As we walked, his gaze cut over to me, until eventually he waved a hand generally in my direction. “Your, uh—”
I glanced down to see that the strings that normally tied in a bow around my waist were hanging loosely at my sides. I gathered them together, tying them back in a crooked bow.
“They don’t really do anything,” I said. “I mean, my dress wasn’t in danger of falling off or anything like that.” Then I closed my eyes. Every single thing I said was the wrong thing. “Thank you, is what I meant to say.”
“It must have just come undone,” he said. “I would remember untying that bow.”
I glanced over at him, trying to gauge if he’d meant that to sound as flirty as it had sounded to me. If I’d thought being that intimate with him would make him easier to read…well, it hadn’t. If anything, he felt even more opaque. It was hard to believe he’d said some of the things he had to me in the car.
The graveyard was relatively small and unassuming, and when Eamonn led me right to a particular grave marker I wouldn’t have known there was anything special about it. Itwas a large, modern-looking gray slab, less adorned or ornate even than some of the other markers in the graveyard. But Eamonn stopped in front of it, and I read the inscription, the dates underneath.
Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death/Horseman pass by.He’d been born in 1865, and died in 1939, and I tried to do the quick math on that. Like seventy-five, to round up? That wasn’t bad. I’d take seventy-five.
“Had they but courage equal to desire,” I said, more to myself than to Eamonn, but I was surprised when I heard his low voice next to me.
“What could have made her peaceful with a mind,”he said,“That nobleness made simple as a fire.”
I glanced over at him. “What’s that poem called?”
“ ‘No Second Troy,’ ” he said, then shot me a look. “I thought you must be a big Yeats fan? If this was the one thing you wanted to do.”
“Ah,” I said, a little embarrassed to have to admit this now. “I think I’m more a big Cranberries fan? I don’t know if you’ve heard it, the song…”
He drew his hand down over his face, laughing a little. It felt good to see him laugh, even if it was minor and at my expense. “ ‘Yeats’ Grave,’ ” he said. “Yeah, I know it.”
I started to apologize, then bit it back just because I couldn’t say those words again, not even in a different context. “I hope that still makes it worth a three-hour drive.”
“Of course,” he said, rocking back on his heels, his hands in his pockets again. There was a very fine scratch on his forearmthat looked fresh. I had a sudden flash of the way I’d gripped him when he’d had his fingers inside of me, wondered if that scratch was mine.
I turned to look at the grave instead. “So why here?” I asked. “Was he from here?”
“Technically, he was born in Sandymount, south of Dublin. But I believe some grandfather or great-grandfather was the rector of this church, and his mother was from Sligo. He spent summer holidays here and thought of it as his spiritual home, or whatever you might call it. He loved the sea, the mountains. He wrote a lot about this area. He even wrote his last wishes to be buried right here, at this church, directly into a poem.”
“That’s kind of funny,” I said. “I guess that’s how you can do it, when you’re a poet.”
“There’s some debate whether it’s really even him buried here,” Eamonn said. “He died in France, and specifically said he wanted to be buried there first and then quietly moved here later, once all the fuss had died down. But there’s some question whether they got it right, and for all we know we’re standing in front of a collection of bones belonging to someone else, and not Yeats at all.”
“God, that’s…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. Morbid? A little sad? Amusing, to think that people like me make pilgrimages to places like this and don’t even know the ways they might not be what we think they are.
“At the end of the day,” I said, “it’s the symbolism of the whole thing, right? It’s less about the bones. We don’t need to exhume every grave to verify it’s really that person. It’s just aplace to visit and think about that person’s life and whatever they meant to you.”
“For example, how they inspired a song you like,” Eamonn said, a smile threatening at the corner of his mouth, breaking out when I couldn’t hold mine back, either.
Then his smile faded, and he tapped the toe of his boot against the grass, like he was trying to knock dirt off the bottom of his shoe. “I’m the one who should say sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let—you were clearly scared, or upset, or something. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of that. And the things I said…I got carried away. I’m sorry.”
Oh god. This was painful. The only thing worse than him not acceptingmyapology was him apologizing for it all himself. And I didn’t like the idea that the things he’d said had been him getting carried away. I wanted to think they were all solid and true, words I could keep and hold in my hands. I’d liked the things he said.
“Please,” I insisted. “It was all me. You didn’t take advantage of anything. I’m the one who practically jumped you, and then…”
Didn’t even finish what I’d started. But I didn’t want to saythatpart out loud. I couldn’t imagine anything more awkward.
“You’re in a foreign country,” he said. “You’re in a vulnerable position. I was supposed to be taking care of you, guiding you around. That’s on me.”
“Well, I’m older,” I said. “I should be more mature than you.”
I’d said it partly as a joke, to lighten the mood, but I could tell it was the wrong thing to say.
“You care about that a lot more than I do,” Eamonn said, his voice tight. “I’m a grown man. I can take responsibility for my choices.”
