Chapter 10 The Letters in the Drawer

It was Niamh who found the letters. She was cleaning the drawer where Oona had kept the account books, the one under the range that held the old knife and a length of string and a pencil stub that had been sharpened so many times it was no longer a pencil but a memory of one, and at the back of the drawer, behind the account books and under a fold of brown paper, there was a bundle of letters tied with a ribbon the colour of the harbour on a grey morning. She brought them to the table. She set them on the boards at her end, in the light from the window, and she untied the ribbon and spread the letters out along the grain the way one spreads cards, edge to edge, and the ink was faded to the colour of rain on stone, and the paper was thin and dry and smelled of the drawer, which smelled of the range, which smelled of the kitchen, which smelled of the house, and Niamh read them one by one, starting with the earliest, which was dated the year Oona's husband had died. They were not love letters. They were not the kind of letters that survive in bundles under brown paper. They were the letters that Oona had written to herself in the years after the drowning, when the house was quiet and the table was long and the boy was small, and she had no one to talk to about the things that mattered, which were the things that did not matter to anyone but herself, and which she put on paper because paper was the only thing in the house that would listen without answering back. The first letter was about the table. It described the morning it arrived, the carriers walking it through the scullery door, the warmth of the top plank under her palm, the knot in the second board that looked like a closed eye. It described the evening she set it for two, the blue cups, the lamp, the way the light pooled on the wood. It described her husband's remark about the length of table for two people, and her answer, and the way the answer had come true. It was written in a hand that was steady and clear, and it read like a report from someone who has decided to observe her own life as though it were happening to someone else. The second letter was about the drowning. It was shorter than the first, and it was written in a hand that shook, and it did not describe the night or the boats or the men on the pier. It described the morning after, when the two men came up the yard with their caps in their hands, and Oona was at the table oiling it, and she did not stop. It described the smell of linseed and turpentine, and the boy sleeping in his crib, and the blue cups on the shelf above the range. It ended with a sentence that Niamh read twice: "The table did not ask me how I was. It was the only thing in the room that did not ask, and for that I was grateful." The third letter was about Callum's leaving. It described the day he went, the canvas bag, the fare she pressed into his pocket and he handed back, the words at the door. It described the letters that came on Tuesdays, then thinner, then in the rhythm of his work. It described the evening she set his place, the blue cup and the chair pulled out, and the food going cold. It was written in the same steady hand as the first, and it had the quality of a map — the writer knew where she was going and she knew what she would find when she got there, and the knowledge did not make the journey easier but it made it clearer, and clarity, in the kitchen of Gort, was a kind of grace. The fourth letter was about the girl. It described the day Callum came up the yard with the girl in the coat the colour of the harbour, and the girl stopped at the closed-eye knot and touched the wood and said the thing about the grandmother's table. It described the engagement evening, the leaves going in for the first time, the lamp between them, the stories Oona told. It ended with the line: "She touched the wood the way I touch it, without thinking, and I knew then that the table had chosen her, which is the only way the table chooses anyone, by letting them put their hand on it without making them feel they should ask permission." The fifth letter was about Niamh. It was the longest of the letters, and it was written in a hand that was slow and careful, and it described the morning Niamh was born, the midwife, the house washed and aired, the knife cutting the mark under the leaf. It described the girl growing at the table, turning the salt pot over in her hands, studying the grain at the closed-eye knot. It described the leaving of the girl's mother, the suitcase on the boards, the front door, the taxi at the gate. And it ended with a line that Niamh read three times, and then folded the letter back into its envelope and sat for a long while with her hands flat on the wood, and the line was this: "She will keep the table because she is the table's kind of person, which is the kind that does not need to be told what things are worth because she already knows, and the knowing is in her hands, and the hands are in the wood, and the wood is in the house, and the house is in her, and that is the whole of it." Niamh tied the letters back into their bundle and put them in the drawer and closed the drawer, and she did not tell Eamon about them. Not yet. She was not ready to share her grandmother's private words with her son, because the letters were not for sharing, they were for keeping, and the keeping of a thing is a different act from the telling of it, and the difference matters when the thing is a person's unguarded self, written in a hand that shook or did not shake, on paper that smelled of the drawer and the range and the kitchen and the house. But she thought about the letters every day after that, and she thought about them at the table, with her hands on the wood, and the words of the letters ran in her mind the way the grain ran in the boards, from one end to the other, unhurried, patient, finding their own way, and she understood, in a way she had not understood before, that the table was not only the marks and the notches and the letters in the end grain. The table was also the drawer under the range, and the account books, and the old knife, and the ribbon the colour of the harbour, and the bundle of letters tied with it, and the words on the paper that the paper held even when the hands that wrote them were gone, and that was a different kind of count, a count that was kept not in wood but in ink, and the ink was in the paper, and the paper was in the drawer, and the drawer was in the house, and the house was in the family, and the family was in the table, and the table was in the house, and the circle closed on itself the way the grain closed around the knot, smoothly and without argument, because the wood had no arguments, only the facts of its own growth, which were the facts of the family, which were the facts of the table, which were the facts of the house, which were the facts of the life that had been lived in it, which was the whole of it, and the whole was enough. In the spring, when the suppers were well-established and the roof was dry and the house was sound, Niamh took the letters out of the drawer and brought them to the table and said to Eamon, "There's something you should read." He read them at his end of the table, with the lamp between them and the grain running to the sea at the far board, and he read them slowly, because they were not the kind of letters you read quickly, and when he was done he sat for a long while with his hands flat on the wood and the letters spread out before him, and he said, "She wrote all of this." "She wrote all of it. And she kept it in the drawer with the account books, and she never showed it to anyone." "Why not?" "Because it was hers. Because some things are kept, not told." He looked at the letters. He looked at his mother across the boards. "You kept them for a year before you showed me." "I did." "Why?" "Because I was doing what she did. Keeping it." He nodded. He understood that. He understood the keeping of a thing in the way the house had taught him, which was not as a hiding but as a holding, and the holding was the thing the table did, and the drawer did, and the house did, and the family did, and the whole of it was a single act of attention, paid in wood and ink and paper and the slow darkening of the boards under the constant press of hands, and the act was the count, and the count was the family, and the family was the table, and the table was the house, and the house was the letters in the drawer, and the letters were the words that Oona had written to herself in the years after the drowning, when the house was quiet and the table was long and the boy was small, and she had no one to talk to, and the paper was the only thing that would listen.