The Peasants and The Mariners. Brian Bouldrey

      Open Door

      For my mother.

      Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory . . . we are all kings in exile.

      —G. K. Chesterton

      ONE

       Home Surgery

      Before we even start our hike on the Ulster Way, a path around the border of Northern Ireland, and certainly long before I read the Ireland guidebook, I make some visits to my pal and fellow hiker Garth at his Chicago condo. We are planning our trip. He lives in a neighborhood called Edgewater, on the top floor of a six-unit brick building which is recognizable among the other buildings on his street because the tuck-pointing is a shade whiter. Garth knows that I always show up late, and usually after dark, but what he doesn’t know is that I depend on the way the cement between the bricks of his house gleams, like toothpaste.

      I am always late, but once I’m ringing the doorbell, I am impatient. I remark on the neighbors’ nameplates. “Rob Tarkington Home Surgery,” says one. Yuck. “The Boltons” seem to work at home, too, because they have posted instructions for UPS. Everybody is at home but me.

      Garth’s voice crackles down the intercom, a device that seems old-fashioned to me. “You’re late!” he’s yelling, and I’m yelling back, “What are you, the narrator?” but I bet he never listens back to enjoy my wit or to make sure I’m not a horrible home surgery patient. I push the inner door to an electrifying and overlong buzz (does Garth think I’m too weak to push open a door? or check my wristwatch?). Climbing to Garth’s, I notice a Country Craft sign nestled in fake plastic vines over the Boltons’ door on the second floor: “Home Is Where Stories Start.”

      It will take me a long time to understand that sign. Isn’t home the place where the stories end? Certainly, the dreams start at home, or the plans start there, plans that Garth loves to make. We will take as much time planning our trip around the Ulster Way as we do executing it, because that’s how Garth is.

      I, on the other hand, am aimless, in no hurry to plot a course from point A to point Z, and because of this, I am eternally grateful to Garth. He even plans the planning—a full dinner, guidebooks open to the right pages, pencils, and memo pads. We are going to create an itinerary down to the kind of sandwich we will have for lunch on Tuesday the twenty-third. My only task is to bring the maps.

      “Okay,” says Garth, just when I think we’ve planned the trip to death, “Now let’s divide up the shared equipment. Who is going to carry the first aid kit?”

      “Why don’t you get some supplies from creepy Dr. Tarkington?” I suggest. Garth looks at me, not recognizing the name. “Your neighbor? I’m sure he travels light with his—,” and here I shudder, “—home surgery kit.” I am imagining little bone saws, an awl, lengths of plastic piping that, having provided a conduit for all the body’s biles, are lightly rinsed and rolled back into a compact coil, like rope on a ship.

      “You are weird. Home surgery does not mean he is going to put you on your kitchen table and pull out rotten teeth with pliers. It means that if something is broken in your home, he will come and fix it.”

      This, of course, makes more sense. Except that if I were a home surgeon, I would probably call myself a carpenter, or an electrician, or a plumber, or just have a card that had a list of skills. “But you can see how I made that mistake, right?” I make this mistake, thinking of home surgery as something about the self and not about the home, because is a home sick or are we homesick?

      All my life I have never been homesick. I have been sick for away: wanderlust, some call it. I have told myself, whether it is true or not, that if I do not travel all the time, I shall kill myself by staying at home. Ninety-five percent of all accidents occur in the home. And not everybody is lucky enough to live above a home surgery expert. I prefer to take my chances on the road, among all the devils I don’t know. “I will carry the first aid kit,” I promise.

      We unfold the maps, maps made by careful people in France, with a 9:1 ratio. At that level, you can see the homes. They appear as little squares, huddled in towns, lonesome in a world of rivers and roads and turnpikes and trails. Then I realize I have made a mistake. They are maps for the Burren in west Ireland. We are hiking the Ulster Way in Northern Ireland. I have brought the wrong maps. Garth is trying to remain calm, although I have come unprepared, and with the wrong maps. It takes a lot to make Garth mad, but I have made him mad.

      I pull a little tin from my pocket. It’s filled with hard candies in the shapes of ducks and rabbits. I bought bags of tart candy ducks and bunnies and I keep a handful of them in this little tin. They are my Angry Ducks. I see that Garth is angry, and so I offer him a duck.

      “When I’m angry, I put a hard candy duck in my mouth and I suck,” I explain. “I don’t allow myself to say or do anything until I have sucked the duck until it’s gone. By then my anger is usually gone and I don’t say or do anything rash. If I am still angry and bite the head off the duck, then I have to start all over again.”

      Garth puts a duck in his mouth.

      “Go

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