it wrong to be this happy when the world is so upside down?”
“My grandfather told me once that happiness is an expression of gratitude. And it’s never wrong to be grateful.”
“I wonder where he learned that?” he murmured, his eyes shining and so blue I could only stare, lost in him.
“Eoin wished for a whole family,” I said, suddenly pensive. “I don’t know how any of this is going to work. I get scared when I try to make sense of it, when I think about it for too long, or when I try to unravel it all in my head.”
He was quiet for a moment, considering, his eyes never leaving mine. “What did your grandfather tell you about faith?” he asked.
The answer came like a whisper, fluttering past my heart, and I was back in my grandfather’s arms on a stormy night in a world so far away and long ago, it hardly seemed real.
“He told me everything would be okay because the wind already knows,” I whispered.
“Then that’s your answer, love.”
16 April 1922
I’ve a head full of thoughts and little room to write them. This journal is full, and I have so much more to say and too much time till dawn. Anne bought me a new journal for my birthday, but it waits to be filled on my bedside table back at home.
I awoke in a cold sweat, alone in my bed. I hate Dublin without Anne. I hate Cork without Anne, Kerry without Anne, Galway without Anne, Wexford without Anne. I’ve discovered I’m not especially happy anywhere without Anne.
It was the rain that woke me. Dublin is caught in a deluge. It’s as though God is trying to douse the flames of our discontent. If there is to be a battle for the Four Courts, it won’t be right away. Mick says they will do their best to avoid it. I fear that his reluctance to engage the anti-Treaty wing will only embolden them. But he doesn’t need to know what I think. I wish I’d stayed at Garvagh Glebe. I would head back now, but the rain is insistent, the roads will be mud, and I’m better off to wait it out.
The sound of rushing water infiltrated my sleep, making me dream of the lough. I was pulling Anne from the water all over again. Like most dreams, it turned strange and disjointed, and Anne was suddenly gone, leaving me wet, my arms empty, her blood staining the bottom of my boat. Then I was crying and screaming, and my screaming became a wail. The wail came from an infant in my arms that was swaddled in Anne’s bloody blouse. The infant morphed into Eoin, clinging to me, cold and terrified, and I held him, singing to him the way I sometimes do.
“They can’t forget, they never will, the wind and waves remember Him still.”
Now I can’t get that song out of my head. Bloody rain. Fecking lough. I never thought I’d hate the lough, but I do. Tonight, I do. And I hate Dublin without Anne.
“Don’t go near the water, love,” I always whisper when we part. And Anne nods, her eyes knowing. This time I forgot to remind her. My head was filled with other things. With her. With thoughts of a child. Our child, growing inside her.
I wish the rain would stop. I need to go home.
T. S.
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.
23
TILL TIME CATCH
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch.
—W. B. Yeats
I spent Sunday morning feeling peaked and tired, as though admitting my pregnancy to Thomas had freed me to act on my condition. Eoin woke with a chest cold, and I remained at home with him while Brigid and the O’Tooles attended Mass. The skies were overcast—a storm was brewing in the east—and Eoin and I climbed into Thomas’s big bed and read all the Eoin adventures,