Air India
June 1985, a bomb
detonates on Air India Montreal London Atlantic Ocean . 329 people perish in the crash. -
Wikipedia
We light candles on the Christmas tree every evening, ever
so carefully, and only for a few minutes. I am the Yuletide guest.
Afterwards we crack GlowSticks, phosphorescent green and red, but Christmassy. These from the Air
India disaster; my hosts have collected dozens washed up on the strand.
This Eskivaude acreage lies far out in Southwest
Ireland , nearly in the Atlantic itself, so
close to the sea, that after a gale, salt crust must be cleared from widows,
and so distant from infrastructure that the farm still awaits electrification.
The Leonards, dissenters of the war in Vietnam
began this place, what had been a communal farm,15 years ago. They are the only
and only remaining of the original residents.
The farm’s seven acres include an artichoke patch, a chicken
run, a small pasture for the milk cow, a main cottage, and half a dozen out
buildings. A phantom Citroën Deux rusts in the pigpen, and the jenny donkey is
about to foal.
Christmas eve, we’re working on Carlsbergs and poitín. My
bladder full, I head outside to the privy. Light from the cottage is a weak and
yellow, otherwise the sky looms pitch black. A gale is blowing up. The fresh
salty wind drives tiny spikes of rain into my face.
Starting back from my business, something gusts and flaps,
curls around me, and brushes past towards the sea. I glimpse a garment, I
think, rushing away, billowing, a snatch of luminous white fabric, silky, some
kind of wrap or gown? Something Asian?
I lose breath. But wait. Surely, it’s only a sheet luffing
on the clothes line. Back inside, I say that Christine might get the bedding
in. But she’s hung no laundry today. Go look again, and I do, and of course
find nothing.
We laugh it off, and over new drinks, the Leonards recount
local tales of the murdered White brothers home from the Congo
wars in Buta, children crying where there are none, the drowned Klonakilty
fishermen, and more.
I lodge 100 yards up hill from the main cottage in a
butchering shed converted to textile studio. For hours, the jenny brays and
paces the farmyard in the hard, black gale.
And I, high in the weaving loft, in the wind and cold and
dark except for GlowSticks, sleep only in fits obsessing, but as if under
water, on aircraft falling from above.
398 Without Wikipedia Citing
439 Including Wikipedia Citing
Bio: Steven Gowin is a corporate video producer in San
Francisco and graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop.
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