Ellis Island (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

We telegrammed our parents from Dublin, and went home to Maidy and Paud’s house to take the softest blow first. We passed Paud in the field on our way in. He shook John’s hand, but did not follow us up to the house. Maidy did not greet us properly at the door. She was tight-lipped and continued about her housework, deliberately ignoring us. I was distraught. I had never seen Maidy like this before. John was not worried. “She’ll forget soon enough,” he said, when she left the room.

“Indeed and I will not!” she shouted back. Then, unable to hold on to her anger, she came back in and pleaded, “Why did you do it, John?”

Would he tell her I had put pressure on him? “We’re well beyond the age of consent, both of us. We waited until Ellie was finished school . . .”

“You did
not
,” she retorted. “Ellie was to join the convent then and teach. Arrangements had already been made, John.”

“Ellie is eighteen, a woman. She can make up her own mind.”

I realized that Maidy must have been speaking with my father. “What did my father say?”

“He said . . .” She paused, as if she did not want to tell me, and instead looked over toward the fireplace. I followed her eyes. Poking out of a grain sack slumped beside the hearth was the blue feather pillow from my bed at home. Maidy found a flint of anger—her lips tightened and she burst it out of her: “He said to tell you he has already paid out your dowry—to the nuns.” Then her face collapsed with regret and her voice softened to the mild Maidy I loved. “He left your belongings. I didn’t open them out, but the bag was damp, so I just kept them by the fire.”

A sob rose in my throat. My dowry. I had not thought consciously about it till that moment, but now I realized I had been depending on it. I knew I could live without my parents’ love, but in that moment I did not know if I could live without their money. I ran over to the bag and emptied it out across the floor. My blanket, my pillow and all of my clothes. But not my Jesus and Mary uniform, or my valuable rosary beads, or the precious prayer book. “Damn those pigs!” Anger and despair came howling out of me. I grabbed at the shabby pile and began to tear into everything, ripping the fabric, shredding everything I owned into rags.

John came over, gently pulled me back and put his arms around me. “They’ll come round, Ellie,” he said, adding, “I’m your family now.”

We stayed with Maidy and Paud for a few days. I slept on the settle in their kitchen and John on the floor. We met in the fields during the day to make love—and for those first few weeks our new marriage was just an extension of the friendship it had always been. John went into town and made contacts in the pub—Maidy disapproved, but reluctantly conceded that John needed to keep “in” with the men of the town if he was to get work. I helped Maisie a bit with the farm, cleaning out the henhouse and trying to milk the cows, but I was not born to farming and she found it easier to wait on me than instruct me. I was comfortable with the old couple looking after us, but on the third day John broke the news to them that we were moving on. “We’re going to live in my parents’ cottage. It’s time we had our own place.”

Maidy’s face collapsed. “But it’s in the middle of nowhere, John—miles from the village.”

“I’ll get work. There’s plenty of work for a good carpenter.”

Paud left the room. He wouldn’t be driven to speech if he was angry. Maidy’s eyes followed her husband out of the room, but she kept talking to John. I had never seen her so worried. She pleaded with him: “Work’s not that easily got, John, you’ve got none up to now—and the cottage hasn’t been lived in for years, it will be in a desperate state. And it’s five miles or more away from here.”

“It’s a fine cottage and it belongs to me.” John had a certain look about him that made me know he wasn’t going to change his mind. “Don’t worry, I’ll tidy it before moving my new wife in.” He put his arms round my waist. “I’ll make it perfect for you, I promise.”

John went to the cottage on foot and I stayed behind with the old couple gathering up our things for our new life. I was excited about sharing a home with my new husband. Our own fire, our own roof to sleep beneath—he would build us a bed and a cabinet, which, in time, we would fill with crockery, and life would be perfect. Maidy and I sewed up the things I had torn in temper, and I turned the remains of my old yellow dress into two pretty cushions, which I embroidered with some wool I had unfurled from an old sweater of John’s. We stuffed the cushions with soft, shredded hay and dried lavender. Maidy gave me two cups, two plates, two spoons, a knife and a mixing bowl. Paud gave us their old pot oven, which they had replaced some years before, but first he had to take it to the blacksmith to be mended. He had only eggs and a chicken to offer as payment, so I gave up one of my new yellow cushions instead. “I need an oven more than I need decoration,” I said, when Maidy objected. When Paud returned with the shining pot mended as good as new, he said, “Theo blushed like a woman when I gave him your pretty cushion. He’ll look after you again.”

John came back after five days and we loaded the cart with our new belongings. It seemed like a lot. The bedding and household bits were added to with a sack of grain, vegetables for both planting and eating and other food to get us started—a tin of tea, baking soda, some butter and eggs, a bag of apples and a cooked chicken. Paud tied a cow to the back of the cart and stuffed three live chickens into a wooden box, where they clucked and squealed until we were afraid they’d kill one another. The horse started to pull off slowly, irritated by the cow at its rear: “Come on, Ellie—hop on.”

“Are you sure you can spare it all?” I said to Maidy.

“It will start you off in any case,” she said and kissed me warmly. “You know where we are if you need us.”

It was almost dark when we arrived, and raining. John jumped off the back of the cart to open the gate and then ran ahead in front of us, shouting, “Welcome to John Hogan’s house, which he shares with his good wife, Eileen!” But my heart sank as Paud drove the cart after him through the gate.

The house was mottled with moss, its ancient whitewash gray and hanging off in wide, peeling scabs. The grass around the front of it had been scythed back and there was a pile of wet mud at the door, where John had obviously dug the earth to plant vegetables. Inside was not much better: dark and cold, with one broken chair, and a table that John had upside down on the floor with his tools scattered around to fix it. At the fireplace were a few half-cleaned tin pots and caddies, and in the corner a large pile of fresh turf. The fireplace itself and the wall all around it were black with soot. John must have seen the expression on my face, because he said nervously, “Don’t worry—the chimney was broken, but it’s fixed now. We’ll be warm anyway,” then hopped from foot to foot like he had as a young boy. “Well, Ellie? Is it good enough for you, Ellie? Will we be happy here?”

I wanted to shout at him for being so foolish. I wanted to cry and scream out, and run from the room. How could he expect me to live in a filthy hovel like this? I looked from the damp patch on the floor crawling with woodlice, to the bare walls streaked with brown water and, finally, I looked again at John. The eager brightness in his face was fading.

Paud was holding his hat and staring down at the ground. “I’ll be heading off so,” he said.

“No,” I said, and I held the eye of my sweetheart, my husband. I gathered all the love I had in my heart for him and I placed it on the sooty, dank dirt of our new hearth. “You’ll stay and have supper in
our
house tonight, Paud. John will take you back in the morning.”

Chapter Fourteen

Despite my fears, the first few weeks in the cottage were wonderful. Our new home was tucked well back from the road at the end of an all but invisible lane, and we had trees all around us. I cleaned and scrubbed the filthy little house until it turned into a palace. Together, we whitewashed it inside and out, and polished the flagstones; John fixed the table and two chairs, and made a footstool for himself that doubled as a milking stool. The apple trees were heavy with fruit, and I made cakes and tarts and bread in my new oven. Maidy and Paud had given us a sack of potatoes—some for seed, and some for eating. I made potato cakes and spread them with butter and, in the mornings, fried an egg alongside them. Our three hens were laying well, and our cow was lazy and happy and full of milk. We had no meat for the winter, but John was confident that he would get money from his carpentry soon enough and would be able to invest in a few more animals by the following spring.

John was a hard worker, a good farmer and a fine carpenter. He fixed the half door of the cottage and made us a pretty dresser, although we had little for it to hold. Life was sweet. We rose early, worked hard until noon and made love every afternoon before tending to our chores again. John had made us a bed, and I had stuffed a mattress with horsehair, sheep’s wool and hay. Each night we fell into it exhausted from our labors, still bristling with love for each other. The sound of our breathing shadowed by the rustling trees, our warm bodies drawing out the sweet scent of the animal hides, it was as if we were the only people in the world. We had everything we needed and I felt as if nothing could touch us, we were so happy.

We were barely in the house a month when the first of the men arrived. John collected him from the road. He was wearing a brown greatcoat and a cap pulled down over his face. When he removed it, he had a bruise the size of a fist on his face. He looked unkempt and dirty, but his accent was educated enough. I offered him a basin of warm water to wash himself, and when he went into our bedroom, I asked John what had happened to him.

“He took a savage beating from the police in Belmullet six days ago and he’s been on the run ever since.”

“The poor man!” I said. “Who is he?”

John looked at me as if he was surprised I didn’t already know, and then as if he was wondering how much to say. “He’s a man I met in Dublin.” He added quickly, “He’s not a criminal, Ellie. He’s fighting the cause.”

When the man came out, I sat him in a chair by the fire and dressed his face with iodine, then passed him a bowl of hot soup. He laid it down on the stool beside him and wiped the palms of his hands against his eyes. I could tell he was crying and went about my business until he had stopped. “Thank you, Ma’am.” They were all the words he spoke to me before he left the following day.

After that, not a week went by when we did not have unexpected visitors. John greeted each one as if he were a long-lost brother. We fed every man who came into our house. At times, they would stay overnight. John never put anyone out in the shed, but laid a good turf fire for them and put down hay matting in the kitchen. I would retire to bed, while the men stayed up drinking. It was the only time John ever drank, when he had his Brotherhood friends about him. They were good men, by and large, and often as I lay in bed I overheard them talking about me.

“He’s the lucky man, with a woman like that to look after him.”

“You’re well out of it, John—stay at home and mind your pretty wife.”

“He’s doing his bit . . .”

“And she too—this bread is delicious.”

I was happy to “do my bit.” As well as supporting my husband, I was carving out an identity for myself, proving that I was a generous, warmhearted woman of the people and a Fenian—the complete opposite of my parents. These strange men filled our house with life, and gave me a sense of purpose. I liked having them about, knowing that they were impressed by me and all of them thinking how lucky John was to have me. I knew we were running a safe house for fugitives, a serious offense and one for which we could be shot, but I trusted that John would keep us safe, and in some part of me I relished the adventure of it.

It was only after a few weeks, when I began to see that our supplies of food and turf were running low, that I started to worry. We had become too caught up in feeding other people, and barely had enough left to feed ourselves.

I tackled John over it one morning after a frugal breakfast of oatmeal and water sweetened with the last scrapings from our honey pot. I washed it out with a teaspoon of water from the kettle so as to extract every morsel: it would be the last sweet thing we would taste for a long time. “We’re running very low on food, John. We need to start cutting back on visitors and looking after ourselves.”

“We can’t turn them away, Ellie. We have to do our bit.” He took a mouthful of tea and looked away from me out of the window, pretending to check the sky for rain, when he was only in the door. Suddenly I realized that John had made promises that were nothing to do with me. This was why he had been so keen for us to move back into his parents’ house—not because he had wanted to live out our dream of rural bliss, but so that he could continue to “do his bit,” looking after his fighting friends in our hidden-away cottage. It was no accident that these men had started “turning up,” looking for our help. It had been arranged, in secret, behind my back. I felt betrayed and angry.

“I’ll go into town today and look for work,” he said, resting his mug on the table and standing up to leave.

“I won’t starve, John, not for Ireland—not for anyone.” It came out sharply, more sharply than I had intended, yet I was glad it was out.

“What do you mean?”

I straightened my apron and drew in my breath. “I hate the British as much as the next person, but not at the price of our own livelihood. We’ve done our bit, but we can’t afford to go on feeding your rebel friends, John. They are going to have to find some other house to hide in.” There. I had said it. Put my foot down as maybe I ought to have done before.

John’s face darkened and he said quietly, “I left my war because I loved you more than I loved my country.”

John went into town that day and he came back alone. The men stopped calling to our house after that. I don’t know if it was John who stopped them or if they had just left the area, and I never asked.

He got no work that day, and we had no money and no food left to see us through the winter. Poverty was the war we fought from then on.

Luck kept escaping out of our house: one of our hens got killed by a fox and the other two stopped laying; our cow fell sick and died. It rained, and rained, and rained so hard that winter that nothing grew and water came down our chimney and made our small fire hiss and smoke. We went to bed early and rose late, clinging to each other’s body under the blankets, our skin sticky with lovemaking, glued together and afraid of what might happen if we let go. Afraid that one might be blaming the other, afraid to make plans for the next meal, the next fire. Afraid of the future because of what it might hold. Each day we became more and more tainted by our failure; I stopped cleaning the house, John stopped walking into town to look for work. We hardly spoke for fear one of us might name the truth.

Early each Sunday morning we walked the pitch-black roads to Maidy and Paud’s house. When they came home from Mass, we were there, waiting at their door. I was afraid to go to Mass myself for fear of meeting my parents. I did not want them to see me looking down-at-heel—I had become prideful, as well as godless and poor. Maidy and Paud fed us and for a while pretended they saw nothing wrong. But one Sunday, Maidy let out a small cry as John, gaunt as he was becoming, buried himself into the leg of a chicken as if it were his first. “Dear God, John—won’t you move, the two of you, back in here? At least until the spring?”

John wouldn’t hear of it. Maidy and Paud had little enough of their own without the strain of looking after us. “Nonsense, Mam—we’re managing fine. Aren’t we, Ellie?”

I nodded demurely and moved my legs closer to the fire in the hope that I could carry some of the heat home with me. I would have moved in with them in an instant, but I didn’t have anything left to fight John with. I felt I had failed him, making him marry me as I had. If we were poor now, it was my fault. We should have waited. In darker moments, on a Saturday night, when the frugal supplies Maidy had sneaked into my bag the week before had long gone, and my stomach yawned raw with hunger, I thought perhaps I should have left John to his fighting and stayed in the convent. We were hungry and cold and tired, and I was running out of hope. Yet at night, wrapping my arms round John’s chest until our ribs locked, I would know that no matter what hardships we had to suffer, we were meant to suffer them together.

In the end, Maidy persuaded John that we should at least stay with her and Paud for the whole week of Christmas. After the festive dinner, we gathered, full bellied and laughing about the fire. I sat opening Christmas letters from my old school friends. My father had forwarded them to the Hogans’—a sign that my parents were softening toward me, perhaps. There were special cards from Maeve and Sister Stephanie. Maeve’s missive was dramatic and hysterical with love; Sister Stephanie’s disappointed, but warm. Then there was a letter on strange, tissuey paper I did not recognize. I unfolded it, and gasped in surprised delight as four bright cerise feathers fluttered out into my lap. They were as vibrantly colored as I imagined fairy wings to be. The address at the top of the letter was in New York. Sheila!

With a cry of delight, I pushed the letter into John’s hands. “It’s from Sheila in New York! We could both go! Maybe this is the answer to all our worries!”

I hoped he would be as excited as I was, but as he read, his mouth grew tight and he handed the letter back to me without saying anything. I remembered then, too late, how John had answered me when I told him about Sheila’s father taking his family to America to keep his son from the struggle. “They should have stayed and stood their ground,” he said. “They should have been proud of their son wanting to stay and fight.” In John’s mind, people leaving Ireland for a better life elsewhere were unpatriotic.

I was furious with myself for having pushed Sheila’s letter on him so suddenly, when I ought to have held back and introduced the idea to him with more finesse, more subtlety—biding my time.

“What’s that about?” Maidy asked, curious.

“I’ve been offered a job in America, in New York, as housemaid to a wealthy woman.” I smiled and shrugged, as if it was of no importance.

“Oh no,” said Maidy, shaking her head. “There’s no need for anyone to go chasing off to America. You’ll manage grand here.” Her voice was trembling now. “We’ll all help each other—won’t we, Paud? What would they want to go to America for?”

Paud said nothing, only picked up the fire poker and stabbed at the turf until a puff of smoke and sparks got sucked up the vast chimney. The answer was one word, unspoken and yet always there. “Money”: a short, ugly word that emptied itself all over the question.

John got up and went outside. I followed him. He was at the gable end of the house with his back to the wind, lighting a cigarette.

“What’s the matter? Why are you angry?” I said. “It’s worth us considering, surely?”

He exhaled, and the wind snatched the smoke sideways. “I’ve done this to you,” he said. “I’ve not made the good life that you deserve here. That’s why you want to go to America.”

I hated to hear him talk in such a way. My strong, spirited John—poverty had made him doubt himself. This was what I wanted us to get away from. “I don’t want to go to America, John. I just think we should consider it. Give ourselves the chance to build a better life. We could make some money and—”

He cut me off. “It’s all about money with you.”

I was hurt that he was accusing me of such heartlessness, but also angry that he couldn’t see that, right there and then, there was nothing more important to our lives than money—or, rather, our lack of it. “We have to survive.”

“There is more to life than money, Ellie.”

“Like loyalty, John—and love? Have I ever denied you either? Go on—say it out loud—do you think I care more for money than I do for you?”