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 empathized, 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.