Ellis Island (9 page)

“No. I’ll stay and help.” I put my arm round the back of John’s head and held him as firmly as I could. As the doctor prepared his instruments, I talked and talked to my husband—whatever came into my head poured out of my mouth in a stream of stupid, cheery words. “Do you remember the day I wore the trousers and climbed that tree?”

“You were the talk of the village, Ellie,” Doctor Bourke joined in. “A living disgrace.” But his voice was detached as he concentrated on the job in hand. “Mind yourself now, John . . . get yourself ready . . . here, Ellie . . .” He handed me an ether-soaked pad. When he parted the wound, John jerked bolt upright in the bed and shouted out in pain. I pushed him back down gently and held the ether to his face, and carried on talking, talking. I mimicked the nonsense of the local gossips.

“I saw Peggy Geraghty in town yesterday in a new blue coat and carrying a brace of pheasant—that husband of hers is surely a poacher . . .”

“Oh, for the love of God,” John cried out and shook his head and grimaced a kind of smile at me, so that I didn’t know if he was cursing the pain or the inanity of my chatter—so I kissed his face and stroked his hair, and kept talking on until Doctor Bourke had strapped and bandaged his hip and leg and waist, and John had sunk back into a haze of etherized sleep.

“Now, Ellie,” said the doctor, wiping his face on his sleeve. “I think we both deserve a cup of tea.” I ran out to the kitchen to make it for him. Padraig and the others clamored for news of their captain, but Doctor Bourke came to the doorway of the bedroom and dismissed them. “I’m sure Ellie will be happy for you to call again tomorrow,” he said. As soon as they were gone, he said to me, “Never mind the tea.” I poured him a whisky instead. He knocked it back, but shook his head when I raised the bottle to offer him another. “I’ve done my best to set him up, Ellie. But the hip is shattered and only time will tell if it heals. I’m no expert, but I’ve done all I can.”

Maidy and Paud wanted us to move back in with them at once, but for the first few weeks it was impossible to move John without causing him pain. As my husband lay in bed, slowly healing, I struggled to manage the farm and the house chores on my own. Young Liam was gone, signed up full time to the IRA. Padraig called to the house with offers of financial help, but John would not take anything from him. He would not take anything from anyone, now that he could not fight. He even made Padraig take back his cows.

His injury changed him. He was irritable and irrational. He hated that his fight had been cut short. He felt abandoned by his unit and mollycoddled by his wife. After the first month, he kept trying to get out of bed and walk. He became angry when he fell, and angrier still when I admonished him for trying. Once he shouted back at me, “This is my house, woman—leave me alone!”

I was helpless to make things better. Every time I reached for him, he moved farther away, until I found myself working alone in spirit as well as body. At night I would lie beside his broken body and watch the last glowing embers from the fire, knowing that a bedroom fire was an extravagance we could not afford, but building it anyway to try and restore some warmth into our marriage.

After six weeks I had cooked the best of our hens to keep up my husband’s strength, and the foxes had taken the one remaining. Our grain and turf and hope had all run out. Ignoring John’s angry objections, I locked up the house and Paud came to collect us.

Chapter Sixteen

Maidy set John up on the settle-bed in the kitchen and he lay all day by the fire. She gave him potatoes to peel in a bowl and peas to shell. She was able to boss my husband about and placate him in a way I could not, and being closer to the town meant that he had more visitors. Padraig called often and kept him up to date with news of politics and ambushes. So John’s mood improved, but his body did not. His flesh had healed, and the pain was almost gone, but even after six weeks he still could not walk. He tried every day, but whenever he went to stand up he fell back.

Doctor Bourke examined him and his expression was serious as he took Maidy and me aside. “John’s hip is not set right,” he said, his eyes on the floor.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

He looked back up at me and said, “I can’t be sure, but there’s a possibility that he won’t be able to use that leg again.”

Maidy took it in her stride. “Sure, we’ll say nothing to him yet, but wait and see.”

I was reeling. “Do you mean he might never walk again?”

“It’s hard for me to tell, Ellie,” he said, “I’m not a specialist in this type of injury.”

“Is that a ‘yes’? Do you know?”

“Ellie!” Maidy said.

“No, no—you’re all right,” he said, gently patting Maidy aside. “It’s a specialist he needs. There’s a consultant I know of in Dublin, Ellie, but . . .” He stopped and sucked his teeth.

“He costs money,” I said.

“Yes,” he replied.

It always came down to money.

“How much?” I asked.

Maidy began fussing and clattering about the place. She was furious with me for speaking out of turn. Talking about money, under virtually any circumstances, was considered the height of rudeness—especially in front of those few people who had it, like doctors and priests. In our lives, transactions were agreed in a series of coded nods and winks. In the market, men passed their money to and fro in closed fists. Acts of charity were dressed as trade-offs. If a local big shot wanted to help a poor neighbor, he would call to the house and ask for some favor: a daughter to come and clean or mind the children. Then the neighbor’s problem—be it paying a landlord or acquiring a few bags of grain to get them through the winter—would be duly sorted without money, or even talk of it, being exchanged. Doctor Bourke was notoriously charitable, and Maidy feared he might think I was begging for help.

But all Doctor Bourke said was: “These people are not ordinary doctors, Ellie. To get an operation like that in Dublin would cost in the region of one hundred pounds.”

Maidy dropped a cup—and made a tremendous fuss about it.

Over supper that evening I tried to force the three of them—Maidy, Paud and John—to discuss how we might raise the money. They would not even talk about it. Paud left the house on some imagined mission; Maidy stood up from the table and began her furious tidying again. I knew them well enough: they felt guilty they did not have the money saved. John was so furious when I suggested approaching Padraig for “compensation” that I gave up trying to reason with any of them.

Late that night I took Sheila’s letter out of the dresser drawer and reread it. Ten dollars a week. I could earn enough money to pay for John’s operation in just ten weeks in America—twenty at the most, given paying back my fare and whatever small expenses I might incur while I was living there. If I sacrificed a year of my life, there would be more besides, to set us up here for life with a bigger farm and the house all neat and perfect for us to start a family, so that neither of us would ever be in this position again.

I did not sleep that night, rolling the possibility of it over and over in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that going to America was the right thing, the only thing, to do. People did it all the time. John had Maidy and Paud here to look after him, and I could be back before he was up walking again, and even go to Dublin for the operation with him.

I knew there was no point in discussing it. John would fight me every step of the way and persuade Maidy to talking me round into staying. So while they were all still asleep I got up again, hurriedly wrote a letter to Sheila accepting her offer and cycled into the post office at first light to post it.

Two weeks later I got a letter back.

With the letter was another envelope, bearing the White Star Line logo, a red flag and star. I recognized the design from newspaper reports on the sinking of the
Titanic
. I stood up from the kitchen table and walked over to the settle, and I handed the letter and ticket to John. At first he was shocked and disbelieving. “What’s this?” he said. “Who is it for?”

“It’s for me,” I said. “I’m going to work with Sheila in America. It’s the only way we can raise the money for your operation.”

He threw the ticket at the fire, missing by inches, then tried to get up from the bed and finish the job. He threatened and cursed, but presently wept and pleaded with me. “Don’t go, Ellie, don’t do this.”

“I am doing this for you,” I said.

“Don’t say that, Ellie,” he said. “Don’t try to tell me you’re not just running away.”

I stared, shocked, for a moment made speechless by his accusation. “I have never,” I said at last, and as the words started to come out, anger rose up through me, “run away from
anything
in my life. Not when you moved us into that cursed hovel of a house, and not when you joined the stupid IRA, John Hogan . . .” Furious now, John tried to get to his feet. “Go on then!” I screamed. “Get up! You see? You can’t! That’s why I am going to America!”

“Hey, hey, hey . . .” Maidy walked in on us. “What’s all this?” Seeing John flailing to rise, she helped him from the bed to a chair at the table, then sat down beside him herself.

“America,” I said quickly, sitting down on her other side, anxious to win her over. “I’m going there to earn money for John’s operation.”

“She’s not going,” John said, tight-lipped and shaking his head, “and that’s final.”

“Is this true?” Maidy asked, looking directly into my face. She seemed neither disapproving nor approving.

“Sheila has sent the ticket,” I said, clutching it safely to my apron. “It’s all organized.”

“She’s my wife. She can’t go to America without my permission. She’s making a cripple out of me . . .”

“You made a cripple out of yourself!”

“Hush now, the pair of you.”

Afraid to look at each other, John and I both looked at Maidy. She studied both our faces, and after a few moments she said, “John, you’d be well advised never to cross a woman as stubborn as this one when she has her mind made up. And, Ellie, you should have told us before now but . . . well, what’s done is done.” And she patted us both on the legs and got up to go about her business.

Before I could move, John reached across her empty chair for my hand. “Don’t go,” he said. “Please don’t go. It doesn’t matter about the money, Ellie—I’ll get back on my feet again soon, I promise. I can feel it. Please. We’ll manage.”

I folded both of my hands around his one. I remembered the boy who came to my mother’s door, with his eggs and his flowers. Tears came to my eyes. I said, “You tried to rescue me once, John. Now you have to let me do the same for you.”

With the ticket Sheila had enclosed all of the information that I needed to get my paperwork in order, including instructions on procuring my passport in Queenstown and a money order for forty dollars, the minimum amount needed to get into the country, with firm instructions to bring it back to her intact.

Maidy contacted my parents and told them I was going. Part of her hoped, I know, that they would make their peace and send us money. But my father simply had a car sent round with my case and the last of my possessions—my rosary beads, prayer book and good Sunday coat. I did not know whether the gesture was intended as a good-riddance rebuttal or a generous act of grace, but I was too desperate for it to matter anymore.

The night before I left, the warmth that had been missing from our marriage since John’s injury surged back in an urgent flood of words and affection. We talked about our future and what John would do while I was away. It would be a year, no more than that, no more than twelve short months. We were agreed. John would have the operation and get back on his feet. Then he’d get proper, paid work and I would come back from America with a big bag of money. We said everything we had not said in the weeks before, quickly inventing hopes and dreams to distract us from the terror of saying good-bye. We painted a picture of how our home would be—whitewashed with curtains and bedcovers, decorated with dainty crockery and full of food. John would slate the roof and buy the furniture that he did not have the skill to make, and a mattress and an iron bed frame, and a shiny new kettle. We would get a horse, and a plow, and a cart while we were at it. There were great times ahead, we agreed—mighty times. We talked about building a corn store, a henhouse. Then he let me make love to him. We lay for the longest time, my head resting on his chest, his warm hands covering my head as I held my cheek to his heart and listened to him breathing, knowing this would be our last night together for a long, long time.

“One year, Ellie Hogan,” he said. “Just one year is all.” They were his last words before we fell asleep and again, the following morning, when we said our final good-byes. “One year, Ellie Hogan—just one year is all you’ll be gone.” I leaned and sank my face into the shoulder of John’s woollen sweater, and swallowed my tears so hard that the lump felt like a stone dropping down into my chest.

I asked to be taken to the train by Paud alone. I could not bear the drawn-out pain of saying good-bye, and Paud’s quiet nature suited me. As the train pulled out of the station, I gazed out of the window and watched the world turn into snippets, fields and rivers and rocks giving themselves over to hills and cattle in an instant. Only the sky remained constant.

I arrived at Queenstown station in the mid-afternoon. It was buzzing with people. There were cases and trunks piled up everywhere. The ornate iron brackets of the station roof were painted a dark bottle-green, the glass ceiling splattered with the debris of seagulls. I stared at the tiny red bricks of the wall, and the stone flags worn with the soles of a million passengers. A flash of colored feathers through the window of the first-class waiting room caused a flicker of excitement in my chest, as I remembered the feathers Sheila had sent me and where I was going.

Outside the station a group of men were playing cards using a trunk as a makeshift table; a small band of musicians had started playing and a gang of children danced around them. A drunkard tried to drown them out with his own song, and others stood around laughing as an old woman berated him. I became aware that I was not merely an observer, a visitor to this scene, but a part of it. The
Celtic
ocean liner would dock here from Liverpool tomorrow and I would be leaving on it for New York with all of these people. The color and music and bustle were the beginning of my adventure. I was doing this for John, but the journey would be mine alone.

I stopped at a booth where they were selling day trips to Youghal for three shillings and asked the attendant to direct me to the American Consulate, where I lined up for three hours to present my papers and get my passport. Then I walked along the quay to the Commodore Hotel, where Doctor Bourke had secured me a room overnight.

The Commodore was grander than anywhere I had ever been, with dark red carpets that my boots sank into like soft bog. I was grateful to be wearing my Sunday coat. I handed in the letter the doctor had given me to the uniformed lady behind the reception desk. She handed me a key with a heavy brass key ring, and as I took it I thought with shame that I had not thanked Doctor Bourke sufficiently for all he had done for us, and for his kind friendship. He had never presented us with a bill for the attention he had given John, and this hotel stay was a parting gift from him. In the room, I drew across the heavy silk curtains and lay in silence on the bed. My skin felt cold and nervous of the starched linen sheets. I tried to sleep for a while, but kept flinching awake as if I were afraid to dream.

Early that evening, I walked up a steep hill with houses lined along one side like a deck of cards. At the top was a cathedral and I went inside to light a candle. The candle box was empty and every candelabra lit, flames burning already for the hundreds heading off the next day. Outside I stood against some railings and looked down at the harbor and across the bay. The buildings of Spike Island prison made a sharp outline against the gray water, which stretched as far as the eye could see in endless, endless ocean. My breath caught in my throat, as I realized that I was going out there in the morning. “I’m a little afraid.” I said it out loud, as if John were there.

“You’ll be all right,” I thought I heard him answer—but it was only the wind from the sea.

I did not check my bag through, but carried it onto the boat with me. I had so little. I stood in line and had my clothes inspected for cleanliness and waited while they shone an electrical light into my eyes to check it for cataracts. I presented my papers and answered their questions: Was I married? What was my last address? The man asked: Could I read and write, and had I good mental health?