Galway Bay (32 page)

“In the southern part, I think, Katie.”

“Good. Warm weather. The shipping agent says it’s only a few days’ walk from Quebec, Canada. That’s where the ship comes in.
Emigrant—
that’s the name of our ship—
Emigrant
. Owen likes that—emigrants on the
Emigrant
. It’s meant to leave Liverpool in one week. Doesn’t give us much time, though Owen says four days’ walking will get us to Dublin and there’s steamer ships crossing the Irish Sea every hour. Imagine, Honora, every hour. I’d wait all day at the crossroads in hopes of seeing Owen and come back again the next morning if he hadn’t passed. Every hour.
Emigrant
—mind that name, Honora, in case, you know . . .”

“I do,” I said.

“I suppose the
Vindicator
will print the story if we sink in the middle of the ocean. That’d please Owen.” Katie paused. “Honora, do you wonder why we are alive? So many have been taken, not only families like the Ryans, without much to fall back on, but substantial people—farmers with long leases and the rent paid, and they’ve died. But we survived. The white hare, a few forgotten turnips, an extra helping of soup—little things. Was it luck, do you think, or grace, or one of that other crowd taking a hand?”

“Fairies, Katie?”

“Why not? Better to believe in them than in what the Reverend Smithson preaches—that God is punishing us. Honora, I was ready to send Annie to that school of his. Copper-colored fuzz had started on her cheeks. I thought better a Protestant child than a dead one. But then your father caught the herring, and we were saved. But why us, Honora, and not the Ryans or the Lonergans or the Clancys?”

“I’ve stopped asking, Katie. I just thank God. I pray we’ll be together again.”

“In heaven, Honora?”

“In Amerikay.”

We walked with the Mulloys to Bearna, where they would meet my brothers, collect their children, and start the one-hundred-mile journey to Dublin on foot. Katie had her pot and Owen had used the few extra shillings Máire gave him to buy clothes for the children from a pawnbroker in Galway City who didn’t know him.

Maybe the Pykes’ agents were far away, but there were so many stories of landlords taking fares for rent, better no one knew they were leaving.

We said good-bye to my brothers. Was it only two years ago Hughie was our scholar, the smartest boy in Master Murphy’s school, and Joseph the best hurler for twenty townlands? The quickness of his compact body was gone, now. And would Hughie’s tall, thin form ever fill out? I’d cared for them both when they were small—my baby brothers. I’d not see them again.

Jamesy wouldn’t let go of Hughie’s arm, and Paddy held Joseph’s leg.

“Easy now,” Joseph said to Paddy, freeing himself gently. “Here.” Joseph took his hurley from the bundle Mam had given her three sons. The meal sack also held a stone from Bearna strand, a piece of turf, and a dozen cornmeal cakes. “I scored many a goal with this stick and plenty more left in it.”

“But you were going to teach me how to bounce the sleen high and then turn and catch it,” Paddy said, indignant, speaking not as a seven-year-old, but man-to-man.

“Sure, when we get rich in Amerikay, we’ll come back and you and I will play for Galway against the world,” Joseph said to Paddy.

“You’d better.”

“We’ll send your fare, Honora,” Dennis whispered to me. “We’ll be together.” The oldest boy, a father himself, Da’s right hand.

He hugged Mam. Dennis and Josie held up their little girls to her. She kissed each one, silent. Then Máire threw her arms around Hughie and started sobbing. He stood straight, his arms at his sides. Impassive.

“Máire,” Mam said. “Máire, please.”

“You can’t,” I whispered to Máire. “No tears. We don’t cry anymore.”

She looked at me, then took a breath and let go of Hughie. He stepped away from her.

All of us went very quiet and let young Annie, baby James Mulloy, Gracie, and my Bridget do the weeping for us. Máire’s boys only stared.

Owen put his hand out to Máire. “Thank you,” he said to her. “You have saved us.”

Máire took Owen’s hand and shook it.

So the Keeley boys and the Mulloys set off for Dublin on that last Sunday in July, Garland Sunday. We prayed with them at Tobar Enda—no candles now, no priest leading the prayers, no crowds of friends and neighbors praying together, circling the well. Silence.

And they were gone.

The weather stayed warm and dry. Two weeks later we dug the early potatoes. Healthy.

“If only Owen had waited,” Michael said.

“But in the first failure, the early crop was sound, too, and the main crop blighted,” I said.
“
Still . . .”

“Still, still, still! We’ll eat tonight, and all belonging to us will, too!” Michael said.

I cooked a great feed for Mam and Da, Máire and her children, and for the first time since the potatoes had turned to pus in the pits two years before, we had stomachs full of pratties and a bit of hope.

“If only our boys and the Mulloys had waited,” Mam said. Now it was Michael who said that we couldn’t be sure all the potatoes were sound until the main harvest next month, and Da said why not dig them up now and Michael explained that the rest of the crop had to grow more. He said that some of what we were eating came from the seeds Patrick had given him, which surprised him. Michael hadn’t thought potatoes could grow from seeds.

While they talked, Máire came up to me. “Step outside,” she whispered.

I followed her out. We stood looking down at the Bay, the last clouds of sunset still red in the west.

“The fever has come to Bearna,” Máire said. The old coast guard warehouse near her cottage had been turned into a fever hospital and workhouse combined. She could smell the dead and dying. “Every night,” she whispered, “Andy John O’Leary drives a cartload of bodies and dumps them into a trench near Bearna graveyard. It’s horrible, Honora.”

“Dear God, Máire.”

“Mam and Da won’t talk about it. She says to pray for their souls. Johnny’s mother’s gone and three Connollys and . . . Jesus, Honora, the whole place is dying around us! Even the songbirds are gone—hardly a lark left. Flown away.”

“Eaten,” I said.

“Oh,” she said.

“You haven’t seen the half of it,” I said. “Up in the hills the people are all gone, cottages tumbled—some with all the families dead inside. Paddy and I went after robins’ eggs up near Cappagh and we saw a pack of wild dogs tearing something apart. ‘A sheep,’ I said to Paddy, but he’d seen. ‘A boy, Mam,’ he’d said to me, just like that. ‘A boy.’”

“Oh, dear God . . .” Máire started sobbing.

“Stop that! You didn’t weep in front of the Pykes. You can’t here.”

“But it’s so horrible! Have you no feelings left, Honora? Jesus Christ!”

“Máire, how dare you . . . ,” I started, but I stopped. I put my arms around my big sister. “We can’t cry, Máire, we just can’t. Plenty of weeping and wailing in the beginning. We keened for the potatoes and mourned every death, but now, after two years, we’ve learned. If you cry, you die. Hold the grief inside you. Bury it.”

“I didn’t know,” said Máire. “I truly didn’t. Even after I came back, during those first months up here with you and Michael, I didn’t understand. Jesus Christ, Honora, I can’t bear it.”

“You can. You will. What choice?” I said.

“Amerikay,” Máire said. “I’ve changed my mind.”

“Amerikay,” I repeated. “But you gave your money to the boys and to Owen Mulloy. A kind and generous gesture, still . . .”

“Honora, Robert gave me a diamond necklace that his mother will never miss. I have to be careful who I sell it to, but we could get our fares.”

“Too late. Michael will never agree. He’s convinced the potatoes are sound and the harvest will be good. And now he has the lease.”

“I only wanted to help, Honora.”

“I know.”

The weather stayed fine, and three weeks later Michael had us all up on the ridges—Mam and Da, Máire and the children—digging into the sweet soil.

“No stench,” he said, “and no fog.” He held up a large prattie. “White potatoes! No blight!”

Paddy yelled, “No blight!” and the others took up the chant:

“No blight! No blight!”

We filled the new pit Michael had dug to the top with potatoes from our ridges.

Three days later, the pratties were all sound. Mam and Da carried a load down to Bearna. We could supply them and ourselves, the townland, anyone who came to our door in need.

Mid-October. The wheat, oats, and barley ripened into a bountiful harvest.

“The crop will pay the rent,” said Michael. “If we can find men to help us bring it in.”

Michael and I talked late that night, glad for the warmth of the fire, stretched out on new hay.

“Of course,” Michael said, “the best would be if the new company forgot about us entirely. Jackson dealt with Owen Mulloy—there’d be only his name on the rent rolls. But if an agent does come, I have the Mulloy lease.”

“I’m worried, Michael. There’s a lot of strangers about now, marking and measuring.”

“By the time anyone figures out exactly who owns what, we’ll have the crops sold. If the worse comes to the worst and we’re discovered, we’ll pay the rent.”

“But they might want to collect Mulloy’s back rent from us.”

“They couldn’t ask that.”

“And what about the poor rate?”

“Oh, for Jesus’ sake, Honora, what else are you going to worry about? Do you think they’re going to track us down for the pennies that would be in it for them? The land’s come back, that’s the great thing. I know this harvest won’t restore us completely, but it will keep us going until next year. I might not have to sell Macha. She’s the best of Champion’s foals. And we have a lease for fifteen acres of good land.”

Michael kissed me, but I wouldn’t be distracted.

“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re being watched. I feel it. We’re getting back on our feet. Someone will try to knock us down. If only the boys would write from Americay or if your brother Patrick . . .”

Michael got up from beside me and stepped over the sleeping children. He stood at the glass window, looking out into the dark.

Let him stand there. Maybe I am going on too much, but I’m only trying to tell Michael the true situation. The land’s back, is it? For how long? Why wouldn’t he at least consider going to Amerikay? I closed my eyes and started to breathe evenly. Let him think I’m sound asleep. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes a bit to see if he had turned and was staring at me, sorry and sorrowful. But I saw only his back. Tense. Still those same broad shoulders. He’ll fill out now with the pratties.

What are you thinking, Michael, a stór? That I’m a hard, hectoring woman and you should never have stopped for that swim in Galway Bay? And if you hadn’t, would I be a nun studying in a library in Rome right now? Who knows. We hadn’t had a real fight since the blight struck. It takes a full stomach to risk an argument. I giggled. He turned then.

“You think it’s funny?” he started in a soft voice, so as not to wake the children, but I heard the anger under the words.

I got up and went to stand near him, but I didn’t say anything. Nor did he. I waited. Finally he spoke.

“We can’t all leave,” he said. “A man has a right to live in his own country, to feed his children, to follow his faith.” He stopped.

“And even play a bit of music?” I said. “And make love to his wife? And run his horses?”

“Yes, all that,” Michael said, “in the land of his birth.”

“I don’t
want
to go,” I said. “But . . .”

He turned to me. “Honora, your heart beats ‘Amerikay, Amerikay.’”

“Only because I want us to live.”

“We will live,” he said. “The land has come back.”

“But, Michael, the soil might be healthy, but the very air is clogged with cholera and fever,” I said.

“There’s no disease in Knocnacuradh, and there won’t be,” he said, and looked back out the window.

“But . . . ,” I started, and stopped myself.

Why keep arguing for the worst of the worst? I pretended reason was talking, but it was fear making the argument, saying, “Run. Run. Go!” I am willful. I do want my way. Granny was right, and Michael knows it. He thinks I don’t trust him, that I don’t believe he can keep us safe. That’s not true. It’s only . . . only what?

I touched Michael’s shoulder. “I suppose we’re safe enough in Knocnacuradh, away from the sick and fevered,” I said.

We’d kept alive on Peel’s brimstone and nettles and a sup of soup stretched and scraped. We had lived. We will live. I put my arm around Michael’s waist. We looked out our fine glass window together.

“Down there in the dark is Galway Bay. We can’t see it, but it is there,” he said. “When I ran along the strand and dived into the sea that summer morning eight years ago, I had no idea what lay ahead of me. I’d left all I’d ever known. I found you. We made a life. We have four children. We’ve suffered and survived. Don’t ask me to leave!”

I stood staring out, too, imagining the
Cushlamachree
sailing down the Bay under the rainbow, across the ocean to Amerikay. The image faded.

Now Michael turned to me.

“Don’t be afraid, Honora. I’m with you.”

“My hero from the sea,” I whispered. “And I’m with you. Here, on this high Hill of the Champions.”

“Faugh-a-Ballagh,” Michael said, and kissed me.

Chapter 18

W
ELL BEGUN
is half-done!” Michael said to the ragtag crew he’d gathered to reap our fields the second week of October, 1847.

Paddy and Jamesy took up the chant: “Well begun, half-done! Well begun, half-done!”

Our workers—five of them, one scrawnier than the next—belonged to the government’s new category, “the able-bodied unemployed,” two from Galway, one from the far reaches of Mayo, one from Connemara, and the other from Sligo. Women and children had been turned out from the workhouse to make room for these men—the only group eligible for relief now. Insane.

They’d been only too glad to leave the workhouse for even the tiny wages we pledged to pay—pledged because the money would come only when the crop was sold.

Michael had done a deal with Billy Dubh, who was here now, walking the fields, praising the fine heavy ears of wheat and the golden oats, making ticks in his little book. Michael showed him the lease Owen had left him. He said, “Fine, fine,” not too bothered about legalities. With Jackson gone, Billy was only too happy to forget the Scoundrel Pykes’ faraway agent in the Dublin company. He’d take the whole crop, no problem, and sell it—at a profit. Ná habair tada. And if someone came looking for the rent, we’d have to pay it, but we’d still have potatoes to eat.