Fearful Symmetry: An Emigrant's Return to Celtic Tiger Ireland

Every summer of the first twenty years of my life, I relived my parents' youngest days. I drank water from the same wells, carried on my clothes and hair the smoke of turf cut from the same bogs, feared the same ghosts and fairies in the long half-light of July nights. Those scenes have since changed, though they have long been resistant to the forward press of time and have not yet completely disappeared. I type this in an office overlooking the silver River Corrib in Galway, where swans drift and along which runs a busy motorway. Our annual returns to Ireland are over; we live here now, characters in what Helena Mulkerns has suggested "might be the next great Irish story," a story my father never imagined would be told.

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Wet currant bush and clover are the smells that return my father to his childhood, a field sown with rock and briar and stinging nettle; damp, rushy, cold. The stark rasp of a rook, then silence. His sister Margaret coughed for days and nights with a sound he didn't recognize, and then she was silent. When he spent a year in bed with scarlet, and then rheumatic, fever, it was believed that what he had was polio, the crippler of children across the country at that time. A man with "the cure" was brought in, and the cure, when it came, was a miraculous one. His heart has murmured ever after.

My mother remembers him when he returned to school after that illness, his face white and wide as a waiting page. He shuffled slowly, watching the other boys at football. Before falling ill, he had dreamed of playing for the county. My parents attended the same school, Ballinameen National School, in north County Roscommon, a year apart. They said the same prayer every Sunday night: that the master would be dead before morning. The master, my father's uncle, did die fairly prematurely, in his late fifties—extinguished, no doubt, by the accumulated pressure of hundreds of desperately murmured pleas, though too late to afford my parents any relief. My father still says he hopes his uncle is suffering all the torments of hell. My mother remembers looking at the back of my father's head as they walked down the same road to school, past the church and churchyard, the old forge and the old chapel, and knowing that she would marry him. She has more stories about those days than my father does. My father's Ireland resembles Edna O'Brien's, "fervid, enclosed and catastrophic," while my mother's memories have more warmth and light and detail, down to the ditties rehearsed to remember spelling words. One of the words rendered into rhythm was Mississippi: "Mrs d Mrs i Mrs ffi Mrs c Mrs u Mrs lty"; a peculiar word for a child in the middle of rural Ireland to be memorizing. She seems to have had no premonitions about one day living within one-hundred-and-fifty miles of the river by that name.

My father's father had also been in the region of the Mississippi, decades earlier. He had worked in Illinois on the railroad in the late 1920s, with no intention of ever returning to Ireland until one of the three emigrant brothers, Matt, fell seriously ill and my grandfather, Brian (also called Bernard), drew the short straw when the decision was made to bring Matt home. Matt was awkward enough to recover and live on for several decades after returning to Ireland. Jim, the brother who remained in the United States, settled in Brooklyn, married, and opened a grocery store. The family dispersal to America resumed when my father, the eldest of five surviving children, was eventually sent to his Uncle Jim, as were two brothers after him. Just a few weeks after turning fifteen, he sailed...