PROLOGUE
November 1976
“Grandfather, tell me about your mother.”
He was silent as he smoothed my hair, and for a long moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me.
“She was beautiful. Her hair was dark, her eyes green, just like yours are.”
“Do you miss her?” Tears leaked out the sides of my eyes and made his shoulder wet beneath my cheek. I missed my mother desperately.
“Not anymore,” my grandfather soothed.
“Why?” I was suddenly angry with him. How could he betray her that way? It was his duty to miss her.
“Because she is still with me.”
This made me cry harder.
“Hush now, Annie. Be still. Be still. If you are crying, you won’t be able to hear.”
“Hear what?” I gulped, slightly distracted from my anguish.
“The wind. It’s singing.”
I perked up, lifting my head slightly, listening for what my grandfather could hear. “I don’t hear a song,” I contended.
“Listen closer. Maybe it’s singing for you.” It howled and hurried, pressing against my bedroom window.
“I hear the wind,” I confessed, allowing the sound to lull me. “But it isn’t singing a very pretty song. It sounds more like it’s shouting.”
“Maybe the wind is trying to get your attention. Maybe it has something very important to say,” he murmured.
“It doesn’t want me to be sad?” I proposed.
“Yes. Exactly. When I was little, about your age, I was very sad too, and someone told me everything would be okay because the wind already knew.”
“Already knew what?” I asked, confused.
He sang a line from a song I’d never heard in a voice both warm and rolling. “The wind and waves remember him still.” He stopped singing abruptly, as if he didn’t know what came next.
“Remember who still?” I pressed.
“Everyone who has ever lived. The wind and the water already know,” he said softly.
“Know what?”
“Everything. The wind you hear is the same wind that has always blown. The rain that falls is the same rain. Over and over, round and round, like a giant circle. The wind and the waves have been present since time began. The rocks and stars too. But the rocks don’t speak, and the stars are too far away to tell us what they know.”
“They can’t see us.”
“No. Probably not. But the wind and water know all the earth’s secrets. They’ve seen and heard all that has ever been said or done. And if you listen, they will tell you all the stories and sing every song. The stories of everyone who has ever lived. Millions and millions of lives. Millions and millions of stories.”
“Do they know my story?” I asked, stunned.
“Yes,” he whispered on a sigh and smiled down into my upturned face.
“And yours too?”
“Oh yes. Our stories belong together, Annie lass. Your story is a special one. It might take your whole life to tell it. Both of our lives.”
1
EPHEMERA
“Ah, do not mourn,” he said,
“That we are tired, for other loves await us;
Hate on and love through unrepining hours.
Before us lies eternity; our souls
Are love, and a continual farewell.”
—W. B. Yeats
June 2001
They say that Ireland is built on her stories. Fairies and folklore inhabited Ireland much longer than the English or even Patrick and the priests. My grandfather, Eoin Gallagher (pronounced galla–HER not galla–GUR), valued the story above all else, and he taught me to do the same, for it is in the legends and tales that we keep our ancestors, our culture, and our history alive. We turn memories into stories, and if we don’t, we lose them. If the stories are gone, then the people are gone too.
Even as a child, I found myself entranced by the past, wishing I knew the stories of the people who had come before me. Maybe it was due to an early acquaintance with death and loss, but I knew someday I would be gone too, and no one would remember that I had ever lived. The world would forget. It would go on, shaking itself free of those who had been, sloughing off the old for the new. The tragedy of it all was more than I could bear, the tragedy of lives beginning and ending with no one remembering.
Eoin was born in County Leitrim in 1915, nine months before the famed Easter Rising that changed Ireland forever. His parents—my great-grandparents—died in that rebellion, and Eoin was orphaned without knowing either of them. We were alike in that way, my grandfather and I—both orphaned young—his loss cycling into mine, my loss becoming his. I was only six years old when I lost my parents. I was a little