The Fire Under the Grass

There is a fire under the grass of this island.

It has been there longer than the roads, longer than the churches, longer than the names of the towns. The old people knew it. They built their days around it. When sorrow came — and sorrow always came — they did not run from it and they did not bury it. They brought it to the fire. They wailed it to the open sky. They sat with the dead for three days and let the grief move through the house like weather, until it had passed, and the living could live again.

Then the fire was covered over.

Not all at once. A little shame here. A new law there. A priest's frown, a schoolmaster's stick, a landlord's ledger, a neighbour's raised eyebrow. Sod by sod, the fire was covered, until the grass grew over it and the people walked on top of it and taught their children to walk on top of it, and the children taught theirs, and after a while no one could say what it was they were walking on. Only that the ground was warm in places, and it was better not to ask why.

This book is about the fire. What it was. How it was buried. What the burying cost us — because it cost us more than we have ever once, as a people, sat down and counted. And how it might be uncovered again. Not to burn the house down. To warm it.

But before a fire can be tended, the ground must be opened. And before the ground can be opened, someone has to stand on the warm patch of grass and say, out loud, what everyone has always known and no one has ever said:

There is something under here.