Chapter 109: The Spark Under the Stone

The priest did not marry us. He was eighty years old and he had a funeral at nine and a wedding at eleven and there was not a thing in his book for two wolves who came into his church at four in the morning with a ring in a pocket and a list of eleven names. But he took us into the sacristy and he put a candle on the table and he wrote the whole of it in a book with a pen that had a nib like a beak and he made us say the thing out loud in front of him and he signed it and put the date on it.

"There is a thing about this that I have to say," he said, when he had finished. "It is not a wedding. A wedding is a thing that is done in front of a congregation and a family and a priest with a stole on. This is a thing that is done in a sacristy at four in the morning with a candle and a pen and a priest in his nightshirt. But it is written down and it has a date on it and there is not a wolf in Galway who is going to be able to say it did not happen."

Declan put the ring back on my finger and the ring was the ring of Maeve and it had a paper in it that had a list of eleven names on the back and it was not the kind of thing a woman puts on in a sacristy. It did not matter.

We came out of the church at five and the sky was going grey and the lane was empty and we went down to the quay and the Star of the Sea was at the wall with her light going and the man in the hood was on the deck with a rope in his hands.

There was a thing we had not expected.

The whole quay was full of wolves. There were twenty of them and they were not from Galway and they were not from Dún Aonghasa. They were standing along the wall in coats and boots with their hands in their pockets and they were looking at the Star of the Sea and at the woman standing on the deck.

It was my sister. She was out of the cabin and on the deck with her grey coat over her arm and her gold hair going grey at the temples and her hand up.

"There is a thing about the morning that you should know," she said, when she saw me. "These are the eleven. Or nine of them. The other two are in the islands and they are coming on the evening tide." She put her hand down. "I sent the letters in the spring. Before the claim. I sent them to the eleven names and I told them that the ban was going to be lifted and that there was a village on the west coast that was going to be a village again. And they did not believe me because they had been banished for a thing they did not do and because a wolf who has been banished for thirty years does not believe a letter."

The nine wolves on the quay were looking at me.

There was an old man with a white beard and a coat that had been mended at the elbow and a woman with red hair and a face like a hawk and a man who was somewhere in his forties with a scar across the back of his hand. There was a woman with grey hair in a plait and a man with a wooden leg and a young wolf with a shaved head. There was a man who was older than all of them with a face like a walnut and a pair of boots that had been made in the north. And there was a woman who was holding onto the arm of the man with the wooden leg and who had been crying.

"Say your names," I said.

They said their names. The old man with the white beard was called Callum and he was the brother of the Callum on the Council and he had been banished in 1961. The woman with red hair was called Aisling and she had been banished in 1974. The man with the scar was called Leo and he had been banished in 1981. The woman with the grey plait was called Maeve and she had been banished in 1963 and she was named after my grandmother. The man with the wooden leg was called Daniel and the young wolf with the shaved head was called Owen and the old man with the walnut face was called Arthur and he had been banished in 1959 and he was ninety one years old and he had come down from Donegal on a bus with his boots in a bag.

The woman who had been crying was called Brigid and she was the sister of the Bridget who had died in the harbor in June.

I stood on the quay with the nine of them in front of me and the ring on my finger and the paper in my coat.

"There is a thing I have to say," I said, "and I am going to say it in front of the whole of you and then I am going to give you the paper and you are going to read it for yourselves. My name is Niamh and I am the daughter of Maeve's daughter and I am the sister of the woman who wrote to you in the spring. I have been in Dún Aonghasa for a month and I have pulled a safe out of a well and read a book in a cellar and stood in a Council chamber in Galway and the whole of it has been read out loud in front of nine wolves who have been taking money out of that village since 1961." I put my hand in my coat and took out the paper. "And there is a thing about the ban. It was not lifted by the Council and it was not lifted by the Alpha. It was lifted by a co-op in a garden in the rain on a night in June when forty wolves said aye and there was not a wolf among them who had the right to do it and they did it anyway."

I gave the paper to Callum the brother and he read it and passed it to Aisling and she read it and passed it to Leo and it went down the whole of them one by one and the woman with the grey plait read it twice and put her hand over her mouth.

"It is her hand," she said. "It is Siobhan's hand and it is the paper she wrote in the winter of 1996 and she has put it in the ring and she has told us the ban is lifted."

"It is her hand and it is her paper and she is standing on that deck," I said. "And there is a thing about the fourteen days that I have to say before any of you says another word. The fourteenth of July is a full moon and it is the day the Council is going to hear the claim and there is a woman in Galway in a room with a pen and a paper who has known about the whole of you since April and who has done nothing about you. And a woman who has done nothing about a pack of eleven wolves for three months is a woman who has done something about them." I looked at the nine of them. "So I am going to ask you a thing and I am going to ask it now. There is a boat and there is a quay and there is a village on the west coast with a hall and a co-op and a whole lot of wolves who have been lied to for thirty six years. Are you coming?"

The nine of them looked at each other.

And then the old man with the walnut face and the boots from the north came down the quay and stood in front of me and put his hand out.

"My name is Arthur," he said, "and I was banished from Dún Aonghasa in 1959 for a thing I did not do. I was nineteen years old and I have been in the north for thirty eight years and I have not set foot in that village since. And there is a thing about me that you should know before you take my hand. I was in the north in 1961 and I was in the house on the hill in Killybegs and I was one of the four wolves who came down this coast in a boat and set a fire in a house on the high ground." He put his hand down. "I did not know it was a fire until we were in the boat. I was nineteen and I was told to carry a can and I carried it and I have been carrying it since. And there is a thing about a wolf who carries a can and does not ask what is in it. He is a wolf who is going to be asked about it for the rest of his life."

The whole quay was silent.

"You were nineteen," I said.

"I was nineteen."

"Then there is a thing about you that I am going to say and that the whole of you are going to hear," I said. "There is not a wolf on this quay who has not done a thing they are ashamed of. I have been in a village for a month and I have stood in a hall and watched a woman with a silver voice say this was ordered and I did not say a word. My mate sat in an office for four months and let me grieve and he did not say a word. The man who set the fire was nineteen years old and he carried a can and he did not ask what was in it." I put my hand out. "That is not a thing that is forgiven. It is a thing that is written down and read out loud and put in a file with every name in it. And then it is a thing that a wolf gets up from and goes on with."

Arthur looked at my hand for a long moment.

Then he took it.

And then the whole quay came down. Aisling took my hand and Leo took it after her and the woman with the grey plait took it and the man with the wooden leg and the woman who had been crying and the young wolf with the shaved head. The nine of them stood on the quay in the grey morning with their hands on mine and the ring on my finger and the whole of it went through me like the tide coming in.

The bond in my chest opened and the whole of it went out along the quay and every wolf on it lifted their head.

"There is a thing about that," Callum the brother said. "That is a thing I have not felt since 1961."

Declan was at the top of the quay with his coat over his arm and his auburn hair flat to his head and his grey eyes on the whole of it.

"There is a thing I have to say before we get on that boat," he said. "It is not a speech and it is not a thing for a hall. I have been the Beta of Dún Aonghasa for twenty years and I have been a man who stood in doors with his hands on the frame and I am not going to be that man any more. There is a woman with gold hair on this quay and she has been in that village for a month and she has done the thing no wolf in it could do." He came down the quay. "And there is a thing about the two of us that I am going to say in front of the whole of you because there is not a wolf on this quay who is going to be in that village on the fourteenth and there is not a wolf on it who is going to hear it from another mouth. She is mine and I am hers and it is written down in a book in a church in Galway with a date on it."

The nine wolves on the quay said a thing that was not a word and it went along the whole of them.

And then the man in the hood on the deck of the Star of the Sea said, "There is a thing about the morning that the whole of you are going to want to hear before you get on this boat. There is a car coming along the quay and it has its lights on and there are three men in it and one of them is the man who was on the street outside the hotel at four in the morning."

The whole quay turned round.