Page 28 of Whale Harbor

“The mill is well-sorted,” PJ said. “It’s here we need the help.”

“He looks very young.”

“They have plenty of horses and cattle at home, the Joyces do. They’re farmers going back generations.”

They were poitín makers and maybe fishermen for generations, but not farmers. Postmen and laborers, but not farmers. At the time of Mac’s departure they had only Elvis and Presley. His father had sold Thistle at the fair at the end of October. Mac glanced over at Jenny. She’d been to the Cuan. She’d seen everything. They had one skinny cow they kept for milk. She was named Queen Elizabeth but they called her Lizzie for short.

“Okay,” Bill said, grasping Mac by the upper arm just as he might feel around a heifer’s flank. “You’re tall enough, that’s for sure. And you’ll fill out. Jenny told me what you all eat over there. Potatoes and seaweed.” He made a face. “A year here and you’ll see big changes.”

Jenny had her head to the pots in the sink, scrubbing.

SIMON SHOWED UP WHEN MAC had been there nearly a week. No one said where he’d been. He was in his thirties, older than PJ, and had been working as a journeyman ranch hand since he was eighteen. One day he got upset when Mac hung his belt from the hook where Simon usually hung his. Simon wasn’t like Coleman exactly—sweet, soft-spoken Coleman—but there was something. Whatever it was, Mac sensed he was harmless and he was good company in the evenings when there was nothing to do but play cards or talk. He told them about hippies and marijuana and Martin nodded now and then and looked over at Mac as if to say it was true, he’d been there seven months and he’d heard it all. The three Irish drank either tea or bottled American beer when they played cards, and Simon drank something called whiskey ditch. PJ spent nights in the upstairs part of the house with Jenny and their girls.

When they didn’t feel like playing cards they turned the television set on a very low volume and watched The Andy Griffith Show. Mac loved that mad Barney Fife.

ON NOVEMBER 22, WHEN MAC had been there exactly two weeks, Jenny came running into the barn asking if he’d seen PJ or her father. She was in her house slippers and wasn’t wearing a coat.

“Are the girls all right?” he asked.

“It’s President Kennedy. He’s been shot in Texas.”

Mac had been rinsing the feeding tubs and still held one in each hand.

“Come on,” she said. “Leave all that.”

They gathered around the television in the family room. Within a few minutes Bill and PJ showed up, having heard it on the radio. A line kept rising bottom to top on the picture, so PJ banged on the set and fiddled with the antennae until it was clear. Martin rushed in, along with a few of the day laborers. The girls’ school called to let them know that they were dismissing all the children for the day. The man on the TV kept diverting to a local reporter in Dallas but that man only knew what they all knew by then, which was that the president had been taken to a hospital. They stood around the television while Jenny kept repeating that she’d just had the TV on for company while she folded laundry, she was just watching As the World Turns. “There’s my cup of coffee,” she said, pointing to the mug on the table. They all looked at her coffee. Within an hour, the man on the TV took off his glasses and announced the president was dead.

Macdara thought of how word would travel through the village, up and down the lanes. He thought of his father twisting his eyebrow and saying they were savages, whoever would kill a man like that.

MAC KNEW HE SHOULD WRITE to everyone at home, especially to tell them what it had been like in America on the day John Kennedy was killed, but he didn’t. He wanted to send Rian his own letter, but Cathal would open it, and one of the others would get their hands on it. He missed all of them, but he worried about Rian. He browsed postcards whenever he went into town and considered mailing Rian a photo of a pair of bison, or a scene of steam rising from a hot spring. They’d all look at it but it would be Rian’s name on the address line and he might feel good about that. But every time he browsed the cards he ended up telling himself he’d buy one next time he was in. Then the next time came and he figured: next time.

Should he mail one to Vincent, too, for Rose to show him one day? He’d wanted to stop by Rose’s house on his way to Shannon Airport on the day he was leaving, but there hadn’t been enough time and Kevin pointed out that a baby wouldn’t know anyway. But Rose would tell him, Mac thought. One day when he was old enough she’d tell him that his brother made sure to say goodbye to him before he left for America, that he hadn’t forgotten. But Kevin had to get the borrowed car back by an appointed time and Mac didn’t insist. Honnie assured him that she knew Rose, knew the Griffiths were a good family, that Vincent would be well cared for. “And he won’t miss what he never knew,” she said to him gently. It was a terrible thing to think about. How hurt their mother would be, he imagined, if she was watching them from heaven. The baby she’d carried and delivered and soothed would not miss her.

MAC FELT LOST, AT FIRST, when it came to the work he was meant to be doing. Even things as small as filling a bucket with water—he walked around and around the outside of the stable with the empty bucket until Simon pointed to a long hose attached to a spigot. One twist and he had water. He couldn’t find rags. He couldn’t find the medicine that PJ mentioned needed to be added to horses’ feed because of parasites, and then when he found it, he couldn’t find the place where he’d written down which horses were supposed to get it. PJ had showed him the basics of driving a truck—“forward, back, on, off, it’s not rocket science”—and given him a rough idea of what needed doing, then left him to it. Mac reminded himself that they were only cows and horses, same as home, only there were more of them and they were fatter. He could figure this out, it was just a matter of scale. It was good to start in the winter, PJ said, because there wasn’t as much to do. He could get the lay of the land and be ready for spring.

THEY HAD CHRISTMAS ALL TOGETHER, going to Teaberry for Mass, and then back to the house. A few of Jenny’s relatives showed up. When Bill Cunningham came to the back door dressed as Santa the Lee girls screamed their heads off and asked to sit in his lap. Someone brought a game called Life and next thing Mac was seated at a table and Jenny’s cousin gave him a tiny automobile that was meant to represent him, and after spinning the wheel and moving the car along a track he went through each of life’s milestones: marriage, children, a house.

WHEN THE TIME CAME FOR opening presents, Mac figured that’s when he’d make his exit. He’d bought brightly patterned mittens for each of the girls, but after mailing most of what he’d made to repay Vincent in Boston he didn’t have enough money to get anything for anyone else. As he headed for the hallway that led to the bunks, Jane—PJ and Jenny’s younger girl—stopped him. Only three, she pulled him back to the family room by the hand and then delivered to him, Martin, and Peter identical packages wrapped in red paper. When they unwrapped them they found individual boxes of stationery that had a neat groove for a pen in the top of the box. Also tucked into the box was a strip of five airmail stamps. Overwhelmed, Mac coughed and went to the kitchen for a moment to stand at the back door, where he could see across the yard to the stable.

Rian, he thought. Rian. Christmas was his favorite day. Last Christmas, their mother was alive. Mac couldn’t remember if the babies got anything, but the older ones had gotten two hurleys and a sliotar to share between them. Rian was worried he wouldn’t be included because he still slept in the baby room but their mother had assured him he could have his turn like the rest of them. They were lucky, they knew. Their father’s postman job made them lucky because it didn’t depend on fields or animals or weather. Some of the neighbors would get nothing so if any of them bragged about it at school there’d be a fight. This warning was mostly directed at Rian. Cathal had stayed back from Mass as always, but he had store whiskey out and extra turf on the fire when they returned. Vincent was in their mother’s belly but she wasn’t big yet. In the evening, Coleman sang “Don Oíche Úd i mBeithil” without any instruments and they all hushed to listen.

After Christmas would be long and cold, PJ warned them now. The most difficult time of year. Once they got to Saint Patrick’s Day, the worst would be over.

EVERY SNOWFALL IN MONTANA SEEMED impressive to Mac, but at the end of February there was talk of a real one. It was 1964, and Mac had been in America for three and a half months. In a few weeks he’d be seventeen. He’d gotten to know the ranch, but except for a weekly trip to Teaberry he’d not ventured farther. On the map of the United States the Lees kept under the glass of what Jenny called the coffee table, he was four inches from California and fifteen inches from New York. Sometimes he moved his finger beyond the edge of the map, beyond the edge of the table, all the way over to where he imagined Ireland would be if the map were bigger.

When talk of the blizzard got serious, PJ and Bill called a meeting with everyone to discuss the plan for the next day—who’d do what and how to protect the animals above all. The snow was promised to start around lunchtime. First thing in the morning they would try to draw the herd together by going out with the feed truck; the cattle were smart and knew the sound, would start walking toward it even if it was not the usual time. PJ said he hated to trick them but it was the fastest way to get them together. The others would be ready to round them on horseback.

The next day dawned with a heavy, metallic feel to the air. The weather bulletin said once again that the snow would begin around noon, but when Mac looked up from his tea he saw the first flakes floating down. Breakfast was quicker and quieter than usual. By the time they headed outside the snow had picked up and the wind was loud and strong. PJ drove the feed truck as planned, and many of the cattle did move toward it as he predicted they would, but the others probably couldn’t hear it over the wind. They tried to round up the rest but some sheltered behind haystacks, others at the windbreaks Jenny’s grandfather had planted, and they refused to budge. By lunch the blizzard was in full rage, driving down hard and adding up quicker than Mac knew was possible. The newest calves refused to go headfirst into the wind to the usual barn door, so PJ shouted at Mac to take down a gate, drive them around toward the east, and then guide the ones who were willing between the barn’s east gable and a snowbank. Every so often one would run off, dodge between haystacks, and disappear into the white blank.

That night, the men stayed in the stable in case they wouldn’t be able to get to it in the morning. As they distributed what Jenny had packed and began to eat, PJ recalled a time when the fog was so thick over the Cuan that no one could see their own hand in front of their face. Mac and Martin had been very small, Peter hadn’t even been born yet, but PJ remembered that there was no school, no work, no one dared ride a bicycle. A torchlight wouldn’t illuminate more than an inch or two. Except for hearing the ocean, all sense of direction was lost and a neighbor’s cattle, eight or ten head, walked right off the edge of Piper’s cliff. When the fog finally began to lift, the shore was thick with seals. They were sprawled on every rock, dozens of them, and as a group they began shuffling back to the water like they’d been caught sneaking up to the human places when no one could see.

Simon and Bill, who’d spent no time near an ocean, couldn’t imagine such a thing. They knew only grizzlies and bobcats. Mac and Peter told all of them about the whale, which washed up after Martin left for America with PJ. To illustrate its size, Mac stood up and walked to the farthest set of doors, which were rattling in the wind.

“Peter? Would you say that’s about right?”

“I’d say so,” Peter said, nodding.

“No way,” Simon said.