Thomas returned to Dublin and brought a healing Robbie O’Toole back to Garvagh Glebe. He had a jaunty patch over his missing eye, an angry scar on the side of his head, and a mild weakness on his left side. He moved slowly, a young man grown old, his days of smuggling arms and ambushing Tans behind him.
No one spoke of Liam or the missing guns, but the foal was finally born, making honest men of us all. Thankfully, the Auxiliary captain did not return to Garvagh Glebe either, and whatever suspicions and accusations had been leveled against me were quietly shelved. Still, I slept with a knife beneath my pillow and asked Daniel O’Toole to put a lock on my bedroom door. Liam Gallagher might feel safe from me, but I didn’t feel safe from him. There would be a point of reckoning, I had no doubt. The worry made me weary, and the wondering stole my sleep.
I thought about the lough relentlessly, pictured myself pushing a boat out onto the waves and never coming back. Each day I walked along the shore, considering. And each day I turned away, unwilling to try. Unwilling to leave Eoin. To leave Thomas. To leave myself, this new Anne, behind. I ached for my grandfather—the man, not the boy. I mourned for my life—the author, not the woman. But the choice was easy to make. Here, I loved. And, in the end, I wanted to love more than I wanted to return.
The years ahead, years that would come and go—years that, for me, had already come and gone—weighed heavily on me as well. I knew what was to come for Ireland. Not every twist and bend or every turn and tumble. But I knew the rocky destinations. The conflicts. The never-ending fighting and turmoil. And I wondered what it was all for. The death and the suffering. There was a time to fight, but there was a time to stop fighting too. Time had not proven especially helpful—not in Ireland’s case—in ironing it all out.
Eoin was the light in the continually darkening tunnel that was closing around me. But even that joy was dimmed by the truth. Loving him didn’t excuse lying to him. I was an imposter, and all my devotion didn’t change reality. My only defense was that I had not set out to harm or deceive. I was a victim of circumstance—improbable, impossible, inescapable—and I could only make the best of it.
Eoin and I had filled several books with expeditions and adventures to far-off places. Thomas had made the connection between my confession in Dublin and Eoin’s stories; I had climbed into a boat on Lough Gill and found myself in another world, just like the little boy in Eoin’s tales. Thomas had stared at the words and then looked at me, realization flooding his face like a black cloud. He’d made himself scarce after that, adding pictures to the stories after Eoin and I had gone to bed.
When we weren’t writing stories, I’d begun to teach Eoin how to tell time and how to read and write. He was left-handed, like me. Or maybe I was left-handed like him. I showed him how to hold his pencil and form his letters in neat little rows so he would be ready when he started school, which came sooner than either of us would have liked. The last Monday in September, Thomas, Eoin, and I walked in silence to the schoolhouse, Eoin dragging his feet, unhappy about our destination.
“Can’t you teach me at home, Mother?” Eoin whined softly. “I would like that so much better.”
“I need your mother to help me on my rounds, Eoin. And you will be with friends. Your father and I met when we were boys. You might miss a chance at making a lifelong friend if you are tutored at home,” Thomas said.
Eoin looked skeptical. Eoin already had a few good friends and probably figured he could see them without attending school. Plus, Thomas hadn’t been taking me on his rounds since we returned from Dublin; he didn’t want to be alone with me.
Seeing that Eoin was unconvinced, Thomas pointed at a little cottage peeking out of the trees in a small clearing, a cottage I’d seen before but never thought much about. It was clearly abandoned, and the foliage had begun to overwhelm it.
“Do you see that cottage, Eoin?” Thomas asked.
Eoin nodded, but Thomas kept walking, moving us along. There was rain in the air.
“A family once lived in that cottage. A family like us. But then the potato blight came, and the family was hungry. Some of them died. Some of them went to America to find work so they could eat. There are abandoned homes all over Ireland. You must go to school to learn how to make Ireland better for her people, so that families don’t die. So our friends don’t have to leave.”
“Wasn’t there any food, Doc?” Eoin asked.
“There was food, just no potatoes,” Thomas answered, his eyes on the landscape as if he could still see the blight that had ravaged the country seventy years earlier.
“Couldn’t they eat somethin’ else?” Eoin asked, and I could have kissed him for his curiosity. I really didn’t know the answer, and I was expected to. I should know these stories better than I did. The research I’d done had been centered on the Irish Civil War and not the decades that preceded it. I listened intently, turning back to look at the little cottage, which was falling down and forlorn.
“The potatoes wouldn’t grow,” Thomas explained. “There was a sickness in the crop. People were used to feeding their families all year long with the potatoes they grew in their little gardens. When the potatoes wouldn’t grow, they didn’t have anything to eat instead. Most families had a pig, but without the potatoes, they couldn’t feed their pigs the slops. So the pigs died, or they were eaten before they got too thin. Then the families had nothing.
“Grain still grew in the fields of the English landowners, but that grain was sold and shipped out of Ireland. The families didn’t have money to buy the grain or enough land or even the means to grow sufficient grain of their own. There were cattle and sheep, but very few people owned either. The cows and the sheep got fat on the grain, and they too were shipped out of the country. The beef and mutton and wool were sold to other nations, while the poorest people—most of the people in Ireland—got hungrier and hungrier and more and more desperate.”
“Couldn’t the people steal it?” Eoin offered hesitantly. “I would steal food if Nana was hungry.”
“That’s because you love your grandmother, and you wouldn’t want to see her suffer. But stealing wasn’t the answer.”
“What was the answer?” I asked quietly, as if the question was a philosophical one, a challenge and not a true inquiry.
Thomas’s eyes were on me as he spoke, as though willing me to remember, to take up the cause that had once burned so brightly in Anne Gallagher.
“For centuries, the Irish have been scattered in the wind—Tasmania, the West Indies, America—bought and sold and bred and enslaved. The population of Ireland was cut in half by the indentured servitude. During the famine, another million people died on this island. Here in Leitrim, my mother’s family survived because the landlord took pity on his tenant farmers and suspended the rents through the worst of the blight. My grandmother worked for the landowner—a maid in his house—and she ate in the kitchen once a day and brought home the scraps to her brothers and sisters. Half of her family emigrated. Two million Irish emigrated during the famine. The British government didn’t care. England is only a stone’s throw away. It’s easy enough to send their own labor over when we leave or starve. We were truly—are truly—replaceable.” Thomas didn’t sound bitter. He sounded sad.
“How do we fight them?” Eoin asked, his face flushed by the seriousness of the story, the heartbreak of it all.
“We learn how to read. We think. We learn. We become better and stronger, and we stand together and say, ‘No more. You can’t treat us this way,’” Thomas said softly.
“That’s why I go to school,” Eoin said, serious.
“Yes. That’s why you go to school,” Thomas agreed.
Emotion clogged my throat and threatened to spill out of my eyes, and I fought it back.
“Your dad wanted to teach school, Eoin. Did you know that? He knew how important it was. But he couldn’t sit still. Neither could your mother,” Thomas added, his eyes finding mine.
I had no response; sitting still had always been easy for me. I could sit and dream, my mind taking me away until I was no longer inside myself but away on a journey. The differences between the other Anne and me were piling up every day.
“I want to be a doctor like you, Thomas.” Eoin tugged on Thomas’s hand, peering up earnestly, past the brim of his peaked hat.
“You will, Eoin. That is exactly what you will be,” I reassured him, finding my voice. “You will be one of the best doctors in the world. And people will love you because you are wise and kind, and you make their lives better.”
“Will I make Ireland better?” Eoin asked.
“You make Ireland better for me. Every single day,” I said, kneeling down so I could squeeze him before he entered the schoolyard. He threw his little arms around me and hugged me tightly, kissing my cheek before he repeated the action with Thomas. Then we watched as he ran to the cluster of boys in the yard, tossing his hat and his little satchel aside and forgetting us almost immediately.
“Why do you tell him things that might not come to pass?” Thomas asked.