Читать книгу The Element of Fire - Brendan Graham - Страница 11

Whether her anger had moved the sullen mountain, or whether it was merely favourable winds, the next morning produced a miracle. A ship out of Londonderry – the Jeanie Goodnight – had rounded Achill Island under cover of darkness and now sat at the quay: and she was Boston-bound. Word of the ship’s arrival had spread like wildfire, igniting all of Westport into frenzied quay-life once again. The Inn emptied.

Ellen left the children behind her in the room, admonishing them not to leave it. Wild with excitement, she threw off her shoes and ran bare-stockinged all the way to the office of Mr John Reid, Jun., the dress hiked up behind her like a billowing sail and with every stride storming Heaven that she wasn’t too late.

The quay was teeming with people. Would-be travellers clutched carpetbags to their breasts – food and their entire earthly possessions within. Many were young, single women, who vied for ground with barking agents and anxious excise men. While late-arriving jobbers had their own solution, jabbing at obstructive buttocks with their knob-handled cattle-sticks.

Already the ship agent’s door was mobbed, cries of ‘Amerikay!’ ascending at every turn. Call the damned at the Gates of Hell. Like it was their last hope.

It was her last hope. If they didn’t embark on this ship, who knew when another would come. She and her children would be fated to stay in Ireland. Her money would run out, and in time they would sink lower and lower, until they, too, ended up on scraps of pity and charity and the off-cuts of ass-meat. She lunged into the crowd, all thought of her gender put aside. Nor did the opposite gender give ground to her, unless she took it. Pushing and elbowing, she scrimmaged her way forward until she reached the front.

‘Mr Reid! Mr Reid!’ she shouted, money in her fist, shaking it above her head. ‘Passage for four to Boston!’ she beseeched.

At last he beckoned her forward, she banged down the money onto his desk.

Fifteen minutes later she left, four sailing tickets to Boston clenched like a prayer between her two hands.

Their passage was secured.

The children were overjoyed, Mary more restrained than the others, at the thought of leaving Katie behind. Ellen wondered if the silent girl really understood what all the excitement was about. Sometimes, you just didn’t know with her. But the girl clapped her hands, looking from one to the other of them, her hazel-brown eyes shining, her pert little nose twitching with delight.

Thrice daily, morning, noon, and at eventide, Ellen went to check on the Jeanie Goodnight lest the ship slip out again unexpectedly, just as she had ghosted into the western seaboard town.

Three days later they were headed out into the bay, Westport behind them in the mist, like a shaken shroud. She hated the place. Its workhouse which had taken Michael; the hordes of its hungry, clawing to get aboard the ship ahead of her, the lucky ones, their passage paid by land-clearing landlords.

Once aboard, she had changed her clothes, shaking the stench of Ireland out of them, then boiled them. As the Jeanie Goodnight threaded its way through the drumlin-humped islands, she was aware of the Reek to her left, the cursed mountain always looking down on them, whichever way you went, by land or by sea; watching, judging. She wouldn’t look at it directly. It was part of the Ireland of the past drawing away behind them. An Ireland of Famine; of vacant faces and outstretched hands – an island of beggars, no place for her and her children.

There they had been, she, Michael, all of them, back there in the mountains, waiting, year in year out, for the potatoes to grow. Beating their way down the road to the priest to give thanks, prostrating themselves, when they did grow; beating their breasts in contrition for imagined sins when they didn’t. Then, trudging over and back to Pakenham’s place to pay the rent, hoping he wouldn’t raise it on them when they had it, grovelling for clemency, citing ‘the better times to come’ when they hadn’t.

Always on their knees, giving thanks or pleading. They were to be pitied, the whole hopeless lot of them. It wasn’t the mountains of Maamtrasna that imprisoned them, or the watery arms of the Mask that landlocked them. It wasn’t even, she knew, the landlords and the priests. It was themselves. Going round in circles, beholden to the present and beholden to the past, with its old seafóideach customs, handed down from generation to generation. Tradition, woven around their lives from before they were born, like some giant web. She wanted to strip it all away from her now, never return. If it wasn’t for Michael and Katie back there on its bare-acred mountain, in its useless soil.

‘A Mhamaí …’ The tug at her sleeve startled her.

It was Mary. The child’s eyes, though dry, were blotched from rubbing. Mary would try to hide it from her that she still cried over Katie. That was her way. In the days they had waited for the ship, Ellen had talked to her and Patrick about the need to be strong; the child now beside her looked anything but. Though her first instinct was to take Mary in her arms, Ellen instead led her to the bow of the ship.

‘See, Mary! See out there beyond the horizon – the place where the sea meets the sky?’

Mary nodded.

‘Well, out there is America

‘Is it like Ireland?’ Mary interrupted.

‘No, Mary, it isn’t. America is a big and rich country not like Ireland at all.’

Mary fell silent. Ellen, sensing the child’s disappointment, pressed on. ‘It will be better than Ireland, Mary, I promise you it will be better. But we are going to have to be Americans. We must forget we are Irish. Leave all … all that behind us.’

Mary turned from looking out ahead, trying to see this land where they would be different people. ‘But, a Mhamaí –’

Ellen stopped her, gently. ‘Mary … you mustn’t call me that – “ a Mhamaí ” – any more. We are going to be Americans now. People don’t say that in America. From now on you must call me “Mother”!’

The child said nothing – only looked at her.

‘It’s all right,’ Ellen said, taking her by the shoulders. ‘Nothing’s changed. We’re still the same between us in English as in Irish,’ she smiled. ‘Do you understand?’

Mary once more looked out between the deepening sky and the widening ocean, trying to see beyond where they met. Out to this place, this America.

‘Yes … Mother,’ she answered, giving voice to the strange-sounding word – the wind from America holding it back in her throat, so that Ellen could scarcely catch it.

Out they tacked, past the Clare Island lighthouse, tall and solid-walled. Its white-painted watchtower, lofted heavenwards two hundred feet, would see them safely past Achill Sound. ‘A graveyard for ships,’ Lavelle had told her before she had left Boston. It was his place, Achill. This island, cut off from Ireland’s most westerly shore. ‘Achill – wanting to be in America,’ he always joked.

She hadn’t yet broached the subject of Lavelle with the children, except in a general fashion, like she had mentioned Peabody; both as people in Boston with whom she conducted business dealings. She would have to tell them more about Lavelle – that they were partners, but in business matters only. Albeit that she was fully conscious of his affection for her, and in turn regarded him highly, it was her intention never to remarry. She would be true to Michael to the grave. If, thereby, she was denying herself the tender comforts of marriage life, and a father’s guiding hand for her children, then so be it. That was the price to be paid of her troth to Michael.

An eddy of breeze swirling up from Achill Sound made her shiver slightly. She loosened then re-knotted the blue-green scarf Lavelle had given her at Christmas. She had four long weeks at sea in which to reaffirm her intentions.

The Jeanie Goodnight, a triple-masted emigrant barque, with burthen eight hundred tons, and a master and crew of nineteen, was constructed of the best oak and pine Canadian woods could yield. On her arrival at Westport she had disgorged four hundred tons of Indian corn, twelve hundred bags of the dreaded yellow meal; flour, Canadian timber and East Coast American potatoes. There had been a riot, the poor seeking to seize what supplies arrived with the ship. It was the only way they would get food, by taking it.

When Patrick raised the question of inferior food being shipped into the country crossing with superior food being shipped out, all she could say was, ‘It doesn’t make any more sense to me, Patrick, than it does to you. I don’t understand these things.’ It really didn’t matter what food there was, good or bad. The famished had scarcely a penny between them with which to buy it anyway.

Soon they had sailed beyond the reach of Achill Sound, leaving behind her last view of Ireland – disused lazy beds climbing towards the sky over Clew Bay.

The voyage was a good one, the elements favouring them so that the copper-fastened Jeanie Goodnight sat steady and proud in Atlantic waters. Ellen kept themselves to themselves. Their fellow passengers were a mixed lot. Above deck were the commercial Catholic classes – shopkeepers, grocers, middlemen – and those called ‘strong farmers’, taking what possessions they had, fleeing the sinking ship that was Ireland. There was too a good sprinkling of voyagers from Londonderry and the northern counties.

It surprised her to hear these talk in their brittle way of ‘the calamity biting deep in Ulster’. She found it hard to reconcile the notion that those who called on the Hand of Providence to strike down the ‘lazy Irish Catholics’, should also be stricken by the same levelling Hand.

‘Planters’, or ‘Scots Irish’, as Lavelle called them; Irish, but not Irish. And they were different. More sober in dress and demeanour than the boisterous middlemen from the southern counties. Two hundred years previously, they had been brought in from the Scottish lowlands, and given Catholic land. In return, they were to ‘reform’ Ireland and the Irish. This zeal had never left them. She had seen them in Boston. Hard work and privilege had kept them where they were – looking down on the ‘other’ Irish, every bit as much as the ‘other’ Irish – her Irish – despised them.

These Scots Irish on board the Jeanie Goodnight already spoke of Boston as if it were theirs, naming out to each other the congregations where they would gather to worship; giving no sense that they were leaving anywhere, only of arriving somewhere else.

Below deck, sober demeanour counted for nothing. Nightly the scratch of fiddles and the thud of reel-sets staccatoed the timbers, as the peasant Irish ceilidhed their way to ‘Amerikay’.

The ‘cleared’, passage-paid by landlords happy to see the back of them, at first rejoiced openly at their leaving. Then, inhabitors of neither shore, they floundered in a mid-ocean of conflicting emotions, fuelled by dangerous grog and the more dangerous fiddle music.

Along with the ‘cleared’ a large body of those below deck were single women from sixteen to thirty years, those Ellen had noticed at the quayside. ‘Erin’s daughters’, fleeing Famine and repression. Most would find their way into the homes of affluent Boston as domestic servants to become ‘Bridgets’. Others would sit behind the wheels of the new-fangled sewing machines in the flourishing clothing and cordwaining shops of the Bay Colony. Others still would become ‘mill girls’, in the Massachusetts mill towns of Lawrence and Lowell. There, their fresh young bodies would make the machines sing and the bosses happy, their spirits thirsting for the fields of home and a cooling valley breeze.

In Boston, the agents of those same factory bosses would be waiting on the piers, to corral the fittest and strongest of these young women, to put shoes on the feet of America, clothes on American backs. She had seen it so many times on the Long Wharf when the ships came in.

And she had seen the jaded ‘Bridgets’ traipse down to Boston Common with their silver-spoon charges, glad of an outing and a few mouthfuls of fresh air. And the threadbare needlewomen, bodies like ‘S’ hooks from fifteen hours a day, every day, shaped over their machines.

America indeed promised much. But it took much in return.

Each evening those below were allowed on deck for an hour to cook what little they had on the open stove before being driven below again. Once uncaged, they tore at their carpetbags like ravenous dogs, until the meagre contents contained within, spilled over the timbers. A few praties, a bag of the hard yellow meal – ‘Peel’s Brimstone’, after the British Prime Minister who sought to feed the starving Irish with it, until it sat like marbles, pyramided in their bellies. Sometimes she saw a side of pig or the hindquarter of an ass, smoked or salted for preservation. Finally, the carpetbags carried a drop of castor oil for the bowels – to clear out Peel’s yellow marbles.

Once, horrified, she watched as a young lad, no older than Patrick, was flung from the carpetbag mêlée by a much older man, his father. The boy careered against the tripod supporting the cooking cauldron. But his screams, as his arms and upper body were scalded, served to distract none but his mother from the frenzy taking place. Ellen ran to summon the ship’s doctor but the boy’s frailty was unable to sustain his sufferings and he expired before relief could be administered.

She noticed, the following evening, that the tragedy stayed no hand from the continuing brawls for carpetbag rations.

Again, Ellen kept the children close to her, having found the silent girl one evening to have disappeared and crept amongst the carpetbaggers, peering into their faces, searching out a spark of recognition between any and herself. Ellen could still get nothing from her, nor did the girl speak to either Mary or Patrick.

At first the strangeness of being on the ship had seemed to frighten the girl – as it did Ellen’s own two children. Then, she became fascinated by it. Looking out on every side, running quickly from windward to leeward, watching the land slide away behind them. Or, facing mizzenward, almost, it seemed to Ellen, listening to the flap of the wind in the masts. Other times she would find the girl staring for hours into the deep, ever-changing waters, finding some kinship there, amidst the white spume, the dark silent depths. What was ever to become of her, Ellen wondered. She would have to give her a name. She couldn’t be just the ‘silent girl’, for ever.

The thirty days at sea, whilst giving Ellen time to regain herself, had done nothing to restore her with regard to Patrick.

He still resented her for deserting them and didn’t seek much to conceal it either. Ellen had decided to let things take their own course between them, not to rush him. But Boston wasn’t far away – and Lavelle. If Patrick didn’t show some sign in the next week or so of coming around, then she would have to sit him down anyway and tell him about Lavelle. Already, when she had returned to Ireland to retrieve the children, her changed appearance and failure to return sooner had caused Patrick to accuse her of having a ‘fancy man’ in America.