Homecoming

HE came by way of the Limerick Road, bent over and dragging his foot. I was repairing a wall in the north pasture when the dogs warned me someone was climbing the back path. Looking down from my rock pile, I was sure the priest had sent me another poor soul to feed and shelter in exchange for a bit of work. While I was thinking how it would be a kindness to slide down the hill and stop him, he took off his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. That gesture, along with the shake of his head, caused me to stagger forward and fall on the stones. This wasn’t a beggar looking for work but my own brother, back from the war—a war that had ended five months earlier with never a word as to whether he was living or dead.

I started to run to the cottage to tell Mam that her prayers had been answered and that she’d been right to turn a deaf ear to my talk of soldiers killed and never seen again. I’d told her thousands of soldiers had been blown to bits, and thousands more had disappeared in collapsed trenches and craters. “The fact is,” I said in November, looking hard at her so she’d have to listen, “they died without leaving any trace of their bodies.”

I didn’t say the soldiers had died for no good reason. And I didn’t say it was a damned shame that thousands of Irishmen had put on British uniforms to fight for the very empire that was murdering their countrymen at home.

“Hold your tongue,” Mam said when I brought up lost bodies. “I only know, as well as I know my own heart, that our James is alive and living on this earth.”

In February, when we still had no word, I suggested we ask Father Corrigan to come to the cottage and say some prayers for the dead. Mam pursed her lips and shook her head before grabbing my arm. “You will not speak of his death ever again,” she hissed. “Do you understand?” Her words went through my head to the back of my neck. “When your brother’s time comes—and we pray it’s after a long healthy life doing God’s will—he’ll be given a proper funeral, and he’ll be buried in the churchyard beside your father and your baby sister.”

As I raced to the cottage, I was filled with happiness; but, when I stooped to undo the paddock latch, I pictured the poor crippled man at the bottom of the hill. I thought how news of James’s return, coming minutes before the sight of his broken body, might be too great a shock. I decided to go to my brother, and, after he was settled in the barn, prepare Mam for the sight of him.

In less than three minutes I was sliding down the rocky hill, passing the shrine to the Blessed Virgin that Mam had built after Da died. Next I passed the wooden benches and the cobbled rocks that Uncle Jack dumped there twenty years ago, for reasons no one could ever understand. After the sharp turn at the five boulders, James came into view, pulling himself along like a wounded beast of burden.

James, twelve years my junior, was born two months after our father died, but he looked as old as a man escaped from the realm of the dead. I was glad my sisters were safe across the ocean and couldn’t see the sight of him. Sometimes, in the girls’ letters, Mam and I picked up a hint of homesickness. More often than not, they weren’t homesick for us, but for baby James.

In her last letter Sarah had written that the twin boys she looked after put her in mind of James. Still, she was quick to add, “There isn’t a little Yank anywhere can hold a candle to our James.” Mary Dora’s letter said she remembered James’s ginger-colored curls and how his face...