Galway Bay (40 page)
“I promised your da we’d go to Chicago,” I said. “Uncle Patrick’s waiting for us there.”
“Is it a far way?” Jamesy asked.
“Clear across the sea,” Paddy said.
“And when will we come home?” Jamesy again.
“We can’t come home,” Paddy said to him. “We have no home.”
“We do too. Don’t we, Mam. We have Bearna and Knocnacuradh—”
“Burned down,” Paddy said, “and Knocnacuradh’s tumbled and Da’s buried . . . gone.”
“He’s not! He’s not. He’s with us! You said so, Mam.”
“I did, Jamesy.”
“Then where is he?” Paddy said.
“You won’t see him, but you’ll know he’s with you, and he wants us to go to Amerikay.”
“Mam,” Paddy said to me, as if I were the child and he’d caught me in a lie.
That night, Sean Og’s brother Tommy Joe took Paddy and Jamesy to Ballynahinch Lake to try for a salmon—Tommy Joe was willing to risk being arrested for poaching in order to feed us well before our journey.
When they returned from Ballynahinch at dawn, Paddy threw himself in my arms.
“Two lucky buachaill you have here, Honora,” Tommy Joe told me. “We caught a big salmon, and they saw a great sight altogether, didn’t we, boys? A herd of Connemara ponies, very rare these days to see them—they stay well away from people.”
“You were right, Mam. Da is with us!” Paddy said. “He sent Champion to us!”
“He did, Mam!” Jamesy said. “Champion and Macha with her.”
“As to that,” said Tommy Joe, “a mare and her foal did leave the herd and run forward toward us. A chestnut, she was, bigger than a pony, and so was her little one—a filly, I think.”
I looked at the boys and smiled. “Your da is watching over you,” I said.
“But he’s here, Mam, in Connemara. How can we leave him behind?” Paddy asked.
Michael’s blue eyes looked at me from Paddy’s face. “He’ll travel with us, Paddy. I promise.”
The next evening, Sean Og took me aside. “The signal’s come, Honora. There’s a bonfire to the north relays the news. A ship will reach Mac Dara’s Island soon after dawn,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
He didn’t bother to answer—hadn’t the Keeleys been smugglers for generations?
“And it will slow for the tide?”
“Unless the captain’s an ejit.”
So.
“At least let me row you out to wait for the ship,” Sean Og said.
“You can’t, Sean Og. The captain must see two women stranded in the ocean, alone. Doesn’t the law of the sea say sailors must rescue the shipwrecked?” I said. “If they saw a big strong fellow, they’d not feel any sympathy for us at all.”
“You’ll be in danger,” he said. “If the curragh turns over, two minutes in the freezing water will kill you. It’s far from big and strong I am now, but I can row you out.”
“And so can we, Sean Og. Don’t you remember how Máire and I won all the races? Beat the girls from Ard every time!”
He finally agreed.
We would have to wait for first light to set out, then row quickly, but we should cover the three miles in time.
Sean Og and his family and many of the Ard Keeleys sat up with us through the night—another American Wake.
Da didn’t want to take the eleven sovereigns I gave him. “You’ll need it to get through the winter and to help the other Keeleys,” I said to him. Máire and I had plenty—sixty-two pounds. Sean Og had said that thirty was the most we’d have to pay for our passage. I told Da I’d try to send more after we found Patrick Kelly in Chicago.
We woke the children. They were sleepy, confused.
“Don’t cry,” I heard Paddy tell the others.
“We’ll write you, Mam,” I said. “We’ll send the letters to Sister Mary Agnes. She’ll get them to you somehow. And we’ll find our brothers, Mam.”
She said, “You will. Of course.”
Mam hugged each of the children and kissed Máire and me.
Da patted the children’s heads, then held my hand. “You’re a strong woman, Honora. Remember your granny. Here.” He slipped Granny’s cross from the penal days up my sleeve.
“Oh, Da.”
“Take it for you and Máire. Be sure you tell your children and grandchildren the stories Granny taught you.”
“I will, Da.”
Da took Máire’s hands. “You were always a good, kind girl, Máire, and I’m sorry for all you’ve suffered.”
Máire clung to him.
“Better go,” Sean Og whispered to me.
“Máire,” I said. “Máire, it’s time.”
She stepped away from Da, nodded, and picked up Gracie. I carried Stephen, and Mam helped us settle the children in the curragh. Then Da and Sean Og pushed us out from the shallow water.
We gripped the oars, set them in the water, and started to pull.
“Slán,” Mam and Da and Sean Og called from the shore. “Slán.”
And then we were out of the harbor and couldn’t hear them or see them anymore.
“Come on, Máire,” I said. And we set out.
“Pull! For Jesus’ sake, pull, Máire, pull!” Máire had finally gotten the rhythm—left wrist over right wrist—but she wasn’t dipping her oar deep enough. The curragh hardly moved, and we needed to get into the open water
now
.
I could see the topsail on the horizon, the ship rising out of the milky pre-dawn sky, pushing against the waves, not too far away.
We need to get closer so the lookout will see us. But if we’re too near, the bow will smash the curragh.
“Stay still,” I said to our children, who lay in the bottom.
Too many of us for the curragh. If we tip over into the sea, we’re dead.
“Máire,” I yelled. “Bend down, put your back into it, come on! The Keeley girls passing those Ard ones, clean strokes—not a splash as we fly! Come on, Máire! Show them—show your boys!” Can’t let the ship pass us by before we reach it.
“C’mon, Mam!” said Johnny Og. “You’re as good as Aunt Honey!”
“I am!” said Máire, and her next stroke matched mine, and so did the next and the next—until we were sliding over the waves.
“Hold on to each other!” I yelled to the children.
Máire and I were bending and pulling as one, feet braced against the bottom, bending and pulling again and again. . . .
“Hoo-rah!” Máire yelled.
“Hoo-rah!” I echoed. “Come on, children, help us mark the time: Hoo-rah!”
“Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah! Hoo-rah!”
We were there, at the edge of the ship’s path.
“Quick!” I said. “Hide the oars. Put them under you, children.”
Now—now or never . . .
The ship rose so tall above us, the sails like round towers. Will they see us?
We waved. We shouted. We couldn’t stand—can’t overturn the curragh, can’t freeze to death.
“Help! Help! Help!”
Very little wind. The ship was nearly stopped still.
“Help! Help! Help!”
A sailor leaned over the railing. “Are you in trouble?”
“We are!” Máire said. “My husband was swept overboard! We’ve lost our oars!”
“Where are you bound?” the sailor yelled.
“Amerikay!” Máire answered. “We were to meet our ship at Westport!”
We waited while the sailor fetched another man, the captain.
“We can’t help you!” the captain shouted down to us.
“Then we’ll die!” I answered him. “We were almost swamped during the night! We won’t survive!”
“I can’t!”
“We have money! We can pay!” I shouted.
“Thirty pounds!” yelled Máire. “Thirty pounds! Show him, Honora! Hold up the sovereigns!”
I had them ready and held up my hands, the palms piled with gold coins.
Could the captain see the glint of gold in this first light? He looked at us for a long time. And then, compassion? The law of the sea? The sovereigns? For whatever reason, he told the sailor to lower the cargo net. I put the coins away.
“Come on, Paddy, Johnny Og, Thomas,” I shouted to them.
The net swung back and forth just above us.
“Grab it, Paddy, Johnny Og. Easy, easy now.” If they fall into the sea . . .
I set Stephen and Bridget into the net, and Máire put Gracie next to them. While we held the net steady, the boys pulled themselves in. Finally, Máire and I grabbed the edges.
“Mam! Mam! Mam!” the children shouted.
I brought the net to me, checked the sailcloth pocket tied around my waist. It contained the Mary Bean, Granny’s cross, Michael’s stone, and a sack with the money—all we had. Then I tumbled into the net, Máire behind me.
As the sailors hauled the cargo net up slowly, careful not to smash us against the side of the ship, I watched the empty curragh bobbing in the waves.
Then we were aboard, the sailors helping us out of the net.
“Welcome to the
Superior
,” the captain said. “Bound from Derry for New Orleans.”
“Amerikay?” I asked.
“Indeed. The southern route—only sensible way at this time of year.”
“We are going to Chicago,” I said.
“That’s a fair distance from New Orleans,” he said, “but closer than you are here.”
I gave him sovereigns from the sack in the pocket under my skirt.
I looked up at the tall sails. This ship’s very like the
Cushlamacree
, and I am standing at the rail as I had so often imagined, but I’d always seen Michael here beside me. “Your da’s traveling with us,” I’d told the boys. “His spirit.”
The ship moved farther out into the Atlantic. Behind me the blue waters of Galway Bay disappeared into the gray sea.
I’ve seen you every day of my life, Galway Bay. Michael came to me out of your waves. But I will never see you again. Not in this life. Perhaps in the life hereafter. Please God.
But our children will live, Michael, a stór. We’ve saved them.
Slan, a ghrá.
Amerikay.
Amerikay
N
OT A COFFIN SHIP
, the
Superior
. Thank God. Enough food, even if it is mostly porridge, and the water’s not foul,” Maggie Doherty said to Máire and me.
In the three days since the sailors hoisted us aboard, this small, fair-haired Derry woman and her husband, Charlie, had helped us settle into the routine of the ship. It was Maggie found us an empty bunk among the rows of these open plank boxes—one stacked on top of the other—that filled the very bottom compartment of the ship where we steerage passengers were confined.
“Dark down here, and of course there’s the stink, but we’ve ten buckets for the waste of a hundred people, and that sees us right. The men are allowed up to empty the buckets every day,” Maggie had told us. “And there’s no fever. Thank God.”
It had been a struggle to fit the ten of us into the six-foot-square bunk, but we’d put Gracie and Stephen and Bridget between Máire and me, and the boys stacked themselves at our feet somehow and slept despite the yelps and groans of, “You kicked me!” and, “Move over!” that went on through the night. How did the men manage? One box per family, no matter how many. Some were too seasick to get up. Ah, Michael, this crossing would have been a misery for you, though you’d still have made a game of it for the boys: The warriors of the Red Branch hunker down in their stronghold. I miss you, a stór.
We stood with Maggie waiting our turn at the cooking fire above deck, while her twelve-year-old daughter watched the children down below. It’s cold today, but no ice on the deck yet. I pulled in great lungfuls of air and walked over to the railing. The gray ocean, so vast, so open, was a relief after our cramped quarters.
“Jesus Christ, Honora, come away from there!” Maggie called to me from the end of a line of women huddled against the ship’s center cabin. “You’ll fall over.”
“I can’t bear to look out at the sea,” she said as I rejoined Máire and her.
“We’re fisherman’s daughters,” Máire said to her. “We learned to be brave in a boat.”
“Nice for you. I prefer the river Foyle. Land’s always in sight. Some of these”—she nodded at the women ahead—“never saw any expanse of water at all, let alone this wide and wild ocean. Terrified,” Maggie said as we watched two women pick up their pots and hurry below. Quick smiles, but no chat. “Protestants,” Maggie whispered as she dipped her pot in a water barrel, then added meal from her sack.
Máire and I had our own supply—ten pounds of oatmeal for each adult every week and five pounds for every child, a fair ration. I filled the pot Maggie had found for us.
“Is it because there are Protestant travelers with us that the
Superior
is better than most?” I asked Maggie as we stood by the fire.
She had told us that though all the passengers came from the north of Ireland, half of them were Catholic like the Dohertys, and the rest were Protestants, “evicted the same as we were, a good few of them.”
Máire had told Maggie she didn’t know there was such a thing as a poor Protestant. We still hadn’t figured out a way to tell one from the other. All spoke with the same flat accent.
“The names will tell you,” Maggie had assured us. “Won’t find any Patricks or Bridgets among them. They’ll be called Sarah and Rebecca, George and Harold, with last names like Johnson, Carson, Smith, Jones, Jackson.”
Jackson—no one like him among the passengers. Not one person had called us “papist idolaters.” Still, you couldn’t go up to people and say, “What’s your name?”
Now Maggie looked around. We were the only ones left at the fire. She gestured us closer. “It’s true enough that the owner and the captain are Protestant and they might treat their own better, but the real reason this isn’t a coffin ship is because of the catastrophe,” she said in a low voice. Then while our pots boiled she told us the story. “This man from Derry, McAllister, owns the
Superior
and four or five others. Well, a year back another of his ships was coming from Sligo with a load of passengers. It was to pick up more in Derry, go on to Liverpool, then cross to Amerikay. On the journey up the Irish coast, a terrible storm hit. The sailors feared the water washing over the decks would flood below and sink the ship, so they tied canvas sheets across the openings to the lower deck as a barrier against the sea. With so many belowdecks, the passengers couldn’t breathe. A hundred were dead when the ship arrived in Derry ten days later. They’d clawed holes in the canvas trying to get air. The sailors had clubbed them back.” She dropped her voice even more. “Scottish sailors, and all the Irish passengers, Protestant
or
Catholic, scum to them. There was a trial. The captain and crew were found guilty of murder. A very black mark against the McAllisters.”