Free The All of It: A Novel by Jeannette Haien Page A

like one of Kevin’s kestrels eyeing the world?”
    “Of course!” she affirmed. “You know, Father, before Kevin got sick, we’d take the walk to Leegans Head on a fine day and be thrilled over and above all the times we’d ever been there before. It’s nothing, I mean, you can ever get used to.”
    “Never.”
    “And it’s there, of course,” she went on, “you’ll see every kind of seabird, gulls and coots, them especially, and ducks. I’ve always thought forqueerness, cormorants is it, the way they ride the water and circle their heads about….”
    “But for charm, it’s curlews,” he put in. “And at Leegans Head, have you noticed too, Enda, how tame the land-birds are? The tits and whinchats? I had one land on my head one day.”
    “No!”
    “Indeed! It’s the seeds of the high-growing grasses that attract them in such numbers, I read somewhere once.” Then, almost shyly: “There’re harebells up there too.”
    “Carpets of them.” Her eyes gleamed.
    He’d come on the violent blue of them hiking, five years ago, his first summer at Roonatellin, after putting in that particularly terrible four-year stint in a profoundly troubled district of County Louth where he’d been sent by the Bishop because, as the Bishop’d told him, “I can trust you not to mix God and the Church in with the politics of the region.” Still, during the time he was there, in the lash of the terrorists’ narrow-eyed hatred, two of his older parishioners had been kneed and three of the younger ones—mere youths—murdered. “You’re overdue some peace,” the Bishop had written at last, and sent him then to tend the flock of usual-seeming beings that was Roonatellin’s.
    He had never spoken, nor ever would he, except in the broadest way, of his days in County Louth.But now, to Enda, he said, “The first summer I was here, I don’t know if you remember, I wasn’t in good health—”
    “Of course I remember, Father. It was an ulcer wasn’t it you had? Dr. Jason let it out that you did to Huey Slieve. Huey had one too, and you know Huey, he blathered it abroad faster then any decent woman would have.”
    The irony: himself and Huey Slieve coupled by ulcers…. “I was tired out, too. I don’t mean to go into it”—certain he mustn’t—“but I mention it because I’ve always thought I was cured more by the heights of Leegans Head than by Desmond Jason’s doctoring.”
    She gave him a conspirator’s grin and lapsed into brogue: “Him was a bad ’un. And us at his mercy…. Dr. Mansfield, now, he’s of a whole other cut.”
    “Indeed. But,” he peered at his watch, “we’ve gotten off your telling.”
    “Ah. I’ll go on…. Kevin and myself, we started down into Roonah Valley, not knowing its name then of course, and we got about halfway down the mountain—just below that knob, you know, that sticks up over Keogh’s land—when the path we were on crossed another that was a bit wider and more travelled-looking, and Kevin said it’d likely be the better one for us, so we took it. We rounded the road-bed by the stream, just as you do today,only then it wasn’t the road that it is now, only a well-earthed cart-track, and there before us, set back from the track, well, there was— this !” She trilled out the word emotionally at the same time she flung open her arms to the four walls of her home. “Forty-eight years ago last August!”
    “Jubilation!”
    She laughed. “Oh, Father, such as it was!” She sat straighter, terribly intense, remembering: “A more sorrowful ruin of a place you can’t imagine, the thatch rotted and caved in onto the floor in places, not a pane left to a window, raspberry bushes so snarled over the yard-wall you’d have the skin taken off you if you tried to get through them. I can still see us, the way we just stood by the wall looking at the place, our tongues in our pockets for the woe of it. Still, though, there was something about it that called to