His father was ever a man of few words. Even when Liam is on the other side of the world, with a new name and unfamiliar clothes, facing a committee of robed men who have come to sit in judgement of him, he will be able to recall the astonishing day that turned his father garrulous.
The morning had been a long one, Liam and his father out since dawn. A north-westerly breeze has been at them for hours, scrupulous in its self-appointed work of lifting the caps from their heads, in hurling a scree of water over them. Liam stands on what he would call a hillock and his father a drumlin or tulach, holding the end of the chain and the surveying pole in hands that are scarlet with cold.
He is scrawny, in short trousers and a handed-down jacket that has been mended and re-mended by his mother. Her patches, with their fretted edges, have to Liam the fascinating appearance of postage stamps. He likes to rub at the stitches, those marks of maternal patience and devotion, with the side of his thumb. He imagines, at night, when he catches sight of the jacket hanging on a peg, that it might take off through the darkness on a journey across oceans and mountains, borne along by his mother’s faceless, stateless stamps. Not that he would tell anyone this: at ten years old, he has lately attained the awareness that such flights of fancy should not be divulged. The year is 1865, the place a narrow promontory of land lapped on either side by cold blue inlets: a peninsula, stretching out into the Atlantic, like an imploring hand, the westernmost scrap of Europe before it surrenders to icy cross-currents of a vast ocean. As Liam waits there, on his hillock, buffeted nearly off his feet by saline gusts, he brings up a hand to worry at the corner of his elbow patch—a minuscule snarl resides there, a place where his mother has been obliged to knot and retie her darning thread, something he knows she is loath to do. He is startled by a sudden noise. His father, at the other end of the measuring chain, perhaps twenty or thirty yards away, reduced by distance to nothing more than a little peg man, like the ones his sisters make with fabric scraps, is yelling something at him—what Liam’s schoolmaster would term an imperative—but the greedy breeze snatches away the words.