1

AT HOME IN BALLYROAN, in the single-story cottage that stood beside the sea, in the bed she shared with her older sister, eight-year-old Greta Cahill woke before dawn to a sound that was not the ocean, was not the animals bawling into the wind, was not a slammed gate, a clanging cowbell, or the rain beating on the gable. The sound was different, it was a first, and to hear it better Greta pushed the layers of blankets away from her shoulders and sat up.

"You're letting in the cold," Johanna said into the dark without whispering, and tugged at the blankets Greta had pushed away. As they struggled, a faint whiff of salmon stopped Greta's hands. She had forgotten that part of last night's catch was lined up on a shallow tray and resting in the emptied top drawer of the dresser she and Johanna shared. Greta pictured the six flat bodies in a neat row—tails to the back, heads to the front, all split along the backbone and buried in salt. The smell was barely noticeable so far, but Greta knew that in a few more hours the delicate tang of the drying fish would be like an itch inside her nose that could not be scratched. The salt would pull the water from the salmon's river-logged bodies, and it would be Johanna's job to drain the brine with Greta looking on and their mother standing behind saying, "Are you watching, Greta? Are you seeing how your sister does it?"

"Christ," Johanna said, and pressed her face to her pillow. Greta knew what her sister was thinking. Last night, late, after listening to the usual activity at the back door and then in the kitchen, and after following the tsk-tsk of their mother's slippers as she scurried around the cottage to the other hiding places, Johanna had sat up in bed just as Lily opened their door and said she'd not have any fish in her room, thank you very much.

Holding the tray flat so the salt wouldn't spill, Lily had set the lantern on the floor, placed the tray in the drawer, and reached over to give Johanna a lug. Smart, fast, her hand fell from the dark space above their bed and caught Johanna square on the cheek. There were salmon in drawers all over the cottage and in the highest cabinet of the press in the hall.

Now Johanna flipped over to her back as Greta worked to identify the sound that had woken her. "There was blood left last time," Johanna said. "She says they're all cleaned, but—"

Greta put her hand over Johanna's mouth and held a finger in the air. "Listen," she said. Then Johanna heard it too. Greta could tell by the way her sister's back went rigid and her head lifted from the pillow.

"What is it?" Johanna asked. "A horse and cart," she answered herself a second later, and jumped out of bed to go to the window. "Coming fast." It was bouncing violently on the stones and dips in the road, the wood of the cart splintering as it slammed against the iron hitch. For a half second here and there the world went silent, and Greta cringed in expectation of the airborne cart landing with a clatter. The racket grew louder as it came closer, rolling toward their cottage like thunder, like a stampede. The bedroom window didn't face the road, but Johanna stayed there, hopping from foot to foot on the wood planks of the floor as she peered through the gray-green light. Just as Greta was about to shout for their mother, they heard the crash, an explosion of wood coming to a sudden halt against stone and hard ground, followed by the everyday sound of a horse galloping away.

"Tom," Greta heard Lily say on the other side of the wall. "Get up."

Johanna opened the door of their bedroom and the cold of the hall swept into the room just as cruelly as if they'd stepped directly outside.

"You stay where you are," Big Tom said when he emerged from his bedroom and saw Johanna. "Don't make me say it twice." He walked over to her, looked over her head to Greta, who was still in bed, and then to every corner of the room. "And keep that drawer well closed."

"It's something to do with the salmon," Johanna said when he left, still hopping from foot to foot. Greta didn't understand about the salmon, so she didn't answer. She suspected that Johanna didn't understand either but liked to pretend that she did.

In another minute Lily came out, tying the belt of her long cardigan, and told Johanna to either get back under the covers or get dressed. "You too," she said to Greta. She lit the paraffin lamp in the hall, twisting the knob to raise the wick and make the yellow flame higher. The boys—Jack, Little Tom, and Padraic—were already outside with Big Tom; Greta could hear the low hum of their voices traveling on the heavy air of dawn. As her much older brothers, they existed for Greta as a unit, all roughly the same age—twenty, nineteen, eighteen—all tall, black hair, black stubble on their cheeks by the end of each day. The only thing that kept them from being three identical spokes on the same wheel was Little Tom, who was born with his top lip attached to the bottom of his nose and something wrong with the inside of his mouth.

Greta squinted to find Johanna. "What's happening? Did Mammy go out too?" She felt for the lump of wool stockings she'd tied and left beside her bed the night before, and then for the navy cardigan that hung alongside Johanna's at the back of the door. "Johanna?" she said, turning around and stretching her neck toward the shadowed corners of the room. "Are you there?" She felt a draft from the front door opening and closing, and she heard the other doors in the cottage shaking in their frames.

"Well, look it—" Big Tom shouted from outside a moment later. His voice was big, full of tobacco, turf smoke, and crushed seashells whipped up by the wind. "Get inside, girl. Lily! Get this child inside!" Lily had just plunged her hands into the water pail in the kitchen when she heard him and rushed out of the house to catch Johanna, who'd taken off in a run across the yard to the field, where a woman's body lay in the grass.

"It's the tinker from yesterday," Johanna shouted as Lily hooked her around the waist and pulled her back toward the house. "Greta, remember your tinker from yesterday?" Johanna kicked as she was pulled. She put both heels into the dirt and drew tracks.

Greta stood framed in the open cottage door, pulling the sleeves of her cardigan over her hands. It was the kind of day that wouldn't get any brighter, gray upon gray in every direction. She could feel the dampness on her skin, weighing down her clothes and making her shiver. She put her knuckle in her mouth and began to suck.

"Greta?" Lily said. "Come in now, will you? Like a good girl? Like two good girls, you'll both wait by the fire." Lily blessed herself. "Lord to mercy on the poor woman."

"It's an awful day to be dead in a field, isn't it, Mammy?" Johanna said, her breath ragged, the heat of her body coming through her sweater, cutting through the cold and the damp so that Greta could feel it as her sister brushed past, flicking her hair this way and that as she looked back and forth between her mother and the field, where Big Tom had gone down on one knee to lift the woman into his arms.

"I'd say so, love," Lily sighed. "Greta, take them fingers out of your mouth."

 

Ballyroan sat at the very western edge of Ireland. Once, when the book man came to the Cahills' door selling volumes on all subjects, he'd taken Greta on his knee and told her to find her village on the map he unfolded and unfolded until it was the width of their kitchen table. When she couldn't do that, he told her to find Connemara. When she couldn't do that either, he used his finger to find Galway for her and covered the whole west of Ireland in the process. She was surprised to learn that at the end of all that ocean that began at the end of their lane was a piece of land a hundred times the size of Ireland, and that someone over there might be standing at the end of her own lane and looking back toward her.

At the start of the Second World War, the village of Ballyroan consisted of seven families, which came to just over fifty people spread over one square mile. Conch, the closest town, was four miles inland and not a single person lived on the bogland or in the fields that stretched between Conch and Ballyroan, leaving those seven families alone, except when the children went to school or the people from town rode their bicycles out to swim in the sea or for some other equally isolated purpose. Big Tom often said that living in Ballyroan was like living on an island, except better. In every direction was water, but unlike the islands that sat out in the ocean like the backs of whales, Ballyroan had a freshwater river running through it. Not a stream, mind you, but a river. Fast, deep, full to the brim with fish if you knew the right places to look. It was because of the river that the Cahills never had to leave. Not when the Normans came, not when Grainne O'Malley ruled the clans and the seas, not even during the potato blight when the people either fled or turned into shadows.

"Because of this," Big Tom always said at the end of this familiar speech, and held up his fishing net.

"Put that away, you fool," Lily said when she saw him at it. Sometimes she would grab it out of his hands, gather it up in her arms until it was as small as she could make it, and carry it out of the kitchen to a hiding place only she and Big Tom knew.

But by 1956, despite centuries of gathering seaweed from the high sea ledges, drying it, giving it to the children to chew or keep for the flower beds, despite generation after generation of the same families driving cattle, footing turf, churning butter, bleeding the fall pig from the ceiling rafter of a dark back room before covering him with salt the size of hailstones and closing him up in his barrel, despite all the narrow headstones sticking out of the fields like milk teeth, five of the seven houses in Ballyroan were abandoned, their windows boarded, their inhabitants gone to England or Australia or Canada or America. Every one of these families said they were certain they'd come back one day, once they had their legs under them, once they'd put aside a little money to bring back home and start again, and when that day came, could they please write the Cahills to take the boards off the windows, light the fire in the kitchen, let the air and sunshine in.

Greta assumed that these families did not have a net like her father did, or they wouldn't have had to leave. According to the man on the wireless radio, all of Ireland was leaving for England and America, all except the very young and the very old. It seemed a simple thing, a net. Such an ordinary piece of daily life—like a bucket or a spade—and Greta couldn't see why people wouldn't just go out and get one.

In the only other house left in Ballyroan lived Mr. Grady. Mr. Grady's house stood exactly one mile north of the Cahills, and considered together the two houses were like signposts marking where one entered and exited Ballyroan. Big Tom said that no one ever wrote to Mr. Grady, and when Greta asked why, Big Tom said it was because Mr. Grady was a miserable son of a bitch. Lily didn't like Mr. Grady spoken ill of in the Cahill house. She said it would bring bad luck. Sometimes she included Mr. Grady in the bedtime prayers she said with the girls, and when Big Tom said she should pray for the net and the salmon as long as she was praying for Mr. Grady, she said that would bring bad luck too.

 

If there were still seven families living in Ballyroan in 1956, the travellers might have decided to keep going to a roadside farther away. They came to Conch at roughly the same time every year, after the Ballinasloe Horse Fair in October, and stayed until the middle of December. Greta and Johanna had seen them there when they went to town for Mass or errands, which they weren't allowed to do alone if the tinkers had set up camp. They had passed the brightly colored barrel-top wagons, their hands clenched firmly in Lily's fists. But by 1956 the travellers had worn out their welcome in Conch. They were run from town, run from the outskirts of town, run up the western road toward the coast, where the townspeople didn't have to pass their damp clothes drying in the bushes, their collection of tinker tools scattered in the grass, their gypsy stews cooked in open view, their made-up language no one could understand. Ballyroan was a compromise that had been reached after name-calling, fist fighting, denial of entrance to pubs and shops, spitting on ancestral gravesites. The travellers were run all the way to the ocean, where that October they lined up their wagons, set up their tents, built their fortresses of plywood, cardboard, scrap metal, and oilcloth, and lit their fires on that particular high sea ledge for the very first time. It was an easy walk from there to Conch, where they could spend the days going door to door begging or offering their services or stealing, depending on who was describing it.

 

The morning before the travelling woman landed in the Cahills' field, she'd come to their door and knocked. "God bless all here," she'd said when Greta answered. Big Tom said that tinkers were without religion. They only pretended when they came to Catholic homes. They had rosaries in their pockets and the string of the scapular peeking out above their collars just like country people, but it was all a trick where a tinker was concerned. Lily said they were born into their lives the same as anyone, and if Big Tom had been born in a tent by the side of the road he wouldn't know any different either.

"I'd know enough, no matter where I was born, not to go around begging instead of going out and doing. They'll pull the hay from our haycocks to make their beds, and they'll turn their animals into our fields at night."

"And what harm?"

"And then after that the whole lot of them will come pleading at the door for the clothes off our backs. What harm? And them with more money than any of us with their goats and donkeys and ponies."

"I've come across a few good ones, is all I'm saying. There's bad ones and good ones just like country people. You think you're perfect, Tom Cahill? Think of what we sell from this house. That's right. Now think of people who might say we're no better than the tinkers."

Greta had opened the door for the woman, and though she shouldn't have been surprised—Lily had said they'd start at the two Ballyroan houses before they headed into town—she couldn't remember what she was supposed to do. Lily was in the kitchen with her bucket of heads and tails, her fingers sticky from pressing the salmons' bellies and sweeping aside with her cupped hand all that oozed out, when she saw the woman walking down the coast road toward their cottage. She had immediately started cleaning up and shouted to Greta to open all the windows in the cottage as high as they would go.

"God bless." Greta echoed the woman's greeting, and opened the door wider.

"Is your mam at home?" the woman asked, taking two small steps into the hallway so that Greta could shut the door. She was about the same age as Lily, Greta guessed, except rougher-looking, lined in the face the way leather gets when it's left outside too long. She was wearing an orange scarf wrapped around her hair and a heavy black shawl over her dress. On her feet were thick wool socks stuck into sandals that had once been white. Lily came out of the kitchen wiping her hands. "Missus," the tinker said.

"Greta," Lily said, "go make the tea."

The woman, whose name turned out to be Julia Ward, stayed for almost an hour. Big Tom and the boys were out cutting turf; Johanna had taken the bicycle into town to sell the eggs, deliver the salmon, buy flour, tea, sugar. Julia undid her shawl to reveal a heather gray cardigan unraveling at the cuffs, a navy blue skirt. Over everything she wore an apron turned backward, so that the pockets were facing inward. The woman reached under the apron and drew out a small bag that glinted in the light of the lamp. The little purse was covered with buttons, brooches, beads from broken necklaces. Julia took out needles, pins, spools of thread, a comb, a smoking pipe, asking as she arranged everything on the table if there was anything Lily needed mended. Lily avoided the question as she cut slices from a loaf of brown bread, the same as she would for a priest or a visitor from town. Greta touched the little purse, ran her hand over the flashes of color that quivered when she moved it. Julia looked at Greta when she touched it, looked from Greta's face to the purse and back, then spoke to Lily.

"If it's not sewing you need I have a husband who does good work with a soldering iron. Will I look in at your kettle or your saucepans?" She looked around the kitchen.

"Drink that down," Lily said as she walked over to the small table next to the fire. She brought back the bundle she'd wrapped. Half a loaf of bread. Butter coming through the paper. A jam jar filled with flour. She left it next to Julia's cup and saucer.

"The one working in the bog by the low road—is he yours? With the mouth?" Julia asked. "I've seen it before, and I know there's a way to cut inside his mouth and his nose to make the lip fall down to where it's supposed to be."

"He has his own way. He does as well as you and I. His two brothers understand him and he's a lovely writer and writes down for us whatever we don't understand."

"And what about that child?" Julia asked, nodding toward Greta. Greta was listening to their conversation only vaguely as she held her teaspoon in her hand and relished again and again the sound of the purse tapping out a miniature racket on the kitchen table as Julia sifted through it. "Is she in need of a tonic?" The woman leaned in close to Greta's face. "She has a kind of a look."

"Don't mind her," Lily said, and for a moment both women looked at Greta in silence. "That's our Greta."

"Is she—?" Julia asked, touching the side of her own head.

"She has her own way, like Little Tom has his way. She was nine weeks early when she came."

"How many have you in all?"

"Ten in all. Five alive. So she's either the youngest of ten or the youngest of five, depending on how you look at it."

Lily noticed Greta peering over at her, peering with that look she had so often, her features drawn together in a clump at the center of her face, her neck stuck out ahead of the rest of her body. Greta the Goose, the children often called her, and Lily lifted her leg to kick anyone she heard at it, whether that child was a Cahill or not.

"We love her," Lily said, and watched the clump at the center of her youngest child's face relax into itself again. Large green eyes, freckled nose, round cheeks, and perfect chin. Not as pretty as her sister, but still a good-looking girl when she wasn't making herself the goose. "Greta is my pet. Aren't you, love?" Lily said, reaching across the table to take Greta's hand and kiss it. Greta knew this was her reward for being home when the others were not. As far as she knew, Lily had never called Johanna her pet. She'd never given Johanna a squeeze when no one else was looking and whispered that she was the best girl.

Julia rummaged inside the purse once again and drew out a square piece of paper, which she folded, twisted, and tucked until it became a flower. She put the flower in front of Greta.

As Greta examined the flower, they heard a bicycle coming up the path, a skid of gravel outside the front door. Julia looked quickly at Lily and then pushed her chair back from the table, stood, took the bundle of food Lily had wrapped, and tucked it under her shawl.

"They wouldn't give me brown sugar in Finnegan's," Johanna announced as she opened the kitchen door. "But I—"

Julia dipped her head in greeting and then moved toward the door.

"Missus," Johanna said, still winded from the bicycle. As she struggled to catch her breath, Lily and Greta both, each in their own way, guessed what she was going to ask. The boys had been up to the sea ledge to size up the tinker camp and report to Big Tom how many were in the group. They'd returned home with a full account: seventeen travellers in all, plus three piebald ponies, four dogs, five goats, two donkeys. Two of the young ones, Padraic mentioned, looked about the same age as Johanna. And then there were babies they hadn't bothered to count.

"Are you the mother of the two young ones in the group?" Johanna finally asked. "About my age? A boy and a girl?"

"Johanna—" Lily warned.

"The twins," Julia said. She kept her hand on the handle of the door and spoke to Johanna over her shoulder. "I didn't mark the day they came. They're gone eleven, I'd say."

"Twins," Johanna said. She nodded and clasped her hands together, as if to agree that this made sense.

"A tinker for tea!" Johanna said when the woman had left and she had time to comprehend the empty cups, the crumbs on the plates. Lily went to the back room to continue the work that had been interrupted. Johanna turned to Greta. "Were you here talking to her the whole time?"

Greta told her about the purse and all the colors and all the things the woman had offered to do. Mending, soldering, milking, how she had a collection of tonics back at the camp, ways to turn gray hair brown, ways to fix a sore back or a sore leg, even Little Tom's mouth. She showed her the paper flower.

Johanna had pulled Greta close to hear the news and now leaned away from her, sinking back in her chair as if she'd eaten too much at supper. "What do you think they do up there all day and all night? The young ones, I mean." Greta could feel her sister's excitement and knew first in her stomach, then in her throat, then in her mind what was coming next.

"We have to go there," Johanna said.

 

That night, once they were sure their father and brothers would not be going down to the river with the net, and after they heard the creak of their parents' bedsprings on the other side of the wall and counted to one hundred, Johanna threw off her blankets and reached for her sweater. She pulled on a pair of kneesocks and stepped into the short lace-up boots that had once been Padraic's and had been carefully preserved by Lily until Johanna's feet grew big enough. Greta, who was without shoes or boots at the moment, was next in line to be brought to the shoe shop in Conch. "Before winter," Lily always said, and at night she would have Greta lie on the floor with her feet on Lily's lap so Lily could rub them.

"Either come or go but decide right now," Johanna said to Greta as she laced the boots.

"Doesn't Pop hate the tinkers?" Greta asked.

"He buys buckets off them," Johanna said. "He says some tinkers make buckets that can last forever. And he bought a horse off one once. But it died the next week. You remember. He said they had it well timed."

"But does he like them or does he hate them?"

"Are you coming or not?"

"Is there a moon?"

"There is. A three-quarter one, and it's a clear night."

"But what will you do when you get there? They'll be asleep in their own beds."

"You mean in their tents."

"In their beds in their tents."

"They mightn't have beds in the tents."

"They must! Straw beds, I mean. What about in the wagon?"

"They might have beds in the wagon, but only for the old ones. Only one or two could sleep in the wagon. I'd say it's strictly tents for the young ones."

Greta sucked her knuckle as Johanna lifted the latch on the window. With one quick heave she shoved it all the way up. She waited a minute to hear if the sound had woken the house; then she put one leg through, straddled the window frame for a moment, and fell onto the grass outside.

"You almost broke it with your boot," Greta whispered with as much ferociousness as she could muster. Then she grabbed her sweater and did the same.

Outside, Greta's stockings immediately wet with dew, they crept around the back of the cottage and swung wide toward the road. Johanna took the lead, fearless of rabbit holes and the ankle that might break if she stepped in one, while Greta stumbled after with her arms and head held in front of the rest of her body. "Come on, you goose," Johanna said, mimicking her sister's style of walking and then shooting ahead.

When they got to the road, the way was easier. Greta could feel the incline begin under her feet, and her body leaned naturally into it. Up they climbed, keeping the ocean to their left, its roar always mightier from the high sea ledge. Both girls held their hands to their heads to keep their hair from flying in the wind. They walked until the road became flat again and curved slightly away from the ocean. Then they saw it at the same time: the flicker of a campfire in the distance.

"Listen," Greta said. She stopped walking. The sound of a harmonica glided through the dark to where the girls crouched by the side of the road. Then: "I have to pee."

"So pee," Johanna said, and edged forward to get a better view. There were three dark silhouettes sitting by the fire and two smaller silhouettes skipping in circles around them. One of the wagons, its door propped open, was pulled up close to the fire. Johanna whispered that there was an old man sitting on a chair inside.

Greta pulled up her nightdress and tried to pee but found she couldn't. "Let's go now," she said, feeling the urge come back the moment she stood up.

"Wait. I see the twins. I don't see your woman from today." Johanna was crawling to get closer; Greta hung back and kept her focus on the white of Johanna's legs. She pushed the overgrowth away from her face and arms. She looked up to find the moon, which was slowly disappearing behind a cloud. She heard the first strains of a fiddle joining the harmonica and wondered if, had they stayed in their beds, the wind would have carried the music all the way down to their bedroom. Then the music stopped.

The young girl who'd been skipping called out something in the tinker language, and the three adults around the campfire stood and peered into the darkness. One, a man about the same age as Big Tom, picked up a plank of wood that was lying on the grass and walked toward them. He lifted it, poised to swing. Kneeling on the wet grass, Greta covered her head with her arms and folded over so that her forehead rested on her knees. She held her breath.

Johanna stepped out into the road as if she were out on her usual midnight stroll. "Good evening," she said.

The man stared at her, then noted Greta just behind. "The two girleens from down below," he called to the others.

"Lookin' at what?" the tinker girl asked, running up to the man and standing behind him. The man threw his plank of wood into the grass. Just then the young boy who must have been the girl's twin came up quietly to observe.

"The cat can look at the king," said Johanna, putting her hands on her hips.

"Johanna!" Greta pleaded as she slowly stood up. She could hear people moving in the long grass, the pop and crack of the fire. Johanna didn't flinch. The wind came up off the water, wrapped her nightdress around her legs, whipped her long hair around her face, and still, she kept her hands on her hips. Greta, expecting more of the Ward clan to materialize out of the darkness with their planks of wood, took her one remaining cool nerve and used it to turn herself around and run back the way she came. She moved as fast as she could, keeping her left hand on the low wall that ran all the way down to the Cahill gate.

She went around to the bedroom window and heaved herself in headfirst, using her hands to walk forward and dragging her legs after her. She pulled off her wet stockings, gave her feet a quick rub with the washcloth, crawled under the covers, and prayed that Johanna had survived. She listened for her parents on the other side of the wall and decided that if Johanna wasn't back in five minutes she would wake them. She counted to herself. She gave Johanna another five minutes.

One whole hour later, Johanna's head and shoulders came through the window. "Christ, Greta," she said. "Thanks a million."

"Where have you been? You could have been murdered."

Johanna took two long strides to the edge of the bed. She pulled on the string of her boot and casually loosened the laces. "I sat by their fire, and then the boy one walked me to the gate. They go back and forth all the time in the dark. You wouldn't believe the places they've been, and some of them younger than us. Dublin, Cork, Manchester, Liverpool. Can you imagine?"

Greta listened as Johanna paused after each place she named to give each city its own particular due. The way she said Manchester was different from the way she said Liverpool, and Greta knew that her sister had already walked down their streets, imagined their people, dipped into their shops, and plucked things from their shelves to have wrapped and tucked into shopping bags. Johanna hugged her arms around her body as if trying to gather these places closer.

"Julia—your one from today—must have been somewhere. She was the only one who didn't show herself."

"Good night," Greta said, pulling the covers and tucking them under the far side of her body so that Johanna couldn't pull them away.

"His name is Michael, by the way. Michael Ward. The one who walked me."

"Good for him."

 

The next morning, just after cock's crow, Big Tom carried Julia's body from the field and brought her to Johanna and Greta's bed. Greta pressed up against the wall as he passed, and the woman's shawl brushed Greta's face. It had the same muscular smell as the animals, and it reminded Greta of how she liked to rest her cheek on the cow's warm flank when she milked. Lily explained that Johanna and Greta's bedroom was the only choice, with the three boys crowding the front room, and she couldn't very well go in Lily and Big Tom's room with the pile of clothes to be washed in a heap under the window. They couldn't very well put her on the kitchen table or on the floor of the hall. Greta took the news quietly, not minding the recently dead woman in her bed but feeling like she should mind, or would mind soon. She watched from the hall as Big Tom placed the woman over the covers and held her in a sitting position while Lily wrapped a bandage around her forehead and then a clean cloth over the pillow. They laid her down, and Lily arranged her legs, skirt, apron, shawl, hands. The woman's hair had come loose, and at first Lily gathered it together and tucked it under her head. Then she fanned it across Greta's pillow.

"Look at the length of it," Johanna whispered.

"Don't talk about the dead," Lily warned as she reached forward and put her fingers under the dead woman's chin and gently pushed her mouth closed. She took her hand away, and the woman's jaw fell open. Lily reached forward again and, keeping her hand on the woman's jaw, looked around Greta and Johanna's room.

"Bring me something," she said to Johanna. "Cut off a strip of the flour sack."

Johanna disappeared and quickly reemerged with a strip of burlap. She handed it to Lily, and Lily wrapped it around the woman's face, starting under her chin and tying the strip off with a bow at the top of her head. When Lily took her hand away, the woman's mouth stayed closed, and Greta, stepping closer to the bed for a better look, thought the woman's face looked like a package, or like a picture in a frame.

"Are you sure she's dead?" Greta asked. The woman seemed to be peering at them from behind lowered lids, peeking at them in the sly way a person might peek if she were only pretending.

Lily placed her hand over the woman's eyes. "Go bring me two coins from the cup over the fire."

 

In the kitchen, after they'd done as much as they could for the woman, Big Tom and the boys prepared to go up to the campsite. Johanna begged to go with them. She whinged, she moaned, she followed Lily around the kitchen. She pleaded with Big Tom; she looked desperately at her brothers, but they shrugged and looked away. She stamped and threatened to follow them. She pulled on Lily's elbow and promised to do anything in the world Lily wanted if she could only go up to the camp.

"That's enough now, Johanna," Lily said. The men were putting on their caps. "You'll see them when her people come down. It's not a day for gawking and asking questions."

Johanna calmed down. "Do you think they'll all come? Will she be waked here?"

"They have their own way. We have to see."

As the men were leaving, Lily walked with them as far as the front gate and told her husband the dead woman's name. Big Tom looked at his wife as if her knowing the tinker's name was more surprising than waking up to find a tinker dead in his field. Then they turned right and walked up the wind-battered coast road, four across, up past the high sea ledge, until they came to the camp.

The ground of the camp was strewn with half-burned sticks, bits of paper, and feathers. In the middle was the dark ring of an extinguished fire. A few feet away was another fire, this one blazing, and next to it a woman bottle-feeding an infant. A man with a sharp red face to clash with his red hair put down the bucket he was making and stepped forward. As the Cahill men stood there looking around, the man recognized them first by their coal black hair, then by their number, four together—three young, one older—and then by the one with his mouth pulled up into his nose. The little imp of a thing from the middle of the night might have made up a story. He hadn't liked the way she cast her eye around the shadows, peeked into the wagons whenever someone went in or out, and now the consequence of his hospitality had come calling.

"I'm looking for the husband of Julia Ward," Big Tom announced.

"I'm Dermot Ward," the red man said. They rarely had country people in their camp, so to have four at once, and so soon after the strange midnight visit of the two girls, drew every traveller in the group away from what they were doing. Julia had gone in the late evening of the night before to perform what she called women's work on a woman named Mary. Last name not given. It was the reason they'd left the Ballinasloe fair a day early. Mary had sent word to her sister, who'd married a man whose brother had married a tinker, settled her in a house near Tuam, but could not get her to abandon her tinker ways.

Dermot Ward didn't mention any of this to the four men who entered the camp. He never liked the idea of Julia's women's work when it brought her down certain roads as opposed to others. They had set up lovely in Ballinasloe, showing their beautiful piebalds to the world, visiting everyone they knew and hadn't seen since the last horse fair. There were ponies to be swapped, marriages to be arranged, fabric to be traded for tools, tools traded for swag. Then, out of the blue, Mary's sister's husband's brother's wife had come knocking. Helping conceive a child was one thing, but this—country people didn't know the value of a child, and now their clans were scattering all over the world. Dermot felt that just because Julia knew more about babies than anyone—making them and otherwise—didn't mean she had to go running. Not for money. Not for all the tea in China. Julia saw it differently.

Dermot crossed his arms over his narrow chest. "You live in the cottage closest to the water. Both waters. At the bottom of the slope."

"We do," Big Tom said. Then he took off his cap, and the boys did the same.

 

Greta wondered, the whole time her father and brothers were gone, where a tinker is buried, where a tinker is married, where a tinker puts a tree at Christmas, what happens when the rain comes lashing and the campfire is put out. Lily told her she was as bad as Johanna with the endless questions, and didn't she ever notice the little chimney pipe coming out the top of the barrel-top wagons? They have little potbelly stoves inside, just like some people have inside houses. There are ways to keep the campfire going in the rain. In the winter they build shelter tents and they're as warm and dry as a house. Warmer, even. Drier. Yes, they might have tables and chairs. Not grand ones, but still. The Cahills didn't have grand ones either. Yes, they have plates and cups and saucers. Yes, they have decorations. Pictures in frames. Yes, the children have dolls. Why wouldn't they? What's there to making a doll except sewing a piece of cloth up the side and stuffing it with feathers? Two buttons for eyes, yarn for hair. No, Lily had never been inside a wagon. No, she didn't know why they didn't just build a house and settle. No, she didn't think the children went to school. No, she didn't know how they took their baths.

Lily started baking as soon as the men left. She kneaded the last of the flour, the new milk, eggs, yeast. Greta greased the tins, going over the corners so that the bread wouldn't stick, not so much that it might burn. The draft from the kitchen door whipped around Greta's ankles, under her skirt, and she wondered how much worse the tinkers had it in their tents. Did they have rags stuck in every crack and crevice like the Cahills had in their house? With every big rain the Cahill roof leaked in the same spot: the boys' bedroom, to the left of the window. The water ran down the wall in thin streams, and when it happened in the middle of the night, Greta would wake to the sound of them swearing, furniture being pushed, Lily and Big Tom rushing in to help. Catching the water would be easier if it came down from the ceiling somewhere in the middle of the room; they could just place a bucket underneath and watch it fill. The way it streamed down the wall in a river, twisting and turning according to the hills and valleys in the plaster, made it impossible to collect in a bucket, and the boys had to take turns standing on the chair and holding a towel at the source. When they held it at one spot, it would burst forward a few inches away. If they managed to hold it in two spots, there would spring a third. That part of the wall was dark with mold, the dried rivers extending down from the ceiling like fingers on a giant handprint, as if someone had reached down from the sky or out from the ocean and taken hold of the house, tried to lift it from its frame.

The days after the leaks were always the same, Big Tom with a plank of wood and a collection of nails held between his teeth, one of the boys on a ladder outside. Jack swore that the whole side of the house was so damp that if they pushed, really dug their heels in, dropped their heads between their shoulders and gave it everything, the wall would come tumbling down. "I wouldn't risk it," said Big Tom.

The Cahill men were back in less time than it took Lily to bake one brown bread. Dermot Ward was with them, plus an older man, Julia's father, and Michael Ward, the son who'd walked Johanna home less than twelve hours earlier. The three travellers followed the Cahills with a horse and cart, making sure before they left to sweep it out and line it with fresh hay and a clean sheet. The horse, when it passed the field where the woman had landed, stopped to sniff the air.

"Where is she.?" Dermot asked as he strode into the cottage. Michael and his grandfather hung back and stood side by side without touching. They seemed unwilling to enter past the front hall.

"I'm sorry for your trouble," Lily said as she opened the bedroom door.

Dermot stood over the bed, put his hands on his wife's cheeks. He lifted her arm and let it fall back onto the blanket. He turned and pulled the curtains apart, then lifted Julia's head from the pillow and inspected the bandage. They'd passed the pieces of splintered wood on the road.

"A stone, I'd say," Lily offered. "When she landed."

"The horse was spooked," Big Tom said from the doorway. "It was charging like the devil with the cart behind it and took off full gallop after the crash, harness and all."

"Took off," Dermot repeated in a dull tone. "That horse was never spooked in his life." This wasn't true and Dermot knew it. Still, he stood to his full height, which was not as tall as Big Tom or any of the boys, and with his windburned face he looked at each of them one by one. He stood as a barrier between the group and Julia. It was the women's work, Dermot knew. The discovery was made and she'd gotten chased. A gunshot probably, aimed just over her head.

"He might wander back," said Lily.

"Unless someone already has him caught and stabled," Dermot said.

"There's that, I suppose," Lily said.

Big Tom crossed his arms over his chest. To Greta he looked the way he did when he caught one of the boys resting instead of working, or whenever they saw Mr. Grady passing on the road.

Dermot turned his back on Big Tom and spoke only to Lily. "She had great nature for people, Julia did."

"She did, of course. Anyone could see it."

"And she mentioned you yesterday, the food you sent."

Big Tom looked at Lily, who kept her eyes fixed on Dermot. "You can leave her if you like," Lily offered. "It's no bother. You can send the women down to wash her body."

Dermot made a little grunt, like a laugh smothered before he could let it go, and otherwise ignored the offer.

"Boys?" Lily said when she saw that he'd made up his mind. She nodded at Jack, Padraic, and Little Tom.

"Leave them," Dermot said. He put his fingers to his mouth and sounded a sharp, short whistle. A moment later Michael and his grandfather appeared, and Greta felt embarrassment light up in her belly when she realized that the boy was seeing his mother dead for the first time. We shouldn't be here, she thought, looking at the tall silhouettes of her brothers, her father, the softer shape of her mother, and Johanna beside her, buzzing with energy even when completely still. Dermot embraced his wife from behind, locking his arms around her chest. He nodded at the old man and the boy to take hold of her legs. Without hesitation they lifted her. Michael kept his chin up, and his lips were white from being pressed together so tight. Only when he squeezed past her brothers did Greta realize how small he was. Dermot said something in the traveller language, and the old man shifted over to help the boy.

They laid her in the back of the cart just as she would lie in a coffin. Michael tugged at the sheet, which had gotten bunched to one side when they arranged her. He tucked the loose straw underneath, and then he climbed in next to his mother. The older men climbed in front.

"I'm sorry for your trouble," Greta said, relieved that she'd thought of the right thing to say, and stood on her tiptoes to reach the boy's hand. Michael sat up straighter but didn't look at her.

"Can we go up?" Johanna asked, turning her big eyes on her mother.

"Hush!" Lily said. Big Tom put one rough hand on top of each girl's head and steered them both inside.

 

The travellers waked Julia for two nights, and on the third morning was the funeral. How word spread along the tinker channels was impossible for Greta and Johanna to figure out, but spread it did, because people began arriving within two days. There were a few wagons, but most of the mourners arrived on foot. Johanna and Greta washed with their minds on the road, they swept with their minds on the road, they chopped and scrubbed and milked and churned thinking only of the road. No chore was completed. Even the boys turned their attention to the activity on the hill, laying down their hayforks to watch the spectacle pass. Only Big Tom was indifferent.

"You know why tinkers wander?" he asked at tea. "Because they made the nails for Jesus' cross and now this is their punishment."

"Have they not paid their debt?" Johanna asked. "Jesus died a long time ago."

Little Tom said something in his mushy style, shush-shush-shushing it out to Jack and Padraic for translation.

"Some say they descended from the ancient kings of Ireland," Padraic said, and Greta wondered if Little Tom had read that in the book he'd borrowed from Mr. Boyle the thatcher. It was a big book, and most nights he read it at the table while the others talked.

"You see?" Big Tom laughed. "That's the kind of trickery they give out about themselves."

Johanna had been quiet since Julia's body was taken away, and Greta followed her from the henhouse to the hay shed to the stable, waiting for her to suggest a plan, expecting at all moments to have to convince her not to do anything silly. When the funeral procession began and the strangers made the long walk from the camp to the old Ballyroan cemetery, where the priest from Conch was waiting with one hand on his Bible and the other on his pocket watch, Johanna turned her head away from her work, but didn't even walk to the gate. When it was over, the woman's body packed tight under the mound of dirt, the visitors journeyed back to the camps they had left, and the only travellers left on the hill were the original seventeen, minus one.

In bed that night, the girls stayed awake long after they tucked their hot-water bottles in at their feet.

"I thought it was a nice life," Johanna said, speaking to the ceiling in the dark. "But it isn't, is it? They put three planks of wood across two barrels and that's where they laid her. I saw it myself. And I saw them, Michael and his sister, Maeve is her name, crawl out of their tents on their hands and knees the morning of the funeral, Michael in a dark suit, Maeve in a blue dress, and both of them brushing off their knees and the palms of their hands. They sat on upturned buckets by the fire. An old one came out of the wagon and ran a comb through Maeve's hair. They were baking bread in the ashes, and when it was ready the visitors pulled it apart with their hands and all the time there's herself on the planks of wood and no one paying her any heed. I waited for it to rain, I thought definitely it's going to rain, and what would they do if it had rained, I wonder? Would they have wrapped her up? Thrown an oilcloth over her?"

"When did you go?" Greta asked.

"Michael looked over at her the odd time, but that Maeve—she was talking and laughing, part English, part Irish, and part that language they have, and miming something the others had to guess."

"I didn't notice you go."

"Oh, I went early, early. She had you in the back room with the you-know-what. I was back before anyone missed me."

"Did they see you?"

"Maeve saw me. She gave me a good long look, but otherwise didn't take any notice."

Greta tried to imagine the body laid out in the rain, stiff like the animals get when they wander off and die and a few days go by without finding them. She thought of the boy Michael who'd helped carry his mother away, and what it would feel like to have no mother at all. It seemed worse for him who had to sleep out in the cold and the rain than for the children in town who had lost parents. They might be missing their Mammies but at least they missed them from warm houses, tucked inside warm beds. She imagined Johanna crouched in the brush where she could see it all, her bony knees tucked under her chin. "They won't come back after this," Greta said. "They won't want to be reminded."

"Strange," Johanna said. "I was just thinking the opposite. Now they're tied to this place and they'll come like clockwork. You watch."

For some reason Greta couldn't think of, she pictured the orange bog grass that stretched from their cottage all the way to Conch, and how it was interrupted here and there by cuts made by slanes and the triangular stacks of damp turf left to dry in the wind. She remembered a story she hadn't heard in a long time. Before she was born, a local man had cut into the bog and found a pig, still pink, still whole, as if she'd sunk into the moist ground only the day before. Men came from Dublin, from Galway, from Cork and decided that pig had been there for hundreds of years. They took it with them to one of the universities, where Jack and Padraic claimed it went on to have a better life than anyone left in Ballyroan.

It was a miracle, some people still said. A sign from heaven to remind them that they don't know even a quarter of the secrets the universe holds.