Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  She tells me of the other relations who’ve made the journey over from Australia, more cousins, seemingly an endless string of them, all fascinated by what they see as their heritage, and she says, with a laugh, that she’s never rightly understood the fascination, why they come here in droves to see this small windy stretch of land, where life is as plain as it comes. I don’t know how to answer her, except to agree that it is somewhat inexplicable, but has, I think, to do with music and stories and poetry and roots and family and belonging and curiosity. She takes this for truth and then goes right ahead and makes me a hot toddy regardless of the time. Her husband, Michael, is sitting in an armchair nearby and when Margaret introduces us I see that he can’t speak, nor can he move well, but he smiles as widely as she does, with the brightest eyes I have ever seen, and she tends to him with the tenderness of a lifetime’s worth of love.

  The family arrives soon. Her three sons and four daughters, and several of their partners and children, too. It’s clear none of them have any idea who I am, but they all shake my hand or kiss my cheek, and they chat and laugh happily, all of us pressed in around the small kitchen table, everyone making room for Michael to be wheeled into pride of place, and we eat chocolate biscuits and drink from enormous bottles of Coca-Cola and then without preamble they draw free their instruments and begin to play.

  I sit in stunned silence as the music unfolds around me. Three fiddles, furiously sawed or plucked, a set of pipes, hand drums, a flute, two guitars, and several of them singing. It swells to fill the kitchen, every inch of it and more, it is a bursting of life, of soulfulness, of fun. I’m watching half the bloody world-famous Kilfenora Céilí Band performing in a kitchen. Margaret bops up and down in her seat, her eyes shining with enjoyment. Without warning she takes my hand. I whisper, “Does this happen every night?”

  And she says, “No, dear, this is for you.” And I do start crying then.

  Later they take a break and demand that I sing, and it’s with no small measure of shame that I admit I don’t know the words to any songs.

  “None?” Margaret’s son John asks. “Come on, you know something, all right. Shout out a name. Or just start away and we’ll follow you.”

  “I’m … it’s not like this in Australia. We don’t really learn songs, not any worth singing. I’m so embarrassed.”

  There’s a surprised silence.

  “Well, then you’ve a homework task to complete. Next time you come to visit us here we expect you to have learned a song to share with us.”

  I can’t nod vigorously enough. “I promise.”

  * * *

  It ends too soon. They all have to get home, and Margaret needs to get Michael to bed. I don’t know what to do or where to go. I keep lying and telling them I already have somewhere to stay, and I have no idea why I do this. I think the idea of imposing any further is mortifying.

  It’s with a swelling of desperation that I pause at the front door, even though poor Margaret is so tired. “Do you know Iris Stone?” I ask finally.

  She frowns and thinks, and shakes her head. “I don’t believe I do. Is she one of yours?”

  I swallow. “My mother.”

  “Ah, lovely. If she’s ever this way, love, you tell her to visit us.”

  “I will.”

  “No, ’tis a shame I don’t know more of you. The only Stone I know, come to think of it, was a Maire Stone, married to old John Torpey, my dear husband’s cousin. They were living up north a ways, last I heard.”

  I’m not sure who these people are but I’m certainly going to find out.

  “You get home safe tonight, dear,” Margaret tells me. “You’re sure I can’t make you up a bed?”

  “I’m sure. Thank you, Margaret. Tonight meant a lot to me.”

  I walk out into the dark night. I’m a long way from town, but I don’t mind. The night is mild with summer and the moon wide, and I like to walk. And perhaps this walk wasn’t one my mother ever made, but I feel a step closer to finding the ones she did.

  It’s time to return to Galway, to where I’ll find Maire Stone and her husband, John Torpey.

  And to where there’s a man, with his coverts and scapulars, with mantles and napes and crowns and birds dead or alive. Without my permission, something in me seems to have turned itself toward him.

  5

  The Saghani, NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON

  There are bodies gathered around mine, pressing against me, elbowing for space. Everyone wants to see: on the laptop screen are three little red dots.

  And they’re moving south.

  “So these are what we’re gonna follow?” Mal asks.

  I nod.

  Samuel sees my expression and laughs, patting me on the back. “Well done, lass.”

  “How reliable are the trackers?” Léa asks skeptically.

  “They’re geolocators,” I say. “They measure light levels, which the software uses to measure latitude and longitude and get the location.”

  “That doesn’t sound reliable at all.”

  Given that’s the extent of my knowledge of the trackers, I can’t help but agree with her.

  “Get your head out of the way,” Basil says, shoving Dae to the side so he can see better.

  Together we watch the dots. After resenting the hell out of me, the sight of movement on the screen has the crew wriggling with eagerness. The birds are still farther north than we are, having only just left Greenland, but they’ll catch up to us soon, cleverly using the winds to hurry themselves along. After a while the three dots diverge a little, converge again, and then seem to be setting off in different directions.

  “That’d be right. What do we do now?” Mal asks.

  I take the laptop up to the bridge. I haven’t been in here before, have only spied from a distance and wondered at the decisions made within. Ennis sits alone at the helm, gazing out to where sea meets sky. This room is higher than anywhere else on the boat, save for the crow’s nest, and I’m struck for a moment by the sight of the world spread before us. Sunrise has cast both sea and sky a startling red.

  “I’ve never seen a sunrise that color,” I murmur.

  “Bodes a storm,” Ennis says. Then without looking at me, “How can I help you, Franny Lynch?” There is a crispness to his tone, his posture. Something in him mistrusts me, resents me, even dislikes me a little. I don’t exactly know why, but I can feel it.

  “The terns have left Greenland.”

  I place the computer on the big round desk at the center of the bridge. Ennis joins me and we peer at the dots. “See how they’re diverging?” Two of the trackers have headed east, while the solitary tracker has veered west.

  “Is that unusual?” he asks.

  “No. It happens. They usually take one of two paths. They’ll either travel alone or in small groups, and some will go east, down the coast of Africa. Some west along America. But never straight. They curve in big S shapes.”

  “Why travel farther than they have to?”

  “They follow wind and food, as you follow the currents.”

  “The hot spots you mentioned.”

  “Aye.”

  “Can you predict where they’ll go this time?”

  “I’ve got old maps of where they once flew, but the data’s outdated. There were fish then. It’ll be different now, with an ocean nearly empty.”

  “What are you telling me to do, Franny?”

  “I think we should follow the two birds along Africa. Better odds.”

  He thinks for a long time, watching the screen.

  My heart beats a little too quickly when I follow his gaze and see where that path might take the birds first. To Ireland, or just past it.

  Ennis shakes his head. “We’ll follow the one traveling west. I know the waters better.”

  “It’s a bigger risk,” I warn. “Half the likelihood it’ll find fish.”

  “I’m not following red dots on a wild-goose chase to the other side of the Atlantic.”
<
br />   Rather than reminding him that this is the whole point of what we’re doing, I bite my tongue. “You’re the boss.”

  “Leave that with me, will you.”

  I open my mouth to argue, to tell him the software won’t be leaving my side, then realize how foolish this is. He can’t follow the bird without seeing it. With a last look at the dots, I relinquish the laptop and head for the door.

  “Tell me,” he says, staying me. “I have the trackers, so why do I need you?”

  I turn around and meet his eyes. It’s the first time he’s looked at me since we left Greenland. There’s a challenge in him, bristling to his surface. He wants to take me back to shore, I can see it, and it stirs my ferocity. I want to snarl at him, dare him to try to leave me behind, tell him the truth that I’d burn this fucking boat to ash before I let it follow the birds without me. I’ve come too far, survived too damn much.

  But I’ve a calmer heart, too, living alongside the savage one. Its voice often sounds a lot like my husband’s, and it counsels caution, it warns me that there is a very long way yet to travel and that cunning will serve me better than fury.

  I clear my throat and say, “You don’t. But I need you. And I guess you gotta work out what your conscience will allow.”

  Ennis’s gaze drops away, grip returning to the helm. “How are your hands?”

  I don’t bother replying. He knows how my hands are. And I won’t play at beholden any more than I have to.

  The skipper dismisses me.

  * * *

  “Why’s he so pissed at me?” I ask around the mess table tonight.

  The crew look up at me from their hand of poker. Léa rolls her eyes, returns her attention to her cards.

  “He’s not pissed—” Samuel starts.

  “Is anyone going to tell me the truth? What exactly have I done?”

  “It’s not what you’ve done,” Mal says uncomfortably.

  “It’s what you are,” Anik says bluntly.

  I look at him, at the blank expression I’m never able to read. “And what am I?”

  “Untrained,” he says. “Dangerous. Too wild for a boat.”

  Words dissolve on my tongue.

  There’s an airless silence.

  “It’s not your fault,” Dae says gently.

  But it is, of course it is.

  * * *

  I’m not meant to, but I return to the bridge twice a day to check on the terns. Their red lights blink steadily, busily tracking their journeys. The bird we’re following is guiding us south and west toward the coast of Canada. Ennis is charting a course he thinks will intercept the tern, as long as it holds fast to its trajectory. He doesn’t speak to me of anything else, and he doesn’t much look at me, but it doesn’t matter; with each visit to the bridge I grow fonder of the little red dot, more concerned for it, more in love.

  * * *

  This afternoon is calm, the sky cloudless. We’re moving slowly through flat glassy water.

  I’m tying knots. Surprise, surprise.

  “Show me a rolling hitch,” Anik says.

  I loop the smaller rope around the thicker one, make another coil, a half hitch, and then finish the rolling hitch by pulling it tight.

  Anik looks unimpressed. “What’s it for?”

  “When you need to pull something lengthwise. Or slacken a tensioned sail line if the winch gets jammed.”

  He watches my face. “Do you have any idea what that means?”

  “No.”

  I think he almost smiles. Then the bastard tells me to do fifty more before I switch back to sheet bends.

  When Anik’s out of sight I lower the ropes, tilt my face back, and enjoy the sun. The deck beneath me is warm and the air is still cold but for the first time I’m not wearing fifty layers. Thoughts drift to Niall, always. I wonder how he would take to this life, to the physicality of it. His mind, always working so swiftly, seeking answers to unanswerable questions, would probably be numb with boredom, but I think it might be good for him to have a break from so much thinking. It would be good for him to live more in his body than in his head. His hands, though. They are smooth and slender and unblemished. They are upon me now as vividly as anything I’ve felt, tracing my sun-warmed skin, my dry lips, tired eyelids, massaging my aching scalp in just the way they do. I’d hate to see them suffer the punishment mine have.

  A voice floats down from the sky.

  I squint up at Dae in the crow’s nest. He’s laughing and pointing.

  The ropes fall from my hands, forgotten. My feet hurry to the railing, heart swelling. And I see them, white shapes in the distance, flying ever closer.

  6

  When I was six years old my mother used to sit with me in our back garden to watch the crows perch in the huge willow tree. In winter months the long hanging leaves would turn white like the snow on the ground, or like the wispy whiskers of an ancient man, and the crows hiding among them were stark spots of coal. To me they were the presence of something profound, though at six I didn’t know what. Something like loneliness, or its opposite. They were time, and the world; they were the distances they could fly and the places to which I could never follow.

  Mam told me never to feed them or they’d grow dangerous, but when she went inside I did it anyway. Crusts from my toast or pieces of Mr. Hazel’s orange cake, carefully concealed in pockets and then scattered covertly over the frost. The crows began to expect the offerings and came more often; soon it was every day. They would perch in the willow and watch for my crumbs. There were twelve of them. Sometimes fewer but never more. I would wait until Mam was occupied and then slip outside to them, to where they waited.

  The crows began to follow me. If we walked to the shops they would fly alongside and perch on the roofs of houses. When I trailed the stone walls into the hills they circled above. They followed me to school and waited in the trees for me to finish my day. They were my constant companions, and my mother, maybe intuiting that I needed them to be a secret, pretended all along that she didn’t notice my devoted dark cloud.

  One day the crows began to bring me gifts in return.

  Little stones or shiny sweet wrappers were left in the garden or dropped near my feet. Paper clips and bobby pins, pieces of jewelry or rubbish, sometimes shells or rocks or bits of plastic. I kept each in a box that year by year had to grow bigger. Even when I forgot to feed the birds they brought me gifts. They were mine, and I theirs, and we loved each other.

  So it went for four years, every day without fail. Until I left not only my mother but my twelve kindred spirits, too. Sometimes I dream of them waiting in that tree for a girl who would never come, bringing gift after precious gift to lie unloved in the grass.

  The Saghani, NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON

  The birds are tired already, even so early in the journey, so it’s lucky that we’ve come to find them. They make a beeline for us and as though the sky has shattered into falling flapping pieces they land on the boat, all over it, at least twenty of them. They fold their wings and gaze calmly at the passing world, happy to catch a ride. My muscles lock me in place, I’m terrified of startling them, but the longer I stand here, holding my breath, the clearer it becomes that they won’t be startled by anything—they’re utterly unbothered by my presence. Dae comes down from the crow’s nest, and the others stop what they’re doing to join us on the deck and watch the birds, to be near them.

  “You forget, until you see one…,” Basil says, and we know what he means. Easy to forget how many there once were, how common they seemed. Easy to forget how lovely they are.

  Anik loses interest first and tries to order me back to chores, but when I give him the finger he leaves me to it.

  I only go inside when it reaches the coldest part of deep night, but for the rest of their visit I sit with the birds, as close as I can get, and write letters to Niall. It’s my method of logging everything: describing the terns to him in great detail. How they use their beaks to scratch beneath t
heir feathers, and how they call to each other across the boat using a language I would give anything to speak. How, when they feel a draft, they spread their wings and let it lift them off their perches, and they just hover there, airborne, as though for no reason at all but the fun of it. I write it all down for him, so that when he reads the words he will be filled with the courage of the birds just as the wind fills their feathers.

  The terns have been with us for twenty-four hours when Ennis emerges to sit beside me on the deck. He alone hasn’t come to spend time among them. The gray at his temples glistens in the afternoon light.

  “Guess you were wrong about the storm,” I say.

  “Where’s yours?” Ennis asks.

  I point her out, sitting on the roof of the bridge, the piece of plastic on her leg poking free of her plumage. Her eyes are closed; I think she’s sleeping. Her mate is probably one of the other birds on the boat—they’re unlikely to attempt the long journey separately.

  “Why aren’t they moving?” Ennis asks.

  “There’s hardly any wind. They’re using the boat to rest.”

  “Can we shoo them along?”

  I shoot him a look. “No, Ennis, we can’t shoo them along. They’ll go when they want to, and we can follow.” If I had the power, I’d carry the birds all the way. Protect them from the journey’s difficulty. Then again, it’s a fool who tries to protect a creature from its own instincts.

  Ennis leaves without another word, returning to the bridge. I watch him briefly through the salty glass, and then I go back to watching sweeter things.

  By dusk the wind has picked up. I haven’t moved from my spot, unable to waste a single precious moment. The crew has been taking it in turns to bring me food, sparing a little time to sit with me and ask questions about the birds. How do they know where to go? Why do they fly so far? Why are they the last, why these ones, what makes them luckier than the others? I don’t know the answers, not really, but I do my best and, anyway, it’s not really answers they want, it’s simply remembering what it feels like to love creatures that aren’t human. A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.