The Great Hunger

The stone was smooth from handling, worn nearly flat by decades of desperate fingers.

Patrick Byrne—the younger Patrick, the grandson—held it in his palm and tried to imagine what his grandfather had felt, carrying this small piece of Ireland through hell and across the world.

It had come from the old stone wall in County Clare, his grandmother had told him. The wall where she and his grandfather used to meet as children, where they'd fallen in love, where they'd said their last goodbye before seven years of separation began.

"He kept it in his pocket every day at Port Arthur," Grandmother Catherine had said, pressing the stone into Patrick's hand when he was twenty. "Through the darkness and the brutality and the times he wanted to give up. This stone reminded him why he had to survive. It reminded him of me."

Patrick had been holding onto it ever since—through his own struggles, his own triumphs, through seventy-five years of life on The Long Fields. Now, standing in the cemetery overlooking the ocean, he placed it gently on his grandfather's headstone.

A gift returned. A circle completed.