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BIRTH

CUAN AN MHÍL MHÓIR

“THE CUAN”

CONNEMARA, IRELAND

1963

ONE

“Macdara,” came a whisper, hot breath near Mac’s ear. “Dúisigh!”

It was morning. A bell in the distance. Mac’s body felt stiff, and he could tell by the light that it was later than he usually slept. Rian’s spot under the blanket was cold so he must have been up for a while. Prowling, no doubt. Exploring. Blackguarding, if such a thing was possible on the top of a mountain. If anyone could find trouble, Rian could. Down at the shore the tide would have pushed great knots of seaweed onto the beach and Mac and Rian’s brothers would have been sent to collect it. It was mid-May already. Fair Day was coming up soon and if Mac could figure a way there he’d have a great time, but his bicycle had been broken for weeks.

“Say it in English,” Mac mumbled to his younger brother. He didn’t want to move just yet—he needed a moment—but in those seconds he could feel the heat of Rian’s breath near his face again.

“Dúisigh,” Rian repeated as he shook his brother’s shoulder. It was just the two of them up in the booley house where their mother had slept during summers when she was a girl, back when cattle were driven into the mountains for the seasonal burst of grass. The booley had been neglected for a generation because no one kept more than a few head of cattle anymore, at least not in the Cuan where they were locked between mountains and sea and the only crop that appeared from the soil in abundance were stones. But as a young girl, their mother had stayed up in the booley for a few weeks each summer along with her mother, and her aunts, and all the other womenfolk in other booleys scattered over the mountains because the men couldn’t leave the sea. The small shelter had a packed dirt floor and a ring of stones marking the place to make a fire. The walls were just stands of carefully stacked bog oak built against one of the boulders that made up the landscape of wider Connemara and that Teacher said were all put there by a glacier, somehow. Outside, a battered ash tree gave some protection from the wind.

Rian gave up on Mac and stepped outside. Mac could hear him scrambling in the brush.

“Tar anseo!” he called eventually.

“English!” Mac called back.

RIAN WAS A TERRIBLE STUDENT, and English was his worst subject. It was puzzling to their mother because Rian was bright and tended to understand things quite quickly once they were explained to him. It was only that he couldn’t sit still. Last month, after a message sent home went unanswered (because Rian had crumpled the note and tossed it into the sea), Teacher walked all the way through the small village of Cuan an Mhíl Mhóir—everyone called it “the Cuan”—and up the narrow lane to let Cathal and Mary Joyce know that of the several Joyces he’d taught in his ten years as schoolteacher, this one was the worst. Rian talked nonstop, distracting the other children. He fought. He bragged. He was an all-around contrary child. The latest offense was that he refused to speak English when Teacher asked him to, and now the other children were copying him. Teacher stood by their fire while Rian and several of his brothers hid in the back room, mimicking the posh way Teacher had one foot turned out and one hand on his hip. They wondered if that’s how everyone who grew up in the city stood. With Rian leading them, they lifted their noses and repeated to one another every word Teacher said, except in whispers. Rian’s mother excused herself for a moment and chased the boys out the back door with the end of her broom.

Teacher reminded Cathal and Mary of what everyone in the village already knew, which was that if any local child wanted to get work one day he’d have to leave the area, and for that he’d have to know English. At age nine Rian should be in at least second class, if not third, but he was still in senior infants. And he wasn’t even ashamed!

“I don’t know much English myself,” Mary said.

“Why would you?” Cathal said, his tone telling her that if that was an apology there was no need.

“In school he has to at least try,” Teacher said. “I’m not saying he shouldn’t hold on to his own language. I’m only saying he needs to know English as well.”

Cathal crossed his arms and frowned, but Mary promised she’d sort him. She’d put his brother Macdara on the case.

“Now there’s a student,” Teacher said. “I’d have Macdara in school still, if it were up to me. I’d have him—”

“Ach,” Cathal said, waving the words away. He searched his pocket for his pipe.

“Now be telling us about your own little ones,” Mary said as she handed him a generous glass of store whiskey. To Cathal she handed a much smaller glass, and when he looked up at her with a complaint in his eyes she looked right back. She asked after Teacher’s new baby, his wife. Now that his official business was over with, he settled in and gave her all the news.

“And you, Mary?” he asked, somewhat awkwardly. “You’re feeling well? Do you think you’ll get a girl this time?”

Mary laughed. “Another boy. I know it.”

“Eleven sons,” Teacher said. “And King David couldn’t even get one. Do you ever wonder that God hasn’t given you a girl?”

“Oh, believe me,” she said. “I’ll raise the question when I meet him.”

But it was true what Teacher said about Rian needing English, needing to at least try, so after he left, Mary kept her eye on the road to catch Mac before he came inside. When she saw him approaching from the direction of the village she pulled on her shawl and walked out to meet him.

He was lost in his thoughts, she could see. But he was still boyish enough to blush when he was happy and when he saw her—unexpected at that time of day that she wouldn’t be standing at the stove—his cheeks flushed. She fell into step beside him and noted how tall he was now, how she needed a step and a half to match each of his.

“Are you missing your brother very much, Macdara?” she asked, surprising herself. It wasn’t what she’d intended to talk to him about, but it struck her as she saw him walking alone that a year earlier he would have been walking with Sean. The pair of them went everywhere together, but now Sean was in England, working. Mac, who was second eldest, would be next to go.

“I do miss him I suppose,” he said. “Don’t tell him.”