Tourmakeady Snow

Tourmakeady is a small rural district situated between Lough Mask and the Partry Mountains in County Mayo. It has a population of approximately one thousand people and remains, or perhaps struggles to be, a Gaeltacht area. My grandfather was born in this district in 1902 and lived there until he was twenty, when he left for West Hants Pool, England, and then for America. His name was Thomas Cusack, spelled with an "a" before he passed through the Ellis Island gates, spelled with an "i" once in America. I often wonder if this shift in spelling was his decision to claim a new start, or if it was his loss. He passed away seven years before I was born; and yet, even as a child, intrigued by the mysterious absence that I now understand as death, this man I would never know fascinated me.

It wasn't until I was an adult that I learned that—despite living with him for close to two decades—my father didn't know much more about his father than I did. He knew that my grandfather had left behind his father, Patrick Cusack, but my grandfather made only infrequent mention of a mother, and no mention of siblings. And there was, especially, no mention of why he decided, in the midst of his simultaneous hope for and disillusionment about an Irish Free State, to leave Ireland. When I would press my father for details with the thoughtlessness of a child, he grew silent until he could turn my attention to my grandmother, whom I had met and had the chance to know; she lived in our home during her last years of life. Once, at one of our Christmas teas that would last into the late hours of a cold evening, a second cousin claimed that my grandfather loved to laugh and joke, but my mother told me that she never heard such stories. In what has become the sad story of too many in the Irish-American working class, he labored long hours and drank too much. He drank even more after the death of his two daughters, the second of whom died in his arms.

On a warm August morning, in the car driving through the rough edges of Pittsburgh neighborhoods on the way to the Mt. Carmel cemetery to bury my own mother, my Uncle John told me that he and my grandfather had taken the trolley to this same cemetery nearly fifty years before, with a handmade wooden cross to put at the grave of his sister. They were poor, and this was to take the place of a more permanent stone. He told me this story with a surprising distance; listening to him recollect, as we rode together behind the hearse, it sounded as if he didn't know the characters within his own memory. My father was born just a year after his sisters died; unlike his three older brothers, my father would not know his family without the absent presence of these losses. The youngest of six, my father was born when my grandmother was forty-seven-years-old. She came to America from Derryherbert, County Mayo, just sixteen kilometers from Tourmakeady, although it would take separate journeys to America, and perhaps some recognition of home, to bring my grandparents together.

When I agreed to join my father, along with his brother John and his daughters, on a trip to Ireland my travel intentions were mostly related to work, with plans for archival research and literary conversations. I was in the midst of my dissertation project, an exploration of how a colonized people turn to the land in hopes of recovery and how the mnemonics of place might guide perspective, even while pulling one to the past. I was studying poetry, photography, and emigrant correspondence—and, with an academic eye, I pushed myself behind the glass of a critical lens, attempting to separate my work about loss and land from the rhythms of my own life, insisting too much that they are different realms.

My father and I had no fixed plan to visit my grandfather's home. Although...