Man in the Shadows (8 page)

He took a deep breath and steadied himself. His eyes locked onto his son’s, and in a hushed but powerful tone, he said simply, “Sit down. Let me tell you about your mother.”

T
he flat was drab and dreary. Conor couldn’t remember the last time his father could afford enough fuel oil to keep the lamps properly lit. The ceiling was black with smoke and the window frames green with mould. An old wood stove kept the room sweltering hot in the winter, but it was dangerously close to the walls and Thomas hung a frightening number of inflammable objects near it. A wooden plank balanced over two barrels created a table; two old mattresses on the floor served as their beds. It was a place to leave, not call home.

Thomas was now standing, looking down on his son. “I’ll tell you what Canada did for your mother,” he began slowly. “It was 1847, the start of the famine in Ireland. Millions of us were starving.” He paused and looked Conor directly in the eye. “Not hungry, boyo, but starving.”

Conor ignored being called “boyo.” He didn’t want to quell the new life in his father’s voice. Thomas pulled up a rickety chair and sat down. Conor could tell that his father’s back was aching even more than usual.

“The British landlords didn’t care about us. Year after year, the potato crop was in ruin, but all they worried about were their prices, their precious investment. We weren’t people; we were just Irishmen.”

Conor knew the story of the famine. Thomas rarely spoke about it—and certainly never to his son—but other Irishmen spoke of little else. He was about to say something, but stopped himself and let his father continue. “The English had the means to help us, but they just sat back and watched us suffer. Finally, when the landlords’ profits really started to decline, they took some action. They evicted us.” Thomas kept his eyes focused on the mud floor. “Then we started to die. By the thousands, good farmers, good people …” His words drifted off, but only for a few seconds. “They wouldn’t give us freedom. They wouldn’t allow us our own government, but their bloody government didn’t give a damn.” Thomas swallowed hard; he was breathing deeply, almost gasping. “Oh yes, they sent commissions over—not to help us or feed us, but to count the dead. And they sent journalists over to watch us slowly waste away. I guess we were quite a story: Irish peasants in tattered rags, dying in ditches; children eating gravel while their parents lay dead beside them; typhus killing those who didn’t starve; undertakers building coffins with trap doors so that dozens of bodies could be buried from the same wooden box. We were a great story.”

Then, strangely, Thomas’s expression changed, as if a dim memory had come to light. He rubbed his weary eyes. “It’s hard to fathom, but amidst the horror, your mother and I were so much in love that we could almost ignore our hunger and the despair all around us.”

Conor was about to tell his father about Meg, the stirring within him, but again he stopped himself.

“You were just a baby,” his father continued. “And dear Lord, how we loved you. You were good, very good. We barely had enough food to feed you, but you seemed to understand. You cooed and giggled from the day you were born, and made everything so … so …” Again his words drifted off, but his distant smile faded as he stared
deeply into the past. “But we couldn’t bring you up in that poverty. And anyway, they evicted us, too. Your mother and I had to leave a land that could have been—should have been—heaven on earth to come to a strange new place we knew almost nothing about.”

Thomas gingerly stood up and carefully paced across the tiny room. “Your grandparents scraped together every bit of money they could find. And so did we. We wanted a future for our family—for you—in the New World.” He walked the length of the small room twice, pressing on the small of his back. “They held a wake for us before we left. Not a going-away party, but a wake. Our leaving meant we would never see any of our family or friends again. Margaret and I danced the steps of the living dead—the expelled.”

Just hours before, Conor had been dancing with Meg with carefree joy. How long had it been since his father was carefree?

Thomas stretched his back and sat down. “We left Galway Bay in the spring, boarding the ship almost in sight of the farm my family had once worked. Margaret cried terribly when she said her final goodbyes to her mother and sisters. I practically had to pull her onto the ship—the ship that would take us on a voyage into hell.” He anticipated Conor trying to defend his precious Canada and raised his voice to cut him off. “Yes, hell! We were packed into that ship like slaves in a hold.”

It had never occurred to Conor how little he knew of the details of his father’s life. He had heard snippets of this story over the years, but he hadn’t pushed for more. Perhaps he was afraid to. One winter night in a lumber camp, when Thomas thought Conor was asleep, he told a fellow teamster about the terrible years of famine and death, and the cruel reception he had received when he arrived on Canadian soil. Conor listened from the next cot, but somehow he let it waft by him. It became a dream, a story from another land, another time. Thomas had never mentioned his wife to the teamster. Conor would have remembered that.

Now his father was not just retelling the story but reliving it.

“It took only a few weeks before the fevers began. We were terrified that you would get it. You were little more than a year old, but you were strong. Your mother, she was strong, too.” He stopped talking and rested, alone with his memories. “I’ll never forget one woman who died. Jenny was her name. She was travelling alone. Her husband had been in Toronto for two years earning the money for her trip—her final trip. When the fever first struck, your mother tried to care for her. Then, one night, when the seas were high, poor Jenny started screaming, calling out for her husband. She wailed and shrieked all night as your mother struggled to bring down her rising fever.”

Thomas was now choking back tears, but he was determined not to give in. This boy who loved the Union Jack so much had some lessons to learn, lessons about British justice.

“By the morning, her feet had swollen to twice their normal size and they were covered in putrid black spots.” Conor looked down in disgust, but Thomas howled, “Look at me, boy, and listen. When she died a few days later, her head had swollen so much it was sickening just to look at her. This beautiful young woman had turned grotesque and ugly.” He chose his next words carefully. “And do you know why? Because she was poor. Because she was Irish!” The memories seemed to drain Thomas. He sat down again. “We were at sea for two months, rotting like the blackened potatoes we had left behind. When we spotted land, we thought we were saved, but we were fools. Nothing would save the likes of us. As we sailed up the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the nightmare only worsened. Land was all around us, but we were still adrift.”

Conor felt he should say something, but what? His father’s story was unrelenting.

“And then we ran out of drinking water. While the sick screamed for mercy, and the dying lay helpless in their own shit, people desperately tried to drink salt water from the Gulf.”

He looked deeply into his son’s eyes, reliving the worst memory of all. “That’s when your mother got the fever. She died just two days before we reached shore.”

Conor leaned over to touch his father, hold him, hug him, anything, but Thomas rejected his affection and carried on as if in a trance. “I wouldn’t let them throw her overboard. I held her body until we reached Grosse Isle. We sailed into the quarantine station flying the flag of sickness. There were four hundred people crammed onto that ship. Thirty-six died at sea and a hundred others were gravely ill. I thought I had witnessed horror in Ireland, but Grosse Isle was the most repulsive place I had ever seen. It was little more than a graveyard on the St. Lawrence River. By day, people lay on the beach, crawling in the mud and dying like fish out of water. By night, you could hear the wailing in the sheds and tents of those lucky enough to die in a makeshift hospital. At least your mother never had to see it.”

Thomas stopped. He reached for a handkerchief to wipe tears from his eyes and sweat from his brow. “When we got off board, I helped dig her grave. I placed two stakes together in a cross. I didn’t have the schooling to write her name, but I vowed by that simple cross that I would never forgive those English bastards who did this to her.”

He spoke his next words directly to Conor. “Before she died, she made me promise not to tell you how wretched her death was. She wanted to save you from it. Well, I have broken my vow. You asked me, and I have told you.”

Conor could only imagine the pain in his father’s heart, how it had grown and festered like a cancer. He wanted his father to continue; he wanted to hear it all. He searched for a tone of understanding in his voice. “Then what happened to you? To us?”

“We survivors carried on to Montreal, where they divided us
like cattle. Those with any strength left after the voyage were sent up the Ottawa River—up the Opeongo Line—to fell the white pines. A job. It sounded good, but it was gruelling, treacherous work in the lumber camps. You know that, boy. You saw it. Working from dawn till dusk for less than a dollar a day. Some went to dig the canals in the United States. Many of us died. Those too weak for ‘Irish’ labouring jobs were left to rot in Montreal, where there was little or no prospect of work. Some people I knew headed for Toronto, and what did they find? Signs staring at them everywhere: ‘NINA—No Irish Need Apply.’ They didn’t mean Irish, they meant Irish
Catholics.
Romanists. Papists. ‘The Queen City’ was as Orange as Belfast’s Shankill Road. You’ve seen the signs yourself. ‘No Irish wanted.’ ‘No Irish employed here.’ There’s your Canada for you.”

Conor had listened in silence. Finally, he took his father’s large, weathered hand and asked softly, “How do you remember Mama?”

Thomas held his son’s hand tightly, but looked at the ground. Conor wondered whether he was trying to conjure up her image on the mud floor. “I remember two things about her,” Thomas said softly. “I remember our childhood in Galway. I remember us dancing with such delight on Saturday night; then at Sunday morning Mass I’d watch her praying with such conviction. I remember her smile.” Thomas brightened as he spoke, and his voice grew stronger. “Yes, I remember her conviction that life was good, that no matter how dreadful it seemed, things were going to get better.” Instantly, his face darkened as if he dared not remember too vividly the happiness of youth. “And I remember her dying on the ship’s floor like an old woman. I can never forget her just … wasting away.”

Conor squeezed his hand. “Father, I know it’s been hard, terribly hard. I know you’ve been lonely—”

Thomas would have none of it. “Don’t give me your pity,” he snarled, and cast his son’s hand away.

“It’s so much better for the immigrants today,” Conor said, sounding far too much like the politicians he worked for. “The voyage is safer, people are better cared for and there are much better conditions when they arrive in Canada now. When Mr. McGee was in the cabinet he made sure—”

“McGee!” Thomas bellowed. “How dare you bring his name into this?”

Conor knew instantly that he had made a stupid mistake, but he compounded it. “And Mr. Macdonald—”

“Macdonald!” Thomas spun from anger to fury. He spit out the name as if he were speaking of the devil. “Mc-Gee … Mac-don-ald!” Rage that had been building within him for days, for months, for years exploded. He shrieked, “Get out!” The explosion echoed through the small room. Shocked, Conor hesitated. “I said, get out of my sight!”

Guilt choked Conor. He was speechless. But he had already said too much. Way too much. “Father, I’m sorry,” he sobbed. But Thomas was not listening. At the very moment when he could have soothed his father’s anger, he had provoked it. He had been a fool. An idiot. An
eejit.

“I will not hear their names in my house.”

“But you must understand—”

“No,
you
must understand.” Thomas glared at his son. “You’ll never understand. You don’t have the heart of an Irishman. Now get out.”

Conor felt sick. He had failed his father and failed the memory of his mother. When he looked at his father’s contorted face, he saw a man overcome with hatred; he saw viciousness he’d never known; he saw pure and utter danger. “Da, please listen to me,” he begged tearfully.

“Who do you think you are?” Thomas shrieked. “You and your wretched books. You and your fucking politicians. Get out. And never come back.”

Conor stood up and stepped back. He wanted to run away, to escape that ferocious stare, the torrent of vitriol, but he also wanted to stay to apologize, to beg for his father’s forgiveness. He tried to speak, but there was nothing to say.

“You’re no longer a son of mine. Damn you! I said, damn you and fuck off!”

He could still hear his father swearing at him after he had closed the door and left.

C
onor walked aimlessly through Lowertown, almost staggering in shame. He knew these streets by heart, but he was lost. He could hear soldiers in the George Street barracks playing cards. It sounded like fun. He assumed they were mostly Protestant soldiers longing to hunt down some Irish invaders. All he could think about was his father’s story. Thomas had protected him from the full truth for so many years. He marvelled at his extraordinary restraint. He had kept the promise he had made to his dying wife. The more Conor thought about where he came from, the more he was losing a grip on where he was, and where he was going.

He wandered along Clarence Street, with its many brothels and ladies of the night. He tried not to stare, but he did notice a skulking man in a grey coat across the street, talking to a woman. A prostitute and a customer. They ignored Conor, and he looked away.

He walked in circles, up and down the squalid streets, confused and rudderless. It was now early morning and he had nowhere to go. He had no home.

He found himself pulled back to Sussex Street, toward the towering Notre Dame Cathedral. The interior was still under construction, but the magnificent structure already dwarfed the tenements.
The cathedral was more French than Irish, but it was Roman Catholic, and he stumbled into its sanctuary. He had never been inside. The golden altar glistened in the flickering light; the unfinished ceiling soared toward the heavens. He didn’t expect there would be anyone there at this hour, and he was surprised when an elderly priest quietly approached him. The priest seemed to understand that he was in need but couldn’t talk about it now, and left him alone, in peace. Conor kneeled in a pew, not praying, just wishing—desperately wishing—and wondering what prayer really was.