CHAPTER 11 - County Mayo, Ireland, 11th April 1912
Dusk was settling over the rugged landscape, casting long shadows and shrouding the mountains in a blanket of mute darkness as Mary d’Arcy and eight other women walked slowly to the Holy Well on the edge of the village. They were a sombre group, making their short pilgrimage to pray for the safe passage of the fourteen who had left their homes just a day ago. To these eight women; some of them mothers, some of them sisters and some of them grandmothers of the departed, it already seemed as though their loved ones had been gone for many, many months, rather than a few short hours.
There was something of a tentative silence hanging over the women who, on any other day, could be heard exchanging friendly banter as they went about their work and daily chores in the village, laughing at a shared joke or a snippet of juicy gossip as they enjoyed a drop of porter in the ale houses. Theirs was not normally a quiet existence, but at that moment it was very much so. Only the haunting sound of a barn owl’s screech broke the silence around them. Approaching the well, they attended to their familiar rituals and said their own private prayers before kneeling on the hard, stony ground, and taking their rosary beads in their hands, began, as one, to recite their Hail Marys.
To a distant observer such as Séamus Doyle, who watched now from the window of his father’s small farmhouse, this was a particularly moving sight, serene in its setting and mesmerising in its solemnity. How touched Maggie and the others in the group would be, he thought, to know how deeply their departure was felt in this small community; how heartened they would be to see this declaration of absolute faith being made in their honour. But they could not know, would not see.
*
Like most people in the parish that day, Séamus’s thoughts had returned often to the fourteen people who had left the previous morning, most particularly to his beloved Maggie.
After giving her the packet of letters he had written and saying a final farewell, he had stood silently to watch the travellers leave. He’d thought them an oddly colourful group considering the solemnity of the occasion, with the bright woollen blankets draped about their shoulders and knees to keep them warm against the chilly April morning and the vivid green of Peggy’s new hat bobbing along. He’d watched the carts as they made their way like a funeral procession down the village; the wheels sounding like distant rolls of thunder as they rumbled across the stone road. He was familiar with the route they were taking, having travelled it himself on a few occasions to help the men buy grain or new farm tools and supplies from the town of Castlebar. They would pass out of Ballysheen, through the small, familiar towns of Knockfarnaught, Tobernaveen, Levally, Bofeenaun, Curraghmore and Cuilmullagh and on to the top of the Windy Gap. The terrain was rough up there and he imagined the carts jostling their passengers around like rag dolls as the wheels struggled over bumps and rolled in and out of the many potholes. They would then follow the winding road down to the Burren and Sion Hill before clattering into the town of Castlebar itself. Séamus knew that some of the women would also have made this journey before to sell their eggs, but he didn’t recall Maggie ever having gone. To her, it would be unfamiliar territory; beyond the train station at Castlebar, it would be unfamiliar territory to them all.
He wondered what thoughts were crossing through Maggie’s mind as they trundled past the familiar sights of the local schoolhouse, the water pump, the broken fence, the hopscotch squares etched with chalk onto the flagstones outside O’Donoghue’s shop, the gorse bushes with their bright, fragrant-yellow flowers, the stone walls she had sat idly on, swinging her legs and the fields where she had taken lunch up to the men at harvest time. He wondered whether she would notice, with particular interest, the smell of ale as they passed Darcy’s Bar or the smell of the peat fires burning in the homes of her family and friends; homes which she had spent almost as much time in as her own. He wondered what it must feel like to see all of this, and wonder whether you might ever see it again. He wondered whether he might ever see Maggie again.
Theirs had been an unexpected, simple romance of snatched embraces and brief kisses on the banks of the lake whenever they could escape from their chores. They’d looked for opportunities for their hands to touch as they reached water from the well and for their paths to collide when one or another of them ran an errand. Séamus was pleased to have suggested the arrangement of meeting every Wednesday after market, under the sixth blossom tree, it being slightly set back from the others and offering a little privacy as it was near neither house nor store. If neither one of them was there, they would know that some other circumstance had kept them away. More often than not, they both made the agreed rendezvous and would spend time together then, for a short while at least, strolling casually down to the lake in the summertime to catch fish, or seeking shelter in the kitchen of Maggie’s cottage in the winter, before it was time for him to walk the three miles home. It was a happy arrangement which suited them both. And then Maggie had told him of her aunt’s intention to return with her to America and he knew nothing now of what the future held for them.