The Shortest Way Home

by Juliette Fay

  The comment was meant rhetorically, but Kevin clearly didn’t get that part. “That’s easy,” he said. “You go far away to help people you don’t even know.”

  CHAPTER 49

  The next day the clouds receded into clumps of cotton batting, but the sea was still too rough to cross. Da was not happy. Sean suggested they visit the nearby Blasket Island Centre.

  “I don’t want to see any dusty old museum on what I already know,” Da grumped, but he allowed Sean to prod him along.

  The Centre itself was surprisingly modern for a museum about a bygone culture. There were interactive displays and enlarged photographs of inhabitants. Da studied each of them. “I knew him, of course,” he’d say, and then offer a tidbit, such as how the man was known for being the most nimble in a naomhóg (“he could dance a reel and never tip into the water”); or how that woman could carry more turf in her creel basket than half the men on the island.

  Kevin got antsy after a while, and they got back in the car and traveled northeast, stopping at Gallarus Oratory, a church likely built in the 700s. Shaped like an upturned boat and built entirely of mortarless stone, it remained as tight and dry as the day it was completed.

  Standing inside the single room on the dirt floor, Sean wondered at the countless prayers that had been sent up from that very spot over hundreds and hundreds of years. Had the senders ever questioned? Had they ever felt fury at a God who would submit them to barely sufferable lives of hard labor, foreign attack, and death as common as a cut finger?

  Sean could easily imagine it, having spent most of his adult life in similar settings. Except the faces here would’ve been white. Actually, they would’ve looked a lot like his, he realized; they’d possibly been his own ancestors. He sent up a prayer—not to the God who watched such suffering, but to the sufferers themselves. Strengthen the hearts of all those in need, he asked, and guide the hands of those who aim to help them. And he felt a little buzz of connection, a lightness that had often come to him when he’d prayed in the past. But maybe it was just the setting—one of the world’s oldest intact churches. Maybe he was kidding himself. Maybe he’d been kidding himself all along.

  They picked up sandwiches and headed to the northern side of the Dingle Peninsula, where Mount Brandon rose gently skyward, grassy and treeless. Sheep grazed lazily, as if the world were their luncheon buffet. They hiked up the trail toward the peak, but Da soon got tired, and they sat down and ate their sandwiches, looking out across the bay.

  “Is that a beach?” Kevin asked Da, squinting into the distance.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’ve never been up this way.”

  Sean pulled out the map Orla had given them and determined they were looking at The Maharees, a spit of land that jutted out into Brandon Bay. The sun shone onto it, illuminating the long crescent of sand that faced them. “It says you can swim there. Also surf, apparently.”

  “Surf?” Kevin’s eyes lit up.

  “You interested?” asked Sean.

  “I’m definitely interested. I saw this surfing competition on TV, and it was in Australia or someplace? And it was so cool, it was like—” He jumped up to show them, stance wide, arms out for balance. “There was this huge wave, and it was like the guy was skating through it—”

  “Okay, but look,” Sean said, interrupting Kevin’s rapture. “You understand it doesn’t start out like that, right? The waves are small and you fall off a lot. You still want to?”

  “Definitely,” said Kevin. “No doubt in my mind.”

  Doubt came by the bucketload, however, when they drove up to the surf school—which was more like a surf shed—and found that wetsuits were required. To Kevin it was like wearing the latex gloves at the Confectionary, times about a hundred. He decided he’d be fine without it.

  “You’ll freeze, man,” said the surf instructor, a slim twenty-­something with wild sun-bleached hair. “The water’s sixteen degrees today. I can’t recommend it.”

  “That’s about sixty Fahrenheit,” Da said. “Pretty cold, lad, especially with this stiff breeze. You won’t last twenty minutes, much less two hours.”

  Sean told the surf instructor, “We’ll get back to you.” They went down to the water’s edge, Kevin insisting he was not cold, he would be fine, he didn’t care what that surf guy said.

  “No wetsuit, no surf lesson,” said Sean. “I’m not wasting the instructor’s time and that much money so you can get hypothermic.” Kevin stormed off down the beach.

  “He can be a bit of a fussbudget,” said Da.

  “Ya think?” Sean murmured sarcastically, for which his father rightly cuffed him.

  Kevin came back. “Fine, I’ll wear it,” he said murderously. “If I cry, I can duck underwater, and he won’t know.”

  Sean helped Kevin change in the shed. Even with a bigger size, Kevin pulled the legs on and off three times before he could stand to tug the top part up. “If you can’t do it, you can’t do it,” Sean said, trying to calm him. “It’s not the worst thing in the world.”

  “Yes,” Kevin said through gritted teeth, as he wrangled the wetsuit over his hips. “It is.”

  Finally the suit was on. Sean zipped up the back and Kevin stood there for a moment with his arms sticking out from his body, his eyes closed. “Are you going to be okay?” Sean asked.

  “I don’t know,” murmured Kevin. Then he walked out of the shed.

  “Good man,” Donal the surf instructor said. “I’m not such a fan of these seal suits, either.” Sean almost slipped the guy a twenty for his compassion.

  Donal and Kevin dragged their big yellow surfboards out to the beach, and Sean and Da followed at a distance. They sat in the sand and watched as Donal and Kevin started by kneeling on all fours on the board. Sean told his father about Kevin’s sensory issues.

  “Hugh hated socks,” Da said. “Never wore them. That’s why his feet always stank.”

  Sean laughed, remembering Hugh’s stinky feet. “I didn’t know he hated socks. Aunt Vivvy told me he spent a small fortune trying to find socks Kevin would wear.”

  Da got a little choked up then. “I keep forgetting Kevin’s his,” he said. “It’s like he’s off with his friends somewhere, and the boy just fell out of the sky.”

  They watched as Kevin worked to conquer the unwieldy piece of fiberglass. As soon as he stood upright, he’d fall into the waves. But when he bobbed up again, Donal would high-five him as if he’d surfed like a pro. Eventually Kevin was up for a few seconds at a time. And then suddenly he seemed to hit everything right and surfed all the way in to shore, arms outstretched, face wide with happy surprise. Sean and Da leaped to their feet, cheering and clapping.

  “I surfed!” Kevin yelled to them, and they howled back their congratulations.

  * * *

  When the lesson was over, they drove out toward the end of the point and happened upon Spillane’s Pub. Inside, they were seated beneath an upturned naomhóg. Wider and longer than a modern canoe, it could carry entire families and their possessions across a lake or a bay. “That’s very like the one we had,” Da pointed out. “I’d go out with my own da, and we’d pull in mackerel or lobsters. Sometimes we even took cows and sheep back and forth to Dunquin.”

  “A cow could fit in that?” Kevin was skeptical.

  “Well, yes,” Da said with a grin, “but not happily.”

  The waitress came to take their drink orders. Sean asked for a pint of Smithwick’s. When Kevin ordered ginger ale, Da said, “You’ll need a better drink than that to celebrate your triumph, lad!” He turned to the waitress. “Can the barman make a Shirley Temple, d’you think?”

  “Come ’round to the bar,” she said, “and you’ll tell him how it’s done.” Da gave them a wink as he left.

  “So,” Sean said to Kevin. “I expect you’re feeling pretty big o
n yourself, now that you’re an official surfer dude.”

  Kevin grinned. “Yeah, now I’ll have two big things I did on this trip.”

  “What’s the other?”

  A glimmer of doubt traced over Kevin’s face. “Carantoo-something. The highest point.” He watched Sean remember this, and rightly took his silence to be a bad sign. “You promised!”

  “Yeah, I know, buddy, but I thought we would’ve been out to Blasket by now. It’s already Wednesday, and if your grandfather doesn’t get us out there before we leave on Sunday, he’s gonna have a fit. We’ll check the weather when we get back tonight.”

  Da came back carrying a bar tray with Sean’s beer and two glasses of pink soda with maraschino cherries bobbing in them. “Once we got the recipe right, it looked so gorgeous I decided to have one myself!”

  The meal was leisurely, and as the sun dangled lower over Mount Brandon to the west, Da reminisced about his early days on the island—about the all-night parties they would have the day before one of their own left to cross the Atlantic. “An American Wake, we called it, and we stayed up all night with ‘the body’ just as we would have done if they’d died.”

  “That’s a little morose, isn’t it?” Sean asked.

  “No, just realistic. We knew we’d likely never see the departed again, and it was only right to give them a good send-off.”

  “With a heck of a hangover to start the journey.”

  Da smiled. “That and a piece of the place.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a little stone painted white. “The traveler would take a chink of the whitewash from his house on the way out as a keepsake. I took this the day we were evacuated and kept it with me ever since.” He studied it for a moment. “Maybe tomorrow I’ll be able to put it back.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Da was up early. Sean found him sitting with a cup of tea, staring out the window at the clouds as if he could vaporize them by force of will. “Too rough” was all he said.

  “It doesn’t look that bad,” said Sean.

  “It’s fine inland,” Da said with disgust. “Only out there is it . . . what’s the word . . .”

  The word came to Sean—in his mind he heard Rebecca’s voice. “Unstable.”

  He was hesitant to broach the subject, but it looked to be the perfect day for the highest point. Da conceded that it was, and besides, he wanted to do some poking around, see if he could find any relatives or old friends. He’d been an only child, but there had been a cousin or two. . . .

  Orla found a hiking book with directions to the base of ­Carrauntoohil and information about the climb. The text noted that at approximately 3,400 feet above sea level, it was not an especially high mountain, but erosion and loose stones along the path ­required caution. The drive would take about an hour and a half each way, and the hike up and back could take as many as six hours. They would stop in Dingle on the way to buy food and bottles of water.

  “Please be careful,” said Da. “The weather can change in a heartbeat.”

  “Enjoy the day to yourself, and don’t worry about us,” said Sean. “We’ll be fine.”

  * * *

  Da was standing sentry at the door when Sean and Kevin straggled in late that night. “Is he all right? What happened!” he demanded. “I was out of my wits!”

  “He’s fine, Da. Just a little scraped up. And very tired.”

  Kevin allowed himself to be guided to bed, and Da hovered as Sean pulled his shoes and jacket off. “Where did he get that cut on his cheek?”

  “Devil’s Ladder,” said Kevin, though he was half-asleep. “The rocks are loose and I slipped. But it was awesome! Uncle Sean got a disposable camera in Dingle and took pictures.”

  Once Kevin was tucked in, Sean went back out to the dining room with Da, who was peppering him with questions. “Did you have it looked at? What took so long?”

  “Da, I’m a nurse. I looked at it. It’s just a big abrasion—wide but not deep. We went to a pub afterward because we were starving and they had a tube of antibiotic cream behind the bar.” He slumped wearily in his seat. “What did you do today? Find any relatives?”

  Da sighed. “I found some people who’d known some people. . . . And I found my parents’ gravestones. Gone fifty years now. Strange to say, but in my mind they were still on the island.”

  “Any leads on a place to stay?”

  “A few. They all look nice.” He didn’t sound enthusiastic, but his eyes brightened when he added, “There’s some land for sale on the island, and a building, though I suspect it’s in pretty poor repair. I know it’s mad, but it would be a dream to live there again.”

  * * *

  The next morning clumps of clouds still trundled across the sky, and Sean braced himself for Da to sulk. But when the older man joined them at breakfast he was grinning broadly.

  “It’s all set,” he told them. “We’re to go on the ten o’clock ­departure.”

  “Are you sure?” said Sean. “The weather doesn’t look any ­different.”

  “It’s not the skies we care about—it’s the seas, boyo!”

  Apparently Blasket Sound had calmed enough for a crossing, and soon they were descending the winding cement walkway to the boat landing, along with a few other families and older couples vacationing together. The trip took a little longer than usual, about twenty minutes, the captain explained, because there was still a bit of chop. Da didn’t talk once they were about halfway across the sound. He stared at the village nestled against the leeward side of the island.

  A hundred feet or so from shore, the captain anchored the boat, and his crewman began to help people into a motorized rubber dinghy. The landing was hidden behind an outcropping, in a narrow, rocky harbor. When they climbed to the top of the steep cement walkway, Da stopped.

  “Are you tired?” asked Kevin.

  “You okay, Da?”

  “I’m . . . a might flabbergasted.”

  From a distance, the shapes of the houses and stone walls seemed deceptively intact. Closer vantage told a different story. The village was in utter ruins.

  There were a few houses farther up the hill that still had whitewash, one or two of which seemed to be used for storage or for rustic overnights. But the great majority of the former homes were roofless and overgrown with weeds. Da was unprepared for the sight of it.

  “These were thick walls,” he murmured to himself. “Never a drop of rain came through.”

  “Not quite what you expected,” Sean murmured. “Which house was yours?”

  “I’m not entirely sure.”

  On his opposite side stood Kevin. Sean saw the boy slide his hand into his grandfather’s. The three of them stood there surveying the remains of Da’s boyhood. Sheep grazed across the hillside. The sun shone, bleaching the white of the few standing cottages, super-saturating the green of the grass. It was breathtakingly beautiful . . . and devastatingly sad, all at once.

  “Let’s go to the top where we can see better,” said Kevin. “I bet you’ll find your house then.”

  So they climbed, and as they did, Da was able to get his bearings. “This was the schoolhouse,” he told Kevin. “But we didn’t even have a teacher those last years. Most of the children went to Dunquin for school, but my parents didn’t want me to go. I was their only child, and mamaí wanted me with her, so she taught me herself.”

  “You called her mommy? What did you call your grandfather?”

  “Mine had died before I was old enough to address them. But I would have called them daideó.” It sounded like “daddo.” “In Dunquin the English-speaking kids used ‘gran-da.’ ”

  Sean realized he’d never heard the boy call Da anything at all. They wandered uphill, and Da pointed out different houses and who had lived in them. Finally they came to the one he remembered best of all. “This is
it,” he said. “Here’s my home.”

  The back wall, what was left of it, was set against the hill. One side wall had held a door with two windows on either side. Remnants of the fireplace were barely visible behind the weeds that sprouted out of the dirt floor. Da described the contents as if it were a litany of sacred objects. “This was my parents’ bed,” he said, pointing to one corner, “and here’s mine over here. Here’s the table and chairs, and the cabinet for the dishes.” His hands made the shapes as he trod through the weeds. “The roof was very sturdy—my da made sure of that. We used to dry the fish up there on sunny days to cure it for the winter. But you couldn’t smell it in the house. That’s how tight that roof was.”

  And now it was made of sunlight and salt air.

  Da took the little whitewashed stone out of his pocket. “I had the idea that the divot I made when I took it would still be here, and it would fit right in.” But there was no whitewash left, nothing but rain-battered stones ready to topple at the next stiff wind.

  Kevin made a loop with his thumb and forefinger and rested it on a rock in the doorway. “Here,” he said. “Try it out.”

  Da set the little stone into the well of the boy’s fingers. He laid his hand lightly on his grandson’s head and gazed at his scraped face. “You’re a keeper, cuisle mo chroí.”

  * * *

  Kevin wanted to get a closer look at the seals on the beach. About forty of them were nestled together at the far end of the sandy spit, like an enormous lumpy gray blanket. Sean, Kevin, and Da sat a respectful distance away and pulled out the sandwiches and drinks they’d brought. Kevin ate his quickly and went down to the water’s edge to skip stones.

  “Our name in Irish,” said Da, “it means either exile or pilgrim.”

  “Doran? I didn’t know that.”

  “There’s some irony in it. It’s the same word whether you’re coming or going. Whether you’re being kicked out or drawn toward a place.” He glanced back toward the village. “I’ve felt like an exile ever since I left here. Except with your mother, of course. That woman had a way of making me feel so at home. You know how that feels? Like you’re in exactly the right place?”