Chapter 32: The Cooper's Records

The cooper in Dún Aonghasa was a man called Arthur, and he was ninety one years old, and he kept his records in a chest under the window of his workshop because the barrel trade in a fishing village had never needed a filing system.

I found him at the back of the shop with a hoop in his hands and a barrel between his knees, and when I told him what I wanted he looked at me over the top of his spectacles and said, "You are Siobhan's sister."

"I am."

"Then you can have the chest. She came to me in January and asked me the same thing and I told her I did not keep the sort of records she was after and she said, Arthur, you have been the cooper of this co-op for sixty years and you have been at every meeting with your book and your pencil and do not tell me you have not." He set the hoop down. "I have been keeping the minutes of this co-op since 1949. Nobody has ever asked to see them. They are in the chest and the chest is full of dust and I would be glad of the reason to open it."

The chest was long and low and made of oak and it had a lock on it that had not been locked in years. Arthur opened it and took out a stack of ledgers tied with twine and put them on the bench and untied the first one.

"1949 to 1961 is this one," he said. "1961 to 1975 is the next. 1975 to 1989 is the red one and the last of them is in the shop and I have not written in it since my hands got too shaky." He tapped the red ledger. "This is the one your sister wanted. She had it open on this bench for three hours in February and when she was done she sat down on that stool and she did not say anything for a long while."

I opened the red ledger. The pages were ruled and the writing was Arthur's, small and careful and old-fashioned, and it began in 1975 with the meeting after Roisin was found on the rocks.

I read it through. It took me the better part of an hour and Arthur sat on his stool and did not interrupt me, and by the time I came to the end I understood a great deal that I had not understood before.

The 1975 meeting was in the ledger in full. Arthur had written the whole of it in his careful hand. The co-op had called the Alpha to account for the death of Roisin and the death of Donal in 1969, and Eileen had answered that both had been rogues in her territory and had been put down under the charter, and the co-op had asked for a vote and the vote had been thirty one to twenty nine. Eileen kept the seat. And at the bottom of the page, in a different ink, Arthur had written a note in smaller letters: "The Alpha's mother, the wife of the cooper of 1902, was never Alpha. She was Beta to Maeve and took the seat by force in 1961 and the co-op has never voted on it. I record this because I am the cooper and I keep the record and I have been told not to write it. I am writing it."

I looked up at Arthur.

"Your father wrote that," he said. "He was the cooper then and I was his apprentice and I held the candle while he wrote it and he said, Arthur, if this co-op ever finds its courage, this page is the thing it needs."

"Eileen was never Alpha," I said. "She was Beta to Maeve and she took the seat by force and the co-op never voted on it."

"The co-op never voted on it and the charter says the seat must be voted on when it passes to a new line. She did not have the vote because she killed the woman who would have asked for it." Arthur tapped the ledger. "And there is the other thing. My father wrote down the names of the wolves who were in the hall the night Maeve died. There were nine of them and one of them was Eileen and one of them was her daughter Mairéad and one of them was Fionn the Beta and one of them was the enforcer Korkut, who was a young man then and was at the start of his career and had come down from Galway for the fire. And two of them were women from this village who are dead now and one of them was a man who went to America in 1962. And the ninth one is not named. My father wrote a dash and then he wrote, the ninth wolf is not known to me but I smelled her and she was from outside the territory."

"A wolf from outside the territory was in this village on the night Maeve died."

"She was. My father was the cooper and the cooper has a nose like a hound and he never forgot a smell." Arthur closed the ledger. "Your sister read this page and she sat on that stool and she said, Arthur, if a wolf from outside the territory was in the hall on the night of the fire, then the fire was not a thing that happened in this village. It was a thing that was brought here. And I said, what do you mean, and she said, I mean that Eileen did not do it alone. She did it with the help of someone from outside who wanted the shore."

"Korkut," I said.

"Korkut or someone who sent him. He was young then and he was not yet an enforcer. He was a clerk in the Council's office in Galway and he came down for the fire and he was in the hall that night and the next morning Eileen signed the deed of gift." Arthur looked at me over his spectacles. "Your sister said a thing to me when she left this shop and I have thought about it every day since. She said, Arthur, a man who comes to a village for a fire and goes home with the shore has been planning to go home with the shore for a very long time. And if he was planning it in 1961 he was planning it with someone. And that someone was not my grandmother and it was not the Alpha and it was not the Beta. It was a woman who was nineteen years old and who was at a teacher's college in Galway and who came home the day after the fire."

I sat on the stool in the cooper's shop with the red ledger in my hands.

"Mairéad," I said.

"Mairéad was nineteen and she was in Galway and she was not a wolf yet and she came home the day after the fire and she was in the hall on the second night." Arthur turned a page and put his finger on a line. "My father wrote it here. He wrote, the daughter came home from the college on the Friday and she was in the hall on the Friday night with the clerk from Galway and they were talking until late and the mother was not in the room. And in the morning the mother signed the deed."

The shop was very quiet. Out in the harbor a gull was crying and the wind was rattling the shutters.

"The daughter made the deal," I said.

"The daughter made the deal and the mother signed it and the daughter has been the Alpha for twenty seven years and not one wolf in this village has ever asked why a woman from a teacher's college in Galway came home the day after her mother burned the Alpha in her own house." Arthur closed the ledger and put his hand on it. "Your sister asked. That is why your sister is dead. Not because she made a claim on the seat. Because she found the one thing in this village that no one had ever looked for, and it was not a ring and it was not a charter. It was a date."

I stood up. I put the red ledger in my coat and Arthur did not stop me.

"Arthur," I said. "Will you come to the hall at noon and say what your father wrote and what you saw with your own eyes?"

Arthur looked at his hands. They were old and knotted and they had been making barrels for sixty years.

"I am ninety one years old," he said. "I have been in this village my whole life and I have kept my head down and I have written the minutes and I have never once stood up in that hall and said a word that was not written for me by the Alpha." He looked up. "But my father held a candle while he wrote a page he was told not to write, and he told me that page was the thing the co-op would need when it found its courage. I am not a brave man and I have never been a brave man. But I am the last of the men who were in the room when the fire happened, and if I do not say it now there will be no one left to say it." He stood up and put his coat on. "I will come. And I will bring the ledger and I will read the page my father wrote and I will tell them what he told me about the smell of the ninth wolf."

I went out of the cooper's shop and up the lane and the bell in the church was ringing for the noon mass, and the whole village was coming out of its doors and going up the hill to the hall. And on the steps of the hall with the green door open behind her and her silver hair down and her pale green eyes bright in the grey light, Mairéad was standing with her hands folded and a smile on her face and the whole co-op coming up to her like a congregation to an altar.

And then she saw me. And the smile did not change. And she lifted one hand and said, in a voice that carried down the whole lane, "There she is. The woman from Dublin. Come in, Niamh. We have been waiting for you."