O'Oide Làmhan

Born deaf, the old man, lived in silence and would draw my gaze by clicking his fingers and gesturing. I would watch his craggy hands form their tactile communication and create a solitary canvas through which he weaved his voice and brought a string of his being into the fabric of others. The sentience of these ideas entered into the mind with each symbol of this silent language imprinting itself to create a pattern that dried onto one’s consciousness and revealed a living philosophy that explicitly expressed the present as it truly is.

My younger sister had been deaf too, and this is how I had come to learn the language of sign. I had been her primary carer. Due to a violence, to which I will not go into here, I was incarcerated and branded to substantial jail time and five years in I received a letter that stated my sister, the year previous, had taken her life. The news touched the waters of my spirit like a typhoon and birthed in me a volatile temperament that landed me in solitary confinement, and in that silence I cut from myself all ties with the world, and with it, that language that was hers.

Through the old man that language was learnt anew and my rusty capabilities emerged fresh like tarnished jewellery scoured and cleaned with silver polish.

The old man was a luddite and he built boats without electric tools. His hands stretched over the wood and pressed and shaped it into vessels. Come night he slept nearby this wood, turning his shed into a place of rest, of work and of worship. After I joined him we worked together in this way, through cold winters and hot summers and the beauty between the two.

Each morning we walked to the nearby woods that grew in a valley and often lay thick with a heavy fog. Sometimes the old man would stop and stand under the cover of large branches, letting the fog’s condensation drip down his hat and shoulders, and he would point with his cane toward a tree and it was that tree that I felled and dragged back to the yellow shed with a horse. The horse was an Irish Draught, a gelding named Phillip, and the horse was with the old man when I first arrived all those years ago. While the horse and I worked together, the old man left a seed in hope that another tree may take its place.

With the tree felled, he sat in his armchair and drew in the little black book. Beside the chair was a small stool where fresh percolated coffee often brewed and from which he filled, and refilled, two demitasse cups. His tobacco lay near the stool and he rolled thick filterless cigarettes that he shared with me, prescribing a single cigarette in the morning, at lunch and at night. In summer, as we smoked we watched Phillip eating from the pasture that ran beside the woods and in winter I trekked to the horse with the cigarette clamped between my teeth and fed him his grain.

Breakfast was hearty and carried us well into the afternoon. Lunch was late, doubling as dinner, for the old man believed in going to sleep hungry. A hungry being dreams more vividly… He would sign. The dreamer remembers the transitions of consciousness into sleep, knows it is a dream, and so pays attention, and in wake it is easier to remember those details and write them down; little clues of genius learned from the spirits and muses.

The old man was strict and I was not permitted to listen to music. He understood that the rhythm would affect my body and the work at hand, and that each tune reverberated through me and shone outward, colouring the world and my work in hues not my own. I trusted this conclusion, believing that deafness instils an evolved sense of consideration for these things. His attitude reflected the silence of the workplace and was not efficient. There were no rapid movements or rushing, instead an equanimous attitude prevailed and we worked slowly and delicately in a process that rebirthed the dead tree, breathed new life into it, and created beauty in a new form. We created one vessel a year. After naming it, we sold it for a fair price to the right person. The old man knew the right person from some internal illumination that I was unable to comprehend.

On a rainy afternoon, when the woods streamed with tiny converging rivers that impeded our daily walk by tracking through the spongy moss which covered the undergrowth, I chanced on a horn tucked at the back of a storage cupboard in the shed. Shaped like an ‘S’ and bearing the short tusks of boars dangling on thin leather strips, the horn fascinated me and I asked the old man what it was. He spelt out C.A.R.N.Y.X. When I asked if I could blow it, he shrugged and signed in your own time, outside. The horn’s drone signalled a deep despair that resounded in me and called to a lost age of glory and of warriors whose spirits allegedly roamed this land. Whenever I sought release I stepped outside, into the rain, fog, or sunshine, and blew the carnyx, calling these ancient times forth until I was lightheaded. Then I sat and held my breath and enjoyed my unsteadiness and the gooseflesh that erupted over my arms from the horn’s wailing tone and I lay on the grass and looked upwards at the ever-changing sky.

The old man died on his 76th birthday. I saw him in the morning, laying on his back, motionless in his cot, with his little black book open in his lap. Having never considered my life beyond the old man, I brewed coffee and filled the two demitasse before rolling two thick filterless cigarettes, and sitting by his side I smoked both cigarettes while drinking the coffee. I did not cry then, but prayed that he had left me a message, believing he would have foretold his own passing with his peerless comprehension. The window beside his cot was slightly ajar and I thought perhaps his spirit had flown out to wander to the woods and search for that good tree and maybe he would wait for me to join him and cut it down. Outside the birds picked insects from the grass and though the sun shone brightly those woods remained wreathed in fog.

His book lay open and I saw the illustration of an Irish-style currach. Scrawled over this design was the message, some passing thought or dream had led the old man to write,

“an echo of steps-

and the echo – a step

that death

is just another step,

along the path…

A most important dream,

remember, drift on.”

I closed the book and placed it back into his hands and only then contacted the town’s doctor.

There was a will. With no known family, he left me everything, alongside roughly $20,000 that he had amassed. For a time I did not know what to do with these things. Seeking some impetus, I sifted through the storage room that enclosed a corner of the shed and dragged out a trunk filled with his black books. These contained his memories, his wisdom, and his passions, they portrayed his soul clearer than I had known it and I delighted that this soul may possibly wander contentedly in the woods. Reading these books let me sail beside the old man and follow currents of his essence and I was led through his life and into the pure craft he pursued and the beautiful simplicity of his creativity.

The old man had let me generate my own life and provided guidance which tethered me to him. A natural guidance through invisible realms that my parents had been oblivious to and which had once led me astray as I could prove no merit to myself or them and in anger lashed out against the society that held me. I thought to give him a Viking funeral and send his body onward, to drift forever through the coastal currents while the sails blazed. The state did not allow it though and on reflection the old man would think it a waste of a good vessel. So I had him cremated and his ashes I poured into paint and tightly sealed the tin. I stashed the paint in the storage room.

I continued his trade, slower and without the old man’s natural movement. I sold a boat, for a fair price, but without that internal illumination I was left wondering if it was to the right person. These projects continued and I accumulated my savings until I could finally focus on my own boat. A small boat, built for single-handed sailing, with a light ballast, shorter sails and a gaff rig. My boat. Built to handle the rougher seas and rugged coasts of my emerald island. With the paint that held the old man’s ash I wrote his name along the hull, Oide Làmhan. And now I sail free the oceans, and when storms blow I hit back with the carnyx and its wail calls on Oide Làmhan’s ancient spirit, pulling him from the woods, and transporting him here to witness the resilience of my spirit and the forte of my craft.

Remember, drift on