by Colum McCann
She would find herself wondering—stuck at a traffic light on the Malone Road, or in the butcher shop on the Ormeau Road, or in the peace group on the Andersonstown Road, or in the shadows of Sandy Row, or at the marches where they carried pictures of their loved ones, or the days she found herself outside Stormont awaiting any news of decency, or strolling the rim of the island, or at the back court of the tennis club in Stranmillis, or simply just walking down the stairs with Ambrose, adding day to day, hour to hour—what it was that brought Tomas to the moment, how it became part of the constant unfolding, what was it that changed his mind.
She never asked. Instead, she watched Tomas lift the towel—scuffing it through his hair—and she returned, then, to the kitchen, lit the flame under the stove, the whole of a happiness moving over her.
YELLOW LEAVES LIE in scattered profusion on the green lawn. The cottage has been touched by the edge of a decaying storm. These are the weekends she likes the most: they drive out from Belfast, down the laneway, pause a moment by the gate, the high-voltage wires singing at the end of the country road.
They park down by the barn, on the high side of the driveway where the ground stands firmer, and they use the leaves for grip as they make their way to the half-door.
TOMAS IS SHOT dead seven weeks into the hunting season. In the early morning dark. In his small blue rowboat. In his new ritual of scattering the decoys out on the water.
She is asleep when she hears the first shot. Ambrose beside her. The rise and fall of his chest. His irregular breath in the back room of the cottage. He shifts slightly in the sheets and turns towards her. His pajama top open. A small triangle of flesh at his neck. The heavy odor of his breath. Lottie shifts slightly away from him. An air of dust about the room. Sure, at first, that she is mistaken. Not a familiar sound for the dark. A crack of falling brick from inside the chimney perhaps: it has happened before. Or the shatter of an outside slate. She fumbles at her nightstand to check her watch. Brings it close to her eye. Has to turn it in her hand, over and over. Five twenty in the morning. That was not a gunshot. Too early for that. Something falling perhaps in the barn outside, or some disturbance from the living room. She glances towards the window. The rain hard against it. The bare cold of the frame when she touches it.
There is, then, a second shot. She puts her hand to Ambrose’s shoulder, allows it there a moment. Maybe she has overslept. The curtains are tight after all. Some trick of the light. She rises from the bed in her nightdress. Finds her slippers on the cold floor. Steps to the window. Parts the curtains. All dark outside. Surely then she is just imagining. She peers out towards the lake. Nothing at all. Only the darker shape of a windbent tree. No moon or starlight. No boat. No small red light. No sign of anyone. Silence.
She closes the curtains and steps back across the room. Allows the slippers to fall from her feet. Lifts the edge of the blanket and the sheet and is halfway into the bed when she hears the sound of the third shot.
That, she thinks, was no slate. That was no tumble of brick.
book three
2011
the garden of remembrance
I’VE HAD IN MY POSSESSION, FOR MANY YEARS NOW, AN UNOPENED letter. It traveled by Vickers Vimy over the Atlantic almost a hundred years ago, the thinnest of letters, no more than two pages, possibly only one. The envelope is six inches wide, four and a half high. It was once light blue, though it is now discolored with patches of smoke and yellow and brown. The writing on the front has faded and is just about legible. No postmark. It is crumpled at the edges and it has been folded over a number of times. For many years it was thrust in and out of pockets and cupboard drawers. At some stage it was ironed out and there is a burn in the upper right-hand corner, a small corruption of black, near the indicia, and there are tiny water splats across the envelope as if, perhaps, it was once carried out into the rain. There is no seal, no insignias, no discernible shape to what may lay inside.
The letter has been passed from daughter to daughter, and through a succession of lives. I am almost half the letter’s age, and have no daughter to whom I can pass it along, and there are times I admit that I have sat at the kitchen table, looking out over the lough, and have rubbed the edges of the envelope and held it in the palm of my hand to try to divine what the contents might be, but, just as we are knotted by wars, so mystery holds us together.
I am shamed to admit that I have spent much of my time with no particular purpose, unfaithful to my inner promises—a couple of years nursing, a decade in the Women’s Coalition, some farming on the island, a few months selling cosmetics, a couple of years breeding bird dogs. I had a child at nineteen, lost him when I was thirty-eight. The bare truth is that I want nothing so much as to hold my dead son in my arms again—if I knew that I could see Tomas row a boat up to the shore, or walk through the kitchen in his wading boots, or step along the mudflats with his binoculars around his neck, I would tear every last piece of the letter to pieces, scatter the lives across Strangford and beyond. As it is, I cherish it. It is kept in the pantry of all places. On a middle shelf, on its own. Tucked inside a sleeve of archival plastic. I am partial, still, to the recklessness of the imagination. The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves. I have no qualms about taking it out every now and then, and examining it for whatever small clue it might give. The Jennings Family, 9 Brown Street, Cork City, Ireland. There is a real flourish to the handwriting, a sense of curl and shape, a stylistic swerve. It was my grandmother Emily Ehrlich who wrote the letter, my own mother who brokered its passage, but it began with her mother, my great-grandmother, Lily Duggan, if anything truly begins at all. She was an immigrant maid from Dublin who moved to northern Missouri where she married a man who cut and preserved ice.
I have often wondered what might have happened if the letter had made it to its proper destination in Cork, what random turn of events might have grown out of it, what chance, what accidents, what curiosities. Opened, it could have been burned. Or dismissed. Or cherished. Scrapped. Left to mold in an ancient attic somewhere, the territory of a squirrel or a bat.
Unopened, the letter is even less effective of course, except for its preservation of possibility, the slight chance that it contains a startling fact, or an insight into some forgotten beauty.
But all of this is hardly new, or much of a revelation. There is simply no way to know what would’ve changed, or how the lives might have touched each other, or parted, or what shape they could have taken with the slice of a knife through an envelope. So many of our lives are thrown into long migratory orbits. The fact of the matter is that I once held my breathing son close to my ear but he was shot dead on a wet October morning, in the fierce dark before dawn, and there are moments that I would like to know what might have happened if it hadn’t happened, and why it happened the way it did, and what it might have taken to prevent it from happening. Most of all, I would like him to be here once more, alive and tall and truculent and willing to defend me from this latest storm.
IN THE MORNING—AFTER the news from the bank—a flock of brent geese came gunneling over the lough, bringing with them their own mystery, low over the water. They arrive every year. Regular as clockwork. Swaths of them. I have in years past seen twenty or thirty thousand over the course of a few days. They can momentarily darken the sky, huge clouds, then tuck their wings, and blanket onto the water and grass. Not so much grace as hunger. They arrange themselves among the marshes and the pladdies and the sudden thrust of drumlins.
I went out the back door to the lough in my housecoat and boots. Carrying a mug of coffee. My hair in a net. No morning bath. Very attractive indeed. The tide was out and the shoreside rocks were slippery with kelp. Georgie followed me to the water’s edge, but then turned back up the garden, put her head on her paws, ancient and tired. I empathize
d, and tucked the coat under me, and sat down on a cold rock twenty feet out from shore. Not a soul for miles. The birds flew vast across the sky. They dipped and rose and came in a mass towards the shore, over our roof, and then vanished behind me, only for another group to come along moments later, from out in Bird Island direction.
The geese have, it seems, a perfect memory. They keep returning to the same rocks on the same tidal reefs, year after year. They teach their youngsters the art of the lough. Tomas used to row out in his grandfather’s blue boat and catch the tidal drift. He watched the scrawl of the geese in the sky for hours, even in the rain. It seemed to me that it was only his boat, or his green oilskin, floating. He sometimes sat up to turn the oar, or to fix the binoculars on a particular point, and his body appeared to rise out of the water itself. In the evenings we rang the dinner bell on the shore to bring him home. He roamed up the garden with the oar over his shoulder.
The water had come halfway up my Wellingtons. It was too cold to swim, though at seventy-two years of age I still like, on occasion, to pull on a ratty wetsuit and take to the water. I remained another hour, watching the geese, until the rock was as good as submerged and my big unwieldy bottom was freezing even through the tail end of my coat. I hailed my dead son and promised him that I wouldn’t let the bank take a single blade of grass or drop of water or broken slate of roof. I rose, stiff with sentiment, and hurried back to the cottage where Georgie waited for me. I fed her some beef, then built the fire with peat and logs, and read a selection of Longley poems.
In the afternoon I prepared a small glass of hot brandy with cloves but I knew myself too well to begin that early, and threw it in the fire where the cloves sizzled. I took the letter from the pantry, propped it up on the mantelpiece where it stood with all the other testaments of flight: photographs and bank demands and a ticking clock.
AN ANCIENT STORY: they desire my land. Five acres of island in an inlet of one hundred other islands. A large cottage, one boathouse, one fisherman’s hut, one dilapidated kennel that my gone husband, Lawrence, built. The island was a working farm, bird dogs and bloodhounds, and for a while it was used for duck hunting, but not a single shot has sounded across the land since our Tomas died.
I can walk the land and still find old cartridges and pellet packages and the skulls of birds that fell from the sky. The trajectory of a shot bird is an incredible thing. Caught hard in the air, the sky continues to move behind, but the bird drops straight down, a plumb line of descent. A thump on the ground, a splash in the mudflats or out on the waves. And then the delight of the dogs skelping through the grass or over the water.
We had eight dogs at the best of times. There is only Georgie now, faithful old Labrador. She, too, is a little heavy on her paws but can still raise a ruckus when a mallard appears.
Just across the bridge there are monastic ruins ten times as old as my precious letter. A heritage site. Brass plates and stone stiles and climbing moss. The holy books were written here fifteen hundred years ago. Ink from the land. Parchment from cattle.
Not many visitors come down these narrow back roads to the edge of the lough, but I am still curmudgeonly enough to swing a stick if they stray past the ruins and come across the bridge, up the mudflats, towards the cottage.
Three bedrooms, a large kitchen, a living room, a pantry, and a new sunroom built in the 1980s, built under the supervision of my mother, as if we could get all that war out of us by looking to the water. The sunroom is high and wide and full of light. A wooden bench along the windows. Pillows patterned with Admiralty charts. The rest of the cottage was built low to keep us humble. Rump-sprung chairs and faded upholstery. A smoke-charred fireplace. A formal bookcase of mahogany and glass. My son used to have to stoop through the doorways. The walls are built thick, but there’s a cold that enters the belly of the cottage and remains. All the doors have to be closed to seal the heat from the fire in the main room. Give me any sort of light: preferably tilleys, storm lanterns, the blackened glass of Victorian lamps.
Shells fall on the roof constantly from the birds overhead. There are times I feel I am living inside a percussion instrument.
AT THE FIRST gesture of dawn, I pulled on the walking gear, grabbed Georgie and took her around the edge of the lough, along the shore, through the damp woods at the back of the ruins. Green boughs on each side and moss soft underfoot. A stone stile in the wall.
She balked at a tangle of underbrush and barked at the shadows of windblown trees scuppering through the ruins. Her ears high, her back arched. The ancient monks used reeds to paint the gospels. Cowhide and wolfskin and the pelt of elk to keep out the weather. They ground down bone, mixed it with grass and soil and berries and plants. Bird quills. Leather bindings. Stone huts. Bronze bells. A series of walls for defense. Round towers for lookout. The fires they lit were small. The books they wrote were taken then across the lough, across the sea, to Scotland.
A female curlew comes to visit these parts sometimes, sailing over the cottage. The mottled gray and brown of her plumage. Her long slender beak looks like a scissors moving across the sky, following her call, snipping through its solitary grief. I like to catch her through the binoculars, in the mudflats, pecking at the earthworms that come up from down below, though I haven’t heard her for quite a while now.
I walked through the ruins of the chapel at the nape of the hill, and picked up the cider cans left by youngsters in the village. Raves, I think they call them. They might as well. Better here than some foul little bedroom in a council estate. There were remnants of cigarette butts scattered all about, plastic sleeves, bottle caps, soggy boxes. I left the condoms for another day. Two forlorn little curlicues in the gravel. She loves me, she loves me not.
By the ruins of the chapel the wrapper of a chocolate bar sparred against the wind and an empty wine bottle completed the romance.
It was all enormously still and silent until a flock of new geese flew in their high patterns from the lough over the air. They made a noise close to rifle fire, and Georgie leaped up along the wall as if she could catch them in midair.
I dumped the litter in the rubbish cans near the heritage signs, crossed back over the bridge, circled around the island. A one-hour walk. Old woman and her dog. Georgie loped on ahead, flushing birds from the long grass. Broken lobster pots were strewn on a sandy patch near the water. The edges of the lough are never watertight, either to the land or the sea. The tides flow in and out. Boats and memory, too.
The phone was ringing by the time I got home. I pushed open the half-door, dropped the leash, walked through the low rooms, stood over the answering machine in the kitchen. The infernal red blinking as he spoke. Simon Leogue, the bank manager in Bangor, again. So polite and poised, a southern accent laced with some London, all our troubles in one voice. Good morning, Mrs. Carson. A fine young man if he wasn’t what he was, but he is.
The only way to erase a message is to listen to it first. The thought of listening twice was far too much for me, so I picked it up and let it drop midsentence, then yanked the plug from the wall. A brief and merciful silence. It was hardly the smartest move, though I have the BlackBerry in case of emergency.
I brought Georgie out the back to the sunroom. The geese formed against the changing sky. The tides beneath it can carry a body swiftly out to sea. Slewter, slaughter, holy water.
THEY SHOT TOMAS as he pulled up his boat to shore in October of 1978. Nineteen years old. Still in university, his second year, advanced probability. I am still not certain whether it was UVF or IRA or UFF or INLA or whatever other species of idiot was around at the time. In truth, I have a fair idea, but it hardly matters anymore. Our ancient hatreds don’t deserve capital letters.
They shot him for a bird gun. Within hearing range of the cottage in the dark of early morning so that my mother rushed into my bedroom and said: That’s odd, Hannah, darling, did you hear that? Already Lawrence was running across the lawn, ice cracking under his feet, saying, Oh, my God, Tomas, oh,
my God. We were sure at first he had shot himself, but it was three shots. He was out early, setting the decoys.
The current took him a long way from us before we caught him, down near the Narrows where he was spinning in relentlessly smaller circles. It’s hardly wisdom, but the older I get the more I believe that our lives are built not out of time, but light. The problem is that the images that so often return to me are seldom those I want. The water was silver and black. The wind whipped cold. We waded through the shallows to get him. The boat still circling. A silver light rippled alongside us. His donkey jacket. Wading boots. Binoculars around his neck. So very young. He didn’t look shot at all, just slumped over. Some frost on his eyebrows. I will never forget that. A little rime of white collecting there. One hand clenched in anger, the other open and limp. Lawrence reached into the boat and took him in his arms. He carried him to shore where the uniforms came running. Cursing their way through the shallows. Drop him, a voice said. Now. Drop him. Spotlights on the shore, though it was full morning. Sirens sounding. My own mother on the shore with her hand to her mouth. In her housecoat. Someone put a blanket around her shoulders. Her silence. Lawrence laid down my son at the edge of the reeds. The newspapers made it ever so simple: a young man out armed with a gun, besieged by men out armed with more guns. How far from real the truth is. I wanted then to take every murdering bastard in Northern Ireland, and have them sleep for a night in my boy’s blue rowboat, out on the lough, in the dark, among the reeds, turning in primal celtic patterns.
