What the Wind Knows(13)

I stopped reading, a lump in my throat, and turned the page only to find another sad account of doctoring in Dromahair. He wrote, “One mother seemed more interested in me marrying her daughter than healing her. She pointed out her fine features, rosy cheeks, and bright eyes, which were all due to an advanced case of consumption. She won’t live much longer, I’m afraid. But I promised to come back with medicine to ease her cough. The mother was ecstatic. I don’t think she understands that I’m not calling on the girl.”

He wrote of Brigid Gallagher’s anger at the Irish Republican Brotherhood, of which Thomas was still an active member. Brigid blamed the Brotherhood for Declan’s death and for the increased presence of the Black and Tans, the British police force, throughout Ireland. Thomas “refused to argue the issue with her. I can’t talk her out of her opinions any more than I can ignore my own. I still yearn for liberty and Irish emancipation, though I don’t see how we will accomplish it. My guilt is almost as great as my longing. So many of the men who fought in the Rising, men that I consider my friends, are at Frongoch in Wales. And in my heart, I know I should be with them.”

He wrote lovingly of Eoin. “He is a light in my life, the glimmer of something better in my days. I’ve asked Brigid to keep house for me so that I can take care of her and the boy. Anne had no family to call on. She and I were alike in that way. Alone in the world. She has a sister in America. Parents and a brother long dead. Brigid is all the family Eoin has left, but I will be his family, and I will make sure he knows who his parents were and who Ireland is.”

He was like a father to me, Eoin had said. I felt a rush of tenderness for the melancholy Thomas Smith and read on. His next entry was months later. He spoke of the O’Tooles, of the efforts of the new overseer, and the satisfaction he felt at the weight the children had gained. He wrote of Eoin’s first words and his propensity to run to him, babbling, when he arrived home. “He has begun to call me Da. Brigid was horrified when she realized what he was saying and cried noisily for days. I tried to convince her that Eoin was saying Doc. But she refused to be comforted. I have begun coaching the little lad in the evenings. He says Doc quite clearly now and calls Brigid Nana, which made her smile just a bit.”

He wrote of the release, just before Christmas 1916, of the last of the Irish freedom fighters, as he called them. He went to Dublin to see them home and remarked at the welcome, at the change in the people. “When we marched through the streets the day after Easter, with all intentions of staging a rebellion and inciting a confrontation, the people jeered and told us to go fight the Germans. Now they welcome the boys home like they are returning heroes instead of troublemakers. I am glad of it. Maybe the hearts of the people have turned enough that real change is possible. Mick seems to think so.”

Mick? Michael Collins was known as Mick among his friends. The picture I’d seen made me think Thomas Smith was well acquainted with him. The journal was a treasure trove, and I wondered why Eoin hadn’t given it to me much earlier. He knew I was knee-deep in research about events that Thomas Smith had seemed to know intimately.

My eyes were growing heavy, and my heart had not recovered from the odd emotional toll of my visit to Ballinagar. I moved to set the book aside, and the pages fell forward, revealing the final page. Instead of a journal entry, four stanzas marched across the yellowed paper. No title, no explanation, just a piece of poetry written in Thomas Smith’s hand. It sounded like Yeats. It felt like him too, though I’d never seen it before. I wondered if it was possibly the poem about the woman who drowned in the lough, the poem the owner of the candy store had mentioned just that morning. I read the words and read them again. The lines were so filled with longing and trepidation, I couldn’t tear my eyes from the page.

I pulled you from the water

And kept you in my bed.

A lost, forsaken daughter

Of a past that isn’t dead.

Somehow love from sweet obsession

Branched and broke a heart of stone.

Distrust became confession,

Solemn vows of blood and bone.

But in the wind, I hear the strain,

Pilgrim soul that time has found.

It moans to whisk you back again.

Bid me follow, sweetly drown.

Don’t go near the water, love.

Stay away from strand or sea.

You cannot walk on water, love.

The lough will take you far from me.

I turned the page and was met with the leather-bound back of the book. There was nothing else written. Pilgrim soul that time has found. Yeats referred to a pilgrim soul in his poem “When You Are Old.” But this was not Yeats, I was certain, though it was beautiful. Maybe Thomas Smith had simply loved it and wanted to remember it. Or maybe the words were his.

“Don’t go near the water, love. Stay away from strand or sea. You cannot walk on water, love. The lough will take you far from me,” I read again.

In the morning, I would take Eoin’s ashes to Lough Gill. And the lake would take him. I shut the book softly and turned off the lamp, drawing the spare pillow on the bed to my chest, lonely and alone in a way I’d never been. The tears came then, a deluge, and there was no one to pull me from the water and keep me in his bed. I wept for my grandfather and wept for a past that was dead, and I felt forsaken when the wind refused to whisk me away.





11 July 1916