Galway Bay (50 page)

Jamesy played a few notes on his tin whistle, and the Clare fellow said he’d teach him plenty of tunes.

Paddy smiled at Jamesy and patted his shoulder. “Well done, Jamesy.”

“You look powerful, Daniel,” Johnny Og said.

Bridget and Gracie smiled up at their big brothers, and Stephen clapped his hands.

A happy bunch we were, climbing up to our attic room.

Jamesy kept the whistle clenched in his fist as he slept.

Stephen and Bridget wriggled close to me on the straw mattress. I closed my eyes and saw Lake Michigan—Galway Bay.

Chapter 26

C
HRISTMAS EVE CAME
. Daniel and Jamesy and the girls played in our room while I was downstairs, standing at Molly’s kitchen window, holding Stephen. It was dark out now. Where were Máire and the boys?

Hours and hours ago, the three older boys had left to meet Máire at Croaker’s store—a half day for them at the packinghouse, and delighted to go downtown to help Máire do the shopping.

“Our first Christmas in Amerikay will be a great celebration altogether,” Máire had said. “We’ll eat rashers from a proper butcher, not the packinghouse scraps. I’ll buy milk, potatoes, tobacco, and two doneen pipes. Sweets for the children, a Christmas tree!”

“That’ll cost a lot,” I’d said.

“I’ll be getting a lot,” she’d told me. “Mr. Croaker owes me at least twenty dollars.”

Máire had passed that first week’s trial and worked two weeks more, selling loads and loads, she’d said, but she hadn’t been paid yet. Mr. Croaker’s clerks got their wages once a month. “He says it teaches us discipline,” Máire’d explained. So not a penny yet, though Máire had received a length of brown wool to make into a skirt and jacket. “Mr. Croaker insists on a good appearance.” Neither of us had the least notion about sewing, but Molly’s friend Kitty Gorman earned her living as a seamstress. She’d stitched up a lovely outfit for Máire and said not to worry. Pay her when Máire got paid. Today.

You’d think Máire would have rushed home. Not that much shopping to do. I hope she hasn’t gone flaithiúlacht with the money. We should be saving. If we could put away five dollars a month, maybe in a year we could move into our own flat. Harder and harder to keep the boys contained and quiet.

Well, today and tomorrow we’ll have the boardinghouse to ourselves. Molly’s family was gathering at her daughter’s place near St. Patrick’s, and the boarders had scattered into homes throughout the Irish neighborhoods, invited by families who wouldn’t want to see a fellow alone on Christmas.

Molly had said we’d be very welcome at her daughter’s but was relieved when I’d said we’d be grand here on our own. “You can let the boys run up and down the stairs to their hearts’ content,” she’d said.

“I know they’re a bit of a handful, Molly,” I’d answered, “but to see them healthy and high-spirited after . . .” She’d said she understood, she did, but Molly hadn’t seen the frail little ghosts standing in line for soup or slumped against the seawalls. The bodies . . . Thank you, Lord, for my children’s lives. Now, where are they?

I carried Stephen over to the chair near the stove and sat down. “I’m a big boy,” he’d say, twenty months now. He’d squirm away from me when I cuddled him. But today he wanted only to lie in my arms. Sick, my poor baby, his hazel eyes glazed, his red hair damp with sweat. Fever? “Only croup,” Molly’d said. “Children get it in winter here. Gone by spring.”

I took the cup of water I’d set on the table and brought it to his lips. “Here, a rún, drink a little water.” Michael’s fever had made him so thirsty, alone in the shed. Keeping hold of Stephen, I reached down, took a log from the wood box, and put it into the stove. The box was only half-full.

Molly had told me to send Paddy, Johnny Og, and Thomas to the lumberyard. The supply of wood she’d ordered was ready. But Paddy had said, “We’ll pick it up on the way home,” eager to get downtown. I should have insisted. Paddy’s a good boy, working so hard, and not as cheeky to me anymore as he’d been in McKenna’s. Let them go their own way, Máire’d said. What choice? She was very motherly to me. “You care for the children, Honora, let that wee life inside you grow. The boys and I are earning powerful money.”

Now Máire added her work stories to the dinner table talk. She didn’t complain, not even about the four-mile walk downtown. She often managed a lift from a delivery wagon, and one night a fancy carriage dropped her off at McKenna’s. Máire liked to repeat the conversations she’d had with the traders and businessmen she met at Croaker’s. “Railroads,” she’d said. “It’s railroads will be the making of us. Chicago’ll be the center of Amerikay with railroads going north, south, east, and west. It’s our geography.”

The fellows had laughed, said that Máire was being taken in by Chicago big talk. Barely twenty miles of track had been laid. Who needed railroads with the canal and lake boats?

It must be freezing upstairs. I stood up, put Stephen on my hip, and went to the landing. “Jamesy, Bridget, Daniel, Gracie! Come down to the stove!”

Jamesy had told me he and Daniel and the girls were “practicing”—I’d heard bits of music and the sound of running feet overhead all afternoon. Good to see Jamesy cheerful. I’d expected him to come home from school brimming with chat about his lessons and the other children, but he and Daniel said very little. They didn’t want me to take them to school or pick them up. “We’re not babies.” He’d asked me would he go to the packinghouse next year when he was seven. Paddy told him, “You won’t.”

It’s me that has to find some work after the baby’s born. Though I’m grateful for these days. I only have to do the boarders’ wash, help clean the house, and amuse the children. And it’s Bridget keeps Gracie and Stephen happy. Only three and full of ideas like “Pretend we’re on a boat on the river.” A good one, that, because I can be a passenger dozing.

“Children,” I called up to them again.

They came bouncing down the stairs.

“How’s Stephen, Mam?” Bridget asked.

“Sleeping.”

Jamesy touched Stephen’s forehead. “Hot, Mam.”

“Croup,” I said.

I gave them the last of the milk to drink. Jamesy and Daniel pulled Molly’s chairs close to the stove. We sat in a circle.

“What games were you playing?” I asked.

“Can’t tell, Mam,” Jamesy said. “You’ll see.”

“We’re going to—” Bridget started.

“Don’t!” Daniel said to her. “It’s a surprise.”

Gracie was beside me now, patting Stephen’s shoulder. Only two months older, but always so tender with “the baby.”

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “Sit with Bridget close to the stove. Light the lantern, Jamesy.”

He’d learned to stick a piece of straw through the stove’s grate and carefully bring the flame to the lantern’s wick.

“Put another log on, Daniel,” I said. “Watch yourself.”

“Not much wood left, Aunt Honey,” Daniel said.

“We’ll have loads when your mam and the boys get home,” I said.

“I wish they were here now,” Jamesy said.

“So do I.”

Stephen slept, his breath whistling in his chest.

Then the children and I nodded off, too.

It was the snow woke us. Hard pellets hit the outside walls of the house, beating against the wooden slats.

Jamesy and Daniel rushed to the window. Jamesy lifted Daniel up to look out for a moment, then let him down.

“A blizzard, Mam,” Jamesy said.

The boarders had told us about these storms. Like nothing known in Ireland, they’d said. Here, the winds blew across the prairies to meet the gales coming off the Lake and together battered the clouds until sharp pieces of ice fell from the heavens—a different species altogether from the snowflakes at home.

“Like musket balls, coming from all directions. Slice your face open,” Barney McGurk had said.

“It comes up fast,” they’d all agreed.

In those blizzard stories people got disoriented, went in circles, were frozen within yards of shelter. Máire and the boys are out there somewhere.

“Piles of snow already, Mam,” Jamesy said.

The boys had been hoping for a really big snowfall. Great fun, their pals had told them. Fun.

“I’m cold, Mam,” Bridget said.

“I know, a stór. Come, all of you, move closer together. The heat of our bodies will help.”

Wind pushed through chinks in the wall and the spaces around the window frames.

“There’s no heat in my body,” Daniel said.

“Come anyway.”

“Get close to Stephen, Daniel,” Jamesy said. “He’s warm.”

I touched Stephen’s forehead—hotter now, a fever, no question.

I took Bridget and Gracie on my lap, Stephen between them, and the boys sat against my legs.

So little wood in the box! Two small logs and a few sticks. Behind the stove’s open grate, one last tongue of flame licked at a stump of a log—almost gone, black with only a thread of red.

“Blow,” I said to Jamesy and Daniel. “Blow on the fire.”

We knelt together,
whoosh
ing at the embers, trying to bring back the fire. Bridget and Gracie pursed their small lips, blending their breath with ours.

Stephen opened his eyes, looked at Bridget.

She’d put her little hands on each side of his face. “A game, Stephen, blow!” She pressed out a bit of breath.

The embers caught fire. Flames.

“Look, Mam,” said Jamesy. “We did it!”

“Daniel,” I said, “put two more sticks in.”

“The fire’s dancing,” Jamesy said.

Bridget and Gracie kept blowing at the fire, bright and crackling now but giving off very little heat. Another gust of wind chilled the room.

Jamesy and Daniel crawled closer to the stove. Where are they?

“Mam, Mam!” Jamesy pulled on my skirt. “Somebody.”

Them, surely. Footsteps pounded on the stairs.

Paddy burst into the kitchen first, his face red, the skin around his lips white. He held his hands over the top of the stove. “I’m frozen. My fingers, my toes.” Barefoot, his boots left down at the door, toes blue.

“Get up, girls.” I helped them off my lap. “Here—” I handed Stephen to Jamesy and knelt down, rubbing the blue toes. “Help me, Bridget.”

She sat on the floor, her little hands slapping at Paddy’s other foot.

“Can you feel that, Paddy?”

“Mam, I can’t.”

I tried to get the blood flowing, kneading his blue skin, remembering the nights I’d stroked life into Michael’s poor feet when he’d come from the roadworks.

Máire and Johnny Og and Thomas came into the kitchen and went right to the stove. Máire pressed her back against the big iron oven, and Johnny Og put his hands next to Paddy’s. Thomas bent over, took off his shoes, and stuck his bare feet toward my hands.

“Next,” he said.

“Not much warmer in here than out there,” Máire said.

“Mam, Mam!” Daniel and Gracie wrapped their arms around Máire’s legs.

“What happened? Where have you been?” I asked.

“We had a few problems.”

“Problems?”

“He wouldn’t pay her, Mam,” Paddy said.

“Oh, Máire!” I stopped.

“Keep on, Mam, please,” Paddy said. “I’m starting to feel my toes.”

“Here, Thomas.” Daniel bent over and began rubbing his brother’s bare feet.

“I knew how many sales I’ve made. I told him my commission should be twenty dollars, but Mr. Croaker had figured his sums different. He said I’d earned ten.”

“Well, ten isn’t terrible,” I said.

“It’s terrible if you’re owed twenty. But I couldn’t prove it. He had the accounts all written down. Lies,” she said. “So I said I’d take ten dollars. But he said he had to deduct the cost of the brown wool cloth.”

“Oh no!”

“He had the neck to hand me five dollars and say, ‘Merry Christmas!’ And I said . . . well, I said some things to him.”

“Aunt Máire knows some powerful curses, Mam,” Paddy said.

“‘Take five dollars or take nothing,’ he said to me.”

“I said we’d destroy the store, Mam,” Paddy said. “We’d break the mirrors, throw the clothes on the floor. But Aunt Máire said not to do it.”

“Only because we’d all end up in jail,” Máire said. “I can tell you, I quit as soon as I had the five dollars in my hand. We did have enough to buy the food, and we got a Christmas tree!”

“You spent money on a Christmas tree?!”

“We didn’t, Aunt Honey,” Johnny Og said. “Professor Lang gave it to us. He said the music store wouldn’t open again until after New Year’s so we might as well have it.”

“He was decent, Mam. Gave us glasses of wine.”

“Máire! You sat drinking wine?”

“It was clear then. The snow didn’t start until we were on our way home. Then the blizzard swept right over us. Couldn’t see a thing. We got lost. I thought we were going to die.”

“We were scared, Aunt Honey,” Johnny Og said.

“Not me,” Thomas said.

“You were too,” Paddy said.

“Let’s just thank God you’re home safe. Now . . .”

“The ice burned my face, Mam,” Paddy said. “How can ice feel like fire?”

“Talking about fire, let’s get
our
fire started. Bring up the wood. We’ll build a big fire, get nice and warm.”

“Oh, the wood,” Máire said.

“The wood,” I repeated. “Molly’s wood for the stove?”

“By the time we found our way to the lumberyard, it was closed,” Máire said.

“We tried, Mam, we did,” Paddy said.

“Dear God,” I said.

“Hold on now, Honora. Molly always has plenty of wood.”

“She doesn’t! Look! Look at the wood box!”

Máire leaned over to see the two logs, a few sticks. “Oh.”

“Oh?
Oh?
My Stephen’s burning up, it’s cold in here already! If we can’t keep the stove going . . .” I stopped, seeing the children’s faces.

“I’m sorry, Mam,” Paddy said. “I thought—”

“I don’t care what you thought. You should have gotten the wood when I told you! And you, Máire. To loll around drinking wine when we’re waiting here for you, worried, and now . . .”

Stephen started crying, a frightening clogged-up kind of weeping. He pushed at Jamesy and lifted his arms up to me. I picked him up and walked back and forth.

“He’s sick, Máire. Molly says croup, but . . .” I rocked him and sang. He quieted.