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“I’ll write. No point talking by phone until we know anything. You know what the Irish in England are like. If Rian is there, then word will get back to us soon enough. Maybe he’ll turn up at Sean’s, who knows. In the meantime, me and Fearghal been talking and thinking what to do. We can’t stay here. Noel’s not ready to leave but I think Fearghal might be.”
“But you wouldn’t leave now, would you? Not until Rian turns up? I spoke to PJ about it a while back and I don’t think there’s a place for you here at the ranch, but I was thinking we could get our own place in Livingston or maybe Bozeman. I have a little saved but if I use it to go back, then that’s cleared out.”
“Go back where?”
“There! To help search for Rian.”
“Mac, no. There’d be no point in that at all. I can tell you that the one thing we do not need is another body in the house. I’d bet my life Rian’s in England and that’s what most people here think.”
“Well,” Mac said. “I still don’t think it’s the right time to come to Montana. Stay a little longer until he turns up.”
“Oh, but we wouldn’t go to Montana. I’ve had my fill of cows and horses, thank you very much. If we go for it, we’re going to New York. We have a good lead on something. Are you doing well there, Macdara? Would you want to try New York with us?”
New York, Mac thought, stunned. He would not have been more surprised if Barry had said Taiwan.
“New York,” Mac said finally. “But what’s in New York?”
Barry laughed. “New York is in New York. Aren’t you curious?”
Mac was silent, thinking.
“We’ve looked everywhere,” Barry went on. “Cathal is beside himself but what can be done? Rian’s clever. He might be the cleverest of us.”
He’s thirteen, Mac wanted to say, but he didn’t want to argue and anyway, who was he to judge? He was over four thousand miles away.
When they disconnected, the man at the desk at the Western Union asked him what language that was, he’d never heard anything like it.
“Irish,” Mac told him.
“How wonderful. I didn’t know they had their own language.”
MAYBE IF MAC HAD SEEN Rian recently he wouldn’t feel quite so worried. For almost four years he’d worked to keep thoughts of home at bay in case homesickness overwhelmed him, but now the question of where Rian could be was with him when he woke up and stayed with him all day, sitting right there in the front hall of his mind. He pictured him asleep on park benches, on riverbanks. He pictured him standing in the rain, in the sun, bent against the wind. He imagined him asking for money on the street, searching the ground for coins. He spoke to him when he was alone, no one but cows to overhear. Where are you? he asked. And at night, when he was trying to fall asleep, he saw over and over again, as if watching a scene from a movie, Rian running alongside the car on the day he left. Why hadn’t he gone ahead and rented a room in town and sent for him, as he promised he would? I was about to, he told himself. He had just been thinking about it. He’d spent the past few years only thinking about the next day, the next week, the next storm, the next round of jobs, and he never took a step back to notice the curve of the earth and where they were headed.
Mac wished he knew what Liverpool and Manchester and London looked like. How could a boy who’d never so much as navigated the Irish bus system simply show up at an address he wouldn’t know how to find? But he’d ask, knowing Rian. He’d ask and ask until he figured it out. For all his instincts to fight he could be very charming when he wanted to be. In his mind, Mac told him to smile; to leave small injustices aside; to be safe and avoid rough people; to be wise and keep to himself and chip away day by day as Mac had done. It had been a long time since he prayed in any sort of formal way—even at Mass his mind drifted off and he found himself surprised after forty minutes to notice people lining up for Communion—but he prayed.
RIAN DID NOT TURN UP at Sean’s. Two months went by and then six. Cathal asked far and wide for anyone who had people in England to report back if he was sighted anywhere, but no reports came. Martin suggested maybe he’d stayed in Ireland. Maybe he went to Wales. Or maybe he was in England but was avoiding other Irish. To Mac, that seemed worse. Who’d help him? One evening at dinner Jenny asked aren’t there a lot of Irish going to Australia lately, and everyone just looked at her.
In the meantime, Barry, Fearghal, and then a month later, Sean, landed in New York. Mac had doubted it would actually happen, and then next thing, it had. From faraway Montana, they made it look easy. They hadn’t labored over their decision the way Mac had. The women of the village hadn’t taken up a collection for them. Someone from home connected them to an apartment in the Bronx, on a road called Gun Hill, and all three got jobs at a meatpackers in upper Manhattan. The airport was pure mad, they said. The journey from the airport to their new home even madder. There were loads of other Irish there, they told Mac. They could see who was going out in the evenings by just looking out their window at the street below, and then you could whistle or shout for them to wait up. An Irish couple in their building had a baby and since they couldn’t go home for the baptism the neighbors made a little party for them on the second floor, where all four apartments were Irish and everyone left their doors open for guests to pass in and out.
There were dances for Irish on Friday and Saturday nights all around the Bronx and Queens if you wanted to go that far. They said it so expertly, that Queens was a pain in the ass but if the girls traveled, then so did they. On New Year’s Eve there was a party at one of these dance halls and they’d met loads of people from all over Ireland, and girls, too, in little hats that said 1968. They’d taken photos and said once they developed they’d send one to Mac. Sean had cooled it with the drinking. In England it was really just a problem of having nowhere to go. Now that he was in America he was addicted to little fruit pies instead. They were so cheap, and they were sold in handy cellophane wrappers at every register.
“Sean’s fat now, wait till you see him,” Barry reported in a phone call. In the background, Sean said something, Fearghal and Barry laughed, and Mac felt a chill cover him, a total stillness, thinking about them together. He had a mug of tea in his hand and he placed it on the table. Everything in the room that had become so familiar to him over the years suddenly seemed jarringly foreign. Jenny’s pitcher of flowers, the red-and-white-checkered quilt, the stack of National Geographics. What was he pretending at?
The meatpackers’ jobs were hard work but good work in that pay was steady. A few of the older guys said if they could get on construction and eventually get into the laborers’ union then they’d be set, so that’s what they were hoping to do. They couldn’t all leave the meatpackers at once, so Sean would start shaping for day labor and once he got a book he’d bring the others on.
“What about you?” Sean asked. It was late evening in Montana, two hours later in New York. Long distance charges were lowest after 9 p.m. Sean picked up this time, Fearghal and Barry having gone out. Barry had a girlfriend, Sean said. In fact he had several girlfriends and he and Fearghal were waiting for the day when he ran into one when he was with another. As always, Mac was in the Lees’ living room, perched on the arm of the sofa. When the telephone bill came at the end of the month, Jenny would make a small red dot next to each call to New York and Macdara would leave the money under the bowl on the counter.
“Are you still happy with your horses there?”
“Happy enough,” Mac said, but he knew he didn’t sound convincing. He felt impatient with his daily routine lately. Any time he found himself alone he wondered what his brothers were doing.
A SHORT TIME LATER, IVOR asked Mac nearly the same but in his own way. “What’s with you lately?”
They had a big job at a stable near Three Forks and since the forecast promised bad weather, they were staying overnight.
“You’re not yourself since you fell off that bike.”
I didn’t fall, Mac thought to himself. More like I got launched. After his accident, and while Mac was still concussed, Bill Cunningham went out with a group in search of the bear and one of them had gotten her. He invited Mac over to the man’s house when the head was mounted, but Mac declined. She hadn’t done a single thing to him except looked.
