In school, I’d studied Catholicism, learned the catechisms and the history, and absorbed it the way I’d absorbed all my other subjects, cleaving to the things that resonated and setting aside the things that didn’t. The nuns complained that religion was not a buffet from which I could select only certain dishes. I politely smiled and quietly disagreed. Life, religion, and learning were exactly that. A series of choices. If I had tried to consume everything that was presented to me all at once, I would have become too full too quickly, and all the flavors would have run together. Nothing would have made any sense in and of itself.
As I sat in the old church where generations of my ancestors may have worshipped, where prayers had been spoken and hearts broken and healed, it all made sense for a small moment. Religion made sense, if only to add context to the struggle of life and death. The church was a monument to what had been, a connection to the past that comforted those in the present, and it comforted me.
I climbed the slope beyond the church to where the cemetery stretched. It overlooked the spires and the winding road I’d just traveled. Some of the stones were tipped or sunken; some were so covered with lichen and time that I couldn’t make out names or dates. Other plots were new, lined by rocks and filled in with mementos. The newer plots, newer deaths, rimmed the edges of the graveyard, as if death rippled outward like a rock tossed in a lake. Those markers were clean, the marble smooth, the names easily read. Maeve had warned that the cemeteries in much of Ireland were a mix of ancient and recent, the connections familial, even if the relationship was centuries old. In Ballinagar Cemetery, most of the graves, especially those higher up the rise, stood like petrified gnomes and hobbits amid the grass, peeping out at me and drawing me to them.
I found my family beneath a tree on the edge of an older section. The stone was a tall rectangle with the name Gallagher engraved at the base. Just above it were the names Declan and Anne. I stared, incredibly moved, and touched their names. The years, 1892 to 1916, were visible as well, and I felt a flood of relief that Maeve had been wrong after all. Declan and Anne had died together, just as I’d believed. I sank to my knees, light-headed and euphoric, not trusting myself to remain standing. I found myself talking to them, telling them about Eoin, about myself, about how much it meant to me to find them.
When I was talked out, I rose to my feet and touched the stone again, noticing for the first time the graves around it. A smaller stone, also with the name Gallagher, sat to the left. The names Brigid and Peter were visible, but the dates, two sets of them, were not. Peter Gallagher, Declan’s father, had died before Declan and Anne, and Brigid had passed away sometime after. Eoin hadn’t ever told me. Or maybe I’d never asked. I only knew his grandmother was gone when he left Ireland.
I touched Brigid’s and Peter’s names too, thanking Brigid for raising Eoin, for molding him into the man who had loved and looked after me with so much care. Surely, she had loved him as intently as he’d loved me. He had to have learned it somewhere.
The clouds were gathering, and the wind nipped at my cheeks, telling me it was time to go. As I turned to leave, a headstone, set back from the Gallaghers, caught my eye, or maybe it was the faded name stretched across the dark stone. It said Smith, the word so close to the ground that the grass obscured part of the lettering. I hesitated, wondering if the grave belonged to Thomas Smith, the somber man in the three-piece suit, the man Eoin had loved like a father.
I felt one raindrop and then another, and the skies split with a groan and a grumble, releasing an angry torrent. I abandoned my curiosity and stumbled down the hill, weaving in and out of the now-glistening monuments and promising the stones that I would be back.
That night, back in my hotel in Sligo, I dug through my suitcase in search of the items from Eoin’s locked drawer. I’d thrown the manila envelope into my suitcase on a whim—mostly because Eoin had been so insistent that I read the book—but I’d hardly given it a second thought since his death. I’d been too grief-stricken to concentrate, too frazzled for research, too lost to do anything but search for my bearings. But now that I’d seen the graves of my great-grandparents, I wanted to remember their faces.
I wondered how long it had been since someone had remembered them, and my heart broke again. I’d been fighting tears since Eoin’s death, and Ireland had not eased my pain. Still, the emotion was different now. It was laced with joy and gratitude, and though the tears looked the same, they didn’t feel the same.
I upended the envelope across the small desk, the way I’d done a month ago at Eoin’s bedside. The book, heavier than the other items, slid out first, the pictures fluttering around it like afterthoughts. I tossed the envelope aside, and it fell heavily, making a small thunk as it hit the edge of the desk. I picked it up again, curious, and reached inside. A ring had found its way under the padded lining and was wedged into the corner. I worked it free, finding a delicate band of gold filigree that widened around a pale cameo on an agate background. It was lovely and old—an intoxicating combination for a historian—and I slipped it on my finger, delighted that it fit, wishing Eoin could tell me to whom it had belonged.
It was probably his mother’s, and I picked up the old photos to see if she wore it on her hand in any of the shots. Anne’s hands were tucked in the pockets of her gray coat in one photo, wrapped around Declan’s arm in another, and out of frame or out of sight in the rest.
I thumbed through them all again, touching the faces that had preceded my own. I stopped on Eoin’s picture, his unhappy little face and stiffly parted hair making my eyes tear and my heart swell. I could see the old man in the child’s expression in the set of his chin and the frown on his lips. Age was the only color in the photo, and I could only guess at the vibrancy of his hair or the blue of his eyes. My grandfather had been snowy-haired as long as I’d known him but claimed he’d had hair as red as his father’s before him and my father after him.
I set Eoin’s picture aside and studied the others, pausing once more at the picture of Thomas Smith and my grandmother. It hadn’t been taken at the same time as the picture with the three of them—Anne, Thomas, and Declan—together. Anne’s hair and clothes were different, and Thomas Smith wore a darker suit. He seemed older in the one, though I couldn’t think why. The patina was forgiving, his hair dark and uncovered. Maybe it was the set of his shoulders or the solemnity in his stance. The picture was slightly overexposed, leaching the details from Anne’s dress and giving their skin the pearly quality so often found in very old photos.
There were pictures in the stack I hadn’t seen. Eoin’s pain had interrupted my perusal on the night of his death, and I paused over a photo of a grand house with trees clustered around the edges and a glimmer of lake in the distance. I studied the landscape and the stretch of water. It looked like Lough Gill. I should have taken the photos with me to Dromahair. I could have asked Maeve about the house.
In another photo, a group of men I didn’t know stood around Thomas and Anne in an ornate ballroom. Declan wasn’t in the picture. A big, smirking man with dark hair stood in the center of the shot, one arm slung loosely around Anne’s shoulders and his other arm around Thomas. Anne stared at the camera, wonder stamped all over her face.
I recognized that look—it was one often captured on my own face at book signings. It was a look that telegraphed discomfort and disbelief that anyone would want a picture with me in the first place. I’d gotten better at controlling my expressions and pasting on a professional smile, but I made a rule not to look at any of the shots my publicist regularly sent me from such events. What I didn’t see wouldn’t fill me with insecurity.
I continued to study the picture, suddenly riveted by the man who stood next to Anne.
“No,” I gasped. “It can’t be.” I gazed at it in wonder. “But it is.” The man with his arm around Anne’s shoulders was Michael Collins, leader of the movement that led to the Treaty with England. Before 1922, there were very few pictures of him. Everyone had heard of Michael Collins and his guerilla tactics, but only his inner circle, men and women who worked alongside him, knew what he looked like, making it harder for the Crown to detain him. But after the Treaty was signed and he began rallying the Irish people for its acceptance, his picture had been taken and saved in the annals of history. I’d seen those shots—one of him midspeech, his arms raised in passion, and one in his commander’s uniform the day the British relinquished control of the castle, a symbol of British control in Dublin for the last hundred years.
I stared at the picture a moment longer, marveling, before I set it aside and reached for the book. It was a journal, an old one, the writing neatly slanted, the cursive beautiful in the way old handwriting often was. I thumbed through it without reading, simply checking the dates. The entries ranged from 1916 to 1922 and were often sporadic, with months between them and sometimes years before the record picked up again. The handwriting was the same throughout the entire book. Nothing scribbled or crossed out; no ink stains or torn pages. Each entry had T. S. at the bottom of the page and nothing more.
“Thomas Smith?” I said to myself. It was the only thing that fit, but it surprised me that Eoin would have the man’s journal. I read the first entry, a date marked May 2, 1916. My horror and amazement grew as I read about the Easter Rising and the death of Declan Gallagher. I thumbed through several more entries and read about Thomas’s efforts to find Anne and to come to terms with the loss of his friends. An entry the day Seán Mac Diarmada was executed at Kilmainham Gaol simply said, Seán died this morning. I thought he might be spared when the executions were halted for several days. But he’s been taken too. My only comfort is that I know he welcomed it. He died for the cause of Irish freedom. That’s the way he would have seen it. But selfishly, I can only consider it a dreadful shame. I will miss him terribly.
He wrote of his return to Dromahair after attending medical school at the University College, Dublin, and of trying to set up a practice in Sligo and County Leitrim.
The people are so poor, I can’t imagine I will make much of a living from the effort, but I have more than sufficient for my needs. It is what I’ve always planned to do. And here I am, driving from one end of the county to the other, from the north to the south, east to Sligo and west again. I feel like a peddler half the time, and the people can’t pay for what I’m offering. I made a house call in Ballinamore yesterday and collected no payment but a sweet song from the oldest daughter. A family of seven in a two-room cottage. The youngest, a girl of six or seven, had been unable to get out of her bed for several days. I discovered she wasn’t sick. She was hungry—hungry enough to have no energy to move. The entire family was skin and bones. I have thirty acres at Garvagh Glebe that are not being cultivated and an overseer’s house sitting empty on the property. I told the father—a man named O’Toole—that I needed someone to farm it and the position was his, if he thought he could do it. It was an impulsive offer. I have no interest in farming or in taking on the responsibility of providing for an entire family. But the man wept and asked if he could start in the morning. I gave him twenty pounds, and we shook hands on it. I left the supper Brigid had packed for me that morning—more food than I needed—and made the little girl eat a piece of bread and butter before I left. Bread and butter. Years of medical training and study, and the child simply needed bread and butter. From now on, I’ll bring eggs and flour along with my medical bag on my travels. I think the food is needed more than a doctor. I’m not sure what I’ll do when I come across the next family starving in their beds.