Hannah turns and takes the bread from the stove. With bare hands. A scorch at her fingertips. She steps to the kitchen sink, runs cold water on the burn.
—I was thinking, Mum. You know. Maybe you’d have a word with him? Maybe he’d go out, just this once? Lawrence has been talking about him all week long.
—You’re his mother.
—Aye. He listens to you but.
—He could maybe row out the decoys.
—He could, that.
Through the window, along the shore, she spies Ambrose wandering under the brown of his hat. He has always loved the lake. It stretches beyond him, a wide plash of gray. He will come in shortly, she knows, rubbing his hands together, looking for the warmth of a fire, a small brandy and a newspaper, the ordinary pleasures of an early September.
THE HUNTERS RETURN
at lunchtime, trudging along the laneway, shotguns swinging. She doesn’t know many of them. Friends of Lawrence. A lawyer, a councilman, an artisan boatmaker.
—Where’s Tomas? says Lawrence.
—Beyond in his room.
Lawrence wears his shirt buttoned high. He is big-boned underneath it. He holds, by the neck, two goldeneyes. He drops the birds on
the table, turns away, fills his pipe with tobacco, tamps it on the heel of his hand.
—He’ll be on then for tomorrow?
—Ach, leave him be, says Hannah.
—Do him the world of good.
—Lawrence. Please.
He shrugs off his cardigan and hangs it by the edge of the fire, mutters. A big man, a small voice. He livens when he joins his friends in the living room.
By late afternoon Lottie and Hannah have their hands in the warm guts of a cooked bird. Hannah pulls her fingers expertly along the bottom of the body and the flesh separates in her fingers. She spreads the meat out on a platter, with some slices of apple and a berry garnish. An extravagant gesture of color.
The men sit at the table, eating, all except Tomas. Jackets draped over the backs of their chairs. Hats perched on the windowsill. A loud laughter rolling amongst them. An ease to the day. A slow banter. A sliding away.
SHE IS GLAD
to see Tomas emerge from his room, darkdown, when the guests have left. He wears an old fisherman’s sweater many sizes too big, belonging once to Ambrose. He wanders around, an air of sleep still about him. Nods to Lawrence across the room. A gulf between them, stepfather and son. Always a layer of cloud.
He rows out in the evening, after dinner, to check his star charts. In his long wading boots. Binoculars at his neck. They can see him operate on the lake, a small pinpoint of red flashlight drifting along the shore. There is a low moon, a small rip of wind across the lough.
When he hits the oar against the water, the light jumps and swerves and shifts, then settles down once more.
EARLY ON SATURDAY
morning she wakes Ambrose for the hunt. The night is pitch-black outside. The cold stuns her cheekbones. She has prepared his clothes already. A warm undershirt and long johns. A heavy tweed jacket. Two pairs of socks. Folded on the small wooden chair. His toothbrush laid out, but no razor. It is the one day of the year when Ambrose does not shave early.
A sweep of headlights over the ceiling. The other guests coming down the laneway. Three, four, five of them this morning. The squelch of their tires in the mud. Lawrence’s voice already among them. A whisper and a shushing of the dogs. The drift of cigarette smoke from outside.
In the kitchen she and Hannah ready breakfast: just toast and tea, no time for a fry. The men are dark-eyed, gruff, weary. They glance out the window at the early dark. Fixing batteries in their torches. Checking cartridges. Tightening their laces.
His silhouette shows sudden in the hallway. She is quite sure, at first, that Tomas has been up all night. It has happened before. He has often spent the whole evening out on the water with his star charts. He slouches his way through the kitchen, nods to the men at the table, sits down next to Ambrose. The ritual acknowledgments. They eat breakfast together and then Tomas rises with Lawrence—not a word between them—and together they go to the pantry where the bolted silver safe is kept.
Lottie watches as the bare bulb throws a globe of light down upon them. Lawrence spins the dial on the safe, reaches in, turns to Tomas. She watches her grandson hold the unfamiliar weight in his hand. Bits and pieces of the language floating towards her: twelve-gauge, five-shot, 36-gram load.
—You’ll be going out then? says Hannah.
An astonishing calm in Hannah’s voice, but her body betrays her: the shoulders tight, her neck cords shining, her eyes a premonition of ill fate. She flicks a look at Lawrence. He shrugs, taps at the pipe in his breast pocket, as if that is the thing that will monitor everything.
—Thought I’d give it a go, says Tomas.
—Better have your woolies on.
The kitchen awhirl now. The rumor of dawn. The guests step outside. Tomas leans down to tighten his hiking boots. Hannah takes Lawrence by the collar, whispers something urgent in his ear. Lottie, too, takes Ambrose aside, beseeches him to look after the boy.
—We’ll be back by noon.
She is still in her dressing gown as she watches them go. A regiment. The marks of their bootprints in the mud. The dogs loping patiently behind them. They disappear around the red gatepost and the sky rises up as they grow small.
THE MORNING SOUNDS
loud with the retort of the guns. Double blasts. Each one a sharp kick inside her. Lottie finds herself entirely on edge. Just to walk around the kitchen needs the utmost control. She would love to wipe her hands clean of flour and step out the half-door, hurry along the laneway, down to the lakeshore, check on them, watch them, bring them sandwiches, milk, a flask. Her eyes can find no resting place. With each shot she looks out the window. A blankness of gray.
Columns of rain pour distantly over the lake. The branches of the trees knit the wind. Surely, now, the storm will bring them home. She turns to the radio for the ease of noise. Bombs doing what bombs will. She searches the dial and settles on a classical station. On the hour mark even that, too, is interrupted. An incendiary device in Newry. Three dead, twelve wounded. No warning.
She watches the shape of her daughter move from table to stove to pantry to fridge. Hannah fakes unconcern. She kneads the dough and allows the bread to rise. As if the heat from the oven itself might push forward the hands of the clock on the stove. An occasional chatter between them. Did Ambrose have a proper belt? Was Tomas given the thickest of socks? Would Lawrence be alongside them both? Did everyone take an oilskin? When was the last time they shot a scaup? Did he bring his eyeglasses? Has he ever even pulled a trigger before?
IT IS LATE
lunchtime before they hear the bark of a dog. The men come down the road as routinely as one might expect: Ambrose and Tomas bringing up the rear, the width of the grassy median between them. Their jackets dark with rain. Shotguns slung over their shoulders. A hint of fatigue in the walk.
She greets them at the front of the cottage, opens the latch on the half-door, beckons them in.
Tomas shucks his jacket and hangs it on the fire irons, bangs his heels on the floor until his boots come off, pulls his wadded socks from his toes, puts them down by the fire. He sits, long and languid, in the chair, hides himself under a towel. A warm smoke rising from his boots and socks.
—What about ye, Nana?
She stands close to the fire, her back against the mantelpiece. She will hold the moment for a long time, the sight of him in the chair, a small crease of light from the fire flickering at the end of his raindark boots.
—Did you like it, then?
—Oh, aye, I suppose.
—Get anything?
—Granddad bagged himself a couple.
There are times—months later, years later, a decade later even—that it strikes Lottie how very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit. She will spend so much of her time wondering why she did not sit down with Tomas and inquire what exactly it was that brought him out the road in the morning, what guided him along the shore, what strange compulsion led him towards the hunt? What was it like, to walk down by the lakeside and crouch in the grass and wait for the birds and the dogs to disturb the blue and the gray? What words went between him and Ambrose, what silence? What sounds did he hear across the water? Which of the dogs hunkered next to him, waiting? How was it that he had changed his mind so simply? She wished, then, that she had carved open whatever idea had crossed his mind in the early hours that one September morning. Was it just one of those random things, slipshod, unasked for, another element in the grand disorder of things? Perhaps he did not want to see his grandfather stepping out alone. Or he overheard his mother talking of the hunt. Or maybe how his stepfather wanted so badly for him to join. Or perhaps it was just pure boredom.
She would find herself wondering—stuck at a traffic light on the Malone Road, or in the butcher shop on the Ormeau Road, or in the peace group on the Andersonstown Road, or in the shadows of Sandy Row, or at the marches where they carried pictures of their loved ones, or the days she found herself outside Stormont awaiting any news of decency, or strolling the rim of the island, or at the back court of the tennis club in Stranmillis, or simply just walking down the stairs with Ambrose, adding day to day, hour to hour—what it was that brought Tomas to the moment, how it became part of the constant unfolding, what was it that changed his mind.
She never asked. Instead, she watched Tomas lift the towel—scuffing
it through his hair—and she returned, then, to the kitchen, lit the flame under the stove, the whole of a happiness moving over her.
YELLOW LEAVES LIE
in scattered profusion on the green lawn. The cottage has been touched by the edge of a decaying storm. These are the weekends she likes the most: they drive out from Belfast, down the laneway, pause a moment by the gate, the high-voltage wires singing at the end of the country road.
They park down by the barn, on the high side of the driveway where the ground stands firmer, and they use the leaves for grip as they make their way to the half-door.
TOMAS IS SHOT
dead seven weeks into the hunting season. In the early morning dark. In his small blue rowboat. In his new ritual of scattering the decoys out on the water.
She is asleep when she hears the first shot. Ambrose beside her. The rise and fall of his chest. His irregular breath in the back room of the cottage. He shifts slightly in the sheets and turns towards her. His pajama top open. A small triangle of flesh at his neck. The heavy odor of his breath. Lottie shifts slightly away from him. An air of dust about the room. Sure, at first, that she is mistaken. Not a familiar sound for the dark. A crack of falling brick from inside the chimney perhaps: it has happened before. Or the shatter of an outside slate. She fumbles at her nightstand to check her watch. Brings it close to her eye. Has to turn it in her hand, over and over. Five twenty in the morning. That was not a gunshot. Too early for that. Something falling perhaps in the barn outside, or some disturbance from the living room. She glances towards the window. The rain hard against it. The bare cold of the frame when she touches it.
There is, then, a second shot. She puts her hand to Ambrose’s shoulder, allows it there a moment. Maybe she has overslept. The curtains are tight after all. Some trick of the light. She rises from the bed in her nightdress. Finds her slippers on the cold floor. Steps to the window. Parts the curtains. All dark outside. Surely then she is just imagining. She peers out towards the lake. Nothing at all. Only the darker shape of a windbent tree. No moon or starlight. No boat. No small red light. No sign of anyone. Silence.
She closes the curtains and steps back across the room. Allows the slippers to fall from her feet. Lifts the edge of the blanket and the sheet and is halfway into the bed when she hears the sound of the third shot.
That, she thinks, was no slate. That was no tumble of brick.
I
’VE HAD IN MY POSSESSION, FOR MANY YEARS NOW, AN UNOPENED
letter. It traveled by Vickers Vimy over the Atlantic almost a hundred years ago, the thinnest of letters, no more than two pages, possibly only one. The envelope is six inches wide, four and a half high. It was once light blue, though it is now discolored with patches of smoke and yellow and brown. The writing on the front has faded and is just about legible. No postmark. It is crumpled at the edges and it has been folded over a number of times. For many years it was thrust in and out of pockets and cupboard drawers. At some stage it was ironed out and there is a burn in the upper right-hand corner, a small corruption of black, near the indicia, and there are tiny water splats across the envelope as if, perhaps, it was once carried out into the rain. There is no seal, no insignias, no discernible shape to what may lay inside.
The letter has been passed from daughter to daughter, and through a succession of lives. I am almost half the letter’s age, and have no daughter to whom I can pass it along, and there are times I admit that I have sat at the kitchen table, looking out over the lough, and have rubbed the edges of the envelope and held it in the palm of my hand to try to divine what the contents might be, but, just as we are knotted by wars, so mystery holds us together.
I am shamed to admit that I have spent much of my time with no particular purpose, unfaithful to my inner promises—a couple of years nursing, a decade in the Women’s Coalition, some farming on the island, a few months selling cosmetics, a couple of years breeding bird dogs. I had a child at nineteen, lost him when I was thirty-eight. The bare truth is that I want nothing so much as to hold my dead son in my arms again—if I knew that I could see Tomas row a boat up to the shore, or walk through the kitchen in his wading boots, or step along the mudflats with his binoculars around his neck, I would tear every last piece of the letter to pieces, scatter the lives across Strangford and beyond. As it is, I cherish it. It is kept in the pantry of all places. On a middle shelf, on its own. Tucked inside a sleeve of archival plastic. I am partial, still, to the recklessness of the imagination. The tunnels of our lives connect, coming to daylight at the oddest moments, and then plunge us into the dark again. We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing möbius strip until we come home, eventually, to ourselves. I have no qualms about taking it out every now and then, and examining it for whatever small clue it might give.
The Jennings Family, 9 Brown Street, Cork City, Ireland
. There is a real flourish to the handwriting, a sense of curl and shape, a stylistic swerve. It was my grandmother Emily Ehrlich who wrote the letter, my own mother who brokered its passage, but it began with her mother, my great-grandmother, Lily Duggan, if anything truly begins at all. She was an immigrant maid from Dublin who
moved to northern Missouri where she married a man who cut and preserved ice.