Galway Bay (22 page)

“Finally a catch to sell at the Spanish Arch,” Mam said.

“And Michael will be planting in a few weeks,” Joseph said.

Dusk had fallen by the time the children and I started up the hill to Knocnacuradh. It was more of an effort now to make the climb, all of us weaker. I felt the little life inside me stir—five months. I stopped to shift Bridget to my other hip. Jamesy was beside me, Paddy behind.

“Paddy, come on.”

“I don’t feel good, Mam.”

“I know, I know. It’s the hunger, but I’m taking some potatoes down from the loft tonight.”

“I’m really sick, Mam,” and he stopped and bent over. “It’s cutting me, Mam. I feel like there’s knives in my stomach.”

Now he was on the ground, curled into a ball. I set Bridget down.

“Watch her, Jamesy. What is it, Paddy, what is it?” I asked, kneeling next to him.

“I only took a little, Mam, only a little.”

“A little what?”

“From the bag the man gave Nana.”

“That corn was too raw to eat!”

“I didn’t know. It’s hurting me! Mam, it’s cutting me!”

“Try to throw up, Paddy.” I put my finger down his throat. He gagged, but nothing came up.

“Mam, Mam, what’s wrong?” said Jamesy. He started crying.

“It hurts,” Paddy kept saying. “It hurts!”

I pushed harder. Paddy’s muscles tensed, and finally a stream of yellow meal came out—kernels of corn mixed with blood gushed out of him.

“That’s right, bring it up, a stór, good boy. Bring it up.”

Bridget began crying, too—a high-pitched whimper—and Jamesy started weeping, tears running down.

“Blood, Mam, look! Blood—Paddy’s bleeding!” he wailed.

Finally Paddy stopped retching. He took in a few breaths.

“Can you stand up, Paddy?”

“I can’t, Mam.”

“Put your arms around my neck. I’ll take you on my back.”

“I can’t reach,” Paddy said.

I got down low enough so he could roll himself onto my back. He held on to my neck. When I felt his weight on me, I straightened up very slowly, using Jamesy for balance.

“Jamesy, you carry Bridget.”

We moved up the hill, Paddy lying along the length of my back. I stumbled. My stomach hit the ground. I lay flat for a moment.

“Mam, Mam,” Jamesy said. “Get up. Get up, please.”

Pushing myself up with my hands, I stood. Had the baby felt the bump? I had so little flesh to protect him.

Paddy clung to me.

“Hold on,” I said to him, “hold on.” Then I could see the cottage above us. “Michael!” I shouted. “Michael!”

“I’m coming, a stór!” Michael shouted. “I’m coming, Honora!”

He ran down for us, and then he had Paddy in his arms and Bridget. I must have fainted because the next thing I knew, I was on the straw mattress near the fire.

“I’m here, a stór. I’m with you. You’re safe—safe.”

But I wasn’t safe. The labor pains started, and then my poor baby was born too soon . . . much, much too soon.

Mam held me and whispered, “It’s for the best, a stór. He couldn’t have lived. He’s in heaven.”

I put my head on her shoulder and sobbed.

“Let me see him, Mam. Please let me see him.”

“You shouldn’t,” she said, “a stór, you shouldn’t.”

“I need to, Mam, I need to see him, to tell him I’m sorry . . . I’m so sorry.”

It was Michael brought him to me, holding the still little body in the hollow of his hands. A boy.

“Pray to Saint Grellan with me, Michael. He brought a stillborn child to life. Pray, Michael.”

“Our son’s in heaven, a stór,” Michael said.

I touched the small wrinkled face, the tiny ears. Mam kept her arms around my shoulders.

I heard Katie Mulloy say to Michael, “There’s a cillín near Saint James’ well. We can—”

“You can’t! You can’t! Don’t bury him in the cillín, Michael, not there! Please, not there! Not in unconsecrated ground! Unbaptized babies, strangers, and suicides? Not there!”

“We have to, Honora,” Katie Mulloy said. “If Michael tried to bury him in the churchyard, Father Gilley would—”

I closed my eyes. “Please don’t.”

“Honora,” Mam said, “he’s with God, whatever the priests say. You must take care of your living children. Let Michael bury your son. It’s for the best.”

“I’ll mark the place, Honora,” Michael said.

Mam was telling Paddy and Jamesy that they had a tiny angel brother in heaven and when they said their prayers, he’d be listening. No matter what anyone might say to them, their brother was in heaven.

And then I left them. Some woman lay in our cottage during that next week, but she wasn’t me—not Honora Keeley. I was somewhere else. Gone astray, and I had no wish to return.

“Listen to me, Fairy Woman! Leave her!” Granny’s voice. “Leave her! Come back, Honora.” I felt her bony hands on my shoulders, shaking me, then other hands—Michael’s—and I was sitting up, leaning against his chest.

He kissed my forehead. “You’ve had a long, long sleep, Honora, but we need you to wake up now.”

“Here, alanna, eat.” Mam’s voice. She tipped the cup to my lips.

Nettle tea, I thought. But this was broth, fish broth. I tasted a bit of herring, a chunk of lobster. I chewed.

“Good girl, Honora,” Michael said. “Your da and the boys brought home a fine catch.”

Then Mam again: “I need your help, Honora, to sell the fish under the Spanish Arch. Come, Honora, wake up! We have to sell the catch now or it will rot.”

“No fish-curing station after all the times the government promised us one.” I didn’t realize I was speaking out loud.

“You’ve come back to us, a stór,” Michael said.

“Fresh herring! Lobster! A-live-a-live-o!” I called out, holding up the red scaly bodies and the pinching claws of the lobsters, back again under the Spanish Arch, but no banter with the Claddagh women now, no jokes with the customers. Finally we’d had a decent catch, but we had to sell it now, today, or leave piles of fish to rot away in the market. No more time to heal my body or my spirit. We needed this money.

Three women watched us from the edge of the market, children with them, dressed very poorly. They came over to us. The oldest one, the granny probably, whispered, “Please, for the love of Our Lord.” The two young women and their children stood behind her.

I looked at Mam. She nodded. I wrapped three lobsters in a sheet of newspaper and gave them to the women.

“Boil them,” Mam said in Irish, “in a big pot.”

From the look of them, they’d left pots and home far behind. Evicted most likely, and too proud or too afraid to go to the workhouse.

“Thank you,” each woman said.

“God bless you.”

Where were they sleeping? I wondered. A lean-to in a ditch? Two of the children were Paddy’s and Jamesy’s ages, and two were even younger. The mothers gripped their little hands so tightly. Strong women. They’ll find a way to cook those lobsters.

At the end of the day, it was Mother Columba from the Presentation Convent who bought all the herring and lobster and gave us a penny a pound. Fair enough. How long ago it seemed since I’d gone to her parlor, asking to become a nun—another life.

“A nice fish stew for our students,” Mother Columba said. “The government requires that we feed only our pupils and that they eat at school. Can’t take food home. The official said the family might sell it. So difficult to deal with men who believe all Irish people are liars and cheats. They watch us. They watch Father Gilley. They watch Captain Anderson of the coast guard. They’re suspicious of anyone they think is ‘soft for the people.’”

“But who are
they
, Sister?”

“‘They’ is every official with a little authority, sent over from England. For them it’s the chance of a lifetime. They’re already asking for bribes from men who want a ticket to work on the roads, and the works are not even open yet.”

“Bribing with what?” I said. “What is left?”

“Drink, a jug of poitín. There’ve been relief committees set up—local men, said to have some sense. But I’ve heard some landlords on the committee are only putting their tenants on the rolls so the six pennies a day will go to pay the rent.”

“Six pennies a day?” I said. “That’s all they’ll pay?”

“If the works ever get started,” said Mother Columba. “The time that’s wasted with filling out forms! If you could see the mail we get from all the officials—two or three letters a day from this man Routh. We’re required to account for every farthing, show we’re following their rules. This Routh controls even the money we collect ourselves, the donations that come from America. We wanted to buy seed and give it to the farmers for planting. The government wouldn’t allow it, said we’d be undercutting the seed merchants, interfering with the market. Ridiculous.” She shook her head. “We can’t waste ourselves in anger. We must pray. Stay sane. It’s our only chance.”

The four shillings we got from Mother Columba bought us nearly forty pounds of meal, at two farthings a pound with another five percent to the trader, his fee.

“Better buy it now, missus,” the trader said. “The price will go up when the roadworks start and there’s more money about.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

“We’re allowed to make a decent profit. It’s the law, missus,” the little crook told us.

He gave us two bags, and I settled one on my back.

“Can you manage that, a stór?” Mam asked.

“I can, Mam.”

The weight reminded me of the length of Paddy on me that night.

And then the fairy woman who’d stolen me away came up beside me:
Your baby is rotting away in the ground,
she said.
Gone to muck and mire, like the pratties. Your other children will die, too. Come away with me now. . . .

“Honora . . . Honora!”

“What, Mam?”

“I’ve been calling your name. There’s the cillín. We’ll stop and say a prayer.”

The cillín was only a bit of wasteland down the hill from the well of St. James, far from the graveyards at Bushy Park and Bearna. Nothing marked this enclosure, no stones with names and dates for the little ones who hadn’t lived or for those who’d taken their own life.

I walked over to a mound of dirt. A bouquet of snowdrops lay on the top—Michael marking the grave. I knelt down with Mam next to me. No prayer came to me, only
I’m sorry, I’m sorry
going through my head.

Mam stood up and walked over to a boulder nearby. She picked up a pebble and started scratching on the side of the big stone.

“What are you doing, Mam?” I asked.

“I’m drawing a rooster like the one on the gatepost of our own Bearna graveyard,” she said. “Your uncle Daniel carved it.”

Uncle Daniel, dead before I was born. A young man, but he’d had some life.

“Fadó,” she began, still drawing on the rock. “It was the second day after Jesus died and was buried in his tomb. The Roman soldiers who crucified him were cooking their dinner when the captain of the guard remembered that Jesus had said he’d rise up from the dead on the third day. What if his followers stole the body and pretended that he’d come back to life? Better put a stop to that.

“So the captain said, ‘Right, boys, go back and put a big stone across the entrance to that fellow’s tomb. By the time you get back, the rooster in this pot will be well cooked and you can have your dinner.’

“So they did the job and came back, ready to eat, but the captain kept asking, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure the tomb’s well barricaded?’ Finally one said, ‘There’s no more chance of that fellow getting out of the tomb than there is of this rooster climbing out of that pot!’

“With that, the rooster jumped up onto the edge of the pot and started crowing: ‘Slán Mhic Máire! The Son of Mary is safe!’ he said. ‘The Son of Mary is safe!’

“And the rooster says those same words every morning,” Mam said, “to remind us Mary’s Son is safe. And your son is slán too, a nún—safe with Mary. He is, Honora. You must believe that. And you must give him a name.”

“I couldn’t, Mam,” I said.

“I called the little one I lost Johnny, for your father.”

I said nothing.

“What’s that Kelly saint called, the fellow had the gold crozier?”

“Saint Grellan,” I said. “He brought another baby back to life, but not my son.”

“Sometimes I think the ones the Lord loves, He takes to Himself quickly. Your baby won’t starve or die in agony from the fever. An angel now, watching over the family. You’ll find comfort in speaking to him, but you must call him by name. So . . . Grellan?”

I nodded.

“Grellan Kelly,” Mam said, scratching the name on the boulder. “Don’t listen to the fairy woman, Honora,” she said as she finished. “Listen for the rooster’s crow.”

It was March, St. Patrick’s Day. Time to plant the eyes cut from the seed potatoes we’d managed to save, the pratties I had denied my children.

“Mam, I got ten from this one, see?” Paddy said. One by one he dropped the eyes into the pot.

“Good boy, Paddy,” I said. “Watch yourself with the knife.”

“May I have a go, Mam?” Jamesy asked.

“You’re minding Bridget, Jamesy.”

“But, Mam—”

“Do as I say. Don’t be distracting me.” I held the seed potato in my left hand as I sliced each eye.

When the roadworks had finally opened two weeks ago, Owen Mulloy and Michael had walked to Galway City before dawn to stand in line with thousands of other men, all waiting eight hours to go in front of the inspector and prove they were paupers because of the potato blight. Men “previously destitute” weren’t allowed to work. Michael and Owen each had a letter from Father Roche that certified their “present destitution”—hard for two men who’d always found some way to feed their families.

“An awful process,” Michael had said when he’d come home that first night long past dark.

He told me that many of the other men seeking work had no English. One stood there dumb while the clerk hurled questions at him he didn’t understand: How many potato ridges did you plant? How many were diseased?

“I tried to translate,” Michael had said, “but the clerk shouted, ‘No colluding, no colluding!’ and waved me away. The poor fellow knelt down before the official and started entreating him in floods of Irish. The official called for the soldiers, and they lifted the man up and carried him away.”