What the Wind Knows

Eoin Gallagher was born in County Leitrim, Ireland, in 1915. His parents died a few months later in the Easter Uprising of 1916. Annie also lost her parents at a young age, and Eoin took over raising her. Annie has a hard time expressing herself, so Eoin encourages her to write her feelings down.

In 2001, Annie visits Eoin in his Brooklyn home. Eoin shows her a coat button that used to belong to Seán Mac Diarmada, a martyr of the Easter Uprising. Annie is working on a novel about Irish history, but the years after the Easter Uprising are chaotic and full of blame, so she’s hit a roadblock in her writing. Eoin left Ireland during that time, but still misses it. He encourages Annie to write a love story to not forget the real people who lived the history she places such importance in. Annie and Eoin look through old photographs of his family.

Eoin, who is dying of cancer, wants Annie to bring his ashes back to Ireland. As Eoin dies, he asks Annie to give her book to a mysterious “him.”

A letter from 1916 details the death of Eoin’s parents in the Easter Uprising.

Annie flies into Dublin with Eoin’s ashes in an urn. She reminisces about her life with Eoin. He encouraged her to read Irish literature and history, and even learn the Irish Gaelic language. But Eoin always refused to visit Ireland. Out of respect for him, she never insisted, but always wondered why he still viewed Ireland as a dangerous place.

In Dublin, Annie wanders the streets. She stops in a candy store and talks to the owner about Lough Gill, where she will scatter Eoin’s ashes. On her scenic drive to Lough Gill, she finds a small-town library. Annie doesn’t know what township her grandfather was from, so the librarian advises Annie to visit an archivist named Maeve in Ballinamore, where there’s a genealogical center.

Ninety-year-old Maeve recognizes Annie—Annie looks so much like Eoin’s mother Anne—and remembers Eoin. Maeve reveals that Anne did not die in the Uprising as Annie and Eoin had thought; Anne returned to her home many years later.

A letter from 1916 details a fruitless search for Anne’s body in the days after the Uprising.

Annie follows Maeve’s directions to the Ballinagar Cemetery. At the cemetery, Annie finds the Gallagher family plot. The gravestones for Declan and Anne list their dates of death as 1916. She spots a gravestone for a man named Thomas, who Annie assumes is Thomas Smith, an old family friend.

Later, Annie reviews the envelope of Eoin’s treasured family belongings. A ring drops out, which Annie matches to the one Anne wears in old photographs. Annie is surprised to find a photograph of Anne with Michael Collins, the hero of the new Irish government of 1922. Among the belongings, Annie finds a journal inscribed “T.S.”—most likely Thomas Smith—which details the formative years of 1916 to 1922. But when the journal diverges into poems that evoke the language of the famous Irish poet William Butler Yeats, Annie wonders if Thomas Smith is Yeats.

T.S.’s letters and journal entries from 1916 highlight his love for Eoin and his concern for Anne, who remains missing.

Annie drives to Garvagh Glebe, an estate near Lough Gill, to rent a boat for the lake and scatter Eoin’s ashes. The gray sky threatens a storm. As Annie rows into the lake and scatters the ashes, they form a cloud around her and she hears a voice whistling one of Eoin’s favorite songs. A barge passes by, with three men wearing old-fashioned clothing. The men look scared to see her, and one shoots at her with a gun.

Annie falls into the water and desperately tries to find her boat in the fog. She is saved by a man who calls her Anne. He rows her to the shore, where he and a man named Eamon discuss their surprise to find Anne alive.

In a journal entry from 1917, T.S. records his alliance with Michael Collins, who employs him as he runs Sinn Féin, the Irish Republic Brotherhood (IRB), and the Irish Volunteers.

When Annie regains consciousness, she is in a room with a little boy, who asks her if she’s leaving again. The boy introduces himself as Eoin Declan Gallagher—Annie’s grandfather. Annie figures she’s dreaming about 1921, when Eoin was six years old. A doctor comes in to treat Anne—he is the man from the boat whom Annie recognizes from Eoin’s old photographs as Thomas Smith. Thomas tells her he’s spent the last few years looking for her (Eoin’s mother Anne), ever since the fire at the GPO. Shocked, Annie floats back into sleep.

In a 1917 journal entry, Thomas Smith admits that though he is part English, he is devoted to the Irish liberation cause.

For three days Annie goes in and out of consciousness. She realizes her new world is real, but impossible. When she’s strong enough to talk again, she finds out that Eoin has gone to stay with family in Kiltyclogher. Declan (Eoin’s father) and the great revolutionary Seán Mac Diarmada were cousins.

When Annie learns that it is July 3, 1921, she tells Thomas that in eight days the British will call a truce but refuses to tell him how she knows this. The next day, the house staff returns and Annie meets Maeve O’Toole—the future archivist who is now a teenager.

In a journal entry from 1918, Thomas writes about helping with negotiations in Dublin while searching for Anne, who is still missing.

While Annie recuperates, the British attack the Carrigan farm on suspicion of harboring weapons. Eoin sneaks into her room to sleep with Annie (whom he believes is his mother), who tells him stories that in the future Eoin once told her: about the Fionn and the Salmon of Knowledge and Setanta, a boy who becomes a knight by listening to the wind.

Annie realizes that she lost her bag of Eoin’s family treasures in Lough Gill. She mourns the loss of Thomas Smith’s journal.

A 1919 journal entry from Thomas Smith details the stresses of building a new organization after the defeat of 1916.

One morning, Eoin’s grandmother Brigid, who has been looking after him since his parents’ deaths/disappearances, gives Annie Anne’s old clothes and berates her for disappearing without a word. Annie changes into time-appropriate clothes and tells Thomas the partial truth that she’s been in America.

Thomas drives Annie and Eoin into town, where Annie wants to pawn her jewelry so she can contribute to Eoin’s expenses.

In a 1919 journal entry, Thomas writes about his longing for Anne. He also describes Michael Collins’s plan to combine all the Irish revolutionary organizations into one Irish Republican Army.

Eoin and Annie meet with the pawnbroker while Thomas makes some house calls. The pawnbroker offers her 160 pounds for her diamond earrings, cost thousands of dollars in 1995. Eoin tries to sell Seán Mac Diarmada’s coat button, but Annie stops him. She tries to sell Anne’s wedding ring, but the pawnbroker refuses to take it. Instead, he returns the watch Declan had used years ago to buy the wedding ring and gives it to Eoin. Annie remembers her grandfather wearing the watch and wonders “Was I changing history, or had I always been a part of it?” (124).

Eoin walks Annie to the department store, where she selects new clothes.

In his diary, Thomas writes about the chaos in 1920, when the British officers were aggressively attempting to quell the new, outlawed Irish government.

The department store charges Annie’s new clothes and cosmetics to Thomas’s account despite her objections. Thomas ushers Annie and Eoin into his car as British soldiers break the windows of a store selling the Irish Times. Annie teaches Eoin how to tell time on his new watch, telling him she learned this skill from her grandfather. When Eoin asks if she misses her grandfather, she says she doesn’t because he is always with her, repeating Grandfather Eoin’s comment about his mother. Annie wonders if Grandfather Eoin had always known who she was. Later, Thomas tells her that if she’s going to leave again, she should do so soon, before everyone adjusts to having her around.

Thomas’s journal entry from 1920 details the squad sent to assassinate Michael Collins, and the violent retaliatory acts between the Irish and the English that followed.