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