Limerick, Ireland

September 4, 1851 

Hopewell, a majestic three-mast sailing vessel, was moored peacefully along the quay on the River Shannon. More than one of the passengers waiting to board prayed the ship’s name would prove prophetic. For if hope was ever needed, it was then and there.

Ann McNamara and her 17-year-old son, Francis, stood away from the rest of the crowd. An old trunk waiting beside her held the last of her belongings. The canvas bag slung over Francis’s shoulder contained a change of clothes, a few dried fish, smoked vegetables, and a book his mother had just given him.

While most of those on the quay were focused on the Hopewell and the activities of its crew as they prepared for departure, Ann’s attention was on her son. She studied his face, aware it would be the last time she would ever see it. Although Francis had matured and grown so much in the past year, he was still just a child in her mind. She wondered how tall he would have grown if food had been plentiful.

Normally, Ann avoided that kind of pointless speculation, but not on this day. She and her family had suffered terribly during the famine. Wishing or making-believe it did not happen was more than unproductive; it was dangerous. She had to conserve her energies to keep herself and her family alive.

So, Ann focused on what was in front of her, considering how things could be improved moving forward. Unfortunately, this future orientation had its own drawbacks, and there on the quay they were blatantly obvious.

She lamented that she would never know Francis in his adulthood. Nor would she meet the person Francis would marry or know her own grandchildren. This realization broke Ann’s already heavily scarred heart.

As for Francis, he was desperately trying to take in every sight, smell, and sound around him. Behind a furrowed brow was a mind deeply concentrating on trying to memorize it all. He did not want the place of his birth to become foreign to him. He feared that each new experience in America would displace a memory of Ireland until, eventually, Ireland would be out of him altogether and gone with it, his lineage, his understanding of the world, and his identity.

Lost in those thoughts, Francis turned to his mother and saw the anguish on her face. He felt ashamed at selfishly entertaining his own fears and anxieties while ignoring those of his heartbroken mother.

He spoke to his mother in the Hibernian English common in the west of Ireland; the pace of his speech, the fluctuating intonation, the stress he placed on some consonants and de-emphasis of others all had their roots in the ancient Irish language and shaped his delivery of English words. He spoke as if softly singing a song and with an upward lilt that seemed to pose everything in the form of a question.

“Don’t worry, Ma. Once I find work in America, I’ll send everything I can along to you.”

He reminded her, “Once you get to Longford, check in with the post office. I’ll send my letters and banknotes there. With a little luck, I’ll earn enough to return to this very spot in no time at all, with Mathew and Jamie under each arm,” Francis added, referring to his older brothers already in America. “It will be like old times, except we will have you living in a fine house with not a worry in the world.”

Francis was offering false hope, and they both knew it. No one returned to Ireland once they left, but Francis felt false hope was better than no hope at all, and Ann loved that her son at least tried.

The last boarding call caught them by surprise. There was too much to say and too little time to say it. Ann grabbed Francis and hugged him tightly. Gently, Francis freed himself and kissed his mother on the forehead, for he was now head and shoulders taller than she.

With that, he was out of her reach forever. She watched him walking toward the ship, at first with a defeated posture, his head hanging low, his shoulders slumped. With each step, however, he consciously straightened himself to look more confident and purposeful. Whatever fate awaited him, Francis would face it standing tall. His father would have been proud.

Part of the young man was excited to board the Hopewell. He had seen ships like it from a distance during his time along the Shannon Estuary, though he was more familiar, close up at least, with the smaller and often crudely made boats used for river and coastal fishing.

Hopewell, in contrast, was made by craftsmen and designed for the mighty ocean; at least that is what Francis was staking his life on as he approached the gangway.

Craning his head up, Francis marveled at the height of the masts, which at that moment constituted the tallest things in Limerick. Even with the sails tightly furled to the yardarms, the rigging and associated equipment conveyed sophistication and speed. He admired the ship’s streamlined silhouette, which evoked images of the vessel gracefully gliding over the ocean and cutting through the fiercest waves.

His awe soon gave way, however, once he was able to inspect the ship more closely. Weathering from repeated trans-Atlantic crossings had chipped the black paint on the hull. The ship’s decking had deep cracks that housed small puddles of saltwater. Dry rot blemished the ship’s rail, and the smell of mold emanated from deep within the ship’s innards.

As he was to learn later, the vessel owners had just relented to the captain’s pleas for a complete overhaul at the end of this voyage, as even the ship’s steering was becoming sluggish with wear. “The ship will be worthless to you if we run aground in some godforsaken place,” was the cornerstone of the captain’s argument.

More disconcerting to Francis than the appearance of the ship, now that he was aboard, was its mass. It was much smaller than he had imagined. He walked the ship's full length, bow to stern, in less than sixty paces. And covering the beam, the widest part of the deck, took less than half that. What had appeared so large from the safety of the quay now looked as if a single ocean swell could swallow it up.

But Francis or anyone else on board had no time for second thoughts. The gangway had been drawn up and the ropes pulled back from the cleats on the quay.

Ann’s eyes began to fill with tears; she had witnessed her son take his last steps on Ireland’s shores. The line of a thousand generations had just been broken. She stared at Francis’s somber face as the ship slowly began to drift away from the quay, the Union Jack unfurling at the back of the ship, hinting at the breeze that would eventually, coupled with the outgoing tide, propel the ship to sea.

Desperate to give her son some assurance, Ann shouted, “You’ll never be alone, Francis. I will pray for you constantly, and God will protect you!” But Francis was already too far away to hear.

Inside the harbor, the ship moved slowly as if to taunt Ann, keeping her son close enough to see but too far away to hear or hug.

She wished they had talked more during their last hour together in their gandelow, an ancient type of small fishing vessel, whose seaworthiness was even more questionable than that of the Hopewell. They had rowed it down the River Fergus to the Shannon and then on to Limerick from their home in the Village of Clare, or Castleclare as some called it.

Ann had been too heartbroken to talk much, while Francis rowed distractedly, constantly staring downriver as if pursued by a ghost.

Ann knew Francis would have difficulty in the United States, but his chances of survival were better there than in Ireland. The letters home from her older boys, Mathew and Jamie, indicated they were eating regularly and getting by, but not much more than that.

“Life’s trials and tribulations,” Jamie wrote, “did not stop on Ireland’s shores. Instead, just the accent of the person kicking your ass changed.”

There were no tales of streets of gold. But Ann did see hints of hope in her older boys’ letters. And hope could not be found anymore in Ireland, so Francis would gain more by leaving.

Francis did not have to be told life was, and would continue to be, harsh. His entire existence had been nothing but, and even the difficulties of his voyage to the New World were clear to him. The price of his ticket included a daily ration of dried bread, called sea biscuit, and rain-barrel water. Luxuries of broth and salted meats would require more cash, cash he did not have. So, once the food he carried with him for a day or two was gone, Francis would have to do without or improvise. Scarcity skills, Francis assured himself, he had mastered well in recent years.

Once enough wind was in her sails, the Hopewell turned completely away from the quay, leaving only the back of the ship for Ann to see—her son’s face now out of sight forevermore.

She continued to eye the stern as her thoughts shifted from her son’s fate to her own. Soon she would be heading to the very center of Ireland, County Longford. A family friend was scheduled to pick her up at the corner outside the quay. He would make room for Ann among the delivery items in his donkey-drawn cart.

For the first time in her life, Ann would be leaving her home in the west of Ireland. She had arranged to take up residence with her daughter, Patricia—whom everyone called Patsy—and Patsy’s husband, a young Protestant named Albert Cummings.

Albert had worked a few years in Limerick at his relatives’ import and export business. It was a mystery to the McNamaras what type of goods the Cummings dealt in. Last fall, Albert had inherited a barley farm, a large one Ann was told, in northwest Longford.

Albert asked for Patsy’s hand so she could accompany him. He had assured Ann that her daughter would be provided for, as would the anticipated grandchildren. They would never know want the way Ann and her children had.

Was that a slight at my husband? Ann wondered, but she checked herself. Albert seemed like a good man.

Albert added that he would never raise a hand to Patsy, knowing Patsy would just as quickly detach that hand and hang it on the mantel. Ann knew this to be true, as Patsy could be fierce—a trait she came by honestly. All the children had one trait or another from her husband, an inheritance that could be a blessing or a curse, depending on the circumstances.

Once the Hopewell was completely out of sight, Ann sat down for the first time since arriving at the quay earlier that morning. Perching on her battered trunk, she faced the street corner, monitoring it for the appearance of her ride to Longford. She feared she would be treated like an intruder in Albert and Patsy’s home or, even worse, as a burden, a fear stemming from anticipated rejection not by her son-in-law but by her own daughter.

While all of Ann’s children could be harsh at times, understandably, given the life they had known, Patsy could be the harshest of them all. Perhaps because she was the most sensitive of the lot, she had found taking on the toughest façade necessary. Ann understood why her daughter acted so.

Her true nature showed when Patsy felt she was safe and no threats were about. Then she could be funny and kind. But more often than not, Patsy needed to be on guard. They all did. And because she was a pretty young woman, she was judged more harshly for it.

The oldest and only daughter to survive infancy, Patsy grew up in a house full of extraordinarily rambunctious boys. She compensated by taking charge and ordering her brothers around. She could not physically dominate the boys, but she could cut them to the quick with her calculated words.

Patsy’s ferocity stood in stark contrast to her sweet and diminutive appearance. Her father loved that contradiction, and she was, by far, his favorite. The boys could not strike back at their oppressive sister physically, fearing their father’s wrath. But they could speak their own minds, as words were always permissible in the McNamara house, as long as they were witty.

Not as biting in their rhetoric as Patsy, the boys took their shots, referring to their sister as the “tyrant” and “she-devil.” Of all the things they could have complained about in regard to their sister’s domination, they focused most on Patsy’s intimidating quality of keeping the neighboring girls away—girls that the boys had an interest in.

“Please,” Patsy would counter, “it’s the heinous, ugly mugs of yours that drive the Colleens away!”

That kind of statement from Patsy required Ann to do damage control for her boys. Ann would take pains to assure each boy separately of their handsomeness and future value to womankind. A man without a reasonable degree of confidence was a menace, Ann knew. Without confidence, men may strike inwardly or outwardly, but they will strike somewhere. Ann did not want that for her sons.

In her conversations with the boys, Ann urged them to be more sympathetic and inclusive of their only sister, but that was wasted breath.

What was not wasted on any of them, sibling rivalries aside, was that their status as a family trumped all else. Patsy would defend her brothers tooth and nail against anyone other than herself. In turn, the boys would respond to any threat that endangered their sister. Surely, she was a tyrant—but she was their tyrant.

As Ann waited on the quay, she thought back to years past, when she would pray for an end to her children’s bickering. Now that she had got her wish, she regretted it deeply. The quiet on the quay as she waited and the loneliness it represented was more of a torture than the sibling ruckus had ever been.

Thinking back, Ann realized that children fighting is simply part of life, a byproduct of energy and striving. She also knew that fighting would help the children learn how to resolve disputes and navigate relationships outside the home. The sibling tension and dynamics also, at times, brought humor.

On one occasion, when the children were little, Ann asked Patsy to mind her younger brothers while Ann attended to the privy, or the jacks as she called it.  Ann reminded Patsy she needed to remain vigilant, as the boys were prone to wander off and sometimes “didn’t have the sense that God gave them.”

Patsy took her charge seriously and with a rope tied the boys together through loops in their pants that were otherwise used for twine belts and suspenders. She then tied the rope to the halter of the family’s aging, slow-moving cow.

Proud of her ingenious solution, Patsy took Ann to see it, only to find the cow meandering in the pasture, dragging three pairs of empty pants behind. The bottomless boys were in the distance, laughing and running as fast as their little legs would take them. The thought of it could still make Ann laugh years later.

With still no sign of her ride in sight, Ann tried to get more comfortable sitting on her trunk, there on the quay, and decided to briefly rest her eyes. Doing so, she instinctively followed her nighttime ritual of three Hail Marys, three Our Fathers, and a listing of each of her family members for God to watch over—as if he needed reminders.

Ann ended the ritual with a brief discussion with her husband. She found it easier to talk to him now that he was dead, gone over a year. She advised him of Francis’s departure and pleaded, “Protect all your boys; they still need you.”

Ann figured she would soon be able to watch over Patsy herself, so her husband should concentrate on the boys. If he were to do as asked, he would have to spread his attention from heaven far and wide.

The eldest, Mathew, was in Philadelphia. The stable and logical one, Mathew had been Ann’s rock. Then there was James, whom everyone called Jamie. He was in New York City. The devilish prankster, Jamie served the family by distracting them from their woes.

These two had left Ireland together a few years before, but, to their parents’ chagrin, parted ways in the New World. Their thinking, specifically Mathew’s, was that they would double their odds of finding good fortune if they separated. Their father, upon hearing this news, thought the boys boneheaded. Never divide already limited forces! Had he not taught them that?

Ann reacted with dread. The family was splintered enough—why would they add to it? She hated the thought that she would never see the boys again, but them not seeing each other either was dreadful.

The truth was that even if the boys doubled their odds of success by separating, their chance of good fortune remained abysmally small. Mathew and Jamie were young and inexperienced. They had no money, no particularly marketable skills, and there was no one looking out for them.

But the United States represented hope, which was more than Ireland could afford. While Ann had once time planned to keep the rest of the family intact in Ireland, the death of her youngest child—her baby, Patrick—and that of her husband showed her otherwise.

Even if it cost her everything she owned, and it would, Ann decided it would be better for Francis, her sole remaining son, to try his luck outside Ireland. She surrendered the lease on the small farm in County Clare that had been the family home for a generation, sold all the fishing equipment the family had subsisted on since the famine and auctioned off the last of her home furnishings, including a cradle made by her father.  In the process, she gave up her own independence, something that at one time she had valued more than anything else, just to give her son a chance.

There was one thing, however, Ann refused to sell, although she was not entirely sure why. It was her husband’s favorite book, a book on Irish history that mentioned the McNamara clan by name. The book, she decided, should go with Francis. It would be his sole physical connection to Ireland, aside from his own flesh and blood.

At first, Francis thought the gift impractical and wished the memento had been a clover, a pebble, or something else easier to transport. But on the long, lonely nights of his voyage to the New World, and times alone afterward, Francis found solace in the book and read it over and over. Ann was a wise and intuitive woman.

With her wait on the quay entering its second hour, Ann’s drowsy thoughts moved on to her own youth, her courtship with her husband, and the excitement of being a young mother. She had not thought about her own appearance in a long time. She had to remind herself that she was once considered a beautiful young lady, with flowing raven hair, sparkling green eyes, and alabaster skin. Now, in such desperate times, Ann thought such things were vain and shallow. But there had been a time when they were not.

Since grey had overtaken her hair, sadness dulled her eyes, and worry ruddied her skin, Ann was glad her mirror was one of the first things she sold for Francis’s trip. She would only groan whenever she passed it anyway. To console herself, Ann rationalized that she gave up her beauty so her children could have it, and indeed they all got the attractive gene.

More importantly, the children got from Ann unconditional love, support, and a model for dealing with adversity. Ann was intelligent, compassionate, and even-tempered. Those traits did not diminish over time. They grew in proportion to her husband’s inner decline and loss of resiliency.

Stephen Francis McNamara had been Ann’s one and only love. But the thought of him as she sat on the quay evoked mixed feelings. The early years had been wonderful. He was handsome and charming, and that smile could melt her heart no matter how angry she was at him. But that smile was seen less and less often, and even when it did appear in later years, it would vanish just as quickly as it would form.

He went by the nickname Seas, with most assuming it was a play on his middle name in Gaelic—Proinséas —which is Anglicized as Francis. Instead, the moniker came from an event in his childhood.

As barely more than a toddler, he had fashioned a makeshift raft and, while his mother was distracted, took to the Fergus— imagining himself a sailor like his father. He quickly was caught up in the current and pushed toward the open sea.  Frantic, his mother summoned the entire village for the rescue effort, and the villagers managed to return the unfazed youngster home safely. To ensure he would never live the incident down, however, the villagers took to calling him Seas, and the name stuck.

As an adult, Seas was taller than most, boasting three inches or so of height over the average five-foot, five-inch Irishman of the time. He had a confident air about him, although that confidence in himself and the world around him would eventually erode.

When Ann first laid eyes on him in his early teenage years, Seas was a towhead. As he matured, his wavy hair turned to ash. He had bright blue eyes and rosy cheeks.

Over the course of their marriage, Ann had noticed that Seas went from discussing his fears and problems with her to find solutions, to just ranting about his frustrations. He seemed caught in an echo chamber; his articulation of his woes only magnified them and drowned out any thoughts about how to cope.

Life could be unfair and arbitrary, that was true, but fighting against that fact was pushing Seas toward madness. His once mighty clan had fallen on tough times, and Seas was left on the outside looking in on financial and political dealings in his home county of Clare.

Ann was sympathetic. Things were difficult for Seas, and looking on the bright side was hard when you were poor and uninfluential. But Ann could not understand why Seas, like many others of his generation, compounded their problems by retreating to the bottle.

He drank poteen, or the devil’s spittle, as it was called, to numb himself. And he was successful in that regard, but he deadened himself to his blessings as much as his pain. Chief among those blessings was his family.

But whatever woes Seas and any other Irishman thought they had at the time would soon pale in comparison.

The “Lumper potato” was introduced to Ireland in the early 19th century. As the name implies, it was not much to look at, and it tasted like soap. What distinguished it was its nutritional and economic profile. The potato supplied all the required vitamins and minerals and could be grown cheaply and copiously. Manna from heaven for Ireland’s growing underclass. Seas and Ann grew it on the small farm they leased to supplement the fish and eels Seas caught in the nearby River Fergus.

The Lumper potato’s attributes were so great that in some places it was grown to the exclusion of all other crops. It became the staple for a sizable part of the population. But as quickly as the potato would prove itself a source of life in Ireland, it brought death.

In 1845, a microscopic pathogen, likely from Central or South America, reached Ireland. Spreading quickly, the pathogen tainted potatoes both in the fields and in the storehouses, making them unfit to eat. People weakened by hunger fell prey to deadly cholera and typhus.

While crop failures had occurred in Ireland before, this time was different. The blight was more widespread, lasted multiple years, and sparked a severe panic. Most people in Ireland, being poor, barely got by when the fields were plentiful. Now, with the potato failure and the export of other foodstuffs to England by the landed aristocracy, little was left, and people died in inconceivable numbers.

Between starvation, related disease, and forced emigration, the Irish population declined by forty percent in just a few years. The country’s Irish Catholics bore most of that loss.

Though they represented the overwhelming majority of the populace, nearly all were relegated to the lower rung of society. Systemic oppression and mismanagement by English overlords and the Catholics’ own self-inflicted wounds of resistance to change, overpopulation and alcoholism trapped them in poverty.

Seemingly oblivious to the plight of the poor in Ireland, British and landed interests in the country operated as if the famine did not exist. Hundreds of thousands of families were evicted because they could not pay their biannual gale, or rent, during the famine.

Some fought back against the evictions, often through secret societies. County Clare had the Terry Alts and the Ribbonmen, while other counties had the Molly Maguires.

The Ribbonmen would be resurrected decades later in New York City to fight against discrimination targeting Irish Catholics. The Molly Maguires, said to be named after a woman who froze to death along with her young children after being evicted in the famine, reemerged in Pennsylvania to protect exploited Irish coal miners.

The violent resistance of both groups in the United States, in the end, proved just as futile as it did in Ireland.

The famine led to masses of starving, homeless people roaming the cities and countryside alike. Their numbers and desperation overwhelmed and destabilized everything.

American abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass visited Ireland at the time on a European tour. He wrote that: “[t]he limits of a single letter are insufficient to allow anything like a faithful description of those painful exhibitions of human misery, which meet the eye of a stranger almost at every step. I spent nearly six weeks in Dublin, and the scenes I there witnessed were such as to make me blush and hang my head to think myself a man.”

Unchecked inflation elevated the price of whatever foodstuffs were not affected by the famine. Rivers became overfished and wild game hunted out. Seas feared he could no longer keep the family alive with his fishing. He and Ann began discussing whether it would be better to go to a workhouse or to risk emigrating to another country.

The workhouse held little appeal. Disease and abuse were known to be rampant there. Besides, the family members would be separated by gender, and they would all eventually be thrown out as destitute as they went in.

At the same time, they didn’t have the money for the whole family to leave Ireland. The consensus Seas and Ann reached was that the older boys, Mathew and Jamie, should emigrate to the United States. That would reduce the number of hungry mouths to feed, and hopefully the boys could send money back once they established themselves in their new home. Seas would have to keep the rest of them going by drinking less and fishing more. To make the fishing successful, he would have to risk coastal and ocean excursions in his small boat designed for calmer river waters.

At first, Seas took to his enhanced obligations with vigor. But he soon found himself physically and mentally exhausted. In that weakened state, he returned to alcohol. After his first relapse, Seas was embarrassed. After the second, he became angry with himself. On the third, he blamed Ann and the family for depending on him. With the fourth, it was the world to blame.

What had been episodic anger and occasional violent outbursts for Seas became a steady state. Then one day, without a word, he just left.

Francis, although still a young teenager, picked up where his father had failed. He fished and laid eel traps day and night, going out in all weather conditions, often out into the ocean, along the rocky coastline, putting himself in great jeopardy.

One day Seas returned, sober and looking apologetic, although no verbal apology was offered.

Ann was cold to him and essentially ignored him, other than to shout that Francis was risking his very life while Seas had been nowhere to be found. Upon hearing this, Seas stormed out of the house but stayed in front of the family’s cottage. He waited there for hours until Francis came home, looking exhausted.

Shocked to see Seas, whom he had feared was dead, Francis stood dumbfounded. Seas said nothing; he just put his arm around Francis and nodded approvingly. Francis walked inside, but Seas did not follow.

Instead, he went to sleep outside, as he had been doing for weeks in fields in the surrounding area, sometimes drunk, more often not. The next morning, Francis walked outside groggily to prepare for the day’s fishing. “Can I help you with the fishing today?” Seas asked, with Ann watching and listening quietly from the cottage’s only window. It was the first time Seas had asked Francis’s permission to do anything. It was an acknowledgment of Francis as a provider and responsible person.

“Sure,” Francis replied, “but don’t get your hopes up too much. Like everything else in Ireland, the fish are all either dead or emigrated.”

Seas laughed. “Today will be a big haul, you’ll see.”

“If the gandelow doesn’t sink beneath us. It’s old as the hills and has as many holes in it as my trousers.”

Seas laughed yet again, this time like he used to in the old days, Ann, still watching, thought to herself.

“No worries,” Seas reassured his son. “Your grandfather was one of the most famous fishermen in all of Ireland. People say he would wave his hand and the fish would jump right into the boat, with smiles on their faces.”

Francis groaned. “I know, I’ve heard that story a time or two, but that ability to attract fish must not be hereditary. My gift is more in the area of repelling fish, and when I do corner them, I have to club them into submission—there are no smiles.”

“You know, I used to think Jamie was the funny one.” Seas laughed again. “But I am starting to think he can’t hold a candle to you.”

That laughter would be the last thing Ann would ever hear from her husband, as he and Francis headed away toward the river.

──────

Father and son arrived at the storage area off the water’s edge where they kept fishing gear and moored their small boat. They were startled to see members of the Toobin family, from upstream, in the act of stealing the McNamara netting and other equipment. There had been rumors for some time that the Toobins were poaching other people’s traps, stealing livestock, and taking tools that families depended on for survival. Francis had noticed the theft of some of his family’s belongings but didn’t expect something as brazen as this—taking complete fishing sets in the light of day and very near the McNamara home.

The Toobins and their ilk would not have dreamt of it, Seas thought, if all his boys were home. Nor would they have done it in days past, when the McNamaras were a powerful force in the county.

But things had changed, and now no one checked the Toobins’ temerity, and it emboldened them.

Seas calmly but sternly directed his son to go seek help from the neighbors, the O’Connors and the Keohanes.

“But Da!”

“Do it now!” Seas growled.

There was no question Seas was back in charge, in light of the physical threat posed by the Toobins. The 16-year-old Francis ran off as directed to get help.

Seas positioned himself between the mass of Toobins and his quickly disappearing son. He consciously stood on an incline in the path between two rising hills, hoping the terrain would help counter the Toobins’ superior numbers. Then, in effort to buy time and appeal to their humanity, Seas called out to the senior Toobin on the scene, Maurice.

“Maurice Toobin, ye know me and mine. If you take our fishing gear, we will starve. Ye don’t want that on your soul.”

There was no answer.

“God won’t forgive you, and the McNamaras never forget.” Seas warned, adding the old Gaelic adage, Ni raibh feall riamh nach fillfeadh--there was never a treachery that did not return.

The Toobins were unpersuaded. They set upon the sole McNamara from multiple directions.

Seas, now in his mid-forties and weakened by drink and hard luck, didn’t have the physical strength he once had. What he did have, however, was an endless store of rage that, for too long, he had taken out on himself and those he loved. Now he would focus that rage on just one of the Toobins. Seas could not fight them all, but he could fight one of them.

Unfortunately, that strategy too was doomed to failure.

Francis found him lying on the path with knife wounds in his back and stomach, his face partially crushed by Toobin boots. Maurice Toobin suffered a black eye and a swollen nose; otherwise, the Toobins got away with murder.

But that was a year ago, a lifetime in a famine-ravaged country. Now Francis, thinking of his father, was on the deck of the Hopewell as it sailed down the Shannon on its way to the open Atlantic, doubling back on the route Francis and his mother had taken earlier that morning to Limerick.

As the ship approached the junction of the Fergus River and the Shannon, Francis rose on his tiptoes and strained his eyes, looking for residual smoke upstream along the Fergus: smoke emanating from the Toobins’ boats and gear that Francis had set aflame before leaving his home for the last time.