TransAtlantic

1863–89, icehouse

SHE STOOD AT THE WINDOW. IT WAS HER ONE HUNDRED AND twenty-eighth day of watching men die. They came down the road in wagons pulled by horses. She had never seen such a bath of killing before. Even the horses seemed incredulous. Kicking up dust behind them. Their eyes huge and sad. The wheels screeched. The line of wagons stretched down the path, into the trees. The trees themselves stretched off into the war.

She came down the stairs, through the open doors, into the wide heat. The wagons were already backed up on the road. A curious quiet. The men had exhausted their shouts. They were left with small whimperings, tiny gasps of pain. The ones sitting appeared to be asleep. The ones lying were packed so close together, breathing in unison, that they appeared as one mass. A contortion of blood and limbs. Rotting leather breeches. Stinking flannel shirts. Flesh ripped open: cheeks, arms, eye sockets, testicles, chests. The beds of their wagons were black with blood. It had fallen on the wheels, too, so that their lives seemed to circle and turn beneath them.

One soldier wore sergeant’s stripes on his sleeve, and a gold harp stitched on his lapel. An Irishman. She had tended to so many of them. He was wounded in the neck. It was covered with a filthy gauze. His face was various shades of dark from the blown-back powder. His teeth were blackened from biting cartridges. He moaned and his head lolled sideways. She swiped the wound as clean as she could get it. His windpipe made a sad low noise. He would be dead within minutes, she knew. Small black strips of shadow moved over him. She looked up. Vultures flew overhead. They did not strike a wingbeat. Soaring on the thermals. Waiting. She had a brief thought that she should smother the injured man.

She touched his eyes. She could feel his life fall shut beneath her fingers. No need to stop his breath. It was much like drawing a small red curtain across. So many of them waited until they were in a woman’s hands.

SHE WAS TAPPED on the elbow. The doctor was small and rotund. They would have to lift the men from the wagon, he said, get them onto the grass. He wore a bow tie splattered with blood. A rubber apron over his tunic. There were twelve other nurses working the wagons: four women.

They lifted the soldiers as gently as they could and placed them in the grass in the imprints of others who had been there just hours ago. All around, the grass was exhausted by the shape of the war.

The doctors paced along the length of the dying. They chose which ones they might possibly save. The soldiers groaned and stretched out their arms. She wanted immediately to wash them clean. The other nurses had lined up wooden pails of water, with sponges at their heads. She thrust a towel down into a bucket.

Lily herself had crossed more water than she cared to remember. She had often thought that she could use all the wide Atlantic to wash them.

THEY CARRIED THE living inside on stretchers. Slippery with blood. The injured sat, vacant, in their beds. The hospital had been a glass factory once. Some of the men had rescued pieces of glass and ranged them around their beds. Intricate vases, colored tumblers. There had been a small amount of stained glass made for the churches of Missouri, but most of it had been taken away and sold.

Occasionally a loud shattering went through the hospital when a soldier stumbled out of bed, or lost his mind, or thrashed his way out from the sheets, or knocked over his bedside table. In the basement below, large glass sheets were still kept. There had been dozens of mirrors, too, but they had been hidden away so the men couldn’t see what had become of them.

LILY HAD LEFT St. Louis in the same week as her son. To be near his regiment. He was seventeen years old. A head of chestnut-colored hair. A shy boy once, he had left, swollen with the prospect of war.

She had walked for days, found the hospital among a series of small buildings not far from the battlefields. At first she was given the laundry room to work in. They had set up a little makeshift hut out back. The hut was a collection of logs with a sloping tarpaulin roof. Under the snapping tarp sat a row of six wooden barrels, four to be filled with hot water, two with cold. She wore long gloves and thick boots. Mud splashed up on the back of her dress. Her hem was dark and thick with blood. She washed bed sheets, towels, bandages, medical uniforms, torn blouses, forage caps. She stirred the clothes around a wooden drum. Another barrel rolled two drums together to squeeze the dirt from the fibers. The handle circled endlessly. Her hands blistered.

When the water was finished, she sprinkled lime in the barrels. It was said to kill the smell of blood. She hung the clothes high on a washing line. At night coyotes trotted out high-legged from the nearby forest. Sometimes they leaped and ripped the clothes from the line. She could see strips of white scattered through the trees.

After eighty-six days a Negro woman had taken over the washing. Lily was brought inside to help the nurses. She donned a black Zouave jacket and a thin cotton dress. Her hair was tied in a bun at the nape of her neck and kept in place with a bonnet. A Union badge was pinned to the front of the bonnet.

She cleaned the bedpans, changed the sheets, stuffed the mattresses with clean straw, soaked cotton balls with camphor. Scrubbed the bloody operating tables clean with sand. Still, the smell was intolerable. The reek of excrement and blood. She longed to be outside with the filthy clothing once more, but she proved to be a good aide and the surgeons liked her. She did basic stitching and fever-soothing. She refilled their bedside basins and slopped out their chamber pots. Put her arms under their shoulders and shifted their weight. Patted their backs while they hacked up lungfuls of dark phlegm. Slopped up the mess from their terrible diarrhea. Held cups of cool water to their lips. Fed them oats, beans, thin soup, yellow horse fat. Gave them rhubarb for the fever. Ignored their desires, their catcalls. Ice baths were prepared for the soldiers who had gone mad. They were plunged down deep into a freezing tub until they were unconscious. She held their heads underwater and felt the freeze move up her wrists.

Some of the soldiers whispered obscenities when she approached. Their language was vile. Their erections were angry. To quiet the men, she told them that she was a Quaker, though she was nothing of the sort. They begged forgiveness from her. She touched their foreheads, moved on. They called her Sister. She did not turn.

Lily helped the surgeons with emergency operations: she had to sharpen the edges of saws to hack off limbs. The saws had to be sharpened twice a day. The men were given rubber clamps to put in their mouths. She held down their shoulders. They spat the rubber clamp out and she shoved it back in. She held bags of chloroform over their noses and mouths. Still, they screamed. Huge wooden tubs were kept under the tables to collect the blood that leaked down. Limbs sat in the buckets: arms next to thighbones, sawed-off fingers next to ankles. She mopped the floor and scrubbed it with carbolic soap and water. Rinsed the mop out in the grass. Watched the ground turn red. At the end of the evening she walked to the rear of the building to vomit.

Few of the soldiers stayed around for more than a day or two. They were sent to another hospital in the rear, or back to the battlefield. She had no idea how the men could fight again, but off they trudged. Once they had been engineers, quartermasters, butlers, cooks, carpenters, blacksmiths. Now they went off wearing the boots of the already dead.

Sometimes they returned just days later and were dumped into the long burial trench in the forest floor. She put camphor in her nose to temper the stench.

Lily inquired after her son, but tentatively, as if probing the flesh of a wound. She knew that if she saw him, she would, most likely, not see him for very long. Thaddeus Fitzpatrick. His short stocky body. His freckled face. His very blue eyes. She described him this way to strangers: it was as if his whole body had been built around his eyes. His father, John Fitzpatrick, had long ago disappeared. She had been forced to take his name. New names didn’t mean all that much anyway. They belonged to the namers. In St. Louis, where she had worked as a maid, she was known as Bridie. Change the sheets, Bridie. Sweep the ashes, Bridie. Comb my hair, Bridie, dear. A woman’s name could swerve. She was Lily Fitzpatrick now. At times, Bridie Fitzpatrick. But she thought of herself, still, as Lily Duggan: if she carried anything, she carried that. The sound of Dublin in it. A name that belonged to the Liberties. The grayness, the cobbles. In America you could lose everything except the memory of your original name.

Thaddeus was named after her own father, Tad. She had raised him by herself, first in New York and then St. Louis. A small handsome boy. He had learned to read and write in school. He showed an interest in numbers. At twelve, he began an apprenticeship as a fence-builder. Her very own son, sinking fence posts. She had a dream of him moving out on the prairies. Going west. Deep snowfalls. High cedar trees. The broad meadows. But the war kept him rooted. He was going to fight tyranny, he said. Four times he had lied about his age in order to join up. Four times he had been returned in his hand-sewn uniform. Each time a little more cocksure than before. A vitriol to his gallantry. As if he didn’t understand it himself. Once, he had hit her. With a closed fist. He turned on her and opened a deep cut above her eye. His father’s son. He sat brooding at the kitchen table. Never said sorry, but quieted down for a week or two, until the anger pushed him out the door again. His shoulders tightened out the uniform. The trousers were so long that he dragged them in the mud.

There was music in the streets of St. Louis. Trumpets. Mandolins. Tubas. Fifes. Men in bow ties along the Mississippi, beckoning boys to war. Other men decked out in ceremonial swords and sashes. Glory. Manhood. Duty. Break this stranglehold. Awaken this nation to its proper Destiny. Out to Benton Barracks with the Boys! They offered seventy-five dollars for enlisting. He somehow thought that it would be a fortnight’s war, a young man’s lark. He put on his haversack and thrust himself amongst the Union soldiers. Right face. Left wheel. Right, oblique, march.

Drummer boys beat a pace. Regimental pennants flew. The First Minnesota. The Twenty-Ninth Iowa Volunteer Infantry. The Tenth Minnesota Volunteers. Snatches of a song were heard on the air. The sun’s low down the sky, Lorena, it matters little now, Lorena, life’s tide is ebbing out so fast.

She had never put much faith in God, but Lily prayed for her son’s safety and so prayed never to see him in the wagons. And in praying never to see him, she wondered if she was dooming him to the battlefield forever. And in praying to bring him home, she sometimes dwelt on whatever terrors he would carry back with him, if he came back at all. Circles within circles. Patterns on a cross.

She stepped out from the ward, down the staircase, into the night. She disliked the immensity of the dark. It reminded her too much of the sea. She listened to the call of the katydids. Their repetition seemed a better form of prayer.

SHE HAD COME, in the early days of 1846, all the way from Cove. Seventeen years old. Eight weeks on the water. The sea wallowed and heaved. Lily stayed in her bunk most of the time. With the women and children. Their beds were stacked close together. At night she heard the water rats scuttling in the hold. The food was rationed, but she was able to eat courtesy of Isabel Jennings, the twenty pounds sterling she had been given. Rice, sugar, molasses, tea. Cornbread and dry fish. She kept the money elaborately stitched in the heel edge of a bonnet. She carried a shawl, a calico dress, one pair of shoes, several handkerchiefs and thread, thimble, needles. Also the blue amethyst brooch that Isabel had slipped into her hands that late afternoon of rain. Pinned beneath her waistband so that it could not be seen. She huddled in her bunk.

The wind was demented. Gales battered the ship. She was terrified by the pitch of wave. Her head was bruised from the bunk frame. Fever and hunger. She wandered up on deck. A coffin was being slid from the side of the boat. It landed and broke in the water. A leg disappeared. Her stomach heaved. She went down below again into the stinking dark. Days piled into nights, nights into days. She heard a shout. A sighting of land. A heave of joy. A false alarm.

New York appeared like a cough of blood. The sun was going down behind the warehouses and tall buildings. She saw men on the wharfside in the ruin of themselves. A man barked questions. Name. Age. Birthplace. Speak up, he said. Speak up, goddamnit. She was sprayed with lice powder and allowed entry. Lily jostled her way along the waterfront among the stevedores, police officers, beggars. A stench rose up from the oily harbor. The brokenness. The rawness. The filth. She had met only a few Americans in her life — all of them in Webb’s house in Dublin, specimens of great dignity, men like Frederick Douglass — but in New York the men were adherent to shadows. The sloping Negroes were bent and huddled. What freedom, that? Some still wore the branding marks. Scars. Crutches. Slings. She passed by. The women along the docks — white women, black women, mulattos — were rude with lip paint. Their dresses rose above their ankles. It was not at all what Lily had wanted the city to be. No fancy carriages pulled by drays. No men in bow ties. No thumping speeches along the waterfront. Just the filthy Irish calling out to her in all manner of disdain. And the silent Germans. The skulking Italians. She wandered amongst them in a haze. Children in rags of unbleached cotton. Dogs on the corner. A mob of pigeons descended from the sky. She moved away from the cries of teamsters and the cadenced call of peddlers. Pulled her shawl around her shoulders. Her heart shuddered in her thin dress. She walked the streets, terrified of thieves. Her shoes were filthy with human waste. She clutched her bonnet tight. Rain fell. Her feet blistered. The streets were a fever. Brick upon brick. Voice upon voice. She passed dimly lit lofts where women sat sewing. Men in top hats stood in the doorways of dry-goods stores. Boys on their knees set cobblestones. A fat man wound a music box. A young girl made paper cutouts. She hurried on. A rat brazened past her on the pavement. She slept in a hotel on Fourth Avenue where the bedbugs concealed themselves beneath a flap of wallpaper. She woke, her first morning in America, to the scream of a horse being beaten with a truncheon outside her window.

THERE WERE STILL sheets of glass in the basement downstairs, made of the finest, clearest sand. She caught sight of herself in the reflection: thirty-six years old now, slight, still fair-haired but an edge of gray at the temple. Her eyes were lined and her neck deeply striated.

ONE EVENING SHE spied a dark-haired soldier in the basement: he had broken the lock on the door and rearranged the sheets of glass into a standing box around him. He sat inside the glass coffin, a sharp laughter rolling from him. He was, she knew, full of laudanum.

In the morning, the sheets of glass were perfectly rearranged, neatly stacked in the corner, and the soldier was in line to go back to the battle. He was one of the ones, she thought, who would survive.

— Look out for my son, she said to him.

The soldier stared beyond her.

— His name is Fitzpatrick. Thaddeus. Goes by Tad. He wears a harp on the lapel of his uniform.

The soldier finally nodded, but his gaze settled behind her. She was quite sure he hadn’t heard a word of what she said. A shout rang out and he moved away, among the harrowed. They rolled their ponchos, scrubbed their tin cups, muttered their prayers, went off again.

It had become for her a very ordinary sight, the way these soldiers disappeared beyond the trees, as if they had become mute assistants to their muskets.

SHE REACHED FOR a hanging lamp, struck a match, lit the wick. It guttered blue and yellow. She placed the pier glass around it, went out of the ward, lighting all before her. She waited on the stairs outside. Open to the night. A small breeze in the enormous heat. The trees darker than the darkness itself. Owls screeched their way through the canopy and bats moved from under the eaves of the factory. Distantly she could hear the yips of coyotes. An occasional sound from the hospital behind her: a scream, the rattle of a trolley along the upper floor.

Lily removed a pipe from the pocket of her Zouave, used a small twig to tamp down the tobacco. Hauled the smoke down deep into her lungs. The small comforts. She clamped the pipe between her teeth, draped her arms over her knees, waited.

She recognized the clack of Jon Ehrlich’s wagon. He pulled the horses up outside the hospital. He hailed her, pitched her the harness rope so she could tie the horses to an iron ring near the basement door. It had become routine. Jon Ehrlich had fifty years on him, maybe more. He wore a forage cap with a leather visor, a logging shirt, a lumber jacket, even in the middle of summer. The ends of his hair were graying where it had once been blond. His back was stooped by work, but still there was a stealth to him. He was taciturn, but when he spoke he had a soft Scandinavian lilt.

On the back of the wagon he had stacked eight crates of ice. He had made a contract with a doctor in the hospital and floated the ice down from storage sheds far north. The ice was carefully packed.

— Ma’am, he said, tipping his cap. Well, then?

— What’s that?

— News? Your boy?

— Oh, she said, no.

He nodded and moved to the back of the wagon, unhitched the ropes and flung them across where they struck the dirt. Underneath the floorboards, there was a small pool of melt.

He took a pin from a hinge, folded down the wooden gate. He used a long iron hook to guide the top crate down. He positioned himself at the back of the wagon, turned, hitched the crate of ice onto his back. Bent his knees and grunted. The weight of the ice deepened his limp.

She lit the way in front of him, a lake of yellow. Down the stairs, past the sheets of glass. They moved through the basement, their shadows multiplying around them. He struggled with the weight of the crate. The size of a sailing trunk. She could hear his breathing, heavy and rapid. She pushed open the ice cellar door. Inside, slabs of meat hung from hooks. Rows of medical supplies lined the shelves. Jars of fruit. The cool blue hit her in a wave. He stepped into the ice-room and stacked the old blocks of ice in the corner. They had melted out of their straight lines. Hard to prop on top of one another. Soon they would disappear.

He pushed the new crate against the wall. Eight times it happened. A silence between them. His lumber jacket wet with ice and sweat.

Jon Ehrlich removed a pair of small pliers from his pocket, carefully opened the crates one by one. Sawdust and straw fell to the floor. He reached in and removed each huge cake of ice, one after the other, wiped them clean with his gloved hands. The new cakes were perfectly planed and straight. A tinge of blue to the edges and then a hard white in the middle. He stacked them in formation. The closer they were, he said, the longer they would last. She sat in the corner and watched him work, then went upstairs to the ward kitchen to fetch him a drink. By the time she returned, he was already sitting on the outside steps, waiting. He had opened a well-worn book. A hard waft of sweat drifted from him. She glanced at the book. The letters meant nothing at all to her.

— That the Bible?

— Yes, ma’am.

She had formed a distrust of men who carried Bibles. It seemed to her that they believed their own voices were somehow embedded there. She had seen them in the churches of New York and St. Louis, raining down their loudness upon the world.

— I’m not saying I’m aligned with every word, said Jon Ehrlich, but some of it makes sense.

He folded the book shut, touched his hat, moved to the wagon, and roweled the horses around. The cart was noisy with its emptiness.

— Good night, ma’am.

— Lily, she said.

— Yes, ma’am.

She slipped back into the cellar and lifted one of the older blocks, three quarters melted. The width of a tea tray now, slippery to the touch. She brought it upstairs to the ward where the two night nurses waited. They placed the old ice in the center of the table and sliced at it with a sharp knife, little edges and slivers that they could place in the mouths of the injured men.

THERE WERE AFTERNOONS she watched the old Negro woman outside at the hut, washing the blood from the uniforms. The tarpaulin roof flapped as she worked, silently, no cane song, no spirituals, only the slap of the tarp punctuating the heat, the woman looking up every now and then at the rows of men still journeying back and forth, carting their corpses.

SHE RECOGNIZED HIM by his feet. He came in a mass of other men. They lay supine on the wagons, their arms and legs entwined, a hideous needlework. He was near the top of the pile, but his face was obscured. She had no need to turn him over. She knew straightaway. He had broken his ankle as a child. The gnarl of the toenails. The curve of the instep. She had massaged that foot. Cleaned the dirt from it. Salved its cuts.

Broderick, the orderly, carried him out of the wagon and laid Thaddeus on the grass. A handkerchief was placed over his face. Flies were already beginning to gather.

— We’ll bury him now, nurse.

Instead she shook her head and turned to carry a soldier upstairs. Broderick lifted his cap, joined her. They shouldered another and then another. Lily arranged them in their beds, scissored through their uniforms. Asked them their names. Tended to the awful mess of flesh. They talked to her of the battle, how they had been pinched on either side by the ranks of gray. How horses had come in upon them. The fog that had opened. The thump of hooves. A casual trumpet silenced in midnote. The thud of bullets into tree trunks.

She attended their every need. Her hand dipped in and out of the washbasin.

It was much later, when all the living had been attended to, that she glanced out the window at the row of bodies still waiting in the grass. Mounds of flesh. Only the clothing would march off again. The jackets, the boots, the buttons. She stood a long while in the silence of the stairway, then set her face hard. She walked outside into the grass and knelt beside him and took the handkerchief from his face and touched his cheek and stroked his bare chin and felt her stomach wrench with the cool against her hand. She undressed him. I expect your risen spirit is listening to me now. When you get up to sit with God or the devil you can curse them both for me. This god-awful manufacture of blood and bone. This fool-soaked war that makes a loneliness of mothers. She undid the buttons on his shirt. Put her hand on his heart. He had been shot just shy of his armpit. As if his own hands had been raised in surrender but the bullet managed to sneak in anyway. A small wound. Hardly big enough to take him away.

Lily cleaned the wound with hard soap and a basin of cold water. She dressed it like she would have for the living, and then dragged his body across the grass.

NO MOON. A great darkness. The hoofclop of the horses. Jon Ehrlich descended the wagon in a narrowbrim hat and boots. She waited for him as always on the lower stairs. When she saw him approach she lit the lamp. The weather was beginning to turn, the hint of a snap in the air.

— Lily, he said, tipping his hat.

She turned to help him take the first crate from the wagon. She pushed the crate forward and steadied it against his back. He locked his knees and shouldered the burden. Bent into the familiar pose. She walked in front of him, into the basement, the light pooling, a swinging semicircle through the old glass factory. Some rats scurried in the corner, slinking past sheets of glass. Lily halted in front of the ice-room door. She turned her face away.

When he yanked on the cold metal handle and pushed open the door, he saw the boy laid out full-length on the remaining cubes. His uniform neat and washed and mended, his shoelaces tied, the harp badge on his chest. His hair washed and combed.

— Lord, said Jon Ehrlich.

He placed the block on the floor, touched his palm against the book in his jacket pocket. Lily let out the sound of an animal: something cut, arrowed, gutted. She came towards him with her head bent savagely low. He sidestepped her. She turned. She drew her arm back and she thumped him on the chest, powerfully, a push of grief. Jon Ehrlich stepped backwards. A shot of breath moved through him. He planted his feet. Didn’t move. She punched him once more. The full force of her fist. She cried out and kept on punching until she was exhausted against him, her head against his shoulder.

Later, almost morning, they buried Thaddeus two hundred yards from the hospital. A chaplain came. There was a drunkenness to his prayers. Some men had gathered at the hospital windows to look down upon them. A faint reef of light climbed up over the east.

She knew she was going with Jon Ehrlich. He didn’t even question her when she sat up on the wagon and straightened out the folds in her dress. She looked straight ahead. She could hear the soft rip of grass in the mouths of the horses: the way it moved and crushed.

LILY ACCOMPANIED JON Ehrlich to his home north of the Grand River. She was baptized into the Protestant faith: it didn’t seem too different from what she had already chosen not to believe in. Not since Dublin had she been in any manner of church. Even then it had only been through obligation. She sat in the second pew from the front. She was given a Bible and a commemorative piece of lace. The service was short and brusque, some words in Norwegian, most in English. The preacher asked if there was anybody present who was ready to renounce evil and accept the Lord as his or her divine savior. Jon Ehrlich tapped her on the elbow. Yes, she said, and went to the front of the church. Bowed her head. Waited. One or two scattered hallelujahs rose around the church. She was taken out the back door, towards a small trout stream, where the congregation gathered. A song erupted from them. Take me from this darkened valley, wreath me in sheaves of peace. She was carried through the reeds into the shallows of the river. A heron took off in the air, flapped wildly across the water, its wingtips touching the surface, rippling it. The pastor told her to hold her nose. He put his hand at the small of her back. When she was dunked, she felt little but the chill.

She had no real idea what it meant to be Protestant, it was an absence to her, although she remembered so clearly the Quaker meetings she had seen in the house in Great Brunswick Street, with Webb at the front of the room, hands interlocked, his long rambling ideas on fate, peace, brotherhood. She had not told Jon Ehrlich of those days. She feared, if she did, he might grow silent around her. He was a good soul. He deserved no jealousy. The old life in Ireland was distant to her now: she needed it no more, she had stepped away.

After the baptism she was married immediately and was taken to the cabin by the lake. Lily Ehrlich. She descended the wagon onto the hard dust and looked around.

— I live by small means, he said.

It was a flat land. A quiet lake. Other small lakes stretching into the distance. A series of wooden storage sheds were clumped together near the road. Mosquitoes swirled in great swarms. The horses swished their impatient manes.

— I best get you inside, he said.

He had a clear, still smile. She pulled her dress tight as a bud, curtsied in front of him.

— Get you flat down.

— About time, she said.

It was the first she had laughed in quite a while.

He swung open the cabin door for her. Silver flecks of dust stuttered the sunlight. A bed in the corner made with pine pole and frapped twine. He watched while she undressed before him, then he dropped his boots, unsnapped his braces, and his clothes pooled around him on the floor.

For an older man, she thought him sprightly and enthusiastic. They lay together, panting, her face against his shoulder. She woke him when the darkness was still on the sky. He turned towards her and grinned.

— Even the Good Book says it’s no harm.

LILY WAS THIRTY-SEVEN years old when she had her first of six Ehrlich children: Adam, Benjamin, Lawrence, Nathaniel, Tomas, and their only girl, Emily, the youngest, in 1872, seven years after the end of the war.

AS SOON AS the cold came, the lake began to freeze. Jon Ehrlich rose and dressed in the faint warmth from the stove and went quietly out from the cabin and tested it every day. When the ice was four inches deep it was capable of holding a man. He walked from one side of the lake to the other, staying close to the shore at first. Lily watched him diminish in the distance, tall and thin, the limp growing smaller.

A fierce wind blew across the bankside snow, kicked small eddies into the air. The trees made a dark run into the flat distance. He brought his oldest sons out to join him.

Father and sons turned and turned, testing the strength of the ice. Falconing, he called it. They circled closer to the center of the lake. Each time they reached the end of a spiral, Jon Ehrlich raised his boot and stamped to check the thickness. Lily watched the two older boys, Adam and Benjamin, do the same thing. The clean thud of their boots broke the silence. She thought they might disappear under at any time, that the lake would take them and ice over, swallow their scarves, their hats, their face wrappings. But they circled inwards, meticulous in their patterns. They knew the depth of the ice by the sound of their boots.

They went out the next morning to begin sinking the lake. Jon Ehrlich used a long thin auger to bore the holes. Steel with a sharp point. When he turned the handle, it looked to Lily as though he were churning butter. Small sparks of ice rose from the surface. He went across the lake with the boys, sinking hole after hole in the ice, three feet apart. They made a checkerboard of the lake. They stood over each hole and inserted a thin stick to make sure the drill had gone all the way through. The water gurgled up and spread. Layer upon layer. The spill from each drill hole met its neighbor, a spreading sheet of freeze.

As the days wore on, they followed their own footsteps back across the lake and rebroke the mouth of ice on each of the holes. The water rose again. Lily brought them lunch on the lake: hunks of bread and ham, bottles of milk corked with toweling and string. Jon Ehrlich drank and drew his sleeve across his mouth. Adam and Benjamin watched their father and did the same. Soon Lawrence, Nathaniel, and Tomas joined them on the lake.

They came inside to the cabin where Lily had built up the fire. Jon Ehrlich washed in the basin, then sat down by the light of a lantern. A man of two lives. He slipped on his spectacles, and read aloud from the Book. Late in the evening, he and Lily walked out together to see how much the ice had deepened. They wore no skates. They did not want to score the ice although Jon Ehrlich knew they would be planing it later on.

They rebored the ice and it deepened, day after day, season after season. When it snowed the process was quicker, and there were nights when the ice could deepen by a full three inches.

The dark of their figures moved over the enormous white. When the lake was thick enough, they drew a heavy wooden frame behind them. The frame was shod with a sleeve of steel. The snow built up and collected in furrows. Row upon row of them appeared on the western edge of the lake. They looked to Lily like so many white eyebrows.

When the snow was cleared, Jon Ehrlich and his sons planed the ice down. They measured out large squares, each the size of a half door. They cut into the lake with an ice plow. The blades were set in grooves and the plow was drawn by the draft horse. Particles of ice shot up in the air. When the lake was deeply scored, they bent into the work of sawing along the plowed lines. The best ice was the color of crystal. Hard and pure.

THE FLOORS OF the storage sheds were covered with tanbark. No windows. Double-walled. The spaces between the inner and outer walls were filled with sawdust to insulate what lay inside. The ice cakes were packed high and so close together that they could hardly slide a blade between them.

It was to Lily one of the great mysteries: how the ice could hold out against the weather, even through the spring.

The cold fell. They farmed the lake. After a while even the youngest, Emily, went out to help them lift the cubes. They used longhandled hooks to slide the cakes across the lake towards the draft horse waiting, patient for its chores. One quick flick of the wrist could send the cake of ice spinning twenty yards across the lake. Lily liked to watch Emily guide the cakes across the surface, the elaborate motions the young girl made with the cubes.

WHEN THE TRIBUTARIES thawed, they floated the ice all the way to St. Louis on a barge that complained under the weight. The cakes were packed in crates and covered in straw to keep from melting. Elk bugled along the riverbanks. Peregrines soared in the blueness overhead.

Jon Ehrlich guided the barge past the sandbanks into port and packed the wares in an underground cellar along the riverfront. An ice dealer from Carondelet Avenue came and inspected the work. Crisp bills were counted out. It was good business. It was as if Reconstruction itself knew how to make things work. Hotels. Restaurants. Oyster shops. Rich men in fancy homes. Even sculptors who wanted to carve from giant ice blocks.

He bought a new lease on a small upstate lake. Experimented with new methods of insulation. Developed a toboggan system. Floated the cakes along a series of intricate canals. He drew up plans for a series of levers and pulleys for the storage sheds. There was a call to float ice down the Mississippi to cities as far away as New Orleans. They built a new house on the far side of their lake, open to morning sunlight. A smokehouse, too. Hanging from hooks were sides of bacon and cured ham. Medicinal plants: spikenard, snakeroot, senna, anise. Bins filled with sweet potatoes. Deep barrels of butter. Apple jelly. Peaches in preserve.

Lily had never seen such stores of food. She moved among the full shelves in a daze.

On Sundays they loaded their horse cart with spare provisions and drove them to church, early, so that they could be distributed quietly amongst others. Jon Ehrlich guided the reins down gently on the backs of the horses. His breathing was labored. Age was beginning to catch him. As if his body had taken on some aspect of the ice. Still, he unloaded the stores of food. Lily felt little call for the church, except as a moment away from her chores, but it gladdened her to give food away. She had seen worse hunger before, long ago. She did not care to see it again. Irish and German and Norwegian families lined up at the back door. An air of hammered pride about them, as if they would not need it long.

Jon Ehrlich came home one mild evening in the spring of 1876 and parked the horses down by the storage sheds. It had been a long journey. A week on the road. He came up through the newly cobbled yard, carrying a large canvas in an ornate frame. He called her name. She did not respond. He walked in the door and kicked off his boots, called her name again. She came from the kitchen at the back of the house. Shuffling her slippers on the floor.

— What in the name of God is the commotion?

He held the painting up for her to see. She thought at first it was a box of some sort. She stepped closer. She glanced at Jon Ehrlich, then at the box once more. A riverside in Ireland. An arched bridge. A row of overhanging trees. A distant cottage.

Lily did not know what to say. She reached out and touched the framed edge of the painting. Looking into it was like looking out another window. Clouds. Fast water. Geese gunneling through the sky.

— It’s for you.

— Why?

— I bought it in St. Louis.

— Why?

— It’s your country, he said.

He had bought it, he said, from an artist who was reputed to be famous. They had told him so at the marketplace.

— Your own people, he said.

Lily stood back from the painting. Her hands shook. She turned away.

— Lily.

He watched her walk out the door, towards the lake. The early insects of spring gathered around her. She sat down on the lakeside with her head in her hands. He could not understand it. He placed the painting against the table by the door. Said nothing more about it. He would, he thought, get rid of it tomorrow.

Later that night they lay in bed together, with their children, Emily and Tomas, asleep at their feet. She trembled and turned away from him, then swung quickly back towards him. She had been a child of deviants in Dublin, she said. Drunkards. She had never told a soul before. She had tried to forget it. She expected no judgment and wanted no pity. Her father drank. Her mother drank. Sometimes it seemed that the rats drank, the doors drank, the lintels drank, the roof drank, too. She was brought into bed between them, mother and father. A tenement house. The bedboard rattled. She lost a child. Fourteen years old. She had been sent to work as a maid. Hers had been a life of basements, of rat droppings, of inner staircases, of soup ladles. A half-day off a week. Sloshing through the wet dark streets. To buy tobacco. The only relief.

No part of Ireland had ever vaguely resembled the canvas Jon Ehrlich had brought home. The country he had brought her was unrecognizable except, perhaps, for one journey she had made from Dublin to Cork long ago. She had walked from a house on Great Brunswick Street. Walked and walked and walked. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen days, south, through Wicklow, Waterford, over the mountains, across to Cork. She was a simple girl then. That was all. She followed a desire. She still recalled the canopies of trees, the shifting light on the fields, the valleys, the riverbanks, the wind whipping a hard low rain into her eyes, the hunger that grew up out of the land, its rotten odor settling over the men, women, children.

Now, a painting. Of all things. A painting. It seemed to say something to her that she had never understood before. A cathedral bell in Dublin sounded out. A horse screamed. Sackville Street. A gull moved over the Liffey. Still, she could not recall the exact sounds of her childhood: they shifted and unshaped in her mind. Why was it that certain moments returned to her? What called them forth? She pressed her face, now, into Jon Ehrlich’s chest. She was not sure what to do with such thoughts. She felt sliced open. The Duggan in her — the gone part of her — had never once thought that she could own anything at all, let alone such a painting. Forty-eight years old. She had been in the country now for more than thirty years. She had become American. At what whirling moment had she halted and turned, unbeknownst to herself, the other way? At what time had her life released its meaning? She couldn’t locate it. She had been, yes, a simple girl. A maid. In a house of unsimple things. Listening to strange talk. Ideas of democracy, faith, slavery, benevolence, empire. They were things she couldn’t quite understand, but they suggested an elsewhere. And so I walked. No idea where I was going. No plan, Jon Ehrlich. I just walked. Look at me now. A painting. You bring me a painting. You place a painting into my arms.

She turned her face into his chest once more. He was not sure what to do with the manner in which she wept. She curled against him then, and fell into a hard, deep, exhausted sleep.

The painting was put on the mantel above the fireplace. At times she thought she could see Isabel Jennings striding along the riverbank, the long elegant swish of her dress. There was Richard Webb standing on the arched bridge, looking down at the fast water, the splash of current, in all his earnest frustration. There were days, too, when she let her mind drift towards Frederick Douglass: he did not enter the painting much, but hovered outside it, waiting to stride in, perhaps from the distant hill or the road behind the cottage. The recollection of him lifting his barbells in his room startled her. His face in the rain on the day she left. The pale of his palms. She remembered the disappearance of his carriage down Great Brunswick Street and, upstairs, the casual way his towel had been left draped over his washbasin. Hunched over his writing desk in his shirts of billowy white.

She had heard that Douglass was aligned now with the party of the late Abraham Lincoln. Making speeches for the proper suffrage for the Negroes. He was a man much admired but reviled, too. They had achieved freedom but at what cost? In Ireland she had thought of him as a gentleman, tall, piercing, commanding, but here he was more of a confusion. It was not that she had anything against the Negroes. Why should she? There was no call for it. They were men and women, too. They starved, they fought, they died, they planted, they reaped, they sowed. Yet there was such an upstirring about them, too. Lily had heard there’d been riots from the Irish in New York. Men strung from lampposts. Children burned in an orphanage. Savage beatings on the streets. Nothing was simple. So many possibilities. The years had shaded her. Lily’s own son had fought for the Union. He had died on the battlefield for the very words that Douglass had spoken of in Ireland all those years ago. And yet Thaddeus had never even once mentioned slavery or darkies or freedom. He had just wanted to fight. That was all. The glorious vanity of dying.

There were times when she went south to St. Louis, or north all the way to Des Moines, that she saw Negroes on the streets and she felt a dislike moving through her. She stopped herself. Tried to catch her own falling. Still, it was there, distant and hazy.

In church she lowered her head and prayed for forgiveness. Old prayers. Remembered incantations. She opened the Bible in front of her. She thought that she should learn how to read, but there was a purity in the silence. She tried to recall the words of Douglass in the drawing room on Great Brunswick Street, but instead, her mind drifted towards those men for whom she had pulled the curtain across: the warmth of blue beneath their eyelids as their flesh moved towards gray.

SHE WATCHED EMILY lean into her father, listening. Seven years old, following the rough of his finger across the page. The Book of Job. Revelation. The Book of Daniel. The sight gladdened her. The space by Emily’s bed was beginning to fill with books from school. Still, it was odd to watch a child so very different from herself, her own flesh and blood.

Often Lily found the young girl asleep with her long hair inserted in the pages, a sort of bookmark.

A SHOUT ECHOED outside. Lily thought nothing of it. She moved from the smokehouse back to the kitchen. She unscrewed a jar of cornmeal, sprinkled some on the wooden counter, leaned against the stove. The warmth rolled from it. She closed one of the stove doors with her knee. She reached for a jar of buttermilk. Another shout cracked the air.

The shouts had come from down near the storage sheds. She paused. Another series of dull thuds, then a silence. She walked towards the window. The sky a very pale blue. Another sound, hollow and continuous, a groan, a slow surrender. Adam’s voice sounding over the snow.

Lily ran out. The cold stung her. The snow kicked up at her feet. No shouts came from the sheds anymore. Just a raw quiet.

Past the stables and the toboggan shed. Calling their names as she went. At the sheds she could see shards of sawdust caught on the air. She rounded the corner. The planks had splintered. Nails had popped out from the boards. A large iron hinge lay on the ground. A single ice fork was still stuck in the snow bank. A tangle of pulleys lay forlorn on the ground.

A small run of blood ran between the cakes of fallen ice and the wooden wall. She went to Benjamin first, then to Adam, across once more to Benjamin. The small of the boy entirely crushed by a single cake. She pushed the weight off his chest, put her cheek to his lips. No breath at all. She wiped the sawdust from his eyebrows. She did the same with Adam. She did not cry out. She could hear the other cakes of ice still moving and slipping above her, but quietly now, as if in reverence. She inched across the fallen planks of wood, and bent over her husband.

Jon Ehrlich attempted a nod, but a bubble of blood rose up at his mouth. She pushed the shattered cube off his legs. Don’t you go. Don’t you dare. He moved his head slightly. His eyes fluttered. Don’t you die on me.

She was sure she saw him nod and then she heard the rattle of his throat. Lily could feel the fall of his life away from him, some manner of relief, a melting away. She rose from her knees and put her hands to her head and let out a high keen.

The storage shed still stood, three-walled. The remaining walls yawed and groaned. The lake within the ice. The water eager for movement. She stepped across the shattered planks and leaned down to Benjamin once more.

She put her arms under the shoulders of her youngest son and tried to yank the dead boy out from under the collapse. His boot caught on a piece of beam. She could feel the boot rip as she yanked him from under the rubble. She tugged again. The ice moved.

Some laughter rolled from him. She bent down towards him. Some laughter again. Oh. Benjamin. Oh. She grabbed the back of his head but it lolled. She shook him. Get up, get up, you’re alive. His eyes were huge and surprised and unmoving. She rose into a crouch, pawed her way across the hard ground. Reached for Adam. She put her face against his lips. No breath. No warmth. More laughter, she was sure of it. But from where, whom? She heard it again, this time from its proper distance. Her chest heaved. From the house. The other children emerging from the cabin. The high play of their voices. Lily rose and rounded the corner of the sheds. She brandished an ice fork. Go back to the house, she said. Put wood on the fire, Nathaniel. Clean up the cornmeal, girl. Don’t come out again. I’ll be right home with you. I’ll be right back. You hear me? Tomas? Lawrence? Now, I said. Sweet Jesus. Now. Please.

Emily stared at her. Rooted to the ground.

— Go, shouted Lily. Go!

She went back to the work of dragging the bodies from underneath the ruin. The three walls remained. They moved minutely, threatening collapse.

SHE LAID THE bodies out side by side on the ground, her husband and two sons, then went back towards the house. She needed cloths to cover their eyes. Lily pushed open the cabin door. The boys were cowering in the pantry. Emily was at the window, looking out. Lily called her daughter’s name. No reply. She called it again. Emily, she said. No movement at all. She stepped across and turned the girl from the window. The child’s eyes were remote, vacant.

Lily slapped her daughter hard across the face, told her to get herself dressed, there was work to do. The child did not move, but then she rose and put her forehead against Lily’s collarbone. Mother, said Emily.

TWO EVENINGS LATER Lily Ehrlich hired a carpenter to come out and restack the cakes and fix the wooden shed. The weather was mean. The wind blew bitter. The hammering went all the way through the night.

A thaw would come soon. She would have to learn how to move the ice herself. To get it to the boats and to float it downriver.

She lay in her bed, surrounded by her four remaining children. The boys were old enough now, she thought. Emily could help manage the books. There were ways to survive. She looked out at the lake. The light from the moon sighed upon it. She woke Tomas first, then the other two. They stepped out into the night, down towards the barn, their breath making cloudshapes against the dark. First of all we’ll get the wagons ready, she said. Make sure the horses are fed.

THE BOOKLETS CAME from a company in Cincinnati. The McGuffey Reader. An All-Surpassing Opportunity. Teach Yourself in 29 Days. Money Back Guarantee. She had no idea what to do with them. The words presented themselves as a series of squiggles. How could she learn to read if she could not, in the first place, read? How could she be expected to learn what was unlearned in the first place? Her eyes swam. Her throat tightened. She tucked the booklets away on the shelf.

She hired a carriage and went south, two days, all the way to St. Louis. The buildings seemed so enormously tall. Laundry fluttered from windows. Men in stetsons tied their horses to hitching posts. A railway station whistle sounded out. Lily inquired about the bookshop. A young boy pointed the way. A bell on the door rang. She shuffled among the shelves. Frightened that she might be seen. The words on the spines of the books meant nothing at all.

It was a clerk who found it for her, high on the shelves accessible only by ladder. She knew it was he by the frontispiece engraving. The book was wrapped for her in brown paper and twine.

At home, Emily ran a small finger underneath the marks on the page. This is I. This is W. This is A. This is S. This is a B.

BY THE THIRD year after Jon Ehrlich’s death, Lily had a group of men working with her — two Norwegians, two Irishmen, and a Breton foreman. Her sons, too. Lily was a small thin figure on the ice, a little hunched by age, tapered by sorrow, but her voice carried across the expanse. They bought the newest machinery: broadaxes, crosscut knives, ice plows, harnesses. The saws kicked up white sparks. The horses heaved and steamed. The sheds were rebuilt and reinforced.

After school, Emily helped skim the huge cakes of ice across the surface of the lake.

Lily went to the city once a month. A grueling journey. Often it took three days each way. Lily haggled across the desk on Carondelet Avenue. She knew the price she was getting and she knew at what price the ice dealer was selling. It galled her to think that there was such a gulf.

She took Jon Ehrlich’s fountain pen out of her small silver purse and marked a signature on the page. She had learned this much, a push of the pen into the resemblance, at least, of a name. The ice dealer worked a thumb at the base of his nose. He was thin and sharp, as if he’d been sliced with a fresh saw.

— You can write?

— Of course I can write. What do you think I am?

— I didn’t mean anything by it, Mrs. Ehrlich.

— Well, I hope not.

She strode away, along the Mississippi. She watched the younger women walk along in their elegant finery: wide hats and swishing dresses. Paddleboats and steamers. The whole river was wide with commerce. Paperboys called out about gold and railroads. A hot-air balloon went over the river and drifted off towards the west. A man on a machine rode back and forth near the Opera House. With an enormous front wheel. The onlookers called it an ordinary. There were young men in wide cowboy hats who tied their horses outside saloons. They didn’t glance at her much anymore, but Lily didn’t mind. Her back was stiff from the years of ice. She developed a rolling shuffle. She kept three elegant dresses for business matters. The rest of the time her clothing was plain, dark, a touch of mourning about it.

In her fourth year without her husband, she negotiated a price with the foreman from Brittany. She sold him the cabin, the leases, and all the equipment. The first thing she packed was the painting that Jon Ehrlich had given her. All the boxes, the furniture, the chairs, the delph, the books. They loaded four wagons. She kept the painting upfront. They pulled up to their new home on Florissant Avenue. The roadbed was made with crushed limestone. The house was a two-story redbrick with high ceilings and a wide staircase. A pale blue carpet festooned with threaded roses. At the top of the stairs she hung the painting, then immediately set about her business as a dealer. Middle Lake Ice. An English sign writer made a logo on the warehouse doors. She was flustered by his accent. He bowed to her and she blazed red with embarrassment. An Englishman, of all things. Bowing to her. Lily Duggan. Bridie Fitzpatrick. Once the death carts had rumbled. The snowflakes fell.

It amazed her to think that she didn’t even have to touch the ice anymore. That it was others, farther north, in Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, who did the work of farming. She costed out the business carefully. The wages, the transport, the melt. The astounding logic of money. The ease with which it could appear, and the speed at which it could be lost. In St. Louis, she secured a line of credit with the Wells Fargo Bank on Fillmore. She walked up to bank tellers who knew her name. How are you, Mrs. Ehrlich? Such a pleasure to see you again. On the street men and women nodded to her politely. It frightened her. She held the edge of her wide dresses and stammered hello. She was shown the best sides of meat in the victualers. There was a hat shop on Market Street. Lily bought a flamboyant design with an ostrich feather, but when she brought it home she caught sight of herself in the long oval mirror and couldn’t bear the thought of being seen in it, put it back in its box and never touched it again.

The demands came. From the hospitals. On the steamers. In the restaurants. Fish stalls. Confectioner stores. There were even some hotels that had begun to use the ice in drinks.

After six years Lily Ehrlich was able to send her oldest surviving boy, Lawrence, to university in Chicago. Then Nathaniel and Tomas, too. In the winter of 1886 Emily turned fourteen years old. She spent most of her time upstairs in her bedroom, devoted to books. Lily thought her daughter, at first, to have been overcome with loneliness, but soon found out that the girl liked nothing more than to shut the curtains, light a candle, read in the flickering dark. The plays of Shakespeare. The writings of Emerson. The poetry of Harte, Sargent, Wordsworth. The room was so full of books that Lily couldn’t see the wallpaper.

Her own experiment with books had not lasted very long: she was mother to the daughter. That, in itself, was enough.

Lily divided her ice business in the winter of 1887. Three equal parts to her sons. Lawrence came home from university wearing a gray suit and bow tie, the owner of an eastern-sounding accent. The two younger boys were interested in the puffs of steam that drifted across the rail yards: they sold their portions, tipped their hats, said good-bye. Nathaniel went west to San Francisco, Tomas went east to Toronto. Emily received nothing: not out of spite, but simple convention. It never even crossed Lily’s mind. Mother and daughter bought a smaller house on Gravois Road. Out front, they cultivated a garden. They kept to themselves. On Sundays they dressed for church: long gloves, wide hats, white veils that fell over their eyes. They were sometimes seen on the promenade together. There weren’t many suitors for Emily’s attention. Nor did Emily expect any. She was hardly considered pretty. The books consumed her. There were nights when Lily asked Emily to come to her bed, slip in the covers beside her, settle against the pillows, and read. I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland.

That house on Great Brunswick Street seemed far away to Lily now, remote from her in daily custom and sound. The years themselves seemed to forget what she once had been. The shadows of forty years.

SHE WAS NO judge of fine fashion, but for the occasion she wore a long purple polonaise with a fitted cutaway overdress. The amethyst brooch lay high on her neck. Her gray hair was tucked under the curved brim of a mauve bonnet.

She stepped slowly from the horse-drawn carriage and shuffled arm in arm beside Emily who wore a simple alpaca dress. The evening was cool. Dark had just fallen. She was confused by the movement of the light and the close passing of so many bodies. They entered the hotel. Past the granite columns. The bellmen gave them cursory glances. Inside, high piano notes floated through the lobby. The dull pain was deep in her body now. Her hands, her knees, her ankles.

Lily cast a quick look at the large wooden clock in the corner near the bay windows. Too early by far. All around, women stood in expensive shawls and gowns. A few men in black tie and jackets. The fuss and flux. Small pockets of Negroes, too, in the corners. Mostly men. Everyone so finely turned out.

She edged forward. A gauntlet. She was sure they were watching her. She skirted the latticed wall, found a row of landscape paintings to pretend to admire, pulled Emily close.

— Quiet now, she said.

— I didn’t say anything, Mother.

— Hush anyway.

On large wooden easels around the hotel lobby she saw his name. Underneath, the words: National Women’s Suffrage Association.

Small clusters of women walked around underneath the chandeliers. Their serious chatter. Over by the bar, curls of smoke purpled the air. A distant clinking of glasses.

The piano player launched into a new tune. Lily turned to Emily and tucked a stray strand of plaited hair behind the girl’s ear.

— Mother.

— Quiet.

— There he is, said Emily.

Across the lobby, Lily saw him. Douglass was seventy-one years old now. His gray hair still stood in serious abundance. He wore a black jacket and white shirt with standing collar. In his breast pocket, a white handkerchief. He filled out his jacket and had developed a slight slouch, but there was still a heft to him: thicker, wider, yet more at ease. He was surrounded by a group of eight or ten women. They leaned in eagerly towards him. He stood at a slight remove, but then he cupped his hands and made some comment and the women laughed as if they were all part of some intricate clockwork.

He glanced across the lobby. Lily couldn’t be sure, but perhaps his gaze had remained on her. Maybe some movement behind her, some human fuss. When she turned to look at him again, he had already begun walking towards the hotel auditorium.

The room drew in behind him. A gust of air. A wake of light. As if it were all being funneled down to follow him. She felt herself falter. She was seventeen years old again. Standing outside Webb’s house. Bidding him good-bye. The early Dublin light. The shaking of hands. So unusual. The creak of the carriage. Later the butler, Charles, rebuked the staff. How dare you. The smallest moments: they return, dwell, endure. The clack of a hoof against the cobbles. The way he had looked at her as he left. The manner in which he had opened the day. The spectacle of possibility. I have little or nothing here. A small room at the top of a house. A series of back stairs. I as good as belong to them. Owned. She left under darkness. The shame she felt in Cork. At the Jenningses’ dinner table. He did not recognize her. At the dockside, too. He remained saddled. She was no more to him than a sweeping of papers, a wash of the carpet, a broom of the floorboards, a yard of calico. But what had she wanted? What had she expected? She heard the loud braying of the horses. The swoop of seagulls. The rain. She could not look him in the eye. Sheets of rain across her face. A destiny. Stepping onto the boat and away. It was all a confusion. She had been so very young. The ship horn was a relief.

Lily took Emily’s arm and they walked together across the floor. Two policemen stood outside the auditorium door, tapping their truncheons against their calves. They glanced at her, said nothing. The hall was almost full. Rows and rows of women on folding chairs. Their dresses spread out around them.

They took their seats near the back of the hall. She removed her gloves and put her hand upon the back of her daughter’s, rubbed her thumb along the inside of Emily’s wrist.

Douglass was introduced by a pale woman in a plain black tunic. The applause rippled through the air. He stepped up from the front seats. Climbed the stairs at the side of the stage. A slowness that he disguised well. He strode to the lectern. Put his hands upon it, looked out. He was thankful for the introduction, he said, glad to be in a city that meant so much to the many causes of true democracy that he so fervently espoused. There was a slight tremble in his voice.

He paused a moment, then stepped from the side of the lectern as if to show the full extent of himself. His polished shoes, his dark trousers, his jacket trimmed at the waist. His skin was lighter than she recalled. He spread his arms wide, allowed a silence. When the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages. He spoke as if he were saying it for the first time, that he had just found these words in the last few steps across the stage, low now, almost a whisper, a secret to be imparted. The cause of the slave has been peculiarly Woman’s cause. Immediately there was a stir around the room. A stout lady stood and applauded. Several other women followed. There was a shout from a man in the front seat, thrusting a book in the air. Send the nigger home! A scuffle broke out. A flail of arms and legs. The protester was escorted out. Four women left alongside the man. Douglass held his hands in the air and extended the white of his palms. A hush descended. When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. She could see an orchestra in him, a whole range of instruments and sound. His voice was loud and booming. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. He paced the stage. In and out of a pool of light. His shoes clicking on the wooden floorboards. Such a truth is a woman’s right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it. It was hers before she comprehended it. The rational basis for proper government lies in the female soul. Lily could feel the grip of her daughter’s hand, growing tighter now with each moment. There were motes of dust around Douglass in the air, animate and twirling: it seemed as if the dust itself might constitute something.

He put his hand to his forehead as if trying to summon a new idea. He shut his eyes: close to prayer.

Lily thought that he might remain that way, that she, too, would become fixed forever in whatever occurrence his mind had found. She was back on the staircase. He brushed past her to go downstairs. She felt her heart lift. All around her now there were women standing, and the applause rang out around the hall, a series of shouts, but Lily stayed seated, and what she felt was incomparable, singular, yet ordinary, too, all the living moments gathered together in this one, the door of his room closed, a tiny rim of light underneath it, growing brighter in the dark. She understood that she had come such a distance, traveled all this way, she had opened a door, and her own daughter was in the room, her own history and flesh and darkness, leaning down by the light of an ancient lantern, to read.

AFTERWARDS, DOUGLASS WAS ushered quickly from the hotel. A carriage waited outside, the horse clopping its hooves against the cobbles. The night had grown sultry. A hangnail of moon perched above St. Louis. The gas lamps made the darkness unequal.

A group of protesters had gathered on the far side of the street, men in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders. A row of policemen stood in front of them, arms linked, nonchalant.

Lily watched as Douglass lifted his head and glanced across as if in amusement. He held the hand of a white lady, guiding her into the carriage. His second wife. The shouts from the street grew louder as Douglass made a show of his manners.

He bowed to his wife and then came around to the other side of the carriage, dipped and turned sideways, then hunched his shoulders, got in. The horse was tall and elegant. It lifted its hooves and snorted.

Lily had the momentary thought that she should stride across, lean in the window, greet him, say her name, ask him to remember, but she stood instead in the shadows. What could she say? What further meaning might she get from saying her name? He might only feign recognition, or perhaps he would not remember at all. She had her daughter. Her sons. The lifting of ice.

Lily heard the jangle of the harness and a wheelcreak across the night. She ruffled the edge of her dress, and put her hand on Emily’s arm.

— Time to go home, she said. Come on.

1929, evensong

STORIES BEGAN, FOR HER, AS A LUMP IN THE THROAT. SHE sometimes found it hard to speak. A true understanding lay just beneath the surface. She felt a sort of homesickness whenever she sat down at a sheet of paper. Her imagination pushed back against the pressures of what lay around her. Emily Ehrlich survived not by theory, or formula, but by certain moments of ease when she felt herself at full tilt, a sprinting, hurdling joy. Lost in a small excelsis.

The best moments were when her mind seemed to implode. It made a shambles of time. All the light disappeared. The infinity of her inkwell. A quiver of dark at the end of the pen.

Hours of loss and escape. Insanity and failure. Scratching one word out, blotting the middle of a page so it was unreadable anymore, tearing the sheet into long thin strips.

The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.

THE FIRST-CLASS CABIN was small and white. Two beds. A portside view. Fresh flowers in a crystal vase. A welcome note from the captain. A chandelier that had been designed not to sway.

Announcements shot through the static of the loudspeaker, a steward’s nasal whine: dinnertimes, sunburn warnings, club alerts.

THEY HAD NEVER cared much for appearances, but on the first evening mother and daughter helped each other get dressed.

The water was calm, but even in the small pitch and roll it was difficult to comb each other’s hair. Emily propped a small round mirror in the porthole window. Her hair had gone gray. Lottie’s had been cut fashionably short. Beyond their own reflection, they could see the lines of moving shiplight on the sea.

The weight Emily carried dragged her down to the ground. She was fifty-six years old, though there were times the mirrors suggested a whole other decade on her face. Her ankles were permanently swollen, her wrists and neck, too. She wore her shoes two sizes too big. She walked with a cane. A dark blackthorn wood. A small knob of silver at the handle. A sleeve of rubber at the bottom. It had been fashioned for her by a craftsman in Quidi Vidi. She had a shy walk, conscious of the space she took, as if her body were waiting to acknowledge her discomfort, the space she took up.

Lottie — tall, redheaded, confident — wore a long taffeta dress, a baubled necklace against the curve of her throat. She was twenty-seven, with an air of earliness about her: she seemed to arrive ahead of herself. Mother and daughter were seldom apart. Caught by an orbit. Stitched together in opposites.

They sidled towards the dining room, Emily resting on her daughter’s arm. They stopped a moment in the entrance, surprised by the sight of a curving balustrade. Flowers were wrapped around the banister. A spectacle of wealth all around. Young men in dark suits and fly-collar shirts. Thin women with feathers in their hair, their necks strained, their arms outstretched. Businessmen gathered in groups, cigarette smoke swirling above them.

A bell rang and a cheer went up. The boat was far enough out to water. An opera of anti-Prohibition toasts unfolded. The air itself seemed to have already drunk several glasses of gin.

They were led to a table to sit with the ship doctor. A handsome Canadian with a curlicue of dark hair down the center of his forehead, his face lean and laugh-lined. In a well-cut shirt and arm garters. He leaned across the table towards them. The talk was of Lomer Gouin and Henry George Carroll, of a slight wobbling in the Stock Exchange, of corn prices, of anarchists in Chicago, of Calvin Coolidge and his fondness for robber barons, of Pauline Sabin and her call for repeal.

The food came out, served on elegant china plates. After a few drinks the doctor began to slur. A jazz note kicked out from the stage. A trumpet swayed. The piano wavered. Wolverine Blues. Muskrat Ramble. Stack O’ Lee Blues.

Emily scribbled a quick word in her notebook while Lottie returned to her room, searched for her new camera, a silver Leica. Emily hoped that her daughter would take pictures of the small galaxies of smoke through which the whole ship seemed to shimmer.

IT WAS THEIR first journey abroad. A six-month trip at least. Emily would send stories back for a magazine in Toronto, Lottie would take photographs. Europe was ablaze with ideas. Paintings in Barcelona. Bauhaus in Dessau. Freud in Vienna. The tenth anniversary of Alcock and Brown. Big Bill Tilden in the men’s tennis at Wimbledon.

They had packed as little as possible in their wooden trunk in the hope that they would be able to move easily from place to place. A few changes of clothes, some weather gear, two copies of the same Virginia Woolf novel, notebooks, photographic film, some medicine for Emily’s arthritis.

THE DAYS WERE lengthy. The hours drifted. The sea stretched a round majestic gray. In the distance the horizon curved. Mother and daughter sat on the deck and looked backwards as the evening sun flared red.

They read the Woolf novel in tandem, matched each other almost page for page. The voice had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks — so it sounded. What Emily liked most of all was the appearance of ease that Woolf brought. The words slid so easily into one another. There was a sense of a full life being translated. It was, in Woolf’s hands, a display of humility.

Emily sometimes wondered if she, herself, lacked a true conviction. She had been writing articles for the best part of three decades. Two books of poems had appeared and faded, from a publisher in Nova Scotia. Her articles had created a good deal of interest, but she wondered if she owned a faint idea of many things, and a strong idea of only a few. As if she had developed an immunity to depth. That she only, now, skimmed the surface. That she swam on an elaborate piece of glass. She may have upset the petty canons of expectation — an unwed mother, a newspaper journalist — but it hardly seemed enough. She had spent many years trying to carve out a place for herself, but she was so much older now, tired enough to wonder why it mattered. A heaviness on her.

There was something she wanted, just out of reach, but she was never quite sure what it could possibly be. She had a sense of something more, the turn of a page, the end of a line, the push of a word, a break in the structure of her habits. She envied the young Woolf. The command and promise the Englishwoman showed. Her profusion of voices. The ability to live in several different bodies.

Perhaps the reason for her trip was to unhem herself from routine. To throw an added pulse into her days. She and Lottie had been side by side in the Cochrane Hotel for so many years. The room was tiny but they would have been perfectly able to move around each other blindfolded.

ON DECK, THE badminton matches unfolded. Emily noticed the arc of the shuttlecock from a distance, the way it caught in midnight and hovered as if arrested by some magnetism that lay inside the ship and then, when hit in the other direction, lazed for a moment, woke to the possibility of wind, shot forward once more.

Lottie came up from the cabin, wearing a long skirt, whisking a borrowed racquet through the air. A live wire. Always had been. No airs, no graces, but shot through with an electricity, a free-floating awe. She was not pretty, but it hardly mattered. She was the sort of young woman whose laughter could be heard around distant corners. She was quickly partnered up for mixed doubles.

A waiter patrolled the deck with a tray of drinks held high over his head. An old Serbian couple walked hand in hand: they were returning, they said, from their experiment of America. Two beautifully dressed Mexican men walked beneath the gloss of their hair. A marching band practiced at the bow. Emily watched the progress of the funnel shadow as it moved across the deck, slowly traveling from one side of the ship to the next.

It astounded her to think that her own mother had been on a coffin ship some eighty years before, a floating boat of fever and loss, and here she was, now, with her own daughter, traveling to Europe, first class, on a vessel where the ice was made by an electrical generator.

SHE LEFT THE dining room, her cane striking off the boards. Gradations of darkness over the water. No moon. Starlight skittered on the high waves. The lights seemed to rise from the ocean. In the distance the sea seemed so much blacker than the sky. The deck was wet with spray. Every now and then the engines calmed and the ship took on a running pace and the silence was immense.

She slowly negotiated the staircase towards the cabin. A steward accompanied her. She bid him good-bye, ached her way into bed. Later in the night she heard voices in the corridor. They drifted and merged, faded and reappeared. She could hear a smatter of laughter and then there was silence for a moment, the sound of closing doors, a distant thump that seemed to come from up on deck, like dancing, a smash of a glass, and voices drifting on the air. She turned the pillow, tried to find the cool side.

The lock on the door finally turned. The breathing slowed. Lottie had been drinking. Emily heard her dress fall exhausted to the floor. The opening of the trunk. A bare foot righting itself on the floor. A slight giggle.

Emily watched her daughter slip into bed.

SHE HAD NEVER been party to love herself. Not even a husband. Just a man who had come along and eventually disappeared. Vincent Driscoll. A newspaper editor in St. Louis. A sheen to his high forehead. Ink on his fingers. He was forty-two years old. He kept a picture of his wife in his wallet. Emily was a secretary in the advertising division. High-buttoned blouses and an amethyst brooch. Twenty-five. She harbored ambitions. She submitted an article about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. She knocked on the editor’s door. Driscoll said she had a feminine style. Florid and overwrought. He himself spoke in hard, clean, clipped sentences. He put his hand on the low of her back. He seemed to take some cynical pride in the way she allowed the hand to remain.

He took her to the Planters House Hotel. He ordered fried oysters, saddle of antelope, a Gruaud Larose. Upstairs, straps fell lightly from her shoulder. The damp white loaf of his body shuddered.

She wrote another article and then another. He took a pencil to them. He said he was grooming her. The spring floods of the Mississippi. A boiler explosion on Franklin Avenue. The shooting of a bear in Forest Park Zoo. Tom Turpin and his Harlem Rag, the Negro music down on Targee Street. He edited the stories closely. She opened the paper one day in 1898 to see her first-ever article there: a meditation on the legacy of Frederick Douglass, dead three years. She had written every word herself. The byline read: V. Driscoll. She felt hollowed out. She swayed. In the hotel, Driscoll pushed against his expansive white suit. His jacket never buttoned without obvious strain. His bottom lip twitched. The appearance of the article in the paper should have thrilled her. How dare she. She should thank him. He was allowing her his name. Their collaboration alone should have been enough. She wandered along the riverfront under a red sky. She heard the newsboys shouting out the name of the paper. Her own words within. She walked to her rooming house on Locust Street. A tiny room with an enamel washbowl and a wooden towel railing. Her few clothes hung lifeless in a carved wardrobe. A small desk folded down from the wall. She made a table entirely from books. She struck the nib against the paper. She would bide her time.

She climbed the stairs of the newspaper office once more. Slid her copy across his desk. He looked up at her and shrugged. V. E. Driscoll, he said again. His concession. The E for Emily. Their secret.

Fireworks shot up over St. Louis. The twentieth century was an explosion of color. In the hotel room she eased her ankles around the back of Driscoll’s knees. He raised the bed sheet as if it were a white flag. She attached the word spread to his life: his forehead spread, his waistline spread, his fame, too. She waited. She was not sure for what. It sickened her. His control. His bearing. The way she allowed it. On the street the Driscoll name was called out by newsboys. Emily walked away. She felt a stirring. A sickness in the morning. She began to carry. It stunned her. She thought briefly of visiting a doctor, decided against it. There would be no father, she was a woman beyond her times, she had suffered for it but she did not care, convention didn’t enthrall her. The dampening of love had shed more light on its nature than any actual experience of it. All she wanted, she said, was her name. Her real name. There was no room for a woman writer at the paper, he said, not beyond the society page. Never had been. She touched her stomach. She mentioned a pregnancy. He blanched. The child might, she said, have real lungs for the world. He spread his palm gently on his giant wooden desk, but his knuckles were white. It was, he said, blackmail. She sat demurely. She moved her fingers in the well of her dress. A portrait of his children sat on the desk. He tapped his pencil on the edge of it. Initials only, he said. She would have to continue to write under Driscoll and then she would have a second column, E. L. Ehrlich. It had enough of a male ring to it. She could live with that. It was hers alone. The L for Lily.

She gave birth to the child in the early winter of 1902. At night, when the baby slept, she wrote again, meticulous with each sentence. She wanted her articles to have the compression and rhythm of poems. She pushed the words towards the edge of the page. Worked and reworked. The cutting contests in the Rosebud Café, where the musicians pounded hard on the piano keys. A meeting of anarchists in the basement of a tenement in Carr Square. The bare-knuckle boxing fights down near the newsboys’ home on Thirteenth Street. She was in the habit of writing at tangents so there were times that she would stray into a treatise on the patterns of bird migration along the Missouri, or the excellence of the cheesecake that could be found in the German diner on Olive Street.

She liked her aloneness. At times, over the years, she had met men who showed interest in her. A vendor of Persian carpets. A tugboat captain. An elderly survivor of the Civil War. An English carpenter who was creating an Eskimo village for the World’s Fair. But she gravitated to aloneness. She watched the back of their jackets as they left, the creases made by their shoulder blades. She was left walking with her daughter along the riverbank. Their breathing melded. Their dresses moved harmonically. She found herself an apartment on Cherokee. She splurged on a typewriter. It clattered through the evening. She wrote Driscoll’s column. She didn’t mind. She even enjoyed inhabiting his narrow mind. For her own column she felt as if she were stretching every cartilage. A happiness came over her. She combed her daughter’s flare of hair. There were days of great release: she felt as if she was hauling herself from the depths of the well.

In 1904 Driscoll was found slumped over at his desk. A massive heart attack. His third in a row. She thought of him shuddering in his tight white waistcoat. The funeral was held in the bright St. Louis sunshine. She arrived in a wide black hat and long gloves. At the back of the mourners, she held Lottie’s hand. Later that week she was called into the newspaper offices. Her heart hammering with expectation. She would now be given her full name, her byline, her right. She had bided her time. She was thirty-one years old. This was her chance. So many stories. The World’s Fair had made the city shimmer. The skyline was stepping upwards. So many accents on the streets. She would capture it all. She walked the stairs. The newspaper owners sat with hands folded, waiting. One of them absently probed the stem of his spectacles at his earlobe. He grimaced as she sat. She began to speak, but they cut her off. Driscoll had left a letter for them in his desk drawer. She could feel her lip tremble. The letter was read out. He had, he claimed, written her articles all along. Word for word. Every small swerve. It was his parting gift. His face slap.

She was stunned by the industry of his revenge. She would never, said the owners, be allowed to work again. She tried to summon a word. They closed the folders in front of them. One stood up to open the door for her. He looked at her as if she were nothing more than a passing horse.

She walked along the river, her face hidden underneath her wide hat. Her mother had walked along here, too, years before. Lily Duggan. Water carried on water. Emily went home to the apartment on Cherokee. She threw her hat away, packed a bag with their things, left the typewriter behind. They moved out from St. Louis to Toronto, where her brother, Tomas, a mining engineer, lived. A room for two months. His wife balked. She did not want an unwed mother around. Emily and Lottie took a train to Newfoundland: the sea did not ice.

They rented a room on the fourth floor of the Cochrane Hotel. Two days later she knocked on the door of the Evening Telegram. The first article she wrote was a portrait of Mary Forward, the owner of the Cochrane. Mary Forward walked around under her storm of gray hair. Her bracelets slipped down her forearms as she lifted the hair from her neck. The hotel itself was captured in quick sharp strokes. The newlyweds — farmboys and farmgirls, their fingers thick and nervous — sitting in the breakfast room. The piano that sounded out at all hours. The banisters that curved into a question mark. Mary Forward liked the article so much that she framed the page in the doorway of the bar. Emily wrote another. About a schooner caught on the rocks. Another about a harbor master who had never been out at sea. She was allowed to use her full byline. She slid into the skin of the town. She felt comfortable there. The fishing boats. The small bells sounding over the water. The threat of storm. She caught the palette of color along the quays. Reds, ochers, yellows. The constant search for the better word. The silences, the blasphemies, the quarrels. The locals were wary of newcomers, but Emily had the texture of old weather and she dissolved amongst them. Lottie, too.

Over the years Emily published poetry with a press in Halifax. The books fell away, but that hardly mattered to her anymore; they had existed for a while, found themselves a shelf to rest upon. So, too, with the weekly columns: she might not have been party to love, but it still took a lot of volume to fill a life.

IN THE MORNING Emily swung her feet from the bed. Lottie was still sleeping. A piece of hair had fallen across her face. It rose and fell gently with her breath. A vague scent of gin in the room.

Emily rolled her tights up onto her ankles and struggled into her shoes. She reached for her cane, bent across Lottie, kissed the warm of her forehead. Her daughter stirred, didn’t wake.

The corridor was quiet. She walked along its whiteness. She stopped and leaned against the wall to get her breath back. She could not lay her hands on the emptiness of what she felt. The boat pitched and moaned. She thought to herself that she was, perhaps, skirmishing her way around a headache.

She was helped up the stairs by a young steward. The fresh air calmed her a moment. The gray of the water stretched endlessly. It fell into shapes like a child’s painting.

The boat hit some choppy water. A loud whistle cut the air. The umbrellas were folded and put away. The deckchairs skillfully stacked.

Somehow a maplewood guitar had been left on the upper deck. A stain of rain on its dark neck. She picked it up and shuffled back to the stairs. She wanted to return it to its owner. A sharp, warm pain moved across her forehead. She was at the point of exhaustion. Her cane dropped and skittered down the stairs. She grabbed the handhold. Slowly eased herself down. She was careful not to clang the guitar against the stairs as the boat rolled.

A reek of vomit came from the corridor. A garbled message shot over the loudspeaker. The last thing she could recall was the falling clang of the guitar as another wave hit.

EMILY WOKE WITH the ship’s doctor leaning over her. He held a stethoscope to her chest. Took her pulse. He wore a reflecting mirror on his forehead. When he backed away to look at her, she could see the shimmy of her form in the round mirror. She struggled to sit up and speak. There was a quality of gauze to the world.

Lottie hovered in the background, chewing her nails. Her tall frame, her pale blue eyes, her short bobbed hair.

The doctor ran his hands along the length of Emily’s arm, checking for swelling at her neck. A stroke, she thought. She mumbled something. The doctor soothed her, put a hand on her shoulder. He wore a wedding ring on his left hand.

— You’ll be all right, Mrs. Ehrlich.

She felt her body tighten. She saw Lottie lean across and mention something to the doctor. He shrugged, said nothing, unhinged the stethoscope from around his neck. He turned to the row of cupboards behind his head, reached for a bottle of pills, counted some out in a silver dish, scooped them into a small glass jar.

SHE REMAINED IN the sick bay for three days. A severe dehydration, he said. A possible strain on her heart. She would have to go for tests when they arrived in Southampton. Lottie stayed beside her, morning to night.

A damp cloth was placed on her forehead. She wondered if a part of her had fallen ill precisely because she wanted to dwell for a while longer in the presence of her daughter. The desire not to lose her. To keep her nearby. To live inside that alternative skin.

A DAY FROM England, she was brought up on deck. A little haze of brown in the mist. An indistinct form of dark. Lottie told her that it was the coastline of Ireland. The headlands of Cork disappeared behind them — at the rear of the boat the phosphorescence shone.

IN SOUTHAMPTON SHE gave the porter a few shillings to carry their trunk off quickly. She would not go to the hospital. They had already made arrangements for a driver to bring them to Swansea. She couldn’t change anything now.

She saw Lottie, on the gangplank, shaking hands with the ship’s doctor. So that was it. That was all. She felt a vague sadness.

She took Lottie’s arm as they walked down the gangplank together. Her legs felt hollow beneath her. She stopped a moment to gather her breath, adjusted her hat and they walked down to a line of drivers who were waiting on the quayside. An old Ford. A Rover. An Austin.

A portly young man with a clean-shaven face stepped forward. He extended a soft hand and introduced himself. Ambrose Tuttle. He wore the blue of an RAF uniform, a pale blue shirt, trousers that accordioned at his ankles. His head came to Lottie’s shoulder. He glanced up at her as if she were walking on stilts.

He gestured towards a maroon-colored Rover with spoked wheels and a tall silver ornament on the hood.

— Sir Arthur is expecting us, he said.

— Is it a long drive?

— Afraid so, yes. We might not get there until nightfall. Make yourselves comfortable. I’m afraid the roads are rather bumpy.

When he bent to pick up the traveling trunk he exposed a wedge of skin at the small of his back. Emily took the front seat. Lottie settled in the back. The car pulled away from the docks. They drove out of the city into a sudden bright sunlight and a tunnel of chestnut trees.

THE ROAD RATTLED through them. On occasion the shadows fretted them as they went beneath an arc of trees. The hedges were long and green and manicured. They seemed to coax the car along.

They were traveling at close to forty miles an hour. Emily glanced at her daughter in the backseat, the wind nibbling at the low of her blouse. The blue of the sky had barely changed since noon. The road was largely empty. She thought the English countryside at ease with its order. Nothing at all like Newfoundland. The fields were angular. They could see a great distance, the ancient highways narrowing towards the horizon, an empire quality to it, regimented, well-mannered. Different from what she had expected. No coal mines, no slag heaps, no gray English slouch.

It was difficult to talk over the noise of the engine. On the outskirts of Bristol they stopped at a small tea shop. Ambrose took off his cap and revealed a head of curly fair hair. He spoke with a curious accent. Belfast, he told them, but Emily figured from the way he said it that he must have been a child of privilege. His accent was more English than Irish. A musical formality to it.

He had been with the RAF for a few years now, in the communications division, but had never graduated to the flying division. He patted his stomach as if to make an excuse.

The sky darkened. Lottie called out instructions from a giant map that gunneled in the wind. Ambrose glanced backwards at Lottie as if she herself might suddenly take flight, a parachute of intrigue.

AS THE LIGHT failed, Ambrose geared the Rover down, banked the corners skillfully, headed into another long stretch of hedges. They neared Wales. A series of small hills, like a sleeping woman silhouetted sideways.

By early evening they were lost. They pulled up to the edge of a field and watched a falconer ply his art: the bird being trained on the end of a string, the long curl of his flight slowly learning its limits. It hovered a moment, then landed superbly on the falconer’s glove.

THEY WERE FORCED to stop in Cardiff for the night. A dingy hotel. The air hinted of sea and storm. Emily felt feverish again, lightheaded. Lottie helped her up the stairs and slipped into bed beside her.

In the morning, they drove out along the coast road. The sun rose high behind them, burning off the fog. Children waved from the sides of ditches, boys in gray shorts, girls in blue pinafores. Some were barefoot. A few bicycles came rolling along, mud-splattered and rickety. An old woman waved a walking stick in the air and shouted something in a language they couldn’t understand. A line of golden hayricks crossed a field.

The three of them stopped by a narrow stream and shared a flask of hot tea, using just the one cup, shaking the last of the contents into the grass. Emily shuffled along the river. She could hear Lottie’s laughter ring high in the air. Down by a bend, at an overhang of trees, Emily saw an older man standing in high wading boots. He had a fishing rod but he made no motion at all, just stood thigh-deep in the water, contemplating. As if rooted in the stream. She raised her hand to wave, but he looked beyond her. She was glad for the anonymity. She was certain now that she would speak to Brown alone.

The man in the river turned, but still he didn’t cast his rod. It was as if he was there to hook the light. She raised her hand again and he nodded, more out of obligation than friendliness, she was sure.

When she returned to the stream bank, Ambrose and Lottie were huddled together, sharing a cigarette.

THE HOUSE LAY on the western outskirts of Swansea. At the edge of the water. Down a long laneway of painted white fences. Large, redbrick, garreted. Emily counted three chimneys. The gravel crunched under the tires. They pulled to a stop. Ravens flew from the eaves. The long limbs of a chestnut tree scratched against the roof of the house.

Brown’s wife, Kathleen, came to the doorstep to greet her. She was dark-haired, serious. Pretty in a guarded way. She guided Emily into a wainscoted living room. Tastefully decorated. Long maroon curtains bracketed two French windows, which led into a manicured back garden. The wind seemed interested in the curtains: it came through the parted doors and ruffled the material, sniffed about, toured the room. Photographs on the shelves. One of Alcock and Brown together with the King of England. Another with Churchill. Aviation books ranged the shelves. Large leather-bound volumes in maroon and beige. Some cut-glass awards and framed certificates perched on small wooden frames. A dozen old yellow roses with red-streaked petals sat dying in a large vase on the table.

Emily struggled into a chair by the window. A single cup and saucer had been left on the carpet by the edge of the divan, forgotten. Some forlorn crumbs on the edge of the saucer. She looked all about her, the room, the green lawn out the window, the silvery sea. It had taken many letters to the RAF to track Brown down. There were rumors of whiskey, of brokenness, of failure. That he envied the celebrity of Lindbergh. That he had lost his nerve. In photographs it had struck her that he was on the verge of disintegration.

From upstairs she could hear the creak and moan of footsteps. There was a sound like the dragging of furniture. Doors closing.

Kathleen put her head around the door frame. Her husband, she said, would be down in just a jiffy, he was looking for something, he extended his apologies. Her hair was a sleek curve of water.

Moments later Kathleen came in again, left Emily with a black lacquered tray of tea and biscuits. A pattern on a saucer. A circularity. No beginning, no end. Striding across the fields of St. John’s ten years ago. Sleeves of ice on the grass. Watching the practice runs at night. The sound of the Vimy throttling in. The rattleroar. The catch of it on the grass. The small spray of muck in the air.

From somewhere came the voice of a child. Emily brought her chair closer to the window, looked down the run of hill towards the sea, gray and corrugated.

She was startled by a low cough. The door was open. Brown stood silhouetted against the light. The shape of a shadow. A young boy stood in front of him, dressed in a crisp sailor suit. His hair was neatly combed. His shorts were pressed. Elastics on his long socks. Brown closed the door. The dark clarified him. He himself was dressed in tweed with a tie firm against his throat. He put his hands to the boy’s shoulders and guided him forward. The boy, well-practiced, extended his hand.

— A pleasure to meet you.

— And you. What’s your name?

— Buster.

— Ah, that’s a wonderful name. I’m Emily.

— I’m seven.

— I was once, too, believe it or not.

The young boy glanced backwards at his father. Brown’s hands curled more deeply around the boy’s shoulders, then he tapped him twice and the boy turned immediately and ran towards the French windows. He threw the doors fully open and a strong smell of the sea burst into the room.

They watched as the boy ran out past the garden towards a tennis court where he jumped over the sagging net and disappeared behind a row of hedges.

— A sweet boy, Mr. Brown.

— He’d run all day if you gave him the chance. Teddy.

— Excuse me?

— Teddy is just fine.

— It’s a pleasure to see you again, Teddy, she said.

— Your daughter?

— She’ll be along later.

— Quite the girl, if I recall.

— She’s taking some photographs along the coast.

— All grown up, I presume.

Brown himself had indeed aged considerably in the decade since the flight. It wasn’t simply the loss of the hair, or the weight that had accumulated on his frame. There was an air of hidden exhaustion about him. Slight bags under his eyes. His neck sagged. He had shaved closely — there was still a pink rawness to his cheeks, but he had cut his neck and a small trickle of blood had made its way down to his collar. He had put on a good suit, but his body seemed foreign to the cut of it.

A whiff of disintegration about him, yes, but surely no more, she thought, than her own.

He took her elbow lightly and brought her over to the couch, indicated for her to sit down, pulled up a small wicker chair. He leaned to the low glass table and filled the teacups, gestured towards the pot as if an answer might be found there.

— I was rather neglectful, I’m afraid.

— Sorry?

He fumbled in the inside of his jacket, took out a letter, crumpled and water-stained. She recognized it straightaway. A blue envelope. The Jennings Family, 9 Brown Street, Cork.

— I was so caught up. After the flight. And then for some reason I tucked it away.

She realized that was what he must have been searching for upstairs: the sounds of shifting furniture, opening drawers, closing doors. It was not that she had forgotten about the letter — she had simply assumed that it had found its way to Brown Street, or perhaps it had been lost somewhere along the way: she and Lottie had never received a reply.

— I forgot to post it. I’m dreadfully sorry.

It was still sealed. She glanced down at her own handwriting. The ink had faded slightly. She put the letter to her lip. As if she could taste it somehow. She tucked it, then, in the back flap of the notebook.

— It’s nothing really, she said.

Brown was looking at his feet, as if nervously wondering where he might land.

— It’s an anniversary piece, said Emily.

— Excuse me?

— What I want to write, it’s a tenth-anniversary piece.

— Ah, yes. I see.

Brown coughed into his fist.

— The truth is I haven’t done that much. I don’t fly anymore, you know. I go to lunches. I’ve made rather a career out of it I’m afraid.

Brown tapped the inside of his pocket: whatever he was looking for was not there. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed it delicately across his brow. Emily extended her silence.

— I’m the best luncher there is. By dinner I start to flag. I could cross the sea on lunch alone. I rather detest these new-fangled airplanes, though. I heard they plan to serve dinner in them. Can you believe that?

— I’ve seen photographs, she said.

— The cockpit is enclosed. The pilots say it’s like making love with your hat on.

— Excuse me?

— I presume you won’t quote me on that, Miss Ehrlich? Rather rude of me to say so. But surely, well, yes, let’s just say there are ideal situations in which one should wear a hat.

This was his performance now, she sensed, he brought a breezy irony to his fame. She laughed, drew back a little from him. His days now were an ovation to the past. She knew he had probably talked the Vickers Vimy out of himself, hundreds of interviews over the years. And yet the whole of anything was never fully told. She would have to turn away from the obvious, bank her way back into it.

— My condolences, she said.

— Excuse me?

— Alcock.

— Ah, Jackie, yes.

— A tragedy, she said.

She and Lottie had been in the dining room of the Cochrane Hotel when they had heard the news. Just six months after the flight. Alcock had gone down over France. On his way to an air show in Paris. Lost in a cloud. Unable to pull the plane out from its spin. He smashed into a field. He was found unconscious in the cabin. A farmer dragged him from the wreck, but Alcock died a few hours later. He wore, on his arm, a diamond-studded wristwatch. He was buried with it a few days later.

— Ten years, Brown said, as if speaking out the window, down the lawn, towards the sea.

Emily drained her teacup and adjusted her body in the soft of the couch. The clock on the mantelpiece ticked. Shadows came into the room, slowly dissolved. She liked the play of light at Brown’s feet. She wanted to bring him back, brush all the tickertape off his shoulders, return to the moment of raw experience, above the water, to chant the moment alive once more.

— You’re a pacifist, she said.

— Of the sort that every man is I suppose. I have done little that is special, and so much that is luck.

— I admire that.

— It doesn’t take a lot really.

— You took the war out of the plane.

Brown glanced at her, looked towards the garden. He ran his hands along his wooden cane, and then tapped it off the side of the table. He looked as if he was weighing up the extent of what he might say.

— Why don’t you fly anymore?

He gave a half-smile.

— We get older, he said.

She allowed a silence, worked the flesh of her hands into the well of her dress.

— We compromise.

The sound of distant laughter from outside broke abruptly, lingered a moment, then faded.

— I suppose I’m still aloft most of the time.

He fell then into the recollection: the sheer release of being in the air. He told her of his nights in the prison camp, the return home, the thrill of the Vimy, the way the old bomber handled, the vibration of it through his body, the snow stinging his cheeks, the narrow lines of sight, the desire to see Kathleen, the way the plane had landed, the catch in the bog grass, the surprise to still be alive, the crowds in Ireland, the return home, standing on the Aero Club balcony in London, the knighthood, the prize, the day he shook Alcock’s hand for the last time. He had written a fair amount, he said, and he still made appearances, but his life was largely quiescent, he was happy at home with Kathleen and Buster. He didn’t ask too much, he already had enough.

She saw an ease come over him. She had thought him, at first, sad — earlier, when he stood in the doorway, shielded by his son — but now she detected a vibrancy in him, a return to his original self. It gladdened her. He had a slow smile that started in his eyes and pulled at his lips, until his face was drawn tighter, more intimate.

The tea had grown cold, but they poured the last of it into their cups. The shadows lay long in the room. He absently touched his jacket pocket again.

— One thing, said Brown. If I may.

He meshed his fingers together as if in some small prayer, and glanced at her. He reached out for a biscuit, dunked it in his tea. He held the biscuit a moment until it tumbled and fell. He fished out the soggy wafer with a spoon. For several moments he did not speak.

— If you’ll forgive me.

— Yes?

— It wasn’t a tragedy.

— Excuse me?

— Jackie, he said. Jackie was in his plane, you see. Exactly where he wanted to be. He would not have thought it tragic at all.

Brown pulled the spoon away from his mouth, but still held the curve of it at his chin. She wished she had brought Lottie so she could photograph him in this pose.

— Up there. Something else takes charge of your freedom. Do you understand what I mean?

She heard him inhale.

— Maybe a child, he said. Perhaps that equals it. Perhaps that is the only thing.

He was gazing out over her shoulder. She turned to see the young boy, Buster, in the garden. He was framed by the edge of the window and looked as if he was talking to someone. She turned farther around and, through the window, saw Ambrose. A cap tilted jauntily on his head. He was picking up the tennis net from the ground. He shook it out as if there were raindrops on it, then he pulled it taut. It fell to the ground once more. The two were laughing, man and boy, though they could only faintly be heard.

Lottie stood at the edge of the tennis court, the camera dangling down by her side. She reached for the other part of the net and tautened it, bent down to pick a tennis racquet off the ground.

— Your daughter, said Brown. Her name escapes me.

— Lottie.

— Ah, yes.

— If you can give her a few moments for a photograph later, we’d be very grateful.

— And who is the young man?

— Our driver. He works at the RAF in London. He drove all night to pick us up in Southampton. Then brought us here.

— We will have to invite him to lunch then.

The china rattled in Brown’s fingers as he put the cup and saucer back down on the table.

— Is he a pilot?

— He wanted to be. He works in communications. Why?

— One goes up in a plane knowing, sometimes, that not all of you is going to come down.

The saucer dropped noisily on the glass table, and he put his hand into his pocket. Even through the cloth, his fingers were trembling. He stood and made his way through the room.

— You will forgive me? said Brown, and he went towards the door. He paused a moment, his back still turned. I have something I must attend to.

HE CAME DOWNSTAIRS fifteen minutes later. His tie was firm against his throat once more, and his cheeks were flushed. He came straight towards Lottie and shook her hand.

— Pleasure to see you, young lady.

— And you, sir. If you don’t mind? There’s good light.

— Ah, yes.

Lottie jiggled the camera from her shoulder. She guided Brown out to the verandah, asked him to sit on the low stone wall, in front of the rosebushes, overlooking the sea. He placed his walking stick along the top of the wall, squinted a little at the camera, took out a handkerchief, wetted it, shone the top of his shoe.

The sky behind him was a spectacle of raincloud, gray shot through with blue. A white rosebush drooped over his shoulder.

— So, Mr. Brown. A question.

— Ah, a quiz.

— Do you remember the color of the carpet in the Cochrane Hotel?

— The carpet? he said.

— On the stairs.

Brown shaded his eyes against the light. For a moment the gesture reminded Emily of that she had seen back in Newfoundland a decade ago.

— Red, he ventured.

— And in the dining room?

— Is that correct, red?

Lottie changed her angle, caught more of the shadow on the side of his face, moved fluidly along the wall.

— And the name of the road you drove along? To get to Lester’s Field?

— I see. A photographer’s trick. The Harbour Road, if I’m not mistaken. Do they still have those fishing boats?

— People still talk about you there, Mr. Brown.

— Teddy.

— They talk of you fondly.

Emily watched her daughter load another roll of film. The exposed roll went into the pocket of her dress. Over the years she had become sharp and skillful: she could reload in seconds.

— I have a shot of you shaving, she said. Do you recall the basin at the end of the field?

— We heated it with a bunsen burner.

— You were leaning forward into the basin.

— Just in case we were to fly in the evening.

As she spoke she dragged a chair across the verandah. Without asking, she guided Brown into the chair. He moved without complaint. The cloudshapes behind him shifted.

— You made our sandwiches, he said. That morning.

He smiled broadly. She changed her lens, hunkered down close to the ground, shot wide.

— I’m terribly sorry about your letter.

— Mother told me.

— I was awfully neglectful.

— It got across, Mr. Brown.

— Indeed, it did.

She lined up another angle, moved him slightly in the chair.

— It was green, by the way.

— Excuse me?

— The carpet, it was green. In the Cochrane.

He threw his head back and laughed.

— I could have sworn it was red.

Moments later a tennis ball shot high in the air and landed in the rosebushes behind Brown.

— Careful, he called out to Buster.

Brown walked across the verandah, and clambered on top of the low wall. He used his walking stick to poke the white ball from among the roses. It took several attempts. A small leaf clung to the edge of the ball.

Brown stepped down off the wall, arched his back, and flung the ball through the sky with surprising agility. She shot him midthrow, the leaf in flight behind him.

— Got it, said Lottie.

IN THE EARLY afternoon they took lunch on the verandah: Brown, Emily, Lottie, Ambrose, Kathleen, and Buster. An array of sandwiches with the crusts carefully cut. A dark fruitcake. A teapot kept warm under an embroidered cozy.

Emily was not surprised to detect a faint roll of whiskey coming from Brown. So that was why he had left the room. That was the ease he had felt with the photographs. But why not? He deserved a novelty of sensation, she thought.

She saw him lean close to Ambrose and touch the young man on the arm.

— And how are things beyond? asked Brown. In London?

— Perfectly fine, sir, said Ambrose.

— That’s quite an assignment. To drive these pretty ladies.

— Yes, sir.

— You’re Irish?

— Northern Ireland, sir.

— Jolly good. I like the Irish.

Ambrose faltered a moment, said nothing. Brown sat back in the chair, nodded, gazed off into the distance. His jacket flap fell open. She saw the peep of a silver flask. Kathleen placed her hand on Brown’s forearm to lock him there, to keep him to the ground, as if he might, in alcohol, take off. He nodded to her as if to say, Yes, dear, but just this one time, allow me that.

The afternoon light lapped around the verandah. At the end of lunch Buster bounded off towards the tennis court. He came back holding three racquets and a white tennis ball.

— Play tennis with me, please, please, please.

Lottie and Ambrose glanced at each other, stood up from the table, took the boy’s hand, strode across the lawn together.

— Ah, said Brown.

Emily watched from her garden chair. The net had been fixed and tightened. Her daughter bounced the tennis ball up and down on the racquet strings several times, then knocked it across the net towards Ambrose. A fine spray of moisture rose from the ball in the sunlight.

BROWN WAS SLEEPING by the time they left. Curled in a lawn chair with a blanket up at his neck. A caterpillar worked its way, green, across the stonework. Brown’s eyelids flickered. Emily reached out and touched his hand, cupped her palm around the edge of his fingers. His body shivered and it looked as though he might waken, but then he turned sideways in his chair and blew air through his lips, exhausted.

Emily stepped away from his chair. She would not mention the alcohol in her article, she knew. No need. No point. She would want, instead, to recall him in the air, between layers of cloud. To give him back that ancient dignity. To hear a whoop as he flew out over the treetops.

She tucked the flap of the blanket around his chin. His shallow breath on her fingers. Small hairs that he had neglected to shave. She turned and shook Kathleen’s hand.

— Thank you for your hospitality.

— You’re most welcome.

— Your husband is a fine man.

— He’s tired, that’s all, said Kathleen.

Ambrose cranked the car and put it in gear. He eased forward. They curved down the road, under the chestnut trees. It would, he said, be a long drive to London.

Emily glanced back and saw Kathleen and Buster standing on the steps of the house. Kathleen had her arms wrapped around her son, her chin perched on his head. The gravel crunched under the wheels.

The trees bent down to the road. The twigs jostled. A small wind shivered the leaves. Buster broke away and Kathleen turned, then disappeared into her house.

WHEN EMILY WOKE hours later — in the car, in the gathering dark — she was not surprised to see her daughter asleep with her head on Ambrose’s shoulder. She looked as if she were fitting into something already made to her shape. Lottie’s hair spread across the lapel of his jacket.

Ambrose held steady to the wheel, driving as carefully as he could so as not to disturb her.

FOUR MONTHS LATER, they were married. The wedding took place in Belfast, in a Protestant church off the Antrim Road. It was September, but the day was delivered on a coattail of summer. Leaves skittered green on the trees. A flock of starlings harried the air.

Emily and Lottie arrived in a white car, the ribbons pulled taut in the breeze. They entered through the black ironwork gates. Emily stepped out carrying the hem of her daughter’s lace. For a moment she even forgot her walking cane. Only a tinge of arthritis. She crossed the shadow into the dark of the church. The pews were filled to near bursting point. Dark suits and elaborate hats. Young men in RAF uniforms. Girls in long flapper dresses. Old women with a strategic handkerchief tucked in their sleeves. Ambrose’s family owned a mill that specialized in aero-linen. Many of the employees had come along. Hard-looking men in gray suits, flat hats stuffed in their pockets. There were bouquets of flowers from Short Brothers, from Vickers, one in the shape of a Wellington glider. Emily sat in the front pew, conspicuous in her aloneness, but she didn’t care: the young vicar began the service by holding his arms high in the air, like a man about to guide a plane towards landing. Emily had not been in a church in many years. She listened closely to the service as it unfolded. She was pleased by the lilt of the northern accent.

A gauntlet was made as the couple walked down the aisle. Ambrose appeared embarrassed at the fuss. His cheeks flushed red underneath his gray top hat. Lottie wore flat heels so as not to tower over him. A rain of white confetti came down outside. The couple kissed on the steps of the church.

In the hotel afterwards, Emily was taken outside to the small garden. Ambrose’s father brought her a chair. She sat in a square of sunshine, her cane positioned across her lap. There were a number of ice sculptures on the lawn. The afternoon melted slowly around her. The hard cry of horses, harnessed up in a Missouri dawn. Her mother’s overcoat shaped by the wind. Her father’s eyelashes frozen together. Ice shard. Prairie storm. It was odd to Emily how life could be so very expansive and still return to the elements of childhood. Lottie in the corridors of the Cochrane Hotel. Walking down along Paton Street on her first day at Prince of Wales. The day Lottie first discovered a camera, a bellowed Graflex. How, at Wimbledon, just four months ago, they sat together at center court, mother and daughter, watching the quarter final, and Lottie turned to tell her what she already knew. The lover’s fine sense of crisis. The circumference of Lottie’s world had shifted. She would stay now. She had fallen in love. Emily nursed a moment of joy that turned to jealousy and then returned once more to a fascination with the swerve of the world. What was a life anyway? An accumulation of small shelves of incident. Stacked at odd angles to each other. The long blades of an ice saw cutting sparks into a block of cold. Sharpening the blades, seating them, slotting them into handles. Leaning down to make the cut. A brief leap of ember in the air.

She felt suddenly grateful. You wake one morning in the howl of a northern Missouri winter, and moments later you are on the deck of a transatlantic cruiser, and then you are alone in Rome, and a week after that you are in Barcelona, or on a train through the French countryside, or back in a hotel in St. John’s watching a plane break the sky, or in a hat shop in St. Louis watching the rain come down outside, and then, just as suddenly, you sit in a hotel in Ireland watching your daughter across the lawn, moving between the ice sculptures, passing a tray of champagne amongst a hundred wedding guests. Emily could sense the skip in her life, almost like the jumping of a pen. The flick of ink across a page. The great surprise of the next stroke. The boundlessness of it all. There was something in it akin to a journey across the sky, she thought, the sudden shock of new weather, a wall of sunshine, or a pelt of hail, or the emergence from a bank of cloud.

She had a sudden urge to write to Teddy Brown and tell him that she understood entirely now, in this raw moment, why he did not want to fly anymore.

Emily rose from the chair and moved across the lawn. Her walking cane sunk into the soft ground. She found herself attended to by a number of Belfast widowers. They leaned in close. She was surprised by their flirtation. They were eager to meet an American, they said. Short, earnest men, well-shaved, teetotalers. She could imagine them easily in their orange sashes and their bowler hats. What would she do now? they asked. What part of the world was she bound for next? They had heard she lived in a hotel in Newfoundland, and not to be rude, but was that any place for a woman? Would she not like to find herself a place to settle down? They’d be quite happy to show her around if she decided to stay in Northern Ireland. There was a fine spot in Portaferry. She should see the glens of Antrim. The windy beaches of Portrush.

The dinner bell rang in the late afternoon. She joined Ambrose’s parents at their table. He was a short man with a generous laugh, she a stout woman under a net of tight hair. They were glad to have a Newfoundland girl in their family, they said. Many of their own had gone west over the years: there weren’t many came in the other direction. They grew curiously quiet when Emily told them the story of Lily Duggan. A maid? From Dublin? Is that so? Her name was Duggan, you say? She thought for a moment that they were interested in the particulars of the story. The details returned to her, sharply — the clothes uncracking upon the warm bar of the stove, the groan of the ice as it was pulled across the lake, a glove slowly blooming with blood, her mother looking up from the body of her father — until Mr. Tuttle leaned across the table and tapped her gently on the forearm and asked if this Lily Duggan went to church, and she launched again into the story, until, finally he leaned across the table in exasperation: Was this Lily Duggan a Protestant, then? It sounded as if it were the only question worth asking. Emily thought a moment that she would leave the answer unsaid, that it didn’t deserve the question, but she was on new turf, and it was her daughter’s wedding, and she told them that Lily had converted to marry, and she saw a quiet relief step into their faces, and a straightforwardness came over the table again. Later she saw Ambrose’s father at the bar singing Soldiers of the Queen. She shuffled her way up the hotel to go to bed. She was stopped on the stairs by Lottie and Ambrose. It was hard to believe: Mr. Ambrose Tuttle and Mrs. Lottie Tuttle. How odd to think that she and Lottie had spent virtually every day of their lives together. This, then, was the moment of release. It was far easier than she had imagined. She kissed her daughter and turned on the staircase, labored her way upwards. Dark drew down. She slept with an abandon, her gray hair splashed around the sheets.

She was taken the following day south to Strangford Lough. A small convoy of motorcars. Out into the countryside. Over the years the Tuttle family had owned a number of islands along the lake. Among the marshlands and tiny islands that they called pladdies. The windbent trees. The curving country roads. For a wedding present Ambrose and Lottie had been given five acres with a cottage that they could use as their summer home. A beautiful, dilapidated affair with a thatched roof and a blue half-door. An overgrown lawn stepped down to the lake. A small fishing shack sagged on the edge of the water. A crew of magpies perched in the swaying lakeside treetops.

They sat for a picnic in the long grass. A cold wind blew in. She could feel it rifling through her.

She could go now, thought Emily. Return to Newfoundland, alone. She would face the days, alone. She would write. Find a small content. A graceful levity.

The lake was tidal. It seemed to stretch forever to the east, rising and falling like a breathing thing. A pair of geese went across the sky, their long necks craned. They soared in over the cottage and away. They looked as if they were pulling the color out of the sky. The movement of clouds shaped out the wind. The waves came in and applauded against the shore. The languid kelp rose and fell with the swells. She could be forgiven the thought that she was already stepping back towards the sea.

1978, darkdown

HE IS, IN ALL RESPECTS, A PRETTY GOOD SHOT. PLENTY OF power. He can whip a forehand from the back of the court. If he wanted to, he could cover the back line in two or three leaps. But he is more of a loper. His lofty head. His mass of blond curls. An advertisement for ease. His shirt hangs off him, his shorts hang off him, his hangdog features, too. Even his socks have a slouch. Missing their Slazenger. Lord, what she would not give for a gentle cattle prod to wake her grandson for a moment, watch him come to life on the other side of the court. When he returns the ball he does so with a fair amount of accuracy. Can put some sting on a ball when he wants to. Not a bad backhand either. Lottie has seen him slice with artful backspin. A natural talent for the game, but a better one for daydreams. She tried once to engage him in the art of tennis as it related to angles, vectors, trajectories, percentages, any sort of arithmetic she could think of, but he wouldn’t take the bait. Nineteen years old and a fine young mathematician, but he will never storm the outer edges of Wimbledon.

She’s not exactly Billie Jean King herself, but she can still stand and knock the ball back and forth near the net. Especially on a late-summer’s evening with the light still lengthy on the northern sky. Nine in the evening. Sunset still a half hour away.

She can feel the rattle through her bones when she catches one of his returns on the volley. All the way up her fingers, along her wrist, through her elbow, into her shoulder. She is not a fan of these new metal racquets. In the old times they had fishtails, fantails, flattops. Wooden presses. Immaculate workmanship. Now it’s all sleek lines and metal heads. One of these days she’ll return to her old trusty Bancroft. She leans backwards and scoops another ball from the bucket, eases it along the middle line towards Tomas, a smidgen to his left. He watches it bounce blithely past. She should tell him to wake his carcass up, but it is enough that he has come out here with his ancient grandmother in her white knee-length skirt, to knock a ball around. The sight of him alone is easy on the eye. He’s a long handsome drink of water, with Hannah’s sweet face and his long-gone father’s Dutch stare. A little slice of Ambrose in him, too. The curls. A hint of chubby cheek. The bottle-green of the eyes. All the more so because he does not know it: if she told him he was a heartbreaker, he’d be stunned. He’d rather write a theorem for desire. There’s not a young lady around who wouldn’t swoon for him, but he’s more likely to be found in the university library, leafing about, trilling figures through his head. He wants to be an actuary of all things, a creature of predictions and possibilities, but this evening she would simply like to know the chance of him hitting another forehand.

— Get a grip! she shouts. Only six more left. Bring your left foot into it. Easy with your hip.

— All right, Nana.

— Pretend it’s rocket science.

Lottie reaches down for another ball. A slight twinge in her back. A whisper of genetics. A drop of sweat thickens over her lip. She straightens up. She is amazed to see Tomas, at the back of the court, leaning down to pull up his socks, all six foot two of him, beginning to bounce on his toes, the Björn Borg shuffle. She cannot help but chuckle. She rolls the white ball in her fingers, releases it and knocks it gently towards him, the ping off the strings, making sure it has enough of a bounce for him to come in beneath it, and he does, with great gusto. She expects him to miss it altogether, to swing empty, or to balloon it over the fence, but he connects with the ball, and not only that, but he turns his wrist over it, follows through with his shoulder, steps his left foot forward, brings every long inch of himself into the motion, and it whizzes past her at the net, a perfect height, a proper speed, and she turns to see it land, and although both of them know that it bounces inches outside the line, she shouts rather too loud: In!

ON THE DRIVE back to Belfast they are stopped at a checkpoint on the Milltown Road. A half dozen young soldiers, fresh-faced, camouflaged. Always a tingle of fear at the back of her neck. Tomas rolls down his driver’s-side window. They are, they say, checking licenses. Not normally a soldier’s job, but Lottie says nothing. The young soldiers are no older than Tomas himself. A bit scruffy and open-necked. Once upon a time they dressed smartly: shining brass badges and pipe-clayed belts.

One of them leans in the window and glances at her. A whiff of tobacco from him. She is hardly a vision in her wide white skirt and open cardigan, she knows, but she gives him a full smile and says: Anyone for tennis?

The soldier is not too fond of flippancy — no love, no deuce — and he walks the full length of the car, circles it slowly, checks the R sticker on the back, then touches his hand against the bonnet for heat, to see how far they have been driving. Since when might grandmother and grandson be a suspicion? Where might their rocket launchers be hidden? How likely is it that they are off down the Falls or the Shankill for a spot of punishment beating?

Not a word is exchanged and the soldier flicks his head. Tomas puts the car in gear, careful not to make too quick a getaway, towards the house just off the Malone Road.

IT HAS BECOME somewhat shabby over the years, though it has remnants of Victorian beauty. Redbrick. Bow windows. Three stories. Intricate lace on the curtains.

They step down the narrow path, amid the floribundas, the tennis bag over her shoulder. They stop at the cracked steps and he leans down to kiss her cheek.

— Night, Nana, he says, and his lips brush her ear. He has lived these past few months downstairs in the basement flat. Close enough to the university and far enough away from his stepfather. She watches him descend, a little gusto in his step, his blond curls darkening in the shadow.

— Not so fast, hey.

She has taken on many elements of the northern accent, though it is still bedrocked by her Newfoundland days, so there are times that it catches, and the music mixes, and she is not sure which is which anymore. Tomas trundles back up the steps, aware of what is coming. Their Wednesday ritual. She slips the twenty-pound bill into his hand, tells him not to spend it all in one bookshop.

— Thanks, Nana.

Always the quiet boy. Model airplanes. Adventure books. Comics. As a child he was always well-kept in his school uniform: shirt, slacks, polished shoes. Even now, in university, his scruffiness has a slight edge of stiff to it. She would like one day for Tomas to come home in one of those ripped-up T-shirts, with safety pins amok, or a bolt of a ring in his ear, show some proper rebellion, but she knows full well he will probably spend the money wisely, put it towards a telescope or a star map or some other such practicality. He might even put it away for a rainy day, hardly a good idea in this sodden city.

— Don’t forget to phone your mother and father.

— Stepfather.

— Tell them we’ll be out for the weekend.

— Ach, Nana, please.

He loves the cottage out at Strangford Lough, but dislikes his stepfather’s hunting weekend with a passion, poor boy. Hannah’s husband is a gentleman farmer, and he has arranged it for many years, first weekend in September, duck season. More of a Tuttle than the Tuttles themselves.

Tomas darts his eyes heavenward, smiles, ambles down the steps towards the garden flat. Glad now, she’s sure, to get away.

— Oh. And Tomas?

— Aye, Nana?

— Find yourself a girlfriend for crying out loud.

— Who’s to say I don’t already?

He grins and disappears. She hears the basement door close, and she climbs, alone, to the house. A scraggly dog rose runs up along the steps to the house. A city flower. A climber. Yellow with a small red center. Every bloom with its own little violence.

Lottie stops in the stained-glass doorway. Puts her key in the wobbly latch. The paint is chipping from around the letterbox, and the base of the door has begun to crack. Hard to fathom, but it is almost fifty years since she first stepped through these very doors. Back then it was all fine silverware and high bookcases and shelves lined with delicate Belleek china. Now it’s smoke-tarred lightbulbs. Water stains. Peeling wallpaper. She shouts out a greeting to Ambrose but there’s no reply. The door of the living room is slightly ajar. He is at his desk, the round white of his dome shining. Hunkered down into the checkbook, stacks of papers scattered all around him. Deaf as a post. She leaves him be, steps along the squeaky floorboards, past the gauntlet of her recent watercolors, some of her old photographs, into the kitchen, where she drops her keys, runs the tap, fills the pot, lights the stove, waits for the whistle. Some chocolate biscuits, why not? Four of them on a plate, the sugar, the milk jug, the pair of spoons nestled together.

She elbows the door gently, goes quietly across the worn carpet. A row of tennis trophies on the shelf to the side of the mantel. Mixed doubles, all. She was never one for singles. Always liked the company of a man, though she was tall and strong, known for taking the back court at times. Could whip the backhand down the line. Always loved, afterwards, the dinners in the clubhouse. The champagne toasts, the trill of laughter, cars weaving down the road in a firefly line of headlights.

Ambrose is startled when she slides the tray onto the edge of his desk, sends a fountain pen rolling towards his lap. A curmudgeonly grunt, but he catches the pen in midflight. She kisses the cool of his temple near a bloom of dark skin. She should bring him to see a dermatologist one of these days. Small isolated continents mottling his scalp.

His desk is an endless stretch of debt. Bank statements. Canceled checks. Letters from creditors.

She leans her chin on the top of his dome and kneads the ample flesh of his shoulders until he loosens a little, and allows his head to fall back against her. She can feel his hand stretch the round of her bottom, happy to see he’s still capable of adventure.

— So how was Stranmillis?

— He’s ready for center court. Any day now.

— A good wee lad.

— We crashed a checkpoint on the way home. A high-speed chase.

— Is that so?

— We lost them in Crazy Prices. Down by the fruit aisle.

— They’ll get you yet, he says. You can’t escape.

He taps her rump as if to prove his point, then settles back down to the checkbook. Lottie pours the tea, the greatest Irish art of them all. She has learned through the years to get the best of the leaves, to soak, to stew, to pour. Even when she lived in England there was never as much fuss made of the tea. She drags a chair beside him, to peer around his shoulder. The linen business went bust a long time ago. Nothing now but empty halls and broken pails and the ghosts of some ancient looms. They inherited it all. The curse of privilege. Janitors for the ambitions of the dead.

Still and all, there’s just enough in the kitty to get by. His RAF pension. The cottage out at Strangford Lough. The investments, the savings. She wishes Ambrose wouldn’t worry so much, that she could coax a longer laugh out of him, that he would rise from the desk and leave it behind, if only for a moment or two, but he is a secret worrier. The crash of ’29. They were hardly out of their wedding clothes. The Great Slump. He left the RAF, returned to Belfast. Linen for parachute harnesses and airplane wings. Military gliders, light reconnaissance. They soon disappeared. The business took a nosedive. Then it was linen for the war effort. An ill-advised venture into lacy handkerchiefs. Her photography fell by the wayside after the war, dissolving away in the chemicals of the time, a child, a business, a marriage. Lottie even worked in the factory office in the 1950s and early ’60s, plied her way amongst the looms and the lonesome pitch of the afternoon factory horn, sad beyond all telling.

She drains the last of her tea and puts her arm around the back of his chair. A clockchime from the hallway.

— Our Tomas might have a girlfriend.

— Is that so?

— Maybe, maybe not.

— Is that a hint?

She laughs, takes his arm and he rises. His cardigan, his open shirt, the sag of his trousers. In every pocket he carries pencils and pads of paper, crumbs of yesterday and tomorrow. The little tuft of gray hair at his chest. Still, there is something impish about him yet. An ability for youth. He caps the fountain pen and shuts the account books, and they move out into the dark of the corridor, towards the stairs.

TWICE BY SHIP, once by plane. They traveled together. The first was to visit her mother, back in the Cochrane Hotel. A vicious wind blew off the Atlantic. They stood on the deck, wrapped in blankets. Lottie leaned against the railing. Ambrose stood behind her. He never cared that she was a full head taller than him. There were times she worried that he was just holding some secret grief, burying his head against her shoulder, that they were locked in an interdependence that would someday shatter in sorrow. They docked in Boston and then rode the railroad along the Eastern Seaboard. Her mother was virtually immobile then: she lived in a chair in her room, but still wrote — plays mostly. Short, sharp, funny pieces that were performed by a troupe on Gilbert Street. An immigrant theater. Macedonians, Irish, Turks. Her mother sat in the rear seats in her knit hat, watching, hands folded into one another, white on her dark dress. Theater was a new form for Emily. She enjoyed it immensely, though the seats were mostly empty. One afternoon they drove together to Lester’s Field and paced the length of the overgrown grass. The runway was inhabited now by sheep.

The second visit was in 1934, two months after her mother’s death, to clear up her affairs. Lottie couldn’t bring herself to throw away the boxes of Emily’s papers. She packed them in the trunk of a car and drove all the way to northern Missouri. There were no ice farms anymore. She and Ambrose slept in a small roadside motel. She left the boxes on the steps of a local library. She wondered for years what had happened to the papers. Most likely burned, or blown away. When she returned to Belfast she took along her own negatives, watched Alcock climb from a bath of chemicals. She liked the notion of him rising from the dark.

Their last journey was in 1959, on their thirtieth wedding anniversary, when they took a plane from London to Paris, then Paris to Toronto, then Toronto to New York, where Ambrose had business with the linen dealers on White Street. They spent much of their savings on a first-class ticket. They tucked the serviettes at their throats and looked out the window at the shifting cloth of cloud. It amazed Lottie to think that she could get a gin and tonic at twenty thousand feet in the air. She lit a cigarette, nestled close to Ambrose, fell asleep with her head against his shoulder. She took no photographs on that trip. She wanted to see how well it could be put together by memory alone.

THE SKY LIFTS the hem of Belfast. At the window she looks out over the rooftops. The endless slate and chimneyscape. It’s a dreary city, but there is something about it that charges her in the early morning.

She knots the belt of her dressing gown. Down the stairs towards the kitchen. Cold rises through the linoleum floor. She finds her slippers at the base of the stove. Lord, but they’re still cold. So much for the last of summer. She opens the front panel of the stove to spread the heat, sits down at the wooden counter that looks out into the rear garden, scoots her feet back and forth to warm them up. The roses are in bloom and there is a spot of dew on the grass. There was a legend long ago that if you rubbed the early morning dew on your face you would stay forever young.

She takes two slices from the loaf in the bread bin, pops them in their new silver toaster, fills the kettle for some instant coffee. Mixes the milk in first and whisks it around. A fine frothy concoction. She is wary of bringing the radio to life. It’s always a temptation to see how the world itself has frothed up during the night: what riot took place across town, what election was rigged, what poor barman had to broom up the bodies. Seldom a week goes by without some calamity or other. Been that way since the days of the Blitz. One of the things she noticed early on about the women of Belfast, even back during the war, was that they all carried a lace handkerchief in the sleeve of their dresses. An odd fashion statement if ever there was one. A glance at the wrist, a little time capsule of grief. She took to carrying one herself, but the fashion has waned now over the years. Less sleeve, more sorrow. The skies, in those days, were a candelabra of violence. She and Ambrose retreated to Strangford where they watched as the planes turned the night sky into a giant orange bloom.

The pop of the toaster startles her: why such an insistent jump? Out hop the slices, like pole vaulters or prison escapees. One of them even reaches the countertop. She rummages around in the fridge, butters both slices, reaches for the marmalade and spreads it thickly. She spoons her coffee and carries it to the counter.

Her favorite moment, this. Perched on the wooden stool, looking out. The small window of silence. The sky lightening. The roses opening. The dew burning off the grass. The house still cold enough to feel that there is yet a purpose to the day. She has taken to painting watercolors in recent years: a pleasurable pursuit, she rises in the morning, a few strokes of the brush, and soon it is evening. Vast seascapes, the lough, the Causeway, the rope bridge at Carrick-a-Rede. She has even taken her camera out to Rathlin Island, working afterwards from photographs. There are times she paints herself all the way back to St. John’s, the footnote the town made to the sea, Water Street, Duckworth, Harbour Drive, all the little houses propped on the cliff as if in a last-ditch attempt to remember where they came from.

THE TAP OF his cane on the floor. The clank of the water pipes. She is wary of making too much of a fuss. Doesn’t want to embarrass him, but he’s certainly slowing up these weathers. What she dreads is a thump on the floor, or a falling against the banisters, or worse still a tumble down the stairs. She climbs the stairs before Ambrose emerges from the bathroom. A quick wrench of worry when there is no sound, but he emerges with a slightly bewildered look on his face. He has left a little shaving foam on the side of his chin, and his shirt is haphazardly buttoned.

She disappears into the bedroom. The worrywart’s dance. Out of her nightdress. Into a pair of slacks and a cardigan. A peek in the mirror. Gray and bosom-burdened. A little bit of weight around the neck now, too.

She peeks her head around the bedroom door to make sure that Ambrose has made it safely down the stairs. His bald head bobs away, around the bottom banisters, towards the kitchen. The ancient days of the Grand Opera House, the Hippodrome, the Curzon, the Albert Memorial Clock. The two of them out tripping the light fantastic. So young then. The smell of his tweeds. The Turkish tobacco he used to favor. The charity balls in Belfast, her gown rustling on the steps, Ambrose beside her, bow-tied, brillantined, tipsy. The music of the orchestra moving in them both. Good days. When the stars were ceilings, or ceilings were stars. She was treated every now and then to songs about Canada. The Irish had a great penchant for singing and could dredge a song from just about anywhere. Some of them even knew the words of the ballad of the First Newfoundland Regiment, doomed to the Bulge, Beaumont Hamel.

Old soldiers from other wars. Captains and colonels. Pilots and navigators. Oarsmen and show jumpers. Elegant men, all. There were times they got together for a gallop of a foxhunt out beneath the Mournes. Summer lawns. Folding chairs. Tennis tournaments. They used to call her the American, much to her chagrin. She even tried to lose her accent, could never quite manage it. She took to stitching the Red Ensign of Newfoundland on the hem of her skirt. The tournaments stretched until sundown. The dinners in the evening. At the big houses of Belfast. Hours of preparation at the dressing table. Leaning into the small oval mirror. Fixing back a strand of hair. Dabbing on the makeup. Not too much rouge on the cheeks. Light on the mascara, but bright with the lipstick. How do I look, honey? Quite frankly, my dear, you look late. His usual answer, but said with a wink and his arm curled tight around her waist. Afterwards she stood naked in front of a mirror, unplaiting the tress of her hair while his white collar fell onto the bed, and the night was kind to them, always kind.

Down the stairs she goes, a spryness in her step. He is sitting by the window with his tea and toast. She leans across to adjust his shirt buttons and manages to swipe away the small patch of shaving foam from his neck without him noticing. He accordions out yesterday’s newspaper, folds it down on the table with a sigh. A bomb scare in the city center. Seventeen men rounded up in a sweep. A boy kneecapped in the Peter’s Hill area. An incendiary device found hidden in the bottom of a baby’s pram.

— The great and loyal heroes of Ireland are at it again, says Ambrose.

ON THE WAY to the lough, the car itself seems to relax. An ancient church, a flock of blackbirds in the eaves, auction notes on stone pillars, sheds bulging with fodder, milk cans at gateways, marshland.

They drive past the heritage site and over the small bridge to the island, then around the red gate in the early morning.

The cottage sits on the edge of the lough, hidden by trees. The thatched roof has long been converted to slate, but the rest still nods to the past. The whitewashed walls, the blue half-door, the old copper flowerpots hanging outside the windows, the faded deckchairs, a dinner bell set on a fence post out the back. How many days has she spent out here, hammering nails and hanging doors and painting walls and puttying window frames? A whole new heating system that never worked in the first place. Pumps and pipe work. Rolls of insulation. Wires and water wells. It began as a two-room cottage and made a gentle spread along the lake. She and Ambrose did most of the work together in the years after the war. Days of calm and quiet. Wind and rain. It weathered their faces. Up on the ladder to fix the slates. Cleaning out the drainpipes. Their summer cottage slid over into winter. All those nights, stunned with simplicity, lying next to him in the back bedroom. Facing east across the water. Watching the light drain.

Tomas swings the car into the driveway. A little too quickly. Ambrose stirs in the backseat, but doesn’t waken. The tires slide in the soft ground. Several other vehicles are already parked in the long grass near the barn. Her son-in-law, Lawrence, has invited far too many guests. So be it. It’s his weekend. His ritual.

— Leave your grandfather sleep a minute.

Lottie leans over the car seat and tucks the blanket around Ambrose’s neck. He gives the faint hint of a snore. The ground has been turned to mush. Puddles and tire tracks. She has forgotten her Wellington boots and she slops her way towards the back of the car.

— Give me a hand here, Tomas, good lad.

He slouches against the side of the car and stretches out his arms, his hair down over his eyes.

— Buy yourself some windscreen wipers.

He squints at her, perplexed, until she swipes the curls away from his brow. He laughs and Lottie loads him up with bags, books, blankets, directs him towards the house. She watches him drift through the long grass at the side of the cottage, the stalks brushing wet against his jeans. He still wears large elephant flares. His shirt hanging out at the rear. Never a boy for fashion. He struggles under the load, almost slips, but finds his footing in the gravel near the front door, steadies himself.

He slides towards the half-door — the top portion open, the bottom closed — and leans his way into the cottage. Half in, half out. The load he carries propped on the rim of the door. Even from a distance Lottie can hear the high greeting of her daughter from inside. The spill of happiness out the door. An apron. A few strands of hair over Hannah’s blue eyes. A smell of tobacco when they hug.

— Where’s Dad?

— Snoozing. Leave him two minutes.

— Did you roll down the window?

— Of course. Are they at it yet?

— They put out the decoys at five this morning.

— They what?

— They began in the dark.

And, as if on cue, Lottie hears her first gunshot of the weekend. Followed quickly by a second. She turns to see a flock of birds bursting their way over the cottage.

AMBROSE WAS, IN his time, a good shot, too. A few of the men from the linen business would get together on the autumn weekends. Headlamps pouring down the road in pale shrouds in the early mist. Boots. Duck-hunting hats. Tweeds. Green slickers. Brownings tucked away in rifle bags, slung over their shoulders. They walked out the island road with the dogs trotting behind them, Labradors, yellow and black. She could hear the heeltaps on gravel as they moved away. They returned in the late afternoon, a faint smell of gunpowder from their clothes. Pochard, tufted duck, goldeneye. They made a ritual of dropping brandy in the boiling water to ease the pellets, they said, from the flesh. She could never taste the meat without thinking of flight.

Arthur Brown. God rest him. She still has the unopened letter from her youth. He is dead now these past thirty years. His own son, Buster, smashed out of the clouds on a mission of war. The second savaging of the century. The failed experiment of peace. She recalls Brown at his home in Swansea, standing on the low wall, his body bent backwards, the ball in midflight and an arc of brief joy on his face.

RANDOM GUNFIRE PUNCTUATES breakfast. She sits in the kitchen, with Hannah at the table, the red-and-white-checked tablecloth spread out in front of them. Tomas perches by the fire, reading, while Ambrose takes a stroll along the shore between naps.

She is happy to spend some time alone with her daughter: it happens less and less these days. The inevitable teapot, the butter, the scones. The lilies leaning in a tabletop vase. The hard whiff of tobacco: Lottie allows it to drift across her face.

On the windowsill stand a bunch of opened letters and a checkbook. Destiny has given her daughter two things — an agile mind, and a gift, or a curse, for giving away money. It has been that way for years: as a child on the Malone Road she would come home shoeless. Even now, there is always a check being dropped in an envelope. Red Cross. Oxfam. Shaftesbury Children’s Home.

— What in the world is Amnesty International?

— Just another bunch of Canadians, Mother.

— Does the postman not hate you?

— I’m on their watch list.

Lottie holds the bundle of letters in the air, flicks through them as if they were a moving cartoon: pound notes disappearing over the hill.

— Everything I know I learned from you, Mum.

Not a lie. She was, in her day, hardly a penny-pincher. Still, always a mother. Impossible to escape. She wraps an elastic band around the checkbook, tries to hide it behind the flowerpot.

They weave the hours away, moving fluidly around one another, swapping spoons, handing off bowls, borrowing dishtowels from one another’s shoulders. The state of the farm. The pulse of the village. The business Hannah has made with the purebred dogs.

Hannah’s hands have aged a little. Thirty-eight years old now, half her life a mother herself. A tilework to her skin. A braid of veins at the base of her wrist. Such a curious thing, to watch your daughter grow older. That odd inheritance.

— Tomas behaving himself up there, is he, then?

— Playing tennis every Wednesday.

— Good on him.

A wistful note in her daughter’s voice: Not driving you mad with that new stereo of his, is he?

— Sure the two of us are deaf anyway.

Hannah turns and takes the bread from the stove. With bare hands. A scorch at her fingertips. She steps to the kitchen sink, runs cold water on the burn.

— I was thinking, Mum. You know. Maybe you’d have a word with him? Maybe he’d go out, just this once? Lawrence has been talking about him all week long.

— You’re his mother.

— Aye. He listens to you but.

— He could maybe row out the decoys.

— He could, that.

Through the window, along the shore, she spies Ambrose wandering under the brown of his hat. He has always loved the lake. It stretches beyond him, a wide plash of gray. He will come in shortly, she knows, rubbing his hands together, looking for the warmth of a fire, a small brandy and a newspaper, the ordinary pleasures of an early September.

THE HUNTERS RETURN at lunchtime, trudging along the laneway, shotguns swinging. She doesn’t know many of them. Friends of Lawrence. A lawyer, a councilman, an artisan boatmaker.

— Where’s Tomas? says Lawrence.

— Beyond in his room.

Lawrence wears his shirt buttoned high. He is big-boned underneath it. He holds, by the neck, two goldeneyes. He drops the birds on the table, turns away, fills his pipe with tobacco, tamps it on the heel of his hand.

— He’ll be on then for tomorrow?

— Ach, leave him be, says Hannah.

— Do him the world of good.

— Lawrence. Please.

He shrugs off his cardigan and hangs it by the edge of the fire, mutters. A big man, a small voice. He livens when he joins his friends in the living room.

By late afternoon Lottie and Hannah have their hands in the warm guts of a cooked bird. Hannah pulls her fingers expertly along the bottom of the body and the flesh separates in her fingers. She spreads the meat out on a platter, with some slices of apple and a berry garnish. An extravagant gesture of color.

The men sit at the table, eating, all except Tomas. Jackets draped over the backs of their chairs. Hats perched on the windowsill. A loud laughter rolling amongst them. An ease to the day. A slow banter. A sliding away.

SHE IS GLAD to see Tomas emerge from his room, darkdown, when the guests have left. He wears an old fisherman’s sweater many sizes too big, belonging once to Ambrose. He wanders around, an air of sleep still about him. Nods to Lawrence across the room. A gulf between them, stepfather and son. Always a layer of cloud.

He rows out in the evening, after dinner, to check his star charts. In his long wading boots. Binoculars at his neck. They can see him operate on the lake, a small pinpoint of red flashlight drifting along the shore. There is a low moon, a small rip of wind across the lough.

When he hits the oar against the water, the light jumps and swerves and shifts, then settles down once more.

EARLY ON SATURDAY morning she wakes Ambrose for the hunt. The night is pitch-black outside. The cold stuns her cheekbones. She has prepared his clothes already. A warm undershirt and long johns. A heavy tweed jacket. Two pairs of socks. Folded on the small wooden chair. His toothbrush laid out, but no razor. It is the one day of the year when Ambrose does not shave early.

A sweep of headlights over the ceiling. The other guests coming down the laneway. Three, four, five of them this morning. The squelch of their tires in the mud. Lawrence’s voice already among them. A whisper and a shushing of the dogs. The drift of cigarette smoke from outside.

In the kitchen she and Hannah ready breakfast: just toast and tea, no time for a fry. The men are dark-eyed, gruff, weary. They glance out the window at the early dark. Fixing batteries in their torches. Checking cartridges. Tightening their laces.

His silhouette shows sudden in the hallway. She is quite sure, at first, that Tomas has been up all night. It has happened before. He has often spent the whole evening out on the water with his star charts. He slouches his way through the kitchen, nods to the men at the table, sits down next to Ambrose. The ritual acknowledgments. They eat breakfast together and then Tomas rises with Lawrence — not a word between them — and together they go to the pantry where the bolted silver safe is kept.

Lottie watches as the bare bulb throws a globe of light down upon them. Lawrence spins the dial on the safe, reaches in, turns to Tomas. She watches her grandson hold the unfamiliar weight in his hand. Bits and pieces of the language floating towards her: twelve-gauge, five-shot, 36-gram load.

— You’ll be going out then? says Hannah.

An astonishing calm in Hannah’s voice, but her body betrays her: the shoulders tight, her neck cords shining, her eyes a premonition of ill fate. She flicks a look at Lawrence. He shrugs, taps at the pipe in his breast pocket, as if that is the thing that will monitor everything.

— Thought I’d give it a go, says Tomas.

— Better have your woolies on.

The kitchen awhirl now. The rumor of dawn. The guests step outside. Tomas leans down to tighten his hiking boots. Hannah takes Lawrence by the collar, whispers something urgent in his ear. Lottie, too, takes Ambrose aside, beseeches him to look after the boy.

— We’ll be back by noon.

She is still in her dressing gown as she watches them go. A regiment. The marks of their bootprints in the mud. The dogs loping patiently behind them. They disappear around the red gatepost and the sky rises up as they grow small.

THE MORNING SOUNDS loud with the retort of the guns. Double blasts. Each one a sharp kick inside her. Lottie finds herself entirely on edge. Just to walk around the kitchen needs the utmost control. She would love to wipe her hands clean of flour and step out the half-door, hurry along the laneway, down to the lakeshore, check on them, watch them, bring them sandwiches, milk, a flask. Her eyes can find no resting place. With each shot she looks out the window. A blankness of gray.

Columns of rain pour distantly over the lake. The branches of the trees knit the wind. Surely, now, the storm will bring them home. She turns to the radio for the ease of noise. Bombs doing what bombs will. She searches the dial and settles on a classical station. On the hour mark even that, too, is interrupted. An incendiary device in Newry. Three dead, twelve wounded. No warning.

She watches the shape of her daughter move from table to stove to pantry to fridge. Hannah fakes unconcern. She kneads the dough and allows the bread to rise. As if the heat from the oven itself might push forward the hands of the clock on the stove. An occasional chatter between them. Did Ambrose have a proper belt? Was Tomas given the thickest of socks? Would Lawrence be alongside them both? Did everyone take an oilskin? When was the last time they shot a scaup? Did he bring his eyeglasses? Has he ever even pulled a trigger before?

IT IS LATE lunchtime before they hear the bark of a dog. The men come down the road as routinely as one might expect: Ambrose and Tomas bringing up the rear, the width of the grassy median between them. Their jackets dark with rain. Shotguns slung over their shoulders. A hint of fatigue in the walk.

She greets them at the front of the cottage, opens the latch on the half-door, beckons them in.

Tomas shucks his jacket and hangs it on the fire irons, bangs his heels on the floor until his boots come off, pulls his wadded socks from his toes, puts them down by the fire. He sits, long and languid, in the chair, hides himself under a towel. A warm smoke rising from his boots and socks.

— What about ye, Nana?

She stands close to the fire, her back against the mantelpiece. She will hold the moment for a long time, the sight of him in the chair, a small crease of light from the fire flickering at the end of his raindark boots.

— Did you like it, then?

— Oh, aye, I suppose.

— Get anything?

— Granddad bagged himself a couple.

There are times — months later, years later, a decade later even — that it strikes Lottie how very odd it is to be abandoned by language, how the future demands what should have been asked in the past, how words can escape us with such ease, and we are left, then, only with the pursuit. She will spend so much of her time wondering why she did not sit down with Tomas and inquire what exactly it was that brought him out the road in the morning, what guided him along the shore, what strange compulsion led him towards the hunt? What was it like, to walk down by the lakeside and crouch in the grass and wait for the birds and the dogs to disturb the blue and the gray? What words went between him and Ambrose, what silence? What sounds did he hear across the water? Which of the dogs hunkered next to him, waiting? How was it that he had changed his mind so simply? She wished, then, that she had carved open whatever idea had crossed his mind in the early hours that one September morning. Was it just one of those random things, slipshod, unasked for, another element in the grand disorder of things? Perhaps he did not want to see his grandfather stepping out alone. Or he overheard his mother talking of the hunt. Or maybe how his stepfather wanted so badly for him to join. Or perhaps it was just pure boredom.

She would find herself wondering — stuck at a traffic light on the Malone Road, or in the butcher shop on the Ormeau Road, or in the peace group on the Andersonstown Road, or in the shadows of Sandy Row, or at the marches where they carried pictures of their loved ones, or the days she found herself outside Stormont awaiting any news of decency, or strolling the rim of the island, or at the back court of the tennis club in Stranmillis, or simply just walking down the stairs with Ambrose, adding day to day, hour to hour — what it was that brought Tomas to the moment, how it became part of the constant unfolding, what was it that changed his mind.

She never asked. Instead, she watched Tomas lift the towel — scuffing it through his hair — and she returned, then, to the kitchen, lit the flame under the stove, the whole of a happiness moving over her.

YELLOW LEAVES LIE in scattered profusion on the green lawn. The cottage has been touched by the edge of a decaying storm. These are the weekends she likes the most: they drive out from Belfast, down the laneway, pause a moment by the gate, the high-voltage wires singing at the end of the country road.

They park down by the barn, on the high side of the driveway where the ground stands firmer, and they use the leaves for grip as they make their way to the half-door.

TOMAS IS SHOT dead seven weeks into the hunting season. In the early morning dark. In his small blue rowboat. In his new ritual of scattering the decoys out on the water.

She is asleep when she hears the first shot. Ambrose beside her. The rise and fall of his chest. His irregular breath in the back room of the cottage. He shifts slightly in the sheets and turns towards her. His pajama top open. A small triangle of flesh at his neck. The heavy odor of his breath. Lottie shifts slightly away from him. An air of dust about the room. Sure, at first, that she is mistaken. Not a familiar sound for the dark. A crack of falling brick from inside the chimney perhaps: it has happened before. Or the shatter of an outside slate. She fumbles at her nightstand to check her watch. Brings it close to her eye. Has to turn it in her hand, over and over. Five twenty in the morning. That was not a gunshot. Too early for that. Something falling perhaps in the barn outside, or some disturbance from the living room. She glances towards the window. The rain hard against it. The bare cold of the frame when she touches it.

There is, then, a second shot. She puts her hand to Ambrose’s shoulder, allows it there a moment. Maybe she has overslept. The curtains are tight after all. Some trick of the light. She rises from the bed in her nightdress. Finds her slippers on the cold floor. Steps to the window. Parts the curtains. All dark outside. Surely then she is just imagining. She peers out towards the lake. Nothing at all. Only the darker shape of a windbent tree. No moon or starlight. No boat. No small red light. No sign of anyone. Silence.

She closes the curtains and steps back across the room. Allows the slippers to fall from her feet. Lifts the edge of the blanket and the sheet and is halfway into the bed when she hears the sound of the third shot.

That, she thinks, was no slate. That was no tumble of brick.