1
A Wild Rover

There were those in the village who claimed that Michael Joyce must be mad. What else, they asked, could make a man leave the green fields of Ireland to risk life and limb all over the world?

"Besides," Mrs. Sheehan, proprietor of Sheehan and Sons Victualers, had told him just last week after he'd sold her husband a dressed hog destined for bacon and chops, "if it was trouble you were seeking, Michael James Joyce, you needn't have gone farther than just across your own country's borders."

"Aye, it's a good point you're making, Mrs. Sheehan," he'd replied through his teeth.

Despite some less-than-subtle coaxing from locals—and wasn't the butcher's wife the worst of them?—Michael never talked about those risk-filled years he'd spent in places where the voices of sanity had gone first hoarse, then mute. Nor had he discussed the incident that had nearly succeeded in getting him killed. Not even with his family, and certainly not with one of the biggest gossips in all of Castlelough.

Still, there were times he was willing to admit—if only to himself—that perhaps those who questioned his mental state might have a point. He may well have been touched with a bit of madness as he'd traveled from war zone to war zone throughout the world. Given an up-close and personal view of man's inhumanity toward man through the lenses of his cameras, Michael had begun to wonder if insanity was contagious.

Despite having grown up in a large, loving family, he'd long ago decided against bringing a child into a crazed world where innocent people could be blown up by terrorists in a Derry railway station or burned out of their homes and murdered by a political policy gone amok called ethnic cleansing.

Whatever part of him had stupidly believed he could make a difference in the world had been blown out of him, and now, like the prodigal son in his grandmother Fionna's well-worn Bible, he'd returned to hearth and home, content to spend his days working his farm and his evenings sitting in front of the warm glow of a peat fire reading the epic Irish tales that had once spurred a young west Irish lad to seek adventure.

His first few months back in Ireland, he'd been haunted by ghosts who'd show up in his bedroom nightly like mist from the sea, ethereal and always so damnably needy, wailing like a band of banshees on a moonless night. No amount of Irish whiskey could silence them; deprived of a voice during life, they seemed determined to make themselves heard through even the thickest alcoholic fog. They'd succeeded. Admirably.

Their bloodcurdling screams had caused him to wake up panicky in the black of night, bathed in acrid sweat. It was then he'd grab yet another bottle of Jameson's and go walking out along this very cliff, which, given his state of inebriation on those occasions, he now realized had been as close to suicide as he'd ever want to get.

But just as he hadn't died covering wars, nor had he died reliving them. And so, as he'd always done, Michael had moved on. In his way. And while the specters from those far distant places still visited on occasion, he'd managed to convince himself that he'd given up his dangerous ways.

Now, as the wind tore at his hair and sleet pelted his face like a shower of stones, Michael realized he'd been wrong.

It was the first day of February, celebrated throughout Ireland as St. Brigid's Day. When he'd been a child, Michael had made St. Brigid crosses with the rest of his classmates. The crosses, woven from rushes, supposedly encouraged blessings on his household, something he figured he could use about now.

Elsewhere around Ireland, devout pilgrims were visiting the numerous holy wells associated with the saint. While he himself was out in a wintry gale, trying to keep his footing on a moss-slick rocky ledge high above the storm-tossed Atlantic.

The nuns at Holy Child School had claimed that the holy well in Ardagh had been created when Brigid demonstrated prowess as a miracle worker to St. Patrick by dropping a burning coal from her apron onto the ground. There were also those, including old Tom Brennan—who'd cut the hair of three generations of Castlelough men and boys—who insisted that toothaches could be cured at the well at Greaghnafarna, in County Leitrim.

"If you're listening, Brigid, old girl," Michael muttered, "I wouldn't be turning away any miracles you might have in mind for the moment."

Despite being the very date his Celtic ancestors would have celebrated as the first day of spring, the day had dawned a miserable one. A gale blowing in from the sea moaned like lost souls over the rolling fields; dark clouds raced overhead, bringing with them a bone-chilling cold and snow flurries. A ghostly whiteness spread over the bramble thickets, clambered up the trunks of the few oak trees on the island that had escaped the British axes, and probed the nooks and crannies of the gray flagstone cliff.

Offshore toward the west, a last valiant stuttering of setting sun broke through the low-hanging clouds for an instant, touching the Aran Islands with a fleeting finger of gold.

He'd spent the summer of his sixteenth year in back-bending toil on Inishmaan, helping out on a second cousin's farm, working his ass off in stony fields that had been reclaimed from the icy Atlantic with tons of hand-gathered seaweed mixed with manure and sand atop naked bedrock.

The elderly cousin was a typical, taciturn—at least to outsiders—islander. He rose before the sun, worked like the devil, spoke an arcane Gaelic Michael could barely comprehend, and went to bed before dark. Michael had never been more lonely.

Copyright © 2000 by The Ross Family Trust.