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“You stop that talk right now.”

“I will not go,” Fearghal said. Next to him, Noel began to cry. “Does that mean we’re to become priests? Me and Noel? I don’t want to be a priest. Noel, do you want to?”

“You certainly will go,” Cathal said to him, a flap of his perfectly coifed hair coming loose. “The students there don’t all become priests. You can decide that later, but in the meantime they’ll give you three meals a day and an education. You’ll have each other for company. Most families would consider it quite an honor to have a son go to seminary, and here we have two going from this house. You should be proud.”

“But not you, right?” Mac said. “You don’t even go to Mass. Why would you send two sons to seminary?”

Grandfather shook his head at him very subtly, as if to say it wasn’t the time.

“The poitín,” Mac pushed. “Is it? But how? An influential customer?”

Cathal gave him a look of warning.

“What about Macdara?” Rian asked, coming over to stand near him.

Yes, Mac thought. What about me?

“He’s needed here for now,” Cathal said. “We can’t be relying on your grandfather and the neighbors any longer.”

“WHERE WAS HE ALL THIS time? A whole month,” Sean asked when Mac rang from the post office. It was a fortune, but neither of them had the patience for letters at the moment, and it felt all part of an emergency. Mac knew the postmistress wasn’t charging him the full amount but he couldn’t muster enough shame about that to insist. He also knew that she’d threatened Cathal’s job if he ever disappeared like that again, but she didn’t go hammer and tongs at him because he’d only just lost his wife, and it was his boys who’d suffer most.

Sean had only learned of the plan right before they did. He hadn’t seen Barry in well over a year, and though he’d expected Macdara, he admitted he was glad to have at least one of them coming. “I assumed he was on the island, but he couldn’t have been. He couldn’t have found a woman there,” Sean said.

“I don’t know,” Mac said. He hated that anyone who walked into the post office to mail a package could eavesdrop.

“Where’d he dig her up I wonder? You’re not curious?”

“Of course I’m curious.”

“You’re stubborn. Like him. All right, well, what if you come too? Tell Cathal you’ll send money back. That’ll help.”

“I can’t get papers that fast, Sean, you know yourself. And anyway, how can I leave them?” Just that morning he made a huge pot of porridge and had his brothers sit at the table in shifts. He washed everything after and then washed the babies one by one because they were getting that redness around their mouths like they did in winter. Seamus, who was not yet steady on his feet, followed his brothers as they were climbing a wall and fell against stones and cut his chin. Twenty times a day Mac pulled him away from the fire, from the angry hoofs of the mule who didn’t like to be badgered by children, from the edge of the well. Every time Seamus cried the cut opened again. Eamon was worse because he could get higher and was that much faster. None of them talked about their mother and perhaps for that reason it felt, sometimes, as if nothing had happened. They were just in a strange holding space until the day she came back.

“Do you think he’ll really marry her?” Sean asked.

Mac sighed. “I don’t know.” The cottage was full of their mother, even in the most silent corners. The things she used throughout her day—crockery, woolen rags, spoons and irons—all seemed animate now that she was gone. Even the worn arm of the chair seemed alive with part of her. He liked going around and touching the things she’d touched. Rian, he’d noticed, often went into her bedroom and sat on her side of the bed. Sometimes he leaned over and rested his head on her pillow. “Come out of there,” Mac had said to him recently, worried that a child of nine could be so capable of holding all his grief inside. “Come out and sit with us.”

“Look at her hair, Mac,” Rian had said, holding the hairbrush that she kept on her bedside table up to the lamp.

Thomas came running in to see, then Noel, then the rest of them. When Thomas tried to take the brush, to hold it for himself, Rian cracked him on the skull with it, not hard enough to hurt him, just hard enough to make him go away. Thomas howled, everyone started shouting, and Mac stood over all of it and ordered them to stop, just stop.

“We’ll take a walk, will we?” he suggested. Everyone was easier to handle outdoors. “We’ll go write words in the sand so the airplanes can read them.”

IT WASN’T POSSIBLE THAT A man could go find a new mother for his children just like he might go out and find the blacksmith to fix a shoe on a horse. Grandfather Walsh returned to the island once Cathal announced his plan, but then he came back the next day to suggest that some of the boys come live with him for a while instead of the plans Cathal made for them. Cathal only got angry. He asked what would happen to them once the old man died. Where would they find wives or make a living? “Your own sons left, didn’t they?”

“Mine were grown. These are only small boys yet and they need to be home a while longer. Send Barry to England, all right, but Fearghal and Noel? To that place? You’ve heard the same talk I have.”

“Rumors. It’s a good school and it’ll give them a leg up even if they don’t take a vow. There are men in Parliament who went to that school.”

“You gave credit to those rumors not long ago. You’re the one who always says it’s a dangerous thing, elevating men above the rest, treating them like forms of God.”

“I never gave credit to anything. I don’t even know the rumors, just looks people give each other and no one says what they mean straight-out, but you know what I’ve noticed about my own people? They love a bit of bad news, so a thing gets believed and passed on having no basis. It gets exaggerated and built on as it passes from person to person. I only said that priests are men, like you and me, for all our faults. But they can teach maths and literature and these boys will be the better for it.”

“Send them to me for one year. Then we’ll see.”

“They go on Friday,” Cathal said.

But by the time Grandfather had walked into the Cuan and conducted his business, Cathal had a change of heart.