Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Luna They Buried: Kabanata 91 - Kabanata 100

The sun came up over the sea at half past five and the whole village was still on the shore road.Ahern stood at the top of the pier with his case and the letter from Galway and the whole of it in his hands, and he said a thing I had not expected and that I have thought about since.“There is a thing about the judgment that I am going to say before the co-op and then I am going to go up to the hall and write it,” he said. “I have the file and I have the pen and I have the book and the ring and the false charter and the letters of my father and the minutes of the cooper and the book of the woman who took children out of this village. And there is a thing about all of it that no one in this village has said out loud since 1961.” He put his hand on the case. “The seat was taken by force in 1961 and the co-op voted to set aside the lease eleven days before the fire and the Alpha was burned in her own house and the woman who burned her took the seat and there was no vote and there has neve

I went up to the room above the hall at ten in the morning with the second charter and the red ledger and the green book and the weight, and I sat down at the table and I did not get up for six hours.The whole of it was in front of me. The charter from 1901 with the bloodline clause and the conspiracy clause and the clause about the vote. The cooper's book with the minutes of every meeting since 1949. My mother's book. The book of the woman who took children out of this village. The letters of Ahern the elder. The deed of gift. The weight of forty one with the page inside it.I read the whole of it the way I used to read a case file in Dublin. Not for the story. For the small thing that did not fit the shape of the other things. For the date that did not match and the name that was in the wrong column and the page that had been written by a hand that was not the hand of the page before it.At noon Ahern came up and sat down across from me and put his notebook on the table.“There is

Declan stood on the north track with the wind coming off the sea and his son in front of him and the hunter's photograph in my hand.“I wrote them,” he said again. “I wrote the letters to your sister in Athlone every week since April and I told her to stay where she was and that I would come for her when the vote was taken and I signed them with my own name.”“Why?” I said.“Because in April I was a man who had let a boat go north with a woman in it and I could not do a second thing that would put her in the water. So I wrote to her and I told her to stay in Athlone and I told her I would come for her.” He looked at me. “And then you came to this village and the whole of it turned over and I did not go to Athlone and I did not tell you and I kept writing the letters because a man who stops writing a letter is a man who has to say out loud that he is not coming.”The wind came up over the shoulder of the headland. I stood on the track with the photograph of my sister in my hand and the

The whole co-op was on the headland with the wind coming off the sea and Mairéad's voice still hanging in the air.Cormac stood in the middle of the slip with his grey eyes on the whole of them and his hands at his sides.“You have said the thing about my father,” he said. “And it is true. He has been on the telephone to a man in Galway since April and he has been writing letters and he has been frightened and he has done what he was told. And I am not going to stand on this slip and tell the whole co-op that my father is a wolf who has not done a wrong thing. He has done a great many wrong things and he is going to answer for them.” He turned round to face Mairéad. “But there is a thing about my father that the co-op has not heard and that I am going to say now. My father did not go to Galway because he wanted the shore. He went to Galway because she sent him. Because the Alpha came to the harbor office in April and she said, Declan, there is a man in Galway who is going to put this

The ring of stones was full of lamps and the whole co-op was standing on the headland and Mairéad was sitting on the flat rock with the telephone receiver in her hand and her silver hair down over her black coat.“There is a thing I have to say,” I said, “and I am going to say it before the moon is up and before any wolf on this headland says another word about a hunt.” I took the bundle of letters out of my coat and held them up. “These are the letters that came from Galway to Maire's cottage every week since April and every one of them is in the same hand and every one of them is addressed to the Alpha of Dún Aonghasa. The last one came on the twelfth of June and it said, the woman from Dublin is to be hunted on the headland at the full moon and the wolf who takes her is the wolf who keeps the seat.”The whole headland was silent.“A wolf in Galway wrote that,” I said. “And a wolf in Galway sent the hunters down this coast in 1995 and 1996 and a wolf in Galway signed the payment to