Migrations(38)

“You should visit Ireland one day,” I tell the girls, sinking into one of the deep leather armchairs. “You’d suit it.”

“Can we stay with you?” Hally asks me.

Surprised, I say, “Of course.”

The littlest one, Ferd, climbs onto my lap and makes herself comfortable.

“Hello.”

“Hi,” she says, curling my hair around her tiny fingers and humming contentedly.

“You like history, huh?” I ask Hally.

She nods.

“Mom wants her to study it in college,” Blue says.

“Leave Franny alone, hounds,” Gammy calls from the kitchen. She’s taken off her huge woolen sweater and I can see that her arms and shoulders are thick with muscle.

The girls are reluctantly drifting away when I say quickly, “No, don’t go.”

From then on I have six shadows. Hally pummels me with questions. Ferd seems to want to always be cuddling. Coll doesn’t speak a word but she watches my face like it holds the secrets of the universe. Blue and Brin seem more interested in mucking around with each other, but stay close, and Sam laughs kindly at anything anyone says.

“Would you like to see our garden?” Ferd asks.

In the kitchen I can see Basil and Gammy arguing about the food they’re cooking for dinner. It seems Basil is rude enough to order people around in their own homes, and Gammy is the first one with enough moxie to stand up to him. Dae and Mal are playing cards again and baiting each other into fights. Léa is with the cars—I can hear her tinkering with Gammy’s engine. Anik has disappeared outside somewhere and I don’t know where Ennis has gone.

I smile because there’s nothing I’d like more than to see the garden. Ferd decides she will be piggybacked, so I hoist her up and march outside. Her little hands gently circle my throat.

“We’ve been harvesting for months,” Sam explains as we head up onto a hill covered in a marvelous, sprawling vegetable patch. “During the summertime.”

“And which vegetables do you grow?” I ask, picking my way over winding stone pathways between beds.

“These were onions here,” Blue tells me, pointing them out. “Potatoes were in those far beds, but we got all of those for the moment. These are beets, carrots, cauliflower, um … what was that one, Coll?”

“Kale,” Coll says in a whisper, running her fingers over the brilliant purple and green leaves.

“They’re Coll’s favorite,” Blue says. “See how they look like roses?”

“There’s heaps more,” Sam says. “Herbs all over there. Mint and stuff.”

“Mint, ugh,” Brin announces, pinching her nose in disgust.

“Do you know how to garden?” Hally asks me.

“A little. Not like you.”

“How do you expect to live sustainably if you can’t garden properly?”

I stifle a laugh. “You’re right, I should. It’s hard when you live on a boat.”

“Well, yeah,” she agrees. “But when you get home.”

I nod.

“We don’t eat anything but what we grow ourselves, and the eggs our chickens lay, and what we catch in the sea.”

“But we haven’t had fish in ages.” Brin sighs.

“What about other meat?” I ask. “Do you raise livestock?”

“No meat,” Hally says. She puffs her chest out a little and looks truly fearsome. “Dad says we don’t need it.”

Does he now. Samuel’s definitely been eating meat on the boat—no wonder he gave me such a sheepish look when I said I was a vegetarian.

“I’m impressed and envious,” I tell them, and Hally’s bristling gaze loses some of its suspicion.

“We’ve been taking down the nets, see?” She points to the end of the garden, where there’s a metal skeleton over which drapes a length of netting. “Hey, get out of there,” she adds to Blue and Brin, who’ve wrestled their way into a bed of dirt and are now filthy.

“Why?” I ask Hally.

She shrugs. “The birds haven’t been trying to eat anything lately.”

“That’s because there aren’t any,” Blue says as though it’s obvious.

I swallow. “That’s sad.”

Hally shrugs. “I guess.”

“But good for the vegetables!” Ferd pipes up cheerfully from my shoulder.



* * *



Next we spend time in the chicken coop, a great big maze of a space, with wooden houses in which the birds sleep and patches of grass for them to scratch around in. There are twenty-three in total, and they’re so used to people that they let us hold and stroke them. Their speckled feathers feel silky to the touch, their soft clucking is almost motherly, and I love it here.

It’s nearing dusk as we walk down the hill to the long stretch of sandy beach. Most of the girls bound ahead, but Ferd stays on my back. She grows heavier by the moment but I wouldn’t part with her for anything.

Two of the girls disappear to fetch their enormous black horses and lead them onto the beach. They both wave at me and swing themselves up onto the bare backs of the creatures, kicking them into a canter along the shore. Mighty hooves thunder and sand sprays; the girls seem miniature and dwarfed by their mounts, and yet earthily at one with them.