member of the family. My favorite blessing, the one offered by young Maeve, was that I would grow old in Ireland.
My eyes found Thomas’s, my arms tightened around Eoin, and I silently prayed for that blessing with all my might, willing the wind and the water to make it so.
“It’s your turn, Doc!” Eoin cried. “What is your birthday blessing?”
Thomas shifted uncomfortably, and a bit of color touched his cheeks. “Anne loves the poet William Butler Yeats. So maybe instead of a blessing I will recite one of his poems to entertain our guests. A perfect birthday poem called ‘When You Are Old.’”
Everyone chortled, and Eoin looked confused.
“Are you old, Mother?” he asked.
“No, darling boy. I’m ageless,” I answered.
Everyone laughed again, but the O’Toole sisters urged Thomas on, pleading for the poem.
Thomas stood, and with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders slightly hunched, he began.
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep . . .” Thomas enunciated “old and grey,” and everyone tittered again, but I knew the poem well, knew every word, and my heart had turned to liquid in my chest.
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep,” he repeated over the chuckling, “and nodding by the fire, take down this book, and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; how many loved your moments of glad grace, and loved your beauty with love false or true, but one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face.”
The room had grown quiet, and Maggie’s lips trembled, the soft sweetness of memory gleaming in her eyes. It was the kind of poem that made old women remember how it felt to be young.
As he spoke, Thomas looked at everyone in turn, but the poem was for me; I was the pilgrim soul with a changing face. He finished, reflecting on how love fled and “paced upon the mountains overhead and hid his face amid a crowd of stars.” Everyone clapped and stamped their feet, and Thomas bowed jauntily, accepting the praise. But he met my gaze before taking his seat. When I dragged my eyes away, I found Brigid watching me, her expression speculative, her back stiff.
“When I was growing up, my grandfather—whose name was Eoin too—wouldn’t ask me for a blessing on his birthday, he would ask me for a story,” I offered hesitantly, eager for a distraction. “It was our special tradition.”
Eoin clapped in delight. “I love your stories!” he yelled. Everyone laughed at his exuberance, but it was all I could do not to bury my face in his red mop and weep. Eoin’s love for my stories was where it had all begun, and somehow time and fate had given us another birthday together.
“Tell us the story about Donal and the king with the donkey ears,” Eoin requested, and with the encouragement of everyone else, that is exactly what I did, keeping the tradition alive.
Thomas couldn’t find Liam. He’d quit his job at the docks right after he claimed the guns went missing, and the men he’d worked with didn’t seem especially concerned about his whereabouts. Brigid said he’d gone to Cork, to the seaport town of Youghal, but she only had a hastily written letter, just a few lines and a promise to write, with his name signed across the bottom. Brigid speculated that he’d found a better position on busier docks, but his abrupt departure didn’t sit well with anyone. I didn’t know what Brigid knew of Liam’s activities, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt. He was her son, and she loved him. I would not hold his deeds against her. I was just relieved he was gone, but Thomas was worried about what it all meant.
“I can’t protect you from a threat I don’t understand,” he stewed one evening after we’d said good night to Eoin. We went for a walk in the autumn air, crunching through newly fallen leaves and avoiding the shore. Neither of us wanted to visit the lough.
“Do you really think I need to be protected?”
“Liam wasn’t the only one on the barge.”
“No. There were two others as well.”
“What did they look like? Can you describe them?”
“They all wore the same caps, the same style of clothes. They were roughly the same height and age. I think one had a paler complexion—blue eyes and a few days’ growth on his jaw. The other