Wheel of the Year

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and thumb the squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

—Seamus Heaney

As I stepped off the cement curb into the airport crosswalk while looking down at my cell phone, a car horn blared, and I jumped out of my skin. The bumper had stopped less than a foot from my shins, so I could clearly make out the driver. He gave me a toothy grin, and I menacingly elbowed the top of his shiny rental car as I bent to collect the bag that I had dropped when my life had flashed before my eyes just moments before. I opened the passenger side door and threw my bag into the back seat as I clambered in.

“Rule number one: don’t stare at your mobile when you’re crossing the street. You’ve got to be more aware, Edie!” This was his genial greeting after two years. “Remember we drive on the other side of the road and we’re coming from ways and at speeds you’re not accustomed to.” He sounded like he was quoting a guidebook.

“Thank you, I did live here once,” I noted. “It’s a crosswalk, and I wrongly assumed the good and gentle Irish people would stop for pedestrians.”

“You can’t trust the logic or the sobriety of my people,” Frank argued, laughing.

“Or their communication, apparently,” I added. “I was looking at my phone to see if you had called me back! I’ve been waiting for ages,” I said with a side-eye.

“I did call. You haven’t switched your phone over.” He laughed, shaking his head.

We were the type of friends who picked up exactly where we left off no matter the time or distance between us, and this occasion was no exception.

“Seriously, though, thanks for picking me up, my dear.” I kissed his cheek, and he smiled and squeezed my right hand in his left. “Pull over at the petrol station up here. I’ll gas you up, and we’ll grab a…” I trailed off, and Frank picked up the conversation as I searched for a cell signal, setting my phone to European service from American.

“You lived here once, you’re right, and now you live here again. I still can’t believe you own a house.”

“Well, I was willed a house; it’s not like I bought it,” I answered without looking up from my battle with technology. “Aha! there we go. OK, let me just plug in the address.” The bells and whistles of my Motorola went off as it announced it was in service.

“Just up the M1 to the A1, and then we’ll pick up the M2 and we’re there,” Frank responded, turning off the car and getting out to gas up before the journey north. I giggled at the simple way in which he delivered this information. He took out the gas pump, and I jumped out of the car after plugging my phone into the console charger to make sure we had at least three hours of battery life to get us to my new Irish home.

“I thought we could go over to the A26 coastal road by Larne so I can check the ferry timetables and have a pretty view. What do you think?”

He lowered his sunglasses to give me a look that said “You are acting like an American tourist.” But instead he ignored me, saying, “I’m going in for some weird-flavored crisps like pickle or curry and a bap.” I smiled at his use of the Irish vernacular for a ham and cheese sandwich, which was also slang for breasts, the equivalent of the American “boobies.”

Frank lived in England, but he was first Francis from Navan, a town in the Irish Boyne valley, with both Irish eyes and an Irish sense of humor. “And yes, we can go the scenic route, ma dearie. I knew it would only be so long before you had me out puking on some ferry on the damned Irish sea!” he moaned.

“Wait for me—I’ll pay for the gas while you get your food!” I called as he jogged in.

Inside, the attendant smiled at me as I dropped an armful of crisps, Frank’s ham and cheese bap he had selected before running out to stop the gas, and two waters on the counter. “Can I get these and the gas—I mean petrol—on number three out there?”

“Welcome to Ireland. Is this your first time?” The attendant asked. His creased eyes twinkled as he opened the cash register to retrieve my change. I felt my pulse quicken with the excitement of having euros clinking in my palm once again.

I closed my fingers around the change and cleared my throat as I gathered the large paper sack he had pushed my way between the crook of my left arm and my hip. “Oh, you know, why does anyone come back? It’s the most beautiful place in the world.” I smiled at “Gerry”—as was embroidered into his shirt—and grabbed a bottle of red wine from the rack next to the newsstand at the register. “This too, please.”

“Take it on the house, my love.” Gerry nodded, shooing me along with a nod of his head. “It’s the time to be celebratin’.” He smiled beatifically at me.

I thanked him and hurried out the glass doors. “Celebrate we will, for life is short but sweet for certain!” I called, hands full with snacks, quoting Frank’s favorite band to him as I walked toward him and he closed the gas cap.

The light was waning as we slinked around the curves of the coastal highway that led to my northern cabin, tucked away amid the bog and bramble of County Antrim. The quaint town of Ballycastle is nestled cozily between Derry and Belfast, with views into the Irish Sea as far as Scotland. We had passed the three-hour drive from the airport petrol station in rapt conversation about everything from Frank’s new nieces and nephews who came to visit/terrorize his houseboat to his most recent French boyfriend and my failed dating attempts back home, which were essentially limited to a series of dull postdoctoral students in and around the Somerville-Cambridge area. It seemed everyone from my past had converged there once I returned from graduate school in Dublin. People from my childhood, first jobs, and college popped up like spring daffodils, bursting from among the crowds of heads bent down in concentration on Massachusetts Avenue like it was newly thawed spring ground. I would meet people for a coffee or at a bar, and we’d talk about the past but have nothing in common beyond that. We played chess in Harvard Square or ice-skated at the duck pond in the common, but my heart was never there.

I did a double take in Harvard Square one afternoon after spying my high school boyfriend, a scientist I hadn’t seen in ten years, out a bus window. I guess people were drawn to the place because it hadn’t truly changed in nearly 250 years. It was still a nexus of cattle paths and brilliant minds. You knew what to expect from Boston. I liked it because I could still hunker down in the corner of a pub with a pint and listen to a burly bartender with an Irish accent and feel that I was here. Boston was magnetic, like Ireland, in the way it pulled people to its center, rich with industry, education, history, and medicine. But Ireland’s pull was mystical and entirely different. So here I was, pulled indeed, ready to confront the past I had left behind several years before. And while I had those “stranger from a strange land” feelings in Boston, arriving in Ireland felt more like a homecoming. Everything we passed on the road was familiar: the farmer in his tractor, waving dutifully as we passed; the modern metal windmills looking like giant alien structures in the middle of thatched roofs and slate houses; the border collies that ran along the road, herding cars; the dark pubs that looked abandoned from the outside but were filled with life on the inside. The green patterns and shapes cut by the land, parceled for sheep grazing, cow herding, and farm plots were like the puzzle pieces of my heart, each outlined with lacy stone walls comprised of stones that had been repurposed before America was even a glimmer in a patriot’s eye.

“It’s sort of cold for Ireland,” Frank said, squinting to see the next narrow turn ahead.

“It’s just the wind chill from the North Atlantic current,” I responded as I searched my backpack for the key.

We turned right off the main coastal road—if you could call it that—and started up an impossibly steep and rocky road. Frank’s eyes bulged out of his head. “Are you serious?” he asked. “Is this the right way?”

“It is,” I quietly responded, memories from my last trip here flooding my thoughts. “You can get up it, trust me.”

“If it’s ever raining or snowing, just go the long route. Take the main road all the way to the coastal road, and then turn right off the coastal road, up the hill. The turn is directly across from the ferry station; you can’t miss it.”

“I thought the Larne Ferry was forty-five minutes away?” He sounded confused.

“Oh, it is. This is a much, much smaller ferry to the islands. I don’t think it even runs in winter. I didn’t see any times when we rode by just now.”

“Don’t worry, I have Dramamine for you.” I smiled. “You can stop here to park. The house is just around this corner.”

Frank was already out, around the back of the house, standing on the wooden deck, and rattling the back door, as I hobbled up with all my luggage. I dropped the bags on the damp deck, and as I did, Frank swung the door open, and there it was. All mine. For the first time since embarking on this wild adventure back to my past, I felt a little self-conscious.

“You OK, Edie? Just overwhelmed?” Frank asked from the inside of the living room, which looked, through picture windows, over a hedge and a cliff down into the quiet roar of the North Atlantic.

“I can’t believe he left it to me,” I said, tears filling my eyes, remembering my elderly professor and only friend in Ireland other than Frank.

In college I had struggled to fit in with the Irish crowd, the age-old story of feeling too Irish for America and too American for Ireland. Round hole, square peg, all that jazz. And I was a square. I was the girl who sat in the front row, raising my hand for every question. The other foreign students did more to fit in—attended pub quiz nights, lived on campus, bounced energetically into group work—but I mostly kept to myself and lived alone. It was a great freedom and delight: my liberation from the competition of young-adult social life that had nearly killed me in high school. But every living thing needs some sort of shared experience and sounding board, so I had become close to my favorite professor before meeting Frank.

Sixty-four and happily married, with teenagers close to my age at home, he was hardly the predatory type. I was four to six years older than his kids. His wife was twenty years his junior and beautiful. They were so in love, laughing and telling stories around the dinner table. It was the only picture I’d had of a beautiful, functional family life. It felt like a scene from a Thursday night sitcom I used to dissociate myself into as a kid. It felt too good to be true, but it was deeply true. And I felt some sense of impostor syndrome being lucky enough to inherit a small part of it, here on the edge of the world, where I belonged.

Professor O’Sullivan and I liked the same archaeology, and instead of lecturing at every class, he took his students on magnificent field trips to obscure standing stones and ancient sites we never would have seen otherwise. We saw the cairns at Loughcrew, Ceide Fields in Mayo, Knowth, and Dowth; passage tombs aligned with equinoxes; and of course, Newgrange, the world’s most complex passage tomb, which aligns with the rising sun on the winter solstice. He led us, as only a boy who grew up on the Wild Atlantic Coast could, through bracken, hills, and bends to solitary stones that overlooked the ocean with ancient (and some more modern) etchings.

It was in these magnificent places, the ones where they say magnetic fields and ley lines converge, that I first became obsessed with ritual landscapes. The ancients sure had a knack for real estate, but I guess you would if you had your pick of it all. There were just one hundred thousand humans in all of Britain at the time the neolithic monuments I studied were erected. It’s hard to imagine that kind of space, or that kind of intimacy, when it’s possible to know everyone around you.

My professor—Sully, we called him—taught us how to decipher if something had been carved by stone or metal and urged us to expostulate in our most creative voices. It was OK to make guesses and be wrong, he said. That was never something anyone else in my life had made me feel. Perhaps the most I learned on our field trips with Sully was actually in between monuments, though. He taught those of us who didn’t know a doe print from a hare how to track and identify all the animals of the Mourne Mountains. But his greatest lesson to me, personally, was in grief. He had lost his sister in a car accident as a teenager too. She had been killed by a drunk driver on a narrow mountain pass, something that happened too frequently here. He understood the preciousness of life in a way that my twenty-year-old classmates could not. But I could. I had lived it too.

Once when I went to borrow a book from him for a paper, he told me that grief was a gift to be cherished, a sign of love so profound and celestial that it felt as if life could not bear it. But while life did bear it, and he had lived many years as proof, it could never be the same. “Never as sweet to live,” he had said, “but all the more sweeter living for knowin’ of life’s worth.”

We had cried silent tears in his office that day I learned about his sister, and we were forever bonded in a grief we wished on no one. He said he wanted to offer me a place in his family, something he had desperately needed in the early stages of his grief and had cultivated with his wife, the magnanimous Mary. I spent that Christmas with his family, drinking tiny glasses of port while tutoring his sixteen-year-old son in high school French and helping his eighteen-year-old daughter with her American college admissions essays. That was eight years ago, and I wondered about them for the millionth time since Sully’s death. They were surely missing their father at those ages at which life seems to be happening so fast, as people complete degrees, start careers, start families, get married. Life seemed to be happening like that to everyone I knew but me. But Sully, in his wisdom, had predicted that and had left me this house and our textbook on ritual landscapes to finish. I had a purpose, and what’s more, I had hope of a research professor position if I could achieve that purpose.

“Oh God, do you think I’m absolutely crazy?” I asked out loud as I ran a finger along the top of an oak dresser. I felt the O’Sullivan family’s warm presence in the cabin, despite the cold air blowing in the open doors from the North Atlantic.

“Do you want my honest answer to that question?” Frank responded, peeping his head out of the doorway of the lone bedroom like a curious little prairie dog. When I didn’t reply to him, he seemed all the more encouraged. “You’re fit for a straitjacket for moving to an old cabin in rural Ireland without a job, but some people like a little crazy because it speaks to the craziness in them. Especially around here.”

“Thank you for that, Jack Kerouac. The only ones for me are the mad ones too,” I quoted to my most literate friend, my only friend now, as I walked over to the large bookcase that covered the entire west wall of the cabin. “Mary said he left all his books and manuscripts here, so it will be easy for me to pick up and move forward with the research, like he asked. It’s set to be published with me as coauthor, so I’ll be flush when the book comes out.” I smiled weakly at my best friend. “I promise I won’t need any of that hard-earned freelance writing cash after I finish this textbook.” I winked. I was mortgage-free and income guaranteed if I could just write like Sully for a few chapters.

Frank picked up a massive tome on rock art in Brittany, ignoring me and moving on to the next thing with ease. “So is Sully like the Irish Indiana Jones? Do you think he left us some clues about your research?” Frank started removing books, flipping through them quickly, and looking between them as if for a secret map or cryptex.

“This isn’t The Da Vinci Code.” I laughed. “It’s academia. Even more boring.” I winked. “I think he just expects me to read through everything he wrote, especially the unpublished stuff.” I knelt down, opening the cabinets below the bookcase to reveal stacks and stacks of papers and a lockbox.

Sully had died of a brain tumor while researching the connections between local rock art and similar Scandinavian designs on standing stones around specific bodies of water. I had gone to Canada to research the same thing for a North American chapter that would be included in the book. I had been slow to send my drafts and data, and I had ignored a couple of his emails, feeling the pressure of expectation or success, something that felt too adult to me at the time. And so the longer I delayed and left him hanging, the more ashamed I felt to respond.

So imagine my even deeper mortification when I received an email from his wife inviting me for Christmas again. I would arrive on the winter solstice, and Sully would pick me up at the airport and we would go straight to Newgrange to witness the alignment of the setting sun. He had won two Newgrange lottery tickets to attend for the second time, and having already taken his wife (who hated the narrow crawl space and tight corridors), he had decided to take me instead of choosing between his children. He had given me the greatest gift of my life despite my ungratefulness and unworthiness. He had looked older and more withered on that trip, but it wasn’t until we returned to his home, long past dinner, with his family sitting around the dining table drinking tea (now that I think of it, there may have been some whiskey in it), that I began to suspect.

Mary had decorated the Dublin house so beautifully, with bunting and garlands and a massive tree, trimmed to the nines, in the center of the A-frame living room. But for all the gaiety and warmth of their home, my breath caught in my throat as I walked in to red, puffy eyes and ancient, dusty photo albums sprawled across the kitchen table. That’s when they told me. Not Sully—he was silent, other than asking me the next morning to coauthor and finish the book. Caitlin and Mary cried and hugged me. I guess Cian, his son, had left, probably off to the local pub.

That was over a year ago now. He had died just weeks later on a freezing January morning. I wanted to give the family some space, so I had been staying at a local inn, and that morning, when I left at daybreak to head to the library so I might have something interesting to show Sully, I saw the coroner’s car stop at the light in front of me and then turn right, down the road to Sully’s house. The memory would stay with me forever, and it sat like a stone in my stomach now, among his beloved books.

I ran my hand along a copy of Shakespeare’s Great Works, nearly six inches wide, in between archaeology references. “There is a tide among men.” I quoted Brutus and laughed because I couldn’t cry anymore. Frank and I always argued about whether Brutus was a hero or not.

“Ahh, I’ve got a better one,” Frank piped up. “Give sorrow words. The grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.”

I looked over at him, simultaneously surprised and comforted. “How the hell do you know so much Shakespeare by heart?” I asked.

“Just Macbeth, actually.” Frank’s last name was Campbell, and he took his Scots-Irishness so seriously that he wouldn’t even mention a MacDonald. I knew he loved the Scottish tragedy. We had debated whether or not it was in the top three tragedies on more than one occasion.

“Look, Edie, he obviously wanted you working on this. He told you where all the unpublished papers were, and his wife trusted you enough to give you his computer! I mean, you are meant to finish this for him. Look, he even left you his trowel.” Frank picked up an old artifact that was too rusted and antique-looking even to have belonged to Sully, who started digging on his family farm in the early 1960s.

“I don’t think I can use that.” I laughed, reaching beyond him to the pretty mahogany cabinet, adjacent to the bookshelf, serving as a makeshift bar. “But I could use some whiskey.” I smiled, holding the Jameson up to eye level. I pulled from the bookshelf what had first caught my eye. “Maybe tonight calls for a more…local poet than old Billy Shakespeare.” I winked.

I held out a tattered, much-loved collection of Seamus Heaney poems. “I’ll grab the glasses and meet you on the porch,” I said.

Frank looked like a schoolboy at a candy shop and lovingly took the tattered book from my hand. “Rocks for me, please!” he called on his way out to the deck. I made a disapproving scowl in the mirror over the bar. Everyone thinks they drink whiskey the right way, I said to myself, but neat with a splash of water is best.

“We’re starting with Belderring because it’s my favorite!” I cleared my throat and called out as I walked toward Frank, who was looking out over the balcony to the sea ahead. Just before I crossed the threshold, the fine hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I could have sworn someone brushed by me. It must have just been the wind through the open doorway, I told myself.

Frank turned and brandished the book, open to a page in the middle. “And we will end with my favorite, from our shared literature course first year and very apropos for an archaeologist, I might add: Digging!”

We snuggled on the bench under a wool blanket and read and talked and laughed, accompanied only by the roar of the ocean, the twinkling of stars, and the pungent smell of damp wool enfolding us. Frank was right: it was cold, even for February. But the company was warming. Or maybe that was the whiskey.

Chapter 3:

I’ve No Spade