Five months earlier May 1886 Off Dawrosbeg, County Galway, Western Ireland

Mary Agnes holds tight to the sides of her granddad’s small fishing boat as they weave through rocky shoals in Ballynakill Harbour toward the wide mouth of the North Atlantic. They’re after cod, ling, hake—and not a moment too soon. No fishermen have dared go out during this furious storm that’s battered the Irish seaboard for days, “a good stir,” Festus calls it, waves that could sink much larger ships. Which means Mary Agnes is desperately hungry by now, five days on; the pain in her stomach throbs like a hammer pounding a nail.

And the storm’s not abated yet. Cold salt spray crashes over the tar-covered currach’s bow, wave after wave of it, as her granddad rows out with the tide. Rain—is it ever not raining in Ireland?—lashes the boat with such vengeance Mary Agnes wonders if God has a special reason for punishing the Irish.

Sure, and there’d be reasons, wet enough to drown the dead, beginning with us Coynes . . .

When they clear Dawrosbeg, Festus heads for the tip of Renvyle Peninsula, four miles northwest, Letter Hill to starboard. Mary Agnes can’t quite see the cliff at the end of the peninsula that extends out into the sea, but it’s not just because of the rain. She can’t see past her hands; everything else is blurry at best.

Mary Agnes’s shabby muslin dress, plastered to her shins, is soaked through, despite wearing one of her granddad’s oversized woolen sweaters. Her feet, clammy and raw, are stuffed into one-size-too-small boots. She’s chilled already, and not a half-hour into their day, with eight, nine hours to go. That she could use an oilskin and a hat like her granddad wears—and so many other things—is like conjuring up fairy dreams. There is hardly enough to put food scraps on the table at home. She cannot ask.

A stiff wind skims the skin of the sea as the currach rises and falls in the waves. It’s as familiar as her own skin. When she was eight, and every year since, she has taken to the sea with her granddad on Fridays, and it’s a relief, getting away from her mam and da and brothers in their overcrowded cottage, unless there’s a new little one at home, that is, and then she’s pressed into service and misses her Fridays out.

And Mam’s due again. More mouths to feed. But feed us what?

Nothing for breakfast again today, for her anyway. The meager slurry her mam scrapes together each morning is for the boys, and don’t ya go grudging it, her mam says. Mary Agnes’s stomach growls, hollow and empty. She’s often faint and has trouble concentrating, even on the smallest of tasks. And then there’s the constant headache. If it weren’t for scant mussels she collects, the family would have even less to eat. And with this recent storm, there’s been no mussel gathering for a week.

As she shifts her bottom on the slippery seat, Mary Agnes catches herself before she scrapes already-bruised knees on the ribbed sole of the boat. If only a fish would jump into the currach, she would eat it raw, sink her teeth into the slimy flesh, skin and all, oily innards dripping down her chin. She touches her mouth, as if tasting it.

As they near the point, Mary Agnes sees the faint outline of three familiar islands through patchy fog several miles off the Connemara coast, the largest, Inis Bo Finne, dominant. When seas permit, Festus fishes off Inishbofin, that’s the English word, and English they’re required to speak now, except at home when no one’s listening.

But on Fridays, Festus and Mary Agnes fish closer to home off Dawrosbeg. It’s their special time. Whether they catch fish or not on Fridays is usually not of issue. Today, however, it’s more pressing than usual. Festus hasn’t been out for a week due to the weather, and, despite it, he needs fish.

Most of the fish caught in Irish waters is bound for England, and don’t think fisherman don’t begrudge it, they do. It’s as palpable as breath. And not just fish. Cattle, horses, rabbits, and honey—anything exportable—is bound for England to feed the British, leaving the Irish hungry.

It’s been this way since before An Gorta Mór, the time of great hunger in 1847.

Maybe the famine could have been avoided—or mitigated—but that’s an old, tired conversation that loops in pubs and cottages and along the lanes, and the result the same, a million dead, two million moved on, and five million more with nowhere to go, most of them still hungry.

History is in the telling of it, Mary Agnes knows, and this much is true: The famine wasn’t the fault of the Irish, none at all, but they’re the ones paying the price. That the Irish continue to feed the British, forty years on now, is nothing less than galling. How can someone not begrudge that? She hates the British so much that sometimes her fists clench so hard her jagged nails pierce her palms until they bleed.

Festus whistles as he pulls to the rhythm of the dark, undulating waves with pole-shaped oars—dip, up, dip, up—the sound of wood grating wood as he pulls the oars hard against the oarlocks. He is taller and twice as thin as his kinfolk. In any weather, he wears a worn, ivory cable-knit sweater; suspenders; heavy, dark wool pants; an oilskin; and a tweed flat cap; all he owns except for well-worn mourning clothes. The cap covers his mop of grey hair—what is left of it—and falls low on his weather-withered face. His eyes, green like Mary Agnes’s, are filmed over with white.

He clears his throat and begins to sing.

I’m a-rowin’ on the ocean

Many miles a-sea . . .

“Join in, Aggie,” he says. “It’s still a ways off to the point.”

Mary Agnes doesn’t need to be asked twice, she loves to sing.

And I wonder oh my darlin’

If ya ever think of me.

She is always asked to sing at wakes, songs in the old language. Demons cower and angels weep, old folks say when she’s finished singing, and everyone nods, yes, yes, indeed she does, that Coyne girl, she’s blessed, what a rare gift she has, that voice, that voice. Like her gram, an angel voice she had, too, when she were young. And on they go, a drop of whiskey, and thanks for that, with the rememberings.

Today, singing keeps Mary Agnes from thinking about cold or hunger—or about Fiach.

Festus and Mary Agnes finish all six verses of the shanty—the last verse quite lustily—as her granddad rows and she tends to nets. And then he laughs. Despite years of hardship and heartache and hunger, Festus is almost always merry. Mary Agnes admires that about her granddad. She is not always merry.

They reach the lee of Renvyle Point and tuck into a nook to escape the weather. Here, they ready the hand line. Mary Agnes pulls the bait bucket between her feet while Festus feeds her line. She baits each of the hundred hooks attached to the long line with bits of limpet she collected last week at low tide and kept alive in a bucket of seawater. She’s proud how fast she can bait a hook, faster than any man, her granddad says. Not today, though. Her fingers are so cold she struggles to work bait onto hooks.

When the lines are ready, Festus rows the boat away from shore and points the bow of the currach into the tidal current. Mary Agnes slowly pays out the line, careful not to let it tangle. She hopes there will be enough fish to sell so Festus can pay his rent. The rest of the fish, well, that’s another story. That her gram will only get tails and heads today rankles, but it will be enough for a scanty fish stew, just enough. Mary Agnes’s fingers are by now raw, and she curses that she forgot gloves today.

But will she complain? No. If she is to be a fisherwoman, she needs to toughen. So what if she’s drenched, cold, famished? She’s with her granddad, sheltered and safe.

“GET OFF ME, YOU BRUTE!”

Fiach’s hand gropes under Mary Agnes’s nightclothes as he pins her to her cot, his fingers cold as dead winter. He smells of dirt and sweat and whiskey. It’s May, the rutting season, as he clamps his hand over her mouth, his breath hot and thick. She chokes back a scream and squirms beneath him, distressed she didn’t hear him climbing the ladder to the loft where she sleeps on a cot pushed up against the single window.

Fiach is built like Festus, tall and lean. His dark hair hangs around his gaunt face. That he has strength at all may surprise, but he does get breakfast, their mam sees to that. Tonight, his fingers dig deep into her behind after he fumbles with his trousers. If she doesn’t act fast, something she dreads more than death might happen nine months from now—all too well she knows about childbearing from her mother. And she is not ready for a child. Especially not now, at thirteen. Mary Agnes bites down hard on Fiach’s hand.

“Whore!” he yells. He lurches back, raises his hand, and slaps her face.

She wrenches free of her half-brother’s grasp and leaps from the bed, her nightdress drenched with sweat. She grabs a candlestick and raises it above her head.

“One more inch, and I’ll bash your face.” Her cheek burns from the slap. Her da beats their mam, so this is nothing new in a long line of women in the parish who sport reddened cheeks like rouge. “The weather,” they say, or “Clumsy me,” or “Walked into the door, that I did.” Mary Agnes knows better. She will never marry.

Fiach lunges toward Mary Agnes and she brings the full force of the pewter candleholder down on his arm.

“Damn ya,” he yells. He holds his arm and glares at her.

A loud padding from the front room, steps on the ladder.

Da. I thought you’d never come.

“What the devil?” John Coyne stands at the top of the ladder, his shoulders slumped. Her da is short and stout like many of the Connemara men, built for work. But work is scarce, and he spends his days at the pub. His speech is slurred from drink again tonight.

Fiach grimaces and slinks past his stepfather, not without a cuff to the side of his head. John Coyne stares at Mary Agnes. He does not speak, just remains there, staring.

Does he see me? Does he care?

Mary Agnes breaks the silence, her voice shaky. “He were after me, Da.”

Her father grunts. “See as ya don’t tempt him.”

Tempt him? “How could I tempt him, Da? I were asleep!”

“Find a way.”

Mary Agnes’s eyes blaze. “And how is it I can do that?”

He shrugs and turns to leave. “Ask yer mam.”

“Da!”

He moves away with tired steps.

Ask Mam? Like she knows? Eight children in fifteen years? All those boys like stairsteps, barely a year between them, except the years the tiny white coffins were spirited away and Mam sank into gloom so dark we daren’t talk to her? For months?

A wan moon casts weak light through the lone attic window above Mary Agnes’s cot. Most nights, she watches the moon, the stars, the clouds, the sea outside her window. Makes up a poem. Sings. But tonight, she doesn’t take her eyes off the top of the ladder for the rest of night, short as it is, hoping that a thousand currachs will come to take her away from this place. She pulls her coverlet up to ward off damp and prays under her breath, quiet enough so no one in the cottage will be roused, but loud enough for Mary and the saints to hear.

But the currachs don’t come—and why would I think they would, that’s the stuff of folktales. She will keep a knife under her pillow from now on, a sharp one.

ONE PULL, THEN ANOTHER, AS MARY AGNES and Festus reel in codfish hand over hand onto the sole of the boat. Fish writhe at their feet. Festus takes a club to each to render it still and marks the catch in a small notebook. She pulls hooks from their mouths, disentangles lines, and stuffs silvery fish, eyes now dulled, into worn baskets. Rust-red blood, sea water, and rain pools at her feet and she bails the bottom of the currach with a small bucket.

Mid-afternoon, Festus rows the boat toward a sheltered harbor on an islet called Finishlagh. The cove is protected from wind here, this Mary Agnes can read from the ripples on the water. The rain has eased, “only spitting,” Festus calls it. He throws out a small anchor and she unpacks dinner, now cold. They sit, huddled, splitting a small, sliced potato and a piece of pickled cod, washed down with lukewarm tea, each swallow a gift.

When they finish their meal, Festus wipes his mouth with his sleeve, picks up a frayed piece of line, and holds it out toward Mary Agnes. He is missing half of his left forefinger.

“A bowline,” he says, as he weaves a knot. “Ya try it.”

Mary Agnes stumbles on the first try, but then finds a pattern, weaving a frayed rope up through a loop, around a fixed line, and down through the loop again.

“Now let’s race,” Festus says. “On your marks, get set, go!”

At the sound of go, old fingers and young work the lines, ten seconds on the next try, then eight, and the winning five, Mary Agnes triumphant as she pulls the knot tight. She holds it up for Festus’s inspection as the currach bobs in the lagoon, small against the waves, the sea, the world.

“Well done, girl. Now behind yer back. Then we’ll try one hand. We’ll make a fisherwoman out of ya yet. Maybe take over my operation. Wouldn’t that be something, a lass in charge.”

Now there’s an idea. Take over from Granda. Move to Inishbofin. Live off fish. Mary Agnes can gut a fish as fast as anyone (and maybe faster, her head low to see her hands, and isn’t that boning knife sharp and her eyesight not—she has cuts on her knuckles to prove it). That would solve everything. And I’d be far enough away from Fiach. Mary Agnes thinks these things as she pulls on a damaged net. She dares to ask the question she’s often worried about, seeing as she cannot swim.

“Have you ever fallen over, Granda? Into the sea?”

“One time too few,” Festus laughs. Soon his face goes dark. “The sea never gives up, Aggie. Certainly never gives up its dead.” His eyes narrow. “I’ve known too many lost. One day it’ll be my turn.”

No. Mary Agnes hurries to change the subject. “Do we have time for a story?” Her granddad is known throughout Connemara as one of the best storytellers. He never says no.

Festus checks the sky. “A short one, perhaps. The mad birdman?” He flaps his large arms. “Or the magic salmon?” He motions a fish swimming.

“The magic salmon,” she says, and mimics his motion, her hands flying through the air like a salmon swimming upstream.

“Then the magic salmon it is.”

And there, amid now choppier waves, wind picking up and seabirds screeching overhead, her granddad begins the story of the boy who caught the world’s most elusive salmon and by doing so gained all the knowledge the world has to offer.

Just the word, fish, and Mary Agnes’s stomach grumbles all the more. It is a curse to even think about food. Maybe I’ll slip one into my dress pocket. Maybe two, when Granda’s not looking, and share it with my brothers later at home.

But then her granddad’s numbers would be off and he’d be held accountable, and it’s better to be hungry than see her granddad hauled off to prison.

Damn the British, she thinks, every one of them, sitting at their polished tables eating our food.

“Can ya imagine it, girl?” Festus asks. “Knowing everything? The past and the future?”

Mary Agnes cannot imagine tomorrow, let alone the future. She squints through patches of fog. By now she can’t feel her fingers. If only she were in front of a fire, reading. She narrows her eyes again, this time scrunching her whole forehead, eyes slits.

“I cannot see the future,” she says. “But I can almost see America from here.” Just last week, another family from Dawrosmore emigrated to America. There was an “American Wake” for them: food, music, and Irish blessings. The word America conjures so many thoughts. Opportunity. No British rule. Food for every meal. Away from incessant wind and rain.

And far, far away from Fiach.

“Everything’s better there, in America, isn’t it, Granda?”

Festus pauses and half turns toward her. How Mary Agnes loves his profile, so familiar and comforting. It’s as if his very presence undergirds her. She can’t imagine life without him.

“I’m not sure of that, girl.” Festus shakes his head and looks at her with filmy eyes. “No one who leaves for America ever comes back. A few letters, maybe, and then there’s only an empty chair at the table.” He sets his shoulders, pulls the oars, and heads back toward Dawrosbeg, the last breath of day limning the horizon with a sliver of light.

Thanks be to God, Festus has a good catch today. The women will be waiting. The children will be waiting. It will be another long night ahead gutting fish, standing in mud to their shins and packing fish into barrels until it’s so dark, all they will see is the outline of hands, faces, lives.

As the boat approaches the tip of the Dawros peninsula, Mary Agnes shivers violently. She worries the line in her already-worn pocket, fingering the knot like a rosary.

I’m not sure it’s better in America, either, Granda. But I have to get away from Fiach, and soon, before I’m saddled with a babe of my own.

Or I kill him first.