Page 3 of Whale Harbor

Mac looked up at the fog-shrouded mountain and shivered. He wished Sean was still home. He wished he could ask his friend Martin to come along, but Martin was gone too. Mac thought they had a whole year more to discuss plans, but Martin’s brother PJ had come home from America for a visit, and next thing Martin was packed off to Montana with him when he left. The Lees lived up the road from the Joyces and no one from either family ever passed by the other’s house without stopping in with news.

“Macdara,” Rian’s small face twisted with distress. “Please.”

THEY GOT A BIT OF precious attention from their mother when they told her the plan. They didn’t need permission, exactly—their whereabouts had been their own business since the day they could be trusted to wander out of sight of the cottage and find their way back—but she’d worry if they were missing at night, especially with their father not at home. Two weeks earlier, she’d given birth to a new son, and as Rian explained to her that they were spending the night on the mountain, Mac noticed that she was swollen, exhausted. A moment later, when Rian scampered off to gather a few provisions and the baby began to stir, she said to Macdara, “You’re a good boy.” She reached for his dirty hand and brought it to her cheek. She pressed it there for a moment and then let go.

FINALLY, MAC KICKED OFF THE blanket and got up. He stepped outside. There were a dozen black-faced ewes milling around the booley, red marks at their shoulders. The day was blue but had a skinning wind. Rian was gesturing wildly for Mac to hurry, to come look at something. Ignoring him, Mac looked down at the valley below, the route they’d climbed the previous afternoon, and saw that the houses of their small village looked flat and insignificant, like there was no way they could hold all the people, and gossip, and worries that made up their days. He’d been up here many times before, and had looked down at the very same scene, but this time something about seeing home from so far above made his heart squeeze. Everything that was broken and weather-beaten and threadbare up close was mended from such a height, and he felt certain if he stood there long enough he might eventually glimpse himself making his way down the muck-drowned lane. Then he lifted his gaze just slightly and saw so much farther—the mountains, the water studded with small islands. It was astonishing, how beautiful it all was.

Mac looked out to the island where their grandfather lived and where their mother had grown up. It was called Illeaneeragh, but they only ever called it “the island.” Two small hops away from that one was Crow Island, where their father kept his still. No one lived on Crow Island.

“My god, would you ever hurry?” Rian said.

Their father had been mostly on Crow Island since the new baby arrived. After the last big batch of poitín, Macdara had helped him plug and sink the jugs in the bog. A few weeks later Cathal asked him along again to see how it was aging. By the light of the moon Cathal reached under the bog in exactly the right place and raised up the keg just enough to clear the water. He pulled the plug and took a long draft of it through the reed he’d plucked on their way. He offered the reed to Mac, and Mac took a sip, but he could barely even swallow.

Cathal slapped his thighs as he laughed at Mac, who was coughing and trying to rid the taste from his mouth.

By his eleventh child, and his eleventh time pulling this disappearing act, no one took much notice of Cathal’s routine. It was just part of a new baby arriving. He left the island to deliver the post, and that’s when he might pop out of a field near home to say hello to one of his sons or suddenly appear alongside them as they walked to school or Mass or wherever they might be headed. He appeared from behind the grocery one recent afternoon, his wild shock of hair even wilder from the elements. They often spotted him in the distance on his bicycle, his basket heaped to the brim with post and packages, and it took Mac until very recently to understand there were also poitín bottles clinking in the basket under the letters, and Cathal was delivering these as well. He’d take the paper money he got for the poitín and put it in the tin box he kept under the bed he shared with Mary. That’s the box he always went to when he gave something to the women who helped whenever a new baby was born. It was the box he went to when the family had balances to settle up in the Cuan. A new baby was always a time for fresh starts.

At home, Mac slept in the loft with the other oldests: Barry, Fearghal, Noel, and now that Sean was in England, Coleman, who’d been promoted. The next four, called collectively “the babies”—Rian, Thomas, Eamon, and Seamus—slept in the room below. Their parents had their own room and that’s where the new baby slept. Once the baby got too big for his cradle he’d move to the baby room and someone from the baby room would get moved up to the loft and someone from the loft—Mac—would have to go somewhere else.

But where? Sean was working at a railyard in Manchester and living in a rooming house with a dozen other Irishmen from his age all the way up to great ages like fifty and sixty. If he missed home he didn’t mention it in his letters. He only told them things that happened, and nothing about what he thought about those things. All emigrants seemed a little different when they returned home, but the main thing Mac noticed was when those who went to England came back they were never better for it. For all the good news reported in letters—the reliable money and the shops full of anything a person could want—none of it was evident. Billy Coyle was great fun before he left for London but when he came back for a visit he was so quiet. His body had become thin and he hunched his shoulders as if to make himself invisible. Maybe Sean had gotten like that and they didn’t even know.

Mac would prefer to stay in Ireland. But in photographs he’d seen in newspapers, the other parts of Ireland looked different. The people looked different, too: their clothes, their hair. In Connemara, it was said that nourishing grass was so scarce the sheep had to wear eyeglasses to find it. Children didn’t usually wear shoes until they went to school. It was almost impossible to make cattle fat enough for market, and the fisheries were all owned by people who lived in different parts. That Cathal had a government job as postman and that the job allowed him an easy way to sell his other wares on the side was what had kept them there, tied to the Cuan, for longer than so many other families. The problem was that the area only needed one postman, and the man had eleven sons.

Years ago, when their neighbor PJ Lee—Martin’s older brother—struck out for Montana instead of the usual places in America, Teacher took the opportunity to tell them about all the Irish in a Montana city called Butte, nicknamed the richest hill on Earth because of all the copper there. Someone joked in that case Butte would be a great place for the Joyces because they needed copper to make the worm for their still. Teacher ignored the comment but Mac felt his face get hot. A book went around, opened to a photograph of a famous graveyard in Butte, which had a lot of the same names etched onto the stones as they had right there in the Cuan. When Mac held the book he glanced quickly at the names but mostly he looked at the sky, at what little he could glimpse in the backdrop, to decide if it would feel terribly foreign to PJ when he got there.

When Mac arrived home from school that day and reported everything Teacher said about Montana, Cathal said that man knew so much he bet he could milk a duck. When Mac told him that there were a lot of Irish in Butte, Cathal said: “There’s Irish in Dublin, too, but you wouldn’t want to be there.”

AFTER BEING IN AMERICA FOR seven years, PJ returned for a visit, just before the eleventh Joyce baby was due. Macdara and Martin had a plan to take the bus to Galway to see the races, but that would have to be put off because PJ was coming home with an American wife who wasn’t from one of the cities on America’s East Coast—breeds they were familiar with—but a girl whose people had been in Montana for generations. Mac barely remembered PJ, but he was curious. He wrote to Sean to tell him and wished his brother were home to hear some of the stories. More than any other return Mac could remember, everyone in the Cuan wanted to catch a glimpse of PJ and hear about his life. Mary prayed that the baby stay put so she wouldn’t miss any of the fun.

PJ had left Ireland in a ship but to return home in 1963 he flew in an airplane to Shannon Airport. Instead of cramming themselves into the damp Lee cottage, he and his wife stayed in a hotel near Oughterard, a good forty minutes’ drive. They rented a car to get back and forth, and for two weeks Mac watched for that blue Ford and wondered what it would be like to sit inside. PJ let the small children pack in and then he drove them all around as they begged for a chance to turn the steering wheel, but Mac felt too old for that. From the garden, he could spot the car’s roof gliding along the narrow lanes up to the Lees’ place, no doubt the beautiful, gleaming paint etched with scratches from branches. PJ wore cowboy boots and had a belt with a huge silver-plated buckle. All the kids lined up to punch him in the buckle, to see how solid it was, and after each child took a shot PJ beat his chest and shouted “Who’s next?”

The Lees hosted a get-together for the neighbors near the end of PJ’s visit. Despite being heavily pregnant, Mary went up early to help Honnie and her girls. When Mac, Barry, and Fearghal walked up, the first person they encountered was their own three-year-old brother, Eamon, who’d climbed up on a stone wall, gotten his jumper snagged, and couldn’t jump back down.

Inside, chairs were for the elders. Most people leaned against walls or sat on the floor with their knees pulled to their chests. Mac felt like he hadn’t seen Martin in weeks and he had things to tell him. When he glanced around to find his friend he saw that Martin and his younger brother, Peter, were wearing startling white shoes with rubber bottoms. The Lee girls were wearing headbands and sleeveless blouses and when Patricia passed by she smelled of washing soap. Mac could see the gooseflesh on her arms.

“Hello, Patricia,” Mac said and blushed.

“Hello, yourself,” Patricia said.

“I like your—” But he didn’t know the word so he tapped his own head in the place where her headband sat.

“Jenny brought it for me from America,” she said, and then it was her turn to blush. Jenny was the tall woman standing in the corner with the bright blond hair. People said she was the image of Princess Grace and Mac had to admit he could see it.

“What kind of shoes is Martin wearing?”

“They’re tennis shoes.”

“Tennis shoes! They’re very…”

“White,” Patricia said and laughed.

Once, when they were thirteen, Mac asked Patricia if he could kiss her. Martin had robbed one beer and one cigarette for each of them from the stash his father kept in the turf shed. Patricia declined and it had been slightly awkward between them ever since.

Mary and Honnie were cutting cakes and arranging the slices onto plates. Cathal leaned against a wall, twisting his eyebrow and arguing with a neighbor about the pope’s recent announcement of dismay about the world scarcity of priests. Radio Éireann was playing a sponsored program about horses and once in a while the program would pause to play a ballad. The Lee girls made tea for the women and the men sipped whiskey from mugs while PJ’s book of photographs got passed around. There were a few pictures of Chicago, but mostly they were of horses, the frames of buildings and their progress as they were completed, mountains capped with snow. Quite a few were of a long, green car called a Chevrolet Impala, which PJ said he loved almost as much as he loved his girls.

“He has girls?” Mac whispered to Martin. He couldn’t help it. He looked over at Jenny. She didn’t seem like a woman who’d had babies yet.

“Two. My American nieces,” Martin said. “They stayed back in Montana with Jenny’s father.”