He’d been awake for some time, watching clouds slip over the stars and hurry out to sea. Finally, Daniel pushed back the wool blankets strewn across the bed. Sleep was gone for the night. He grabbed his watch from the straight-backed chair that served as a nightstand and squinted in the moonlight at the black numerals mounted on a white back. Three-thirty. Hours yet until dawn.
“Not so fast,” he said to the old timepiece. The return to daylight savings time had occurred during the night. He pulled out the tiny knob on the side and rolled it between his first two fingers. “Four-thirty. Rise and shine.” He snapped on the small lamp beside his bed, and its low light glinted off the copper figure at rest on the chair seat: a hand-beaten and brazed sculpture of a Red-billed Chough, one of his early pieces, worked from a two-millimeter-thick scrap. The bird appeared to be walking, one twiggy claw set before the other, its slender head thrust forward, long beak slightly agape, as if in mid-call. Daniel picked up the half-sized metal specimen and turned it in his hands. The bird’s gaze was steady, the open beak an unspoken thought. He cursed softly and returned the chough to its bedside roost.
He wasn’t ready to work. His cluttered mind raced with anger at his sister, guilt over the anger, and concern for the battle the peninsula had ahead if it really intended to fight this damn mine. He couldn’t get Mort’s clear blue gaze out of his head. In it, he’d read a mixture of disappointment and love. Mort’s eyes mirrored his heart.
Daniel prepared a press pot of gut-burning coffee and dressed while it steeped. A ceramic heater kept his small sleeping space warm, but he could see his breath when he stepped beyond the screen into the large expanse of his studio. Coffee into a thermos, feet into battered leather boots, hands into fingerless gloves. He buttoned a flannel-lined Carhartt jacket over his wool sweater.
Fiana’s house sat a heart-stopping distance from the edge of the bluff, where it seemed a rogue wave might sweep it out to sea. When she wrote to tell him she’d purchased Turlough Meaney’s old homestead, Daniel was surprised that his practical sister would take a chance on so precarious a house. At last, her inner romantic had expressed itself—it was the Fiana she’d squelched decades ago, trying to create a stable life for herself and her reckless younger brother.
A steep, boulder-strewn trail led down to Ballycaróg Bay. Daniel held the thermos in one hand, extended the other for balance, and let momentum carry him to the shore.
There was no beach to speak of—none at all at high tide. The peninsula plunged into the sea in cracked, twisted clumps of black and brown sandstone and silt rock that was covered in patches of gray and white bird shit. The air tasted of raw oysters—briny and ripe with the tang of kelp and saltwater. Waves hissed and roared. There was never a moment’s silence at this end of the bay. The ocean continued its incessant consumption of coastline, pecking away at Ireland millimeter by millimeter.
He walked to the edge of a narrow escarpment. The rock trembled beneath his feet with the force of the water. He could slip on the wet stone and tumble into the ocean, where the waves would slam him into the rock, drag him under, and carry him out in the time it took to heat water in a kettle. Not long ago he’d stood on this very spot, or dozens like them up and down this stretch of the Beara coast, considering such a tumble. It wouldn’t have been an accidental slip. It would have been a dive into oblivion.
Above the sizzle of the retreating waves he could hear squawking and shrieking. Terns, herring gulls, and fulmars congregated at this prime fishing spot. It was as noisy as a pub during a World Cup match. Daniel continued north, until the land curved. A cove, bound by pockmarked cliffs, drew him into its shelter. The clamor in his head stilled as a certain listening quiet surrounded him again.
At first he heard only his own breath and the muffled sound of distant surf. A halo of light in the east cast shadows of silver and blue into the rock and earth that rose above him, and he tilted back his head, peering into the nesting area of the Red-billed Chough.
What Daniel waited for rushed over his head, swooping in from beyond the cove, a jet-black fleet of four in loose formation. A bright chiach sounded, descended, and was answered. One bird trailed with a bit of white fluff clutched in a tapered red beak—sheep’s wool or dryer lint to line her nest. If someone could explain to these birds their possible fate, would they leave? Or would the choughs cling as stubbornly to their piece of this rock as he had learned to do?
He realized then he hadn’t come out at dawn to relive his darkest hours. He’d come to be with a piece of the future he might have some hand in preserving. For this knuckle of Irish rock was the only thing that kept him grounded. The only way he knew he was home.