The Deliveries Due
He began delivering them. Not all at once — he was too old and too careful for grand gestures — but one by one, in the order they should have arrived, walking the route he had walked for thirty-eight years with letters that were thirty, forty, fifty years overdue. The first was a letter from a father to a son, written in 1963, apologizing for a beating that had driven the son from the house and into an emigration that had lasted the rest of both their lives. The son, now eighty-one, lived in a nursing home in Bantry. Padraig drove there on a Wednesday and handed him the letter without explanation, and the old man opened it and read it and wept with a violence that shook his entire body, and Padraig sat beside him and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the letter had not already said, decades too late and yet, somehow, not too late entirely.
The deliveries changed things. Not dramatically — dramatic change is for young communities, and Cloonagh was old, its residents settled into patterns of relationship that had hardened over decades like cement. But small shifts occurred. The Brennan sisters, who had not spoken in twenty years over an inheritance dispute, received letters that revealed the dispute had been based on a misunderstanding that a single piece of correspondence, delivered on time, would have resolved in an afternoon. They did not reconcile