We've been driving along the west coast of Kerry. I don't know it's a ghost village. I don't think about the historical implications because I'm a stupid American. I just see the rubble from the top of a hill. A row of roofless cottages, chimneys, and wildflowers. I ask Seamus to pull onto a rutted road and drive up to the ruined village. I jump out of the car before he comes to a complete stop. Yellow wildflowers bend in the wind. I have to shoot fast before a passing cloud changes everything. The rocky walls, the remnants of blown-away thatch, the marguerites spouting up from the rubble. Ivy laces the chimney. Perfect light. 

 

I square the scene in my viewfinder. I click and click. This is stage 1. My photos are still predictable. I'll see this later. It's easy to take a beautiful photo with a long exposure in a field of wildflowers. The stones of the ruined houses make odd pyramids. I run through the hole where once was a door. The chimney stands and so do the black fireplace walls. I imagine placing a teakettle on the blackened grate. It's like make-believe, a roofless place to lie in the uneven ground and shoot pictures of the clouds. I feel so free, but also as if I'm earning my keep, my travel grant shall be paid back.

 

Seamus observes me. When I say I find the village beautiful, he says where I see something picturesque, he sees something sad. They call them Ghost Villages, he tells me. So many people starved to death, the survivors abandoned the village.

 

He says this difference between us is a symptom of the diaspora. I say I don't understand the Famine. He says please call it the Genocide, and never the Great Hunger. He's been taking a class, so he knows. He's full of fresh knowledge, the knowledge the young have, the certainty that casts his face in shadow but also makes a man of him. He needs to share historical facts because he should have always known them, but he wasn't ever told. They don't tell you, the adults. They tell you how rough the people had it, but they don't give specifics. There was a blight, a fungus, that killed the potato crop. They say they had a "tough go of it." He says starvation is a particular humiliation. You go mad with the hunger. Your stomach distends, your tongue swells, the lining of your nose will crack. People ask why they didn't just go fishing? Who had the strength to walk to the sea? They had fertile land, yes, why didn't they plant other things? The British exported all the grains. The tenants couldn't afford the bread their own crops produced.

 

We're sitting on the ruined wall, and I'm feeling ashamed, even as the sun warms the crown of my head. Even as the wildflowers bend in the wind, I feel this crushing dissonance: the tower of a castle, the fairytale hills, and a sense of the groaning ghosts of the starved. He notices that I've gone quiet and he takes my hand. I hold onto my camera with the other. He says it's not your fault. How would you know? I like that he forgives me. Even if I don't understand why I need to be forgiven. 

 

Because I'm a Shea, because I'm here, which proves famine didn't kill my ancestors, I want to know how some people survived. Because I need the rosy spin, or the triumph of denial, or because I inherited some sort of resilience, I want to know more about the survivors. He says there were soupers. Some of the sympathetic landowners set up soup kitchens, but in Killarney one kitchen served ten thousand people. I've heard about the people eating grass, dying with green mouths. That's true too. Do you know how your people survived? There was one woman, my great-great grandmother with two little boys. The husband didn't make it. Somehow the missus did. Did your people go to America at that time? he asks. No, somehow they made it too. It was later that my grandmother sailed. Early 1900s. She was seventeen. Her mother was dead. She didn't like her new stepmother; her aunt in Chicago paid her passage. My grandfather came on his own, as well, though he had brothers on the East Coast.

 

They met in Kenwood.

 

They fell in love in the New World, he says.

 

I want to say, and I fell in love in the Old World. But it would sound too corny. You can't answer Seamus when he says the word love, because it sounded like luf. Your Chicago accent, with its nasal twang—it was best just to keep quiet. Or to move toward him, to put down your camera and start to kiss. To kiss away the darkness of history, to believe in pain and to believe also that sex is its antidote, or maybe its kin. When his hand goes under your shirt, when your breast draws back from the cold shock of his hands, you recover and press the nipple against his palm again. Then you feel his hardness through his pants, you rub him, you are the sort of lovers that thrive on the salt of bitter truths because your lovemaking survives all that, it makes its song known to the world, its life cry, and then you're on your back in the weeds and you're going at it in grand style. With a stone in your back and weeds in your hair, you go at it in grand style. With your socks still on and your nails in his back, you go at it in grand style. Because in the face of all this history, what else can a young person do?