Chapter 2 The Long Way Back

Callum grew up in the kitchen of Gort the way the table grew into its grain: slowly, and in the company of the things that stayed. He learned his letters at the boards before he was old enough for school, tracing them in the flour Oona dusted out for the bread, and he learned to read his mother's moods from the direction of her hand with the rag — the long flat strokes of an easy day, the short impatient wipes of a hard one. He knew the table before he knew the house, the way any child comes to know a landmark: because it did not move, and because the world did. He was a restless boy. Oona saw it early, the way his eye went to the scullery window when the boats came in, the way his knees would not stay still beneath a silent table after the age of ten. She did not try to hold him. Her own mother had tried to hold her, and the failure of that attempt had become Oona's whole life — the room they had planned for her in that other house was still waiting in her mother's telling of it — and it taught her to recognise the shape of a leaving heart. Callum left in his nineteenth year, in the dry August of a long summer, with a canvas bag and the fare his mother pressed into his pocket three times and handed back to her twice. "You'll write," she said at the door, which was not a question. "I'll write," he said, and he did, more faithfully than either of them had expected. The letters came on Tuesdays at first, then thinner, then in the rhythm of the work that held him — the warehouses along the city quay, a room in a boarding house shared with three other men, a girl who worked the till in a stationer's on the far side of the river and could not believe he came from a place with one street and a table nine strides long. Oona read the letters at her end of the table and answered them on the same boards, the reply laid flat under the lamp while the ink dried. When the letters thinned to one a month she set his place anyway, on the odd Sundays, a blue cup and a chair pulled out from the long side, and she left it there until the evening was over and the food had gone cold. It was a small ceremony, never spoken of, and it kept the shape of a family that no longer had any other shape. She knew about the girl long before the girl was mentioned, the way she knew about most things at the table, from what was set down and what was left off. Then in the spring a letter came that was different: it did not end with the weather or the price of bread but with one line written smaller than the rest, that he was coming home for a fortnight and he was bringing someone with him, and would his mother set a place for two. Oona read that letter twice, standing at the table, and then she did a thing she had not done since the year of the drowning: she lifted down the second blue cup, the chipped one, from the shelf above the range, and she washed it, and she set it out beside its pair, rim to rim, at her end of the table under the lamp. They came up the yard on a day of torn cloud, Callum thinner than she remembered and cheerful in a way he had never quite been as a boy — the cheerfulness of a man who has made his own decisions for long enough to feel the fit of them — and the girl beside him, in a coat the colour of the harbour on a grey morning, stopped in the kitchen doorway the way people stopped at thresholds before entering a room, and she looked at the long table and said, "Oh." It was a small word. Oona heard in it the same measuring her husband had done thirty years before, and she recognised with a private start that she had been dreading this measurement for a decade, without once admitting that she dreaded it. But the girl walked past the head of the table to the closed-eye knot, and put her hand flat on it, and said, "My grandmother had a table like this. She kept the oak so you could smell the forest on it." And she turned to Oona and said, "If we're to sit at it, I'd rather sit at the side, where I can see both ends." Oona looked at the girl for a long moment. Then she said, "You can sit where it suits you." Which was as close as she came, that spring, to saying she was glad. The engagement was made good at the table, on the last evening of the fortnight, and it was the first time in all the years at Gort that the leaves went in. Oona had never extended the table — her husband had died before the family grew to its length, and after him there had never been enough mouths to justify the ceremony — and she had to fetch the two spare leaves from under the eaves, dusty and smelling of dry wood, and fit them into the runners, and Callum held the boards level while his mother worked the pegs in with her knuckles. When it stood at its full length, seven strides from end to end, the girl ran her hand along the seam and laughed. "A table that can grow," she said. "There's something kind in it." They ate that night with the lamp between them and the kitchen dark around the circle of light, and Oona told stories at last that she had kept to herself for thirty years: the carpenter's remark about a table keeping you company, the scorched ring and how it came about, the boy in the flour letters who would not keep his knees still. They were good stories, told flat, and the girl laughed where the stories were funny and did not look away where they were not. Callum's hand lay in hers along the board, and once, when he reached across to take the salt, Oona saw him touch the wood the way he had touched it as a child, without thinking, the fingers finding the grain of their own accord. That night the leaves stayed in. Oona thought, standing at the scullery door before bed with the lamp out behind her, that the table had been built to this very size and had waited patiently through a marriage, a drowning, an exile, and a return to see it. She had always told herself the table was furniture. It was something else, and she had known it from the first day, but she had not wanted to say so in front of it. The wedding was that June, in the church at Carra, and the breakfast after it was the first full seating the table had ever known. Oona counted the chairs — six, with the two extra borrowed from the parish hall and the bench brought in from the yard — and watched her son and his wife sit down together at the long side, on the far side of the closed-eye knot, where they could see both ends of the family they were beginning.