by Amy Harmon
Barbara had called earlier in the week to see how my next book was coming along. I had to confess it wasn’t coming at all. I had a story to tell, a love story like no other, but I couldn’t face the ending. My words were a tangled mess of agony and denial, and whenever I sat down to plot or plan, I ended up staring out the window, traipsing through the yellowed pages of my old life, searching for Thomas. There were no words for the things I felt; there was only the rise and fall of my breath, the steady slog of my heart, and the unrelenting ache of separation.
Unable to paint and unwilling to write, I decided to walk. I pulled a pink cashmere shawl over my shoulders and stuffed my feet into a pair of black Wellies so they wouldn’t get wet when I walked to the lough. My hair danced in the gloom, waving at the naked branches of the shivering trees. No need to tame it now. No one cared if it hung halfway down my back and curled around my face. No one would look twice at my black leggings or disapprove of the way my cotton tunic hugged the swell of my breasts or clung to my pregnant belly. The beach was empty. No one would see me at all.
Western Ireland was caught in the damp doldrums of a dying fall, and the moldering mist licked at my cheeks and hovered over the lake, obscuring the sky from the sea, the surf from the sand, and the silhouette of the opposite shore. I stood facing the lough, letting the wind lift my hair and let it go again, watching the fog gather into ghosts and shift in the tepid light.
I’d stopped going into the water. I’d stopped rowing out, away from the shore. The water was cold, and I had a child to consider, a life beyond my own. But I still came at least once a day to plead my case to the wind. The blanket of fog cushioned the air, and the world was hushed and hiding. The lapping of the water and the squelch of my boots were my only company.
And then I heard whistling.
It stopped for a moment and it came again, faint and far away. Donnelly’s dock was empty, his business closed for the season. Light shone from his windows, and a tendril of smoke rose from his chimney, merging with the hazy sky, but nothing moved along the shore. The whistling was not on the land but in the water, like a foolish fisherman was hiding in the fog.
The sound grew stronger, drifting in with the tide, and I stepped toward it, listening for the whistler to finish his tune. It warbled and broke, and I waited for an encore. When none came, I pursed my lips and finished the song for him, the sound breathy and soft and a little off-key. But I recognized the melody.
They can’t forget, they never will, the wind and waves remember Him still.
“Thomas?”
I’d called to him before. I’d screamed his name across the water until I was hoarse and hopeless. But I called to him again.
“Thomas?”
His name hung precariously in the air, weighty and wishful, before it teetered and fell, sinking like a stone beneath the surface. The lough whispered back with liquid lips, slow and sighing. Tho-mas, Tho-mas, Tho-mas.
The bow appeared first, shifting in and out of sight. The lough was playing hide-and-seek. There it was again. Closer. Someone was rowing with steady strokes. The pull and release of the paddle through the water mocked a hushed endearment, the sound of his name becoming the sound of his voice. Coun-tess, Coun-tess, Coun-tess.
Then I saw him. A peaked cap, broad shoulders, a tweed coat, and pale eyes. Pale-blue eyes clinging to mine. He said my name, low and disbelieving, as the small red boat split the fog and slid toward the shore, so close I heard the oar scrape the sand.
“Thomas?”
Then he was standing, using the oar like a Venetian gondolier, and I was sinking to my knees on the rocky shore, crying his name. The little boat bellied up to the beach, and he stepped out onto solid ground, tossing the oar aside and pulling his hat from his head. He clutched it against his chest, like a nervous suitor come to call. His dark hair was shot with silver, and a few more lines creased the corners of his eyes. But it was Thomas.
He hesitated, teeth clenched, gaze pleading, as though he didn’t know how to greet me. I tried to rise, to go to him, and he was suddenly there, swooping me up and holding me against him, the swell of our child cradled between us, his face buried in my hair. For a moment, neither of us spoke, our burning lungs and pounding hearts stealing our speech and robbing our senses.
“How is it that I’ve lost eleven years, and you haven’t aged at all?” he cried into my curls, his joy tinged in sorrow. “Is this my child, or have I lost you too?”
“This is your child, and you will never lose me,” I vowed, stroking his hair, touching his face, my hands as delirious as my heart. Thomas was wrapped around me, so close I felt every breath, but it wasn’t enough. I drew his face to mine, frantic, afraid I would wake without kissing him goodbye.
He was so real and so wonderfully familiar. The scrape of his cheeks, the press of his lips, the taste of his mouth, the salt of his tears. He kissed me like he’d kissed me the first time and every time after that, pouring himself out, holding nothing back. But this kiss was flavored with long absence and new hope, and with every sigh and second that passed, I began to believe in an afterlife.
“You stayed in Ireland,” he choked, his lips skimming across my cheeks, down my nose, and over the point of my chin, his fingers cradling my face.
“Someone told me once that when people leave Ireland, they never go back. I couldn’t bear the thought of never going back. So I stayed. And you stayed with Eoin,” I said, overwhelmed.
He nodded, his eyes so full and fierce that tears trickled down my face and pooled in the palms of his hands.
“I stayed until he told me it was time to go.”
On July 12, 1933, the day after Eoin’s eighteenth birthday, Thomas lowered the little red rowboat from the rafters in his barn and packed a small suitcase with a box of gold coins, a change of clothes, and a few photographs. He thought he might need something that had belonged to me in 2001, something that would guide his travel, and slipped the diamond earrings I’d sold Mr. Kelly into his pocket; he’d bought them back the day after I pawned them. He had the empty urn that once held Eoin’s ashes, and he knew the verse I’d recited that day on the lough, the poem by Yeats that spoke of fairies and riding on the wind.
But Thomas was convinced the diamonds, the dust, and the fairy words made no difference whatsoever. When it was all said and done, he simply hitched a ride to 2001. The moment the boat was returned to the lough, it began to sail toward home, slipping through the ages, parting the waters, and calling the mist. Eoin had watched it disappear.
We left the boat on the shore, the paddle in the sand and the lough behind us. Thomas was wide-eyed but unafraid, his suitcase in his hand, his cap back on his head. I doubted much about Thomas would change, regardless of the decade he called home. For eleven years, two months, and twenty-six days, he had patiently waited. He’d worried that I would be gone, that he would have to find me in an unknown world and across an ocean. He expected to find a son or daughter half grown, if he found us at all. And what if time took him somewhere he didn’t want to go, and he lost everything? It was the legend of Niamh and Oisín all over again.
And still he came.
13 November 2001
Friday, 9 November 2001, was the day I arrived. Eleven years, two months, and twenty-six days were condensed to one hundred thirty-four days. Anne’s ten months in 1921–22 were reduced to ten days when she returned. I’ve tried to puzzle it out, but it’s like trying to wrap my mind around the creation of the universe. I spent ten minutes studying a child’s toy in Lyons department store yesterday—the store still exists! The expansion and contraction of the toy—Anne called it a Slinky—made me consider time in a whole new way. Maybe time is coiled into ever-widening (or tightening) circles, layered and wrapped around the next. I spread my arms as wide as I could, lengthening the coils of the Slinky, and then I pressed my hands together, flattening it between my palms, intrigued. Anne insisted on buying it for me.
I told her my new theory on time and toys last night
as we laid in her glorious bed. It is enormous, yet we sleep spooned together, her back to my chest, her head beneath my chin. I can’t quit touching her, but she suffers from the same insecurity. It will be a while before either of us can bear any type of separation. I was in the shower—so much hot water coming at such a wonderful velocity—and she joined me after a few minutes, her eyes shy and her cheeks pink.
“I was afraid . . . and I didn’t want to be alone,” she said. She didn’t need to explain or apologize. Her presence there led to another discovery. The shower is delightful for a variety of reasons. But apparently there is a limit to the hot-water supply.
The trip to Sligo made me appreciate Anne a little more, if that is possible. I can’t imagine the fear and intimidation she must have felt that first time, trying to navigate a new world (and new clothes) while pretending to be someone who was well accustomed to it. We ended up purchasing a wardrobe that looks much like my old one. Peaked hats, white button-downs, and trousers haven’t gone out of fashion. Suspenders have. Vests have. But Anne says the style suits me, and I can wear whatever I like. I’ve noticed I dress like the old men. But I am an old man—even older than Maeve, who has taken all of this in remarkable stride. We went and paid her a visit today. We talked for hours of the years I missed and the loved ones who are now gone. When we left, I embraced her and thanked her for being a friend to Anne, both now and then.
Anne’s going to write our story. I’ve asked if I can pick my character’s name, and she agreed. She also wants me to pick our child’s name. If it’s a boy, he will be Michael Eoin. I’ve had more trouble thinking of a name for a lass. I don’t want her to be named for the past. She will be a girl of the future, like her mother. Anne says maybe we should call her Niamh. It made me laugh. Niamh is one of the oldest names in Ireland. Niamh, the Princess of Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Young. But perhaps it is fitting.
Anne is even more beautiful than I remember. I haven’t told her—I don’t think women like comparisons, even with their old selves. Her hair is glorious. She makes no effort to control it here, and it curls with complete and joyous abandon; it curls the way Anne makes love. She laughs at her burgeoning belly and her swollen breasts and the way she waddles and can’t see her toes, but all I want to do is look at her.
We’re going to Dublin in the morning. Anne says eventually we will see all of Ireland together. I recognize old Ireland beneath her new clothes. She hasn’t changed much, Éireann, and when I look out at the lough and up into the hills, she hasn’t changed at all.
Dublin might be hard for me. I went back very little in the ten years after Mick died. He lurked around every corner, and I had no wish to be there without him. I wish he could see Dublin with me now, and I wonder what the world would have looked like had he lived.
We’ll go to his grave at Glasnevin when we’re through, and I’ll describe all the ways the world has changed for the better, even in Ireland. I’ll tell him I found my Annie. I wish I could see his face; he took her loss so hard. I’ll tell him I found my girl, and I’ll ask him to keep an eye on my boy.
Eoin is very present. He’s in the wind. I can’t explain it, but I have no doubt he’s here. Anne showed me the books—The Adventures of Eoin Gallagher—and I felt him beside me, turning the pages. Then she handed me a box teeming with letters Eoin had insisted she keep. Hundreds of them. Anne says she never understood why he hadn’t sent them. They are dated and bundled in decades. There are more from the early years, but at least two for every year of his long life, and all of them are addressed to me. He promised he would write. And he did.
T. S.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In the summer of 2016, after doing a little research on my family tree, I traveled to Dromahair, Ireland, to see the place where my great-grandfather, Martin Smith, was born and raised. He emigrated to the States as a young man; my nana said he got involved with the local IRB, and his parents sent him to America because they didn’t want him getting into trouble. I don’t know if that’s true, as Nana has been gone since 2001, but he was born the same year as Michael Collins, in a period of reformation and revolution.
Nana had written a few things on the back of a St. Patrick’s Day card one year about her father, my great-grandfather. I knew when he was born, I knew his mother’s name was Anne Gallagher, and his father was Michael Smith. But that’s all I knew. Just like Anne, I went to Dromahair with the hopes of finding them. And I did.
My parents and my older sister took the trip with me, and the first time we saw Lough Gill, my chest burned, and my eyes teared. Every step of the way, it felt like we were being guided and led. Deirdre Fallon, a real-life librarian—libraries never let you down—in Dromahair, directed us to the genealogical center in Ballinamore. We were then directed to Ballinagar, a cemetery behind a church in the middle of fields. When I asked how we would find it, I really was told to pray or pull over and ask someone, just like Anne was told to do in this book. I won’t ever forget how it felt to walk up that rise among the stones and find my family.
The townland where my grandfather was born was called Garvagh Glebe, just like in the story. But Garvagh Glebe is not a manor, and it is not next to Lough Gill. It is a rather barren and rocky stretch of land, a true “rough place” up in the hills above Dromahair where there is a wind farm now. When I saw those big windmills, the title was born. What the Wind Knows was inspired by these events and by ancestors I’ve never met but feel like I know.
I couldn’t give my main character my great-great-grandfather’s name (Michael Smith) because Michael Collins was such a central figure in the book, and I didn’t want two Michaels. So Thomas Smith was named for two of my Irish grandfathers, Thomas Keefe of Youghal, County Cork, and Michael Smith of Dromahair, County Leitrim. We also have a Bannon branch that I can’t get a lock on. Maybe there will be another book about John Bannon.
Even though this book has a strong dose of the fantastical, I wanted it to be a historical novel as well. The more research I did into Ireland, the more lost I felt. I didn’t know how to tell the story or even what story to tell. I felt like Anne when she told Eoin, “There is no consensus. I have to have context.” It was Eoin’s response to Anne, “Don’t let the history distract you from the people who lived it,” that gave me hope and direction.
Ireland’s history is a long and tumultuous one, and I did not wish to relitigate it or point fingers of blame in this story. I simply wanted to learn, understand, and fall in love with her and invite my reader to love her too. In the process, I immersed myself in the poetry of Yeats, who walked the streets my great-grandfather walked and who wrote about Dromahair. I also fell in love with Michael Collins. If you want to know more about him, I highly suggest Tim Pat Coogan’s book Michael Collins, to gain a deeper appreciation of his life and his place in Irish history. There is so much written about him, and so many opinions, but after all my research, I am still in awe of the young man who committed himself, heart and soul, to his cause. That much is not in dispute.
Of course, Thomas Smith is a fictional character, but I think he embodies the kind of friendship and loyalty Michael Collins inspired among those who knew him best. I did my best to blend fact and fiction, and many of the events and accounts I inserted Thomas and Anne into actually happened. There was no assassination attempt or arson at the Gresham Hotel in August of 1921, and that event is fictional, but it mirrors many of the attempts that were made on Michael Collins’s life during the time. The night Michael and Thomas spent inside the records room was based on actual events, as were Michael’s friends—Tom Cullen, Joe O’Reilly, Gearóid O’Sullivan, Moya Llewelyn-Davies, Kitty Kiernan—and historical figures like Constance Markievicz, Arthur Griffith, Cathal Brugha, Eamon de Valera, Lloyd George, and so many more. Terence MacSwiney, his sister Mary, and others mentioned in a historical context were also real people, and I tried to stay true to the record where they are referenced. A bodyguard for Michael Collins was alluded to in several accounts—one with d
etails very similar to the events at Garvagh Glebe and the shooting in the marsh—but his name was not Fergus as far as I know. Brigid McMorrow Gallagher was named for my great-great-great-grandmother, Brigid McNamara, and her relationship to Seán Mac Diarmada’s mother was completely fictional.
Any mistakes or embellishments to the actual record to fill in the historical gaps or to further the story are well intentioned and are completely my own. I hope when you are finished with What the Wind Knows, you simply have a greater respect for the men and women who came before and a desire to make the world a better place.
I must give huge thanks to my friend Emma Corcoran of Lusk, Ireland, for her input and Irish eyes on this novel. She kept the narrative authentic and my facts straight, as well as helped me with the Gaelic at every turn. Grateful thanks to Geraldine Cummins also, for reading and enthusiastically reporting back.
Big thanks to my friend Nicole Karlson, for reading each section as I wrote it and for leaving me long messages filled with encouragement and praise. This was a hard novel to write, and her enthusiasm kept me optimistically plodding away more times than I can count.
To my assistant, Tamara Debbaut, who is always a steady source of support and so much more. She does all the things I can’t ever seem to do for myself. There would be no Amy Harmon, author, without Tamara Debbaut. I am quite useless without her.
Karey White, my personal editor, must also be mentioned for her time and care on perfecting my manuscripts long before my agent and publisher ever see them. To my agent, Jane Dystel, for believing in my books and making big dreams happen. For my Lake Union team, particularly Jodi Warshaw and Jenna Free, for enthusiastically embracing my efforts and walking with me through the publishing process once more.
Finally, my never-ending gratitude to my dad for giving me Ireland, to my husband for giving me unfailing belief, and to my children for not caring one whit about my books and reminding me what is truly important in my life. I love you all very much.
