I stopped reading, a lump in my throat, and turned the page only to find another sad account of doctoring in Dromahair. He wrote, “One mother seemed more interested in me marrying her daughter than healing her. She pointed out her fine features, rosy cheeks, and bright eyes, which were all due to an advanced case of consumption. She won’t live much longer, I’m afraid. But I promised to come back with medicine to ease her cough. The mother was ecstatic. I don’t think she understands that I’m not calling on the girl.”
He wrote of Brigid Gallagher’s anger at the Irish Republican Brotherhood, of which Thomas was still an active member. Brigid blamed the Brotherhood for Declan’s death and for the increased presence of the Black and Tans, the British police force, throughout Ireland. Thomas “refused to argue the issue with her. I can’t talk her out of her opinions any more than I can ignore my own. I still yearn for liberty and Irish emancipation, though I don’t see how we will accomplish it. My guilt is almost as great as my longing. So many of the men who fought in the Rising, men that I consider my friends, are at Frongoch in Wales. And in my heart, I know I should be with them.”
He wrote lovingly of Eoin. “He is a light in my life, the glimmer of something better in my days. I’ve asked Brigid to keep house for me so that I can take care of her and the boy. Anne had no family to call on. She and I were alike in that way. Alone in the world. She has a sister in America. Parents and a brother long dead. Brigid is all the family Eoin has left, but I will be his family, and I will make sure he knows who his parents were and who Ireland is.”
He was like a father to me, Eoin had said. I felt a rush of tenderness for the melancholy Thomas Smith and read on. His next entry was months later. He spoke of the O’Tooles, of the efforts of the new overseer, and the satisfaction he felt at the weight the children had gained. He wrote of Eoin’s first words and his propensity to run to him, babbling, when he arrived home. “He has begun to call me Da. Brigid was horrified when she realized what he was saying and cried noisily for days. I tried to convince her that Eoin was saying Doc. But she refused to be comforted. I have begun coaching the little lad in the evenings. He says Doc quite clearly now and calls Brigid Nana, which made her smile just a bit.”
He wrote of the release, just before Christmas 1916, of the last of the Irish freedom fighters, as he called them. He went to Dublin to see them home and remarked at the welcome, at the change in the people. “When we marched through the streets the day after Easter, with all intentions of staging a rebellion and inciting a confrontation, the people jeered and told us to go fight the Germans. Now they welcome the boys home like they are returning heroes instead of troublemakers. I am glad of it. Maybe the hearts of the people have turned enough that real change is possible. Mick seems to think so.”
Mick? Michael Collins was known as Mick among his friends. The picture I’d seen made me think Thomas Smith was well acquainted with him. The journal was a treasure trove, and I wondered why Eoin hadn’t given it to me much earlier. He knew I was knee-deep in research about events that Thomas Smith had seemed to know intimately.
My eyes were growing heavy, and my heart had not recovered from the odd emotional toll of my visit to Ballinagar. I moved to set the book aside, and the pages fell forward, revealing the final page. Instead of a journal entry, four stanzas marched across the yellowed paper. No title, no explanation, just a piece of poetry written in Thomas Smith’s hand. It sounded like Yeats. It felt like him too, though I’d never seen it before. I wondered if it was possibly the poem about the woman who drowned in the lough, the poem the owner of the candy store had mentioned just that morning. I read the words and read them again. The lines were so filled with longing and trepidation, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the page.
I pulled you from the water
And kept you in my bed.
A lost, forsaken daughter
Of a past that isn’t dead.
Somehow love from sweet obsession
Branched and broke a heart of stone.
Distrust became confession,
Solemn vows of blood and bone.
But in the wind, I hear the strain,
Pilgrim soul that time has found.
It moans to whisk you back again.
Bid me follow, sweetly drown.
Don’t go near the water, love.
Stay away from strand or sea.
You cannot walk on water, love.
The lough will take you far from me.
I turned the page and was met with the leather-bound back of the book. There was nothing else written. Pilgrim soul that time has found. Yeats referred to a pilgrim soul in his poem “When You Are Old.” But this was not Yeats, I was certain, though it was beautiful. Maybe Thomas Smith had simply loved it and wanted to remember it. Or maybe the words were his.
“Don’t go near the water, love. Stay away from strand or sea. You cannot walk on water, love. The lough will take you far from me,” I read again.
In the morning, I would take Eoin’s ashes to Lough Gill. And the lake would take him. I shut the book softly and turned off the lamp, drawing the spare pillow on the bed to my chest, lonely and alone in a way I’d never been. The tears came then, a deluge, and there was no one to pull me from the water and keep me in his bed. I wept for my grandfather and wept for a past that was dead, and I felt forsaken when the wind refused to whisk me away.
11 July 1916
Eoin turned one today. He is a smiley lad, healthy and content. I find myself watching him, absorbed in his perfect innocence and unblemished spirit. And I mourn for the day when he will grasp what he’s lost. He wanted his mother in the days after Dublin and cried for her. He had not yet been weaned from her milk, and he sought a comfort no one else could give. But he doesn’t ask for her anymore. I doubt he’ll have any memory of them at all, and the tragedy of that truth weighs on me.
There is a rumbling in rural Ireland spurred on by the executions after Easter week. Some men were spared—Eamon de Valera, who was in command at Boland’s Mill—while others, Willie Pearse and John MacBride, men on the periphery, were sentenced to death. Instead of the executions and imprisonments tamping down the rebellious undercurrent in the country, it seems to have fed it, contributing to a growing sentiment that another injustice has been done. We simply add it to the centuries-old list every Irishman keeps tucked in the back of his mind and hands on to the next generation.
Regardless of the rumbling, the people are wounded and afraid. We are in no position to fight back now. Not yet. But there will come another day. When Eoin is a man, Ireland will be free. I have promised this to him, whispering the words into his downy hair.
Brigid has begun to mutter about taking Eoin to America. I have not discouraged her or made my feelings known, but I can’t bear to lose Eoin too. He has become mine. My stolen child. Brigid worries that I will marry, and then I will not need her to keep house and look after me. On that count, I have reassured her often. She and Eoin will always have a place in my home. I have not told her that when I close my eyes, I see Anne’s face. I dream about her, and my heart is unsettled. Brigid would not understand. I’m not sure I do. I didn’t love Anne, but she haunts me. If I had found her, maybe it would be different.
But I didn’t find her.
T. S.
4
THE MEETING
Hidden by old age awhile
In masker’s cloak and hood
Each hating what the other loved,
Face to face we stood.
—W. B. Yeats
Deirdre didn’t seem especially surprised to see me, and she beamed at me in cheerful welcome when I walked through the library door the next day.
“Maeve sent you to Ballinagar. Any luck?” she asked.
“Yes. I found them—where they are buried, I mean. I’m going to go back tomorrow and put flowers on their graves.” The tender feelings I’d had among the grass and the stones welled in me again, and I smiled awkwardly, embarrassed that I was, once more, becoming overly emotional in the librarian’s presence. I cleared my throat and retrieved the picture of the house I’d tucked between the pages of Thomas Smith’s journal and held it out to Deirdre, brandishing it like a shield.
“I wondered if you could tell me where this is?” I asked.
She took it, looking down through the lower half of her glasses, her chin jutting forward, her eyebrows raised.
“That’s Garvagh Glebe,” she said, delighted. “This is an old picture, isn’t it? Goodness! When was this taken? It really doesn’t look all that different. Except for the carpark off to the side. I think there’s been some guest cottages added in recent years as well.” She squinted at the picture. “You can just see Donnelly’s cottage there in the trees. It’s been there for longer than the manor. Jim Donnelly fixed it up about ten years ago. He takes tourists out on the lake and out exploring the old caves where smugglers used to store arms during the Black-and-Tan War. My grandfather told me the lough was used to move weapons in and out of this area all through those years.”
“Garvagh Glebe,” I breathed, stunned. I should have known. “It was owned by a man named Thomas Smith, wasn’t it?”
She looked at me blankly. “When would that have been?”
“In 1916,” I said, sheepish. “I guess that was a little before your time.”
“Just a bit,” she laughed. “But I might remember something about that. Well, I don’t know. I think so. The house and property are run from a family trust. None of the family live there now. They have groundskeepers and a staff, and they let out rooms. It’s on the Dromahair side of Lough Gill. Some folks call it the manor.”
“You mentioned the manor yesterday. I didn’t realize.”
“Yes. There’s a dock there as well, and people rent boats from Jim to fish or just spend the day on the lake. The lake leads to a little inlet. When the tides are high, you can follow the inlet all the way out past the strand in Sligo and into the sea. There are stories of pirate ships in Lough Gill back in the days of O’Rourke, the man who built the castle—they call it Parke’s Castle. Have you been?”
I nodded, and she babbled on with barely a pause.
“He built Creevelea Abbey as well. O’Rourke was hung for treason by the English for giving shelter to marooned Spanish sailors of the Spanish Armada. The English king gave O’Rourke’s castle to a man named Parke—can you imagine working for twenty years to build something that would survive for centuries and having someone just swoop in and take it away?” She shook her head in disgust.
“I’d like to see Garvagh Glebe. Is the house open to visitors?”
She gave directions much the way Maeve had the day before. “Go left for a bit; go right for a bit more. Pull over and ask if you get lost, but you shouldn’t get lost because it’s not that far.”
I listened intently, scratching notes into the little pad from my purse. “Thank you, Deirdre. And if you talk to Maeve, would you thank her for me as well? It meant a great deal to me to find those graves.”