The plans that could not be made in the lifetime of John Michael’s mother were made now. John Michael would go soon. In May he would return for the wedding, and take Fina back with him. He didn’t know what work he’d get, but according to Bat Quinn it had never mattered to the men who’d gone before that fishing was all they knew. ‘Leave it open till you’ll get there, boy,’ Bat Quinn advised, the same advice he had been giving for forty years. Matt Cready came back, the only one who did, his big bucks spent like pennies every night in the bar of the half-and-half. ‘Look at that, boy,’ Bat Quinn invited, displaying for John Michael the dollar bill he kept in an inside pocket. Bat Quinn had a niece, a nun in Delaware, and had had a sister in Chicago until her death two years ago. Slouched heavily at the bar of the grocery and public house that Fina’s family kept, his great paunch straining his clothes, his small eyes watery from drink, Bat Quinn showed everyone his dollar. ‘I’ll send you back another,’ John Michael always promised, and Fina always giggled.
They knew one another well, had gone together to school, picked up on the pier every morning by the bus, the only two from the village at that time. Concerned about the adventure that was being embarked upon, Fina’s father had protested more than once that they were still no more than the children they’d been then. ‘Oh, John Michael’ll fall on his feet,’ her mother predicted, fond of John Michael, optimistic on his behalf. ‘But isn’t he welcome to move in with us all the same?’ Fina’s father had offered when John Michael’s mother died, and Fina passed that on, knowing that John Michael wouldn’t ever consider serving in the half-and-half, drawing pints or checking the shelves for which grocery items were running out.
‘Sure, we have to go,’ was all John Michael said himself. Fina’s own two brothers had gone, one to Dublin, the other to England. One or other of them would have had the inheritance of the half-and-half but both had turned their backs on it.
A few evenings before they were to be parted, they walked through the twilight on the strand, talking about what they intended to reject for ever: the sea and the fishing, or John Michael being beholden in the half-and-half, his uncle’s farm. Eleven miles away, beyond the town of Kinard – which had a minimarket, a draper’s, five public houses, a hardware, and Power’s Medical Hall – the farmhouse was remote, built without foundations according to John Michael. Slated and whitewashed, it was solitary where it stood except for the yard sheds, its four fields stretching out behind it, as far as the boglands that began with the slope of the mountain. The mountain had no name, John Michael said, or if it had it was forgotten now, and there wasn’t a gate that swung. Old bedsteads blocked the holes in the hedges, there was a taste of turf on the water you drank. Damp brought on mildew in the rooms.
‘Even if you could get the place up on its feet again,’ John Michael said, ‘it’s never what we want.’
‘No way.’ Vehemently Fina shook her head, reassurance and agreement bright in her eyes. ‘No way,’ she said again.
Physically, there was a similarity about them, both of them slightly made, John Michael hardly a head taller. Both were dark-haired, with a modesty in their features, as there was in their manner. They seemed more vulnerable when they were together than when they were on their own.
‘Did you ever think it, though, Fina? That we’d be on our way?’
Her hand was warm in his, and his felt strong, although she knew it wasn’t particularly. Since they were children they had belonged to one another. On this same strand two years ago, in the twilight of an evening also, they had first spoken of love.
‘I only wish I’d be going with you,’ she said now.
‘Ah sure, it’s not long.’
He was gone, quite suddenly. For two hundred and one days they would be parted: already Fina had counted them. She thought at first that maybe at the last moment he’d be sent back, that the immigration-control men at Shannon wouldn’t let him on to the plane because he didn’t possess a work permit. But he’d said he’d be ready for that and he must have been. You had to be up to the tricks, he’d said.
