Way Out West E-Book

Anthony Glavin

• Herausgeber: New Island
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 380

Beschreibung

Fintan Doherty's 1950s childhood in Glenbay, Donegal, is filled with two things: tales of America told by a plethora of 'returned Yanks' and the silent sadness after his mother's death. Soon as he becomes an adult, he leaves for the States – via Europe – and never stands still again. His journey Way Out West to Ohio and back up to Boston brings Fintan to an eclectic and diverse array of jobs, rented rooms, landscapes, acquaintances, friends and lovers, each one either confirming or confounding his idea of the land he now inhabits. His life as a new emigrant – a self 'missing in motion' – is underscored by his search for a painting of his mother by an American artist who once visited the home place long before Fintan was born. Although we first met Fintan in Nighthawk Alley (1997), Way Out West stands alone as an enchanting coming-of-age story of texture and world-building, many affectionately observed characters and Glavin's subtle reflections on trauma, loss and a hope that somehow renews.  

Leseprobe

WAY OUT WEST

First published in 2024 by

New Island Books

Glenshesk House

10 Richview Office Park

Clonskeagh

Dublin D14 V8C4

Republic of Ireland

www.newisland.ie

Copyright © Anthony Glavin, 2024

The right of Anthony Glavin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright and Related Rights Act, 2000.

Print ISBN: 978-1-84840-909-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-84840-911-8

All rights reserved. The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means; adapted; rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All reasonable effort has been made to seek permission to reproduce textual material. Please contact the publisher if any copyright appears to have been infringed.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Set in 11.5 on 16pt Adobe Caslon Pro

Typeset by JVR Creative India

Edited by Neil Burkey, neilburkey.com

Proofread by Michelle Griffin

Cover design by Fiachra McCarthy, fiachramccarthy.com

Cover image: Gray and Gold (detail), 1942. John Rogers Cox. Courtesy of The Cleveland Museum of Art.

Printed by FINIDR, Czech Republic, finidr.com

New Island received financial assistance from The Arts Council (An Chomhairle Ealaíon), Dublin, Ireland.

New Island Books is a member of Publishing Ireland.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Also by Anthony Glavin

NOVELS

Nighthawk Alley (1997)

Colours Other than Blue (2016)

SHORT STORIES

One for Sorrow and Other Stories (1980)

The Draughtsman and the Unicorn (1999)

AS EDITOR

The Best of Benedict Kiely: A Selection of Stories (2019)

For Brother Mike (1941–2014)

CONTENTS

Also by Anthony Glavin

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Part II

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part III

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

I

1

A storyline is seldom the shortest distance between two points – say Ireland and America. And fact is that Fintan first headed east across the Irish Sea – to London – not west across the North Atlantic. Yet picture this for openers: a little village on the southwest Donegal coast, cottages scattered across a long glen that sweeps back up from the sea. Blue skies that soar over brown hills whenever the grey rain relents. The same hills green with bracken in spring and flecked with purple in the summer, the blooming heather like specks in a swathe of Donegal tweed.

Picture too a three-room whitewashed cottage on the north side of the Glen, with blue trim and a small byre, a turf shed and a small loom-shed. A cottage still thatched in 1955, when Fintan was born, but it was re-roofed shortly after with grey fibreglass sheets by his father, Packy. In early memories the new roof crackled as it expanded in the morning sun, and nettles stung his hands as he foraged beneath the fuchsia hedge for eggs from a hen that refused to lay in the byre. Also, the pungent scent of sheep dip, and the milk his mother, Mary, left out to sour for bread-making. Her hand, gentle on his brow when he fell ill with scarlet fever. Or the sound of Texarkana singing ‘The Streets of Laredo’ by the open fire in Molly’s pub, the first time Mary sent him, at age seven, to fetch his father home.

Imagine Texarkana so – a tall man crowned with a shock of white hair who had peddled his wares around Texas for fifteen years before coming back to Glenbay to swap lies about America with a fellow villager, Dakota, who himself had returned from an even longer stay across the Big Pond and put a second storey on his house. ‘They’re wild for the second storey in America,’ Dakota had informed his sister Nora, before ordering the best of Bangor slates for their new roof. Be that as it might, the Vaseline (as Nora was known behind her back) refused to mount the stairs in the fifteen-odd years she would live with a second storey over her head. At that point over ninety, Dakota only left the house for Sunday Mass, where Fintan might see him lurching suddenly sideways, like an outsized crab, as he returned from the Communion rail.

‘Why the Vaseline?’ Fintan had asked at home, only to be told by his father not to be so nosy. ‘Why Texarkana?’ he later chanced, after the ex-pedlar had died, guessing it was more the kind of thing you might inquire. ‘It’s a place he lived in America,’ his mother answered, Packy being little given to speech at home, and even less so to Fintan or his younger brother, Frankie. Nor had Packy much notion of Texarkana or Dakota – the localities that is – having never ventured any farther west than where their parish met the Atlantic, nor farther east than Donegal Town. ‘A great place, that,’ he sourly observed of a postcard of Paris Mary had once shown the boys. ‘You’d hate to live there. See nothing but spires in the morning.’

Imagine this then – a village that included amongst its returned émigrés not only Texarkana and Dakota, but Montana and James the Yankee, although James had passed away a few years before Fintan was born. But Montana, rigged out in a three-quarters ranch coat, string tie and Stetson, still walked down most days to Molly’s for a few bottles of stout. ‘Montana’s rich,’ Packy often remarked, believing that anybody who had been in America must have come back with plenty of cash. ‘Rich my ass!’ snorted Mary’s brother, Uncle Condy, when Fintan, aged thirteen, quoted his father. Not ‘arse’ but ‘ass’ – yet another echo of America, where Condy Cunnea and his father Cornelius, Fintan’s grandfather, had themselves both worked.

Certainly Condy lived like he had little money, a tattered woollen gansey hanging off him like a torn swathe of blanket. His cottage over the hill in Pier, Fintan’s mother’s home place, was rough and ready too: a blackened tin on the range that did for boiling an egg, the plastic basin of rainwater outside the door to rinse his boots, and more often than not a cock atop the dung heap beside the tiny byre that was home to a lone cow. That said, Condy had invested in an electric fence around the meadow beyond the byre to keep the cow in line, a single wire powered by an old car battery. Plus Condy had a car, an old black, humpbacked Morris Minor. Further evidence, Fintan reckoned, of the decade his uncle had spent across the water.

Like her father and older brother, Fintan’s mother had also ventured out to America, having left Pier at eighteen to work as a nanny to the two daughters of a young Irish-American doctor and his wife in Chicago, where she stayed for five years before returning to Glenbay to look after her dying mother. Three years later she married Packy Doherty, a taciturn man nearly fifteen years her elder, a weaver who fished salmon in spring and kept sheep year-round.

It was Mary so who told her sons of a world beyond the parish of Glenbay. Showed them the postcards of Paris she’d found in a trader’s stall at the Carrig sheep fair, or photographs of the Black babies in The Messenger from Mass with its bright red cover. Mary too who described the snow that froze into dirty lumps along the Chicago streets, or the wind off Lake Michigan like a knife blade on your nose and ears. Though truth be told she spoke little of herself in America: at most a few words about her charges, ‘Two wee girls who’d be young women now,’ and their father, the doctor, ‘a perfect gentleman’. But Mary had also witnessed another way with children within that household, and so in small ways was markedly attentive to her own – cuddling her two sons when they were little, gifting them a watercolour box one Christmas, encouraging them to draw on old sheets of wrapping paper, or reading the odd passage aloud to them from whatever book she took up in the evening.

Fintan in turn occasionally questioned her about America, if his father was out. She laughed when he asked had she ever seen a cowboy, and merely shook her head whenever he asked why she hadn’t stayed on over beyond. Yet one afternoon, when Packy was mucking out the byre, she took down a little black-and-white photograph from a tea caddy atop the dresser to show to Fintan. A photograph of a striking young woman in a long-sleeved blouse and high-waisted skirt, her long dark hair tidied into a loose knot at the crown of her head. Fintan looked quickly up at his mother beside the dresser, then back to the photo, where she stood, nay posed, by a flower bed beneath the railed veranda of a massive wooden house, all clapboards and big windows. Of course Fintan didn’t know to call it a veranda yet, nor the clapboards clapboards, not until he hired on, some fifteen years later, to cover the weather-beaten boards on a succession of Missouri houses with wood-grained plastic siding, on behalf of an outfit called Vinyl Is Final that made sure to have moved on to another state by the time it took, generally a year or two, for the cheap-grade plastic to begin to crack and peel.

Fintan had never seen his mother in a costume like that, never seen her in anything fancier than the best dress she kept for Sunday Mass, while alternating the several dresses she kept for everyday use, unlike Packy, who might don the same muddied trousers and jacket for days on end. ‘Was that the gentleman doctor’s house?’ Fintan asked, ignoring his brother’s outstretched hand as he handed back the photograph.

‘A summer house they had on Lake Michigan,’ Mary said, taking care to show Frankie the photo before replacing it in the tea caddy. ‘Homes,’ she said, ‘Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior,’ she recited, offering a geography lesson that would stand Fintan in the years to come. And then – as if whatever had prompted her to take out the photograph held sway – she turned and whistled a three-note call. ‘A whip-poor-will,’ she told her sons, ‘which sang me to sleep each night beside that lake.’ And that night in the lower bedroom Fintan tried to picture the interior of the huge wooden house, puzzling why anyone needed a second home – ‘a summer house’ – that was four times the size of their Donegal cottage.

But mostly it was America itself he conjured, fashioning six-guns from bits of timber with his best mate Rory O’Gara, making granite-faced Craig Beefan, behind his cottage, into a landscape of mesas and buttes, imagining the gorse-lined stream that divided the north side from the village proper to be an arroyo choked with sagebrush. Indeed he was abetted in such by Father Boyle, the parish priest, who preferred to hear confession in the parochial house kitchen, where he could take snuff and watch telly. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ Fintan would begin, sitting on a bench beside the priest, who kept one eye on the small black-and-white telly in the corner, the first in Glenbay, and tuned, it seemed, to a perpetual Western, so that hoofbeats and gunfire often punctuated the litany of Fintan’s sins, such as they were, as the elderly priest struggled to both grant absolution and stay ahead of the posse.

One summer night Mary took Fintan, aged nine, to the Spink, a large green corrugated-iron shed below the chapel, which, together with Molly’s pub and Barney’s shop-cum-petrol-pump, made up most of the village’s main street. At the back inside the Spink, Andy the Post stood behind a 16-mm projector that soon began to noisily spool out, over the heads of a benched audience, The Return of Frank James, onto a pull-down screen on the far wall.

Dakota had died earlier that summer, but Fintan would hear a few years later from Uncle Condy how the old man had walked one night out of the Spink halfway through San Francisco with Clark Gable and Jeanette MacDonald. Dakota had said nothing in Molly’s afterwards, but he told Condy several weeks later how he had been in San Francisco, barely twenty years old, in 1906. ‘He was in the toilet of a pub when the first tremor struck,’ Condy told Fintan, ‘jamming the door. But then a second tremor freed it up and he got out.’ His uncle also recounted what else Dakota had described: fires burning everywhere, dead bodies buried in the debris. And live bodies, trapped waist-high in rubble behind walls of flame, beyond the reach of rescuers, pleading for their lives, until the army simply shot them dead. ‘Out of mercy,’ Condy explained to his wide-eyed nephew.

The Return of Frank James had impressed itself on Fintan, who woke later that night – loud voices and chairs scraping the kitchen flags – after Packy and Montana landed back from Molly’s, along with a naggin of whiskey bought with the latter’s Yankee dollars. ‘Is Daddy after robbing a bank?’ Fintan tearfully asked Mary when she came into him. ‘Hush,’ she replied, ‘don’t wake Frankie’ – the same Frankie capable of sleeping through a hurricane.

According to Condy, Dakota had confessed to Father Boyle upon his return from America, saying, ‘Bless me Father, for I have sinned – all sins, bar murder!’ And how, a few years later, at a funeral Mass when mourners still gave a name and townland along with their offering at the table inside the chapel door, your man had hollered out – ‘My name is Freddy McIntyre from South Dakota, the Land of God!’ – loud enough to raise the chapel roof. But Fintan had never told Condy in turn how another of his fellow returned Yanks, Texarkana, had swivelled round one morning at the boreen below the chapel to show him and Rory his thing, like a mouldy yellow carrot, hanging from his open flies.

*

That autumn after his first Western, Mary found him several books at the same Carrig sheep-fair stall where she’d seen the Parisian postcards, encouraging him throughout that winter to read at night same as she did, while Packy talked to Jack Gara, their nearest neighbour, who called in most evenings. Fintan’s favourites were a dog-eared anthology of adventure stories, set everywhere from the Alps to Africa, along with a hardback of Greek myths, which also had bits of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. ‘Go out and get turf, you,’ Packy, who read nothing but the weekly Democrat, might mutter when he saw Fintan with a book, even if the kitchen creel were in no ways low. But Packy would often go out then – to the loom house or the byre – leaving Fintan to read on while Frankie pushed a little red-metal double-decker bus around the kitchen flags in front of the range.

There were, of course, other chores. Climbing the hill behind the cottage after the sheep, or helping his father with the turf in the bog high up on the north side once April arrived. The worst of the bog were the midges, which flew into eyes, ears and nose on close, warm days. The best of it was the descent home, sitting atop the trailer of turf, which crested and plunged like a wave-tossed boat behind Rory’s father Connie’s grey Ferguson tractor, prompting Packy to intone ‘Hateful old hill’ as he clung to the trailer-side.

Gathering the sheep would have been easier, had his father been any ways handy with a dog. But each successive canine he got was ever more useless per Packy, who scarcely bothered to train the most recent black-and-white collie mix, which Andy the Post had given him, choosing instead to dig a shallow hole at the eastern gable of the cottage, where he confined the pup beneath an old bicycle wheel, anchored by a large stone.

‘Does he bite?’ Jack Gara asked upon seeing the makeshift kennel. ‘If you took up a stick and hit him,’ replied Packy, ‘he wouldn’t do it again.’ In fact Shep, as the boys christened him, did not bite, preferring, once he had outgrown his hole, to lock forelegs around and hump the bejesus out of the leg of any and all male visitors to the house. That said, the dog also proved a formidable ratter who’d deposit his broken-necked bounty by the front door, like an argument for his keep, one or two times most months.

As with dogs, what else Packy turned his hand to would often give him a kick in return. Short of a final fibreglass sheet for the loom-shed roof, he quickly mixed a load of cement to slap over the remaining thatch. ‘Like icing on a feckin’ cake,’ Andy the Post remarked in Molly’s, where earlier that night Packy had declared himself done footering with thatch forever. ‘Like a dog’s breakfast,’ Andy offered again some six months later, after the cement had fallen through the rotten thatch.

*

‘The back of beyond,’ Fintan sometimes says when people in America ask what part of Ireland he grew up in. But fact is the wider world had washed in to Glenbay from time to time. Sometimes literally so, as with the three drowned French sailors the sea spat onto the stony shingle at Pier back in 1879. Or the single seaman a decade or so later, with a fine gold ring on his finger, which came away when the parishioner who’d discovered his remains tried to prise the ring off with a bit of driftwood. Or the rusty, solid-iron sphere that beached itself like a gigantic globe on the Big Strand of a November morning in 1917.

‘The 13th of November 1917,’ Jack Gara told Fintan one afternoon after Mary had sent him over with a half-scone of soda bread. ‘I’ll not be long,’ Jack’s father, Dominic, had told his family that morning before heading down to the strand, as he did daily, to see what might’ve come in on the filling tide. But two other Glenbay men had already spotted the huge iron orb and, taking it for some class of buoy, were tentatively probing it with a longish bit of driftwood as Dominic Gara drew near. The subsequent blast from the naval mine was heard throughout the village, the remains of the three men found scattered along the beach. ‘I’ll not be long,’ Jack said again now to Fintan – as if to underline how words you utter unawares might echo thereafter down the years.

A year later – the 11th of November 1918 to be precise – word from the wider world blew in on the wind to Glen. ‘I was gathering spuds when we heard the bells,’ Jack told Fintan, who’d been sent over to the neighbour this time by Packy, looking for the loan of a loom paddle from Jack, who no longer wove. First those of the coastguard station by Rossan Point, followed by the Glenbay chapel bell, and then far off to the east, the tiny chime of the Carrig church bell. ‘We stood there puzzling,’ Jack said, ‘till my brother worked out it might have something to do with the war. The chapel bell cracked that day,’ he added, an assertion Fintan never doubted, even after he came upon similar stories of the Liberty Bell years later in Philadelphia.

A few years later, a gang of English sappers arrived in the village to sink a shaft in the meadow below the Garas’ cottage. The mining operation lasted only a fortnight, but a handful of strangers turned up at the entrance to the shaft over the next several years, including three men in well-weathered trench coats the following April, carrying a clock-like apparatus that they variously positioned on the ground around the shaft. Plus an Englishman another August, who divined what he called ‘the vein’ with a hazel rod, following its course down the meadow, until the rod suddenly flew back up with sufficient force to break in half against his face. Texarkana told Jack’s widowed mother it was gold the sappers were after, but Montana later told Jack it was pyrites they had found; pyrites a sure sign of copper, the very metal Montana had mined in America.

In 1952 then, three years before Fintan’s birth, the wider world had walked, not washed, into the parish of Glenbay. Arrived on foot from Killybegs in the person of Randall Hart, an American artist, adventurer and ardent socialist who sounded to Fintan far larger than life than the first American tourists who began to filter through southwest Donegal in his early teens. Struck by the sparseness of the locale, backdropped by majestic sea-cliffs and boundless ocean, Hart had stayed some two years in Glenelg, a tiny townland beyond Pier Hill that rose up behind Fintan’s mother’s home place on the far side of Glen Head from the village proper.

Mary Cunnea, then but a year back from Chicago, often saw the Yank, who walked over the hill to Pier most evenings, calling into one or more of its half-dozen cottages, including the Cunneas’, where Mary lived with her ailing mother Kate, her Auntie Cassie and her older brother Condy, himself home from America but a year before his sister. She lived there until she wed Packy Doherty, leaving Pier for Packy’s cottage on the north side a few months before Hart went back to America.

*

Fintan turned eleven his last year at the village school. A kind of nowhere year it felt, too old for waving homemade wooden pistols up on Scrigg Mor, but too young to be allowed much more scope, nor old enough yet to truly care about girls. What few books the Master kept on the classroom window ledge Fintan had finished the previous year, likewise whatever exercises the Master set them, sometimes the very same sums as the previous week, while he chain-smoked at his desk in the front of the classroom, nose buried in the Irish Press that had reached the village on the midday bus. ‘He wouldn’t teach goats to climb!’ Condy grunted, dismissing the Master in a half-dozen words after Fintan had grumbled about him – more easily done with his uncle than around Packy, who did not readily entertain complaints.

Players were what the Master smoked, whereas it was the odd Woodbine that Rory nicked from his father’s pack to share with Fintan behind the Spink, the cigarette cupped against a November shower, or sheltering out of sight below the Minister’s Bridge. Fintan wasn’t gone at first on the acrid taste, and even less the bitter shock of smoke on lungs, though he took great pleasure from the cigarette they shared one Saturday afternoon outside Freddy Rua’s cottage, taking turns to exhale into the keyhole in hopes Freddy might go mad upon his return from Molly’s, thinking somebody had been in the cottage.

Not that Freddy wasn’t half-mad already, unstrung by the same combination of isolation and alcohol that bachelors living alone in the west of Ireland often failed to finesse. It helped to have a brother at home – or, better yet, a sister – a quotient of companionship, provided the siblings got on. But Freddy’s only brother, John James, was out in America, living on a disabled veteran’s pension from the Korean conflict. ‘He was badly affected by the war,’ Freddy would tell any stranger, most of whom, as he described the poisonous snakes loosed by the Koreans, quickly sussed which brother the war had likely most affected. ‘Big snakes, Freddy?’ Rory chanced once for badness, to draw him out. ‘Oh, aye,’ Freddy trembled, ‘nine-foot long some of them, capable of killing with their spit,’ before recounting yet again how only the brother and another soldier had survived.

It was that same last year at the village school that Fintan first walked out over the hill to Pier, a forty-minute journey each way. ‘I called over to Uncle Condy,’ he told Packy, after his da asked where had he disappeared to. But Packy said nothing further after Mary, smiling broadly, inquired after news of her brother. Two weeks later Fintan chanced the journey again, only ensuring this time that the cow was foddered and the kitchen turf-creel filled before he struck off. The first part of the trek was hardest, climbing up past the radio mast on the brow of Glen Head, before the road began its gradual decline towards the five dwellings scattered in the lee of Pier Hill, which rose more steeply behind. He might not always find Condy at home and, half-scared of Great-Auntie Cassie, he wouldn’t sit with her for long. But there was always something to forage for among the lobster traps scattered on the small shingled beach, or the sea to peer down into from a small concrete pier tucked into the rock face on the far side of the small harbour, its two sea stacks like roughly hewn twin towers of stone. Two other Glenbay men also fished out of Pier, but the Cunneas’ was now the sole townland home place still inhabited.

Before that spring was out, Fintan would see his mother Mary everywhere he looked in Pier – imagining her as a child in that same house, or making the daily trek over the hill and back from the same school he and Frankie reached in five minutes flat. Or standing beside her older brother Condy atop Pier Hill, waving at their father in a boat below as it headed towards the herring shoals that shifted like red shadows on the sea. There would be several boats out after the herring, each with a spotter on the hill, and Condy might employ covert signals – wipe his face, say, to indicate that a shoal had been spotted – after which Mary would turn in its direction. And the men in the boats wouldn’t always see the herrings even when directly over them, at which point Condy would take off his cap for them to drop their net. All of it an arcane code that Fintan marvelled at – then forgot, until watching his first baseball game in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park years later, where Belinda, a die-hard Giants fan he was seeing, explained how the two base-coaches employed similar stratagems, possibly touching the peak of their caps for the batter to swing at the next pitch, or spitting over their left shoulder if a runner on first was to break for second.

But Mary had yet to weigh heavily upon his heart during those first autumnal forays, and so he simply took in the lay of the land, the play of light and cloud on heather, clay and rock. Or the flash of a red beak on a black-winged chough, or an occasional peregrine circling lazily on high. Taking with him in late October a jar of brambleberry jam his mother had sent over for her brother and aunt, out of the batch she made each year from berries gathered along the road, assisted by two sons who ate far more than they harvested, until the past year in which Fintan had grown old enough to truly lend a hand, while taking care to show Frankie that he had harvested far more berries before emptying them into the kettle Mary carried.

Smiling like a child, Auntie Cassie helped herself to spoonfuls of the jam straight from the jar that afternoon. Small, stout, and nearly ninety, she wore a kerchief over whatever hair she still had, though not low enough to cover a large black wen, which to her grand-nephew Fintan looked like a coat button affixed to her brow. Most any time Mary called out with the boys, Cassie read their cups, instructing them to upend the dregs of the tea leaves onto the saucer first. Yet Uncle Condy, were he about, would not allow Cassie to read his, taking care always to rinse his cup out at the sink.

Occasionally Auntie Cassie might read the cards for them too, foretelling of money, letters, weddings and visitors. One afternoon she turned up the knave of diamonds – ‘Sandy-haired like Fintan!’ Staring intently at the card, she had him shivering as she exclaimed with excited laughter: ‘You’ve good news across deep water!’ – as if she actually saw him elsewhere. On their way back home then over the hill, Mary had told him and Frankie how their grandfather, deceased from a stroke before they were born, had always insisted any deck of cards in the house go out into the byre during a lightning storm. On their August visit, however, Auntie Cassie had said nothing as she held her niece’s saucer up to the window, had turned away, telling them later that she hadn’t a notion as to where the cards had got.

The sense of a solitary adventure – of finally being old enough to take that road alone – saw Fintan dissemble the first few times Rory asked where he had been. ‘Up after sheep,’ he’d reply. Or ‘fishing’ – which he and Rory were now finally allowed to do together on their own, casting for glasán from the rocky shore – ‘only there was nothing going’. But one November afternoon he relented and, calling for Rory, took his friend with him up over the hill. Daring each other to dip their bare feet into the small stream flowing down to the sea just before the townland of Pier, they eventually arrived at Uncle Condy’s, where they paused to play a game with the electric fence, counting aloud to see who could hold on to the wire longest, wriggling in pain as the current laced their palms. ‘Jaysus, a cow has more sense than ye!’ Condy gave out when he caught them at it, but taking the sting out of it shortly after with a cup of tea and a heel each from a freshly baked pan loaf, the bread lathered with Stork and marmalade, the three of them seated at the kitchen table, and both lads feeling grown-up or just about.

Rory had never before been in Pier, so Fintan lorded his advantage over him that first visit. Pointed to where Glenelg lay beyond Pier Hill, and at three faint mounds in the green bank beside the descending path – not unlike abandoned potato lazy beds – where the trio of drowned French sailors had been buried the previous century. He also repeated for Rory what Condy had told him of that shipwreck, of so much timber strewn along the shore that you might walk like Jesus on the water from Pier to Glen, including the finest mahogany, which was subsequently fashioned into chairs throughout the parish. And of the two survivors who swam in, not a stitch on them. And of the ship’s dog that also washed ashore, minus his head, shorn off by a piece of the jettisoned timber.

Fintan had heard at home from Mary how she and two neighbour girls used to feel lonely when they passed those unconsecrated graves at night, coming back over the hill from a dance in the Glen. Lonely in the Donegal sense of that other world that lies about us, and so they blessed themselves as they hurried past, an act of faith to counter any evil spirits, whether Christian or pagan. Indeed the prayers offered at the end of Mass against the fairies had only ceased when Father Boyle arrived as curate. Only Father Boyle himself had come down hugely since – had taken to using snuff on the altar, his vestments streaked yellow with the stuff – until the bishop had finally retired him the previous summer.

The new curate, a waspish priest named Father Mullane, not a speck on his black rig-out, was mad for card games, which he played with his favourites, all females, in the parish. But Mary was not among those – nor did she join the Legion of Mary, which the new curate had introduced, her sojourn Stateside having given her the confidence to sidestep at least that much of the clerical control that clenched rural Ireland in its fist.

*

Packy too had little time for the new priest, concurring with his wife for a change. Not that he and Mary disagreed on everything – not openly anyhow. There were few enough angry rows during the twelve years of their marriage. The heated exchange after Fintan had fetched his father home from Molly’s pub, the same night he’d heard Texarkana singing of Laredo, had been an exception, as were the pound notes to hand, which had afforded Packy a feed of pints earlier that evening, from a better-than-expected price for a calf sold the previous day in Dunkineely. Instead a kind of muted indifference marked the ground between their parents, whereon Packy generally managed to check his habitual truculence, if less successfully with his childer, although arguably easier on son Frankie than son Fintan.

And if Mary felt she’d made a poor match, chosen an ineffectual man, she never said as much in the cottage, at least not within earshot of her sons. Still it seemed on the surface a curious match, a younger, travelled, naturally inquisitive woman having settled for an older, largely uncurious man. Any wanderlust within the Doherty clan had likely expired along with Packy’s gunshot-granda in Missouri, but even that chapter belonged amongst all that Packy chose not to speak of, nor was it a tale Fintan would hear from his mother, only getting it at age eighteen from Uncle Condy.

Instead, Packy often preferred to talk about what he scarcely, if at all, knew – of how a Jewish shopkeeper in America would never refuse the first money of a morning. ‘Say you offer him two dollars,’ he informed his sons, ‘for something that costs three? Well, he won’t say no! Bad luck to refuse the first offer!’

‘You wouldn’t get far trying that on Mr Stein,’ Mary laughed when Fintan repeated it later that evening when his da was out, describing for her sons the small hunched shopkeeper with outsized spectacles on her Chicago street, who never failed to dole out free sweets to the doctor’s two little daughters.

Something his parents did share though were their good looks – Mary retaining her strongly-featured beauty into her late thirties and Packy, for all his awkwardness, carrying a muted handsomeness into his early fifties. Who knows what initial spark there might have been, though marriages might also factor in the size of a man’s farm – or what resources a wife might bring – as well as any manifest sexual magnetism. Yet such economics had not likely figured within their match, as Packy had but two acres of a rushes-filled north side meadow behind his cottage, and Mary, whose father had died the previous year, only the few dollars in savings that she’d managed to bring back from Chicago.

Both of course attended Mass, Mary’s brother Condy being the sole parishioner who declined to darken the chapel door. That Packy left the cottage first of a Sunday, a few minutes ahead of Mary and the boys, also betokened little, as most Glenbay couples made their way so to Mass, wife trailing husband or vice versa. But whatever faith Packy had – as apart from practised – was not as readily apparent. One of a half-dozen men who chose to loiter inside the chapel porch during Mass, he received no Communion bar when fulfilling his Easter duty. Whereas Mary, a regular communicant, took her sons several times a year up the hill behind their cottage to the Holy Well ascribed to St Colmcille, who was said to have visited Glenbay many centuries ago. A massive cairn of stones had formed over time beside the well, carried up by the faithful, and Fintan made sure each visit that his was a larger rock than Frankie’s, while also making sure that his younger brother knew that too.

A small tranche of relics lay scattered across the flagstones that bordered the well: rosary beads, tiny crucifixes, a scapular half-rotted by rain, plus a jam jar, which Mary would fill with sea pinks or purple-flowered self-heal gathered on their climb up. Kneeling, she would bless herself with water from the small dark pool, followed in turn by Fintan and Frankie, after which they would pray silently together for a minute or two.

*

On the morning of his eleventh birthday that February, Fintan noticed for the first time how tired his mother looked. Took in the dark circles under her eyes as he thanked her for his birthday jumper, an Aran knit with blackberry and diamond patterning, crafted over hours by the range after he had been sent to bed. Her weariness quickly gathered pace as well, and before long the simplest chores began to leave her breathless, her right hand pressed against her left side before she moved on to the next task. By mid-March she had taken to her bed, from where she instructed Fintan on how to begin the dinner if Packy were out digging lazy beds for the early spuds, or mending his traps for the lobstering that would resume in April, seas permitting.

By the end of March Father Mullane had begun to call to the house, accompanied by the Host, which he administered to Mary in her bedroom. Packy or Fintan would offer him a cup of tea, which the priest always refused, much to their shared, if unspoken, relief. His parents had never talked in front of them about Mullane, but Fintan could sense that his mother also had little time for the priest – who, with Mary confined to bed and subject to his ministrations, had her at a disadvantage now. And while she clearly welcomed the Eucharist, her spirits appeared to equally lift upon hearing its bearer go out the kitchen door.

One afternoon Packy retreated into the upper bedroom to fetch something before seeing Father Mullane off. Returning to the kitchen, he saw Shep locked around the priest’s left leg, humping its black-trousered shin for all he was worth, while Fintan and Frankie looked on, horrified. Letting loose a roar, Packy swept a poker off the range and swung at the dog in a single, fluid motion – strangely graceful for an often ungainly man – and with such force that it might’ve taken the priest’s leg off at the knee.

However Shep had uncoupled himself at Packy’s bellow, and Mullane managed to jerk his leg back from the lethal trajectory of the iron rod. Fintan had the front door opened by then, through which Shep fled, followed directly by Father Mullane. Turning, he saw a rare smile on his father’s face and so chanced a smile back. ‘Sure, what harm?’ chuckled Packy as he replaced the poker. ‘It’s not like he’d’ve known what the dog was at now, would he?’

Still Shep knew better than to try that on with Condy, who called in the following day, one of the few times Fintan could recall his uncle ever visiting the house. And had he been a year or two older, he might’ve been able to piece it all together – the priest and his uncle’s visits, along with the pained, if awkward solicitude his father had latterly discovered for his mother. But such was the enormity of what was in play – larger by far than any storm cloud out to sea – that Fintan could no ways see nor imagine such a thing at all.

That Friday after school, Frankie and he found Mary out of bed and sitting in her nightdress beside the range, a cardigan over her shoulders against the early April chill that spilled through the door whenever it opened. Delighted to see their mother up, the boys took out their books and began the weekend lessons that they usually left till Sunday night, happily content with her company once more in the kitchen. Frankie, aged seven, was reading now, and Mary even had energy enough to sound out the longer words with him, as he sat beside her with his tale about a fox and a foolish hen.

Saturday she stayed in bed, only poking at the dinner Fintan brought into her. She brightened at bedtime, however, as he described for her the carry-on of the cattle rustlers in his current paperback Western. Yet rising for Mass the following morning, the boys found the kitchen freezing, its range stone cold, and Packy sitting at the empty table, his face in his hands. ‘Fuair sí bás orm,’ he said, as both boys stared at their father, who seldom ever spoke Irish at home. ‘Fuair sí bás orm,’ he repeated: ‘She died on me.’ Getting up, he awkwardly embraced his sons, before leading them into the upper bedroom, where all three knelt and blessed themselves by the bed where Mary lay, for all the world, asleep.

When Fintan next saw her – after Packy had sent them off alone to Mass, both of them silently weeping – Agnes Curtin, a near neighbour, and one of his mother’s few close friends, had Mary already laid out. Clothed in a brown shroud, hair combed, hands clasping her rosary beads, Mary in no ways now feigned sleep, her brow and the set of her mouth more like a waxen facsimile of their mother. Choosing his moment – after Agnes departed, his father finally out at his toilet, and Frankie crying in their bedroom – he took the black-and-white photograph of Mary, dressed up to the nines in America, from the floral-patterned tea caddy on the mantel, and slipped it into the Riders of the Purple Sage softback on the chair beside his bed. And only wondering, as he did so, had his father ever seen it?

Fintan had held Frankie’s hand during the Prayers for the Dead at Mass two hours earlier; had returned Cáit McGlinchey’s greeting outside the chapel afterwards like any other Sunday. ‘Oh, feeling better yesterday,’ he replied as Moira Byrne, another parishioner, asked after their mother, trusting Frankie would hold his whisht. And back now in the lower bedroom, he put his arms tentatively around his brother, as if trying to tend him as Mary used to tend them both. He went out then with a few cold boiled spuds to the turf shed where Packy had Shep tied up, lest the dog pay court to all the men of the parish who, with their wives if they were wed, would call in to the cottage over the two days and nights in which they would wake Mary, before her remains were taken to the chapel on Tuesday evening for the funeral Mass the following morning.

Late that Wednesday night he again managed to stem Frankie’s bedtime tears with a never-ending story of how they’d meet Mary again in Heaven, only Heaven lay somewhere east of China, with all kinds of creatures – dragons, griffins and every class of adventure – before they reached the huge palace, and it only a Summer Palace, all clapboards and verandas, where their mother now resided. And only after his brother’s breathing finally evened out had he heard his own grow suddenly ragged, his own hot tears once again spilling out.

He did not, however, take Frankie along up to the Holy Well the following week, carefully making his way alone up the wet, grassy bank, then down into the hollow where the huge cairn rose like a tiny beached whale above the small pool of water. A few faded primroses sat in the chipped mug on the wee stone shelf above the well, nor had Fintan thought to pick any cowslips or buttercups on the way up, much less a stone to place upon the cairn. Kneeling, he said a prayer for Mary, then another for Packy, Frankie and himself. Getting up, he spotted Johnny Jack’s dog tracking a half-dozen sheep across the scree below Craig Beefan, on whose ridge line that morning’s brief snow shower yet lay, like a scattering of chalk dust under the slate-grey sky.

Nor did he take his brother along out to Pier a fortnight later, though the day was better, a dry east wind, and the sky that clear shade of blue that can often be oddly harder on a heavy heart than dull clouds overhead. Condy was off somewhere, his door on the latch, but Fintan didn’t let himself in, even though his Great-Aunt Cassie might’ve welcomed a visit. Wandering back down to the small strand with its large, round, white stones, he followed the shoreline for a bit, before turning and walking back up to the wee bridge, where he sat with his feet hanging over the stream as it rushed down to the mother ocean. New growth was showing green across the banks and rocky fields, the sky an even deeper blue now overhead, and the tide retreating harshly over stone shingle, sounding like it were tearing the shore apart.