Men of No Property (4 page)

“Now, biddie!” a sailor cried, tightening the vise on Lavery’s arm, “you can let him have that fancy toe of yours.”

“Kick high and he’ll remember!” another chimed in.

“Oh he’ll remember, he’ll remember you.”

Still she stood, proud and full of hate, waiting for him to beg it too, he thought.

“Forgive me, Peg!” he cried out. Something needed forgiveness. He did not know what.

Her lips parted and the smile was crueler than her eyes.

“A good word, Peg,” he cried, for now he hated her and thought this to be the best of taunts that he could thrust at her who had no good words to comfort a man, only bad ones to tempt him.

She turned her back on him, and he could see the high tilt of her chin as the wind fanned her hair about it.

They dragged him away and thrust him down the steps of the forward hatch. “While he lay below, breathing the smell of rust from the cargo, and waiting the irons they promised, an old Scots seaman who was the easiest of his captors, said: “Ah, lad, dinna ye know better nor ask a gud word o’ the de’il’s whore?”

T
HERE WAS THIS TO
be told of Peg: nothing she did was contemplated with malice aforehand. Indeed, by this lack of contemplation she was often the last to discover the mischief of which she was the origin. She was restive and curious, and did love things of flame and beauty. She was running through youth as she might through a fire, fearful at times, but more often wild with the excitement of something she perceived but did not understand, and her one determination was to turn back from nothing.

She had small pity for Dennis Lavery in his solitary confinement, thinking her own lot much the worse to have been tumbled, feeling raw and naked, back into the hold to the spitting scorn of the women who cried “Shame!” at her day and night the week since. She was ashamed, but not for the reasons for which they chastized her. She was ashamed now because she knew that Norah was pining after Dennis Lavery and she had permitted him and herself the temptation when she cared not a fig for him more than she had cared for any man she had ever known. She could have killed him herself for the kiss he forced upon her, for rousing in her something of torturing pleasure that left nothing but shame in its passing. Whether she despised herself or him more for it, she could not say. In truth, there was much she could not say, and no ears willing to listen if she could, save the boy, Vinnie, who took to her out of instinct or because he was lonesome entirely.

“You must go to the priest,” Norah pleaded with her. “For my sake, do, and they’ll forgive you, seem’ it.”

“If it’s for your sake, go yourself,” she said. “You’ve been to him before.”

“If you confess yourself,” Norah said, “he might put in a word on Dennis’ behalf. And you did tempt him, Peg.”

Peg laughed. “What do you know of temptation, keepin’ your heart wrapped up in flannel?”

“You’re as selfish as sin, Margaret Hickey, and I could wish now what I never thought would come into my heart—I do wish you weren’t my sister at all. There’s people sick and ailin’ he’d sing a song to. He’d cart water for them not able…”

“Is it for all the others you want him back?” said Peg.

“Peg, I swear it to you before heaven, I wouldn’t try to take him from you if I could, so do say the word to the priest.”

“Oh, for the love of God!” Peg exploded, and went up without another word.

Her first wish when she gained the deck was that Dennis had not burdened her with the knowledge of Farrell’s true identity. She must still pretend him a priest to herself or she could not speak to him at all, she thought.

“I would see the priest,” she called up from below the captain’s bridge.

“Would you?” said the mate, and then to a seaman and with a wink of his eye, she thought: “Tell Mr. Russell one of his parishioners is down here—the bad one.”

She turned her back and waited, trying to fashion her first words for when the man came. He was so soon there that he spoke before she was aware of his presence. “Yes, Miss Margaret?”

She swung around and seeing him tall and quiet and waiting patient for her words, she knew she could not blame herself before him. “I’ve come for the book you promised by my sister.”

“It’s been so long I’d quite forgot it,” he said.

“I’ll forget it myself,” she said then. “I’ve no great need for it…Father.”

“I’ll see what I have if you’ll excuse me a moment,” he said, ignoring her words and retreating up the steps quickly.

He was as shy of her as she was of him, she realized. Oh, what nonsense ran through people’s minds of one another! Did they know themselves so poorly to be that fearful of them they didn’t know at all? Was conversation a game to conceal the truth instead of revealing it? Now here was a man as well known by name as his times in Ireland, for his paper had stirred up a storm of tempers with every issue, and he needed to get a book in hand before he could talk to her! It gave her a fine and dangerous sense of her own power, and she entirely forgot Dennis Lavery for the moment.

“I wonder,” he said on returning, “does your taste run to poetry?”

“It runs wherever I chase it, Father,” she said, and held her hand out for the book. He was slow in giving it. “Sonnets. I heard of them but I never seen them afore.”

“There are all kinds of sonnets,” he said.

She thumbed through the book. “There’s some here on love.”

“There are. And some on gardens and some on the sea. All manner of things touching a poet’s fancy.”

“You said that pretty, Father,” she remarked, glancing up at him. And seeing the little alarm in his eyes she plunged into the mischief. “Ha!” she cried. “Wait till they see what you gave me! I better tell them this is a prayerbook.”

“You’ll tell them nothing of the sort,” he said. “If you can’t tell the truth of it, you’d better not take the book at all.”

“Father, I know it’s hard for a holy man to believe, but I’ve been in more trouble by far for tellin’ the truth than ever I got into for tellin’ a lie.”

The trace of a smile warmed his mouth and she found him much to her liking. “Perhaps we should walk a bit,” he said, “if your legs are as steady as your tongue.”

“They both run off with me at times,” she said. “It would be grand could we go to the front of the ship. I do love to look before me and never back though it be the same.”

He held the rope up for her as might a gentleman, and with not a word for permission to the dour sailors watching them. He was accustomed to taking the way he wanted, this one, and not wasting words to ask it. “What will you do in America?” she asked, looking up at him suddenly.

“I rather think I should be asking you that question,” he said.

“Oh, I’ll marry the lord mayor of New York and live in a mansion.”

“I shall not be surprised to learn it,” he said, “but I do think your sister would settle now for your promise of something less.”

Peg sighed. “She’d marry me to a jailer if he’d keep me in chains.”

“That’s unfair, Miss Margaret,” he said. “She has reason to worry, you know. New York is not Dublin.”

“What’d I be goin’ there for if it was?”

“To discover it yourself,” he said.

“Ha! You know me well and just made my acquaintance. Have you seen poor Dennis Lavery where they put him away?”

“The captain will not permit it,” he said. “He’s chosen to make an example of him to his men.”

She thrust the book toward him. “Would you mind readin’ me one of those so’s I’ll know how it’s supposed to sound?”

“I would mind,” he said. “I gave it to you to read and it will have to occupy you for the rest of the voyage.”

“Oh-h-h,” she said, trailing the word while she planned a new tack. “You gave it to me to keep me from mischief. Will you listen then to see do I read it right?” And before he had the chance to protest she opened the book and read:

“‘Love’s a thing as I do heare,

Ever full of pensive feare;

Rather than to which I’le fall,

Trust me, I’le not like at all:

If to love, I should entend,

Let my haire then stand an end:

And that terrour likewise prove,

Fatall to me in my love.

But if horrour cannot slake

Flames, which wo’d an entrance make;

Then the next thing I desire,

Is to love, and live i’ th’ fire.’”

She read each word as a child might, but her savoring of some of them indicated more than a child’s discovery. “Oh, I like that last,” she said, “‘to love and live i’ the fire.’ Did I read it all right?”

“By your pleasure in it,” he said, “I should say you read it excellently.”

“By my pleasure in it,” she repeated. “Do you think I’d make an actress?”

“I’m certain of it,” he said.

She looked up at him sharply. “Because you think I’m always actin’ you say that, is it?”

He nodded.

“But that doesn’t make an actress at all to my notion. I’d need to be shy o’ the brogue and speak as eloquent as you.”

“God help you then,” he said, “if I answer your notion of eloquence.”

“There’s them eloquent never say a word,” she said. “I was wonderin’, Father, though ’tis bold to ask it, would you know them in New York you could put in a word for me with? I do fancy myself a governess first while I’m learnin’ my way—for you seen how I can read and I can write as well.”

“I am no better acquainted in New York than you, Miss Margaret.”

“But you won’t be there long and takin’ up with a fine class of people. I’ve the notion of betterin’ myself, you know. Will you have a parish there?”

“I shall not have a parish and you know it,” he said, his eyes upon her then chill as morning mist.

“I’d better go down now,” she said, for it was a poor game after all, and she was already ashamed of it.

“Are they all as wise as you down there?” he said.

“There’s some wiser, thank God.”

“I would not deceive them any longer,” he said, “if they are deceived still.”

“They are better off deceived, Mr. Farrell, for to my thinkin’ a priest is what you make of him.” Their eyes met at her mention of his true name.

“That sounds very Protestant,” Farrell said.

“I must’ve caught the disease from Young Ireland.”

“Did you know me from the beginning?”

“By reputation,” she said. “Many’s the time I read
Irish Freedom
aloud to my da.”

“And did you like what you read?”

“’Twas grand soundin’,” she said.

“But hollow as a drum,” he said. “We were all of us wrong except Mitchel and Lalor. We should have first claimed the land for the people, and then the people for the land itself.”

“’Tis done now,” she said.

“Done and undone, all in a day.” He touched his fingers to her elbow to turn her back. “We had better go now before I confess myself to you.”

“Would that be so terrible?”

He smiled without answering her question. “I hope you savor the book. There’s meat in it, and I shall try again on Lavery’s behalf.”

“I would…Father, for I’ve the notion he’s a man who can carry a grudge, and you never know what a man’ll turn out to be in America.”

“Thank you,” Farrell said in a smiling, far-off way that put more distance between you and himself, Peg thought, than if you had never met.

A
BOOK WAS A
book wherever it came from, and Peg learned it by heart before the week was out. When Dennis did not come back, the rumor spread first that he was ill and then that the crew had crippled him, and not one amongst the emigrants had the courage to speak of him to the priest. “’Tis best we don’t know or he’d tell us,” they said, and asked no more of Farrell ever than the prayers for the dead. They would have no spirit left at all in them, Peg thought, if they were much longer at sea, and then the hard times worsened.

The Valiant
fell into a becalmed sea, and as sullen was the ship and crew as the fog hanging round them. The watch stood his vigil with a pistol in hand, and the men worked only under threat of the lash. They snarled at one another and spat at the emigrants, who for their own safety were permitted on deck but an hour morning and night and the women not at all.

Misery in the hold demanded intimate company and the division of the bunks, men on one side and women on the other, was no longer respected. Whenever the urge was upon them, man and wife, they climbed silently into the nearest bunk and sated the only hunger left them. The children watched and some of them tried it, finding the darkest corners to shroud themselves. The widowed and virgins hid their faces. No one gainsaid it, for the captain came only to seek out the dead, and would hear nothing of the women’s complaints lest his men overhear them and mutiny for the privilege themselves. Peg drew from her portmanteau a scissors and put it into her sister’s hands. They sat down face to face, walked hand in hand, lay down side by side, one wakeful while the other slept and giving the child no more care than her crying demanded.

On the third night of the torpid stillness Peg was aware of a stirring. Norah and the child lay asleep. When she recognized Vinnie creeping by she watched him as far as a few bunks and closed her eyes again. She was dozing off when she heard him scream and without quite realizing what she was doing she darted out of the bunk and across the aisle. The boy and a man were threshing and howling. “Thievin’ my gold” and “Crackin’ my ear” cried one and the other, and as she tried to pull them apart she was tumbled on top of them. As sudden as life the entire hold was crawling and leaping with angry men and women. Some tore at her and some with her, women clawing her face and spitting names at her as foul as their breath. When she saw Norah trying to flail a way across to her and beaten back entirely, the fear thickened her throat beyond speech. Men clogged the aisle, threshing one another, breaking open barrels and heads alike. The fiends in hell behaved no wilder.

Then from the hatchway the priest leaped like a black bird upon them beneath him and strove to pull one man from another. He was sucked down in their midst, swallowed, then disgorged again by the cursing, groaning men—imploring them in God’s name and by the saints they honored, his words like so many more blasphemies, until he was quieted by a blow. When he fell still they moved suddenly back from him. The women held their tongues a moment.