Fiana’s whistling pierced into Daniel’s studio, and he sat up with a start. One finger was trapped between the pages of John O’Donohue’s Eternal Echoes, his other hand still clutching the pen he’d used to underline his favorite passages. He’d planned to set off for a hike in the Slieve Miskish the moment she left for Mass, but he’d fallen asleep just before sunrise. Sunlight now pushed past the half-drawn shutters on the west-facing windows. A stable door once occupied that space, but Daniel had removed it and installed a deep window seat where he could sketch, read, or simply watch the sky converse with the ocean.
He smiled. Fi whistled when she was angry, and this morning she was making a show of her defiant cheerfulness as she shoved the wheelbarrow across the gravel paths between her garden beds. She shouted now and again at Bannon, the blue heeler stray who’d arrived unannounced two years ago, establishing herself with immovable certainty at Daniel’s side. A jangled crash signaled that a collection of garden tools had been dropped just on the other side of the plaster wall from Daniel’s bed.
After storming from the dining room the night before, he’d spun out his anger in muttered, solitary arguments. The early morning walk had cleared the last of his self-pity. Whatever Fiana intended, it was with her bull-headed but loving heart. He shoved his stocking feet into mud-spattered Wellingtons just inside the door. “Right. Well. Let’s get this over with.” Daniel left the studio to join his sister in her garden.
“It’s high time I get these onion sets and shallots into the ground. If I can chase down Liam, he’s needed to mow this lawn.” Her face shielded by a large sunhat, Fiana stabbed at the earth with a garden trowel.
“Can we talk a bit, Fi?” Not waiting for a response, Daniel brushed dirt from the brick edge of a wall that enclosed the newly seeded vegetable beds and sat facing his sister, his forearms on his knees. “I don’t agree with what you have in mind, but it wasn’t reason enough to lose my temper. I’m sorry.”
Fiana sat back on her heels and pushed up the brim of her hat. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for. I should have talked to you first, before Mort and Michael arrived.”
“It’s not that. I have nothing to hide from either of them. It’s the idea that I could represent this community. That they would allow me to, after what I’ve done.”
“Daniel. I just—”
“You just want me to be more than I am. I’m not the right one to be a public face for anything, not even this, whatsit, this Beara Chough Council.”
“Coalition,” Fiana corrected. “It’s the Beara Chough Coalition.”
“That’s a damn silly name.” He lifted a corner of his mouth in a half-smile.
“Well, if you’ve got another, you’re welcome to put it forward.” She swatted at his knee with the trowel and then grew serious again. “But you’d better do it fast. We don’t know how long this fight is going to last and what financing we’ll need to seek, so we’re doing this right. We’re registering ourselves tomorrow with the Charities Regulatory Authority as a not-for-profit.” Fiana attacked the flowerbed again, yanking out volunteer strands of ivy.
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Mort, Michael, and me. And Denis O’Sullivan from the Beara Action Group.”
“What about Alice?”
“She’s pro-mine.”
Daniel tipped up his chin in response. Alice Regan served with Denis as co-representatives from the Ballycaróg parish in the organization that acted as the voice of the greater Beara Peninsula. Already he could imagine the rift in this small community as families and businesses chose sides—save the economy or save a small crow—both claiming moral superiority, both with valid arguments that their cause was the just cause.
“This fight is going to tear Beara apart,” he said at last.
“No, Daniel. This mine is going to tear us apart. And right when the economy is starting to turn around. Tourism is picking up, no small thanks to your guided hikes,” she added gently. “The Germans and Dutch are building holiday homes again, the Americans are putting offices in Cork because it’s so much cheaper than Dublin. And the weather’s better.”
He smiled weakly at her joke.
“We don’t need this mine,” she continued. “And what about when the mine leaves? And it surely will. Maybe not in our lifetime, but when it does, what will Liam and Catriona be left with? Unemployment and a torn-up peninsula.” She waved the garden trowel, scattering damp black earth in her sweep, and stabbed again at the upturned bed.
Daniel watched her dig furiously in the rich soil as if in search of something. After a moment, he put a hand on her back, and she stopped, listening without turning.
“If I were to join this campaign, you know what would happen. It’s one thing for an ex-con to sell his art—that makes me a story to tell around the pub. But if I supported your fight in any public fashion, what I did would become the focal point, not what I said or what I stood for.”
Her back rose and fell in a silent sigh. Fiana set her trowel aside and joined him at the low wall. “Daniel, it was a terrible thing that happened. But you served your time, and there’s not a soul in all of Ireland that would condemn you without turning away from his own conscience.”
She’d all but said, “It was an accident.” But he let it go. They’d had this argument too many times, Fiana insisting he drop the hair shirt of guilt, Daniel pleading to be left alone to deal with the remnants of his life as he saw fit. They needed one another—this family of two who had clung together through years in communes and New Age travelers’ camps, linked to the shadow of a mother but no known father. Or fathers.
His sister had never wavered in her support. Not after the many times she’d collected him from the sidewalk in front of a bar after he’d been tossed out, or—more than once—from a drunk tank. Not after he’d wandered away from Cork, contacted her from Dublin, from Belfast, and finally from Manchester, asking for money each time. Not after he’d disappeared, only to call her from Cork jail six years later. That time, however, he’d needed more than money—he’d needed a criminal defense lawyer. Fiana, by then a single mother of two young children, breathed in deeply, cursed him once, and extended a hand to her brother.
She was the one waiting for him when he emerged from Cork Prison four years ago, the only father she could offer Liam and Cat after so many grim years with a man who ground them down with silent reprobation. Daniel felt her watching him with caution, one eye on her children, as he learned new ways of living with the world, with his addictions and his past. Fiana had allowed him to heal in his own way, through his art and the forces of nature that surrounded them on this peninsula, where the world seemed to spin more slowly, ancient legends knitting themselves into the present. Now he was a found thing, remade by regret and grief, and she a safe haven. They were, brother and sister, survivors.
“Would you at least be willing to lead some prospective supporters on the Beara Way? We want people to see what’s at risk, to fall in love with this place. You know Beara like no one else, and something comes over you when you talk about it. We need that poetry, Daniel. We need everyone to feel it like you do.”
He slapped his palms on his thighs and stood. “I can be a guide, not a spokesman. I can share with you all I know of the chough and their nesting ground in the cove. You keep me out of whatever limelight you’ve got planned, and I’ll take punters through the mud and make them love it.” He squeezed his older sister’s shoulder. “Don’t wait on dinner for me. I’m off on a hike.”
Moments later, while gathering his gear, Daniel paused by the window overlooking the garden. Fiana sat motionless on the ledge of the brick wall, and her face in profile crumpled as if she might cry. Instead, she yanked down the brim of her sunhat, pushed herself up, and attacked the weeds with renewed vigor. The only whistling came from the chaffinches, which trilled with laughter as they darted in the fuchsia.