Chapter 4: Twenty Boats in the Rain

The funeral was small, the way Siobhan would have wanted it, which meant the church was full of people who had known her and half of them sang. Father Byrne said the mass in Irish and English both, and the woman from the post office did a reading, and when they carried the coffin out into the rain the whole village followed it up to the little graveyard on the hill behind the church. I stood at the graveside in my good black coat and watched the clay go in and did not cry. I had done my crying in the car outside Galway, at a service station, with a cup of tea going cold in the holder, and I did not have any left for the hill.

Afterward they came up to me one by one and said the things people say. I said thank you. I said she would have loved the singing. I said yes, I would be staying a few more days to sort out the house.

That last one was a lie I told so smoothly that it frightened me a little. I had no intention of going back to Dublin until I knew what had happened to my sister, and I had decided at the graveside that the story Declan had told me in the harbor office was not a story I could walk away from. A woman was dead. A boat had been taken. A boy had asked me whose weight I carried. I had spent fifteen years pulling at threads, and there was a whole village here made of thread.

The rain settled into a soft grey drizzle that evening and I walked down to the harbor to count the boats.

It was a thing I had done as a child, when my father brought me down to the pier in the evenings, and it was a thing my sister had done every day of her adult life, because she kept the co-op's records and the records began with the boats. So I told myself I was doing it for her. I stood at the end of the pier with my collar up and I counted them from left to right. The Mary Rose. The St Bride. The Star of the Sea. The O'Rourke boat with its blue stripe. The Murphy boat with the patched sail cover. The Cormorant, which was Declan's. The Maggie May. The Sea Holly. The Rose of Tralee. The Kathleen.

I got to twenty and I got to twenty again and I stood there in the rain and I thought about the number.

Every boat in the harbor. On a Wednesday in July. The mackerel were running and the weather was soft, and the whole fleet was tied up like it was the middle of a January storm.

I went into the shop. The woman from the shop, whose name was Nora, was behind the counter with a magazine and a radio on low, and she looked up at me and her face did the thing every face in this village did when I walked in, which was to arrange itself quickly into kindness.

"Bad evening to be out," she said.

"Bad evening for the boats." I took a bar of chocolate off the rack and put it on the counter. "Is there a festival? Something on the water?"

"Not tonight."

"Then why is the fleet in?"

Nora looked at the window. Then she looked at the chocolate and rang it up on the till, and the till made its old mechanical clack. "The men take a night off now and then. They are not machines."

"Twenty boats, Nora. Not one out."

"There will be a reason." She pushed the chocolate across the counter and her hand stayed on it. "There is always a reason. You should not be counting boats in the rain, love. You should be at home with a cup of tea and the fire on."

I took the chocolate and went out. She watched me through the glass and her hand had already gone to the telephone on the wall behind her.

So I did the other thing. I walked the shore road south toward the headland, and I found the place where the track turned down to the boathouse, and I stood in the lee of the wall where I could see the harbor and not be seen. The tide was half out. The rain was soft. I waited.

At half nine the door of the co-op hall opened and a light went on over the pier, and people began to come down from the village. Not the fishermen. The rest of them. The women from the shop and the post office, the older men from the wake, the tall woman with grey plaited hair. They came down the road in twos and threes with their coats buttoned and their hoods up, and they did not stop at the pier. They went past it, along the shore road, out toward the headland where the land fell away to the sea.

I followed them.

I kept to the hedge and the wall and the dark places, and I was quiet, and the rain helped. The track up to the headland was rough with stones and furze and it climbed and then it flattened and then it stopped at the edge of the world. There was a wide place there of short grass and black rock, and the people of Dún Aonghasa were gathered on it, thirty of them, maybe forty, standing in a loose ring with their backs to the sea.

And in the middle of the ring, on a flat stone, was Mairéad.

She stood with her silver hair down over her black coat and her pale green eyes turned up to the moon, which was out now over the water and nearly full, and the ring of people stood quiet and watched her. There was no singing and no talking. One of the men from the pier stepped forward and put something into her hand, and I could not see what it was, and she held it up for a moment and then lowered it.

Then she said, in a voice that carried clear across the grass in the wind, "The fleet stays in. The tide turns at eleven. Nobody goes out past the headland until the moon has crossed."

And forty people said, "Aye."

I went cold from the scalp down.

I had heard a congregation say amen. I had heard a court say guilty. I had never heard forty people say aye like that, in one voice, to a woman standing on a stone under a full moon, in answer to an order about boats.

I backed away along the hedge. I did not go home the way I had come. I went down the shore road to the pier, and I did the thing I should have done two days ago. I went into the co-op hall.

The hall was empty and dark, and the door was locked but the window on the sea side did not catch properly, and I had a penknife in my coat and I used it on the old latch and it gave. I climbed in over the sill and stood in the dark with my heart going hard and listened for a long moment. Nothing. The room smelled of stout and candle wax and the animal smell I was beginning to know.

The records were in the back office, in a big iron safe that was not locked. I found them by the light of my lighter, because there was no electricity on that side of the hall, and I sat on the floor with the ledgers open on my knees and read.

They were co-op records. They went back forty years, and they were kept in a neat clerk's hand that I recognized as my sister's for the last fifteen of them. Each page had a date and a list of boats and a count of the catch. And each month, at the full moon, there was a line across the page and no entries at all.

Not a storm. Not a broken engine. Every full moon, for forty years, in fair weather and foul, a line across the page.

I turned back through the years. It was the same in 1987. The same in 1974. The same in the first ledger I could find, which was dated 1957 and signed by a clerk whose handwriting I did not know.

And then I found it. In the front of the newest ledger, tucked behind the cover, there was a folded page that was not part of the book. It was a list of names in my sister's hand, thirty or so of them, the names of every adult in this village. Next to each name was a number. Next to each number was a date.

Nora: seventeen. The date of her marriage.

Declan: twenty two. The date of his father's death.

The tall woman with the plaited hair: thirty four. A date I did not know.

And at the bottom, in a different ink, in a hand that was thinner and older:

Niamh: forty one. The date of her first shift.

My hands were shaking. I folded the page and put it in my inside pocket and stood up in the dark office with the rain on the roof. Forty one was the number stamped on the fish on the weight in my coat. Forty one was my mother's charter number. And the date beside my name was not a date in the past. It was a date three days from now.

I climbed back out the window and dropped to the path. The moon was high and white over the water and the village was dark, and the co-op hall stood behind me with its secret ledgers and its line across every full moon.

There was a light in my sister's cottage.

I stood on the path and looked at it. A yellow glow in the kitchen window, the same window I had stood at when the wolf was on the headland, and I had not lit that lamp. I had not lit any lamp in that cottage since the morning.

I walked up the road toward it, and my own footsteps sounded very loud in the rain.

The back door was open again. The kitchen lamp was on. Declan was sitting at my sister's table with his wet jacket over the back of the chair and his hands flat on the wood and a face on him like a man who had been sitting there a while and had not found a way to make the waiting easier.

"The full moon is on Saturday," he said, before I could speak. "She is taking the Mary Rose out on Saturday night, and she is taking it out past the headland, and she is going to do it in front of the whole co-op so that nobody can say afterwards that she did not have the right." He looked up at me and his grey eyes were flat and hard and very tired. "I have been trying to work out how to tell you this for two hours. I am going to tell you the truth now, all of it, and then you are going to have to decide what you are, because on Saturday night there will not be time."

I took the folded page out of my pocket and put it on the table between us.

"Whose first shift?" I said. "Mine, Declan. The date beside my name is Saturday. What happens to me on Saturday night?"