A Song Across the Sea Read Free Page B

eyes upon her!
    But it was hard not to shut out her parent’s voices.
    “…and O’Leary says the taxes on the land are going to be raised again,” her father was saying. “I’d hoped to buy a new cow in the spring. Molly’s drying up. There’s barely enough milk left over after the household needs to take to the creamery.”
    Her mother sighed. “The oats don’t look as full as last year.”
    “Too much rain this summer. We won’t be fetchin’ a top price for them.”
    Tara’s mother said something in a low voice that she couldn’t make out, but she heard her father’s reply clearly enough.
    “No, no. Let the child have her music lessons.”
    Tara put down her scissors and listened intently. Twice a week, she walked the three miles into the village and took music lessons from Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Standing in a tiny parlor cluttered with furniture, Tara sang her scales and practiced phrasing and sight-reading while the gray-haired Mrs. O’Shaughnessy accompanied her on a rickety piano. The old woman’s bent, arthritic fingers wrung extraordinary sounds out of that dilapidated instrument in much the same way that her father coaxed crops out of his forbidding, rock-strewn fields.
    These visits were a joy to Tara. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy was firm yet encouraging with her. She opened up the world of music for Tara as if it were an enormous book, with each page yielding new treasures.
    Mrs. O’Shaughnessy had studied voice in Dublin many years ago. She’d met a handsome young farmer visiting relatives in the town and married him, moving to this quiet village with never a backwards glance, but she’d brought her music with her.
    Mr. O’Shaughnessy had passed on long ago. A large framed photograph of him hung on the wall over the piano, his austere gaze sometimes distracting Tara when she sang.
    “What was he like?” she’d once asked, impulsively. “He looks so…serious.” Her youthful curiosity overcame any thought that the question might be a painful one.
    Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, however, looked up at the picture with a smile. Her fingers rested lightly on the piano keys as she considered the question.
    “Ah,” she said. “That was the face he showed to the world, but to me he showed his gentle side. Don’t be deceived by appearances, Tara. That photograph doesn’t half show the man’s quick smile and ready laugh. When we lost the wee one—”—Mrs. O’Shaughnessy’s only child had died of a fever at the tender age of two—”—I thought the sun would never shine for me again. I sat in that chair by the window, day after day, never stirring. I looked out the window but saw nothin’, not ponies and traps passin’ by on their way to the market, not little children hurryin’ along to school. Not the mist, springin’ up in the fields beyond the village. Everything was dead to me.
    “But Dennis waited, and brought me tea, and told me news of the townsfolk that I wasn’t even hearin’.”
    Mrs. O’Shaughnessy absentmindedly tinkled a few keys on the piano. Tara saw her suddenly as she must have been those many years ago: young and strong, her long red hair caught back in a bun, her green eyes aloof with grief.
    “And what happened?”
    Mrs. O’Shaughnessy smiled. “One day I looked at him and realized that he was sorrowin’ also. I wasn’t the only one who’d lost a child. You see, in me grief, I selfishly believed that I was the only one in all the world who’d ever felt such a terrible ache. It was only together that we were able to go on.”
    The old woman stared at the picture for a long moment then said softly, almost to herself, “I hope one day you’ll be lucky enough to find a man that good, Tara.”
    So Mrs. O’Shaughnessy stayed on her in the village that had become her home. She gave piano and voice lessons to children—mostly children from town, whose parents had the funds to afford them. Tara, though, was her special project. The girl had a voice so pure and strong