhythmical movement.
As they talked to me and gave me a little poteen and a little bread
when they thought I was hungry, I could not help feeling that I was
talking with men who were under a judgment of death. I knew that
every one of them would be drowned in the sea in a few years and
battered naked on the rocks, or would die in his own cottage and be
buried with another fearful scene in the graveyard I had come from.
When I got up this morning I found that the people had gone to Mass
and latched the kitchen door from the outside, so that I could not
open it to give myself light.
I sat for nearly an hour beside the fire with a curious feeling that
I should be quite alone in this little cottage. I am so used to
sitting here with the people that I have never felt the room before
as a place where any man might live and work by himself. After a
while as I waited, with just light enough from the chimney to let me
see the rafters and the greyness of the walls, I became
indescribably mournful, for I felt that this little corner on the
face of the world, and the people who live in it, have a peace and
dignity from which we are shut for ever.
While I was dreaming, the old woman came in in a great hurry and
made tea for me and the young priest, who followed her a little
later drenched with rain and spray.
