Eoin was more excited for me than he’d been for his own birthday, and he asked if Thomas was going to hold me upside down and administer my “birthday bumps,” knocking my head against the floor for every year of my life and once more for the year to come. Thomas laughed and said birthday bumps were for laddies and lassies, and Brigid scolded Eoin for his impertinence. I whispered to Eoin that he could give me thirty-one kisses instead and a tight squeeze for the year to come, and he climbed up into my lap and dutifully complied.
The O’Tooles didn’t bring gifts, thankfully, but they each offered a blessing and took a turn bestowing them on me after the meal was consumed, with their cups raised high.
“May you live a hundred years with an extra year to repent,” Daniel O’Toole quipped.
“May angels linger at your door. May your troubles be less, and your blessings be more,” Maggie added.
“May your face remain bonny and your arse never grow bony,” was a blessing bestowed by Robbie, who hadn’t yet regained a sense of what was appropriate. I laughed into the handkerchief Brigid had adorned with the letter A, and a new blessing was hastily offered by another 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 was heavier, I think. He had fuller, red cheeks. I couldn’t see his hair color . . . and I was focused on Liam, on the gun.”
“That’s something, I suppose. Though it doesn’t bring anyone immediately to mind,” he worried.
“Liam was so shocked to see me. Do you think it was just surprise or . . . fear . . . that made him shoot?” I mused.
“I was shocked to see you too, Anne. But shooting you never crossed my mind,” Thomas muttered. “You can lay low, you can keep quiet, but they all know you saw them, and you are not safe. Liam thinks you’re a spy. He sounded a bit crazed when he told me you weren’t Anne. But seeing as he was right, it only makes me more nervous and more desperate to find him. Mick is from Cork. Maybe he’ll have someone who can ask around for me. I would feel better if I knew for sure Liam was in Youghal.”
“Do you think he took the guns, Thomas?” I asked, voicing a suspicion that I’d had from the beginning. Divining plots was my specialty.
“They were his to take—at least, his responsibility. Why would he lie about them being gone?”
“To cast suspicion on me. He knows what he did, Thomas. He knows he tried to kill me on the lough. Maybe he wants to make me look crazy . . . or maybe he knows if he paints me as a traitor, a spy, no one will listen if I point the finger of blame at him. All he had to do was move the guns when no one was around—just as he’d intended to do—and then tell Daniel they were missing. Daniel wouldn’t know any different. You wouldn’t know any different. His accusation did exactly what it was designed to do. It made you wary—warier—of me.”
“That makes as much sense as anything else.” Thomas was silent, considering, and then he sat down wearily on the low rock wall that divided the grass from the trees, resting his head in his hands. When he spoke again, his voice was tentative, as if he feared my response.
“What happened to her, Anne? To Declan’s Anne? You know so many things. Did something happen that you’re afraid to tell me?”
I sat down beside him and reached for his hand. “I don’t know what happened, Thomas. I would tell you if I did. I didn’t even know Declan had older brothers and a sister. I suppose I’m like every other Irish man or woman. I have cousins in America too. I thought Eoin and I were the last of the Gallaghers. Your journal . . . the description of the Rising and their part in it, was the most complete picture I’ve ever had of my great-grandparents. Eoin never spoke of them. For him, they didn’t exist beyond a few facts and photographs. I grew up believing Anne died in the Rising, alongside Declan. It was never even a question. In 2001, their grave looks the same as it does now, minus the lichen. Their names are on the stone, side by side. The dates are unchanged.”
He was quiet for a long time, contemplating what it all meant.
“The sad truth is that when people leave Ireland, they rarely come back.” Thomas sighed. “And we never know what happens to them. Death or emigration. The result is the same. I’m beginning to think only the wind knows what happened to Anne.”
“Aithníonn an gaoithe. The wind knows everything,” I agreed softly. “That’s what Eoin told me when I was small. Maybe he learned it from you.”
“I learned it from Mick. But he says the wind is a gossipy wench, and if you don’t want anyone knowing your secrets, you’re better off telling a rock. He says that’s why we have so many rocks in Ireland. Rocks soak up every word, every sound, and they never tell a soul. It’s a good thing because the Irish love to blather.”
I laughed. It reminded me of the story Eoin had requested on my birthday about Donal and the king with the donkey ears. Donal told the king’s secret to a tree because he’d been desperate to tell someone, anyone. Sometime later, that tree was cut down and used to make a harp. When the harp was played, the king’s secret sang from the strings.