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By Root 464 0

of this small town had fascinated him during his two weeks in residence. This evening he was wandering again through the wood, a little conservation area that nestled between the golf course and the river. This place, with a Gaelic name he couldn’t even begin to pronounce, was filled with trees, swamp and water, all overlooked by low hills. There were wooden benches, a bat sanctuary, leafy trails and scampering teenage would-be lovers, and it was the place his granny had talked of most. Before the days of conservation, wooden benches and a bat sanctuary, this was where she had been a girl full of romantic dreams for a bright future anywhere but in a small, depressed town in south Kerry. This was the place where she would lie on her back, count the stars and pray that some day she would cross them to reach her destiny. Even as a child, his granny had known she would not stay in the beautiful little town yet in some small way she would mourn it all her days.

“Caught between two lovers!” She’d laugh. “Ireland versus America.” Her smile would fade just a little. “Heart versus head.” There was nothing in Kenmare for his granny in the early 1930s. The war had scarred the whole country and there was little opportunity, especially for a woman who didn’t believe in marrying for the sake of it. Her mother had despaired of her but she was the apple of her father’s eye. Her five brothers treated her like the princess they felt she was destined to become. Her mother had found a man to take her but she’d stood firm, not willing to compromise in a time when compromise was the way of life.

Maybe her feisty nature had turned her mother against her, but it had ensured her doting father’s support and her brothers’ admiration. When her mother had tried to force her daughter’s hand, the men in her life had contrived her escape. Her father could have put his foot down, but he knew that, married or not, his daughter wanted more from life. She was desperate to taste the New World and he was desperate to give her all she wanted. Instinct told him his beloved girl belonged to another place, so he drove her to the boat and sobbed as he handed over the money he and his sons had worked for to secure her emancipation. He had held her close while the whistle blew insistently, willing them to part, then pushed the money into her hand. “It’s up to you now, girleen,” he’d said, his voice choked and eyes brimming. “We can’t help you when you’re gone. America is so far away.”

She wiped the tears from his eyes. “I’ll always be in here, Daddy.” She laid a hand on his chest so that he could hold it there. “You tell the boys that I won’t let you down.” She was crying because she knew she might not see him again.

They used to call the party that was held before a family member moved to the States the “American Wake”. Emigration was tantamount to death. Sam’s grandmother didn’t have an American wake and her mother never got to say goodbye to her. In hindsight her father might have admitted this was a mistake, as his wife was not the same after her only daughter had deserted her. The boys hadn’t made a fuss either: each one had packed a small token in her bag and kissed her goodbye on a day she thought she was accompanying her dad on a job. She’d only realized she was leaving when they were on the docks and he’d handed her a bag filled with her clothes and her brothers’ farewell gifts.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, mo chuisle.” And with that he turned and walked away, not looking back at the daughter he would never see again.

Sam’s granny had often talked to him about the boat journey to America with enough money to last her a week or two. She would speak of her fright that first night at sea, feeling desperately sick in the bowels of the ship, without a soul to comfort her. But then she’d tell him she need not have feared facing the New World alone because on the third day of the voyage she met the man she would marry. Together they would get off the boat and together they would forge a new life better than the one they had left behind.

When Sam was