Paradise Alley (29 page)

“Cleared! All cleared to sail!” he shouted at them from his window as they passed—clutching at each other's arms, leaning on each other in their hunger.

“Cleared, oh please God, you're cleared to get out of here!”

Afterward they barely had enough strength left to stagger over to a grocer's and spend their last two pounds on biscuits and salt cod, and
lemons and cured beef. Ruth thought they might need the money for New York—but once she saw the food, she could not help herself. She would have wolfed all of it down right there, but that Dolan cuffed her on the back of the neck.

“That's enough then! It's a long trip!”

“But they said there was going to be food on the boat!” she remonstrated with him, remembering the lacquered loaf of bread at the passage broker's.

“Oh, aye,” Dolan sneered. “You go ahead an' believe them. I'll be damned if I ever take anyone's word for it again when they say there'll be enough food.”

The next morning the docks were so crowded Ruth did not know if they could even force their way through, much less find their boat. There were families and even whole villages filling the wharves, holding drunken, teary American wakes for their sons and daughters. Others tried to force their way up the gangplanks whether they had the passage or not, clutching bags and trunks, tumbling into the water. The teamsters and longshoremen cursing at each other as they loaded the black hulls, their teams neighing and rearing on the cobblestones. Newsboys threading their way in and out of the crowds, shouting out their dueling rumors:

“The Liberator is dead in Genoa! Heart taken on to Rome, his body returned to dear Ireland!”

“O'Connell safe in Padua! Rumors of his death a fraud!”

A few men flipped pennies to the boys, grabbed their broadsheets, and bent over the stories. But these were mostly shipping agents, and other officials of the port—the rest of the crowd pushing on, clutching their few possessions and shoving and tripping each other in their haste to get to the boats.

Dolan pulled her on through and up to the deck of the
Birmingham—
holding up the cabinet while he walked ahead, scowling and kicking at anyone who got in his way. He marched them right to their berth belowdecks, where Ruth thought that it seemed as low and dark as it had been inside the scalp with her family. The whole deck was divided into rows of narrow wooden booths. There was a row of single men's berths up by the bow, another row for the single women by the
stern—and in between, only a few inches wider, a row for the married couples and families.

Each of the berths was less than half the width of a horse stall, though like horse stalls, they contained only a single water bucket, and a thin yellow layer of straw along the deck. There were no doors, no curtain. Each berth simply opened onto a narrow aisle that ran the length of the ship, a charred wooden cooking settee squatting in the middle of it like a toad.

“Well,” said Dolan, his voice uncharacteristically mild and uncertain. The confidence seeming to seep almost visibly out of him, the idea that he knew what he was doing when he was still kicking ships along the quay.

“Well—it'll have to do,” he grunted.

Up on deck it was better. She even felt exhilarated there, looking down on the whole crowded wharf below. There was a wind blowing from the east, and the crew was rushing to catch it, clamoring about in the rigging while the clouds rolled past. And some of the other passengers wept at the rail, and waved to neighbors and family on the dock. But most of them had come to the ship as they had, walking in from the country and leaving their dead behind them.

As the ship moved away from the pier, they tried to shake off their grief with the land, and set up a kitchen racket on the deck. Men brought out their penny whistles and their mouth harps, and then a girl brought an old, blind singer up onto deck. He had a country banjo, and he sat down against a mast and plucked out “Fiddler's Green,” then swung into a new song, one that she had heard men singing before in the Liffey bars:

This ship it sails in half an hour

To cross the broad Atlantic,

My friends are standin' on the quay

With grief and sorrow frantic.

I'm just about to sail away

In the good ship
Dan O'Leary,

The anchor's away and the gangway's up

I'm leavin' Tipperary.

It was a merry reel, when she had heard it in the pubs. But now the old man played it as slow and melancholy, as a lamentation. It was not what they wanted to hear—no one dancing to it, though they tried to keep time with their feet and hands, even Johnny Dolan himself.

And it's good-bye, Mick, and good-bye, Pat,

And good-bye, Kate and Mary.

The anchor's weighed and the gangway's up,

I'm leavin' Tipperary.

And now the steam is blowin' up,

I have no more to say.

I'm bound for New York City, boys,

Three thousand miles away.

A few children smiling anyway. Peeking out from around their mothers' skirts and arms. Ruth almost as curious as they were. Thinking only,
How did they do it How did they keep them alive.
The patched white sails fluttering and booming out above them as the ship began to move swiftly down the river now.

“Daniel O'Connell! Daniel O'Connell, dead and gone!”

The twanging of the old singer's banjo stopped with the words. Other voices shouting them down.

“He lives! He lives, I tell ye!”

But there was the ship, moving up the river toward them. It looked huge and modern, draped from bow to stern in black pennants and crepe, the
Birmingham
swinging sharply to starboard to get out of her way.

“Daniel O'Connell!”

The funeral ship came on, thick clouds puffing steadily from its funnel. Its crew, standing ramrod straight at the rail in their best whites. The
Dutchess of Kent—
the name from the paper, right enough—visible just below its bowsprit.

“The Liberator!”

A man smacked his hand against his penny sheet, as triumphant as if he had just backed the winning horse at a county fair.

“That's him, sure enough!”

“Swaggering Dan!”

The man pointed to where their eyes were already directed—the black catafalque, strapped to the center of the main deck, just behind the crew. An honor guard of sailors stood at each corner of the casket, muskets in hand.

“Don't swagger so grand now!”

There was a small commotion, the speaker immediately knocked down, with threats and a curse.

“Daniel O'Connell!”

“They sent his heart on to Rome—”

“Daniel O'Connell! Dead and gone!”

The singer staggered cautiously across the righted deck, temporarily abandoned, in the excitement, even by his niece. Blind, rheumy blue eyes flicking back and forth as if straining to see across the water.

“I heard him speak at the monster meeting on Sidney Hill!”

He fell into a reverie for a moment, as if conjuring up for himself the mass night meeting, when he had still had his sight. Ruth could see it, too. Her father's voice by the hearth, when the banshee cried outside. The monster meeting. The hill and all the roads and the fields filled with people, making torches out of tar barrels, and hogsheads of sugar. Straining to hear every word, the rumble of their approval sweeping back, up over the man only when they could not contain it anymore.

The potatoes, and the wiggin of milk beside it. And all of us, grinning around the fire.

On the hillside, he waited patiently for it to die down, the handsome, fleshy, broad-chested man, his eyes glazed and beneficent in the torchlight. The old blind singer trying to bring to life his marvelous, rolling voice:

“Ireland! Land of my father—Ireland! Birthplace of my children—Ireland! That shall hold my grave—Ireland! Your men are too brave, your women are too beautiful and good—you are too elevated among the nations of the earth, too moral, too religious to be slaves. I promise you that you shall be free!”

The passengers silent as the singer finished. But when the black ship passed, the women gave out with a high, keening wail, their cries echoing across the water.

The funeral ship answered back with the single gun at its bow. Booming the salute as it moved past, around a bend in the river and up to Dublin. The passengers lapsing back into silence only as the last of their own sails unfurled, billowing out against the clouded sky, and the schooner moved down to the sea.

•
34
•

In the hold everything was black. There was only the red glow of the men's pipes and their lucifer matches, the coals in the wood cooking settee. The men and women by the little settee bickering and jostling for space—dancing like maddened imps around the fire when the ship rolled and brought everything sliding down on them.

“Watch the cakes,
watch the cakes!
”

The ship rolled again, its timbers groaning like a wounded beast, snapping like old bones. Snuffing the fire, filling the hold with a fresh stench of vomit and filth as it did.

She rolled with it, along the fetid, scratchy straw. Trying to sleep again, so she wouldn't feel the thirst. It wasn't possible, the unchanged straw in their stall, crawling with lice and roaches.
His
thick body there beside her in the crowded stall. She could barely see him but she knew he was there, big and lumpish and unbearably warm. Lying there remarkably still and untroubled by the straw lice.

Could he be dead?
she wondered idly.
Could he be dead, an' this is hell we're in?

We thought it was a good ship, but they cheated us. We thought it was a good ship, but the captain didn't know his business and once we put to sea, we could make no headway.

Before they were three weeks out, they had run through the salt
pork and ship's biscuits. After that they were given only broth, a cup of stirabout, and one pint of water each day. If it had not been for the bits of meat and biscuit and fish Dolan had bought in Dublin, Ruth was sure she would have died, but there was still no making up for the water.

She tried not to think about it—tried to lie in her stall and think of nothing at all. But soon her mouth would dry up, and her lips would begin to crack. She would run her tongue over them, but then that would dry up, too, swelling like a dry clod of earth in her mouth—

If we could've eaten the earth. If we could've—

When it got that bad, she would take some of the water, but there was never enough. They gave out the pint in the morning, and she would try to nurse it through the day, but that only made it worse. Having to think about it all the time, right there beside her. Worrying if the next turn of the ship would knock it over, painting the planks of the deck with her ration. Or knowing that, if she turned her back for an instant—even if she got up for a moment to walk around, or empty their reeking bucket of slops—one of the children in the hold was likely to be on her cup. Refusing to pull their lips away from it until she had to drive them off with her fists.

Soon she began to drink all of her water first thing in the morning, just to be sure of it. Many of the other passengers did the same, then spent the rest of the day lying in their straw, calling for more.

And people went mad from it, an' threw themselves in the ocean, just to get a drink. It was as bad as it was back on the land, without any food—but at least then you could get up an' walk somewhere, anywhere, even if it was only to the end of the road.

Dolan sniffed around the barrels, muttering knowingly under his breath. Cursing, but pleased with himself, too—pleased to be cheated.

“Goddamnit, goddamnit, I should've known!”

She hovered behind him, where he had commanded her to follow.

“What is it, then? You counted the barrels before we left—”

He didn't answer, but pulled out his knife and pried the top off the first barrel. A sharp, bitter smell stung their nostrils. Dolan cupped a handful of the water to his mouth, spat it back out onto the moldy deck timbers.

“Iodine!” he announced, and cursed again, his face scowling but triumphant. “They packed the water in old iodine barrels!”

He shouldered his way back through the packed hold. The men and women standing motionless by their stalls, unprotesting as he pushed them out of the way. Others lying about, hanging from the hammocks or laid out groaning on the deck. They stumbled over them, Dolan moving inexorably toward the ladder, and up to the captain's cabin. Ruth still dutifully following, despite the weakness she felt already, struggling on up to the main deck.

She staggered there—out in the open for the first time in days, reeling under the litter of stars above. She had not been up on deck at night since the voyage began, and she could only stare now at the sky, at the blackened, restless sea roiling all about them. The wind cutting through the sails and freezing her where she stood—cutting through her, so that for a moment she did not know if she existed at all, if she was anything separate from the blackness all around her.

And I saw it then. I saw how all of us were riding on the tip of the ocean, like a flea on the back of a beast. And I saw then that this was God's own world—beautiful and vast, and empty of pity.

“C'mon!”

Dolan pulled her along the deck after him. There was a tar posted outside the captain's cabin, seated on a barrel, but he knocked the man aside even as he started to stand up. Forcing his way on into where the captain sat, as passive as the devil, behind his charts and a good bottle of brandy. Seemingly unsurprised by this intrusion—

“Iodine!” he spat it in his face. “Goddamn you, if you didn't buy the barrels off some Dublin chemist!”

The captain not even bothering to rise at the accusation. An Ulsterman, his speech thick with the streets of Derry and slurred with drink.

“What of it?”

“What of it? Ye know that yourself well enough! We won't be able to drink a drop of it soon, that's what of it. Ye damned thieves!”

“It was cheapest that way,” the captain said. He pointed over to the wall, where a row of brandy and rum bottles were fastened to the shelves. “Besides, if ye get too thirsty, ye can buy some of this, at a good, Christian price—”

Dolan took a step toward the man, but he instantly produced a knife and a belaying pin on the table before him. Dolan only hesitated
for a moment—but then the door opened and more sailors came in behind him, armed with pikes and muskets. They grabbed Dolan by the arms, holding him before the captain.

“Had your say? Now get back in the goddamned hold, where ye belong!”

Dolan forcing himself to stop struggling. Glaring instead with murderous satisfaction at the captain.

“God curse ye, it don't matter where
we
are.
You
still have to cross the goddamned ocean with your water turnin' bad in those barrels.”

The captain only leaned back in his chair.

“Ah, if that's all that's worryin' ya. I've had experience with this sort of thing. Trust me—I expect the water ration to be goin' up any day now.”

The sailors walked them back across the deck, where the sea was shining and turning like a giant black snake, and forced them back down into the hold with the rest of the cargo. And that night she came down with the relapsing fever—lying in her own filth in the stall, listening to the others all around her dying from the
teascha
and the
tamh.

And every morning I could hear them, slidin' the bodies into the ocean. Sometimes there would be two or three at a time—dropped over the rail without so much as a word said over them, or a stone to mark their grave.

And I would have followed them, were it not for Johnny Dolan. It was he who fed me, an' cleaned my straw as best he could. Without him I should have perished in the belly of that boat. I should have died there, with my soul unshriven, an' my sins upon my head, an' my body tossed into the wide an' trackless sea.

His awful face leaned in over her. The hair finally starting to grow in again in tufts and bunches. The rotted teeth grinning despite himself, whenever he opened his mouth.

“Here, take some stirabout.”

He ladled the thin porridge into her, a spoonful at a time. She didn't quite believe it at first—thinking he would hit her when she could not get up off her straw in the morning. She had even thought he might do for her as he had for that woman, screaming for food in the empty village. One more body for the sailors to bump up the stairs in the morning, step by step—

“Here, take it!”

He made her, holding up a half cup of water, to help it past her dry, splitting lips. She took it in as best she could, trying to keep it down. Grateful especially for the water, which she knew must have come from his own ration. She still could not believe that he would sit there and nurse her, uncomprehending and suspicious despite her gratitude.

What does he want?

“Leave me go. It's a judgment upon me, for helpin' to kill that tinker—” she cried.
Yet wondering at herself, that she still did not want to die.

“A judgment!” Dolan snorted. “If there was such a thing as a judgment, even God would have to pick up his pace.”

He put the cup to her mouth again—and after she had drunk, he began to unbutton and slip off the crude dress, the shabby underthings she had worn since Dublin. She tried to resist at first—thinking this was all he wanted, to force himself on her again.

He ignored her, pulling her clothes off easily, and began to wash her down. Clumsily, but carefully as a mother with a child, he wiped down her head and chest, then pulled her clothes back up and rearranged the straw beneath her. She lay down again, shivering helplessly in his arms now.

“Why won't you just leave me go?”

Looking up at him with an irrational surge of hope.
It has to be something. Some bit of affection—

“No.”

His face above her as brutal and dispassionate as ever.

“No. Not with the money I put out on you. I'll need a wife in Amerikay.”

For the rest of the passage, he kept her alive, through all the bouts of the fever. That was the nature of the sickness, the relapsing fever. After a week or so, it would break and she would begin to feel better, cooler, her head clearer. Then it would start again, worse than ever. Laying her out in the straw, her heart pounding in her chest so she thought it would burst. Too weak to do anything, even get to the slop bucket.

He cleaned up for her, even found her fresh straw from someplace. He brought the food and water to her, and she couldn't help herself, she took it. Gulping it down greedily—the water tasting cooler and sweeter than before, less pungent with iodine.

“The water—”

A ghost of a smile hung over his lips.

“The captain knew his business. He had no good idea how to sail a ship, or how to provision one, but he knew his business.”

“Did he, then?”

“Aye. They slipped the bugger over the side yesterday morning. Ship's fever. The first an' second mate as well. The rest of the crew's holed up in the cabin with their muskets now. They don't even come down anymore, just throw the food through the hole.”

He smiled again at the thought of the captain. Yet as he did she saw that his own eyes looked bleary and clouded—felt that his touch on her head was no cooler than her own feverish skin.

“Are
you
sick?” she asked him, almost tenderly, but he shook his head.

“Never mind for me,” he said, making her drink the rest. “You just do as you're told an' take it.”

She tried to push back against him but she couldn't. Falling down into the straw again, letting the water run into her mouth and crying for her weakness, but not resisting him any longer.

Sometime later. He was gone for the moment, and her hands groped for the cabinet, lifting up a corner of its black cloth curtain. Trying to stare in at all the marvels. She could barely make out their familiar outlines: the blackamoor's ear, and the lovers in the moonlight, and the ship in a bottle. The giant's eye, staring frankly back at her. All of it now, just so many glittering pieces behind the glass.

And from a great distance above, I could see the
scalp,
too, out on the Burren, an' the whole family inside, with the roof pulled down over them. Brian an' Sean an' Liam—an' the girls, Kate an' Agnes an' Colleen, an' me Ma, too. With the roof pulled over them like a blanket, an' all of them tucked inside, asleep forever in our house.