Migrations(37)

I wind up in Gammy’s car with Ennis and Léa, while the others all head off to find a rental car. Gammy and Samuel’s place is out of town somewhere.

“I hope this’ll be enough for you now, Ennis Malone,” Gammy says. Maybe she’s one of those people who find authority in using full names. Her accent is the same as Samuel’s, the distinct “Newfie” mix of Irish and Canadian. “Although losing your men to the waves has never stopped you before,” she adds coldly. “Anyone’d think you’d started tossing them overboard yourself.”

This is an immensely cruel thing to say, and I wonder at the poor people she’s talking about; I wonder at Ennis’s involvement in their deaths and his regret. It shouldn’t surprise me. He sent Anik into a storm, didn’t he? Wasn’t it his determination to catch fish that nearly got Samuel killed? And the rest of us, besides?

I find myself coming to an uneasy understanding of the captain’s will. Twice before I’ve recognized something similar—in myself and then in my husband—and I know it to be destructive. How far will Ennis go to get what he wants, this mythical Golden Catch? What will he sacrifice?

“He’s home now, Gam,” Ennis says quietly from the back seat. I steal a look at him in the side mirror. His head rests on the window and he watches the ocean to our left. The burden of his desire weighs heavily upon him.

“Too late, Ennis Malone. Too fucking late. And if you’ve brought any trouble with you I’ll be giving you a hiding.”

“We’ll stay in town if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“It wasn’t Skipper’s fault,” Léa speaks up, obstinate. “We all know the risks. It’s a fool who steps onto a vessel and assumes he’ll leave it breathing. You know it, Samuel knows it.”

Gammy looks in her mirror at the much younger woman. “And do you think it’s fair, to use people’s devotion against them? To pull at their hearts until they do as you say, and take bullets for you as well?”

Nobody speaks.

Gammy looks at me and I brace myself for her next blow. “Who’s this one, then? How’d he rope you into his mess, darl?”

“I roped myself in.”

“Good luck to you, then. Lord knows you’ll need it. Now if you keep an eye on the hills ahead, you’ll see our place coming up a little ways.”

As we round a curve in the road a lighthouse appears on the headland, rearing into the sky.

“No,” I say. “Do you really—?”

Gammy laughs at the look on my face.

The lighthouse is remote enough that it’s not automatic, but still manned, and as Gammy tells me the story of her family and how they’ve always kept it, passed from generation to generation, I feel her deep sense of home. I can feel it in the earth, too, when I get out of the car and walk upon the rocks. It’s in the sky and the roaring ocean and the keening of the wind, it’s in the way she strides over her land and into her lighthouse; she owns this place and it owns her, tangible and unarguable. What must it be like to be bound so deeply and willingly to a place?

“You right, love?” Ennis asks me, handing me my backpack from the trunk.

I nod and follow him inside. The house adjoining the lighthouse is normal, really, not a relic of the past but an ordinary house, low-ceilinged, fireplaced, messy enough that it must harbor children.

And what children they are.

For an instant I try not to stare, and then I give up and do so with delight as they emerge from their shared rooms or come in from the hills outside. There are, not a dozen, but six identical daughters, the littlest six, the oldest sixteen, each with the same unruly red hair and pale freckled skin. None of them wear shoes. They look strong, a little dirty, very free. And they gaze at me with the same expressions of interest, with intelligence and mischief. I love them even before I’ve learned their names. Maybe it’s their Irish-ness, their familiarity. Maybe it’s the fabulousness of their sameness, or the strangeness of it.

They each hug Ennis excitedly, then Léa, and then the rest as they pile out of the rental car. Me they are watchful of.

“Hally,” the oldest introduces herself as she shakes my hand. She has the most disheveled hair of all and eyes a deeper blue than the sea on a clear day.

“And this is Blue, Sam, Coll, Brin, and Ferd.”

I say hello to each, trying to commit their odd names to memory.

“Don’t worry, nobody ever remembers us all,” says the one I think is called Brin.

“I’ll try my best.”

“Sometimes I make them wear name tags,” Gammy admits.

“You’re Irish?” Hally asks me.

I nod.

“We’re Irish!” says Ferd.

“A long way back,” Blue adds. Then, “Which part are you from?”

“Galway.”

“The republic,” Hally says. “So did you support the end of the War of Independence and the British colonization of Northern Ireland?”

I blink. “Uh … How old do I look, exactly?”

Hally makes an impatient sound and decides I’m not worth questioning further on the matter.

The rest of the adults are all gathered around the big kitchen table, while I’ve been surrounded by children in the living room. The fire is raging, even now with the sun high—the wind out here cuts through the house, turning the air frigid.