What the Wind Knows(111)

“If his journals are still on that top shelf, they will tell you all you need to know, Anne,” Maeve said. “Thomas Smith was a remarkable man. You should write a book about him. And don’t be afraid to go back to Ballinagar. The dead have a great deal to teach us. I’ve got my own plot picked out.”

I nodded, emotional once more. I longed for the day when my pain and my tears weren’t so close to the surface.

“Come visit me, will you?” Maeve grumbled. “All my other friends are dead. I can’t drive anymore, and I can’t speak freely with Deirdre listening. She’d have me committed, and I don’t want to spend my last years in the loony bin.”

“I’ll visit you, Maeve,” I said, giggling through my tears, and I meant it.



I couldn’t face the top shelf. Not right away. I waited several days, hovering in the library only to retreat again, arms wrapped around myself and barely holding on. I’d been standing on a ledge since leaving 1922. I couldn’t move forward or back. Couldn’t move to the left or the right. I couldn’t sleep or breathe too deeply for fear of falling. So I held perfectly still on my ledge, making no sudden moves, and in that stillness I existed. I coped.

Kevin found me in the library, clinging to the ladder, not climbing, not moving, my eyes glued to the top shelf.

“Can I help you, Anne?” he asked. He still wasn’t comfortable calling me Anne, and his hesitation to say my name made me feel as old as Maeve and separated from him by six decades instead of six years.

I moved away from the ladder gingerly, still firmly on my ledge. “Will you see if there are some journals on the top shelf?” I pointed. “Maybe you could hand them down to me.” In my mind, I could hear a rush of smattering pebbles; I was standing too close to the edge. I closed my eyes and sipped the air, willing myself to be calm.

I heard Kevin climbing the ladder, the rungs protesting each step.

“There are journals, all right. Looks like six or seven of them.”

“Will you just open one and read the date at the top of the page . . . please?” I panted.

“All right,” he said, and I heard the reservation in his voice. Pages ruffled. “This one says 4 February 1928 . . . um, it looks like it starts in ’28 and ends”—the pages ruffled again—“in June of 1933.”

“Will you read me something? It doesn’t matter which page. Just read whatever it says.”

“This page says 27 September 1930,” Kevin reported.

Eoin’s grown so tall, and his feet and hands are as big as mine. I caught him trying to shave last week and ended up giving him a lesson, the two of us standing in front of the mirror, bare-chested, our faces lathered, razors in hand. It’ll be a while yet—a long while—before he needs to remove his beard with any regularity, but now he knows the basics. I told him how his mother used to steal my razor to shave her legs. It embarrassed him and embarrassed me. It was too intimate a detail for a boy of fifteen. I forgot myself for a moment, remembering her. It’s been more than eight years, but I can still feel Anne’s smooth skin, still see it when I close my eyes.

Kevin stopped reading.

“Read something else,” I whispered.

He turned the pages and began again.

Our child would have been ten years old now had Anne stayed. Eoin and I don’t talk about Anne as much as we used to. But I’m convinced we think about her even more. Eoin is planning to go to medical school in the States; he’s got Brooklyn in his head. Brooklyn and baseball and Coney Island. When he goes, I’ll go too. I’ve fallen out of love with the view from my window. If I’m to be alone for the rest of my life, I’d just as soon see the world as sit here watching the lough, waiting for Anne to come home.

“Can you hand it down?” I interrupted, needing to hold the book in my arms, to hold what was left of my Thomas.

Kevin bent down, the book dangling from his fingers, and I took it from him, drawing it to my nose and inhaling desperately, trying to find the smell of Thomas lingering in the pages. I sneezed violently, and Kevin laughed, surprising me.

“I need to tell Jemma she isn’t doing a very bang-up job of dusting,” he said. His laughter eased the tight knot in my chest, and I made myself set the book aside for later.

“Will you open another one, please?” I asked.

“All right. Let’s see . . . this journal is from, eh, 1922 to 1928. It looks like they’re in order up here.”

My lungs bellowed, and my hands grew numb.

“Want to hear something from this one?”

I didn’t. I couldn’t. But I nodded, playing Russian roulette with my heart.

Kevin opened the book and flipped through the first section. His fingers whispered past the pages of Thomas’s life.

“Here’s a shorter one, 16 August 1922.” Kevin began to read, his Irish brogue the perfect narration for the heartbreaking entry.

Conditions in the country have disintegrated to the point where Mick and other members of the provisional government are at constant threat of being picked off by a sniper or shot in the street. Nobody goes on the roof to take a smoke anymore. When they’re in Dublin, nobody goes home. They are all living—all eight members of the provisional government—in government buildings surrounded by the Free State Army. They are young men constantly on the knife’s edge. The only senior member among them, Arthur Griffith, suffered a brain haemorrhage on 12 August. He’s gone. We’ve lost him. He’d been confined to his bed but kept trying to carry out his duties. He’s found the only rest available to him.