But Glenis couldn’t hide her amazement that Anna was learning the Irish language at all. Anna figured it had to be those years on the bassoon; their band teacher had told them repeatedly that kids who studied music also learned languages easier. Anna’s mother had insisted that she study an instrument in junior high and high school. Her mother had agreed with the music teacher. “It’s about your brain,” her mother had said. “Musical training will develop parts of your brain that will help you learn languages, and possibly math too, but the jury is still out on that one.” Anna had suffered with the clarinet until eighth grade, when the band teacher had said that they’d needed someone to play the bassoon. Anna had raised her hand and never looked back. She’d played it for the next five years.
Anna tried to explain to Glenis. “I studied music, which helps some with learning languages. I have an ear for them, that’s all.”
“Some people love that you’re beginning to speak the language. But others are suspicious, and you can’t blame them entirely. Kathleen O’Connell was heard to say that this is absolute proof that you’re a British spy. But I said to her, when has an Englishman ever been able to speak Irish? They can’t do it, it’s not that they won’t; they can’t work it out. Anna’s too smart to be English. That’s what I told them.”
“Thank you, Glennie. Will it cause problems for you if I keep learning it? I mostly learn it from the children when I teach them on Sunday nights.”
Glenis flicked a bit of straw from her skirt. “I want my children to be more than beasts of burden. You keep teaching them and let them bring you along in Irish.”
The two women walked arm in arm along the streets of Kinsale. Anna felt suddenly bold and playful. “Is mise munteoir,” she said, in what she hoped was a passable accent.
Glenis stopped and raised an eyebrow, looking up at Anna. “Indeed you are the teacher. A very odd-sounding teacher, but yes, my dear, you are the teacher.”
Chapter 17
“Come along and meet the best horse in Ireland, or he is such for me,” Glenis had said after the midday porridge had been served to Tom and the children. The two women and Glenis’s daughters walked down the long road toward Kinsale. Mary and Nuala held hands and stopped at every beguiling fern or perplexing rock that called to them from the roadside. The cooler winds of late October had found even this southern coast of Ireland, and Anna had to pull a shawl around her shoulders when the chill sought her bones.
Both sides of the road were lined with hedge rows that nearly obstructed their view of the fields on either side. Glenis led them along a smaller lane that ran uphill to a freshly whitewashed cottage. A powerful horse galloped along the pasture, creating a chorus of trilling sounds from the girls.
“O’Connell, O’Connell. We’ve come to visit,” announced Mary. Both girls reached into the fence with their small hands, and it was only the horse’s accommodating bow that allowed them to come anywhere near his head.
“This is the great Daniel O’Connell,” said Glenis, who also reached out to stroke the dark mane that had flopped to one side.
“That’s an odd name for a stallion,” said Anna, who knew next to nothing about horses.
Glenis and the girls suddenly stopped speaking and erupted in laughter.
“Now you can’t tell me that horses are so different in America that geldings and stallions look the same. O’Connell is a gelding. Just take a look,” said Glenis with a tilt of her head to the horse’s flanks.
Anna looked and nodded in what she hoped was a convincing manner.
“You do know that geldings are castrated, don’t you now?”
“Well, of course I do,” said Anna, putting that bit of equestrian knowledge into an almost blank file.
“And please don’t tell me you’ve not heard of Daniel O’Connell in America? He’s a champion of the Irish people; the only one who has worked his way into the British parliament and is a royal burr in their backside,” said Glenis.
At some point Anna had stopped berating herself about her deficits in Irish history. She knew more than most people, but that was due mostly to Jasper, her buddy in law school whose first summer clerking job had landed him in the historical archives researching an Irish claim of genocide on the part of the English during the famine years. The claim was widely ridiculed in the law firm, but he’d been assigned to the grunt work in his first months with the firm.
He’d summed it up in one of his long emails. “Your people didn’t just get screwed in the 1845 famine; they’d been screwed for hundreds of years before that. The convenience of an airborne fungus that wiped out their last remaining crop and one million Irish was just the icing on the cake. Another two million emigrated the hell out of there. Our firm dropped this claim like a hot potato. Get it?”
Anna knew the worst famine to ever hit Ireland would arrive with the first crop of potatoes in 1845. Yet here was Glenis, laughing with her two daughters at Anna’s lack of common sense and general knowledge, unaware of the tsunami that would hit them within the year.
“There is too much that I don’t know,” said Anna. She reached down and picked up wiggling Nuala. “Even this little girl knows more than I do about horses and Daniel O’Connell.” Anna gave the child a quick hug and put her back down again.
They said their good-byes to O’Connell and began walking home.
Anna let it be known that her primary mission was to find Joseph. But the complexities of what to do once she found him had to remain unspoken—not that she knew what to do other than find him and then find a way home. If they had time traveled one way, there had to be a way to travel back again. And she had to do this while protecting Tom and Glenis, and not interfering with their life any more than she already had. Teaching the kids on Sunday afternoons was as far as she could go; math and English would not change the course of the universe. Doing long division in 1844 had to be the same as doing long division in the twenty-first century.
There was a sweetness to the way of life that Tom and Glenis had, despite the backbreaking rigor of it. The couple was absolutely certain that they would be together forever; that was clear. To survive, one had to be a member of a family, a “clan” as Glenis said. They knew every person in a thirty-mile radius—if not personally, then by association. A man in the desolate peninsula of Beara might never have stepped into the town of Kinsale, but Tom knew that his cousin in Cork was a mason of the first order. In this way, Tom was connected to the man in the windswept crags of the peninsula.
Anna longed for the familiarity of their world. She knew only one of her neighbors at home in Rockport and that was only because the neighbor’s dog, a scruffy miniature poodle, had appeared at her door one day. Anna had scooped up the shivering dog and carried it to the closest house. Because of a lost dog, she knew one neighbor. Here in the world of Glenis and Tom, she already knew many more people, and people knew about her before they ever met her. She was knitting into their family, and she knew it from the hunger that wrapped around her and everyone else. Her belly was pulled in with hunger; she ran her palms over the expanse between the ridges of her hip bones, the knob of the pubic bone and the faraway ribs. The hunger wove her in with Tom and Glenis, their three children, and their yearning for each day’s warmth of porridge, a slosh of potatoes, and buttermilk in a sea of water, extending it so each mouth received a full, hot dose of the elemental food source. Anna’s insistence on seaweed soup did little to stem the constant hunger. The less they had, the more Anna felt like she belonged with them in their quest to live and eat.
As the rhythm of their life revealed itself more and more, she noted that people came and went, stopping to speak with Tom in his blacksmithing building. This did not at first register as anything but the normal drumbeat of life in a coastal village. That they were often men did not send up a red flag; of course men would cluster around a guy like Tom. He had an unflappable nature that would draw others to him, a sureness that resonated in him whether he was bartering for food, tending his p
otato patch, managing his other tenant farmers, or grappling with a sick calf. Of course a steady stream of men would stop by the local blacksmith, and yet…
Anna finally distinguished a pattern. Almost all of the visits were at night, which made sense in a hardworking community; they saved their recreation until the day’s work was done. But it was the fact that the same faces appeared with the same regularity. And they never carried lanterns, never.
“Why don’t your friends carry a light to guide them home?” asked Anna. Tom had just said good-bye to three solemn-looking young men. “I’d be afraid that I’d fall off a cliff without a light, especially on misty nights like this.”
Tom looked first at Glenis, as if all his words had been used up. Glenis crossed the room to move to her husband’s side. “They know the roads by heart, and lamp oil is dear. There’s no need for a light,” she replied.
The couple had pulled in tight, closing ranks, standing side by side with no room to spare between them, one finishing a thought that made the other weary. Anna envied them for their certainty. There was no question of their marriage lasting, there was only a question of surviving together. But Anna wanted to know what the two of them weren’t telling her, because it was becoming clear that there was a subtext to life here and she wanted to know what it was. Any bit of knowledge that she could gather might let her find Joseph and find their way home.
“Of course they would know the roads by heart. What was I thinking? And now it is time for me to go to sleep before I ask any other overly obvious questions of my two hosts.” She felt a sudden fondness for the young couple. She headed for her tiny alcove of a room where her bed waited for her. On the way she kissed each of them on the cheek, as she had seen so many people do here. They were her only link to finding Joseph. They had promised that they would help her find him.
Several days later, as Anna headed for the door first thing in the morning, eager for fresh air, she was startled by an unusual sight. Anna was not a horse person; she was intimidated by their size and power, and the specter of her sister-in-law’s death in a riding accident was ever prominent. But even she noticed that the chestnut mare that she had tentatively nuzzled behind the ears for weeks had been replaced by a speckled mare. The chestnut mare was gone. She heard Tom’s footsteps on the flagstone steps, returning from an early morning milking.
“Tom, someone has switched horses on you,” Anna said, knowing immediately how idiotic this sounded.
Tom said nothing. He set down the bucket filled with warm milk. She had started to adjust to the interminable pauses between sentences that people of this time used. No one talked over the middle of someone else’s sentence. And they were profoundly good listeners, taking in a speaker’s words as if they’d been tender and precious. She’d learned to count to thirty after asking a question; people needed this much time or more to collect their thoughts. No one was multitasking here.
The morning fog was raw, filtering into Anna’s bones. She counted to thirty, and still Tom did not respond.
“Where is the other mare? I know I’m being too direct, too nosy, but I’m an inquisitive person and I can’t help but notice things. It’s what I do. When I went to sleep last night, the chestnut mare was here and now the sun is just peeking over the horizon and there is a different horse in its place that looks like she needs some fattening up. What happened?”
Tom took off his hat, ran his fingers through his dark hair, and put his hat back on again. She counted to thirty again before he finally replied.
“I can’t legally have two horses. And I can’t have one horse that looks too grand. If they see that I have one horse worth more than five pounds, then they have the right to take it from me. Oh, they’ll give me the five pounds, but the horse would truly and rightfully be worth far more. So when I feed the mare regular and her flanks fill out, then we have to run her out to the high meadows and switch her off with my other horse that has to fend mostly for herself, eating off the hillsides. My cousin brought me the other horse last night and rode out with the mare you’ve come to know, taking her to the high meadows.”
Anna’s thoughts flew into legal hyper speed, stuck on the law about having a horse that was worth too much. She looked at the speckled mare, her ribs and pelvic bones showing clearly through her hide.
“So you cannot appear to acquire more than the British believe you are due.”
“That’s one way of saying it. The same goes for the value of our house. If we improve the condition by building on another room, then the value of the house goes up and we would be charged more, and in most cases far more than the house is worth.”
“You have two horses but must appear to only have one. But what about O’Connell? Is he yours or your neighbor’s horse? He seemed awfully fond of Glenis.”
“Fond, you say? Those two are in love with each other. Glenis would some days sooner brush the gelding than cook our porridge. And you’ve rightfully discovered our third horse. We’ve had O’Connell since the day he dropped to the ground. We keep him at the good neighbor’s to make it look like they own him. What can we do? We are Irish and we love the horses.”
Chapter 18
“Cork is rich and fertile; anything can grow here, anything. But the Irish are an odd lot. They lack the spirit of enterprise, and it’s a great pity,” lectured the colonel.
The colonel, Joseph, and Sean, the stable hand, rode along the outskirts of a village. A herd of sheep was being walked through its tight streets, blocking the way. To Joseph’s surprise, the colonel pulled his horse off the way to let the sheep pass, followed by a barefoot boy. Joseph had imagined that his benefactor would rear up his great horse and clatter over the sheep, roaring like a lion.
“It’s not about dignity, lad, it’s about commerce,” he said, catching the look of surprise on Joseph’s face. “There’s an inn on the far side of the town, which is not far at all, and that is where we will stay for tonight.”
After the sheep passed, they rode through the village and stopped at the Farmer’s Arms. Sean slipped off his horse and made ready for the colonel to dismount. He took the reins of all three horses and led them to the stable.
As they walked up to the door of the pub, Joseph saw a flyer nailed to the door. Parish Wrestling Tournament, Saturday.
“Look, sir,” said Joseph. He had easily fallen into the habit of calling the colonel sir, something he had never in his life done before. He noted how easy it was to change into someone else. “There’s a wrestling tournament tomorrow. Will we still be here?”
The older man smiled. “They think they’ve invented wrestling the way they carry on. Big farmers with mud on their hands. In England, wrestling is a gentleman’s sport.”
The colonel pulled open the door, and the tang of a turf fire greeted them, laced with aromas of something like soup, followed by layers of men’s sweat and pipe smoke. Joseph’s eyes began to water as soon as he stepped into the pub. The air felt filled with tiny bits of gravel, all of which kept dropping into his eyes.
“Innkeeper,” the colonel intoned. The hum of jovial voices dimmed and quieted. “Have you a proper room for the night, for me and the young lad?”
This didn’t sound like a question, this sounded like a summons. The innkeeper looked a lot like Joseph’s father, dark-haired with a dusting of freckles, dark eyebrows that formed a ridge, like a declaration. He wiped his hands on his pants and said, “A room, sir? Yes indeed, we have a room. Give us a moment while me good wife prepares the room for you. We’ve a fine brisket that’s ready for eating. Sit down, eat a bit, and the room will be ready.”
The other men in the pub looked at Joseph and the colonel, their eyes reading them only as long as they dared. Then they looked away. Joseph needed fresh air. He was still unaccustomed to rooms thick with smoke.
“I’ll go and give Sean a hand, sir,” he said as he bolted for the door and a release from the density of the pub. He gulped in fresh air and trotted off in the direction of the stables, w
here he’d last seen Sean. He heard the thrill of competition before he saw it, heard the timeless sound of people wagering, urging on others. When he came around the back of the pub, he saw two men circling each other, with crouched knees, intent looks of winning in each face, a crowd of people around them.
“Come on, lads, give us a show, give us a show,” said one of the men in the crush of onlookers.
Wrestling. Right here, right now. Joseph suddenly felt anchored and real, not struggling to guess the right answers, as he so often did with the colonel. Joseph pushed his way to the front of the small crowd, sliding between people like a fish, slick and young. The late afternoon sun cast a warm glow over the two men who circled each other, knees flexed, arms loose and ready, eyes focused on each other. Finally, here was something that Joseph understood—wrestling.
One of the men looked like he’d been selected for his height and body mass. He must have been over six feet tall, maybe six foot two. The other man was more slight, a likely candidate for the 160-pound class, of which there had been few at Joseph’s school.
One of the guys had to be the local champion. Joseph could see the confidence in his shoulders, his smile, and the open invitation that he gave his opponent. This wouldn’t take long; the local champ was going to take this guy to the mat with the first throw. The champ had red hair, stiff and curly with the requisite thick neck. The late rays of sun played off the hairs on the man’s arm, and for a second, he glowed golden. They danced slowly, walking around each other, each tapping the other’s arm, circling and taking one million years longer than any wrestlers would ever take in high school. Then, like a pit viper, the champ struck, flipping his hapless opponent over before he even hit the ground, pressing both shoulder blades into the dirt, smiling a big toothy grin the whole time.
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