“I don’t like that song, Nana,” Eoin said, his voice hitching with the sobs that still shuddered through him.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because it’s about Jesus, and Jesus died.”
Brigid looked a little shocked, and I felt inappropriate laughter bubbling in my chest.
“It’s not a sad song, though. It’s a song about remembering,” she protested.
“I don’t like remembering that Jesus died,” Eoin insisted, his voice rising. Brigid’s shoulders fell, and I patted her hand. She was trying, and Eoin wasn’t being especially receptive.
“Remember Him, remember when, remember that He’ll come again, when all the hope and love is lost, remember that He paid the cost,” Thomas sang softly from the doorway. “They can’t forget, they never will, the wind and waves remember Him still.”
Thomas’s pale eyes had dark circles, and his clothes were rumpled, but he walked forward and lifted Eoin from my arms. Eoin clung to him, burrowing his face in Thomas’s neck. His sobs rose again, gut-wrenching and unrelenting.
“What’s wrong, little man?” Thomas sighed. I stood, vacating my spot so Thomas could tuck Eoin back in his bed. Brigid stood as well, and with a soft good night, she walked quickly from the room. I followed, leaving Eoin in Thomas’s capable hands.
“Brigid?”
She turned toward me, her face tragic, her mouth tight.
“Are you all right?” I asked. She nodded briskly, but I could see that she was struggling for her composure.
“When my children were small, sometimes they would cry in their sleep like that,” she said. She paused, tangled in a memory. “My husband—Declan’s father—he wasn’t gentle the way Thomas is. He was bitter and tired. Anger was the only thing that kept him going. He worked himself into the ground; he worked us into the ground. And he had no patience for our tears.”
I listened, not commenting. It was almost as if she wasn’t talking to me at all, and I didn’t want to startle her.
“I wouldn’t let Eoin call Thomas Daddy. I couldn’t bear it. And Thomas has never complained. Now Eoin calls him Doc. I shouldn’t have done that, Anne. Thomas deserves more,” Brigid whispered. Her eyes found mine then, and there was a look of pleading in them that begged for absolution. I gave it to her, gladly.
“Thomas wants Eoin to know who his father was. He’s very protective of Declan,” I soothed.
She nodded. “Yes. He is. He looked after Declan the way he looks after everyone else.” Her eyes skittered away again. “My children . . . especially my sons . . . inherited their father’s temper. I know that Declan—Declan wasn’t always gentle with you, Anne. I want you to know . . . I don’t blame you for leaving when you had the chance. And I don’t blame you now for falling in love with Thomas. Any wise woman would.”
I stared at my great-great-grandmother, shocked beyond speech.
“You are in love with Thomas, aren’t you?” she asked, misinterpreting my stunned expression.
I didn’t answer. I wanted to defend Declan. To tell Brigid that Anne hadn’t left, that her beloved Declan hadn’t raised a hand to his wife or scared her away. But I didn’t know what was true.
“I think I’ve outlived my usefulness, Anne,” Brigid said, her tone brittle. “I’m making plans to go to America to live with my daughter. It’s time. Eoin has you. He has Thomas. And like my dear, departed husband, I’m no good with tears anymore.”
Emotion swelled in my chest. “Oh no,” I mourned.
“No?” she scoffed, but I could hear the emotion in her throat.
“Brigid, please don’t. I don’t want you to go.”
“Why?” Her voice sounded like a child’s, like Eoin’s, plaintive and disbelieving. “There is nothing for me here. My children are scattered. I am getting older. I am . . . alone. And I am not”—she stopped, searching for the right words—“needed anymore.”
I thought of the grave in Ballinagar, the one that bore her name in the years to come, and I pled with her gently. “Someday . . . someday your great-great-grandchildren will come here, to Dromahair, and they will walk up the hill behind the church where your children were baptized, where your children were married and laid to rest, and they will sit by the stones in Ballinagar that bear the Gallagher name, and they will know that this was your home, and because it was your home, it is theirs as well. That is what Ireland does. It calls her children home. If you don’t stay in Ireland, who will they come home to?”
Her lips had begun to tremble, and she raised her hand toward me. I took it. She didn’t pull me closer or seek my embrace, but the distance between us had been bridged. Her hand felt small and frail in my own, and I held it carefully, grief sitting heavy on my shoulders. Brigid was not an old woman, but her hand felt old, and I inwardly raged at time for taking her away—taking us all away—layer by layer.
“Thank you, Anne,” she whispered, and after a moment she released my hand. She walked to her room and softly shut the door behind her.
22 December 1921
The debates continued in the Dáil for hours on end, day after day. The press seems to be firmly on the side of the Treaty, but the early debates were closed to the public, against Mick’s wishes. He wants the people to know what the disagreements are, to know what is at stake and what is being argued. But he was overruled, at least in the beginning.
Public debates began on the afternoon of the nineteenth and recessed today for Christmas. Last year on Christmas Eve, Mick came within a hair’s breadth of being arrested. He got drunk and loud and careless, drawing too much attention, and we ended up crawling out a second-story window at Vaughan’s Hotel only seconds before the Auxies arrived. That’s what happens when you carry the weight of the world on your shoulders; sometimes you lose your head. And Mick lost his last year.
This year, getting arrested won’t be a problem, though I think he’d gladly exchange the troubles of the past for the troubles he’s now facing. He’s a man being torn in two, stretched between allegiance and responsibility, between practicality and patriotism, by people he would rather die for than fight with. His stomach is bothering him again. I rattled off the same instructions, the remedies and restrictions, but he brushed me off.
“I gave my official remarks today, Tommy. I didn’t say half the things I should have said, and what I did say wasn’t delivered well. Arthur (Griffith) said it was convincing, but he’s generous that way. He referred to me as the ‘man who won the war,’ but I might be the man who lost the country after today.”
Mick wanted me to ask Anne how she thought the vote would go in the end. I tucked her beneath my arm so she could share the receiver with me and speak into the transmitter on the upright, which I held clutched in my hand. I found myself immediately distracted by the smell of her hair and the feel of her pressed against me.
“Careful, Anne,” I whispered in her ear. I didn’t like that others could be listening, wondering at Mick’s interest in her opinions. Anne wisely told Mick she “believed” the pro-Treaty faction of the Dáil would prevail.
“The margin will be slim, Michael, but I’m confident it will pass,” she said.
He sighed so loudly that it rattled through the wires, and Anne and I both withdrew from the receiver to avoid the whistling static.
“If you’re confident, then I will try to be confident too,” Mick said. “Tell me this, Annie, if I come for Christmas, will you tell me another one of your stories? Perhaps Niamh and Oisín? I’d like to hear that one again. I’ll recite something too, something that’ll burn your ears and make you laugh, and we’ll make Tommy dance. Did you know Tommy can dance, Annie? If he loves like he dances, you’re a lucky lady.”
“Mick,” I chided, but Anne laughed. The sound was warm and rolling, and I kissed the side of her neck, unable to help myself, grateful that Mick was laughing too, his tension falling away for a moment.
Anne promised Mick if he came there would indeed be stories, food, rest, and dancing. She pinched me as she said dancing. I’d shown her my dancing skills one day in the rain. And then I kissed her senseless in the barn.
“Can I bring Joe O’Reilly?” Mick asked. “And maybe a man to watch my back so poor Joe can relax a bit?”
Anne assured him that he could bring anyone he liked, even Princess Mary. He laughed again, but he hesitated before signing off.
“Tommy, I appreciate this,” he murmured. “I would go home, but . . . you know Woodfield is gone. And I need to leave Dublin for a while.”
“I know, Mick. And how long have I been begging you to come?”
Last year, Mick didn’t dare go to Cork for Christmas. It would have been too easy for the Tans to watch his family and swoop in and arrest him. This year, he no longer had a home to go home to.
Eight months ago, the Tans burned Woodfield, Mick’s childhood home, to the ground and threw his brother Johnny in jail. The Collins farm is now a burned-out husk, Johnny’s health has deteriorated, and the rest of the family is scattered across Clonakilty in County Cork. Mick carries that burden too.
Anne became very still at the mention of Cork and Mick’s home. When I hung up the receiver, her smile was bent and misshapen, though she tried her best to keep it in place. Her green eyes were shimmering like she wanted to cry but didn’t want me to see. She hurried from the room, muttering an excuse about bedtime and Eoin, and I let her go, but I see through her. I see through her now the way I saw through her on the lake, the day everything became clear.
There are things she isn’t telling me. She’s shielding me from the things she knows. I should insist that she tell me everything, just so I can help her carry the weight of what’s to come. But God help me, I don’t want to know.
T. S.
19
A NEEDLE’S EYE
All the stream that’s roaring by
Came out of a needle’s eye;
Things unborn, things that are gone,
From needle’s eye still goad it on.
—W. B. Yeats
Michael Collins and Joe O’Reilly arrived early on Christmas Eve with a bodyguard named Fergus in tow, and they took the three empty rooms in the west wing of the house. Thomas had ordered three new beds from Lyons department store, hauling the frames and mattresses up the stairs to the freshly scrubbed rooms where Maggie and Maeve covered them with new linens and plump pillows. Thomas claimed Michael wouldn’t know what to do with a big bed in a room of his own, having slept so often wherever his head landed and never staying in one place for too long. The O’Tooles were beside themselves with excitement, preparing the rooms as though ancient King Conor himself were coming to visit.
Eoin was frantic as he waited for them, running from one window to the next, watching for them to arrive. He had a secret he was bursting to share. We had created a new adventure in the Eoin sagas, a story where Eoin and Michael Collins rowed the little red boat across the lough and into an Ireland of the future. The Ireland in our story slept under the tricolor flag, no longer ruled by the Crown, the troubles and tribulations of past centuries long behind her. I told the story in rhyme, plotting each page, and Thomas sketched little Eoin and the “Big Fella” sitting atop the Cliffs of Moher, kissing the Blarney stone, and driving along the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim. On one page, the mismatched pair saw the wildflowers and braced themselves against the winds on Clare Island. On another, they witnessed the winter solstice at Newgrange in County Meath. The story hadn’t begun as a gift for Michael, but by the time we were finished, it was agreed that it needed to be.