excerpt
SEVEN
The early March evening nodded like an old man nearing sleep. Soon his blue eyes would close, and slumbering darkness come upon him. In the long shadow of the hills the MacLir house darkened. Lamplight appeared in one of the windows. Then a shaft of light speared the gloom as the back door opened and closed again. Caitlin pulled a shawl around her shoulders and looked at the sky as she crossed the yard to the high iron gate that opened into the loaney. Finn, sitting by the range in the kitchen, heard the bolt of the gate drawn back, then clanged into place again. He looked at the clock on the mantelpiece and for a moment watched the pendulum swing to and fro with its regular tock, tock, tock.
Where to this time? he asked himself with a sigh. The cottage or the church?
The church. The squat, granite building topped a low ridge of stony ground overlooking the sea. Whin bushes and brambles grew along the ridge, and sheep grazed the grassy clearings. Behind the church, where the ridge sloped less steeply to the cliffs, the tombstones stood unevenly or slabs of polished granite, carved with forgotten names, lay flat in the cropped grass. No trees grew, no sullen yews, nothing to stay the wet winds or slanting rain nor shade the solemn graveyard from the sun.
No wide driveway led from the main road; only a path covered with shingle that crunched under the footfalls of the faithful as they crowded into Mass. As Caitlin walked this noisy path to the church, a cloud, shining in the last high rays of sunlight, sailed behind the tower and glowed like a halo. A few stars already glittered. A large flock of starlings wheeled across the sky and disappeared in the direction of the village. The breeze was fresh and cool and smelt of kelp.
On her right she passed the white-washed, two-roomed schoolhouse where Liam Dooley hoped one day to teach the Roman Catholic children of the twin parishes of Corrymore and Aughnashannagh once old Joseph Shaughnessy retired. Caitlin considered it a feeble ambition for one who had studied to be a teacher in a training college in London.
Mayanaam
vequinox
Manolis 
