PROLOGUE

Fit & Start

I’M COMING THE coast road into Moveen. This part replays itself over and over to a standstill, until I’m hardly moving. Out in the ocean are islands I’ve never seen in the pictures I have of this place. I take this as a signal I’m dreaming.

It is early morning. I’ve been flying all night. The air is sparkling, dewy, and new. I’ve landed safely and am on the last leg of the journey.

Gulls diving everywhere are the souls of the dead, rising in the wind, hailing me by the working of their wings: Nora and Tommy, my mother and father, Mary Maloney and her brother Sean, sometimes Sam Curtin, Johnny Hickey, Peg and Siney Burns, the brothers Hedderman, Danny Gorman, Kant Lynch, that one-eyed man, the pink Collins sisters, Bridey and Mae, and their brother Patrick. Patrick was a lovely dancer.

Sometimes they set to dancing in the dream, the Caledonia, the thump of their boots on broad flagstones mixes with the music in the updrafts of air. Andrew McMahon and Patrick Murray. And John Joe, J. J. McMahon’s ancient father. Haughs and Walshes, Deloughreys and O’Deas, and Paddy Mullany, a saintly class of a man, and lately Tom and Catherine Collins’s boy, killed by a tractor gone astray—all of them circling and dancing and diving among the islands. The sea is rising now, silver blue, the gulls are dancing everywhere.

And everything is becoming new again and known. The Holy Well and Bishop’s Island, the quarry and the rising, falling cliffs, then finally that curl in the road before Dunlicky, where the vista opens to the whole southwestern narrowing of land to its peninsular denouement at Loop Head. I stop and look and listen here, where in the year of “three eights,” some cousins of mine were swept into the sea by a freak wave whilst they were collecting sea grass for the gardens or the dinner. There’s a new stone here to mark the place and time where, twenty-some years ago, two boys from Cork drove off the cliffs on motorbikes. Nora wrote with word of the misadventure. “Drink,” as she told it, “had been taken.”

Sometimes in the dream my youngest son, Sean, is painting that picture of Murray’s Island—the fourteen-acre stone that rises two hundred feet out of the ocean and has always looked to me from the landside like a great gray whale turning in the sea. Poor farmers, it is said, used to graze their sheep on this rock. They rowed out in curraghs to the sloping western side. Was I told that in a dream? Now it is mostly rookery. And Sean is stationed by a heap of rocks—all that is left of Dunlicky Castle. He has his canvas and his oils and his brushes. His sister, Heather, stands in the tall grass taking photos while his brothers, Mike and Tommy, are fishing the cliffs. Shoals of mackerel ruffle on the soft sea. Mary is back at the house making tea. Sitting above the mantel now, the painting was done when Sean was the age I was when I first came here, when this coast road first began to appear and reappear in the space between my waking and sleeping.

The road slopes downward to Moveen, past the fisherman’s cottage gone to ruins at Goleen, where a stream slips under the road, down the rock ledges into the sea. Smoke curls from P. J. Roche’s chimney, his mare and filly foal grazing in the field by Goleen. I make left at the bottom of the hill and back the narrow road past the fields and cattle and households of neighbors—Mahanys, Murrays, Keanes, McMahons, and Carmodys, Downses and Carmodys again. A mile from the sea, I’m at the gate I stood at all those years ago for the first time, home.

When I wake from all of this, the cry of gulls gives way to bird whistle. The roar of the sea is the morning’s early traffic. The kettle gives way to the coffee machine. I go online to Clare FM and wait for the noontime news with Noel Fogarty. It’s 7 A.M. in Milford, Michigan. There’s news of the world, the country, and the county with the weather forecast and death notices. After news of the war and protests at Shannon, the gridlock in Ennis, and the chance of dry spells predicted for the evening, “Clare FM regrets to announce the following deaths.” Noel’s voice is proper and calm and among the sad details most recently: “Michael Murray, Moveen West, removal from Lillis Funeral Home, Kilkee, to St. Mary’s Church, Carrigaholt, to Moyarta Cemetery. May they rest in peace.”

The Lord have mercy on him, Michael was a quiet, decent man who farmed the westernmost acres of Moveen—high, dry pasturage and a herd of Friesians—then turned the spread over to his son, P. J., and built his retirement home by the road where he and Mary could live out their years. I’d often see him on my walks, painting the garden wall, working with his grandson in the yard, checking the fences around the cliffside fields. We’d have a little chat and go our ways. That was my last sight of him, last April, working his way down the land toward the sea to check on the yearlings grazing there—a Moveen man in his field, among his cattle, the sun divided by the evening clouds, the huge sea gone silver before him there on the western edge of his world.

My Mary and I send flowers and sympathies, through John and Martha Howard at Lillis’s, to Michael’s Mary and their family. We are, as is said there, “sorry for their troubles.”

I COUNT, BY my passports current and expired, thirty-some crossings in thirty-some years between my home in Michigan and my home in Moveen. I owe to both places my view of the world, my sense of my self, whatever I know about life and times. In Michigan I am the local funeral director in a northwestern suburb of Detroit. In Moveen I am the every-so-often Yank who writes and walks and is related to the old woman, dead with years now, who lived here too. What once seemed different, distant worlds entirely, altogether other lives, now seem like different rooms of the one house, branches of the one family, one language spoken in a blend of local brogues.

THE RITUAL OF RETURN remains unchanged. I stop in Kilkee for bits and pieces, the latest paper, matches, bread and milk and tea. At the Central Stores, Marion gives me the latest news.

“Christina Clancy died at Christmastime, addressing cards at the kitchen table. She was so good. The funeral was huge.”

“It was, I suppose.”

“And young Gabriel McMahon in February, the poor man, of a cancer, and left a family.”

“I saw that in the Champion. How very sad.”

I consider my options at the roundabout at the bottom of O’Curry Street, then drive ’round the West End esplanade to the sign on the left marked, SCENIC ROUTE, which takes me uphill past the last row of new homes, out this coast road around the north edge of Moveen. It is always fresh and new to me—this treeless, edgy, thick-grassed landscape falling into the ocean, washed by the wind and rain and tides—and I am put in mind of the first time and the last time I was here. I’m giving out with bits of songs now, scraps of poems, lines from old sayings—talking to myself almost liturgically, as if though alone here I am not alone, though distant from home I am home all the same, as if my being here has meaning beyond the sureties. I mark changes in the near term and the far and arrive by turns at the gate of the home my people and I claim as our own, persuaded that we are all what Nora Lynch used to say we are—“just passing through life.”

I’m passing through.