IN THE United States a perfect spring day is a pretty fair promise of one not too different the next day. Not so in Ireland. When I woke up the next morning, Nuala Anne had left our bed, the wind was rattling the windows, rain was beating down on the roof, and a thick fog blotted out everything more than ten yards from our house.I dressed in a sweatshirt and pants and shuffled down to the nursery. Fiona had decamped, doubtless to run with her crazy mistress. The rugrats were playing contentedly on their respective pallets.
“Daddy,” my daughter complained, “change Mick’s diaper. He stinks.”
“Right away, ma’am.”
I changed the diaper and carried the two of them into the kitchen for breakfast. My daughter devoured hers with prim table manners. My son slobbered happily and covered his face with dire orange-colored stuff.
Then I turned to the preparation of breakfast for herself so it would be ready when she thundered in—Nuala Anne does not so much walk as bolt—muesli, bacon (Irish), orange juice, bagel, and toast.
Just as I was about to dig into my own raisin bran, the
front door blew open and the wind rushed into the house, along with it my wife and faithful wolfhound, both soaking wet.
“Isn’t it a grand day?” she shouted as she picked up our son and swung him through the air. “A fine soft day!”
“You went swimming!”
“Naturally! Didn’t we, Fiona girl?”
The wolfhound barked in agreement and shook her wet fur, as always, so as to transfer the water from herself to me.
“You’re both out of your friggin’ minds!”
“T‘was glorious.” Nuala embraced me. She was almost blue with cold. “Not lukewarm like your friggin’ Lake Michigan.”
Ice cold or not, I was not about to break the embrace.
“Here’s your morning tea!”
“I have to jump into the shower first. Keep it warm!”
A typical scene of matutinal bliss in the Coyne family.
An hour later, her long black hair still wet from her swim, dressed in gray slacks and blouse, Nuala received the Gardaf in full solemnity in our parlor, regardless of the fact that the gentry might be upset by our using their domain to receive mere cops.
“Commissioner Keenan sends his very best, Ms. McGrail,” Declan McGinn began, “and hopes that you will visit him in Dublin before you return to America.”
My wife nodded, now in her archduchess role despite her plastered hair.
“We surely will.”
“We wanted to inquire, Nuala Anne,” Constable Peig Sayers continued, “whether you have noticed anything while you’ve been here in Renvyle that might explain the explosion down the road.”
If either of the two cops thought it was strange that they should be asking this hoydenish aristocrat for help, they did not show it. They knew that she was “one of
them as knows.” The Irish have no trouble accepting such people’s insight, though they were also profoundly skeptical of such folks.
“Well.” Nuala sighed. “When I first heard the explosion up above in Letterfrack, I thought it might be the lads, but sure, it wasn’t them at all, at all, was it now?”
“We don’t think so.”
“This is Republican country and all and your man has always supported the lads as much as he can. Besides they wouldn’t waste good plastic explosives on blowing up an empty bungalow.”
“Precisely,” the Chief Superintendent agreed.
“Maybe,” Nuala Anne continued, “someone else is trying to send someone a message.”
“’The Russian Mafia,” I suggested.
All three people looked at me as though I was out of my mind.
“There’s a couple of fat Slavic types up at Renvyle House,” I continued. “With all those Russian planes landing down below at Shannon—twenty-five hundred last year—some of them might have seen money to be made in Irish real estate.”
The idea was crazy. Patently so, as the little bishop would say. I was playing games.
“We have looked into them, Mr. Coyne,” Peig said, continuing the custom of addressing us as Nuala Anne and Mr. Coyne. “They seem to be honest businessmen.”
“There are no honest Russian businessmen,” I countered.
“Why would they blow up a T.D.’s house?” Declan McGinn asked.
“Beats me. If they’re trying to send a message, they’ll probably try again.”
Nuala frowned.
“I think you may have the right of that, Dermot Michael.”
The two Gardaf paid their respects to Fiona, who waited for them at the door. We promised them that we would stay in touch and report any further insights.
A few minutes after they left, the doorbell rang again. It was our angry little silver-haired leprechaun of the night before, Sean O’Cuiv, hat in hand with an attempt at a genial smile on his face. Nuala Anne politely asked him to come in out of the rain and even brewed a cup of tea for him.
“I hope you were not offended by my overloud comments last night, Mr. and Mrs. McGrail,” he said anxiously. “Sure don’t I always lose my temper when the subject is Colm MacManus?”
Before I could comment on Chicago, my wife took over.
“Ah well, ’tis a terrible thing altogether to have your house blown up even if you’re not in it, isn’t it now?”
“It is that, Mrs. McGrail,” he said smoothly. “And I asked myself when I came home last night and began to say my prayers how I would feel if the same thing happened to me as happened to poor Colm.”
“Did you now?”
“I did, and I realized what a frightening experience it would be and actually prayed to God to help him through the crisis. Even if he has another house in Dublin and rarely uses this one, it must have been terrible to lose all the things he had here.”
“Did he have that much?” Nuala wondered.
Fiona wandered in, curious about the strange voice. She sniffed Sean O’Cuiv, who squirmed nervously and murmured, “Good doggie, nice doggie.”
Fiona was not convinced. She curled up next to Nuala and watched O’Cuiv intently.
“Beautiful dog,” he said nervously.
“Isn’t she a grand lady altogether?” Nuala agreed.
“Wasn’t I after wondering about how much of his worldly goods poor Mr. MacManus had in his house?”
“Not all that much, I suppose. All the valuables, I’m told, are in Dublin. Still it’s home, isn’t it now?”
“’Tis,” she said with a loud and phony sigh.
Fiona continued to stare suspiciously at our visitor. Nuala patted her massive head.
“Well, I just wanted to tell you that I am as horrified as anyone else at this terrible outrage. I hope it doesn’t cause you to leave Ireland. We don’t want to frighten off any of our American friends.”
“Ah no,” my wife assured him. “We’re not afraid at all, at all.”
Speak for yourself, Nuala Anne.
YOU GUYS OUGHT TO PACK UP AND GO HOME RIGHT AWAY. WHY TAKE ANY CHANCES?
“She’d never agree.”
YOU’RE THE BOSS, AREN’T YOU?
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Well, I’m delighted to hear that,” he said as if the purpose of his visit had been achieved. “I hope you have a grand time during the rest of your stay here at home.”
“I’m sure I will, Mr. O’Cuiv, though my home is really in Chicago these days.”
ZAP!
Fiona and my wife conducted Sean O’Cuiv to the door and bid him a courteous good day. Well, my wife was courteous. The wolfhound was silent and skeptical, as I was.
“Well,” she said after she had closed the door, “sure I hope the wind doesn’t sweep him into the ocean.”
“Won’t he find it warmer outside than he did inside the house!”
“We showed him, didn’t we girl?” she said to Fiona, who had stood up and placed her forepaws on Nuala’s shoulders.
Nuala hugged her.
“I love you too,” she assured the delighted dog.
We returned to the parlor and sat on the couch. Me wife seemed deep in thought.
“It’s bad, Dermot Michael, very bad. There are wicked people here in Renvyle. There is worse to come … . Now you better go see Father Lane and see what he knows about Maamtrasna.”
“Jack Lane, Nuala Anne. Doesn’t herself tell me that he’s a brilliant priest, but he doesn’t use the word ‘father’ or dress in clericals?”
“Isn’t that because of all the sex-abuse scandals? The eejits probably deserve it for all the cover-ups. Still, most priests are good men, like his rivirence and the little bishop.”
His reverence is my brother George, who thinks he knows everything, and the little bishop is his boss at the cathedral, who may well know everything.
Unlike some American priests who dress in T-shirts and jeans, Jack Lane looked like a respectable yuppie businessman—gray trousers, blue blazer, light blue shirt, redand-blue tie, neatly trimmed black hair. Not a commodity broker, more likely a corporate mortgage manager.
He was a big guy, broad shoulders, not as tall as me, low forehead, quick grin.
“Hurling?” I asked.
“Rugby, actually, though I’m a bit long in the tooth for it … It’s nice of you to stop by, Dermot. I’ve seen you and your family at Mass. I hope you’ll let me take you to supper down in Clifden some night … . Should I turn off the disk?”
“I’m never tired of hearing her sing,” I said. “Finish this song and then let’s talk.”
We were both silent for a minute, listening to the end of “Shenandoah.”
“She’s seen the river, I assume? She sings about it with so much love.”
I decided that I liked this priest.
“Neither the Shenandoah nor the wide Missouri. Nor for that matter the Erie Canal or the Mississippi, save from the air. And she’s never walked through the Streets of Laredo.”
He sighed, shifted his position, and turned off the disk player.
“Let’s sit around my coffee table. I don’t like to hide behind a desk, though many of my parishioners would rather keep me at a distance.”
“As for me wife,” I finished my comment on her relationship with the places about which she used to sing, “she imagines all the places she sings about and makes them more real maybe than they really are.”
“The river behind the river, I suppose.”
“You have the right of it, Jack Lane.”
“Let me put the kettle on … . You’ll take a cup of tea?”
“I will.”
“And a biscuit or two?”
“I’ve been known to have a weakness for a biscuit on the odd occasion.”
“Good. Excuse me for a minute …”
“Jack Lane?”
“Yes, Dermot Coyne?”
“I don’t pollute my tea with milk.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Well, I’m a multiculturalist, so I won’t pass judgment.”
He came back in a few moments and devoted himself to the ancient (and often, it seemed to me, timewasting) Irish ritual of steeping and pouring the tea. He did so with the grace of a bishop presiding over a solemn liturgy.
“How can I be of any help to you, Dermot?”
“First of all, you must extend your tolerance to my shanty Irish custom of dunking the biscuit in my milkless tea.”
He laughed again. “You’re a desperate man altogether, Dermot Michael Coyne … . Now, what is it you want to know?”
“You can tell me about Maamtrasna.”
“Ah,” he said, shifting uneasily. “In the five years I’ve been here, no one has asked. Yet it is a grand story, one that ought to be told … . Would you be after thinking about telling it yourself?”
“I might, if you don’t mind … . You said it ought to be told … . Why?”
I dunked a cookie, as I still insist on calling it, into me tea. My tea.
“To show how corrupt and cruel and incompetent British rule was here. I’m not one of your revisionist historians who want to pretend that, all things considered, the British were pretty benign folk in nineteenth-century Ireland.”
“You’re a historian?”
“Every Irishman is a historian of a sort. Maybe I’m a little more systematic than some of the others. I try to distinguish between history and legend, though sometimes it’s not easy. As a storyteller, of course, your intentions are a bit different, aren’t they?”
He also dunked his biscuit, a man after me own heart.
“I have no objection to history so long as it makes a good story.”
He laughed, a rich, generous, and happy laugh.
“Well, Maamtrasna would make a great story. Briefly, it was the early eighteen-eighties, and it was clear to everyone who had sense that English barbarism in this country had to come to an end. Unfortunately, most of the leaders in the English government had no sense. In the Land League, Michael Davitt and Charles Stewart Parnell
hit on a brilliant strategy that the earlier nineteenth-century revolutionaries, filled as they were with wild rhetoric and romantic incompetence, could not have imagined. The Land League tapped into the agrarian discontent that had produced local violence for two centuries, the violence of men who cared less about a free Ireland and more about owning their own property.”
“The twentieth-century leaders didn’t quite get it.”
“Collins, the bloody eejit, got it, but then he got himself killed … . Anyway, the various secret societies had been burning houses, stealing cattle and sheep, killing agents and even an occasional landlord, for at least a century and a half. Generally they are called ‘Ribbonmen’ because they wore various colored ribbons. They were clumsy, crude, and often brutal. But they did scare the hell out of the English. Davitt and Parnell had the idea of focusing this discontent in a massive refusal to pay rents. Their tactics were mostly nonviolent, anticipating Gandhi by sixty years, just as Collins anticipated urban guerrilla war by a couple of decades. Astonishingly enough, they managed to win much of what they wanted. However, out here in North Galway and Mayo, they had a hard time controlling the violent men, just as the Sinn Fein leaders have now up above. Like some of the IRA, the violent men mixed personal feuds with their political causes. At the time of our story, they had killed a couple of agents and even one English Lord. The Brits in this part of Ireland were scared stiff, as well they might be. Didn’t the lads burn Gogarty’s hotel down the road in 1922 and himself as Irish as I am? … More tea?”
“Yes, please … So the killings were the result of revolutionary activity?”
“Not exactly.” He sighed as he refilled my teacup. “There were accusations that John Joyce had stolen money from the local secret society. More likely, however, his reputation as a sheep thief was the real motive.
He was a big, hulking man, strong and determined. It was said that whenever he saw a sheep he stole it. Sheep were important property in those days. A man with a reputation like his could expect trouble. However, the violence of the killings was out of proportion to the crime of stealing sheep. Why kill three innocent women and a boy because the father of the family stole sheep?”
“Five killings?”
“And another boy barely survived injuries.”
“For sheep?”
“My guess, formed perhaps by some evidence I’m going to give you, is that the men involved had discussed it for some time. August seventeenth, 1882, was a hot and humid day. A lot of the drink had been taken, and a plot that had been fantasy suddenly became real. Then, when the killers had disposed of John Joyce, in a mix of fear and fury, they felt they had to kill everyone else, including a lovely sixteen-year-old girl.”
“It’s hard to believe that anyone could have been so cruel.”
I waved off another cup of tea. My thirst and appetite had dried up.
“Only if you don’t understand the extreme poverty of the region. You were out here several years ago, weren’t you, Dermot?” he asked, reaching into a drawer in his desk.
“Six years ago.”
“We were poor people even then, before Ireland became, much to everyone’s astonishment, richer than England. There’s still some poverty out here, but not like the early nineties. Imagine, if you will, this part of Ireland a hundred years ago as the most densely populated section of Europe even after the famine. Most of the poor people were eking out an existence that was not much different from that of the Stone Age. They were destroying the environment too. The picturesque Connemara countryside,
at which you Yanks marvel, is the result of overgrazing and deforestation. The English thought the people here were no better than savages in Africa, in fact probably worse. That they were reducing a people with a rich and ancient culture to savagery never occurred to them.”
“It’s the Ireland my father’s parents left behind.”
“A lot changed in the four decades before the Great War. However, at the time of the Maamtrasna killings, life was cheap here. Famine always threatened. Most people did not live very long. If it wasn’t for their Catholic faith, there would have been a lot more killing. Moreover, the Church didn’t have much influence up above in Maamtrasna. The five murder victims were buried in open ground without a funeral or a priest to bless their graves. In those days the Irish-speaking folk had only a frail connection to Catholicism. Most of the victims and the accused and their families were illiterate, except for the very young like Peggy Joyce, and herself with golden hair the records say, and could neither speak nor understand English. They could no more grasp the rules of English civil society, so-called, than the people Stanley and Livingston met in Africa.”
He placed what looked like a manuscript on the coffee table between us.
“You know a lot about it, Jack Lane. Aren’t you the one who should be writing the story?”
“I think not.” He sighed. “No, not at all.”
“And why not, if you don’t mind my asking?”
He hesitated.
“No, not at all. It’s not the kind of book that a priest could write, even today. A secular historian, should one be interested—that young woman who’s your nanny—could do it. But a priest shouldn’t. He’d be thought to be disloyal, perhaps rightly so.”
“Really?”
“Back in 1982 didn’t Father McGreil, you know the
Jesuit sociologist who restored the shrine at MauMain, try to place a cross at the Joyce house with the inscription ‘pray for the dead,’ and didn’t he give it up when the locals opposed the project?”
“And why did they oppose it?”
“They told him that the dead should be left alone. Even after a hundred years they were uneasy about what the valley had done.”
I considered the manuscript cautiously. What secrets might it hold?
“Disloyal if it told about English cruelty?”
“No.” He sighed, almost as loudly as my wife would. “Disloyal because it would have to tell about Irish brutality towards one another.”
I said nothing. Jack Lane was determined to tell me the story, but in his own way and his own time.
“You’ve seen the film by your man about the informer?”
“Ryan’s Daughter or Liam O’Flaherty’s?”
“O’Flaherty’s of course. The theme of the informer is important in Irish literature because so many of our ancestors were informers. In a cruel society, in which the foreign tyrant had reduced most of the population to penury, some men—and the occasional woman—saw informing on their fellows as the only way to survive. There is solid reason to believe that one innocent man was executed and others went to prison because some of their friends and neighbors saw a chance to pick up a few English pounds by falsely accusing them.”
“And they survived?”
“They did and a few—a very few—of their descendants are members of my parish still.”
“Wow!”
“Moreover, the people of the valley knew who the real killers were. They never denounced them to the English
because they feared the wrath of English law if they told the unpleasant truth.”
“My God!”
“Oh yes, Dermot Coyne. The real killers continued to live in the valley, even when innocent men were released after twenty years of prison.”
“And survived?”
“There seemed to be no taste for vengeance after twenty years. Everyone seemed eager to forget about the murders. Some of the killers’ descendants also live in my parish.”
“They know you know about it?”
“No reason why they should … They know the story, however, in some mythological form. Alas, they don’t comprehend the dangerous truth that lurks behind the myth—people who live in a cruel tyranny can easily be cruel to each other.”
I nodded solemnly.
“I understand.”
“Do you, Dermot Coyne? What do you understand?”
“That the story would reveal that the Irish lived up to the stereotypes the occupying power had created.”
“Of course … The Irish-speaking culture is not warlike. It is gentle and quiet. It becomes violent only when pushed into the ground and violence is seen as necessary for survival. Even then it is not very good at killing, which is why we lost all the wars. The remnants of Maamtrasna living in this parish are quiet and gentle indeed and no longer are forced to be violent as were their ancestors. The story of Maamtrasna should be told, but not by the priest.”
“I understand,” I said again.
“Here is a strange manuscript.” He pushed the stack of handwritten papers across the coffee table. “I found it when I arrived here, tucked away in the cellar. It’s part
of a longer manuscript. I haven’t been able to find the rest of it, though to tell the truth, I haven’t looked very hard.”
“‘A Diary of a Galway Crime, by Edward Hannigan Fitzpatrick, 1882,’” I read, squinting at the old-fashioned handwriting.
“Your man was a young fellow, probably even younger than you. From your home city, in fact. Went on to become a journalist there. Lots of money. Came to Ireland in search of his family’s history. Galway Town, not at all like our area out here.”
“He is a reliable reporter?”
“Oh yes, he’s all of that. Candid about himself. I don’t know how the manuscript ended up in this parish house. He wrote about the story for one of your Chicago papers, accurately as far as I can tell from the quotes I’ve seen. For some reason he must not have wanted to take it home with him.”
I glanced at my watch.
“Jack Lane, I am in deep trouble. Me wife, er, MY wife is waiting for me to go water-skiing. I’m already fortyfive minutes late. Excuse me for running … May I read this?”
“Surely … I’ll search for the rest of it. Ease my sense of responsibility. We can talk about what to do with it later.”
I thanked him, shook his hand, and departed hastily, shielding the precious manuscript under my Chicago Bulls denim jacket (a memento of a happier time).
I was soaking wet when I stumbled into the bungalow. In the family room, my son had arrayed a fleet of trucks around himself, and my daughter was carefully constructing what might be a house with her building blocks.
“Dermot Michael Coyne! You’ve been lollygagging with the priesteen all morning.”
“He’s not little, Nuala Anne McGrail. He played rugby.
“For Ireland,” Ethne interjected, proud that her local priesteen had represented the country in international play.
“Regardless, we have to leave now to go skiing and can’t with yourself soaking wet. Go put on dry clothes, or you’ll catch your death.”
I had long since given up trying to persuade my wife that colds are caused by a virus and not by wet clothes.
“Did it ever occur to you, woman of the house, that the very fact that I’m soaking wet should dispense us from skiing?”
“If you’re wet, you’re wet,” she said imperiously. “Hurry up now! Isn’t poor Ethne dying to learn how to ski?”
Ethne’s face suggested that this statement was something less than literal truth.
“Didn’t he give me a manuscript?”
“Did he now?”
Manuscripts like that of Edward Hannigan Fitzpatrick had led to the solution of many of the mysteries on which we had stumbled.
I showed it to her.
“Och, isn’t that wonderful, Dermot Michael, and meself a terrible witch?”
“I’ll change my clothes,” I said, enjoying the (temporary) moral superiority I had earned. “I don’t want to keep Ethne waiting.”
That young woman and perhaps future historian looked as though she wouldn’t lament a delay. At all, at all.
In our bedroom, I debated donning swim trunks and chose discretion over valor. The Maamtrasna painting was back on its easel, more detailed and more terrifying than ever. The murdered young woman had golden hair. One of the two boys seemed to be alive. The dead man was, as Jack Lane had said, a hulk.
It was the first time I had seen proof of the detailed
accuracy of my wife’s, what shall I call it, psychic sensitivity.
Why not bet on the market on the basis of such evidence?
“Dermot Michael Coyne, are you wearing a swimsuit?”
“Woman, I’m not!”
“Sure, ’tis your call, isn’t it now?”
My phrase turned against me.
Nuala and Ethne bundled our children, who were patently (as the little bishop would say) not eager to leave the warmth and the turf fire smell of the family room, into sweaters and rain slickers. They collected blankets and towels and clean jeans and sweatshirts for the return trip. The Mick would not leave his trucks, and Nelliecoyne refused to relinquish her toys.
Naturally, Fiona had to come.
“Sure we can’t leave her here to be blown up with the house, can we now?”
Finally, we departed towards the small lake where, allegedly, there was a water-skiing facility. I wished that I had brought along the Fitzpatrick manuscript to read while the young women, as I had come to think of them, were frolicking in the lake.
It was not, to tell the truth, all that much of a lake, not in the same category as Lake Michigan or even Pine Lake, to which we retreated when Michigan was too angry to permit us to ski. This lake, which had an Irish name that I could not catch, was at the most two miles around, with a small tree-covered island on the far side. Island trees sometimes escaped deforestation because Irish culture had decided that islands were sacred, that is more sacred than other things in a land where the sacred loomed everywhere.
The perverse Irish winds had chosen the moment we arrived at the lake, having bumped down a muddy dirt
road, to sweep the sky clean of clouds and leave the little mud puddle of a lake an inviting turquoise.
“See, Dermot Michael Coyne, aren’t you disappointed now that you didn’t wear your swimsuit?”
“No.”
“Go ’long with you!”
“That boat is older than the Republic of Ireland and the motor produced fifty horsepower only when it was brandnew, and that was a long time ago.”
“Well, I suppose it wouldn’t be able to lift a big, old man out of the water.”
That was unfair.
The “water-skiing facility” was a rundown frame house, an equally rundown little pier, and a wooden boat that might be useful for fishing, but little else. An elderly couple were in charge and welcomed us with characteristic Irish hospitality, offering us a small drop of something to keep us warm on the water. The young women declined, but Mr. Coyne, who was neither driving nor skiing, said he wouldn’t mind a wee jar at all, at all. Our host and hostess reacted as though my request had made their day a complete success.
“The boats at Grand Beach have four times as much power,” I whispered to my bride.
“Isn’t that because they have to pull old men out of the water?”
After she had picked over a range of decrepit wet suits, she and Ethne retreated to the bedroom of the house and emerged after considerable delay in wet suits, which included wet boots. I arranged the children near the single window of the house so that they could watch Ma and play with their blocks and trucks.
I thanked the angels for inspiring my decision to avoid the challenge.
Rory, the man of the house, went out to the boat and, using a funnel, poured maybe half a gallon of gas into the
tank of the old outboard. Nuala gave Ethne detailed instructions on how to bounce out of the water. The skis, I noted, as my wife carefully fit them on the young woman, may well have existed before the founding of the Republic.
Fiona, who had showed little interest in joining us in the house, was poking around the environment, sniffing for other dogs who might be present.
“Come on, kids,” I said, lifting the Mick into my arms, “let’s watch Ma hotdog.”
“Hotdog, is it?” my wife said, a dangerous edge in her voice.
Neither child seemed interested in my suggestion. However, Nelliecoyne, with a sigh, abandoned her blocks, captured her current favorite dolly, and walked out with me.
After several minutes of tugging at the starter cord, Rory was able to persuade the ancient motor to come reluctantly to life. Still carrying their purses, Nuala and Ethne climbed into the boat, which seemed to me to sink dangerously close to the waterline. They putt-putted out into the lake. The winds died. The water was as smooth as glass or—as I thought—a sheet of ice.
Rory stopped the boat twenty yards offshore. Fiona snuggled up to me, uneasy about the whole process. My son, who had never seen his mother ski, began to make noises like the beginning of a howl.
“Hush, Mick,” his sister ordered. “Ma’s going to ski!”
With that Nuala Anne, having tossed out the tattered rope and the aging ski, dove into the lake with supple grace. She shouted briefly with the shock of the cold and then yelled, “Och, Dermot Michael, ’tis brilliant!”
The Mick wailed. Fiona barked. Nelliecoyne, having seen it all before, was bored.
Rory started the boat and pulled the line taut. I wondered whether there was power enough to pull my wife out of the water.
She popped up immediately. I feared she would tilt the craft over its stern. However, it struggled manfully—you should excuse the expression—and chugged around the lake as best it could. My wife shouted triumphantly.
She was a picture of pure grace as she cut back and forth across the wake, a sketch of beauty against the blue lake and the sun-drenched sky. Fiona barked approval, and the Mick stopped his howl.
Then it was Ethne’s turn, on two skis, naturally.
“Won’t she get up right away? She’s a canogie player, isn’t she now?”
Canogie is the women’s version of hurling, one of the Irish national sports. It equips a couple score of Irish women with clubs and a puck and sets them loose on a field. To compare it to hockey is unfair to the civilized gentleness of hockey.
Poor, sweet Ethne, as my wife called her (in her absence), made it up on her third try and circled the lake once, screaming hysterically. She tried to cross the wake and flew into the air with a wondrous somersault.
Nelliecoyne clapped her hands in approval.
“I’ll take another turn,” Nuala informed her, “and then you can do it again.”
She dived in again, rose triumphantly from the lake, now rough from the wakes the ski boat had created, and shouted joyously as she rose and skimmed the waters.
This was the Nuala Anne I had married, a young hoyden innocent of depression.
Then a crackling sound cut the air. Rifle shots, I thought. Nuala fell into the water.
I heard a scream.
It was mine.