This Is Happiness

At Easter Sunday Mass, Christy² spots Annie Mooney⁵ in the congregation. She is silver-haired now, her face graven with dignity and sorrow. He arranges to pass her at the Communion rail, but she shows no sign of recognition. Afterward, Noe¹ lies and tells Christy² that Annie⁵ smiled.

That night, fired by the false hope, they cycle out seeking the legendary fiddler Junior Crehan,¹⁴ drinking in a dozen pubs without success. At dawn, Christy² parks his bicycle in Church Street, squares his shoulders, and sings the same love ballad outside the chemist's shuttered window.

The village dogs howl, doors crack open, faces appear, but the curtain above the chemist's never moves. Christy² finishes the song, mounts his bicycle, and accepts that this first approach has failed. Noe¹ is left to absorb the catastrophe.

Days later, sitting in a sun-baked field above the valley, Christy² finally tells Noe¹ the truth. In St. Michael's church, Sneem, County Kerry, fifty years earlier, he left Annie Mooney⁵ at the altar. He was young, overwhelmed by the magnitude of his own feelings, terrified that love would swallow him whole.

He ran. He never explained himself to her. He spent decades on other continents loving other women, but some part of him remained frozen on that day. Now he has come back not to reclaim her love but to ask her forgiveness.

Noe¹ receives this confession with a young man's absolutism, first swinging to judgment, then recognizing in Christy's² suffering something that transcends easy condemnation. The revelation reframes everything: the tulips, the serenade, the quest itself.

Continuing their work gathering signatures, Christy² and Noe¹ arrive at Quirke's field just as a crew is raising a new electricity pole. When the rope snaps and the horse rears, the men scatter. Noe¹ alone stays, pressing his hands against the creosote timber in a deluded attempt to hold it upright.

The pole crushes down on him. He wakes in Avalon, Doctor Troy's⁹ once-grand house, his wrists bound and his head throbbing. A young woman in a blue dress is holding a book by his bedside. She introduces herself as Sophie Troy,⁶ the doctor's youngest daughter.

She places pills on his tongue, lifts his head to drink, and in that moment Noe¹ experiences a sensation unlike anything in his life: the sheer, annihilating nearness of extraordinary beauty. He is lost before he can name what has happened.

While Noe¹ lies unconscious, Christy² volunteers to fetch medical supplies from the chemist's. He knocks on the locked door, and after decades, Annie Mooney⁵ opens it. His rehearsed speeches evaporate. He tells her he is there because of an accident, not for himself. She looks at him without anger, without warmth, and says only, 'Wait here.'

She returns with the supplies, hands them through the door, and says, 'Goodbye now.' That is the entirety of their first exchange in fifty years. When Christy² tells Noe¹ about it later, his voice is subdued, his eyes no longer shining. He has spent half a century imagining this moment, and it has come and gone in six words. Noe¹ blames himself for the ruined reunion and resolves to intervene.

On a night when Noe¹ has been treated for a second foolish injury (throwing himself down the stairs to see Sophie⁶ again), Charlie Troy⁷ slips into the dark surgery smoking a cigarette.

She is the middle sister, a reckless and magnetic beauty who renamed herself Charlie to honor her dead grandfather's belief that she was a boy. She finds Noe¹ on the divan and, with imperious confidence, instructs him to take her to the Mars cinema on Friday. When Noe¹ arrives at Avalon, Sophie⁶ opens the door and he is struck dumb.

Charlie⁷ sweeps him to the back row of the cinema balcony where, under the silver flicker, she teaches him the mechanics of kissing with a ferocity that leaves him breathless and bewildered. She commands him to return the following week.

Determined to help, Noe¹ visits Annie⁵ at the chemist's and tells her that Christy² came to Faha solely to seek her forgiveness. She listens with weary calm and says it is best they not meet. When Noe¹ calls again, Doctor Troy⁹ opens the door and leads him upstairs. Annie⁵ is in bed, her hair combed out, her eyes glistening with pain. She is dying. She makes Noe¹ promise not to tell Christy.²

So begins a quiet conspiracy among Noe,¹ Doctor Troy,⁹ and Father Coffey.¹⁰ Noe¹ visits daily, making tea and toast, helping her sort through her belongings, listening to her speak about her life. He becomes, improbably, the bridge between two sundered lovers, bound by his promise to a dying woman and his loyalty to the man who sleeps in the room above his.

The electricity crews finish wiring the parish. When Purtill the electrician arrives to install light switches and sockets in the crooked house, Ganga³ interrupts with a gentle but final refusal. Harry Rushe,¹³ the Area Organiser, pays a second visit to pressure the old couple.

He deploys every argument: their neighbors will have light, they will be left behind in darkness and loneliness. Doady,⁴ who has secretly yearned for the ease of electric appliances, stands beside her husband.

Ganga,³ who has been losing his hearing and did not catch the particulars of Rushe's¹³ pitch, brings the negotiation to a close by smacking his hands together and asking, with genuine wonder, 'Aren't we happy as we are?' The State retreats, defeated by a contentment it cannot manufacture or measure.

One evening the telephone, which Doady⁴ has always regarded with suspicion, rings for Christy.² Annie⁵ is on the line. She has decided she wants to hear his story, but with one condition: they will not speak about her illness. So begins a nightly ritual.

Christy² sits at the window with the receiver pressed to his ear and tells her everything: his flight from Sneem, his decades wandering North and South America, the women he loved and lost, the morning in Boston when he resolved to seek forgiveness. Annie⁵ listens, sometimes falling asleep mid-sentence, and when she wakes she asks, 'Where were we?'

Doady⁴ and Ganga³ and Noe¹ sit outside in the garden, playing draughts and pretending not to eavesdrop as Christy's² voice, tender and urgent, fills the house. Noe¹ plays the fiddle, and sometimes Christy² holds the receiver out the window so Annie⁵ can hear.

Annie Mooney⁵ dies in her sleep one night while Christy² is talking to her. He had been telling her about the morning of their wedding, describing himself as a young man in a rain-heavy tweed suit squeaking down the aisle of St. Michael's, and then, suddenly, he realized she was gone. The line stayed open.

Mrs. Prendergast on the exchange listened, her headset pressed tight, as Christy² said Annie's⁵ name softly, then louder, then fell silent. In the morning, the postmistress called the house with the news. Doctor Troy⁹ had found Annie⁵ in her chair beside the telephone. She had held on long enough to hear the story of the love she had lost, and in the hearing, perhaps, had found something that resembled peace.

The funeral is enormous. People from seven parishes come, filling the church and spilling out into the graveyard by the river. Christy² sits with Noe's¹ family in a place of honor. The undertaker offers him the role of pallbearer, and he accepts.

When the prayers end and the crowd is about to disperse, Christy's² voice rises. He sings the same love ballad he sang outside her window, and before that in Craven's pub, his eyes shut and his face tilted toward the sky. He sings all the verses.

The crowd freezes, making themselves invisible so as not to intrude on the intimacy. When he finishes, there is no sound but the river. Christy² has sent the song after her, and for a long moment, it seems as though it might actually reach the next place where she is gone.

Christy² leaves Faha shortly after the funeral, heading to France to visit a brother he has not seen since he was sixteen. Noe¹ stays on through the summer, playing his fiddle and gradually finding his way. He attends the fleadh in Miltown and finally hears Junior Crehan¹⁴ play, a moment of deep completion he wishes Christy² could share.

On June 8th, the parish gathers in Church Street for the switch-on ceremony. A stage is built, banners strung, a washing machine and a bare light bulb displayed. Harry Rushe¹³ lifts his short arm, drops it, and the bulb glows.

The crowd applauds, then hurries home to see if the electricity has crossed their own thresholds. Ganga³ and Doady,⁴ who refused it, ride the horse and car home at their own unhurried pace. Somewhere past Considine's, Noe¹ lifts his face and holds out his palm. It has started raining.