“Did you know Eoin well?” I asked after we’d both set our saucers down.
“No. Not really. He was much younger than I. And a little scamp at that.”
Eoin was younger than Maeve? Eoin was just shy of eighty-six when he died. I tried to calculate what “much younger” might mean.
“I’m ninety-two,” Maeve supplied. “My mother lived to be one hundred and three. My grandmother was ninety-eight. My great-grandmother was so old, no one really knew exactly how old she was. We were glad to see the auld wan go.”
I hid my snort of laughter in a demure cough.
“Let me look at you,” she demanded, and I raised my eyes to hers obediently.
“I can’t believe it. You look just like her,” she marveled.
“Like Eoin’s mother?”
“Like Anne,” she agreed. “It’s uncanny.”
“I’ve seen pictures. The resemblance is strong. But I’m surprised you remember. You would have been a very little girl when she died.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Oh no. I knew her well.”
“I was told Declan and Anne Gallagher died in 1916. Eoin was raised by his grandmother, Brigid, Declan’s mother.”
“Nooo,” she disagreed, drawing out the word as she shook her head. “Anne came back. Not right away, mind you. I remember how folks talked about her after she returned. There were some rumors . . . speculation about where she’d been. But she came back.”
I stared at the old woman, stunned. “M-my grandfather didn’t tell me,” I stammered.
She considered this, nodding and drinking her tea, her eyes cast down, and I gulped my own, my heart racing from a sense of betrayal.
“Maybe I am confused,” she retracted softly. “Don’t let the ramblings of an old woman cause you to doubt.”
“It was a long time ago,” I offered.
“Yes. It was. And memory is a funny thing. It plays tricks on us.”
I nodded, relieved that she had withdrawn her assertion so easily. For a moment, she had seemed so sure, and her confidence had made mine crumble.
“They’re buried in Ballinagar. That I am sure of.”
I rushed to retrieve my little notebook and a pencil from my bag. “How do I get there?”
“Well now. It’s a pretty walk from here. Or a short drive. Maybe ten minutes or less. Go south on the main street—just there, see?” She pointed toward the front door. “It’ll take you straight out of town. Go about three kilometers. You’re going to veer right at the fork and continue for, oh . . . for half a kilometer or so. Then go left. Go a wee bit farther. Then the church—St. Mary’s—will be on your left. The cemetery is there too, behind it.”
I’d stopped writing after she said to veer right.
“Don’t these streets have names?”
“Well, they’re not streets, dear. They’re roads. And people around here just know. If you get lost, pull over and ask someone. They’ll know where the church is. And you can always pray. God always hears our prayers when we’re wantin’ a church.”
15 May 1916
The drive to Dromahair with Declan’s body wrapped and secured to the running board of the car was the longest of my life. Brigid would not speak, and the baby was inconsolable, as though he felt the black of our despair. After I dropped them at Garvagh Glebe, I took Declan to Father Darby for burial. We laid him to rest in Ballinagar, next to his father. I purchased a stone that will be laid when the engraving is done. If Anne is dead, as I fear, we will bury her beside Declan, and they will share the stone. It is what they would have wanted.
I returned to Dublin, though getting back into the city proved arduous. The British army had declared martial law, and all the roads were cordoned with armoured vehicles and soldiers. I showed my papers and my medical bag, and they eventually let me pass. The hospitals are full of injured insurgents, soldiers, and civilians. Mostly civilians. The need is great enough so they let me through when others were turned away.
I searched the deadhouses and the hospital morgues—Jervis Street, the Mater, St. Patrick Dun’s, even the women’s hospital where I’d heard the rebels had gathered on the grass after they surrendered. A temporary field hospital had been assembled at Merrion Square, and I went there as well, though nothing remained but the folks that resided in the homes nearby. They told me the wounded and dead had been taken, and they weren’t sure where. Rumours of mass graves of the unidentified dead at the Glasnevin and Deansgrange cemeteries had me begging beleaguered groundsmen for names they couldn’t provide. I was too late, they said, adding that the lists of the dead would be compiled and eventually posted in the Irish Times, though no one knew when.
I searched the streets, walking down the burned-out shell of once grand buildings on Sackville and trundling through endless ash that was still hot enough in some places to melt my shoes. On Moore Street, where I had found Declan, people moved in and out of the crumbling tenements. One, situated right in the centre, had taken a direct hit. It had collapsed in on itself, and children scrambled over the debris, searching for firewood and things they could sell. Then I saw Anne’s shawl, a bright grass-green that matched her eyes. When I saw her last, she’d been wearing it wrapped tightly around her shoulders and tucked into her skirt to keep it out of the way. A young girl wore it now, and it fluttered in the breeze like the tricolour flags we’d raised above the GPO as triumphant conquerors. Those flags were gone now, destroyed. Just like Declan and Anne.
Senseless with fear and fatigue, I ran to the girl and demanded that she tell me where she’d found the shawl. She pointed to the rubble at her feet. She had a blank stare and old eyes, though she couldn’t have been more than fifteen.
“It was just here, buried under the bricks. It has a small hole. But I’m keeping it. This was my house. So it’s mine now.” She jutted out her chin, as though she thought I’d rip it from her. Maybe I would have. Instead, I spent the rest of the day in the tumbled pile of rock and walls, searching through debris, looking for Anne’s body. When the sun set and I had nothing to show for my efforts, the girl removed the shawl and handed it to me.
“I’ve changed my mind. You can have it. It might be all that’s left of your lady.” I could not hide my tears, and her eyes were not as ancient when she turned to go.
Tomorrow I’ll go back to Dromahair and bury the shawl beside Declan.
T. S.
3
THE STOLEN CHILD
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping than he can understand.
—W. B. Yeats
With my heart in my throat and my eyes peeled, I repeated Maeve’s directions like a Gregorian chant. I found my way to Ballinagar Cemetery and to the church that sat like a guardian over the graves. It was in the middle of empty fields, a parochial house behind it and only the endless stone walls of Ireland and a smattering of cows keeping it company. I pulled into the empty lot in front of the church and stepped out into the tepid June afternoon—if Ireland had a summer, it hadn’t arrived—feeling as though I’d found Golgotha and seen Jesus on the cross. With tear-filled eyes and shaking hands, I pushed through the huge wooden doors into the empty chapel, where reverence and memory had seeped into the walls and the wooden pews. The high ceiling echoed with a thousand christenings, countless deaths, and innumerable unions that stretched back beyond the dates on the nearby graves.
I loved churches the way I loved cemeteries and books. All three were markers of humanity, of time, of life. I felt no censure or guilt, no heaviness or dread, inside religious walls. I knew my experience was not widely shared, and perhaps that was because of Eoin. He had always approached religion with respect and humor, an odd combination that valued the good and put the bad into perspective. My relationship with God was equally untroubled. I’d heard once that our view of God has everything to do with those who taught us about Him. Our image of Him often reflected our image of them. Eoin taught me about God, and because I loved and cherished Eoin, I loved and cherished God.
In school, I’d studied Catholicism, learned the catechisms and the history, and absorbed it the way I’d absorbed all my other subjects, cleaving to the things that resonated and setting aside the things that didn’t. The nuns complained that religion was not a buffet from which I could select only certain dishes. I politely smiled and quietly disagreed. Life, religion, and learning were exactly that. A series of choices. If I had tried to consume everything that was presented to me all at once, I would have become too full too quickly, and all the flavors would have run together. Nothing would have made any sense in and of itself.
As I sat in the old church where generations of my ancestors may have worshipped, where prayers had been spoken and hearts broken and healed, it all made sense for a small moment. Religion made sense, if only to add context to the struggle of life and death. The church was a monument to what had been, a connection to the past that comforted those in the present, and it comforted me.
I climbed the slope beyond the church to where the cemetery stretched. It overlooked the spires and the winding road I’d just traveled. Some of the stones were tipped or sunken; some were so covered with lichen and time that I couldn’t make out names or dates. Other plots were new, lined by rocks and filled in with mementos. The newer plots, newer deaths, rimmed the edges of the graveyard, as if death rippled outward like a rock tossed in a lake. Those markers were clean, the marble smooth, the names easily read. Maeve had warned that the cemeteries in much of Ireland were a mix of ancient and recent, the connections familial, even if the relationship was centuries old. In Ballinagar Cemetery, most of the graves, especially those higher up the rise, stood like petrified gnomes and hobbits amid the grass, peeping out at me and drawing me to them.