When I made it back to the cabin and saw what they had done, I instantly thought of my father a world away.
He’s passed on. A peaceful passing, so said Claire’s letter. He had known it would come, too, and had built his coffin well ahead of time. He put maritime cleats on it so that it could be lowered like a life raft into the earth. Such was his love for the life of boats. And such, also, was his cantankerous Irish humor.
Yes, when I got back to the cabin, and beheld the wreckage, my father’s words flooded my mind. Of things he would tell me as a child. Words about boats. Things he’d oft repeat as our oars dipped into the quiet obsidian waters before the dawn light, searching for salmon. The mornings when I couldn’t tell if he prayed for them or to them. 
“The only difference between a boat and a man is the material.”
Or how when we were repairing damage to our little fishing boat, the old currach he’d made with his father and brothers, that he compared the gash in the hull to “the stigmata of blessed Jesus himself.” 
And most of all, I remembered that shameful day when Connor and I were rough housing with the tools in the barn and almost sent one flying straight into the hull of the currach. Don’t you know that this was just the moment when my father walked in from the rain to see the ball ping hammer hit the strawbale nearby. And my did he lay into us, then. For he warned us, “to smash a hull is to smash a skull. And such a thing is a murder, punishable as such.”
He really did think that, you know. He thought of a boat as having a soul, an entity. He thought that there couldn’t be anything more barbaric or depraved - other than the actual literal killing of a person, maybe  - than the idea of someone taking a hammer and smashing in the wooden siding of a craft. To him it was not like murder, but was murder. 
Murder. The word flew from my astonished lips as I approached my cabin, where I always drew up my currach to rest. So many thousands of miles now from Ireland, in this cold corner of America as lawless as it is Godless, I felt my father turning in his sunken grave. And I wished for him stillness as I approached the wreckage of what these Americans had done to my boat. The one I had made when I first landed here. My boat. 
My hands trembled as I picked up the pieces of my currach’s bow, fractured and crunched by the blunt force of those lumbermen’s mallets and axes. All of it lay mangled, brutalized. I knelt in the carcass of this boat, smashed to splinters. And I began to weep, mourning both the boat and a new wave of old grief that washed over me for my father, also. And wept for something else more subtle, deeper, submerged and unknown. As I wept the tears soaked into the un-oiled interior of the broken wooden frame. The timber was thirsty and drank this offering in its gasping for life. It was then that I finally could grasp what my father had meant about boats and souls. It was also then that I finally had some semblance of a grasp of what all those figures of Mary weeping over Jesus might have felt like, sitting there alone in the frigid, grey stone chapels of my homeland. For in a way, I wept not only for a boat, nor just for the incarnation of my father’s memory, but for the death of all innocents in this world.