Chapter 28: The Archives in the Church

Father Byrne was in the sacristy at seven in the morning with his coat off and a cup of tea going cold beside him, and when I knocked on the door he looked up and said, "I have been expecting you since the funeral."

"Then you know why I am here."

"I know that a woman has been asking questions in this village for a week and that the Alpha has been in the hall with the enforcer for two nights and that there was a howl on the headland last night that the whole village heard." He got up and put his coat on. "I also know that my housekeeper is the Alpha's cousin and that she will be in the kitchen until nine. So we have two hours."

He took me through the church and into the back where the vestry was and then through a door I had never noticed into a low room with a flagged floor and shelves from the floor to the ceiling. The shelves were full of books and boxes and bundles of paper tied with string, and the air was cold and dry and smelled of dust and candle wax and old leather.

"The parish records go back to 1798," Father Byrne said. "Births and deaths and marriages and the land. The co-op keeps its own records in the hall. The parish keeps the ones nobody wants in the hall." He pulled a chair out from under the table. "What are you looking for?"

"A land deed. Any deed from this village that mentions the shore or the headland or the waters, and anything from 1961." I sat down. "And there is a thing I have not told anyone. My sister kept a record of every first shift in this village for fifteen years and sent a copy to a woman in Galway. She kept it in her boots and under a flagstone and in a hole in a wall. She was a woman who hid things in more than one place. If she was keeping a record for fifteen years, she kept a copy of it somewhere no one in this village would look."

Father Byrne looked at the shelves.

"There is a box in the corner with her name on it," he said. "It has been here since 1989. She brought it in herself and she said, Father, if anything happens to me, this box is for my sister and no one else, and I said, Siobhan, nothing is going to happen to you, and she said, Father, I am asking you as a parishioner, and I put the box in the corner and I have not looked at it since."

The box was a wooden tea chest with a lid and a rope handle and it had S. MAC CARTHAIGH on the side in my sister's handwriting. I sat down on the floor with it and Father Byrne sat down on a stool and I opened the lid.

The first thing was the notebook. It was a school exercise book with a brown cover and it was full of my sister's handwriting, small and neat and going down the page in columns, and it was the record of the shifts she had kept and sent to Galway, but it was more than that. There were notes in the margins. There were names with dates beside them and names with question marks beside them and a page near the back with a list of figures and the word TITHE written at the top and circled twice.

The second thing was a bundle of papers tied with string and when I opened it there were deeds in it. Old deeds, on parchment, with seals on them, and the writing was the cramped legal hand I had seen in the charter. The first one was dated 1789 and it granted the shore and the headland and the waters from the point to the cove to a man whose name I did not know. The second one was dated 1881 and it was a conveyance of the same land to a company in Galway. The third one was dated 1961 and it was a deed of gift, and the name on it was Eileen, and the land it conveyed was the shore and the headland and the waters, and the person it conveyed them to was a man called Korkut.

I sat on the floor of the church archives with the deed in my hand and the cold coming up through the flagstones.

"Father," I said. "What does a deed of gift from 1961 have to do with the price of fish?"

Father Byrne took the deed and read it. His face did not change and he read it twice and then he put it down on the table and said, "In 1961 the co-op in this village owned the shore and the headland and the waters. It had owned them since 1789. The co-op was the pack and the pack was the co-op and there was no difference between them in law or in fact." He put his finger on the deed. "In 1961 a woman called Eileen gave the shore and the headland and the waters to a man called Korkut as a gift. That is what this says. It says gift. It does not say sale and it does not say lease and there is no sum of money on it."

"The Council's enforcer owns the shore."

"The Council's enforcer has owned the shore since 1961 and no one in this village has known it because the deed was not registered and the co-op kept its own records and the county council never asked." Father Byrne sat back. "And a man who owns the shore owns the moorings and a man who owns the moorings owns the boats and a man who owns the boats owns the catch and the co-op is the catch." He looked at me. "That is why the Council has never come to this village to ask about the Alpha's seat. The enforcer of this region is the landlord."

The notebook was in my lap. I opened it to the page with the figures and the word TITHE and read it with the cold coming up through the floor.

It was a list of years, going back to 1962, and beside each year there was a sum of money and a name. 1962, one hundred pounds, Korkut. 1963, one hundred and twenty, Korkut. The sums went up and up and the names changed in the nineties and there were notes in the margin in my sister's hand. "Paid from the co-op fund, not declared." "Paid in cash from the boat account." "Paid in the winter when the catch was bad and the co-op borrowed from the bank to make it." And at the bottom of the page, in bigger letters: "This is not a tithe. This is rent. She is paying rent to a man who owns the shore and she is paying it out of the co-op's money and the co-op does not know."

I turned the page. There was one more entry at the bottom, in a different ink, with the date 1997 and the sum blank, and beside it my sister had written: "This year there is no money left. She has borrowed against the boats. She has borrowed against the hall. And in March she is going to pay him with something else."

Father Byrne leaned over and read the line. Then he got up and went to the door and looked out into the church and came back and sat down.

"Your sister came to me in February," he said. "She asked me questions I could not answer and then she stopped asking and started telling me things. She told me the Alpha was in debt. She told me the co-op was in debt. She told me there was a man in Galway who owned the shore and that the Alpha had been paying him for thirty years out of money that was not hers to pay." He folded his hands. "And then she said a thing I have thought about every night since. She said, Father, if I make a claim and I lose, the co-op will be his. The boats, the hall, the moorings, all of it. And I said, how can that be, and she said, because the lease on the moorings is in the Alpha's name and not the co-op's, and if the Alpha falls the lease falls, and the man who owns the shore will take the boats as his collateral."

I put the notebook down on the table.

"Then Mairéad is not taking the Mary Rose out on Saturday to prove the line of Maeve is finished," I said. "She is taking it out because the enforcer is going to be on it and she is going to hand him something. The man in the garden said there was a box in the locker in the boat with the Council's seal on it and it came from Galway in the spring and the woman with the red hair brought it."

Father Byrne looked at the deed and then at the notebook and then at me.

"There is a thing in my head," he said, "and I do not like the shape of it. If the Alpha is going to hand the enforcer the co-op on Saturday night, she will do it in front of the whole village, and the whole village will see it and there is not a wolf among them who will understand what they are looking at. They will see the Alpha on the boat with the enforcer and they will think it is a courtesy. And on Sunday morning the co-op will be his, and the boats will be his, and the hall will be his, and there will be nothing left for you to win."

"The deed is a gift," I said. "A gift can be set aside."

"By a court."

"By the co-op. The co-op is the pack and the pack is the co-op and the charter says the land of the pack cannot be given away without a vote of the co-op. It is in the charter. I read it with Ronan. The first part, the part about the land." I stood up. "A deed of gift from 1961 that was never voted on by the co-op is not a deed. It is a piece of paper. And a piece of paper from a woman who took the seat by force on the same night she signed it is worth less than the paper it is written on."

Father Byrne looked at me for a long moment.

"There is a copy of the charter in this room," he said. "The parish has one. It came here in 1901 and it has been in that box on the bottom shelf ever since. I have never opened it. I am a priest and not a lawyer and I have enough trouble with the canon law without the pack's." He got up and went to the bottom shelf and pulled out a box and brought out a book bound in green leather with a clasp on it. "If the clause about the land is in this copy, and the clause about the vote is in this copy, then you have a thing to put in front of the co-op that no one can argue with."

He put the book on the table and opened it. The pages were stiff and the ink was brown and the writing was the same cramped hand as the charter in the hall, and I turned to the first part and read the clause about the land, and then I turned the page and read the clause about the vote, and then I stopped.

There was a line through the clause about the vote. It was drawn in a different ink, a thinner and darker ink, and it went from the top of the paragraph to the bottom, and in the margin beside it there was a note in the same thin dark ink, and the note was in handwriting I had seen before, thin and elegant and sloping to the right.

"Struck out by order of the Alpha, 1961, and confirmed by the Council. No vote required for a gift of land to the Council or its officers."

The church was very quiet. Somewhere outside a gull was crying over the harbor.

Father Byrne looked at the line and the note and his face had gone the colour of the wall.

"That is the enforcer's hand," he said. "I have seen it on a letter in this sacristy. He has signed his name to the margin of the parish charter." He sat down heavily on the stool. "Niamh. If the clause was struck out in 1961 and confirmed by the Council, then the deed is good. The shore is his. And there is not a thing in this village that can be done about it."