In the Shelter of Each Other

Forty-One Envelopes

My great-aunt Peigí sent the letters from Carna by registered post in a boot box, and the box took eleven days to cross the Atlantic and find its way up the hill from the Albany post office to my grandfather's door on Elm Street. It came on the second Saturday of November, 2025, and he signed for it with the pen he keeps on a string inside the door, and then he did not open it. He set it on the kitchen table between the salt and the radio and left it there overnight, unopened, until I came for Sunday dinner, which is the day I always come.

I found it there when I walked in with a bag of groceries. Irish stamps, a puffin and a curragh. His sister's handwriting, which slopes uphill the way his does. "Peigí," he said, when he saw me looking, and "Well, now," and that was all. He went back to the stove, where there was a pot of potatoes coming to the boil and a piece of bacon he had been minding since noon.

I am writing this down in October of 2026, a year later, so I know now what was in the box and what it cost him to have it opened in front of me. That afternoon I knew nothing. I was twenty-five, I drafted legislation for a living, and I thought my grandfather was the least mysterious man in the city of Albany.

Here is what anyone on Elm Street could have told you about him. Tadhg O'Malley, seventy in March, born in Carna in the Connemara Gaeltacht in 1956, a stonemason for thirty-five years in this city, retired, widowed. Lives alone in a narrow brick row house with green shutters that he painted himself. Built a stone wall in his backyard with no mortar in it, which the neighbors' children are forbidden to climb and climb anyway. Plays the tin whistle at a session in a bar on Delaware Avenue on Tuesday nights. Bakes brown bread on Fridays. Says "grand" about everything, including the weather on days when the snow is up to the mailbox. Served in the Irish Army, a long time ago, somewhere hot. That last fact came up about as often as the color of his shutters.

"Your aunt is clearing out the house," he said, with his back to me. "My mother's dresser. Peigí says the man is coming for it on Thursday."

My great-grandmother, Máire, died in 2001, the year after I was born. Peigí, the eldest of the family, had lived on in the home place, a white house a mile outside the village with a view over the bog to the sea and, on clear days, to the Twelve Bens. I had been there twice as a child and remembered a red half door, a smell of turf smoke, and a dog that would only obey Irish. Peigí was seventy-nine and moving to her daughter's house in Galway city, where there was a bathroom on the ground floor and a bus to the hospital. The dresser had been sold to a man who restored furniture for the summer people.

I cut the tape with the bread knife. Inside the boot box was a bundle of envelopes tied with a strip of torn sheet, and on top of the bundle a note on lined paper in English: Tadhg, these were in the left drawer under the good tablecloth. Mam kept every one. They are yours now. I do not want them going in a skip. Peigí.

There were forty-one envelopes. Most of them were the thin blue kind that fold into themselves, airmail forms, gone soft at the creases. Some were proper envelopes with stamps I did not recognize. All of them were addressed in the same young, careful hand to Mrs. Máire Uí Mháille, An Aird Mhóir, Carna, Co. na Gaillimhe, Éire. The postmarks I could read said 1979 and 1980. A smaller group, held with an elastic band that had gone to tar, said 1983.

"Granda," I said. "These are from you."

"They are."

"From Lebanon."

"From Lebanon." He drained the potatoes into the sink and the steam went up and fogged the window over the backyard, so that the wall outside went gray and soft. "Set the table, will you. Your father will be here in ten minutes and he'll eat the box if there's nothing else."

I unfolded the top letter. The paper was so thin I could see my fingers through it. The writing ran edge to edge, with no margin, the way people write when paper costs something. I could read the date, 4 Samhain 1979, because I knew Samhain was November from the Halloween parties at the Irish museum on Broadway when I was in middle school. I could read the first two words, A Mhama, because they looked like Mama. After that I could read nothing at all. It was all Irish, every line, every page, every one of the forty-one.

I want to be honest about what that felt like, because the rest of this book comes out of it. I had grown up three blocks from this kitchen. I had heard my grandfather speak Irish all my life: on the phone to Carna on Sunday mornings, to the two old men from Ros Muc who used to come to the session, to the dog he had when I was little, to himself when a stone would not sit. I knew the sound of it the way you know rain on your own roof. I knew perhaps forty words, most of them food or warnings. Here was my grandfather at twenty-three, writing home from a place I could not have found on a map, and the words were six inches from my face and as closed to me as a locked door.

"What does it say?" I asked.

He turned around then. He is not a tall man, but he is wide, and his hands are the size of the stones he worked with, with the skin of the knuckles gone shiny from forty years of lime and cold. He has very blue eyes in a face the color of brick, and a way of looking at you for a second longer than you expect, as if he is checking your level.

"Léigh féin iad," he said.

"I can't read them myself. That's the point."

"Then that is the point," he agreed, and handed me the forks.

My father came in at ten past three with the cold on his coat and a six-pack of ginger ale, which is what he drinks at his father's table because his father does not keep beer in the house. My mother was working a Sunday shift at the hospital. My brother Conor, who was nineteen, was at college in Oswego and had sent a text that said only tell granda hi and a picture of snow. Dad saw the box, and the letters spread out in a fan between the salt and the radio, and stopped with his coat half off.

"Peigí sent them," said my grandfather. "Sit down, the bacon's getting cold."

My father was born in Galway in March of 1980, while his father was in Lebanon. That is one of the facts I had always known without ever thinking about it. Dad picked up a letter, turned it over, put it down. He had come to Albany at seven, with a Galway accent that lasted until about second grade, and his Irish was what he had kept from his grandmother's visits and from the Sunday phone calls: hello, how are you, goodbye, the weather, and a handful of curses that he uses only when he hits his thumb.

"You never told us there were letters," he said.

"I wrote them. I didn't keep them. My mother kept them." My grandfather put the plates down. "Eat."

We ate. Bacon and cabbage and floury potatoes with the skins cracked open, and a jug of white sauce with parsley in it, and his brown bread from Friday, toasted. The radio was on low to the public station, a man talking about the Hudson River and the striped bass. Outside the light was going early the way it goes in Albany in November, the sky over the Helderbergs turning the color of a nickel, and someone two houses down was raking leaves into the gutter for the city truck. My grandfather talked about the Bills, which is the only thing he and my father agree about completely, and about a woman on Lark Street who wanted him to look at her front steps even though he had retired, and about the price of oats. Nobody touched the letters. They lay there through the whole meal like a fourth person at the table who did not speak English.

When the plates were cleared I asked if I could take them home.

He was at the sink with his sleeves pushed up. He did not answer for a while. The tap ran.

"You'll be careful with them," he said.

"I'll be careful."

"You'll not be handing them to some stranger to translate." He said stranger the way he says slugs.

"No," I said, though I had been thinking exactly that.

"And you'll not be asking me what they say." He turned off the tap. "If you want to know what's in them, you'll have to read them. I'm not reading them out to you. I'm not sitting here listening to myself at twenty-three. I was a fool at twenty-three. Every man is."

"Then teach me."

"I'm no teacher." He dried his hands. "There's a class. Martina from the session told me. In the library, on Washington Avenue, Wednesday nights. A girl from home is teaching it, from the islands, Leitir Móir way. She has proper Connemara Irish, not the Dublin kind." He looked at me that extra second. "If you're serious."

I said I was serious. I am not sure I was, that night. I think I was curious and a little hurt, the way you are when you find a room in a house you thought you knew. My father drove me home to my apartment in Pine Hills with the boot box on my knees, and neither of us said much. At the light on Madison he said, "He never talked about it, you know. Lebanon. Not to me either. I asked him once when I was about fifteen, for a school thing, and he told me it was hot and the oranges were good. That was the whole interview."

"The oranges were good," I said.

"Apparently they were very good."

That night I did the one thing I knew how to do with a pile of documents, which is make a record of them. It is my job. In the Bill Drafting Commission, in an office on the third floor of a state building on the Empire State Plaza, I take what a legislator wants to say and turn it into language the law can hold, and the first thing I learned there is that you never work on the only copy of anything. So I laid the letters out on my kitchen table in date order, all forty-one, and I photographed each page, front and back, under the lamp. Twenty-two from the first tour, November 1979 to May 1980. Nineteen from the second, spring and summer of 1983. I put the photographs in a folder in our family's private space online, the one my mother set up after my grandmother died so that the pictures from Galway and Albany would stop living in eleven different phones. Only the family can see it. I named the folder Letters from Lebanon and then, after a minute, changed it to Litreacha, which I had to look up, and which means letters.

Under the photograph of the first page I typed the only thing I was sure of: 4 November 1979. To his mother, Máire. In Irish.

Then I sat for a long time with the first letter under the lamp. I could pick out his name at the bottom, Tadhg, and above it two words, do mhac, which I guessed meant your son. I could pick out a word that might have been Tibnin, and a number, 653. Halfway down the second side, in the middle of all that closed Irish, there was one word in English, underlined twice: ORANGES.

I laughed out loud in my empty kitchen. Then I put the kettle on, because it was nearly midnight and I am my grandfather's granddaughter, and I went online and signed up for the Wednesday class.

Before I went to bed I sent him a message. He has a phone, which he treats like a dangerous animal, but he reads his messages, slowly, with his glasses on. I wrote: Registered for the class. Starts Wednesday. You said oranges.

The answer came at seven the next morning, which meant he had thought about it overnight. It was one word.

Maith.

I looked that one up too. It means good.

Ó Dónaill, Page by Page

The class met in a meeting room in the basement of the main library on Washington Avenue, a room with a drop ceiling, a whiteboard that never fully erased, and a radiator under the window that knocked like someone wanting to be let in. There were nine of us on the first night. A retired state trooper named Gene whose grandmother came from Achill and who wanted to read her prayer book, though he said he would settle for the inscription. A Brazilian woman, Luciana, married to a man from Dingle who refused to teach her because, she said, he was afraid she would find out what he called her. Two students from the university up the hill. A couple in their sixties who were planning a walking holiday in Donegal. A quiet man in a Siena College sweatshirt who never said why he came. And me, with a boot box in a canvas bag.

The teacher was Fiadh Ní Chonghaile, twenty-seven, from Leitir Móir in the islands of south Connemara, eight miles across the water from where my grandfather was born. She had come to Albany for a year on a teaching exchange and was living, she told us, in a room on Hudson Avenue above a woman who played the cello at seven in the morning. She had a short black coat, a big laugh, and the Connemara habit of answering a question with a question. On the first night she drew a map of Ireland on the whiteboard, shaded in the Gaeltacht areas with the side of the marker, and wrote under it: ní hé lá na gaoithe lá na scolb. Then she asked us what we thought it meant.

Nobody knew.

"The windy day is not the day for the thatching," she said. "You don't start a job in the middle of the storm. You learn the slow way, on the calm days, so that when the wind comes you are ready." She looked around at nine Americans in a library basement in November. "This is a calm day. So. We start with how to say hello."

At the break I showed her a letter. I had not meant to; I had meant to wait until I could read a sentence on my own. But she saw the blue airmail form sticking out of my bag and said, "What's that, a love letter?" and I said it was from my grandfather to his mother, from Lebanon, 1979, and she held out her hand.

She read the first side standing up by the radiator, her lips moving a little. Then she sat down and read the second. When she looked up she had a strange face.

"He's from Carna," she said. It was not a question.

"An Aird Mhóir."

"I can hear it. He writes the way they talk. Look, here." She put her finger under a word. "Muid. We. A Dublin teacher would mark that wrong, they'd want sinn, but every person in Connemara says muid. And here, he spells it the way it sounds, he's not bothered with the book. This is the real thing. This is a man writing to his mother the way he'd talk to her across the table." She handed it back to me carefully, the way you hand someone a baby. "You'll be able to read this. Not this month. But you will."

"Can you tell me what it says?"

She thought about it. Then she shook her head. "I could," she said. "But I think you'd be sorry. Get the dictionary. The big one. Ó Dónaill. Do a line a night. Bring me the lines you can't break and I'll help you break them. But you do the reading."

That was the second person in four days to tell me to read it myself. I bought the dictionary from a bookseller in Galway, online, because the library's copy could not leave the building. It took three weeks to come. When it did, it was the size of a cinder block, with a plain cover and thirteen hundred pages of very small print, and the man who made it had been dead for decades. Niall Ó Dónaill. Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla. 1977. Two years before my grandfather wrote the first letter. I liked that. It felt like the dictionary and the letters had been in the world together, even if they had never met.

I am not going to pretend that the reading was romantic. It was work. I sat at my kitchen table in Pine Hills after my shift, with the radiator ticking and the bus going by on Western Avenue, and I copied one line of my grandfather's handwriting onto a legal pad in block letters, word by word, leaving space under each. Then I looked up every word. Irish changes the beginnings of words depending on what comes before them, so that mother is máthair but my mother is mo mháthair and her mother is a máthair and our mother is ár máthair, and for the first month I spent half my time hunting for words in the dictionary under the wrong letter. I would find a word like mhuintir and look it up exactly as written and find nothing, and then remember that the h was only a lodger, and look again for muintir, people, family, folk, and there it was, with eleven meanings, and I had to pick one.

It took me nine days to read the first letter. Here it is, in my English, which is not as good as his Irish.

Dear Mama,

We are here and we are all right. Do not mind what the radio says, the radio says everything. We flew a long day and came down in the dark and the air was warm like a kitchen with the range going. Warm in November. Then the lorries, a long way, and I slept most of it, and woke up on a hill with the sun coming up and a castle over us like something out of a schoolbook. That is the town, Tibnin. Our camp is here. The lads call it Camp Shamrock, and it is not much, huts and wire and the cookhouse, but the tea is strong and there is a fellow from Ballinasloe who can make a fry that would raise the dead.

You would know this country, Mama. It is all stones. Stone walls on the hills, and small fields inside them, and the ground so full of rock that you would wonder how anything grows. But things grow. Olive trees, very old, gray, with twisty trunks, and the people were picking the last of them when we came, the women and the old men with sheets on the ground under the trees, beating the branches with sticks. And tobacco, the fields of it cut down now, and the leaves hung up drying under the roofs. The houses are white stone with flat roofs, and on top of every roof is a stone roller like a small one of Daid's, for rolling the clay on the roof flat after the rain. If you took the sea away from Carna and turned the sun up you would have this.

There are 653 of us in the battalion, from every county. I am out at a post near a village called Haddatha, in a house with sandbags at the windows, eleven of us and a corporal from Mayo who snores like a donkey. From the roof you can see a long way, hills on hills, and at the end of them in the morning there is a mountain with snow on it. Snow, and us sweating.

The children come up to the post selling oranges. ORANGES, Mama. They come from down by the coast at Tyre, and they are the best thing I ever put in my mouth, sweeter than the Christmas ones, and the peel comes off in one go. We pay them in Irish money and they don't care. I have eaten nine today. Tell Peigí.

Do not be worrying. Tell Bríd I am writing to her too and I am minding myself, and tell her to mind herself and the one that's coming. I'll be home for the spring, for the turf.

Your son, Tadhg

I read it to myself in my kitchen at eleven at night, in English, from the legal pad. Then I read it again. I want to describe how strange it was. It was like hearing a voice I knew come out of a radio I had not known was on. Every line sounded like him. The tea is strong. A fry that would raise the dead. Do not be worrying. I had never heard him say oranges with that much feeling about anything, except possibly the Bills' offensive line.

And I had not known that the hills were like Connemara. I had not known about the stone roller on the roofs, and I had not known that he had called his father Daid, and I had not known that the one that's coming was my father, four months before he was born, mentioned in the middle of a letter about oranges like a weather report.

Daid was Pádraig Mór O'Malley, my great-grandfather, lost off a fishing boat off Mweenish in 1968, when my grandfather was twelve. I had his name in the family tree but nothing else. Now I had a stone roller. That night I added a line under his name in the tree, roller for the roof, from a letter of 4 November 1979, and felt foolish, and left it there.

On Sunday I asked my grandfather whether his father had a stone roller.

He was at the stove again. He put down the spoon.

"Who told you that?"

"You did."

He looked at me that extra second, and then he laughed, a short surprised bark, and turned back to the pot. "He had," he said. "For the yard. A big round stone with an iron pin through it. He'd roll the yard after the rain so the cart wouldn't sink. I'd forgotten that." He stirred. "Ye read the whole first one, then."

"Nine days."

"Nine days." He shook his head. "I wrote it in twenty minutes on a sandbag."

Before I left that afternoon I asked him for one more thing, and I asked carefully, because I had been thinking about it all week. I had started a word list on the legal pad, every word from the letters that I had to look up, and it was already four pages long. The dictionary gives you the meaning, but it does not give you the sound, and the sound in my head was coming out American, flat and wrong. I asked if he would say the words for me, just the words, into my phone. Not the letters. Not anything he had written. Only the words, one at a time, so that I would have them in his voice.

He took a long time to answer. Then he took off his glasses and put them on the table, as if he would need his whole face.

"Words," he said. "Not the songs. I'm not singing into that thing."

"Only words."

He held out his hand for the list.

We sat at the kitchen table for an hour that Sunday, the last light going copper on the backyard wall, and he read my handwriting aloud, one word at a time, and I held the phone. Oráiste. Cloch. Teas. Tobac. Daid. Muid. Sacaí gainimh, which means sandbags, and which he said twice because the first time he laughed. At the end I put each recording next to its word on the family's list, the one my mother had started years ago with nine words of Italian from her own grandmother and that had sat untouched since. Now it had forty-four words of Irish under the Italian, each with a small arrow you could press, and when you pressed it, there was my grandfather in his kitchen, saying stone.

Friday Bread

On Fridays my grandfather bakes two loaves of brown bread, and for most of my life I believed both of them were for him.

I learned otherwise in December, because I took a week of leave before Christmas to use it up and had nowhere to be on a Friday morning. I let myself into the house on Elm Street at half past eight with a box of decorations from my mother, and found the kitchen hot and the windows running, and two round loaves cooling on a wire rack by the back door, each with a deep cross cut into the top. My grandfather was wrapping one of them in a clean tea towel, the blue-checked kind, the way you would swaddle something.

"You're up," he said.

"Who's that for?"

He tied the corners of the towel together in a knot. "Get your coat," he said. "You can carry it. It's slippery out."

We walked. My grandfather does not drive in the city if he can help it; he says Albany drivers learned on the Northway and think every street is a merge. It had snowed two inches overnight and then gone hard and bright, ten degrees, the sky a thin washed blue, and the salt trucks had been through so that the sidewalks were crusted white and gray and crunched like sugar. We went down Lark Street past the closed bars and the coffee shop with its window full of paper snowflakes, and turned up toward Central Avenue, where the wind comes straight down from the west the length of the street with nothing to stop it. My grandfather walked with his hands in his coat pockets and his cap pulled down and his breath going out ahead of him, and I walked beside him carrying a warm loaf of bread against my chest like a hot-water bottle.

Central Avenue is the long spine of the city that runs out toward Schenectady, and if you want to know who lives in Albany now you walk it. In the stretch we walked that morning there was a Jamaican bakery with patties in a heated case, a West African hair braiding shop, a halal butcher, a Vietnamese noodle place with steam on the windows, a laundromat called the Bubble Room, two bodegas, an Ethiopian restaurant with a hand-painted sign, and a store selling phones and prayer rugs and soccer jerseys all in one window. Between Quail and Ontario, in a two-story brick building with a green awning, there was Jaber's Market.

I had passed it a hundred times and never gone in. It was a small grocery, very clean, with a bell on the door and a smell inside that I would know anywhere now: thyme and toasted sesame and sour sumac, and under it the smell of bread on hot iron. There were sacks of rice and lentils and bulgur on the floor, jars of pickled turnips colored pink with beet, a cooler of white cheeses and yogurt, pistachios in bins, a whole wall of olive oil, and in the back, behind a half wall with a counter, a woman in a cardigan and a long gray skirt standing over a domed black iron griddle the size of a car wheel set over a gas ring.

"Abu Batrik!" she said, when she saw my grandfather, and lifted both hands, which were floured to the wrists.

He took off his cap. "Hiyam," he said, and something in Arabic I did not catch, and she laughed and answered in Arabic and pointed a floured finger at me.

"This is the granddaughter," my grandfather said in English. "Maeve. Pat's girl."

"I know who it is," said Hiyam Jaber. "I have seen the photograph on his wall a thousand times. The first-day-of-school one, with the teeth missing." She wiped her hands on a towel and came around the half wall and took my face in both her hands, flour and all, and looked at me. She was eighty, small and straight, with very black eyebrows and white hair pinned up tight and a gold chain at her throat. "She has your eyes," she told him, as if accusing him of something.

I gave her the bread. That seemed to be what was expected. She unknotted the towel and put her face down close to the loaf and breathed in, and nodded once, the way a mechanic listens to an engine and nods. Then she went back around the half wall and put the brown bread on a shelf beside the cash register, where there was already a small stack of folded tea towels, blue checked, a dozen at least, and I realized they were his, returned week by week.

My grandfather stood at the counter with his cap in his hands while she worked. She took a ball of dough from a covered tray and flattened it with her fingertips, then lifted it and began to throw it from one forearm to the other, turning it, stretching it, so that it grew wider and thinner with each pass until it was a round of dough as big as a pillowcase and so thin the light came through it. Then she laid it over a cushion, flipped it in one movement onto the hot dome of the griddle, and it bubbled and blistered and was done in under a minute. She peeled it off and folded it in quarters like a cloth. Then she made two more flat rounds, smaller and thicker, spread them with olive oil and a dark green paste of thyme and sesame and sumac, and baked those too, flat on the iron, until the edges went brown and the paste smelled so strongly that my mouth watered behind my scarf. She wrapped everything in brown paper and gave it to me.

"Sahtein," she said.

"Shukran," said my grandfather, and she slapped his arm.

"Since nineteen eighty-eight," she told me, "he comes Friday. Every Friday, except when he was in the hospital with the gallbladder, and then his wife came. Brown bread for markouk. Every Friday. Thirty-seven years. My husband, when he was alive, used to say the Irishman is courting you, Hiyam. And I said let him court, the bread is good."

My grandfather looked at the ceiling.

We walked home with the wind behind us and the warm paper parcel under my coat, and I did not ask him anything until we were back in his kitchen with the kettle on. Then I asked what Abu Batrik meant.

"Read your letters," he said.

That was the answer to most things that winter. So I went home that evening and took out the next letter in the pile, the fourth, dated 9 December 1979, and I worked at it for eleven nights with the dictionary, and with Fiadh on the Wednesday between, and here is what it said, in my English.

Dear Mama,

Your parcel came on Tuesday and you never saw eleven grown men so glad of a cake. The tin was a bit bashed but the cake was perfect, and the lads said to tell you it is the best Christmas cake in the Middle East, which might be true, there is not much competition. I kept the half of it.

You asked about the people. I will tell you about one house. There is a man in the village, Haddatha, who builds walls. I saw him the second week, on the hill below the post, putting back a terrace wall the rain had knocked out, and he was doing it the way Daid did the wall at the bog road, no mortar, every stone found its own place, the big ones at the bottom and the through-stones across. I stood and watched him a while, because I couldn't help it, and then I went down and held a stone for him without asking, and he let me. He has no English and I have no Arabic, but you don't need talk for walls. His name is Abu Samir. That means the father of Samir, which is the son, a lad of about fourteen who has more English than the whole of Carna, from the school and from the soldiers, and he does the talking for us.

On Sunday they had me to the house. Mama, you would like the wife. She was baking bread on a thing like the bottom of a pot turned upside down over a fire of olive sticks, out in the yard behind the house, and she threw the dough over her arms back and forth like Peigí shaking out a sheet, until it was thin as a tablecloth, and slapped it on the iron and it was done before you'd say your name. They tore it and gave it to me with a white cheese, soft, and green olives they put up themselves, and tea in small glasses with a great amount of sugar. And they kept giving. Every time my plate was empty it was full. I did what you taught us, I left a bit on the plate at the end so they would know I had enough. Then they filled it again. I think it means the opposite here.

I brought them the half of your cake. Abu Samir's mother, who is very old and sits in the doorway all day, took one bite and closed her eyes. Then she said something and they all laughed, and Samir said she said it was too much. Too much of everything, fruit and sugar and the drink in it. And then she ate the whole slice and asked for another. So Mama, your cake is famous now in two countries.

I will bring the tin home. Don't be worrying. Tell Bríd I got her letter. Tell her the nights are cold here now and I wear the jumper.

Your son, Tadhg

I read it on a Sunday night in mid-December and laughed at the old woman and the cake and then sat very still at the kitchen table. Because I had just watched a woman in a cardigan on Central Avenue throw dough from one arm to the other until it was thin as a tablecloth, and slap it on a dome of black iron, and fold it like a cloth, and give it to my grandfather in exchange for a loaf of bread. And he had been walking down to Central Avenue with a loaf in a tea towel every Friday for thirty-seven years, through snow and heat and his own gallbladder, and he had never once told any of us why.

On Friday I went with him again. The temperature had come up to the thirties and the snow had turned to gray slush in the gutters and the sky was low and the color of a dishpan, and the bells were going on the trucks in the street because somebody had tied sleigh bells to the grille of a delivery van. At Jaber's Market there was a young man behind the register this time, in a Hudson Valley Community College hoodie, with a short black beard and a pencil behind his ear. Hiyam's grandson, Karim. He ran the store now, with his sister Lina doing the books and the website and, Karim said, making him wear better shirts. He shook my grandfather's hand and called him Mr. Tadhg, which my grandfather allowed from nobody else.

While my grandfather and Hiyam did the bread, I asked Karim where his grandmother was from.

"A village down south," he said. "Near Bint Jbeil. You won't have heard of it. Right up near the border." He held up two fingers, close together. "She came in seventy-six, with my grandfather and my dad, who was a baby. The war was bad. My grandfather had a cousin in Watervliet working in the arsenal, so, Albany. Why?"

"My grandfather was a peacekeeper there. With the Irish. Seventy-nine."

Karim looked over at the half wall, where Hiyam was stretching dough over her forearms and my grandfather was watching her with his hands behind his back, the way he watches anyone do skilled work. "Yeah," said Karim. "I know. He came in here in eighty-eight and asked my grandmother in Arabic for bread like a tablecloth. She said she nearly dropped the tray. Nobody in Albany knew what markouk was. He said a woman made it for him in Haddatha." He shrugged. "That's like four miles from her village. She knew the family. Not well, but. You know."

I did not know. But I was beginning to.

Before Christmas I made one more entry in the family's private space. Under the folder of letters I started a map, the kind where you drop a pin and attach a picture to it. I put a pin on Carna, with a photograph of my great-grandmother's white house that Peigí had sent years ago. I put a pin on Elm Street, with a photograph of the backyard wall. I put a pin on Central Avenue between Quail and Ontario. Then I zoomed out across the ocean and the whole of Europe and the sea and found Tibnin, a small hill town in the south of Lebanon with a castle on the top, and four miles from it, a village called Haddatha. I dropped a pin there too, and dated it December 1979, and left the picture blank.

A Wall With No Mortar

The wall in my grandfather's backyard is thirty-one feet long, four feet high, and built of stone he collected from the demolished buildings of Albany over about eight years. It has no mortar in it. Every stone sits on the stones below it by weight and by choice, and in the thirty years since he built it, it has been through ice storms and a derecho and the snowplow banks of the winter of 2003, and one stone has fallen out. That was last spring, after a hard frost heave, and he has not put it back yet. He says it is resting.

I grew up climbing it. I never once looked at it.

The day after Christmas, the day they call St. Stephen's Day in Ireland and the Wren's Day in Carna, when the boys of the parish used to go house to house in straw masks with music and a pole with a holly bush on top, my grandfather had his one visitor of the season. Walter Prentice came at two in the afternoon in a camel coat and a gray fedora, carrying a bottle of Irish whiskey in a paper bag that my grandfather would put in the cupboard unopened, as he had done every December 26 since 1987. Mr. Prentice was seventy-seven, tall and thin and very upright, with white hair cut close and gold-rimmed glasses. He had grown up in Arbor Hill, served in the Army in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969, come home, and built a masonry business from one truck. In March of 1987 he had hired a man from Galway who showed up at a job site on Swan Street with a trowel in a canvas bag and a letter of reference written in a language Mr. Prentice could not read.

"I hired him anyway," said Mr. Prentice, settling into the good armchair by the radiator. "Because I watched him set two courses of brick while I read the letter. Didn't need to know what it said."

"It said I was a hard worker and I didn't drink," said my grandfather, from the kitchen door.

"Well, it was half right."

They had worked together for twenty-four years, until Mr. Prentice retired and sold the business to his nephew, and they had been friends for all of it. I had known Mr. Prentice my whole life as the tall man who came on December 26 and called me Miss Maeve and gave me two dollars in a card until I was nineteen. I had never thought of him as a soldier, or of my grandfather as one, or of the two of them, in the kitchen with the whiskey going unopened, as two old men who had been to two different wars.

So I asked. I am not proud of it. I waited until my grandfather went out to the yard to fill the bird feeder, and I asked Mr. Prentice whether my grandfather had ever told him about Lebanon.

He took his time. He took off his glasses and polished them on a handkerchief and put them back on.

"No," he said. "Not one word. And I told him nothing about the Central Highlands. That's how we got along for thirty-eight years." He looked out the window to where my grandfather stood in the snow with the feeder in his hands and the chickadees already coming down to the wall. "But I'll tell you something, Miss Maeve. When a man has been out there, there's a way he stands on a job. He looks at the ground first. He looks at where the water goes. He looks at where he'd go if he had to go somewhere fast. I saw that in your grandfather the first day on Swan Street. He saw it in me. We never needed to say a thing about it." He folded the handkerchief. "Some men need to talk. I respect that. We were the other kind. We talked about stone."

Then, because I suppose I looked disappointed, he leaned forward.

"You want to know about him," he said, "look at that wall. Every stone in it has a story. He'll tell you the stories of the stones all day. He told me every one. It's the only way he tells anything."

When Mr. Prentice had gone, in the early dark, with his fedora on and his coat buttoned to the throat, I put on my boots and went out into the yard. It was twenty degrees and very still, and the snow on top of the wall had a crust like the top of a crème brûlée, and the light from the kitchen window lay across it in a yellow square. My grandfather came out after me with his cap on and stood with his hands in his pockets.

"Mr. Prentice says you'll tell me the stories of the stones," I said.

He looked at me. Then he looked at the wall. Then, without a word, he went down to the far end, by the garage, and brushed the snow off the top with his sleeve, and began.

That long gray one at the bottom is bluestone, from the sidewalk on Hudson Avenue they tore up in ninety-one. The city was dumping it. That red one is brownstone from a stoop on Lark Street, the house burned, a terrible thing, the family was all right. That pale one with the shell in it is limestone from the Helderbergs, a farmer up in Berne gave me a truckload for fixing his chimney. That one there with the drill mark is from the old railroad bridge. That flat one is a piece of a doorstep from a house in the South End that Irish people built in the 1850s, the cellar was full of broken pipes, clay pipes, the kind the men smoked, I gave one to your father. He went along the wall stone by stone, by the light from the kitchen window and then, when we got past it, by the light of my phone, and I followed him and listened, and it was the most I had heard him talk in one go in my life.

Near the middle of the wall, about three feet up, he stopped at a small stone I had never noticed. It was the size of a loaf of bread, pale and chalky, cream with a faint blush of pink, and very smooth on the face, as if it had been handled a great deal. It did not match anything around it. He put his hand on it flat, the way you would put your hand on the neck of a horse.

"That one," he said, "is from Haddatha."

I did not say anything. I had learned that much.

"Abu Samir gave it to me. The day I left. From the terrace wall we built. He took it out of the top of the wall and put it in my hands and put another stone in its place, and he said something, and Samir said, he says the wall will remember you have a piece of it." My grandfather took his hand away. "It was in my kit bag on the plane. It was in a drawer in Galway for seven years, and in a drawer here for eight, and then when I built this I put it in."

"In the middle."

"In the middle. Where it's held up by everything else." He looked at it a while. "That's where you put the stone you don't want to lose."

That night, at home, I opened the family's private space and went into the collection my mother had made of things worth keeping: Nonna Russo's rolling pin, my grandmother Bríd's nursing pin from the Regional in Galway, the clay pipe from the South End cellar, which I had not known was there. I added a new entry. I wrote: Stone from a terrace wall in Haddatha, south Lebanon. Built by Abu Samir and Tadhg O'Malley, winter 1979. Given to Tadhg the day he left, May 1980. Now in the middle of the backyard wall, Elm Street, Albany, three feet up. I took the photograph the next morning, in the flat white light after more snow, with my grandfather's hand on it for scale. He let me.

I had been reading the next letter all that week, the fifth, dated 23 December 1979. It was short. Here it is.

Dear Mama,

Happy Christmas to you and to Peigí and Seán and the house. We had our dinner today because tomorrow some of us are on duty. Turkey that came on the plane and ham and spuds and sprouts like bullets, and a pudding, and the officers served us, which is the custom, and the colonel himself poured my tea and I didn't know where to look. Then the lads had a sing-song and they made me do one, so I did Amhrán na Trá Báine the way you do it, and the room went quiet, and a fellow from Dublin who doesn't have a word of Irish came up after and asked me what it was about and I told him, and he went outside for a while.

Abu Samir and I finished the wall. Six weeks, on and off, when I was free. It is nine feet long and comes up to my chest and it is the best thing I have ever built. When the last stone went on top he put his hand on it and said a word, and Samir told me it was the same word they use for a roof. Then his mother brought out tea and we sat on it, the three of us, in the sun, and looked at the valley. There was snow on the far mountain. There were boys down below on the road with a donkey and they waved up at us. It was a good day, Mama. I want you to know there are good days here.

Samir wants to learn the whistle. I have been teaching him The Kerry Polka. He is terrible. He practices on the roof of the house and the whole village knows it.

Your son, Tadhg

I read it to Fiadh the next Wednesday, in my halting English, at the break, and she was quiet. Then she said, "Amhrán na Trá Báine. Do you know it?"

I didn't.

"The Song of the White Strand," she said. "It's a Connemara song. Three brothers go out in a boat to fetch their sister's lover from the far shore, and the boat goes down, and she's left on the beach. She sings it. You can't get through it if you know what it's about." She turned the pencil in her fingers. "A boy from Carna, whose own father went down off a boat when he was twelve, sang that, at Christmas, in Lebanon, the way his mother sings it. No wonder the Dublin fella went outside."

I asked her if she would sing it for me.

"I will not," she said. "Ask him."

I did not ask him that winter. I was not brave enough. But I added another word to the list that Sunday, and he said it into the phone in his kitchen with the snow coming down past the window, in the voice I knew from the session, low and round. Claí. A wall of stones without mortar. A field wall. The kind his father built at the bog road, and Abu Samir built in Haddatha, and he built in Albany out of the bones of other people's houses.

Then, without my asking, he said one more. "Díon," he said. "Roof." And handed me back the phone.

The Shepherd's Flute

The Half Door is a narrow bar on Delaware Avenue with a tin ceiling, a dartboard nobody uses, and a back room with a fireplace that has not held a fire since the city changed the codes in the 1990s. On Tuesday nights from eight until the musicians get tired, which is usually about eleven, there is a session in the back room. The owner, Gerry Flynn, whose father came from Tipperary, sets out three tables pushed together and keeps a jug of water and a basket of sandwiches on the end, and plays the bodhrán, badly, when he thinks nobody is looking.

My grandfather has been going since the bar opened in 1994. He sits in the same chair, with his back to the cold fireplace and his cap on the table in front of him, and he plays a D whistle, a cheap one with a green mouthpiece that he says he has had since 1986, and a second one in a lower key that comes out only for slow airs. The other regulars that January were Martina Daly, a retired school nurse from Clare who played the fiddle with her eyes shut; Ruthie Abrams, a concertina player in her seventies who had learned from records in the 1970s and played in a red cardigan with the elbows out; a young man named Deshawn from Troy who played tenor banjo, very fast, and had learned it from videos and then from Martina; and whoever else came in out of the cold.

I had been to the session maybe ten times in my life, mostly as a teenager made to sit and drink lemonade. That January I went every week. I told myself it was research.

It was not quite. I went because I had started to hear the letters in his voice, and I wanted to hear the voice doing the other thing it did, which was music. I sat in the corner by the coats with a ginger ale and listened to them go through the reels and jigs and polkas, one set after another, Martina calling the next tune with a nod and the others falling in after two bars. I did not know the names of anything. I knew that the jigs bounced in threes and the reels ran in fours and that my grandfather never played a note louder than he needed to. He sat very straight and his big fingers came down over the holes with no fuss, and the whistle made a thin bright clean sound that somehow came through everything else in the room, the fiddle and the banjo and Gerry's drum, like a thread of light through a door.

And at the end of every night, when the others were putting their instruments away, he took out the low whistle and played one slow tune alone. Nobody talked during it. Even Gerry stopped wiping the bar. It was about two minutes long. It went up and hung and came down in a long curling way, with little turns and catches on the long notes, so that it sounded less like music than like someone trying to say something difficult and changing the words as they went. Then he put the whistle in his coat pocket and put on his cap and went home.

"What's the last tune?" I asked Martina the third week, at the break.

She shrugged. "Nobody knows. He's played it every night for thirty years. I asked him once. He said it doesn't have a name." She tapped her bow on her knee. "I tried to learn it off him. You can't. He never plays it the same twice. It's like the old singing at home, the sean-nós. There's no right way, there's only his way, tonight."

The next letter I read was the seventh, dated 20 January 1980. It took me two weeks. I was getting faster with the dictionary, but this one had words I could not find anywhere, and in the end Fiadh and I worked out that some of them were not Irish at all, but Arabic words written in Irish spelling, the way a boy from Carna would hear them. Here it is.

Dear Mama,

It is the rainy season now and the post is like a cowshed, and we are all coughing, but we are in good form. The rain comes in off the sea in the night like a train and then in the morning the sun comes out and the whole valley steams.

I want to tell you about the music. In the evenings when it is fine Abu Samir goes up on the roof of his house with a flute. It is a short flute of a kind of cane, open at both ends, with six holes, and he blows across the end of it, not into a mouthpiece. Samir says it is a shabbabeh, the shepherd's flute. Every shepherd in the hills used to have one. He plays tunes on it that go round and round like water going down a drain, and the sound goes all over the valley in the evening. You can hear it from our roof. The lads go quiet when he starts.

Last week I went up on his roof with my whistle and we played for each other. He played one of his and I played The Blackbird, and then he made me play it again, and then he tried it on the flute and got the half of it. And then the old mother came up the steps, which she never does, she is near ninety, and sat on the roller and asked me to sing. So I sang Úna Bhán, the way you sing it, with all the turns.

Mama, she started to cry. And then she started to sing. Samir said it was a song they call 'ataba, that the old people make up as they go, four lines, and the last word of each line has to rhyme and change its meaning, and they sing it at weddings and at funerals and when somebody comes home. She sang with her eyes closed, no music, long notes and the voice going up and turning over itself, just the way you do in the kitchen, the way the old people at home do. And I knew it. I didn't know one word of it but I knew it. It was the same thing. It was the old singing. They have the old singing here.

Then Abu Samir said something and Samir said, he says your mother and his mother are cousins. I said they never met. He said that is not what cousins means.

Your son, Tadhg

I read that letter on a Tuesday afternoon in my office on the Plaza, on my lunch break, from the legal pad, because I had finished the last line at one in the morning and had not been able to wait to read it straight through. My office looks out over the long flat stretch of the Empire State Plaza, with its reflecting pools frozen white and the skating rink at the near end and the strange round building everyone calls the Egg sitting on its stalk like something that landed. People were skating in the low winter sun, government workers in their good coats going around and around on their lunch hour. I sat at my desk with a cold sandwich and read about an old woman in a village in Lebanon in 1980 singing to my grandfather on a roof, and I had to put the legal pad face down and go stand in the stairwell for a while.

I think it was the word cousins. Or the way he wrote I knew it. Or the fact that I had sat in the back room of the Half Door three Tuesdays in a row listening to a man play a slow tune with no name, with all its turns and catches, and I had heard, without knowing what I was hearing, a thing that was the same as a thing an old woman sang on a roof in Haddatha.

My job, as I said, is making language that the law can hold. People think the hard part is the big words. The hard part is the small ones. Shall and may. And and or. The difference between a person who is a resident and a person who resides. A word in a bill means only one thing, and it has to mean that one thing to everyone who will ever read it, forever, including people who want it to mean something else. I am good at that. I like it. That winter I found out that it had made me bad at another kind of reading. Irish does not work like a bill. Fiadh told us in the third week that Irish has no single word for yes or no; you answer with the verb, you are or you are not, it is or it is not, you do or you don't, so that every answer is a small sentence and you cannot dodge it. And it has six words for a wall, depending on what the wall is for and what it's made of and whether it keeps something in or out, and none of them is wrong. My grandfather's letters were not trying to mean one thing. They were trying to mean everything at once, to a woman at a kitchen table in Carna, in a language where cousins is not what cousins means.

That Friday, at Jaber's Market, while Hiyam stretched the dough, I asked her if she knew what 'ataba was.

She stopped with a round of dough hanging from her forearms. She looked at me over the half wall for a long moment, and then at my grandfather, who was studying the jars of pickled turnips with great attention.

"Who told you about 'ataba?"

"An old woman in Haddatha. In 1980. In a letter."

Hiyam laid the dough on the cushion and flipped it onto the iron and did not say anything until it was done. Then she folded it and set it aside and wiped her hands, and she came around the half wall, and she took my hand in her floury one, and she sang. In the middle of Jaber's Market on Central Avenue at nine on a Friday morning, with Karim at the register and a man in a Teamsters jacket waiting to pay for a bag of lentils, she sang four lines, with her eyes closed, long and high and turning, the voice going up and folding over on itself. The man in the Teamsters jacket stood very still with his lentils. Karim put down his pencil.

When she stopped there was a silence in the shop, and then the bell on the door went as someone came in with the cold.

"My mother sang that," said Hiyam, in a normal voice. "When we left. On the road to Beirut, in the car. It is about a person who goes away and the house that keeps their place at the table." She let go of my hand. "You don't hear it now. The young ones don't sing it. Karim doesn't sing it." Karim held up both hands. "Your grandfather," she said, "when he came in eighty-eight, the first time, he heard the radio I had in the back, a cassette of 'ataba, and he stood in the middle of the shop like you saw a ghost. And I said, what. And he said, my mother sings like that. In Irish." She shrugged. "So. Since then. Bread."

My grandfather put the jar of turnips back on the shelf, very carefully, and squared it with the others.

That Sunday I asked him, at last, whether I could record him playing the slow air. Just once. Just for the family.

He was quiet for so long I thought he had not heard. Then he said, "Not yet."

It was the first time he had said yet. I wrote it down that night, on the legal pad, under the last line of the letter: not yet. Then I went online and ordered a D whistle, a cheap one, with a green mouthpiece.

Abu Batrik

February in Albany is a long gray hallway with a door at the end that never seems to get closer. That year it snowed every few days, never much, and never melted, so that by the middle of the month the banks along Madison Avenue were black on the outside and white in the middle like a cake somebody had dropped in a coal bin. The city buses wore beards of dirty ice. In Washington Park the lake froze and the geese stood around on it looking betrayed. I went to work in the dark and came home in the dark and in between I sat in an office drafting amendments to the agriculture and markets law, and in the evenings I practiced the whistle in my apartment with a towel stuffed in the bell end so the man downstairs would not call the landlord.

I was very bad. I want that on the record. The whistle has six holes and you would think a person with a law degree could manage six holes, but the low notes squeaked and the high notes shrieked and I could not get from one to the next without a sound in between like a gate. Fiadh, who played a little, told me to stop trying to play tunes and spend two weeks just holding one note until it was clean. So I did. I stood at my kitchen window looking out at the snow on the roofs of Pine Hills and held a low D until it stopped wobbling. It took eleven days. When I finally got it, a clear soft round note that sat in the room like a cat, I sent a recording of it to my grandfather.

He sent back: Again.

So I did it again. And again. By the end of February I could play the first half of The Kerry Polka at about the speed of a funeral, and I was almost happy.

In the family calendar, the one my mother keeps and nobody else touches, there are three days in March. My father's birthday, the 14th. St. Patrick's Day, the 17th, marked Parade, with a little green dot because my mother is from an Italian family in Watervliet and is the only one of us who has ever enjoyed it. And my grandmother Bríd's birthday, the 29th, which my mother kept in the calendar after she died, with no dot at all.

My father turned forty-six on a Saturday. On the Friday before, the 13th, I went with my grandfather to Jaber's Market as usual, through a morning of thin cold sleet, and when we got there Hiyam had a covered glass dish waiting on the counter beside the register, with a folded note taped to the lid in English: For Pat.

"Every year," said Karim, when he saw me looking. "Every March since I was a kid. She makes it the night before."

I lifted the edge of the lid. It was a pudding, smooth and the color of milky coffee, set in the dish, with a thick layer of chopped pistachios and walnuts and grated coconut on top, and a smell coming off it of caraway and cinnamon and something warm and spiced I did not know.

"Meghli," said Hiyam, from behind the half wall. "For when a boy is born. You make it for the neighbors and everybody comes to eat it. Every year on the birthday."

I looked at my grandfather. He was looking at the jars of turnips again.

My father, when I brought it to him on Saturday, said, "Oh, the Lebanese pudding. She always sends that." He had a spoon in his hand before I had the lid off. "I thought it was some Lebanese thing for St. Patrick's Day. Like, she was being nice."

"It's a thing for when a boy is born," I said.

He stopped with the spoon halfway to his mouth.

That week I had been reading the thirteenth letter. It was dated 18 March 1980, and it was the longest of all of them, four pages of airmail form, written very fast, with words crossed out and written over. Some of the lines ran uphill and some ran down. Fiadh said it was the handwriting of a man who had been up all night. It took me three weeks. I finished it on the Thursday night before his birthday, and on the Sunday after it, at my grandfather's table, after the dinner, while he was out in the yard putting seed on the wall for the birds, I read it to my father in English.

Dear Mama,

He is here. I know you know, you knew before me, but I have to write it anyway. The adjutant called me in on Saturday morning with the paper in his hand, and I thought someone was dead, and he said you are the father of a boy, Private, and shook my hand, and I walked out of the hut and straight into the wall.

Pádraig. Bríd says we will call him Pat. Seven pounds four ounces. Bríd says he has the Ó Máille nose, the poor creature, and Daid's ears. Bríd says she is grand and you were there and Peigí was there and the nurse from Inis Meáin, and that is all I know. I am reading the paper over and over like there will be more on it.

Mama, I don't know what to do with myself. I am here and he is there. He will be seven weeks old before I see him. I keep going up on the roof and looking west, like I'd see him if I looked hard enough, and the lads think I am mad.

Here is a thing. I told Samir and Samir told his father and his father told the whole village before dinner. In the evening Abu Samir came up to the post with Samir and the wife and the old mother, all four, and the old one up the hill on her two sticks, and they had a big dish with them covered in a cloth. It was a pudding, brown, made with rice flour and spices, with nuts all over the top, and Samir said in their country you make this when a boy is born and give it to everyone, and they had made it for me, because my mother was too far away to make it. Mama, the lads ate it standing up in the yard, eleven big Irish soldiers with spoons, and the old woman watched every bite.

And then Abu Samir put his two hands on my shoulders and said something to the whole yard, and Samir laughed and said, he says now you are Abu Batrik. Because here the father is called after the first son, father of. And they have no P in their language, so Pádraig is Batrik. I am Abu Batrik. The father of Pat. That is my name in Haddatha now, and the children are shouting it at me on the road.

I can't write any more, the light is going. Kiss him for me. Kiss Bríd. Tell her I am the happiest man in the Lebanon. Tell her I'll be home the first week in May and I'll never go anywhere again.

Your son, and his father, Tadhg

When I finished, my father did not say anything for a long time. He put his hand flat on the table, on the oilcloth, and moved it slowly back and forth, the way you smooth out a map.

"He was in the wall," he said at last.

"He walked out of the hut and straight into the wall."

"Seven weeks." My father shook his head. "I knew that. I knew he wasn't there. Mam always said it like, he was in Lebanon, like he was at work late." He looked out the window at the yard, where my grandfather was standing by the wall in the gray light with the bag of seed, very still, while the chickadees came down onto the stones around his hands. "And the pudding. Every year, Maeve. Forty-six years of somebody making a pudding because he was born, and I thought it was for St. Patrick."

"She's been making it since 1988. Before that—" I stopped. Before that, I did not know. Before that, maybe nobody.

"Abu Batrik," said my father, trying it out. "Abu Batrik." He laughed, a short laugh that was not quite a laugh. "That's what she calls him. Hiyam. I always thought she was saying a word in Arabic. Like, hey you."

"It is a word in Arabic," I said. "It's you."

My grandfather came in from the yard, stamping the snow off his boots on the mat, and hung his cap on the hook and looked at the two of us at the table, my father with his hand flat on the oilcloth and me with the legal pad, and he knew. I don't know how. He has always known when you've been talking about him, the way you know when somebody has been in your toolbox.

"Well," he said.

My father stood up. He is taller than my grandfather by four inches and has been since he was fifteen, and they have never been men who hug. My father put his arms around his father in the middle of the kitchen, with the snow from the yard still melting on my grandfather's shoulders, and held on. My grandfather stood with his arms at his sides for a moment, like a post, and then one hand came up and patted my father twice on the back, the way you settle a horse.

"You walked into the wall," said my father, into his shoulder.

"I did," said my grandfather. "I had a lump on me for a week."

On Tuesday, which was the 17th, St. Patrick's night, the back room of the Half Door was packed to the coats with people in green plastic hats, and my father came to the session for the first time in twenty years. He sat in the corner by the coats with me and a ginger ale and did not say anything. At the end of the night my grandfather took out the low whistle and played the slow air with no name, and my father sat with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the floor, and when it was finished he got up and went out to the car without his hat. I brought it to him. He was sitting in the driver's seat with the engine running and the heater going and the windshield fogged, and he did not look at me, and I gave him the hat and went back in.

The parade had gone up Central Avenue on the Saturday, my father's birthday, with the pipe bands and the fire trucks and the dancers in their curls, and green beer in the bars on Lark Street from ten in the morning. My grandfather, as always, had not gone. He never goes. On the Wednesday after the session I went over with a dish of my mother's lasagna and found him at the kitchen table with my father's baby photograph from 1980 in front of him, the one where my father is in a white knitted cardigan in my grandmother's arms in the doorway of the house in Carna. He had taken it down from the hall.

"I'm going to put that on the map," I said. "On Carna. With the date."

He nodded. Then he turned the photograph over and pushed it across the table toward me. On the back, in my great-grandmother's slow, upright hand, there was a line of Irish, and I could read it. It was the first sentence I had ever read in Irish without the dictionary.

Do Thadhg, i bhfad ó bhaile. For Tadhg, far from home.

"She sent it out to me," he said. "It came in April. I had it in my shirt pocket the rest of the time." He put his finger on the bottom corner, where under the Irish, in careful English capitals, as if she was not sure of the spelling, she had written two more words.

ABU BATRIK.

"She got it from my letter," he said. "She wanted me to laugh." He took the photograph back and looked at the front of it a long time. "I did."

Easter Sunday, Nineteen Eighty

There is a gap in the letters.

I did not notice it at first, because I was reading them one at a time, in order, at the speed of a dictionary. But at the end of March I laid the remaining ones out on my kitchen table to see how far I had to go, and I saw it. Through the winter he had written every week or two, and in March, around the baby, more often, the blue forms dated in a steady row: 2 March, 9 March, 13 March, 18 March, 23 March, 30 March. Then 3 April. Then nothing until the 14th. Then one on the 21st that was shorter than any of the others, half a side, and the hand was small and very neat, the opposite of the March letter, as if each word had been placed with tweezers.

I knew what had happened in April of 1980. I had known it, vaguely, since I was a teenager and typed my grandfather's name and the word Lebanon into a search bar and found nothing about him and a great deal about a place called At Tiri. I had read a paragraph and closed it. That spring I went back and read it properly, the way I would read the history behind a bill: the record first, the stories after.

So here is the record, as plainly as I can put it. The Irish battalion, the 46th, took over its area of south Lebanon on the 3rd of November 1979, six hundred and fifty-three men, with their headquarters at Camp Shamrock in Tibnin. The area was a patchwork. Some villages were under the United Nations, some in a strip along the border were held by a local militia armed and backed from across the border, and the two touched at the edges. On Easter Sunday, the 6th of April 1980, men of that militia forced their way into At Tiri, a village in the Irish area, to set up a position there. The Irish refused to let them. For six days there was a standoff, with fire exchanged; Irish soldiers were taken and released; a Galway man was wounded on the 7th and died on the 16th; a Fijian peacekeeper was killed on the 12th; Dutch troops came in to help. On the 12th the United Nations forces took the village back. Six days later, on the 18th of April, two Irish soldiers were taken from a supply convoy by the same militia and killed, and a third was wounded and survived.

I am not going to write more about that than that. Those men have names, and families, and the families have spoken for themselves for forty-six years, and it is not my place. I will say only that I read that he was a Galway man and sat back in my chair, because my grandmother Bríd grew up in Salthill, and Galway is a small place, and her brother would have gone to school with boys like him.

The letter of the 14th of April said this.

Dear Mama,

You'll have heard it on the radio. We are all right. I am all right, not a scratch on me, I swear it. Don't believe the half of what they say and don't worry about the other half. It is over now. I am eating and sleeping and the lads are in good form.

I got the photograph of Pat. I have it in my shirt.

Your son, Tadhg

And the letter of the 21st said this.

Dear Mama,

Bad news here this week. You'll have heard. I didn't know them well. Think of their mothers. I am all right. I'll be home soon.

Tadhg

That was all. Half a side of blue airmail form, folded three times.

It took me twenty minutes to read both, because the words were easy. I had all of them in my word list already, in my grandfather's voice. Scratch. Radio. Photograph. Mothers. It was the first time I had read a whole letter without the dictionary, and I wished I had not been able to.

Then I sat at the kitchen table in Pine Hills, at ten o'clock on a Tuesday night in the last week of March, with the window open an inch for the first time that year and the smell of wet ground coming in, and I thought about a boy of twenty-four in a house with sandbags at the windows, a month after he walked into a wall for joy, writing to his mother that he was not scratched. I thought about every letter after it, which I had already glanced at, and which went back to oranges and walls and the weather as if April had been a bad day at the bog. I thought about the slow air at the Half Door every Tuesday for thirty years, with no name.

I called my father.

"Does he do anything," I said, "in April?"

There was a long pause on the line. I could hear the television, a ball game, and my mother saying something in the kitchen.

"The sixth," said my father. "He goes to the park. Early. Mam told me once, years ago, not to call him that morning. She said he goes down to the lake in Washington Park before it's light and comes back at eight and has his breakfast and that's that. I don't think he knows she told me." Another pause. "I never went. I thought it was his business."

The 6th of April 2026 was a Monday, the day after Easter. It was forty-six years to the day.

I took the day off work. I did not tell anyone why. I set an alarm for half past four and walked from my apartment down Western Avenue in the dark, with the streetlights still on and the air cold and damp and the trees just beginning to fuzz at the tips, and nobody out except a man walking a very old beagle and a city bus going by empty with its lights blazing like a ship. I came into Washington Park at the top by the big monument and went down the slope toward the lake in the blue half-dark. The grass was soaking. The tulip beds along the paths had been planted the autumn before, thousands of bulbs, and the first green blades were up in rows like a crop, but nothing yet showing color. The lake was black and very still, with a thin skin of mist on it, and the old stone lakehouse at the far end sat with its roof against a sky that was going from navy to gray.

He was on the bridge. The old stone bridge across the narrow part of the lake. I saw him from a long way off, a short wide figure in a cap and a dark coat, standing at the middle of the bridge facing east, the way he must have stood on the roof in Haddatha looking west. I stopped under a tree, a hundred yards back, and did not go any closer.

When the sky over the trees behind the lakehouse had gone the color of a pigeon's breast, he took the low whistle out of his coat. He played the slow air. Out there, over the water, with nothing around it, it was a different tune from the one in the back room of the Half Door. It was slower. It went out across the lake and hung there in the mist, and the turns on the long notes sounded like a voice catching. Two geese came off the water at the far end and went up over the trees honking, and he did not stop for them. He played it through once and then he played it again, slower, and then he stood with the whistle down at his side and his head bowed, for a long time, while the light came up and the first jogger went by on the path below the bridge in a yellow jacket, not looking.

I stayed under my tree. I had come to see if he did it, and he did, and I thought now I should go home and let it be his business. I had turned to go when I heard him say, not loud, across the hundred yards of wet grass, "You may as well come over, Maeve. You're standing on the tulips."

I was. I came over.

He did not look at me when I came onto the bridge. He was looking at the water. His face was red with the cold and wet under the eyes, and he did not wipe it and I did not say anything about it. I stood beside him at the parapet. The mist was lifting off the lake in patches and you could see the bottom near the edge, dead leaves and a bicycle wheel.

"Your father told you," he said.

"Granny told Dad. Years ago."

"Bríd." He nodded slowly. "She would." He turned the whistle over in his hands. "I've been doing this since eighty-one. In Galway I went down to the Claddagh, by the water, by the swans. Here it's the geese." He was quiet a while. "You read the April ones."

"Yes."

"Then you know what's in them."

"I know what isn't."

He breathed out through his nose, a long breath, and it went white in front of him and drifted off over the parapet.

"I'm not able," he said. "I'm sorry, a stór. I'm not able for it. Not yet." He put the whistle away inside his coat. "But there's a man in Kinsale. Mossie Kearney. He was at the post with me, the whole six months. He talks. He talks more than any man you ever met. He's in the association, the veterans, he goes into schools and tells them about it, he wrote a piece for the paper. If you want it, ask Mossie." He looked at me then, that extra second. "Tell him I said it was all right."

"Is it all right?"

"No," said my grandfather. "But tell him anyway."

We walked back up through the park together as the sun came over the trees, past the tulip beds and the monument and the tennis courts with their nets taken down for winter, and out onto Madison Avenue where the coffee shop was just opening. He bought us two teas and two scones, which he examined critically and pronounced dry, and we ate them on a bench in the sun, and he talked about the stone in the lakehouse wall, which he says came down the river from the bluestone country, and the bad repointing somebody had done on the south side in the 1980s, with hard cement that would crack the stone. He was right. I went and looked at it later. It had.

That night I added nothing to the family's private space. I sat with the April letters for a long time, and then I put them back in the boot box in their order, and I did not photograph the back of the 21st, where in the corner, small, in pencil, there was a word I had not been able to find in any dictionary, and which I would not ask anyone about for a long time.

The next morning, I found Mossie Kearney.

Mossie from Kinsale

The Irish veterans of the United Nations have their own association, with branches in towns all over the country, and the branches have meetings in hotel function rooms and the backs of pubs, and they march on certain days with their blue berets on, and some of them keep websites the way you would keep a parish newsletter, with photographs of men in blazers holding plaques. The branch in Cork had a page with a phone number on it. I called it at eight in the morning Albany time, one o'clock in Cork, and a woman answered who said she was only in to do the accounts, and when I said the name Mossie Kearney she laughed so loudly I had to hold the phone away.

"Mossie? Oh, you'll have no trouble with Mossie, girl. The trouble'll be getting him to stop."

By that evening I had a message from a man who signed himself M. Kearney, Sgt. (retd.), 46 Inf Bn and others, and who wrote, in full: Tadhg Ó Máille's granddaughter!!! Ring me any time. Not before nine my time, Noreen will kill you. Not during the hurling.

We talked on a video call on the Saturday, the 11th of April. I sat at my kitchen table in Pine Hills at eleven in the morning, with a pot of tea and the legal pad and the boot box beside me, and the screen filled with a man of sixty-nine in a navy jumper with a face like a cheerful potato, very bald, with enormous white eyebrows, sitting in a bay window with a harbor behind him. It was four in the afternoon there and raining. Through the rain on his window I could see boats at their moorings, white and blue and one red, and across the water a row of houses painted yellow and pink and mint green climbing a hill, and gulls standing on a wall.

"Look at you," he said, before I could say anything. "You're the spit of him. You are, you are. Noreen! Come here till you see. That's Tadhg's granddaughter. In America."

A woman leaned into the picture in an apron, waved, said, "Don't let him go on," and leaned out.

I had prepared what I would say in Irish. I had practiced it with Fiadh. I said it: my name is Maeve, I am the granddaughter of Tadhg Ó Máille, I am learning Irish, I am reading the letters he wrote to his mother from Lebanon, and he says it is all right for me to talk to you.

Mossie Kearney looked at me with his eyebrows up around his scalp. Then he answered me in Irish, slowly, in the hard clipped Irish of a Cork school, and I understood about half of it. Then he said, in English, "That's the most Irish I've spoken since the Leaving Cert. Your grandfather would have been ashamed of me. He was always ashamed of my Irish. He used to say I spoke it like a man reading a bus timetable." He leaned back and the chair creaked. "Did he really say it was all right?"

"He said to tell you it was."

"Did he say it was?"

I hesitated. "He said no. But tell him anyway."

Mossie laughed until he coughed. "That's him," he said, wiping his eyes. "Oh, that's him to the life. All right. Pour your tea, girl. I'll tell you what I know."

He talked for two hours and ten minutes. I have the recording; he said I could keep it. I am not going to put most of it here. Most of it was about the six months, not the six days. The post at the edge of Haddatha with its sandbagged windows and its eleven men. The corporal from Mayo who snored. The fellow from Ballinasloe and his fries. The dog they adopted, a yellow bitch with one ear up and one ear down, that they called Corporal. The day the water truck went into a ditch. The football match against the Dutch that ended in a riot, a friendly riot, Mossie said, nobody hurt, but the referee was a Fijian major and he never refereed again. My grandfather on the roof with his whistle in the evenings, and Abu Samir on his own roof across the way with the shepherd's flute, the two of them going back and forth across the dusk like birds. The boy Samir murdering The Kerry Polka. The cake. Mossie remembered the cake. He remembered the meghli, the night of the baby.

"He walked into the wall," Mossie said. "Did you know that? Came out of the adjutant's hut with the paper and walked straight into the wall of the cookhouse. Bang. We thought he'd been shot."

Then I asked about April. He stopped smiling. Not all at once. The smile went out of his face a bit at a time, the way the light goes out of a room in the evening.

"Our post wasn't At Tiri," he said. "I want you to know that first. The lads at At Tiri, that was them, that was their week. We were on the road behind, between Haddatha and there. We were stood to. That means for six days we never stood down. We slept in our boots, in the bunker under the house, when we slept. The firing was a couple of miles off most of the time, and then some nights it wasn't, some nights there'd be a round go over the roof, or a few, and you'd hear it go over, and you'd be lying there in the dark with your heart going." He looked away from the screen, out his rainy window. "We had three young lads in the section that were only out of training. Eighteen, nineteen. One of them, a Dublin lad, he'd go to pieces at night. Not his fault. Shaking, you know. Couldn't stop it."

He was quiet for a moment.

"Your grandfather," he said, "on the second night, in the bunker, with the lights out, and the firing going off over toward At Tiri, he started singing. In Irish. Low. Not to anyone. Just, out into the dark. I didn't know what it was. I found out after. It was a lullaby. Seoithín seo hó. The one the mothers sing at home to settle the babies. And then another one after it, and another. He'd only just found out about your father, you see, the baby. I think he was practicing. I think he'd been lying awake planning the songs he'd sing to him." Mossie rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "And the Dublin lad, he stopped shaking. He went to sleep. And your grandfather kept on singing, every night, the whole of that week, at about two in the morning, in the dark. All the old songs. The ones his mother sang. We'd lie there and listen to him. None of us had a word of what he was singing and we all knew exactly what it was."

I could not say anything. I wrote on the legal pad, seoithín, which I would have to look up, and found my hand was not steady.

"Then the thing on the eighteenth," said Mossie. "The convoy. You know about that."

"I read about it."

"He knew one of them to see. Not well. From the canteen at Shamrock, from the queue for the phone, you know." Mossie shook his head. "He didn't say anything when we heard. He went up on the roof. He stayed up there till dark. And he didn't speak, Maeve, not one word, to anyone, for three days. Did his duty, ate his food, never said a word. We were worried about him. We didn't know what to do."

"What happened after three days?"

"Abu Samir happened." Mossie almost smiled again. "On the third evening he came up the hill to the post on his own, which he never did, he always came with the boy. He had a round of their bread wrapped in a cloth. He didn't have a word of English, and your grandfather wasn't talking in any language, so he just sat down beside him on the step of the post and tore the bread in half and gave him half. And they sat there. The two of them. Eating bread on the step, looking down the valley, not a word. For an hour, I'd say. And then Abu Samir put his hand on your grandfather's back, like this," and Mossie put his big hand flat on the air in front of him, "and he said one word. I don't know what it was. Something like mallish. Malaish. And got up and went home. And your grandfather came inside and said to me, Mossie, is there tea. And that was the end of it."

I put the pen down. Malaish. In my boot box, on the back of the letter of the 21st of April, in the corner, in pencil, there was a word I had not been able to find in any dictionary of Irish, because it was not Irish. It was spelled the way a boy from Carna would spell a sound he had heard once on a step, at dusk, from a man who had no English. Máleis.

I did not tell Mossie. I don't know why. I think I wanted to keep it for my grandfather.

At the end, when Noreen had come in twice to say the dinner was on the table, I asked Mossie one last thing. I asked whether he knew what had happened to Abu Samir's family.

"I went back in eighty-three," he said. "So did your grandfather, with a different battalion, and we both went up to Haddatha. The old mother was dead by then. Abu Samir was the same as ever, building walls. Samir was seventeen and could play the whistle better than your grandfather, which put Tadhg in a terrible humor. He had his eye on going away, Samir. There was nothing for the young ones there then, with the war. He had a cousin in Canada, he said. Montreal. I remember because I thought, the poor divil, the cold." Mossie spread his hands. "After that I don't know. The south had a hard time of it, Maeve. For years. Hard times, more wars than one. A lot of people went."

"Montreal," I said, and wrote it down.

"That's only up the road from you, isn't it?"

"Four hours."

"Four hours." Mossie Kearney leaned into the screen, so his face filled it, his eyebrows and his potato nose and his wet blue eyes. "Listen to me now. If you find that boy, you ring me. And you tell your grandfather Mossie says he's a stubborn Connemara mule and he should have rung me himself twenty years ago. And you tell him," and he stopped. "Tell him I still can't sleep through the night without hearing that lullaby. Tell him I sang it to my own three. Badly. In Cork Irish. Tell him that."

I said I would. That night I saved the recording in the family's private space, in a folder of its own, and set it so only I could open it for now, and under it I typed: Mossie Kearney, Kinsale, 11 April 2026. Recorded with his consent. For Granda, when he wants it.

On Sunday I told my grandfather I had talked to Mossie. He was peeling potatoes. He did not turn around.

"And how is the bould Mossie?"

"He says you're a stubborn Connemara mule."

"He would know." A long curl of peel dropped into the sink. "Did he talk?"

"Two hours and ten minutes."

My grandfather put down the knife and stood with both hands on the edge of the sink, looking out the window at the wall.

"Did he tell you about the step?" he said.

"He did."

He nodded. Then he picked up the knife and went on peeling. After a while he said, without turning, "You found the word."

"Máleis."

"It means never mind," said my grandfather. "More or less. It's what you say when you spill the tea. It's what you say when the whole world is broken." He dropped a potato into the pot of water. "There's no word in Irish for it. I looked."

What He Said at the Wall

The tulips in Washington Park come out all at once in the first week of May, a hundred and something thousand of them, the city says, in beds laid out like carpets along the paths, red and yellow and a purple so dark it is nearly black, and the whole of Albany goes down to look at them on Mother's Day weekend. There is a festival, with a Tulip Queen and a street scrubbing on State Street in Dutch costume with brooms, a thing that has been going on since the 1940s and that nobody under eighty can explain. There are food trucks and face painting and a stage with bands. It is the day the city decides winter is over, whatever the weather says.

My grandfather has never once gone. He says the tulips will be there on Monday and the people won't.

So on the Saturday of the festival, the 9th of May, while half the city was in the park, I was in his backyard on Elm Street in a pair of his old work gloves, which came halfway to my elbows, helping him rebuild the stretch of wall the frost had heaved the year before.

He had been putting it off since spring of 2025. A single stone had come out near the garage end, a long flat piece of Hudson Avenue bluestone, and when one stone comes out of a dry wall, he says, the wall starts to think about it. The stones on either side had shifted. The top had a sag in it like an old horse. He could have fixed it in an afternoon on his own. Instead, on the Thursday, he had sent me a message, the longest he had ever sent, which said: Saturday 8am. Wear old clothes. Bring gloves. Not the good ones. And then, a minute later: Please.

It was a soft warm gray morning, the first really warm day, with the smell of cut grass coming over the fences and somebody's lilac two yards down so strong it was like a perfume counter. The robins were working the lawn. From the direction of the park, faint, you could hear a brass band tuning up.

He took the wall down first. That surprised me. I thought we would just put the one stone back. But he said no, you have to take it down to where it's sound, and he lifted the top stones off one at a time and laid them out on the grass in a row in the order they came off, like a man taking apart an engine, so that the wall lay on the lawn in front of us in pieces, a stretch about five feet long, and the old stones that had been in the dark for thirty years were dark and damp underneath and smelled of earth and had pale worms on them. Then he showed me how to build.

"Big ones at the bottom," he said. "Long side into the wall, not along it. You want the length going in, like a book on a shelf, not like a book on a table. One over two and two over one, so every stone sits across a joint. Never one joint over another joint, or you've a crack waiting. And the batter. Look." He held his two flat hands up in front of him, leaning in toward each other like a tent. "The wall leans in on itself as it goes up. Both faces. So every stone is leaning on the stones behind it. That's what holds it. Nothing else."

"Each one holding up the others," I said.

He looked at me. "That's what I said."

We worked for two hours before he said anything else. I lifted stones that were heavier than I expected, every one, and set them wrong, and he took them off and turned them a quarter turn and set them right, and the difference was something I could feel in my hands when I tried to rock them afterward and they would not rock. In the middle, between the two faces, he showed me how to fill the space with small stones, packed tight, which he called hearting. "The face is what people see," he said. "The hearting is what holds it up. Nobody ever sees the hearting." He let me do the hearting on my own. It was like doing a jigsaw puzzle with no picture and no edges, in the dark. I loved it.

At about half past ten, with the wall back up to knee height and both of us sweating, he sat down on the low part of it with a mug of tea, and patted the stone beside him, and I sat. The band in the park had got going. You could hear the bass drum and not much else, thump, thump, like a big heart a long way off.

"I'll tell you," he said. "Now. Here. The once. And I'll not tell it again, so you'd better listen."

I listened.

I am not going to write down all of what he told me. I have thought about it a great deal since, and I think some of it was for me, and some of it was for the wall, and only some of it is for this book. But I will write down what he said I could, because I asked him, at the end, and he thought about it and said, "That much. You can put that much."

He told me about the bunker under the house at Haddatha, which had been a cellar for keeping olives and smelled of them. He told me about the sound of rounds going over in the dark, a sound like tearing cloth, and how on the second night he lay on his back on a camp bed in his boots with his rifle beside him and was so frightened he could not feel his hands. He said that plainly. "I was frightened, Maeve. Every man there was frightened, and any man who tells you different is a liar or a fool. I was twenty-four. I had a son three weeks old I'd never seen."

He told me about the Dublin lad who shook. He said he did not decide to sing. He said he heard his mother singing in the kitchen in Carna in his head, so loud he thought for a moment she was in the cellar with them, and he opened his mouth and it came out, and once it came out he could feel his hands again. He said he sang every lullaby she ever sang to him and to Peigí and to Seán, and then the slow songs, and then, by the fourth night, he had run out of songs, and he started making up a tune of his own, in the dark, with no words, to keep going. "That's the tune," he said. "The last one. At the Half Door. It was made in a cellar full of olives, at two in the morning, for a boy from Crumlin who couldn't stop shaking and a baby in Galway I'd never seen. That's all it is."

He told me about the young engineer from Galway who was wounded on the 7th and died on the 16th, whom he had not known, and how it was the first time it came into his head that he might not go home. He told me about hearing the news of the 18th on the radio in the post, and going up on the roof, and how he could not go down again because if he went down he would have to speak, and if he spoke, he did not know what would come out. He told me about the step. He told it almost exactly the way Mossie had. The bread torn in half. The hour without words. The hand on his back. Máleis.

"I wanted to go home," he said. "After that. I wanted to go home that night and never come back to any of it. And I'd have gone, if I could. And then Abu Samir sat down beside me with the bread." He turned his mug in his hands. "He'd lost a brother in the war, years before. Samir told me that, later. He knew. He didn't have to say anything. That's the thing I never could explain to anyone at home. He knew, and I knew he knew, and neither of us had a word of the other's language, and it didn't matter. That was the whole of it. The bread and the step and knowing."

The band in the park had stopped. A cardinal was singing on the garage roof, the same three notes over and over.

"Why didn't you ever tell anyone?" I asked. "Granny. Dad."

He was quiet a long time.

"Because once you tell a thing," he said, "it's a story. It has a beginning and an end. People nod and they say, oh, that's terrible, and then they ask you to pass the salt. And those lads aren't a story. They're lads." He put his mug down on the wall. "I told Bríd some. Not all. She knew the rest without me telling her. She always did. That's why she never let anyone ring me on the sixth."

Then he said something I have thought about every day since. He said: "There's a thing my mother wrote to me. After. In her letter back. A seanfhocal, an old saying. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine." He said it slowly, so I could get it. "People live in each other's shelter. In the shadow of each other. That's what she wrote me. She'd not say any more about that week than that, and neither would I. She knew too." He stood up, and his knees cracked, and he looked down at the wall. "That's what this is," he said. "That's what a wall is. Every stone in the shelter of the next one. You can't build it on your own and it can't stand on its own." He picked up the next stone from the row on the grass and handed it to me. "Long side in."

I put it in, long side in, across the joint. It did not rock.

We finished the wall at a little after one. The last stone on the top was the long flat piece of Hudson Avenue bluestone that had fallen out the spring before, and he let me set it. Then he stood back, and walked the length of it slowly, and put his hand on the pale stone from Haddatha in the middle, and nodded. From the gate we heard someone say "Well, now," and it was Walter Prentice, in a straw hat and a short-sleeved shirt, who had come by from the festival with a paper plate of fried dough under a snow of powdered sugar. He looked at the new section of wall for a long time, and then at me, and then at my grandfather.

"She do that?"

"The hearting," said my grandfather. "And the cope stone."

Mr. Prentice nodded slowly. "Then she's a mason," he said, and offered me the plate.

That night, at home, sore in muscles I had not known I had, I wrote down what my grandfather had said I could put. Then I went into the family's private space, into the list of words, and added three. Hearting. Batter. Ar scáth a chéile. There was no recording beside them. I had not wanted to take out my phone at the wall.

On Sunday, Mother's Day, at my parents' house in Delmar, where they moved from Center Square when Conor started high school, with my mother's family down from Watervliet and my brother home from Oswego and a tray of sausage and peppers on the table, my grandfather came in late, which he never does, and sat beside me, and put his phone on the table between us. He held up a finger for me to wait. Then he pressed it, and out of the speaker, small and tinny and unmistakable, came his own voice, saying the three words slowly, one at a time. Hearting. Batter. And then, after a pause where you could hear his kitchen clock, the whole of it. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine.

"I did it last night," he said. "On my own. Put it on your list."

The Tune With No Name

The last letter of the first tour is dated the 1st of May 1980, and it is written in pencil because, he says in the first line, his pen has been stolen by a Dutchman. It is cheerful. It is the most cheerful of all of them. The battalion was handing over to the 47th in two days and going home, and he wrote it, he says, sitting on the terrace wall in Haddatha in the evening, with the sun going down behind him and the whole valley gone gold.

Dear Mama,

This is the last one from here. When you get it I'll be nearly home, and I'll be up the boreen before the postman, so you can read it to me yourself.

I went down to say goodbye today. The wife made the bread and the old mother's chair was empty in the doorway, she is poorly, and I went in to her and she held my hand and said a lot of things and Samir wouldn't tell me what they were. He said they were for me, not for him to say. I'll take his word for it.

Abu Samir took a stone out of the top of our wall and gave it to me. I said no and he said yes. You don't argue with a man like that about a stone. It's in my kit bag. I'll show you. It is the color of the inside of a shell.

And I gave Samir my good whistle. The black one with the brass ring that Uncle Colm gave me when I was fourteen. Don't be cross. He has been playing that tin one I gave him at Christmas till there's no paint left on it, and he's getting good, Mama, better than me on the fast tunes, which I'll never admit to anyone at home. He cried when I gave it to him and pretended he didn't. So did I, a bit. Don't tell Peigí.

I'm coming home. I'm coming home to see my son. I'll be in Carna the week after next for the turf, and I'll carry it home on my own back if I have to.

Your son, Tadhg

When I got to the end of that one I put down my pencil and sat at my kitchen table on a warm evening in late May, with the window open and the sound of someone's sprinkler going tick-tick-tick across a lawn, and thought: he gave away his whistle. The good one. And then he came to Albany and played for nearly forty years on a cheap one with a green mouthpiece, and never bought himself a better one, and I had never wondered why.

There were nineteen more letters, from the second tour, in 1983. I read them that spring faster than the first ones, because I was better at it and because I was looking for one thing. They were different. He was twenty-seven, a corporal, a father, a man who had been there before, and he wrote to his mother about the changes: new posts, new faces, the roads worse, the war around the area worse, more men with guns who belonged to nobody. He went up to Haddatha in his second week. The old mother had died in 1981. Abu Samir had built four more terrace walls and a new room on the house. And Samir was seventeen.

He is a man now, Mama, taller than me, and he plays my old whistle like a Clare man. He knows The Blackbird and The Kesh and The Kerry Polka and a slow one he made up himself that he says is called the Irishman, which he plays for me on the roof and won't tell me which Irishman. He wants to go away. His father won't hear of it. There's a cousin in Canada, in Montreal, and the cousin writes letters about snow and work and Samir reads them over and over till the paper goes soft. I said to him, Samir, I'm from a place where everyone goes away, and every one of them wants to come back. He said, then you'll understand when I go.

That was the letter of the 19th of June 1983. I read it on the 2nd of June 2026, and on the 3rd I went to Jaber's Market on my lunch hour, not on a Friday, which I had never done, and found Lina Jaber at the counter with a laptop and a cup of Turkish coffee, doing the books.

Lina was twenty-eight, Karim's sister, a graphic designer who did the market's signs and website and, on weekends, painted murals. She had painted the one on the side of the building, which I had passed a hundred times: a long panel of the hills of south Lebanon in olive green and stone white, with terraces stepping down them like the lines of a hand, and across the bottom, in a band of blue, the Hudson River with the Albany skyline drawn small and precise, the Capitol and the Egg and the Corning Tower, and between the two landscapes, no border, the one running into the other. Her grandmother had told her what the hills looked like. She had never been.

I told her what I was looking for. I showed her a photograph my grandfather had let me take out of his album, from 1983: a tall thin young man with a mustache and a striped shirt, on a stone roof, holding a black whistle to his lips, with a valley behind him and a far mountain with snow on it.

Lina looked at it for a long time. Then she picked up her phone and called her grandmother.

I should explain what happened next, because I would not have believed it if I had not watched it. Hiyam Jaber was at home, in a two-family house in the Pine Hills six blocks from my apartment, and I had thought of her as an old woman who baked on Fridays. In the next ten days I found out that she was a switchboard. She called her sister in Dearborn. Her sister called a woman from Haddatha in Dearborn whose husband had been in school with someone. That someone's son was in Montreal. The son's wife's cousin had a shop. There were calls to Beirut, and to Sydney, and to a town in Brazil I had never heard of, and to Montreal again. Lina made a group on her phone and added me to it, and for ten days it buzzed in my pocket at my desk in the Bill Drafting Commission with messages in Arabic and French and English and voice notes from old women, and Lina translated them in the evenings, and Hiyam called me every night at nine to report like a general. She did not ask my grandfather anything. She said she would not tell him until there was something to tell. "Men," she said, "are no good at waiting."

On the 13th of June, a Saturday, at seven in the evening, Lina sent me a phone number in Montreal and a name. Samir Daher. Sixty. A tile and stone setter in the Saint-Laurent borough, with his own small company, Daher Pierre et Céramique, three trucks. Married, a widower now. One daughter, Rania, a pharmacist. Came to Canada in 1989. Plays, said the message from the cousin's wife's cousin, the Irish flute.

I sat with the number for an hour. Then I called my father, who said, "Don't you dare call that man before you tell your grandfather," which I had already decided. Then I drove to Elm Street.

My grandfather was in the backyard in the long June evening, in a folding chair beside the wall, with the low whistle across his knees and a glass of water, watching the swifts go over. The light was coming in sideways and gold across the yards, and the new stones of the section we had rebuilt in May were a little paler than the old ones, and the stone from Haddatha in the middle glowed like the inside of a shell. He looked up when I came through the gate and saw my face.

"What," he said.

I gave him the phone with the number on it, and the name, and the photograph from the album beside it.

He looked at it a long time. His face did not change, except at the mouth. Then he handed me back the phone, and he picked up the low whistle, and he played. He played the slow air. In his own backyard, sitting in a folding chair in his shirtsleeves in the warm light, with the swifts screaming overhead and somebody's television going two houses down, he played the tune with no name the whole way through, and I stood by the wall and listened, and when he finished he played it again, and this time when he got to the place where it goes up and hangs, he held it, and held it, until the note thinned out to nothing.

Then he said, "Ring him."

"You ring him."

"I can't." He held out his big hand, flat, and it was shaking very slightly, the way I had never once seen it shake on a stone. "Look at that. You ring him. I'll talk after."

So I rang. I put it on video, because I wanted to see, and I held the phone up in the backyard with the wall behind me, and it rang four times. Then the screen filled with a long thin face with a gray mustache, a man in a work shirt in a kitchen with yellow cabinets, holding his glasses in one hand.

"Allo?" he said. "Oui?"

I said, in English, that my name was Maeve O'Malley, that I was calling from Albany, New York, and that I was the granddaughter of Tadhg O'Malley, who was an Irish soldier in Haddatha in 1980.

The man in the kitchen in Montreal did not say anything at all. He put his glasses on, slowly, and leaned toward his screen, and looked past me, to the wall, and to the old man in the folding chair beside it who had stood up.

"Abu Batrik?" he said.

My grandfather came and stood behind my shoulder. He did not say anything either. The two of them looked at each other through my phone, across two hundred and twenty miles and forty-three years. Then Samir Daher reached out of the picture, and his hand came back holding something, and he held it up to the screen.

It was a black whistle, very old, with the paint worn to the metal where the fingers go, and a brass ring at the top.

"I still have it," said Samir Daher. "Habibi. I still have it."

My grandfather put his hand on my shoulder, heavily, the way you lean on a wall. He opened his mouth, and what came out was not English, or Irish, or Arabic, but a sound like the one he must have made the day he walked into the wall of the cookhouse. And then he laughed, and wiped his face with the back of his hand, and took the phone from me, and went down to the end of the yard with it, by the garage, where the old stones are, and I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on and stood at the sink, not listening, while the light went down over the wall and the two of them talked for an hour and twenty minutes in a mixture of English and bad Arabic and worse French, with long silences, and once, faintly, through the open window, the sound of two whistles playing The Kerry Polka very badly, at the same time, two hundred and twenty miles apart.

Up the Northway

We went on the last Saturday of June, in my mother's Subaru, because my car has a check-engine light that has been on since I was in law school and my grandfather said he was not crossing an international border in a car that was already complaining. We left Elm Street at six in the morning with two passports, a thermos of tea, a tin of brown bread wrapped in a tea towel, the boot box of letters, which he had asked me to bring, and the low whistle in his inside pocket. He sat in the passenger seat with his cap on his knee and the seat belt held away from his chest with one hand, the way he has always worn a seat belt, as if it might go off.

The Northway runs straight up out of Albany past the malls and the office parks and the commuter towns, and then, about an hour out, past Glens Falls, it starts to climb and the trees close in, and suddenly you are in the Adirondacks and there is nothing but forest and rock and sky. It was a clear blue morning, already warm. The road cuts went by, walls of gray granite blasted through with the drill marks still in them, and my grandfather looked at every one. "Anorthosite," he said, at one. "Look at the crystals in that." At another, "That's a terrible job of blasting." At Lake George we came down out of the hills and the lake opened out on the right, long and blue and glittering, with the mountains folding down to it on both sides and a white steamboat out on the water, and he said nothing at all for a long while.

North of the lake the mountains went on, wave after wave of them, dark green and blue, with the mist still lying in the low places and the occasional red barn or a sign for maple syrup. He talked, a little. He told me about the first time he drove this road, in 1988, in Walter Prentice's pickup, going to look at a stone farmhouse in Keene that needed a chimney, and how he had seen a bear crossing the road with two cubs and Mr. Prentice had said, "Well, that's the Adirondacks," as if the bear were a sign. He told me Bríd had loved Lake Placid in the winter and had made him take her every year for her birthday to walk around Mirror Lake on the ice. I had not known that either.

Past Plattsburgh the mountains fell back to the west and the land went flat, wide open dairy country with Lake Champlain shining off to the right like a strip of tin, silos and hayfields and Holsteins standing in the long grass, and then we were at the border. There was a line of cars, and a booth, and a young Canadian officer in a navy shirt who looked at our passports and at my grandfather and asked what the purpose of our visit was.

"To see a friend," said my grandfather.

"How long since you've seen him?"

"Forty-three years."

The officer looked up from the passports. He was perhaps twenty-five. He looked at my grandfather's face for a second, and then he handed the passports back without another question and said, "Bonne visite, monsieur."

Montreal comes up at you across the flat farmland on the Autoroute 15, first as a smudge, and then as a mountain, the small green mountain in the middle of the city that gives it its name, and then as bridges and towers and traffic. Samir's house was in Saint-Laurent, in the northwest of the island, on a quiet street of brick duplexes with the iron outdoor staircases Montreal is known for, curling up from the sidewalk to the second-floor doors like the stems of plants. The trees were enormous, maples and lindens, and the street was striped with shade. There were children's bicycles on the lawns and a man washing a car and the smell of somebody grilling. We found the number. Before I had the car in park the front door of the downstairs flat opened, and a tall thin man in a pressed white shirt came down the three steps, and stopped at the bottom.

My grandfather got out of the car. He left his cap on the seat.

I will not try to describe it. I stayed in the car with my hands on the wheel. They walked toward each other on the sidewalk under the linden trees, a short wide old man and a tall thin one, and stopped about a yard apart, and looked at each other, and then Samir Daher said something in Arabic and put out both his arms, and my grandfather, who has never in my life been a man who hugs, walked into them.

There was a young woman on the steps behind, in a green dress, with her hand over her mouth. That was Rania. When I finally got out of the car she came down and shook my hand very formally and then gave up and hugged me too, and said in English with a French accent, "My father has been cleaning the house for two weeks. He repainted the hall. He bought new glasses for the tea. He has not slept."

"Neither has mine," I said.

Inside, the flat was cool and dim and smelled of coffee and orange blossom water and floor polish, and the dining table had been extended with a second table, a card table, covered with the same white cloth, and on it was enough food for the Irish battalion. I will only say that there were small pies of spinach and lemon folded into triangles, and a bowl of tabbouleh so green it was nearly all parsley, and labneh with olive oil pooled in it, and a whole fish, and stuffed grape leaves, and pickles the same pink as the ones at Jaber's Market, and a tall stack of thin bread folded in quarters like cloth, which Samir had driven to a bakery on Jean-Talon at six that morning to get. My grandfather looked at the bread and then at Samir.

"Markouk," he said.

"I could not make it," said Samir. "My mother made it. My wife could. Me, never. My arms are no good." He held up his forearms. They were thin and brown and roped with muscle, a tile setter's arms, and covered to the elbow with old white scars from stone. "Stone, I can do. Bread, no."

We ate. Or rather, my grandfather and I ate, and Samir and Rania filled our plates. Every time my plate was close to empty it was full again. At some point I remembered the letter, and looked across the table at my grandfather, and saw that he was leaving a small piece of bread and a single olive on the side of his plate, very deliberately, the way his mother taught him. Samir saw it too. He looked at the bread and the olive, and then at my grandfather, and then he threw back his head and laughed so loudly that Rania jumped.

"Still!" said Samir. "Forty-six years! Still he leaves it on the plate so we'll know he has enough! And still in this house it means fill it up!" And he filled it up.

After the food there was tea, in the new glasses, very sweet. And then Samir got up and went into the other room and came back with two things in his hands, and set them on the white tablecloth between the dishes.

One was the black whistle with the brass ring. The other was a short cane flute, open at both ends, dark brown and polished nearly black with handling, with six holes and a band of copper wire wound around the bottom where it had once split.

"My father's shabbabeh," said Samir. "He died in 2003. My mother in 2011. When I go back, for my mother, I bring this. Nothing else. The house," and he spread his hands, "the house, my cousin has. It has been hit, repaired, hit, repaired. The village has seen more than one war since your time, Abu Batrik. You know this." My grandfather nodded. "But the wall," said Samir, and he took out his phone and scrolled and held it out, and there, in a photograph from 2019, was a terrace wall on a hillside of pale stone and olive trees, chest high, nine feet long, with a man in a blue shirt standing beside it for scale, and on the top of it, set in the middle, a stone that did not quite match the others. "This is the stone my father put back," said Samir. "In the place of yours. Still there. My cousin sends me the picture every year."

My grandfather held the phone a long time.

Then Samir picked up the shabbabeh and played. He played sitting at the table, with his eyes closed, blowing across the open end of the cane so that the sound came out breathy and soft and hollow, like wind across the top of a bottle, and the tune went round and round on itself the way the letter said, like water going down a drain. I had never heard anything like it. Rania sat with her chin in her hand. My grandfather sat with his hands flat on the white cloth.

Then Samir put down his father's flute and picked up the black whistle with the brass ring, and said, "And now the Irishman. Which I told you in 1983 I made myself."

He played it. And I knew it in the first four notes, and so did my grandfather, because his head came up like a dog's. It was the slow air. It was the tune with no name, the tune from the cellar and the bridge in Washington Park and the back room of the Half Door, but it was different. It was the same bones, the same going up and hanging and coming down, but Samir played it with other ornaments, with the turns of the 'ataba in it and the breath of the shepherd's flute, so that it was my grandfather's tune and also not, the way a stone that has sat for forty years in another wall is still the same stone.

When he finished there was a silence in the cool dim room.

"I lied to you," said Samir. "In 1983. I did not make it. You made it. You played it on your roof every night after, in April and May, after the bad week. Every night. I lay on my roof and learned it. I was fourteen. When you left, I kept playing it. My father heard me and he said, that is the tune of ma'alesh. That is what he called it, all his life. Ma'alesh. The Irishman's ma'alesh. Then I came to Canada, and it was too long a name, so I called it the Irishman." He set the whistle down on the cloth. "I am sorry I lied. I wanted something that was mine."

My grandfather did not say anything. He reached into his inside pocket and took out the low whistle, and held it for a moment, and then he looked at me.

"Get your phone out," he said.

I got my phone out.

"Ma'alesh," said my grandfather, and put the whistle to his mouth, and nodded at Samir, and the two of them played it together, at a dining table in Saint-Laurent on a Saturday afternoon in June with the dishes still out and the sun coming through the blinds in stripes across the white cloth, two whistles, the low one and the black one, going up and hanging and coming down, each with its own turns, never quite together and never quite apart. I recorded every second of it, with both of their permissions, asked for out loud, so it would be on the recording. When it was over Rania was crying openly and so was I and so, I am fairly sure, was the next-door neighbor, who had come out onto the iron staircase to listen.

That night, in the motel off the autoroute, while my grandfather slept in the other bed with the sound of a man who has been awake for two weeks, I opened the family's private space and saved the recording, and named it, and under the name typed the date and the place and the names of the two men playing. Then I went to the map, to the pin on Haddatha that had sat with a blank picture since December, and attached the photograph Samir had sent me of the terrace wall in 2019, with the stone that does not quite match in the middle. Then I went to the boot box, which I had brought in from the car, and took out the letter of the 21st of April 1980, and turned it over, and looked at the word in pencil in the corner.

Máleis.

It was the word Abu Samir said on the step. It was also, it turned out, the name of the tune, given to it by the man on the next roof who heard it every night after. My grandfather had written the word in the corner of a letter to his mother the evening he heard it, and for forty-six years he had played the tune every Tuesday and never once said its name out loud.

Two Kinds of Ornament

Albany in July is a wet towel. The heat comes up the Hudson from New York and sits down on the city and does not move, and the air is so thick that the Capitol looks as if it were drawn in pencil and then smudged with a thumb. The cicadas start up in the trees of Washington Park at noon and go on until dark like a power line humming. Every afternoon around four the sky over the Helderbergs goes the color of a bruise, and the thunder walks across the city, and for twenty minutes it rains so hard that the gutters on Lark Street run like millraces, and then the sun comes out and everything steams and it is hotter than before.

Samir Daher and his daughter came down on the second Monday of the month and stayed for five days, in my grandfather's spare room and on my grandfather's sofa, which Rania said was the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in North America and which my grandfather said had been good enough for a county councilor from Galway, which nobody believed. I took the week off. I am not sure I have ever been so tired or so happy.

On the Tuesday I took Samir to see the wall. He had heard about it on the phone in June. He stood in the backyard in the heat in his pressed white shirt and looked at it for a long time, the way my grandfather looks at walls, and then he walked the length of it slowly and put his hand flat on the pale stone in the middle, and held it there. He did not say anything. Then he went down to the end by the garage, to the section that we had rebuilt in May, and looked at that.

"Who did this?" he said.

"Granda and me. I did the hearting."

He crouched down, which at sixty with a stone setter's knees took some time, and looked into the small gaps between the face stones, where you can just see the hearting packed inside. Then he stood up and dusted his hands.

"Good," he said. "My father would say good." He looked at my grandfather. "She has the hands."

"She has the head," said my grandfather. "The hands are coming."

In the afternoon Walter Prentice came by in his straw hat to meet the man from Lebanon, and the three of them, the Irish mason, the Lebanese stone setter and the American mason, stood in the backyard in the heat for an hour and forty minutes and talked about lime mortar. I am not exaggerating. I timed it. They talked about lime and sand and the right ratio for old brick and the terrible things people do with Portland cement, and Mr. Prentice told a story about an old firehouse in Troy that had been repointed so badly the bricks were spalling off the face like pastry, and Samir told one about a bank building in Old Montreal with the same problem, and my grandfather told one about a pub in Clifden, and all three of them shook their heads in exactly the same way at exactly the same moment. Not one of them said a word about any war. When the thunder came at four they all went into the kitchen and had tea and went on talking about lime.

On the Friday, the bread. I want to tell this properly, because it was one of the funniest mornings of my life, and I think it belongs here more than almost anything.

Samir knew about Jaber's Market. He knew Hiyam's name and her village, and she knew his; she had known his mother's people, distantly, fifty years ago, the way everyone in the south seems to have known everyone. They had spoken on the phone in June, at the end of the ten days of calls, a long call in Arabic that Lina said was mostly about who had married whom. But they had not met. At nine on Friday morning, in a heat that was already eighty-five degrees, my grandfather and Samir and Rania and I walked down Lark Street and up Central Avenue with two warm loaves of brown bread wrapped in blue-checked tea towels, and pushed open the door of the market with the bell going, and Hiyam Jaber came around the half wall with her floury hands up.

She looked at Samir. Samir looked at her. Then she said something sharp in Arabic and he answered and she said something else and suddenly they were both talking at once, very fast, with their hands, and Karim at the register put down his pencil and said to me, "Okay, they're arguing about whose village has better olive oil," and Lina came out from the back with her laptop and said, "No, it's figs," and Rania said, "It's both."

Then Hiyam took Samir by the arm and marched him around the half wall to the saj.

"You make the markouk," she said in English, for our benefit. "Your mother made it. Your wife made it. You watch them all your life. You make it."

"My arms," said Samir. "I have told everyone. My arms are no good."

"Your arms are fine. Your head is no good." She put a ball of dough in his hands.

He tried. Samir Daher, who can set a marble floor so flat you could roll a ball bearing across it and not see it drift, threw the dough from one forearm to the other and it tore down the middle. He tried another and it folded over on itself like a wet sock. A third went onto the floor. Hiyam stood beside him with her arms crossed and said things in Arabic that Lina declined to translate. Karim had his phone out and was filming, and Samir said something to him that made Hiyam slap Samir's arm. My grandfather leaned on the counter by the pickled turnips and laughed until he had to sit down on a sack of rice. On the fifth try Samir got a round of dough the size of a dinner plate, thick in places and thin in others, with a hole near the edge, and flipped it onto the hot iron, where it bubbled and scorched and came off brown and lopsided and torn.

Hiyam picked it up, tore a piece off, and ate it. She chewed it slowly, considering, while we all waited.

"Terrible," she said. "Your mother would be ashamed." And then she tore off another piece and gave it to my grandfather, and another to Samir, and another to me, and we stood around the half wall in Jaber's Market eating Samir's terrible bread, and it was, I will say, the best bread I have ever eaten in my life, because of who made it and who was there.

The night before all this, the Thursday, there had been the session. Gerry Flynn had moved it from Tuesday for the week, because he had heard about Samir and wanted, he said, a proper night. The back room of the Half Door was full by eight, and hot, with the air conditioner in the window grinding away and losing. Martina was there with her fiddle, and Ruthie with her concertina in a sleeveless red top for once, and Deshawn with his banjo, and Fiadh, who was going home to Leitir Móir in two weeks and had come to say goodbye to the session. Hiyam came, in a dress with gold buttons, brought by Lina and Karim, and sat in the front with her handbag on her knees like a queen at a play. My parents came. Walter Prentice came, in his straw hat, and drank ginger ale. Even Gene the state trooper from my Irish class came, and stood at the back.

For the first hour it was an ordinary session, reels and jigs and polkas, with Samir sitting beside my grandfather with the black whistle and keeping up with most of it, and taking a break with a big grin when Martina went off into a set of Clare reels too fast for anyone. Then, at about nine, Samir took out the shabbabeh and played alone, the breathy round-and-round tune from the dining table in Montreal, and the room went so quiet you could hear the ice in the glasses at the bar. When he finished, nobody clapped for a second. Then everybody did.

And then Hiyam Jaber stood up.

She did not ask anyone. She stood up in the front of the room in her dress with the gold buttons and put one hand flat on her chest and closed her eyes and sang. It was the 'ataba, the four lines, long and high and turning, the voice going up and folding over itself. It went on longer than the time in the market. She sang two verses, and then a third, and Samir, beside my grandfather, sang the last line of the third one with her, very softly, in a cracked tenor, and she opened her eyes and looked at him and finished it.

Then the room was quiet, and in the quiet my grandfather stood up.

I knew what he was going to do before he did it. I had my phone in my hand, and I looked at him across the room and lifted it a little, an inch, a question. He looked back at me, the extra second. And he nodded, once.

Then he sang. Sean-nós. Unaccompanied, in Irish, standing in the back room of a bar on Delaware Avenue with his cap on the table in front of him and his big hands hanging at his sides. Úna Bhán, the song he had sung to an old woman on a roof in Haddatha in January of 1980, the way his mother sang it, with all the turns. I am not going to try to describe his voice, except to say that I had heard him speak every day of my life and had never once heard it, that it was rough and low and very steady, and that on the long notes it did the thing the 'ataba does and the whistle does and the shepherd's flute does, went up and hung and turned over on itself, like someone trying to say something difficult and changing the words as they went.

Hiyam put her hand over her mouth. Samir closed his eyes. Fiadh, in the corner, was mouthing every word. My father was sitting very still with his elbows on his knees and his eyes on the floor. When it was finished my grandfather sat down and picked up his cap and turned it around in his hands, and the room did not clap at all, for a long moment, because it did not seem like the kind of thing you clap for. Then Walter Prentice, at the back, in his straw hat, said quietly, "Well, now," and everyone laughed, and then everyone clapped.

At the end of the night, at the door, with the heat coming up off the sidewalk and the cicadas still going in the dark, I asked him why tonight.

"I told you," he said. "Not yet." He put on his cap. "It's yet now."

I kept the recording with the others, in the folder in the family's private space, with his permission, which he gave again out loud at the door, so it would be on there. Two kinds of ornament, Fiadh said to me that night, walking to her car: the Irish kind and the Arab kind, and in that room you couldn't have said where one stopped. Then she hugged me hard and said, in Irish, so I would have to work for it, that I was to keep reading, and keep speaking, and that she would know if I stopped.

Carna

We flew out of JFK on the night of the 18th of August and came down into Shannon at dawn, over a sea the color of pewter and then a sudden quilt of small green fields stitched together with gray stone walls, thousands of them, running every way, so that the whole country from the air looked like a map of my grandfather's backyard. He had the window seat. He did not sleep on the plane. When the wheels touched he put his hand flat on the window for a second, the way he puts it on a stone, and took it away again.

My father came too. My mother had wanted to and could not get the time off, so she had sent a list of instructions and a bag of presents and a stern message to my father about sunscreen, which in the west of Ireland in August is a joke that lasts until the one day it isn't. Conor was at a summer job. So there were three of us, in a small rented car on the wrong side of the road, my father driving with his knuckles white, my grandfather in the passenger seat saying "left, LEFT," and me in the back with the boot box on my knees, because my grandfather had asked me to bring the letters home.

Galway city went by in a blur of roundabouts and rain. Then we were out past Oughterard on the Clifden road, and the country opened out and went wild. I had seen it twice as a child and remembered almost nothing. I want to set it down properly now. Connemara in August is bog and rock and water and sky, and nothing else, and the nothing else is everything. The bog goes away from the road on both sides, brown and purple with heather and dotted white with bog cotton nodding in the wind like a field of tiny flags, and in the middle of it, everywhere, lakes, small black lakes and big silver ones, so many that you stop counting. Behind the bog the mountains, the Twelve Bens, bare and gray-green and folded, with the cloud sitting on their tops and then lifting off and then sitting down again. The light changes every minute. A shower comes across the bog like a gray curtain being drawn, and the car is in it, the wipers going, and then out of it, and everything behind you is gleaming. The road twists between walls. Every field is walled, every small square of thin green grass among the rocks, the walls built of gray granite stones laid without mortar, so loose you can see daylight through them, and my grandfather said, before I could ask, "That's so the wind goes through. If you build them tight, the wind knocks them."

At Carna the land runs down to the sea. The village is not much: a street, a shop, a pub, a hall, a church with a gray slate roof, a pier with a few boats. The houses are white and scattered over the low rocky land toward the shore, not in rows, each on its own with its own small fields and its own wall and its own view of the water, and the water is everywhere, inlets and bays and islands. There were fuchsia hedges along the roads, dripping red. The air smelled of salt and seaweed and, under that, faint and sweet and unmistakable, turf smoke. My grandfather wound down his window and breathed it in, and did not wind it up again even when it started to rain.

Peigí was waiting in the house at An Aird Mhóir, which her daughter had kept for the summer, before they sold it. She was at the red half door. She was small and white-haired and very straight, in a navy cardigan, with my grandfather's blue eyes in a face like a winter apple, and when the car stopped she did not come out to it. She stood at the half door and waited, with her hands on the top of it, the way, my father said afterward, her own mother used to wait.

My grandfather got out of the car and walked up the path to her. She said something in Irish. He said something back. Then she opened the bottom half of the door and he went in, and she looked past him at my father and me standing by the car in the rain, and said in English, "Well, are ye coming in or are ye going to stand there and drown?"

The house was nearly empty. The dresser was gone; there was a pale square on the wall where it had stood for seventy years, and a nail. But the range was lit and the kettle on it, and the table was there with an oilcloth, and four chairs, and a plate of brown bread and butter and a pot of tea under a cozy, and the window over the table looked out over the bog and the small walled fields and the rocks to the sea, and the islands, and the far line of the Twelve Bens with the light sliding across them. It was the view from the letters. Not from the ones from Lebanon, but from the ones I had not read, the ones that came the other way.

I had practiced for weeks what I would say to Peigí. Fiadh had helped me with it on her last night in Albany. When we sat down, I said it, in Irish. I said I was glad to be in her house, that I had read her brother's letters to their mother, every one, that it had taken me nine months, and that I wanted to thank her for not putting them in a skip.

There was a silence. Peigí put down her cup. Then she said, in Irish, slowly and clearly so I would follow, "You have a Connemara girl's Irish, with an American's mouth." And then, "Who taught you?"

"A girl from Leitir Móir. And him." I nodded at my grandfather. "He said the words into my phone."

Peigí looked at her brother for a long moment. "He did?"

"He did."

"Well," said Peigí, in English, "miracles," and poured me more tea.

We stayed five days. I will not tell all of it. I will tell that it rained every day and that every day the sun came out in between, and that the rainbows over the bay were so many that my father stopped pointing at them by the second day. I will tell that my grandfather took me out the bog road to the turf bank where his family had cut turf for generations, and showed me how to use the sleán, the long narrow spade with a wing on one side, to cut a wet black sod out of the bank and throw it up onto the top, and that I could not do it at all, and that he cut thirty sods in about four minutes, at seventy, in the rain, and then stood on the bank with his face turned up and laughing. I will tell that beside the bog road, at the place where the road bends, there is a dry-stone wall about forty feet long that his father built in 1961, the big ones at the bottom and the through-stones across, and that I put my hand on it, and it did not rock.

And I will tell about the party.

Peigí's eightieth birthday was on the Saturday, the 22nd, and it was in the hall in the village, a low concrete building with a stage at one end and a kitchen at the other and a floor that had been danced on since 1950. Weeks before, I had made a page for the day in the family's private space, a single page with her photograph at the top, the one of her at eighteen at the half door, and a place underneath for wishes, and I had sent the link to everyone I could think of. By the morning of the party there were sixty-three. From Galway and Dublin and Boston and London. From my mother in Albany, in English, and from my brother in Irish, which I had helped him with and which was nearly correct. From Hiyam Jaber, in Arabic and English, which said: To the sister of Abu Batrik, long life, and thank you for the cake. From Samir in Montreal, who had heard about the cake from his father. From Walter Prentice, who wrote: Dear Miss Peigí, your brother is the best mason I ever worked with and the worst at taking a compliment. Happy 80th. And at the top, from my grandfather, the first thing he had ever written in that space, typed with one finger at the kitchen table in Carna the night before, in Irish, four words. Go maire tú, a Pheigí. Long life to you, Peigí.

Mossie Kearney came up from Kinsale for the party, a five-hour drive, with Noreen. He walked into the hall in a navy blazer with his blue beret folded in the breast pocket and his medals on, and when my grandfather saw him across the room he put down his glass and said a word in Irish I will not translate, and Mossie said one in Cork Irish that was worse, and then they stood in the middle of the hall with their hands on each other's shoulders and said nothing at all for a long time, while the music went on around them.

There was a céilí band, and set dancing, and sandwiches and a cake the size of a door. There was a lot of drink, and my grandfather did not take any of it, and nobody remarked on that, as nobody ever had. Late in the night, the band stopped, and the old people began to sing, one after another, from their chairs, the way it is done there, someone calling on someone and the room going quiet. Peigí sang. She sang Amhrán na Trá Báine, the song of the white strand, the song my grandfather sang in Lebanon at Christmas, the way their mother sang it. My father sat beside me and did not move. And when it was finished someone called for Tadhg Ó Máille, and he sang, and then, without being asked, he took out the low whistle and played the slow air. Ma'alesh. In the hall in Carna, at one in the morning, with the rain on the tin roof, the tune from the cellar of olives went home.

Afterward, when the hall was emptying, Peigí took my arm on the way to the door.

"Your great-grandmother," she said, "used to read them aloud. His letters. At night, by the range, to me and to Seán, and to half the village that would come in to hear them. That's why they're so soft at the folds. She read them to pieces." She stopped in the doorway, with the rain blowing in past us and the dark beyond full of the sound of the sea. "That week in April," she said, "when it was on the radio. She walked down to the shore every evening and stood there looking out. East. Every evening. She never said a word about it. And when the letter came that he was all right, she read it out to the kitchen, and then she went out to the shore again and stood there, and she came back and wrote to him for two hours." Peigí looked up at me. "Has he still got her letters? The ones she sent him?"

I said I did not know.

"Ask him," said Peigí. "He has. I know he has." She patted my arm. "Ask him."

The Other Half of the Post

I asked him on the first Sunday of September, at the table, after the dinner, with the window open onto the backyard and the last of the summer coming in: the smell of somebody's tomatoes gone over on the vine, the cicadas slowing down, a lawnmower two yards away. We had been back from Carna nearly two weeks. He had slept for most of the first three and then got up on the fourth and walked to Jaber's Market with two loaves and told Hiyam the whole of the party in Arabic, Irish and English, with gestures, for forty minutes, while a line formed behind him at the register and nobody in it complained.

"Peigí says you kept Mamó's letters," I said. "The ones she wrote back."

He was clearing the plates. He stopped with one in each hand.

"Peigí says a lot of things."

"Did you?"

He put the plates down in the sink, very carefully, and ran the water over them, and stood there with his back to me for long enough that I thought he was not going to answer. Then he turned off the tap and dried his hands and went out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I heard him in the back bedroom, the scrape of a chair being pulled to the wardrobe, a grunt, a thump. He came down with a tin box under his arm.

It was a big square biscuit tin, the kind Irish people get at Christmas and keep for forty years for buttons and string, with a painted lid of a coach and horses in the snow outside an inn, the paint gone pale and scratched. He set it on the oilcloth in front of me, between the salt and the radio, exactly where the boot box had sat ten months before.

"I took them to Galway," he said. "And from Galway here. I had them on the top of the wardrobe for thirty-nine years. Bríd knew. Nobody else." He sat down across from me. "I never read them again. Not once. I couldn't. I'd read the first line and hear her." He pushed the tin an inch toward me. "You read them. You can. I can't."

I opened it. Inside were letters on lined paper torn from a child's school copybook, each folded in four, perhaps forty of them, in envelopes and out of them, with Irish stamps and the battalion's post office address. The handwriting was very different from his. It was old-fashioned and upright and slow, with the letters made separately, like someone who had learned to write at a school desk with a dip pen and had not written much since. My great-grandmother Máire left school at twelve, in 1934, to help at home. She never learned to read or write English well. She wrote Irish the way her own teacher taught it, with old spellings that Fiadh, when I sent her a photograph of the first page in Leitir Móir, called "beautiful, and about fifty years out of date even then."

It took me much less time to read these than the first letters. I was better by then, and I knew the people in them, and Máire wrote shorter sentences than her son. I read the first one at the table that afternoon while he sat across from me with his hands around a mug of tea and looked out the window at the wall. I read it to myself. Then I asked if he wanted me to read it out.

"No," he said. Then, after a while: "Yes."

So I read my great-grandmother's letter of the 20th of November 1979 out loud in her son's kitchen in Albany, in my American Irish, slowly, stumbling on the old spellings. It was about the weather and the cow and the price of the turf and Bríd's mother coming down from Galway and the postmistress falling off her bicycle, and a line at the end which said: Mind yourself, a stór, and don't be giving all your oranges away. You'll want some. I had to stop at oranges, because he had put his hand over his eyes.

I read them all through September. Most of them I read at home, alone, at the kitchen table in Pine Hills with the window open and the evenings getting cooler. Some I read to him on Sundays when he asked. He did not ask often. When he did, he sat across from me with his tea and his eyes on the wall, and did not say anything until I had finished, and then usually said one thing: "That's her," or "She never could spell Haddatha," or once, at a letter about the neighbors coming in to see the new baby that was mostly about what everyone wore, "She was a terrible gossip," and laughed until he coughed.

There is one I will put here, because it is the one I think this whole book has been walking toward, though I did not know it when I started. It is dated the 26th of April 1980, and it answers both of his April letters, the one that said not a scratch and the one that said think of their mothers, and also a third that I have not put in this book, of the 23rd, in which he told her, in four lines, that a man from the village had come up to the post and sat with him on the step.

A Thaidhg, a stór,

Your letter came and I read it to the kitchen, and then I went down to the shore and stood a while, and now I'm writing to you.

I won't say anything about the radio. You know I was listening. You know I was at the shore. I won't say any more about it and you won't either, and that's how we'll manage it.

But there's a thing I want you to have, and it's an old thing my mother used to say, and her mother. Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine. People live in each other's shelter. You know it. Every child in Carna knows it. But I don't think you knew it till this week. I don't think I did.

Thank the man who sat with you. Thank him from me. Tell him a woman in Carna that he'll never meet says he did what she'd have done if she was there, and better, because he had the bread and I'd only have had my two hands. Tell him that. Get the boy to tell him.

I'm sending a gansey for him. I had wool from the sheep from Peigí and I started it the night of the radio, because I had to do something with my hands or go mad. It's the rope pattern, the one I did for Daid. It'll be too warm for that country but you said the nights are cold. If it's too big he can grow into it. If he's too old to grow, tell him to grow anyway.

Mind yourself. Come home. Your son is the image of you and screams like a curlew. Bríd is well. We are all waiting.

Your mother

I read that letter on a Wednesday night alone, and I did not sleep. In the morning, before work, I called Montreal.

Samir answered from a job site. I could hear a tile saw behind him and men talking in French. I asked him if his father had ever been given a jumper, a wool sweater, from Ireland, in 1980.

The tile saw stopped. Somebody shouted something and Samir shouted back, and then there was a silence on the line, and then the sound of a truck door, and the noise of the site went away.

"How do you know about the sweater?" he said.

"His mother wrote that she was sending it."

Samir was quiet for a long time.

"It came in May," he said at last. "After Abu Batrik went home. A parcel with Irish stamps and a letter in Irish that nobody could read. Inside a sweater. Cream, very thick, with ropes down the front, cables, and little knots, and diamonds. It smelled of sheep and smoke. My father put it on in the yard in May, in the heat, and wore it for one hour, and the sweat ran off him, and he would not take it off." Samir laughed, a cracked sound. "He wore it every winter for twenty-three years. Every winter. When he died my mother would not give it to anyone. She kept it. It is in my cedar chest. Here. In Montreal. In the basement. I have not looked at it for ten years."

"Will you look at it?"

"I will look at it tonight."

That night he sent me a photograph. It was taken under a bare bulb in a basement, on top of a cedar chest, and it showed a cream wool sweater folded with great care, yellowed a little with age, with the patterns down the front clear and deep: the twisted cables like ropes, the diamonds, the little raised knots, and at the cuffs, very neat, a darn in wool of a slightly different cream, which Samir said his mother did in 1994. Under the photograph he had typed: She did not know him. She made it the night of the radio. Tell your grandfather I will bring it to Albany. Tell him my father said the Irish mother made it too big. Tell him he grew into it.

I put it in the collection in the family's private space, with Samir's permission, under the stone from Haddatha. Gansey, rope pattern, knitted by Máire Uí Mháille, Carna, April 1980, for Abu Samir of Haddatha, whom she never met. Worn every winter until 2003. Now in Montreal, kept by Samir Daher. I put the date of her letter. I put the four lines about the bread and the two hands.

On Sunday I showed my grandfather the photograph on my phone. He held it up close to his face, without his glasses, and then put on his glasses and held it again. He did not say anything for a long time.

"I carried that parcel to the post office in Tibnin," he said finally. "It came on the last plane before we left and I'd no time to bring it up the hill. I gave it to the lads from the 47th and told them which house. I never knew if it got there." He gave me back the phone. "Forty-six years."

"It got there."

"It got there." He took off his glasses and folded them and put them in his shirt pocket, the way he does before he goes out to the wall. Then he said, "Read me that one again. The one with the bread."

So I read it again. Out loud, in his kitchen, on a Sunday in September, in the Irish of a woman who left school at twelve, to her son who was seventy and sitting across the oilcloth from me with his eyes closed. When I got to Get the boy to tell him, I heard him say the next line with me, under his breath, in his mother's words, because he knew it. He had never read it again, not once, in forty-six years. He knew every word.

Slán Abhaile

It is the last week of October as I write this, a year almost to the day since the boot box came up the hill from the post office. The maples on Elm Street have gone the color of a struck match, and the wind off the Helderbergs pulls the leaves down in handfuls and sends them along the gutters in rattling rivers, and the city trucks with their big vacuum hoses come round on Tuesdays to suck them up. It gets dark at six. The radiators have come on with their first knocking. On the porches of Center Square there are pumpkins, and on the door of the house two down from my grandfather's somebody has hung a skeleton in a blue beret, which I think is a coincidence, and which he says is not.

Samir came back to Albany on the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, in the second week of the month, alone this time, with a suitcase and a cedar-smelling bundle wrapped in a pillowcase. He undid it on my grandfather's kitchen table, between the salt and the radio. My grandfather looked at the gansey for a long time without touching it. Then he picked it up and held it up against his chest, and it was too big for him, too, and he laughed, and then he held it to his face for a moment and breathed in, the way Hiyam breathes in the brown bread. Forty-six years, and a cedar chest in Montreal, and a basement, and it still smelled, he said, faintly, of the range in Carna. I could not smell anything but cedar. I believed him.

He folded it up again himself, very neatly, the way his mother would have, and put it back in the pillowcase, and handed it back to Samir.

"It's his," he said. "It's yours."

Samir did not argue. You don't argue with a man like that about a gansey.

That Friday the three of us took the bread to Central Avenue, and Samir did not try to make the markouk, and Hiyam made it for all of us and put a piece of the first one aside on a saucer by the register, which she said was for the old woman in the doorway in Haddatha, who had liked the cake. Then she sang a line of the 'ataba, just one, over the saj, without stopping her hands, and my grandfather answered with a line of Úna Bhán, and Karim at the register rolled his eyes and said they were turning his store into a concert hall, and then quietly turned the radio off.

I want to set down where things are, before I finish. That is what I do at work at the end of a bill: I write a section that says when it takes effect.

My grandfather is seventy, in good health apart from his knees, and still says grand about everything. He goes to Jaber's Market every Friday with two loaves. He goes to the Half Door every Tuesday, and since July he sings there, perhaps one Tuesday in three, when Martina calls on him, which she does now with great satisfaction. He plays the slow air at the end of every night, and when Gerry Flynn asked him in August what it was called, he said, "Ma'alesh," and Gerry wrote it on the chalkboard above the fireplace under the list of tunes, misspelled, and nobody has corrected it. He talks to Samir on the phone every Sunday after dinner, in English and Arabic and French and once, by accident, Irish, which Samir answered with the four words of it he knows. He talks to Mossie Kearney once a month, which Mossie says is twenty years late and forty times too seldom. He has gone down to the water on the 6th of April forty-six times, in Galway and then in Albany. In the family calendar my mother keeps, on that day, there is now a note in her hand which says only: Granda at the lake. Don't ring before eight. I asked her about it. She said Bríd would have wanted it written down.

Samir is sixty and has more work than his three trucks can handle. He plays the black whistle with the brass ring in a session at a pub on Saint-Laurent Boulevard on Wednesday nights, and he has started, he says, teaching the shabbabeh to two young men from the Lebanese community center who want to learn it, and to one woman from Galway who heard him play and would not leave him alone. Rania is getting married in May. We have all been invited. My grandfather has asked me what he should wear and I have said: the jumper his mother made for his father in 1961, the one with the darned elbows, which hangs in his wardrobe and which he has never worn in America. He has said he'll think about it.

Hiyam Jaber is eighty-one. Karim says she has started teaching Lina the 'ataba, on Sunday afternoons, in the back of the market, and that Lina is terrible, and that Hiyam is happier than he has seen her since his grandfather died. Lina has asked my grandfather if she can paint a stone wall into the mural on the side of the building, between the hills of Lebanon and the Hudson River. A dry wall, she said, with one pale stone in the middle that doesn't match. He said she may, so long as she paints the batter right.

Peigí is eighty and lives in Galway city with her daughter and calls my grandfather every Sunday morning at eleven, as their mother used to. Since August, if I am there, she asks for me, and she talks to me in Irish, slowly, and I answer, slowly, and she corrects me, not slowly at all. Fiadh is back in Leitir Móir, teaching in the secondary school there, and sends me a message once a week in Irish with a word in it she knows I won't know. Mossie Kearney has started going into the schools in Cork with a printout of the recording of Ma'alesh from the dining table in Montreal, and he plays it for the children at the end, and he says they go quiet. Walter Prentice turned seventy-eight on the 2nd of October, and we gave him a cake, and he gave me two dollars in a card, for old times' sake.

My father has started coming to the session. He sits in the corner by the coats and doesn't say anything. In September he asked my grandfather to teach him the Irish for the twelve words he would most need in Carna, and my grandfather said them into my father's phone, and my father put them on the family's list under mine. My brother Conor wants to go to Lebanon someday, when it is possible, to see the wall. I have told him I am coming too.

And me. I am twenty-six. I draft legislation in an office on the Plaza, and I am good at it, and I am better at it than I was, because I have learned this year that a word can mean more than one thing and still be exact. I read Irish well enough now to read a newspaper slowly, and my grandfather's letters easily, and my great-grandmother's with only a little help. I speak it badly, with an American's mouth, as Peigí says, and with a Connemara girl's grammar. I can play The Kerry Polka at nearly full speed and Ma'alesh at no speed at all, because you cannot learn it, you can only learn his way of it, tonight, and then make your own. I can build a dry wall, small, with help. I can not make markouk. I have tried.

Last week, on the Sunday, I did the last thing I meant to do before I wrote this ending. In the family's private space there is a place where you can leave a letter that will not open until a date you choose. My mother has put one there for Conor's thirtieth. I wrote a letter in Irish, my own Irish, my first real letter in it, two sides, with the dictionary open and not looking at it more than I had to. I will not put it here. I will say that it is addressed to whoever in this family can read Irish on the 2nd of March 2056, the day my grandfather would be a hundred, and that it tells them about the boot box and the dictionary and the bread and the wall and the step and the tune, and that it ends with the four lines from Máire's letter about the bread and the two hands. I set the date. I sealed it. I sent it to him before I sealed it, and asked if it was all right.

He sent back one word, after a whole night of thinking about it. It was not maith. It was a word I had to look up, even then.

Foirfe.

Perfect.

Tonight is a Tuesday. In an hour I will walk down to the Half Door through the wind and the leaves with a cheap D whistle with a green mouthpiece in my coat pocket. Martina will call the sets, and Ruthie will be in her red cardigan with the elbows out, and Deshawn will play too fast, and Gerry will hit the bodhrán when he thinks nobody's looking. My father will be in the corner by the coats. And at the end, when the others are packing up, my grandfather will take out the low whistle, and he will look across the table at me, the extra second, and I will take out mine.

We have played it together twice now. It does not go well. I am too slow on the turns and too quick on the long notes, and his way and mine are not the same way, and that is, he says, how it should be. Every stone in the shelter of the next one. You can't build it on your own.

When it is over he will put on his cap, and we will walk home up Lark Street together in the cold, and at the corner of Elm, where I turn off for my bus, he will stop and put his big hand on my shoulder for a second, flat, the way he puts it on a stone, and say what he has said to me at that corner every Tuesday since July, and what his mother wrote at the bottom of the first letter in the biscuit tin, and the last.

Slán abhaile, a stór.

Safe home.