Land

Tomás¹ rises from bed one morning with a plan. He has used their savings to lease a ruined cottage and a plot of land on the peninsula, the very place he and Liam³ surveyed. Phina² is furious; she will not live in an eviction ruin. At the sight of the roofless, rubble-filled shell, she turns and walks away with her children.

The widow⁸ intervenes, offering shelter while Tomás¹ rebuilds. Over weeks, Tomás¹ repairs the walls, clears the chimney, and hires a thatcher. Phina² negotiates terms: she will stay only if Tomás¹ returns to mapping for the redcoats, keeping wages coming.

He agrees, swallowing his anti-colonial fury for his family's survival. They move in on a windless day. The house, standing on a flat shelf of land between two hills, with an ancient standing stone built into its gable, welcomes them with the smell of new thatch and lime-wash. Eugene,⁶ the baby, is born soon after.

Liam,³ now a student of Father Joseph,⁷ follows Enda⁴ to the copse one night. He drops his saint's medallion into the well as an offering, praying not to be sent on his father¹'s next mapping expedition. Enda,⁴ hidden in a tree with her fiddle, hears him confess he wants to be a priest.

When she mockingly sings his secret, Liam³ climbs the tree in a fury and grabs her foot. She kicks free, sending him crashing to the ground with a shattered shin. The bonesetter sisters splint his leg; he cannot travel. Desperate not to lose the wages, Phina² suggests Enda⁴ go in Liam³'s place.

She dresses in his clothes and meets Tomás¹ at the harbor. On the boat to the remote island, Tomás¹ discovers the deception, but it is too late. Enda⁴ serves as chainboy all winter, and in the islanders' evenings, she learns fiddle tunes from local musicians.

Walking home from the widow⁸'s with young Eugene,⁶ Phina² feels a strange sensation in her chest. She clutches at her son's jacket, then collapses to the ground. Eugene,⁶ who cannot speak, repacks her overturned basket and waits. When she does not rise, he wanders to a nearby rock outcrop to watch the sea.

Returning, he finds her gone. Neighbors have carried her body to the cottage. Rose⁵ weeps; Enda⁴ burns with silent fury; Tomás¹ roars his grief, his face pressed to his wife's body. Liam³ arrives with Father Joseph.⁷ Tomás¹ wants to bury Phina² on their land, but Liam³ insists on a church service.

Father Joseph⁷ presides. Eugene⁶ refuses to say goodbye, shaking his head violently at the grave. In the weeks that follow, Rose⁵ tries to hold the household together, but her stitches unravel and her bread burns. The family of six is now five, and the center cannot hold.

Weeks after his mother²'s burial, Liam³ announces he will leave for the House of First Formation. Rose⁵ begs him to delay; she cannot bear another loss. Enda,⁴ furious, retreats to the roof to avoid the arguments. Tomás¹ produces emigration papers he and Phina² had arranged: passage to Québec, a chance at a new life of freedom and land.

He begs Liam³ not to wall himself away with the Jesuits. Liam³ refuses both his father¹'s offer and his father¹'s grief. On the morning of his departure, Tomás¹ stands at the haggard wall sharpening his loy, refusing to turn around.

Rose⁵ and Eugene⁶ cling to Liam;³ Enda⁴ follows him to the end of the boreen, playing her fiddle. As Liam³ walks down the road, he passes the viscount's phaeton without deference, a small act of defiance from a man who is no longer a tenant. He arrives at the novitiate and renounces the world.

Enda,⁴ restless and trapped by domestic labor, searches Liam³'s abandoned belongings and finds the Québec emigration papers Tomás¹ had purchased, along with money for passage. She cuts off her long hair, dresses in Liam³'s old clothes, and walks to the harbor.

Presenting herself as Liam,³ she boards a ship bound for Canada. Rose⁵ discovers the severed hair near the copse and understands the depth of her sister⁴'s betrayal. Enda⁴ survives the Atlantic crossing, playing fiddle on deck for coins and to lift spirits. When ship fever strikes, dozens die and are buried at sea.

At the Grosse Île quarantine station, she meets a Baltic musician named Anatole⁹ and his sister, who help her pass the medical exam by lending her a skirt to conceal her male papers. She enters Canada as both herself and her brother,³ a spliced identity that will define her new life.

Needing money after the viscount raises their rent, Tomás¹ takes a surveying commission in Cavan. A sapper, impatient with a stuck cart, yells at Tomás¹ and drags him into the ditch to push. Tomás¹'s right hand, the one that draws coastlines with exquisite precision, is trapped between wheel and road.

The cart rolls forward. His hand is crushed to pulp. A drunken country doctor doses him with laudanum and sends him to hospital, where surgeons amputate at the wrist. Infection streaks up his arm in red lines; they amputate again at the elbow.

Rose⁵ and Eugene⁶ receive him back at the cottage, delivered unconscious by soldiers, a bandaged stump where his mapping hand used to be. When he wakes, he touches the absence and weeps. He mutters that this is punishment for a lifetime of working for the enemy, a retribution long deserved.

In Québec, Enda⁴'s savings are stolen on her first night, leaving her destitute. She sleeps under a park bench, washes in a fountain, and begs for work. An elderly French priest finds her curled in his confessional and arranges a position as a hired girl for a fur-trader's family.

Her spiritedness disrupts the household; she names the taxidermied animals and teaches the children Irish songs. Later, working at a Trois Rivières rooming house, she re-encounters Anatole,⁹ the man from Grosse Île, now a cook. He recognizes her immediately.

They begin playing fiddle and accordion together on street corners, their music drawing crowds and coins. One night in an alleyway, he reaches into her pocket to deposit her share of the earnings, and they become lovers. He promises to return from the summer logging camps and marry her. She gives him a promise to wait.

Now Father Gulielmus, Liam³ serves in Cochin, India. He teaches mathematics, weeds the mission garden, and visits the swamp-village where the poor live in clay shacks. Watching a grand new church rise from the ground, built by laborers whose children break stones with tiny hammers, he feels his faith eroding.

A distraught man brings him a stillborn infant, begging for the priest's magic to restore life. Liam³ can only offer prayer. The man spits a curse at him and shoves him to the ground. Then a letter arrives from Father Joseph:⁷ Tomás¹ is dead.

Reading the news, Liam³ realizes he feels no concern for his father¹'s soul, no belief in Purgatory or Hell. His faith, he understands suddenly, was merely topsoil over his father¹'s bedrock atheism. Standing in his classroom, watching parakeets burst from an almond tree, he knows he can no longer be a priest.

With one hand and a compensation pension, Tomás¹ becomes a wanderer. He carries a smudged map of Ireland and walks the country, following every lough and valley, searching for the place of his origins: a V-shaped valley with a grey lough, a road he walked as a starving child after the eviction, the last time he saw his family alive.

For months he walks out and returns, walks out and returns, his children accustomed to absences they cannot explain. Rose⁵ assumes he is simply restless. Only Eugene⁶ understands there is a quest.

One day, in a neighboring county, Tomás¹ lies down beneath a tree, his blanket roll under his head, and does not rise again. Passersby assume he is sleeping. He has found the valley at last, the road of his childhood trauma, the place where pigs rooted up his father's grave. He dies there, alone, reunited with his memory.

Walking to the strand to gather mussels, Rose⁵ comes upon the viscount's son¹¹ and another gentleman whipping a grey wolfhound puppy strung up by its neck. She intervenes, cradling the animal. The men turn on her. They chase her down, strike her to the ground, and begin to tear at her skirts.

Bran, her great grey dog, lunges to defend her and is shot dead. But Eugene⁶ has been uneasy all day, sensing something wrong in the wind. Carrying his father¹'s spade, he follows Rose.⁵ He finds the men on top of his sister.⁵

Without hesitation, he brings the spade down on the viscount's son¹¹'s head, then the other man's. He kills them both. Rose⁵ lies in the marram grass, her face bruised, her clothing torn, but the worst has been prevented. Around her, three bodies: two gentlemen and her beloved dog.

The widow⁸ takes charge. She and Eugene⁶ haul the bodies to the cliff and push them into the sea, making the deaths look like a fall. A timely storm washes away the tracks. She gives Rose⁵ and Eugene⁶ her life savings and sends them to the port to buy passage to Québec, to find Enda.⁴

On the ship, Rose⁵ holds Eugene⁶'s hand and tells him stories of their new life. But when the vessel rounds the final headland of Ireland, and the passengers gather to bid their homeland farewell, Eugene⁶ does something Rose⁵ cannot anticipate.

He places the rescued puppy in her arms, grips the rail, and vaults over it, plunging into the cold Atlantic. Sailors restrain Rose⁵ from following. She screams his name as the green water closes over his head. She is now utterly alone, clutching the last living link to her brother,⁶ sailing toward a sister⁴ she has not forgiven.

Anatole⁹ does not return from the logging camp. Enda,⁴ now pregnant with his child, goes to the timber company office and learns the truth: he drowned freeing a logjam in the river. Worse, the clerk mentions a wife and children in Québec. Anatole,⁹ the man who promised to marry her, had a family he never disclosed.

Devastated, Enda⁴ takes to her bed, unable to eat or speak. Days later, a knock at the back door rouses her. She opens it to find a gaunt, shabby woman with a puppy on a string. It is Rose.⁵ Her sister⁵ is furious, calling her a turncoat and a deserter.

Then Rose⁵ tells her about Eugene:⁶ the attack, the killing, their flight, and Eugene⁶'s leap into the sea. The anger drains from both of them. They hold each other on the doorstep, two women who have each lost nearly everything, reunited in a foreign country, neither able to promise the other safety.

After confessing his loss of faith, Liam³ is sent to Calcutta for interrogation by senior Jesuits. For days, robed fathers demand definitions of his apostasy. He tells them Father Joseph⁷ was to blame, a vengeful priest who turned a son against his father.¹ The Superior Provincial strips Liam³ of his crucifix and points to the door.

Liam³ sails back to Ireland, arriving in Dublin with nothing. Too ashamed to face his family as a failed priest, he applies at the Ordnance Survey office, citing his father¹'s name and his own apprenticeship. He is hired.

He writes letters to his siblings on the peninsula; they are returned marked 'GON AWAY' and 'BOTH DECEASED.' He marries an innkeeper's daughter, fathers sons, and rises in the mapping office, following in Tomás¹'s footsteps after all. But his letters to his siblings never receive replies. He does not know who lives and who has died.

Years later, a mapping assignment brings Liam³ near the peninsula. He walks the familiar road to the village, finding the fishermen's cottage reduced to foundations, the widow⁸'s house occupied by strangers. A woman tells him the young ones from up the hill went across the sea long ago.

Liam³ climbs the boreen, now overgrown with brambles he must fight through. The cottage is inhabited: tidy vegetable rows, stacked turf, smoke rising. He knocks; no one answers. Not wanting to disturb whoever lives there now, he wanders to the copse instead.

At the well, a crack behind him and a flash across the water send him fleeing once more, his hat left behind. He never knows that Eugene⁶ was watching him from an oak tree, that his brother⁶ is alive and has been here all along, the gruagach the village children whisper about.

After leaping from the ship, Eugene⁶ swam to shore and walked across Ireland back to the cottage. The widow⁸ discovered him and established the rules of his hidden life: stay on the hill, never come down by day, keep the fire small. He followed these rules for the rest of his life.

Villagers left offerings at the base of the path; he left gifts in return. He kept goats, tended the garden, and knew without being told that his siblings were alive across the sea. One evening, after the stranger in the straw boater fled, Eugene⁶ went to the pool.

A spotted fish spoke to him, demanding the gold ring he wore on his thumb, the ring he had found years ago in the bog. He dropped it into the water. A figure of a man rose from the pool and sprinted away up the hill, as if freed. Eugene⁶ lived past a hundred, the last custodian of the land.