5

MICHAEL WARD NOTICED the bicycle on the caravan's first day in the Burren, before they had even set up camp. It had a white frame, which was unusual, and handlebars set wide so a rider could pedal without leaning forward. The chrome fenders were shining and the black rubber tires clean, as if the bicycle had dropped from the sky just to twinkle and catch Michael's eye in the late evening sun. It leaned against the mud-splashed gable of the first pub they'd seen in many miles, and Michael knew that wherever Dermot chose to camp would be within easy distance of this pub. An Bhoireann could not be crossed in a single day. Not by the old ones. Not by the ones who were too small to keep up but too heavy to carry. There were no trees in the Burren, few pastures, no bog, just slabs of limestone as far as the eye could see. Dermot claimed that there were rivers hidden beneath the bald landscape, that they flowed underground through caves and tunnels. As Michael walked, he tried to listen for the water rushing beneath his feet.

The Wards were on their way from Ennis to Kilkee, where one of their women would be married and handed off to her husband's people. Sometimes new husbands or wives joined up with the Wards, sometimes the new couple went to the in-laws. It was all a question of need, and in this case, the husband's people needed more women. The bride-to-be was young, only fifteen, and Dermot said that circumstance alone would be her dowry. Maeve had also gotten married at fifteen and now, three years later, had two girl children. Sometimes Michael watched Maeve and wondered what life would have been like as a girl. They had shared their mother's womb, swam in there together for nine months, split everything fifty-fifty, and then when the cards were revealed, he came out a boy and she a girl. The two little ones roared at her all day and, when the older one could walk, toddled after her as if she were attached by a string. Maeve had gotten fat. She wore her skirts too tight, too short. Their mother would have had plenty to say about it, and about the way Maeve once left the younger baby on the ground, where she rolled off down a slope, under a wooden fence, and could have been stomped by one of the grazing cows if Michael had not seen the empty blanket lying in the grass.

Michael had been through the Burren only once before that he could remember. The campsite was a short stretch of earth and wind-eaten grass cordoned off by the government in an attempt to keep travellers off the roads. As Michael looked off into the distance, the limestone clints and grikes backlit by the setting sun, he realized that this might be the last stretch of grass for many miles, and when they started moving again, it would be up to the animals to find knots of green at the side of the road.

Normally, Dermot did not like to stop at these camps. He didn't like the particular designation, the poles set up special for tethering animals, the stones already arranged in neat circles to hold traveller fires, a well to the back of the site with the hand pump painted red in case they would miss it. "Only one half step until they've pushed us into flats in Ennis," Dermot usually complained, but this time he whistled to the boys who'd gone ahead and used his thumb to jab the air, just once, in the direction of the camp. "Two nights," he said to Michael as he took off his cap and rubbed his head.

It was evening, almost completely dark, and within five minutes of turning off the road, the youngest boys had already set to work milking the goats. The women with infant children sat down on the sparse grass and unbuttoned their blouses as they pulled their babies into their laps. The oldest woman of the group—Grandmother, they called her, though to most of them she was a great-aunt—continued her work on a piece of lace for the bride-to-be. The rest of the women peeled potatoes and carrots. One woman unwrapped a large section of smoked pork loin from the grub box and began dividing it into portions. As they prepared supper, they discussed what would have to be done once they arrived in Kilkee. There was a wedding cake to be made and the ingredients to be begged. For fifty guests they needed two dozen eggs, two pounds of sweet butter, eight cups of sugar, and five pounds of flour just to make the inside of the cake. For the frosting, ingredients would have to be bought. And they'd have to protect these ingredients as they gathered them. The little ones would take spoonfuls of the sugar and pour it onto their tongues if they knew no one would catch them. Michael, who was far too old for such theft, had been caught and boxed for eating a spoonful of sugar as recently as his sixteenth birthday. Then there were the cake decorations: colored paper flowers, enough satin ribbon to circle the base of each tier. As the women fretted over what they might be forgetting, they also discussed how in their day a wedding cake always meant a fruitcake, which could be made six months ahead and tucked into the bottom of a trunk until the wedding day came. Not anymore. The young ones now had their heads turned by shopwindows that displayed pure white three-tiered cakes that looked like they'd blow away in the wind as soon as they met with the blade of a knife.

In addition to planning the ingredients they'd need, the women also reminded the bride-to-be of the things she absolutely musn't forget, just as they'd been reminding her since the day the arrangement was made. Go on, laugh at your old aunties, they told her, but mind you do what we say. "First," Grandmother said, taking the girl by the wrist and pulling her close to the sharp angles of her face, her breath like the dank bottom of the grain barrel, "you'll eat the oatmeal with your husband before any celebration begins. No matter what's going on about you, you'll eat it, and well salted too, for the salt and the oatmeal together is what protects. They're pure useless on their own, you see. Three big spoonfuls of it, and then carry on. Him too. It'll be your first duty as a wife. Second, if there's dancing—and I never saw a wedding where there wasn't—mind you keep one foot on the ground all the time. If you were to jump or hop or do any sort of thing where both feet are off the ground, like if he lifted you up in the air—some husbands do it without thinking, though his people should have him warned—or if one of your brothers should swing you. Fairies love all beautiful things and nothing so much as a bride. Don't smirk at me, girl. You're not too big for a slap on the mouth. Not today, not any day while I'm alive, married or no, are you too big for a slap. You think I'm blind as well as slow? I survived this long because I am wise. As you, please God, will be wise one day. Third, remember not to sing, even if you love the song, even if everyone else's throat is burst from singing..."

Michael looked at the bride-to-be, a second cousin, and wondered if she knew what this wedding meant for her. She would be lashed to her husband's people just like a new animal bought at the fair. He stood and strolled away from the light of the fire to where he'd tossed the tarp he'd sleep on. It was a clear night so far, and he decided to chance the weather until morning without building a tent. The rest of the men were busy constructing their low shelters, and as Michael watched the others tap long stakes into the hard earth, lug jugs of water from the well, talk, stir, chop, feed, he wondered if any of them had ever lain awake at night and thought about settling.

There were eighteen in the group now, including the babies, and for supper they divided among three separate fires. "Soon it will be your wedding we're off to," Dermot said to Michael as he tucked his fork and knife into his pocket and took his wedge of pork in his hand. "Did you hear me? Don't you want a warm body next to you at night? Don't you want someone when the wind finds a way beneath the tent flaps?"

Michael knew he was only teasing. Men got married later than women; Maeve's husband was thirty-one. Lately, Dermot's teasing had touched on everything related to females. What kind of shape did Michael like in a woman? What color hair? At every question, Michael shrugged and Dermot laughed. Marriage was practical, Michael knew. It was the way things were done. But for a long time now he had been wondering where a partnership left a person except chained more tightly to the camp and to the wagon. Dermot spoke of the travellers' life as if theirs was the only way to live, as if they were the only ones who truly saw the world because they were up to their necks in it, not only when it was dry and fair but also when it was wet and miserable. To Michael it felt like all they ever did was go round and round, with fair days few and far between. A few months back, on the way from Bantry to Kinsale, the caravan had passed a construction site—three identical squares dug into the ground, three wood frames, and two men pouring wet cement from buckets. And just like the gray splatters that had already hardened on the toes of the workers' boots, the concrete foundation would also harden and become an anchor for these structures, keep them from being blown away in the wind. It would be easy to build a house like that, Michael had thought as the group passed by and the two men stopped their work to watch them, and the thought had prodded him forward like an iron taken from the fire and pushed into a goat's flank. Also like the hot iron, the thought marked him, and later, when Dermot shouted for him to hurry up, Michael flinched.

In the morning, Dermot decided they should send a letter to the husband-to-be, letting him know they'd be a few days delayed. Bitty Ward, who'd married Dermot's brother, was the only one among them who could read and write, but she wasn't around to put the letter down for them. Dermot guessed that she'd walked up to the closest house with two of the other women in hopes of getting flour and eggs. The Christmas month in Galway was the only time of the year when travelling children went to school. Officials came down to the riverbank, asked the adults for the names and ages of the children under fourteen, and then directed them to a schoolhouse on the other side of the river. Each year, Dermot Ward went mad at the idea and forbade his children to go. They could already add up what was in the cash box. Why should they go to a goddamned schoolhouse all day to be called names and told all the things that are wrong with them? Before she died, Julia had always found a moment to speak softly to Dermot, to assure him it was no harm for the children to go learn a few things. But after she died, Dermot stood his ground, and Michael was sorry for it. He liked sitting in the schoolhouse. He liked the warmth of the stove, the huge pot of porridge the teacher made for them, the passing around of bowls and spoons. In school, they learned about letters and making words.

Dermot usually gave Bitty money to buy a paper whenever they passed a shop, and at night she would read it to them around the fire. Another few Christmases, Michael believed, and he'd have been able to tell what the sheep and donkey were saying to each other in the comic that ran on the back page.

"Michael," Dermot said, "let's go to that pub and see will anyone write a letter for us."

Dermot came up behind Michael to hurry him as he splashed his face with water and changed into a fresh shirt. "Quick, before the women ask us to help hang up the wash."

As they walked the two miles back toward the pub, Dermot with his arms crossed over his chest and his hands tucked into his armpits, as comfortable as if he were stretched out on soft ground, Michael with both hands shoved deep in the pockets of his trousers, Dermot told him about a girl he would meet at the wedding. Dermot had never seen the girl, but she had a motorized camper she'd bought with her own money, and she was looking for a husband. Her father had a painting business—houses, fences, signs, wagons—but had all daughters and needed a young son-in-law to help. The girl was twenty-two and had already been engaged, but that had fallen through for reasons Dermot said Michael should find out.

"I'm only eighteen," Michael said. Surely, all that jabbing around the fire the evening before about his wedding being next was only teasing. Only the same old teasing that had been going on since he was twelve. Everyone knew that males married older than females. His older brothers had not married until their late twenties. Michael's pace slowed, and Dermot's slowed beside him. Michael looked at his father and saw that his eyes were closed. He had once told Michael that he could sleep while he walked, because his feet knew to follow the road. Michael had tried it and ended up slipping on a fresh cowpat.

"There's no right age for marriage. You marry when the time is right," Dermot said. He opened his eyes. "You might see that motorized camper and decide now's the time."

"I won't," Michael said, and Dermot smirked, threw up his hands.

"You're handsome, you know," Dermot said, as if he hadn't heard Michael's protest. It was something he'd been wanting to point out to the boy for some time, in case he wasn't aware or in case he didn't know it was important to some women. "I'm not good at seeing these things myself, but the women talk, and it's a point they've agreed on. And you know as well as I do what it means when the women agree. Michael Ward is easy on the eyes."

Dermot looked over to see how Michael had taken this news about himself, but they were just coming up to the ruins of a stone fort they'd passed the day before, and Michael stopped to look. The day before, it had seemed a natural part of the landscape, as permanent as the limestone and the rivers flowing under their feet. But now Michael could see that there was logic to the arrangement. Choices had been made by men, not nature. There was a hole, three feet wide, three feet deep, that could have been a cooking pit. There were mounds of stones piled here and there around the periphery of the site, some arranged in intricate and intentional patterns, and Michael knew that these were burial cairns. There was a long slab of stone set upon two smaller ones, which could have been an altar.

"This has been here since Brian Boru," Dermot said, stepping carefully around the crumbling walls. He picked up a smaller stone and cracked it against another.

A thousand years, Michael thought as he tried to imagine the fort as it must have been once. He had long ago stopped asking his father how he knew things, never having been to school, never having read or written a single word. "I know because I have eyes to see and ears to listen," was all Dermot would say. And then he would ask, as he had asked before, "You think something has to be written in a book to be true?" Michael went over and stood in the center of what looked like the foundation of a small building—a dwelling for people or for animals—and thought about how even then, even in this place, so old and hard it didn't even look like the earth anymore, people had felt the need to build four walls and a roof to lie down in at the end of each day. They remembered their ancestors, whose graves were marked with stones set into patterns. And when they were far away finding food or fighting battles, they thought of a single place on the face of the earth, a specific place with walls of a particular thickness, land of a particular slope, and when they spoke of this place, they used the ancient word for home.

Julia Ward hadn't wanted to settle any more than her husband, but she had sympathy for the travellers who tried it. She wished them well. And when they failed, she welcomed them back and never held it against them. She also saw more similarities between country people and travellers. Michael recalled being on the road with her one day and seeing two men stop their work to pull bottles of porter out of a cool bog hole. There were no houses nearby, no bicycles, and Julia told Michael that the men must have come over the mountain from one of the bog houses on the other side. "God bless the work," Julia had called out to them. "God bless," they'd answered. When they passed again, the men had built a small fire and were eating their supper. "Well, look it," Julia had said. "Everyone does what they have to do in this world, don't they, Michaeleen?"

Since Julia's death, the caravan had avoided that part of the country where she was buried. Dermot didn't want to camp out in that direction anymore, didn't want to pass the place on the road where she'd died, didn't want to see those people who had taken her into their cottage and propped her up on a bed and watched his every move as he removed her from the dwelling and took her back to the camp. Also, he pointed out, that sea ledge in Ballyroan was too remote, too far from the village, too abandoned to make a living. If Maeve wondered about their mother's grave—whether it had grown over with weeds, whether the headstone was still standing straight—she never mentioned it. Dermot either, and perhaps, Michael thought, they carried Julia around with them in other ways. They didn't think of her grave, because that was only her body, only the skin she walked around in. And maybe that marker by the high sea ledge in Ballyroan meant no more to them than any other place they'd been. Maybe his father, who'd known Julia longest after all, recalled his wife equally in every place they'd been together. But since 1956 Michael couldn't forget that his mother was not in all of these places. She was in one place, in Ballyroan. By dying, she'd made herself a country person.

What could be so difficult about settling, Michael had been wondering since seeing those houses built on the Kinsale Road. Not difficult for other people, but difficult for travellers in particular. There were places that had been hard to leave, so what would have been so difficult about deciding to stay for good, building a house, planting a field, seeing the seasons in one single place? Dermot always said it had to do with blood, with something very basic inside them that had nothing to do with the brain or the human ability to reason things out. It was outside of reason. It was just the way things were. A cousin of Dermot's, Peter Ward, had tried settling and had lasted for two years. When he came back to the camp, he said that every night when he went to bed, no matter how cold or wet it was outside, and how grateful he should have felt, and how his wife had gotten used to storing her dishes in the press, and her sugar and flour on the kitchen counter, he always felt as if someone had gotten a rope around his neck. And oftentimes, in the middle of the night, in his warm bed and his dry clothes, he woke up with a feeling that someone was standing on his chest, tightening the noose.

But I'm not like the others, Michael thought as he walked alongside his father. "Go on, boy," the older men would urge when they went to the market and he set up his smithing tools. He was supposed to call out to passersby, draw people down to the stall with his voice, but he was no good at yelling and calling. Sometimes he opened his mouth and drew a long breath, but when he went to speak, he didn't know what to say.

 

The pub was empty except for the bartender, who stopped what he was doing the moment they entered.

"Lost?" he asked, and then glanced over his shoulder to a door that led to a back room. Michael could hear plates being stacked, something heavy being dragged across the wood planks of the floor.

"Never," Dermot said as he claimed a stool. He ordered two pints, and the bartender waited until he'd put his coins on the bar before he brought them over. Dermot didn't like asking favors of country people, but when he did, there were certain rules he always followed. First, show them they can trust you, which was why Dermot put his money on the bar. Second, show them that you don't trust them, which was why he waited until the man brought back his change before taking his first sip. When he was younger, Michael used to wonder how people always seemed to know right away that they were travellers. Now he guessed it was just something in the way they carried themselves, tired from all the walking. From the back room a second man emerged and wiped his hands on his shirt as he watched Dermot tip his glass to his mouth.

"I wonder can I ask you a question," Dermot said to the bartender once he'd drained his first pint. "Do you have any kind of knack with writing?"

"Why? You need a letter put down?" the man asked. Dermot put another coin on the bar, and the man went to the back room and came back with a biro, one sheet of paper, an envelope. He placed them in front of the man who'd earlier emerged from the back. "Will you put down a letter for them, Ethan?" Ethan shrugged, rolled up his sleeves, licked the tip of the biro, and tested it on the back of his hand. Dermot pushed his glass away and straightened up in his stool as if he were preparing to address a large crowd. He cleared his throat. "To Mister Liam Costello who is to marry Miss Aoife Ward," he began. When Dermot finished his dictation, he told the man to address it to the post office in Kilkee. "Right there on the front, just put the word Hold," Dermot instructed, and looked closely at the letters the man drew, as if he were making sure.

On their way out, the letter sealed, stamped, and left on the corner of the bar for the postman, Michael noticed the bicycle again. It leaned against a different wall but was just as clean as it appeared the day before. "Lovely-looking bicycle," he said to Dermot.

"Careful, boy," Dermot said.

"Careful what? I'm just saying."

"Well, now you've said, so get on with it," Dermot said, and with his hands tucked under his arms, he started for camp.

That night, after a supper of oatmeal and currants, Dermot brought up the girl with the motorized camper once more. Michael's cousin's husband, Malachy, was at the same fire, and he said he'd seen the girl a few times. Good-looking, he said. Blond. Good hips. Another cousin at the other side of the fire said he knew the girl too, and what's more he'd seen the camper.

"Will you make an offer?" Malachy asked Dermot.

"We'll see what this lad has to say about that once he meets the girl," Dermot said, winking at Michael. Michael swallowed what was in his mouth and felt the warm spoonful slide down his throat to his belly. Then he stood and scraped the rest of his oatmeal into Malachy's bowl. The night air smelled like rain, and he set to work building his tent.

Later that night, Michael heard rustling outside his tent and lifted the flap to find his father stretched out on the damp ground. "We need turf," Dermot said without moving. Michael raised his eyebrows and thought of the last bog they'd passed, more than twenty miles back. "That place," Dermot said, referring to the house that had earlier turned Bitty and the other women away. "They'll have it somewhere."

"Now?" Michael asked. There was a harvest moon, yellow and close.

In answer, Dermot jumped to his feet and brushed off his backside. He waited in the road as Michael pulled on his boots, stretched his jacket tight over his thick sweater, and just managed to get the button in the hole. The moon made a bright path of the road, and Michael shook the sleep off his limbs to match his father's pace. It was the hour of night when the world always seemed haunted to Michael, their ponies turned to kelpies, their women turned to banshees, and Dermot, paces ahead, collar pulled tight against the back of his neck, was the spirit who spit and hummed and picked his teeth with his longest fingernail.

They found the turf shed just a few yards away from the house, and Dermot reached under the rusted, sagging tin roof that came up to his chest and passed piece after to piece to Michael. From somewhere in the dark hills behind the house a sheep bleated, and another answered. "We have enough," Michael said when he could hold no more, but Dermot untucked his shirt and filled that too. The turf was damp in Michael's arms, and he wondered if it would be dry enough to burn so soon. "Enough," Michael said again when he saw that Dermot was still reaching for more. He thought of the day in Achill when the gardai came to arrest Dermot for stealing eight lobsters from the fishermen's traps. It was before Julia died—how long before, Michael couldn't remember—and they'd all feasted on the lobster with butter and salt. After, her lips still rimmed with butter, Julia had walked circles around the wagons, asking aloud why he hadn't stopped at one or two. Michael had driven his tongue into the gaps between his teeth as he watched her, hoping to find one last piece of fish.

As they walked home, careful to keep close to the ditch in case anyone should pass, the moon so bright above the empty landscape that it was easy to imagine they were alone in the world, Michael decided to ask the question he'd been thinking of asking now for many weeks. Dermot was humming in low tones, and Michael waited until he stopped and then took his chance.

"What if I wanted to settle?" he asked. He felt a piece of turf slide out of his arms to the ground, but he ignored it. He hadn't meant to blurt the question out like that. He meant to bide his time, to raise the subject gradually over several months. But then Dermot had thrown off his plan with talk of a blond girl with a motorized camper, and he felt that the question couldn't wait any longer. Sometimes the dream of settling seemed like an idea that had just come to him, a seed blown in the wind that had landed and taken root. Other times he could look many years back and remember Maeve accusing him of wishing for a bed in the country houses they passed, wishing to go to a settled school, wishing for a barn and a field of his own. After Julia's funeral so many years ago, after all the mourners had left, Michael had crawled into Maeve's tent to tell her about the cottage by the river, the short hall with doors that led to different rooms, the smell of bread coming from behind one of the doors, the windows that allowed a person to look out onto the world from the inside. Even then, Maeve had been offended by his admiration for the cottage and had asked if he thought he was too good to do as his people had always done. And though he'd denied it when accused, as he had denied the same accusation since then, he knew he had wished for those things, or at least wondered about them, felt curious enough to want to try them.

Now that he'd said it, he pushed on. "No, don't say anything. Listen. What if I wanted to get one of those little attached houses and try it? I'm serious."

"Michaeleen," Dermot said. "No more than a country person can become a traveller, a traveller cannot settle. It's been tried! You think you're the first that's liked the look of those government houses? And it's failed over and over and over and over. First, your people have been travellers for a thousand years. Did you hear what I said? Second, you think people won't see you as a traveller just because you live in a house?"

"But why would I care how they see me, as long as I live in the house and earn my living and come home at the end of every day?"

"Michaeleen, you're my son, but you're no more than a newborn sometimes. Worse. You're like the foal who thinks he's a stallion. Now"—he stopped to get a better grip on the tails of his shirt—"I won't hear this again."

Then I won't ask again, Michael thought, and instead listened for the water flowing through the caves carved out of the earth below them and beside them, untouched by sun, untouched by a moon so close it seemed the earth had spun out of position. He imagined the gaping mouths of the caverns, guarded by sharp and craggy teeth. He smelled rain in the air and wondered if the underground rivers ever overflowed their banks.

 

When morning came, the women decided it was too wet to leave. The rain lashed down like it was blown straight out of the ocean, and when Michael licked his lips, he tasted salt. The rain and wind were blowing from the west, so Michael drove two stakes into the ground and draped their heaviest oilcloth across like a sail. On the east side of the stakes, he moved the stones of the ring closer together and then laid down a grid of sticks, five one way, five the other, the way the women laid the reeds before they wove baskets. When the grid was three layers above the damp ground, he went to the wagon that carried his tools, drew out four short planks he'd been saving, and leaned these planks over the turf and kindling so the rain would slide down and away. Holding a plastic tarp over his head, he crouched in front of the fire until it grew big enough to warm him. Once he was warm enough to get wet and cold again, he set out for a walk.

When he got to the pub, the bicycle was in the same place it had been when he pointed it out to Dermot. After a quick look around, without any real plan, he gently kicked the back tire. He took hold of the handlebars and kicked the front tire. He lifted the bike and bounced it against the ground. He reached down, spun one of the pedals, and listened for a healthy tic-tic-tic as they whizzed around and around. He looked behind him at the door of the pub and then in front of him at the miles of limestone, its weather-polished surface gleaming in the rain. He expected someone to shout at him, ask what he was doing with a bicycle that was not his, but there was no sign of the bartender from the day before, no sign of the man called Ethan who'd written their letter. I'll just test it, he thought, swinging his leg over the crossbar.

The seat was the perfect height for him, and without allowing himself to think, he put his head down and pushed the pedals. After a while the pub disappeared; the Burren became an ocean of hardened rock. He cycled as hard and as fast as his lungs and legs would allow. Village after village fell behind him like a curtain that had been yanked aside, and the same for field after field. Uphill, downhill, the smell of seawater came and went as the road bent toward the ocean, then away again. No one stopped him, no one shouted after him, and by the time he slowed down, sweat-soaked and lungs burning, he'd reached Galway.

Outside Galway City, more than forty miles from the pub where he began, he rested under a tree in an empty field. The rain had stopped hours before. He could see the lit-up windows of a house just beyond the field, but it was growing dark, and no one would be out again that evening. He could go back, catch up with the caravan as they were leaving, or take his time and catch up with them in the Midlands in a few weeks' time. He wondered if they'd hear of the stolen bicycle, if the man in the pub would go marching straight up to the camp looking for him. His stomach rumbled, and it dawned on him that he was alone, without money, without food. It rumbled again, and he fell back on the old wisdom: when there's no food to quiet a hungry belly, go to sleep and eat in your dreams.

He woke the next morning to a crick in his neck and a sharp pain in his side. He pissed against the tree he'd slept under, making sure to keep the thick trunk between himself and the house beyond. After buttoning his pants, he raked his fingers through his oily hair. He folded the blackened cuffs of his shirt so that they were hidden beneath the sleeves of his jacket. He put his fingers in his mouth and did his best to clean under his fingernails by biting and licking away the grit. He broke a twig off the tree to finish the job. He ignored the uncomfortable dampness of morning dew in his clothes and walked the bicycle up to the house. Begging was women's work in his clan, but in others, where women were scarce or unwell or too busy, it sometimes fell on the men to go out. He'd watched Maeve long enough to know that the trick was to offer a service—mending, hauling, handiwork—but that was only to show they weren't lazy and if the country person gave them something for free, that was his own choice. He observed the house from a distance and then up close. It was small but well kept, with fresh whitewash, decent curtains in the window. He expected a woman to answer, so when a young man came to the door, a boy, really, younger than Michael, his plan went out the window.

"Howaya," Michael said, friendly, as if they'd met before. The boy raised his eyebrows and waited. It was sneaky, Michael knew, pretending to know the boy, acting familiar. Country people already thought travellers were too sneaky. Honest and straightforward was best. "I'm starving," Michael said, and immediately regretted his choice of words. Travellers also had a reputation for exaggeration. "I cycled all day yesterday, and I've another day of it ahead. Can you spare any bread?"

The boy looked him up and down. "Did ye sleep in the field?"

"It's just myself."

"Is it a tinker, you are? Traveling alone?"

Michael surprised himself. "I'm no tinker," he said, smiling, "but I suppose I have all the markings. I been on the go for so long without a shave or a change of clothes. I'm from up Conch way, from Ballyroan." He stopped, but the boy was still looking at him. "I was robbed. I was lucky to get away with my bicycle."

The boy nodded, held up his hand for Michael to wait where he was standing. Michael heard a low voice from inside the house, also male, and then he saw the boy cross the hall into what must be the kitchen. He left the kitchen door open and Michael could see the boy's elbow and forearm reaching for an empty jar. He saw the boy's knee bend as he dipped the jar into a milk bucket that was out of sight. When the boy came back, he was carrying half a loaf of brown bread and a cut of pork along with the house-warm milk. "The ole one's having an off day," the boy said, passing off the items one by one. "Cancer of the stomach." When he'd handed Michael everything and they stood there looking at each other, he added, "My two brothers are out back. They could be here in half a second if I shouted for them. For the ole one. They keep an ear out. Drink up the milk here if you don't mind. It's the last jar."

Michael bowed his head and thanked him for the food, taking care not to look inside the little house in case the boy saw some kind of want in his expression and misunderstood. He wondered if the boy's brothers really were out back, or if there were any brothers at all.

"And look it," the boy said just as Michael was lifting the jar to his mouth. "If you're trying to pass yourself off as a local, you'd better start talking like the west of Ireland. You tinkers have the strangest way of talking. It's from everyplace, isn't it? All mixed up. Just now I heard Dublin, Cork, Donegal, and a little bit of Connemara, all jammed in together. So eat up your bread and mind what I said. Leave the jar whenever you've finished."

Michael sat on the stone wall at the side of the house and ate every last crumb of what the boy had given him. How old could the boy be? Twelve? Thirteen? Just like a little old man, with his advice and his way of watching. Michael drank all the milk, and after looking around for a place to rinse out the jar, he gave up and left it on the wall, its thin white film clinging to the glass. He walked his bicycle to the road and oriented himself. Behind was the direction he'd just come from, ahead and slightly left was the direction he needed to go if he was really going to go through with it. What was there to go through with? he asked himself as he lifted one leg over the bar of the bike. What was wrong with a son visiting his mother's grave? There was nothing wrong with it, nothing at all, and yet the more he insisted on the rightness of it, the more he feared he'd done—or was about to do—something to his father and to the rest of them that would be unforgivable once he returned. Dermot would tell them, Michael supposed, about what he had said about settling, and they would be disgusted, Maeve in particular, who looked on everything he did as if it were an extension of her own actions.

Back in that desolate landscape, they'd have gathered close around the fire and talked about him all night, how closed he was, how no one ever knew what Michael Ward was thinking, and how he'd probably been preparing himself to leave for many years, planning it, saving little bits of money, and one among them might point out that if this was the case, Michael Ward was far shrewder than they'd ever given credit for. Then they'd think on that for a while, and Dermot would point out that no one knew whether he'd left for good. Dermot would remind them to think back on themselves at eighteen and the foolish things they'd done, the men in particular, and with all the attention Maeve had gotten in the last few years—don't forget things were different with twins.

But Michael hadn't planned anything. The possibility of leaving, of actually, physically, striking out and doing it, had not come to him until that first time he saw the bicycle leaning against the gable. No. In truth, he couldn't really say it had come to him then either. He didn't even understand that he'd left until he'd reached Galway and rested and felt the spikes of hunger in his belly and the dampness the field had left in his clothes. Even now, a day later, headed farther west on the same bicycle, he didn't know whether he was leaving or had left or was just taking a few days out of the routine. I'll catch up with them in the Midlands, he told himself. But like his thoughts on visiting his mother's grave, the more he insisted on one way of looking at the thing, the more false that one way seemed.

To pass the time as he cycled out to Ballyroan, he counted the electricity poles and remembered hearing that those very same poles had once been trees as far away as Norway and Finland. As he closed in on Conch, he expected the poles to fall away, the wires strung through the air to reach their boundary, but they didn't. Where there was one, he could always look into the distance and find the next one, and the next and the next. He skirted Conch village and headed straight for Ballyroan. For the first time in years he thought of those two strange girls who had lived out there the year Julia died, the way they'd watched him, how they'd spied on the camp in the middle of the night, the way the older one asked question after question while the younger one shivered in her thin nightdress and her wet feet before turning and running away. Then seeing them again in Galway just a few months later, the older one greeting him as if they were relations, dragging him along the quay to say hello to the younger one, who once again seemed frightened by her surroundings, as if the action on the pier had come to her, and not her to it. They were lonely, Michael realized now, and wondered why it had not occurred to him at the time.

The road to the sea was shorter than he remembered it, the curves arriving sooner. The abandoned houses were still abandoned, and a few were slung so low and were so wet and black and grown over that they'd become as much a part of the landscape as the mountains and the bog. He had to look twice and say to himself, That's a house, and there, that's another. The thought of needing to eat again soon was growing stronger by the mile, but he kept going, pressing the pedal with all his weight as the road began to tilt up toward the sea ledge. He dropped the bicycle to the ground just outside the flimsy gate of the cemetery. The ground was so uneven that he had to take hold of a headstone now and again as he negotiated the slope and the wet grass. Unlike the cemeteries in towns or cities, here there were no neat rows, no aisles, and to get to one grave, a person had to walk on many others. Many of the headstones were worn down to stumps.

The first thing he noticed when he reached her grave was the thin green film that covered the light stone. He reached out and touched it, rubbing the slimy matter with his fingertips. It was one of the only headstones without a name stamped across the top, and after looking at it for a while, examining how well the mound of dirt that covered her had leveled out, he wondered what to do next. It crossed his mind that a prayer would be the thing, but he'd never prayed by himself without being told, without joining in with a dozen or more other voices. Then he noticed the fresh dirt just beside his mother and the yawning hole beyond. A new arrival expected. Tomorrow, from the looks of it. His thoughts leaped to the cottage by the river and how they were the only family that would still bury its dead in this place.

Up at the top of the slope was a wind-bent and knobby hawthorn tree that looked as if it were pointing back at Ireland. Michael walked up to it, again stepping over grave after grave, doing his best to stay at the edges and take broad strides. He broke a small, leaf-heavy branch from the tree and went back to scrub some of the green veil from Julia's headstone. He rubbed and scratched until he had warmed up again, eventually dropping the useless branch and using the rough tweed of his jacket sleeve. When he had done as much as he could, he walked in a wide circle, gathering wildflowers and then a long blade of grass to tie them together.

It was beginning to feel impossible to go a single step more without eating. Catching a fish might take hours, and he had no line and no net, and the thought of the water when he was already so cold made him shiver and feel sorry for himself. "Well what do you expect?" he demanded, casting the words hungry, tired, sore, and cold from his thoughts. Then, at the height of his frustration, he had a thought that stopped him. There was another option, one that didn't require getting wet. He half wished he hadn't thought of it, but now that he had, he couldn't turn away. Stomach turning in dread, he got back on the bicycle, which he'd begun to think of as his own, and coasted down the hill to the rocky beach at the bottom. There they were, the rocks he remembered, standing at high tide. And yes, there too were the spots of grayish white covering the rock, covering all the rocks at high tide, a feast of barnacles for the taking. He willed himself to do what he'd seen his father and his uncles do a thousand times. He got up close to the rock, leaned in to examine the little creatures, then pried off a middle-sized one and pulled it out of its shell. Dermot ate them alive, killing them with his teeth and swallowing them down just the same as if they'd been fried in a pan full of sweet butter. But at the moment Michael was about to put it in his mouth, he found he couldn't, and instead he squeezed it between his palms good and hard until he was sure it was dead. He put it in his mouth and thought he felt it move. He spit. If I could get hold of a pot or a pan, he thought. If I could build a fire.

As he called himself every harsh name he could think of and geared up to try it again, he heard a splash. He looked out at the water and saw a person swimming, male or female he couldn't tell, just a pair of pale arms and a dark head. He looked around to see if anyone was watching him and noticed a heap of clothes lying just beyond the reach of the water. Women's shoes. He looked out again at the water, and the person had stopped swimming. Her head bobbed in place, and he couldn't tell if she was just resting or whether she was looking at him. He hurried away.

Back on the road, he could just make out the roof of the cottage where he'd first seen his mother dead. Cahill was their name. What could he do but ask? They would remember him, surely. How many dead travellers had they given shelter to in their day? He turned in on the narrow road, the weeds and bushes pushing in from both sides to a degree he hadn't remembered from before, and he went straight up to their door. He knocked and waited. Knocked again. Waited. Shouted "Hallo?" toward the side of the house before walking around to the back and knocking again. He gave up knocking and listened. A bolt of nervous energy shot from his stomach to his groin, then up again to the back of his neck. I'll just take something to hold me over, whatever's on the counter. They were decent sort of people and will understand, and I'll come back tomorrow and I'll tell them. He pushed open the door, called out one last time, and, after waiting for a moment, stepped inside.

The door led to a back room kitchen, small, just a counter and a few flimsy cabinets. There was an electric cooker sitting out, an electric teakettle, and a small refrigerator that hummed softly and was so pristinely white it seemed out of place. There was a full loaf of bread sitting out, and when he laid his hand on it, it was still warm. He cut four thick slices from the loaf and smeared butter onto each. He looked for some kind of meat—more pork like he'd had that morning, or cured beef, or salmon. Surely a cottage this close to the river had salmon to bring them through the season, but no matter where he looked, he couldn't find anything. He thought of the hens he'd heard clucking on his way around the house, but he pushed the thought out of his mind. He took four eggs instead, filled a jar with milk. He pushed the swinging door open just a crack and looked into a room with a table, four chairs, a fireplace, and a larger cushioned chair pulled up close to the fireplace, which was now cold. He listened for a moment, then tiptoed across the room. He swiped a book of matches off the mantel and a few pieces of turf from the pile. Once in the back room again, he thought he heard a creak—like a footstep or a door being pushed open slowly, carefully. He froze, his arms full of the things he'd gathered, and he waited, breathing as quietly as his pounding heart would allow. It would be better to call out, he told himself. It would be better to announce myself and say I called out once before. More than once, in fact. His thigh muscle began to twitch. It would be better to put these things back, go round front, and try again.

After a few seconds passed and he did not hear another sound, Michael let himself out the door he'd come in and, crouching low as he passed the windows, ran off into the closest field, careful not to drop anything.

That night, he decided to sleep indoors in one of the derelict cottages. If he hadn't been so bone cold, the heavy iron padlock on the door would have been comical against the rotted wood that flopped open with one kick of his travel-weary legs. Inside was a scene halfway between two worlds. To the right of the door the roof had caved in, letting a generation's worth of weather and bird shit in upon the single bare mattress and single wooden chair. To the left was a table, a mirror spotted with mold but still hanging, an iron pot sitting where a fire would have roared, a broom leaning in the corner. After taking an inventory of the house, everything precisely where the occupants had left it except for the half the weather had claimed, he went out once more to gather more turf from one of the neat stacks at the side of the road, and to see if the old well still had water.

He tested the old well rope and retied the knot that held the bucket. He leaned as far as he could into the dark hole and sniffed. He stood and lowered the bucket, hoping there was enough rope, giving it just a few inches at a time. As he waited and hoped, he spoke to himself out loud for the second time that afternoon. "Tomorrow I'll go straight over and tell them what I done."

He heard a gentle slap and felt the rope resist his grip as the bucket filled with water. Fighting his own greed, he forced himself to pull it up early, hand over hand, careful to keep the bucket from banging against the sides.

As he lifted the bucket to his mouth, tilting it too high so that the water sloshed out and ran into his nose, he thought of the girl's name. He hadn't been trying to remember it, but there it was. She must have been the one swimming, head bobbing in the waves, squinting and craning her neck toward shore as she'd squinted and craned that night on the road and again when he'd gone to help collect Julia's body. Yes, in Galway too. Her stained face, her arms stretched out like a child acting the bird, ready to take flight. Greta.