She watches the shape of her daughter move from table to stove to pantry to fridge. Hannah fakes unconcern. She kneads the dough and allows the bread to rise. As if the heat from the oven itself might push forward the hands of the clock on the stove. An occasional chatter between them. Did Ambrose have a proper belt? Was Tomas given the thickest of socks? Would Lawrence be alongside them both? Did everyone take an oilskin? When was the last time they shot a scaup? Did he bring his eyeglasses? Has he ever even pulled a trigger before?
IT IS LATE lunchtime before they hear the bark of a dog. The men come down the road as routinely as one might expect: Ambrose and Tomas bringing up the rear, the width of the grassy median between them. Their jackets dark with rain. Shotguns slung over their shoulders. A hint of fatigue in the walk.
She greets them at the front of the cottage, opens the latch on the half-door, beckons them in.
Tomas shucks his jacket and hangs it on the fire irons, bangs his heels on the floor until his boots come off, pulls his wadded socks from his toes, puts them down by the fire. He sits, long and languid, in the chair, hides himself under a towel. A warm smoke rising from his boots and socks.
— What about ye, Nana?
She stands close to the fire, her back against the mantelpiece. She will hold the moment for a long time, the sight of him in the chair, a small crease of light from the fire flickering at the end of his raindark boots.
— Did you like it, then?
— Oh, aye, I suppose.
— Get anything?
— Granddad bagged himself a couple.
There are times — months later, years later, a decade later even — that it strikes Lottie how very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit. She will spend so much of her time wondering why she did not sit down with Tomas and inquire what exactly it was that brought him out the road in the morning, what guided him along the shore, what strange compulsion led him towards the hunt? What was it like, to walk down by the lakeside and crouch in the grass and wait for the birds and the dogs to disturb the blue and the gray? What words went between him and Ambrose, what silence? What sounds did he hear across the water? Which of the dogs hunkered next to him, waiting? How was it that he had changed his mind so simply? She wished, then, that she had carved open whatever idea had crossed his mind in the early hours that one September morning. Was it just one of those random things, slipshod, unasked for, another element in the grand disorder of things? Perhaps he did not want to see his grandfather stepping out alone. Or he overheard his mother talking of the hunt. Or maybe how his stepfather wanted so badly for him to join. Or perhaps it was just pure boredom.
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.