Five Ferries Excerpt

With the last sunlight, an elderly couple picked me up. I told them my destination and the woman asked whom I would be visiting. I replied with Catherine’s family name and address. “Sure, the Donahers are gone from there two years now,” said the man, looking to his wife for confirmation. “They’re out on the Lattone Road.”

I put myself in the couple’s hands, and they dropped me before a small, suburban-looking house with flowerbeds and a concrete fountain on the lawn. I waved goodbye, but they waited to see that I got in. Turning toward the door, I pumped myself up for a fast pitch, realizing I’d sent my postcard to the old address so this would be a cold call. 

Before I could ring the bell, the door flew open. The doorframe filled with a man’s ruddy face and broad smile and around his legs two little boys and a slightly older girl.

“You’ll be Stephen from America!” he said. The boys giggled and hid behind their father.

“Yes,” I said, astonished they’d heard I was coming and that my own prepared smile felt sincere. In a twinkling I was whisked to the kitchen table and seated before a steak and a glass of Guinness. Aunt Catherine and her husband, Brendan Donaher of the permanent ruddy grin, were probably fifty years old. She hurried about finding more food to set on the table, while he kept my glass full. 

My guard let down. The instinct to stay alert and assess my surroundings simply vanished, and this almost brought me to tears. I felt with a certainty there was no need for concern. Compared with every place I’d arrived in five months, this was home.

At their insistence, I outlined my trip and the American lineage. Catherine was fascinated to hear first-hand of relations lost to her after my grandmother died twenty-five years before. When I told them about Edward, she crossed herself and said they had read that tragic news in a Christmas card and kept him in their prayers.

There was no way to reconcile my father’s picture of poor, rural Ireland with the Donahers’ comfortable life in a modest house on a bit of land, with fishing lodges to let to German anglers. They gave me the daughter Bernadette’s room and drew me into this family, my family. This was not just the latest place to crash, where kind people treated me well; this was my cousin’s bed, and pouring tea for me was the author of those long, sincere cards that had reached my house every Christmas of my life.

Aunt Catherine answered some of my questions about the family in Ireland but said I should get the details from her mother Ann. She was the last surviving sibling of my grandmother and the matriarch of a family that spread beyond the ends of each of Catherine’s stories. She’d been napping when I arrived but was roused and was dressing to meet me. Given my unwashed state, this seemed more ceremony than was warranted. 

When I’d finished my meal, I offered to help wash up, but Catherine would have none of that and took my hand to lead me to the front parlor. I was touched at how even my best technique for ingratiating myself with hosts was no use in this house.

“She’s nearly blind, Stephen,” said Catherine, “and a wee bit hard of hearing, so you’ll have to sit close and speak loudly.”

Ann sat ramrod straight in an armchair in the front parlor crowded with Belleek pottery. She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds and wore a neat, print dress with a lace collar. She smiled softly, sensing rather than seeing my approach.

I was eager for a connection with the grandmother I never knew but was overwhelmed by the glow surrounding this ancient woman. Catherine made the introductions and Ann clasped my hand in her bony, pale fingers with the strength of a vise grip. She held her head high as if peering a great distance. 

“Your Granny was coming home to visit, Stephen,” she said in a shallow voice choked with emotion, “when the Lord took her to his own.”

“I never knew her,” I confessed apologetically.

“Sure, but that was twenty-five years ago,” she said as if that were the blink of an eye, and turned toward me. 

“Your Granny never made it,” she said, patting my hand, “but at least you did.” She paused. “You’ve come in her place.”

Chills ran down my spine. My reason for visiting, to find a place to stay or a meal, was suddenly inconsequential and even irreverent. Ann continued to hold her head nobly. The set of her jaw and strength of her grip exclaimed unbounded joy. Her sister had returned from beyond the ocean and this life for a last farewell. I was humbled to see I had closed the circle of her life.

I made up greetings from my father, who could not have imagined this scene. But wishes from distant relations concerned Ann less than what she held in her hands. I asked about her family, and she paused with a pregnant smile and then started to name her children. I begged her to wait until I had my pad and this pleased her, like everything I did. Then she dictated, and I copied furiously. She named her twelve children and their many children and whom they all had married and where they all had settled. 

When she had covered her progeny, my hand was cramped and I counted forty-seven second cousins completely new to me. My known family had expanded instantly and geometrically.

Catherine came in quietly, reminded her mother it was time for bed and said: “And you’ll have a bit of tea, Stephen, won’t you?” Her voice was musical, high notes at the question ending each sentence. “Wouldn’t you?” “Isn’t it?” “Doesn’t she?” She hit her highest note in the earnest long first “E” in “Stephen.” No one had ever before said my name that way and it touched me.

“You’ll have a bit of tea, Stephen, won’t you?” she repeated.

“Oh, no thank you; I’ve had enough tea today.”

“You’ll have just a drop, then?”

There was nothing but to give in with a smile.

“And a wee biscuit would be lovely with your tea, wouldn’t it?”