Salt

In Kirkhaven they salt everything, because the alternative is to lose it.

Fish, obviously. Herring in barrels, cod on the racks, the whole shore stinking of it from March. But also: pork, in the autumn. Butter. Once, memorably, a stag that Colm Neary shot out of season and could not be seen to eat fresh.

And other things.

Aoife learned this the way you learn everything in Kirkhaven, which is slowly and by accident.

She was eleven when she asked her grandmother why nobody spoke to the Mulryans. Not why don't we, which would have got her nowhere — why doesn't anybody. Her grandmother was elbow-deep in a barrel and did not look up.

"Because of the boat," she said.

"What boat?"

"The boat."

That was the whole of it, that year.

At fourteen she got more. There had been a boat. There had been a night in a bad November and two crews, and one boat had turned back and one had not, and of the one that had not there had been nothing found but a hatch cover and a boot.

"So the Mulryans turned back," said Aoife.

"The Mulryans turned back," her grandmother agreed.

"Was that wrong?"

Her grandmother considered this for a long time, working the salt in with her hands.

"No," she said, eventually. "It wasn't wrong."

"Then why—"

"Because it wasn't wrong and they still didn't come home." She wiped her hands. "You can't be angry at the sea, Aoife. There's no purchase on it. So you put the anger somewhere it'll keep."

Aoife was twenty-two before she asked the question that had been sitting in her for eight years.

"When was the boat?"

Her grandmother was very old by then and did not do the barrels any more, and sat in the good chair by the window where she could see the harbour, which Aoife privately thought was the cruellest possible arrangement of furniture.

"Nineteen and thirty-one," she said.

Aoife did the arithmetic twice.

"That's ninety years."

"It is."

"Nobody alive was there."

"No."

"Then who—" She stopped. Started again. "Nan. Who are we angry at?"

And her grandmother turned from the window and looked at her with an expression Aoife had never seen on her before and would think about for the rest of her life, and said:

"That's the first useful question anyone's asked in this house in fifty years."

Here is what Aoife found, in the parish records, in the spring.

There had been no Mulryan on either boat.

The Mulryans in 1931 were a family of four who had arrived from Donegal eighteen months earlier and who owned no boat at all. The man who turned back that night was called Bradan, and his descendants still lived on the hill, and were well-liked, and had run the shop for two generations.

Somewhere in the ninety years, the anger had been moved.

Aoife could not find when. There was no record of it, because nobody writes that down. But she could guess how: a family arrives from elsewhere and does not have the sense to leave; a village needs somewhere to put a thing that will not keep; the salt goes on; the barrel is sealed.

And it works. That is the part she cannot get past. It worked. Ninety years and it has not spoiled once.

She told her grandmother.

The old woman listened all the way to the end without interrupting, which was not her habit.

Then she said: "Does that change it?"

"Of course it changes it. They didn't do anything."

"Nobody did anything. That was always the trouble." She looked out at the harbour. "You've found out the wrong family's been carrying it. What you haven't found out is what happens to a place that puts the barrel down."

Aoife stood in her grandmother's kitchen with ninety years of parish records in a folder under her arm.

"I'm going to tell them," she said.

Her grandmother nodded slowly, and turned back to the window, and did not say don't.

She said: "Then you'll want to be ready to be the one they're angry at."