What the Wind Knows(7)

When I arrived at the Great Southern Hotel—a stately, pale-yellow establishment built a few years after the Irish Civil War—in Sligo at sundown, I sat in the crowded parking area and said the Rosary for the first time in years, grateful to be alive. I stumbled into the hotel, bags in tow, and after checking in, I climbed a staircase that reminded me of pictures of the Titanic, which was strangely symbolic of the sinking feeling I’d been battling since leaving New York.

I collapsed onto the big bed, which was surrounded by heavy furniture and papered walls in various shades of purple, and fell asleep without even removing my shoes. I awoke twelve hours later, disoriented and starving, and stumbled to the bathroom to huddle in the ridiculously narrow tub, shivering while I tried to figure out how to turn the hot water on. Everything was different enough that it took a moment to adjust but similar enough that I grew impatient with myself for the difficulty I was experiencing.

An hour later, washed and dried, dressed and pressed, I took my keys and headed down the ornate staircase to the dining room below.

I walked down the streets of Sligo in tragic wonder, the girl in me gaping at the smallest things, the grieving woman devastated that I was finally there and Eoin wasn’t with me. I walked down Wolfe Tone Street and over to Temple, where I stood beneath the bell tower of the enormous Sligo Cathedral, my head tipped back as I waited for it to ring. William Butler Yeats’s face—with white hair and spectacles—was painted on a wall next to words that proclaimed this “Yeats country.” The painting made him look like Steve Martin, and I resented the tacky display. Yeats deserved more than a shoddy mural. I passed by the Yeats museum in stony protest.

The town sat higher than the sea, and here and there, the long strand, glistening and bared by the tide, peeked out at me. I’d walked too long, not paying attention to how far I’d gone, my eyes gobbling up what was immediately around me. I ducked into a candy shop, needing sugar and directions back to the hotel and to Dromahair if I was going to attempt another afternoon behind the wheel.

The owner was a friendly man in his sixties, selling me on sour licorice and chocolate caramel clusters and asking me about my visit to Sligo. My American accent gave me away. When I mentioned Dromahair and an ancestral search, he nodded.

“It’s not far at all. Twenty minutes or so. You’ll want to take the loop around the lake—stay on 286 until you see the sign for Dromahair. It’s a pretty drive, and Parke’s Castle is along the route. It’s worth stopping for.”

“Is the lake called Lough Gill?” I asked, catching myself just in time and pronouncing it correctly. Lough was pronounced like the Scottish loch.

“That’s the one.”

My chest ached, and I pushed thoughts of the lake away, not ready to think about ashes and goodbyes just yet.

He pointed me back in the direction of the hotel, telling me to listen for the bell tower on the cathedral if I got turned around. As he rang up my purchases, he asked me about my family.

“Gallagher, huh? There was a woman named Gallagher who drowned in Lough Gill, oh . . . it had to be almost a century ago. My grandmother told me the story. They never found her body, but on a clear night, folks say you can sometimes see her walking on the water. We’ve got our own lady of the lake. I think Yeats wrote a poem about her. He even wrote about Dromahair, come to think.”

“‘He stood among a crowd at Dromahair; his heart hung all upon a silken dress, and he had known at last some tenderness, before earth took him to her stony care,’” I quoted, lilting immediately into the Irish accent I’d perfected in my youth. I didn’t know the poem about a ghost lady—it didn’t ring any bells at all—but I knew the one about Eoin’s beloved Dromahair.

“That’s it! Not bad, lass. Not bad at all.”

I smiled and thanked him, popping a piece of chocolate in my mouth as I traipsed back across town to the hotel that reeked of time and bygone eras.

The candy man was right. The drive to Dromahair was beautiful. I plodded along, gripping the wheel and taking the turns slowly for my own safety and the safety of the unsuspecting Irish traveler. At times, greenery rose so thick on either side of me, I felt goaded by the canopy that threatened to enclose the road at every turn. Then the foliage broke, and the lake glimmered below, welcoming me home.

I found an overlook and stopped the car, climbing onto the low rock wall that separated the road from the drop so I could drink it in. From the map I knew that Lough Gill was long, stretching from Sligo into County Leitrim, but from my vantage point, looking down on her eastern banks, she seemed intimate and enclosed, surrounded by squares of stone-lined farmland that rose from the banks and onto the hills on every side. An occasional home dotted the hills, but I didn’t imagine the view could be much different from what it had been a hundred years before. I could have easily climbed the wall and made my way down the long grassy slope to reach the shore, though it might have been farther than it looked from above. I considered it, knowing I could take the urn with me and have the dreaded task behind me. Part of me wanted nothing more than to dip my toes in the placid blue and tell Eoin I’d found his home. I resisted the call of the water, not knowing if the terrain to the lake’s shores was marshy beneath the grass that stretched below me. Being stuck up to my hips in boggy mud with Eoin’s urn was not in the plan.

Ten minutes later, I was pulling down the main street of tiny Dromahair, searching for signs and symbols. I was not sure where to begin. I couldn’t start knocking on doors, asking questions about people who had lived so long ago. I walked through a church cemetery, eyeing the names and dates, the clusters that indicated family, the flowers that indicated love.