Johnny Og got up at first light and woke us all at dawn, full of the wonders of the steamboat. He’d found the pilothouse, the smokestacks, the engines, and the greatest prize of all—the paddle wheel.
“Come see it, Paddy!”
“I won’t,” Paddy said, huffing still. “Are you sure Da wouldn’t want us to make a fortune singing and dancing with Lorenzo and Christophe?” he’d asked just before we boarded the boat.
But when Jamesy, Thomas, and Daniel jumped to their feet and went off after Johnny Og, Paddy frowned at me and said, “I’d better watch out for them,” and took off running.
“They’ll come back when their stomachs are growling,” I said to Máire. “We’ve chicken, and Sister Henriette gave us biscuits. So kind. Generous! . . . Máire?”
She didn’t answer. Asleep, or pretending to be. She’d been very silent since we’d left. “I’ve given in, but I won’t pretend to be happy,” she’d said.
“Máire, are you sure you’re not hungry?”
No answer.
Stephen and the girls still slept, and I closed my eyes as the sun rose over the Mississippi.
“Wake up, Mam!” Paddy, excited now, stood in front of me with the other boys around him.
Midday. I’d slept longer than I thought.
“Listen to this, Mam, listen.” Paddy dropped his voice and cupped his hands around his mouth. “By the mark, twain!” he boomed. “That’s what the man says who drops the line over the side of the boat: ‘By the mark, twain!’”
“He measures the water, makes sure it’s deep enough,” Johnny Og added. “Ah, Mam,” he said to Máire, “could we live here on this boat, go back and forth, up and down the river?”
I looked over at Máire. “His father’s son,” I said. “Brave in a boat.”
Máire didn’t reply to me but smiled at Johnny Og. “Stay on the boat, is it? That sounds a lovely idea.”
“Oh, Mam, you would like the rooms above us.”
“I would?”
“You would, Mam,” Thomas said. “Ladies, real ladies eating and drinking at long tables with china and silver, like at home.”
Home. Poor Silken Thomas. The Big House was never your home.
“And card games, Mam, and music,” he went on, “the same as the places my da was going to take us to in London.”
“Robert told great stories about the gambling houses in London, fortunes made and lost on the turn of a card,” Máire said to me.
“The rents of Irish tenants wagered and lost,” I said.
“Beautiful carpets, Mam,” Thomas went on, “and drapes and lamps and—”
“Honora,” she said, “pass me one of those biscuits. I’m peckish.” Máire bit through the crust into the soft center. “Eat up now, boys,” she said. “We’ll go for a wee tramp around the boat.”
Máire settled the red silk shawl around her and started up the steps to the upper deck, with Johnny Og and Thomas on either side. “Coming, Honora?”
“Go on,” I said. “We’ll stay here.”
A few hours later, we came to a wharf. “Natchez, Mississippi—this is Natchez, Mississippi,” a voice called out. A bell rang.
After an hour, we cast off. The big wheel started turning. No new passengers. Bridget, Gracie, and Stephen let me sing them to sleep as the engines throbbed and the paddle wheels churned through the river. I slept.
Máire and the boys came back in the middle of the night.
“Wonders,” she said. “Miracles and wonders up above.” She eased down next to me, smiling and talking. “Oh, Honora, those rooms! Saloons, they call them—lounges with crystal chandeliers, red walls gilded with gold. And the people! Dressed like I’ve never seen before! Wouldn’t poor addled Mistress Pyke cross her eyes in jealousy to see the satin and silk of the ladies there, the shiny boots of the gentlemen? And didn’t some man come over and tip his hat and ask me if the boys and I didn’t want a closer look? He took my arm and brought us into the midst of it all! And here’s the best part. The gentleman said there are saloons in Chicago, lots and lots of them, and guess who owns them? The Irish! And he said Chicago had something of the spirit of New Orleans. So. Isn’t it a good thing Sister found this red-fringed shawl for me among all the charitable garments?” She smiled, leaned back, closed her eyes, and slept. Máire never could sulk for long.
Three days later, the last of the Irish left the boat at a place called Memphis. Two more days—more room now down among the cargo and the children comfortable enough. The boys ran all over the
River Queen
while Bridget and I played games with Stephen and Gracie in the corridor near us. Máire and Thomas “promenaded”—her word—on the upper deck. She found the kitchen, made friends with the cooks, and brought us bread and slices of ham to eat when we’d finished our New Orleans food.
The
River Queen
turned into the Illinois River. We’d been traveling nearly two months. Very weary, all of us.
LaSalle, Illinois. Dawn. The children stumbled like newborn foals down the gangplank of the
River Queen
and onto the pier to board the canal boat. The Sligs fellow waved good-bye to us.
“Your fares are paid all the way to Chicago,” Peter Doherty had repeated over and over. “Don’t let some villain come up and try to convince you different. Terrible altogether, how they prey on travelers. They’ll tell you your ticket is no good because it shows one horse pulling the canal boat instead of two. Or they’ll say, ‘Your ticket has a horse, and that’s donkeys pulling this barge. Buy another.’ Ignore them,” he’d said. “Speak up for yourself.”
But the boatman took my ticket, no bother.
LaSalle, Illinois. LaSalle . . . The French had owned this territory once, Sister Henriette told us. Amerikay now.
The canal boat
General Fry
, a stump of a thing—long, but wide and narrow-bottomed—could barely fit between the stone walls of the canal.
“Come on, missus! Step lively there, boys. A cold wind’s sweeping down from Chicago. Clumps of ice in the canal if we don’t hurry. Temperatures drop overnight. You’ve left it late enough. We’re one of the last boats going.”
The fellow shouting wore a blue uniform and waved the shiny horn he held in one hand at us, urging us forward. “Come on! Let’s go!” The two big horses who would pull the boat along the tow path moved in their harnesses, impatient, too: Come on. Move.
We followed the other passengers into the cabin at the center of the boat, where big glass windows looked out at the deck, and settled ourselves on a lovely plush sofa.
I was exhausted, but the baby inside me was wide awake and kicking. Still, I closed my eyes and was falling asleep when a loud sound startled me wide awake.
“Holy Sweet Jesus!” Máire said.
Another blast!
“There, Mam, on the deck,” Jamesy said. “The boatman’s blowing his horn.”
“We’re off!” said Johnny Og, running out of the cabin and across the deck to the rail.
“See, Mam?” said Paddy. “The horses have started pulling.”
Twenty-four hours, a hundred miles at a steady pace, and we’d arrive in Chicago. Stephen, the girls, Máire, and I fell asleep, lulled by the canal boat’s easy motion. But the boys, including five-year-old Daniel, stayed out on the deck with the boatman.
“Mam, Mam!” Paddy called to me. “Come out and see!”
The sun was high in the sky. The boys have forgiven me for taking them from New Orleans. Give them food, sleep, and a big engine to look at and there’s not a bother on them, I thought as I joined the boys on deck.
What beautiful colors the leaves of the trees on the canal bank had turned. I’d never seen such a mass of red and gold. “What are those trees?” I asked the boatman.
“Maples,” he told me. “The last of them. Bare boughs in Chicago.” He stood next to the gate on the deck. “Maples, oak, birch grow along the canal route, but out beyond on the prairie there’s hardly a tree or bush.” He pointed to the open space I could just glimpse through the trees. “No wood, no fuel. Farmers build their houses from sods.”
“Sods?”
“Pieces of ground, cut up and piled one on the other.”
“Like skalps,” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Shelters built in ditches with pieces of turf,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, not interested. “The sod houses out on the prairie will be gone soon enough. The farmers will build frame houses with lumber brought to them by the boats of this fine Illinois and Michigan Canal. We pick up their crops, bring them to Chicago, carry everything they need back to them. The canal’s only been open six months, and change is coming already. We’d never have finished the I and M Canal but for the wild Irishmen. They could dig, I’ll say that for them. No brains, but plenty of brawn, and willing to risk life and limb to make a dollar. But they don’t put the same value on human life that we do, I guess because there are so many of them.”
“I’m Irish,” I said, “and—”
“And you have how many children?” he interrupted me. “Ten?”
I walked away from the man to the boat rail. What an ignorant guilpín. Our boys hadn’t heard him, thank God. Too busy waving at the children on the bank. Are these the farm children who’d be moving from their mud houses into wooden homes?
The boatman followed me, going on and on about how the Irish workers died because they wouldn’t wear proper clothes, and they drank rotgut whiskey. . . .
I tried to close my ears. Too tired to argue with him.
But then a fellow who’d been standing there quiet, drawing in a notebook, spoke up. He was German, he said, named Carl Culmann, an engineer surveying public works in Amerikay. Nowhere had he come across the level of craft as he’d seen in the canal, he told the boatman. Very skilled workmen, to fit the stones in so carefully. The walls had to hold back millions of gallons of water. He turned to me. “I compliment your countrymen, madam.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said. I turned my back on the boatman and went into the cabin.
At dawn, the boatman called out, “Summit!” The children and Máire slept on, but the older, plump man next to me, a farmer coming to Chicago to sell his harvest, wanted to talk. Why do I get the chatty fellows?
The
General Fry
was for passengers, the farmer told me. Other boats carried cargo—tons and tons of it. The wheat he was selling would be loaded onto a steamer in Chicago, go across the Great Lakes to Buffalo, out the St. Lawrence River, and then to Europe.
“All by water,” the farmer said. “Think of it—a waterway from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to Canada and the Atlantic. The dream of centuries, this Illinois and Michigan Canal! Our congressman, a young lawyer called Abe Lincoln, gave a big speech the day the first cargo arrived in Buffalo. He said what the old-time French explorers could only imagine we Americans had done. Watch Chicago grow now!” he said. “How many people living there now?” he asked the boatman who came into the cabin.
“I’d say at least fifteen to twenty thousand.”
“Twenty years ago,” the farmer said, “population was less than a thousand. But it’s a shame, really. Life in a city is no good.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked.
“Why? Because Chicago’s a barren place, full of brutes and criminals. Even the Indians say it stinks—that’s what Chicago means in their language: bad smell.” He paused, expecting me to laugh. Then, “You’re Irish,” he said.
“I am.”
“I have a question for you. Why won’t you paddys start farms on the prairie?” the farmer asked. “Acres and acres of land going cheap, yet you people crowd together in shantytowns.”
“Well . . . ,” I started.
But he was off telling me how just a few miles west of Chicago grass grew six feet tall and the soil was so rich a dry stick would grow in it. “The land’s flat,” he said. “Easy to plow. I can stand in my field and watch the sun go down below the horizon and there’s nothing between me and it—not a hill or a mound, only the grass and wildflowers. There for the taking. Yet the Irish won’t farm! They stay jammed in Chicago. Why?”
“Money’s needed to buy even cheap land, and then there’s the seed,” I said. “And the plows and shovels, the chickens, calves, and pigs, and . . .”
I remembered the families of Swedes and Norwegians on the
River Queen
. I was sure those still-faced men had money belts wrapped around their waists full of the profits made from selling their land at home, something to help them start again in Amerikay. Our fellows had only their own strong backs, and what they earned went back to Ireland to pay the rent and bring out another family member.
Five loud, long notes on the trumpet. “Bridgeport,” said the boatman. “Last stop.”
“Bridgeport?” I said. “Where’s Chicago?”
“The boat stops here. This is the end.”
“But . . . I don’t understand,” I said. I looked out—no buildings or streets, only an empty wharf.
“The center of the city is a few miles north, but the canal ends here,” the farmer said to me.
“We have to find Saint Patrick’s Church in Chicago. How do we get there?”
“You can pay a small boat to take you up the river, or hire a wagon, or walk,” he said.
“Walk? And how far is it?”
“Four, five miles.”
Walk? Not walk, I thought. The children had traveled two months with hardly a whinge or whine, but to ask them to go five more miles on foot?
“Please, we have to get to Chicago,” I said.
“Bridgeport is where you people live,” the boatman said. “It’s where the digging for the canal began. You’ll find someone. You have no choice anyway, missus. Off you go.”
The boatman made Máire and the children stand up—still half-asleep, all of them. I picked up Stephen, took Bridget’s hand. Máire carried Gracie. We stood on the deck.
“But, sir . . . ,” I began.
The boatman pushed me, put his hand between my shoulders and shoved me down the gangplank—I could hardly keep hold of Stephen. Bridget started crying, grabbing on to my skirt, tripping on the ramp.
Máire still stood on the deck, clutching the red silk shawl to her. “This is Chicago?” she said. “Where are the pink buildings? Where are the church spires? Where are the saloons!”
The wharf was empty. I saw a few small wooden houses in the distance. Not one person about, no streets. Only a path of mud.
I suppose I had expected that somehow Patrick Kelly would have been watching for us and would be here to meet us, or that I could ask a docker where Patrick Kelly with the golden staff lived.