She reached up to touch my hair, but she didn’t have the strength, so I bent over her and let it fall over her hand and her face and when I drew back she was gone.

I didn’t say anything to anyone till after the funeral.

That was a real bash. She’d been well loved. Afterward everyone came back to the house even though it was a hell of a drive for most of them. The priest was there too. He’d given Gramma a good send-off in the church, so I reckon he deserved his throat-easer, and you had to admire the way he downed the stuff like mother’s milk.

When he came to take his leave, he offered Pa his hand, which Pa took like it was a copperhead.

“I’ll be off now, Sam,” he said, real hearty, like they were best mates. “I know how much you’ll miss your ma. I promised her I’d keep an eye on you all and I’ll be back very soon to see how you’re getting on.”

“No, you won’t,” said Pa.

You could have heard a pin drop.

“I’m sorry?” said the priest.

“You heard,” said Pa.

I said he didn’t waste words.

And to give the priest his due, he had the sense not to keep pressing.

He went out of the door. Pa turned to the remaining guests and said, “All this talking makes a man thirsty. Who’s empty?”

It was later that same night after all our visitors had gone and me and Ma and Pa were sitting together nursing mugs of tea that I spoke.

I told them what Gramma had said and asked what it meant.

Pa didn’t hesitate. He said, “They adopted me.”

I said, “Is that it?”

He said, “I’m adopted. You’re not. What’s your problem?”

I could see his point. I mean he was the one who’d found out his ma and pa weren’t his real ma and pa, not me. But I’d still felt my life had taken a little lurch.

I said, “I’ve just seen someone I thought was my grandmother put in the ground, now I find she wasn’t really related to me at all.”

“So you’re going to miss her less?”

“No, of course not!”

“Well then.”

He stood up and ran his fingers through my hair.

“Your ma knows the tale, such as it is. I’ve got some things I need to check.”

I sometimes think Pa will live forever, ’cos whenever death comes for him, he’ll always have something he needs to check.

When he’d gone out, I turned to Ma and said, “Well?”

And she told me what she knew from talking to Gramma over the years and what she’d managed to extract from Pa.

Gramma Flood’s tale was one of sorrow turned to joy.

She’d wanted children and so had Granpa. When she reached her forties and they hadn’t come, their thoughts turned to adoption.

Technically they were a bit old, but they were in good with their priest, who gave them such a red-hot intro to a Catholic adoption agency, they checked out fine.

No shortage, it seemed. Odd thing that about you Catholics; even those ready to risk the sin of fornication still draw the line at contraception.

Gramma loved to tell Ma the tale. Seems Granpa was taken by a strapping boy with lung power to match his physique. Then Gramma spotted this smaller kid, with a stubble of red hair. He lay very quiet, though when you got close you could see his eyes were alert and watchful. When the nun in charge saw her interest, she smiled and said, “Now I think there may be a message here for you, Mrs. Flood. You take this one, you won’t have to change his name because he’s called Flood already. Sam Flood.”

That clinched matters. How could this be simple coincidence? asked Gramma. In her eyes, this baby was gift-wrapped from God. And Sam, my pa, seemed to confirm her judgment by growing up a loving son and taking to wine making like it was in his blood.

In himself he stayed as he was when first she saw him: quiet, watchful, self-contained. Granpa saw no reason to tell him he’d been adopted, but Gramma thought different and when he got to sixteen, she decided it was time to tell him the truth.

Not that there was much to tell. All she knew was that his mother had been a young woman who’d got into trouble, turned to the nuns for help, and died in childbirth. No details known about her origins or the baby’s father.

I can see Pa taking in this news. I bet he said next to nothing, asked a couple of brief questions maybe, showed no emotion. But a couple of days later he vanished.

He was away for a week. He’d gone in search of more information about his real mother. What he discovered seems little enough, but for a boy of sixteen to discover anything was remarkable. Don’t know who’s better at walling up a secret, the government bureaucrats or you Catholic bastards.

Sorry. Maybe things are better now, but this was a decade before that English woman who finally got all this murky stuff out in the open started chipping away. Don’t expect her book was on the curriculum at your seminary, but if you ever get to read it, you’ll see what a hell of a job she had to make progress.

What he discovered was that his mother, Samantha Flood, far from being a young woman who’d got into trouble and sought the help of the nuns, had been little more than a child herself and already in the nuns’ care when she got pregnant.

And she was English, an orphan brought out here for resettlement.

When Ma told me this my mind went hurtling back ten years.

“You mean she was like those kids in that play?” I asked incredulously.

“Looks like it,” said Ma. “Back then no one knew how many of them there were, of course. Somehow your pa got to see her death certificate. It gave her address as St. Rumbald’s Orphanage.”

“This wasn’t where Gramma went to choose Pa then?” I interrupted.

“No, that was the baby unit of the Catholic Hospital. They don’t have facilities for taking care of infants out at St. Rumbald’s. Or anyone, from the sound of it. Your pa hitched a lift out there and asked to see the records but they told him there weren’t any. He got real frustrated. That’s why he decked the priest.”

Told you you wouldn’t like this.

“Pa hit a priest?” I said, surprised without being amazed. “Why?”

“I asked him that,” she said with a bit of a smile. “He said, hitting a nun wouldn’t have looked so good. But when I pressed him, he said he reckoned the tight rein those nuns kept their girls on, the only bastards who’d get close enough to dip their wicks would have to be priests.”

I took this in. My grandmother the child. My grandfather the priest.

The police had got involved, but the decked priest had shown Christian charity, or maybe just didn’t want publicity, and no charges were brought. Pa came home as if nothing had happened, except that from then on in he’d have nothing to do with the Church.

This must have been a trouble to Granpa and Gramma, but even at sixteen I guess they knew where they were with Pa. If they’d made it a stay-or-go issue, he’d have gone.

He doesn’t say much, but Pa never has any trouble getting his message across.

The same when he met Ma four years later. Within a fortnight he’d asked her to marry him. Ma didn’t go into details but I doubt if it involved making flowery speeches from a kneeling position. They were married in another fortnight.

I asked Ma if he ever did anything more about finding out about his real mother.

She said no. After watching that play, Gramma had been very upset and had said to Ma that she hoped Sam’s mother hadn’t been one of those poor kids. This was the first Ma heard anything about Pa being adopted and naturally she hadn’t rested till she got the whole story, such as it was.

“I asked your pa why he hadn’t told me and he said, would it have made a difference? And of course I said no, and he said, well then. I reminded him of all the stuff we’d read about these child migrants and all, and asked if it didn’t bother him. He said he could see why anyone who’d grown up here, not knowing the truth about themselves, would want to dig. But he’d been born here, been brought up by good people, he’d got his own family he loved, what was in the past for him but pain, and wasn’t there enough of that waiting to jump out on you without going looking for it?”