Galway Bay (12 page)

“It’s an easy way, really,” I said, trying to convince her and myself. “Less than an hour’s walk. We’ll be up and down to each other often, won’t we? Michael
could
sleep in the cottage now, but he wants to stay in Owen’s shed until we can step over the threshold together.”

She agreed. “A man should follow the woman in—that’s the luck.”

“The lease starts on September twenty-ninth, the feast of Saint Michael the Archangel, Michael’s name day. Could we have the wedding then? It’s a Monday—lucky. We wouldn’t have to worry about taking people from the harvest. Or maybe we could be married on my birthday, September fifteenth, three weeks from now.”

Mam had stopped on the road.

“Though that was the day I was supposed to enter the convent. Miss Lynch might take offense, and her father was good to us with Champion,” I said. “Mam, are you listening to me? We have to choose a date.”

She pointed above. Big black clouds were bullying their way across the blue sky to settle over Galway Bay.

“Run, Honora,” Mam said.

The wind hit. Lightning burnt the air and flashed on the stones under our feet. I felt my hair stand up around my head. A driving rain started. Then hailstones fell.

I thought I heard Michael shouting down to us, but we kept running as the path turned to mud.

Protect the boats, dear Lord. Please, keep them safe. Da, Dennis, Joseph, Johnny Leahy—all of the fishermen, please, Blessed Mother, St. Bridget, Mac Dara, hear me.

We had to pull and pull against the wind to get the door into our cottage open.

“The Bay has lost the run of itself,” Granny said. “Broke over the seawall, washed against the cottages. Nothing to do but kneel in the house and pray.”

“They’ve put in somewhere, surely, Granny,” I said.

But we knew Bearna was the only safe harbor for twenty miles.

As fast as it had come up, the storm rained itself out and blew past. Wind still rumpled the Bay, but now we could go out. We ran with the other women across the strand and out onto the pier. Máire was there already.

“I see the sails!” Annie Leahy, Máire’s mother-in-law, called out. “They’re coming! They’re coming! Thanks be to God, they’re coming!”

“We’ll be mending sails forever,” Mam said as the boats got closer and we saw the tears and tatters.

“A kiss with every stitch,” said Máire. “I was worried that Johnny might . . . So silly. We’ll have a party tonight!” She ran to the pier’s edge.

The Bearna fishermen steered their boats up to the pier while the Claddagh men went on, the Bay rocking them along as if nothing whatsoever had happened.

“There aren’t enough boats,” Mam whispered to me.

“What?”

“Count them. There should be twenty . . . I only see nineteen.”

“Do you see ours, Mam? Do you see Da?”

“I do. And the Clancys, and the Folans, and the Dooleys and the Higgins . . . Honora, I don’t see the Leahy boat.”

Da jumped off our boat, went to Máire, took her in his arms.

The Leahy boat had disappeared in the storm. Johnny, his da, and his brother, Daniel, were gone.

“The storm came up so fast,” Da told us that night. “No time to do anything but lie down on the deck and hold on. I saw Johnny lowering the sails on the Leahy boat, the better to ride out the storm. He’d gotten them halfway down when this wave—the tallest I’ve ever seen—carried the boat up, then slammed it under the water.”

“The sea,” Granny said from her place at the spinning wheel. Mam was with Máire at the Leahys. Michael, my brothers, and I sat on the floor huddled near Da on his stool. Hughie had settled himself on Da’s lap, something the six-year-old had not done for ages.

“There was no way to help them,” Dennis said.

Joseph only shook his head. My young brothers carrying a man’s grief at fifteen and thirteen.

“You did well, boys,” Da said. “Brave in a boat, both of you. I was proud of my sons today.”

The next day, Máire and I walked the shore, searching. We climbed over rocks, following the broken stone teeth along the shore of Galway Bay.

“Máire, a ghrá, his body may never wash up,” I said after that first day.

“Johnny did not drown.”

“But they saw the boat go down.”

“He got to the shore. He’s walking along the rocks to me right now, or he’s hurt in a cave, or . . .”

“Ah, Máire,” I said.

Survivors did climb out of the sea. Sailors from the Armada ship
Concepcion
that wrecked near Ard made it to land. Granny says Da inherited his black hair from one of them. Such tales gave Máire hope as we searched every cave and cove from Bearna to Spiddal.

On the eighth day, a púcán crewed by three of the Ard Keeleys docked at Bearna pier, bringing the bloated corpse of Johnny’s brother, Daniel, the youngest of the three on the boat. They hadn’t carried the body more than twenty steps before Annie Leahy, his two sisters, his granny, and Máire were upon them. The current had carried Daniel Leahy almost fifty miles to where Galway Bay met the sea. Only his body had washed onto shore. No sign of Johnny and his father.

The wake began that night at the Leahy cottage. The same people who’d shared the joy of Champion’s victory only a few weeks before now crowded together in sorrow. Michael and I stood behind Máire, close so she could lean on us, but she stood straight through all the long hours.

Daniel lay wrapped in a sail in the center of the room. Clothing from Johnny and his da would be placed on the floor to represent their bodies.

Annie Leahy put down her husband’s old woven belt. Máire spread out Johnny’s wedding shirt, smoothing the arms, pulling the collar so the edges were flat.

She stepped back, and the Widow Clooney began the keening. “Three men from one family—so kind, so fearless, so skilled in their fishing, so sure in the ocean, but a wind past describing, strong and destroying . . .” She went on and on, crouched on the floor, eyes closed, head back, sometimes murmuring, sometimes shouting, “An evil pact of the wind and waves defeated the best effort of the Leahy heroes to fight their way back to the women who waited for them. Sons with no issue, a family name disappearing, no children to remember the brave Leahys.” She paused and opened her eyes, and screamed over and over—a blood-stopping cry.

Then Mrs. Leahy cried out, “No issue, no son with our name!”

Máire, silent before, wailed now. A sound without form, no words. I knew then she hadn’t told her mother-in-law she was pregnant. Annie was a very godly woman, and she wouldn’t like to know that Johnny and Máire had hurried their wedding night, but surely now . . .

All had great sympathy for Máire, but hearts broke over Annie’s loss.

“Poor Annie Leahy,” Mam said after we got home. “To lose her husband and all her sons. The sorrowful Mother herself had an easier time of it—at least Our Lady could hold His body and mourn. But Annie won’t see her sons until after her own funeral when she meets them again in heaven.”

So. Máire came back to live with us. She didn’t want much to do with Annie Leahy, and I didn’t know why. Finally she told me.

“After that terrible keening, no more Leahys, I told Annie Leahy I was pregnant. I thought she’d be glad. But then she asked me how many months. I said I’d missed for the first time in May. ‘Well before the wedding,’ she said. ‘Are you sure it’s Johnny’s?’”

“She was out of her head with grief. She didn’t mean it.”

“Not so out of her head she didn’t ask me how many months and count back in a flash. She always has thought I’m no better than I ought to be.”

“You need to help each other, not let anger . . .”

But Máire refused to speak to Annie. Three weeks went by. Máire would not relent, nor would Annie come to her.

“I need a father for this baby and a place to live. I don’t want to stay with the family forever, and I can’t keep the cottage built at the meitheal—the oldest Leahy girl claimed it,” Máire said. “She’s getting married, and says Johnny paid the rent for it with money from his father, so it belongs to the Leahys. She wants it as a dowry. And as for Annie Leahy . . .”

“Come live with Michael and me.”

“I’ll marry. I think there will be men in Bearna and the Claddagh only too glad to offer for the Pearl,” she said. “And as much as I’m breaking my heart over Johnny, he wouldn’t want our child to be marked and commented on. I need to get a father for the baby before it’s born.”

She chose one of the Connors—Kevin—and she and Kevin Connor and Da and I went to Father Gilley’s to arrange for the wedding.

“Better sooner than later,” Máire said.

“But, Máire, we don’t conclusively know that your husband is dead,” Father Gilley said.

We were in Galway City at the parish house. I thought of the awful puffed-up body of young Daniel, his face chewed by fish, his hair the only human-looking part of him. When I had walked the shore with Máire, I’d prayed we’d find Johnny’s body to bury. But after seeing poor Daniel, I was glad Johnny’s grave was the sea.

“Do you think, Father, that some ship bound for Amerikay picked Johnny up?” Máire said. She’d proposed that from the first.

But Granny had told Máire very kindly that the cousins from Ard said no ships could have sailed into the sea during that storm, and none had been seen in the days before or after. She’d accepted that.

Here was Father Gilley making her hope again.

“So, Father, my Johnny might have been saved?”

“Ah, my child, I doubt that very seriously; however, without conclusive proof of his death, the marriage bond remains in place, and”—this last was to Kevin Connor—“I could not sanctify any union. I’m sorry.”

But the look on his face said he wasn’t sorry at all. He was pleased, for whatever reason, to apply some version of Church law to Máire. Forcing us to obey made him feel the big man, acting like the Sassenach, who made rules and regulations that had nothing to do with real life, to give themselves another stick to beat us with.

Máire and Mam went to Miss Lynch, hoping she’d speak to Father Gilley, but that was not to be.

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly question Father Gilley’s judgment,” she said.

“What odds to be a widow in a parish oversupplied with them,” Máire said to me that night. “And me only nineteen. Here’s Mam and Da with three sons to raise up and find boat shares and bits of field for them and their families. And there’s Kevin Connor, happy to take me and my child, and willing that I call it Leahy. What’s to become of me now? Does that fool of a priest want me to go off to Bride’s Hotel? That would give him some real sin to preach against.”

“Máire,” I said, “you would never, ever do that.”

“I suppose I never, ever would, but I know how men look at me and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life fending off lads who fancy a chance with the widow, or spend my time convincing wives that I have no interest in their husbands.”

I thought of Owen Mulloy, worried about the Pearl visiting us.

No one would bother a young woman growing up in her parents’ house, or a married woman protected by her husband, but an experienced widow presented great temptation, especially to men convinced that the Pearl would welcome them, and then, ructions.

“Máire, if you lived with Michael and me up in Knocnacuradh, he’d make sure no one bothered you.”

“I couldn’t go up there with those farm women,” she said. “At least now I can go to town with Mam and sell the catch.”

Granny was furious at Father Gilley. For thousands of years, the Irish followed the Brehon laws, where marriage was a contract between equal partners. “Ten different legal relationships between a man and woman,” she said. Granny told Máire she had Irish tradition on her side. Johnny was gone. The contract broken. “When I was young in Connemara, we got married without priests. Touched our fingers together through a hole in a stone cross. Done and dusted.”

Máire asked did Granny know some fellow still following the ancient ways. Granny told her she just might.

“For God’s sake, Honora, get married,” Máire said almost every day of the month that followed.

“It doesn’t seem right,” I said. My birthday came and went. Father Gilley celebrated the Month’s Mind Mass for Johnny and Daniel and their father, but it still seemed too soon to have my wedding.

“He’ll pray for Johnny’s soul, but won’t agree that he’s dead. What kind of sense in that?” Máire said to me.

She and I were alone, the rest up digging the potatoes from the garraí Mhurchadha—the fishermen’s common field—and Michael gone, too, helping Owen Mulloy.

Three days until St. Michael’s Day and the start of the lease. Bad luck for Michael to move in alone. I couldn’t leave Máire. Though she didn’t look very pregnant, Máire thought the baby might be born as soon as Christmas.

“Granny thinks I should go out to Ard/Carna, far away from all the priests. Says there’s surely a spare Keeley second or third cousin out there to marry me,” she said. “They know Johnny’s gone, for haven’t they lost enough of their own?”

“It’s a poor enough place, and Máire, you’d be so far away.”

“Maybe I’ll find a handsome highwayman. There’s no law west of Oughterard, no roads, thousands of men out there,” she said.

“Oh, Máire!”

She sang:

Let me sing of a young highwayman

Dick Brennan was his name . . .

“Stop it, Máire! Do you want Annie Leahy to hear that her disgraced daughter-in-law is singing?”

Brennan on the moor,

Brennan on the moor . . .

Máire started laughing and crying at once.

“That’s what I’ll do. I’ll have old Martin O’Malley make a match for me with an outlaw or a poitín maker. There’s one behind every rock in Connemara.”

I would have told her about Patrick Kelly then, but Máire was sobbing. “Where do you think he is, Honora? My laughing Johnny with his sweet mouth. Is he in heaven at all? No body buried, no bones to rise up on the last day. Did the fish he hunted revenge themselves on him? Oh, Johnny! Your wee one inside me.” She rubbed the tears from her eyes. “I’ll not walk in Bearna with a bowed head, Honora. And you should have your wedding. I know what Johnny would say: ‘Máire, for God’s sake, shake some sense into your sister—there are plenty of girls would want a fine handsome man like Michael Kelly with a plot of land and a sack of gold. Tell her to marry the fella.’ So it’s Máire for Connemara, and Honora for Askeeboy,” she said.