Honorary Englishman: Excerpt from Valiant Gentlemen, forthcoming from Grove Press, November 2016.

Casement skirts the cottage, passing inches from a narrow window ledge, and wonders if he’s made a mistake. The clochan should be right here. He ducks beneath the clothesline and its flapping drawers. He’s having a hard time summoning that romantic frame of mind that will let him truly appreciate what it might have been to be a monk trying to come closer to God through this feat of exile. Sure enough, the clochan is no more than a fortified badger hole, and when he peeks in through the broken roof, his feeling is more of disappointment. Had he expected the monk to still be there in 1904? Casement is thinking like a child, although he just turned forty last month.

Casement has a couple of weeks on the island of Inishmaan, which is as far to the west as Ireland can manage. This is at the recommendation of Alice, who thinks he should indulge his recent interest in the Irish language and seems to have no shortage of activities to occupy his time. He’s come in the shoes of Synge and all those Irishmen who had their language stolen somewhere in the past and now have to go retrieve it. He’d be happy listening in on people’s conversations, but that requires getting two people together in the same place, when the majority of the time the men are working alone in the fields, hanging in their required locations like planets in the sky. And the women, well, they are often grouped together about the hearths and washing, but what’s his excuse to find their company? How would he enter their houses?

Casement tracks back up the curving path. There is Dún Chonchúir, the great cheese-wheel of it, sitting on the windswept mound, hairy with grass. An escaped sheep crops growth drunkenly by the entrance, sidestepping when Casement comes near. Inside the quiet is the kind you can almost touch. A set of stone steps leads up to the top of the fort and to a view of the island, and from the island out to the sea. The blanket of fields rolls out to the flatlands, out to the pounded, gray brim of sand. A few currachs dot the water. Birds wheel and drop.

Casement wanders past fields marked off by wobbling walls of flat rocks. They don’t use mortar here because the walls would be toppled in the first gale, which is practical, but gives a sense of impermanence, or at least struggle. He’s just gone through a gap into a field, then into another, but there’s no exit other than that so recently serving as entrance. Casement, pacing around like a fool, has gained the attention of the farmer, who was busy at his rows but is now standing with his knuckles resting on his hips. He takes his hat from his head and puts it back, and Casement wonders what this action has accomplished.

“Dia dhuit,” says Casement.

“English, are you?” says the farmer.

“No,” says Casement. “I’m from up North.”

“Ah,” says the farmer.

Which says a lot, but makes self-defense impossible. “Where are you needing to go?” asks the farmer.

“Nowhere in particular.”

“The pub’s just down the road,” the farmer offers. Suddenly this seems like a good idea. That he’s not actually lost doesn’t seem worth arguing. He listens out of politeness, then follows out of inertia. Besides, it looks like rain.

The wind picks up and palms the surface of the island. A brisk breeze rattles at the karst, sings through the walls, makes Inishmaan feel as if it is alive, shivering. A breath of wet chill blows over and the first handful of raindrops rattles on the packed dirt. He has barely time to pull his scarf up to his ears when the rain drifts over like a windblown drape.

The weather changes minute to minute here, as does his mood. The rain does not...