The Crooked Branch (4 page)

IRELAND, SEPTEMBER 1846

G
inny was on her hands and knees at the edge of the potato pit, staring in. Moisture seeped up from the soil and stained damp circles onto the knees of her petticoat. Her fingernails were caked with black earth, and a stink of rot saturated the air. She covered her nose with one hand to keep from retching. In the chilly dampness, her breath came out from behind her hand in puffy white blooms.

“Mammy, I thought we weren’t supposed to open the pit again until spring, only as we needed them.” Her daughter Maire was beside her, talking in her granny voice. “Sure, we only pulled these up last week, and we still have loads in the shed. Shouldn’t we leave them covered?”

Ginny looked across the pit to where Raymond was digging on the other side. She tried to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at her; he was staring into the opened ground.

“Maire, you’re eleven going on seventy-three,” he said to their worried daughter without looking up.

“But isn’t that right, Daddy?” she said. “The air isn’t supposed to get at them.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Usually, Maire.”

“But not this time?” Now it was Michael talking, jumping at the chance to prove his big sister wrong.

“No, not this time, son.”

“Why not?” Maire asked.

Raymond finally looked up at Ginny with his deep brown, half-moon eyes. The first time she’d met him, she’d been caught by those eyes, by the beautiful curl of them, the way he looked like he was always dreaming. But now she could see only naked fear in his face. She hoped Maire wouldn’t notice.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?” their daughter said.

Ginny shook her head at him. He was a good man, funny and handsome, but he never was much good at pretending, even for the sake of the children. Ginny smiled at her daughter.

“Never you worry,” she said to Maire. “Your father and I will sort it out.”

“Sort what out?” she said.

“Never mind,” Ginny said, standing up, brushing the dark clumps of earth from her hands. “Take Michael and your sisters inside for a few minutes. Let Mammy and Daddy have a chat.”

Maire twisted on her feet but didn’t go. Her long, fair hair was stringing across her face in the late-morning wind, and her mouth was screwed up with worry. Her face was bright and clear, with only a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

“Go on, love,” Raymond said softly.

Maire’s shoulders drooped, but she grabbed Michael by the hand, and then she turned and trudged toward the door, calling for her sisters to follow. Maggie went running, but Poppy was still squealing in the hazy fields, flinging her arms out to her sides while she spun in circles.

“Come on, Poppy!” Maire called again. “Inside!”

Poppy stopped spinning, but toppled over, laughing. Then she stood, and ran dizzily after the others, her moppy golden curls bouncing against the back of her neck. Ginny winced, watching her baby run, thinking she might zigzag into the doorjamb, but Poppy corrected her course and disappeared inside with the others.

“How bad on that side?” Raymond asked without looking up.

Ginny shivered and looked down at the hole by her feet, where she’d dug into the fresh pit to check the potatoes from the early harvest. They’d dug them up a few weeks premature, at the first sign of blight in the fields, hoping to save them. Even as they’d pulled them out from under their wasted stalks, a good portion of them had already turned to slime, black and spongy in their beds with an awful gag of an odor to them. But they’d managed to save and store more than half, and they’d been living the weeks since on hope.

This morning when they opened the pit, they found a horrid, stinking, squelchy mess. Those salvaged earlies were decaying altogether.

“Any savers?” Raymond asked.

Ginny shook her head, kicked some dirt back over the hole. “Maybe three out of ten if we’re lucky,” she said. “What about over there? Anything?” Raymond scratched the back of his neck, and then folded his arms in front of him.

“Maybe a few, Ginny,” he said. He walked the rim of the pit, and put his arm around her shoulders.

She tried to breathe deeply, to refute the tears that were coming. She looked toward the cottage door and felt the fear clawing up the inside of her throat like a monster. Raymond put both arms around his wife, and she collapsed her forehead against his shoulder.

“We’ll manage,” he said.

“Gale day is coming, Ray,” she said. “Rent will be due.”

He nodded his head.

“Thanks be to God, the oat harvest looks to be in strong condition, at least,” he said.

“Touch wood,” Ginny answered.

“It’s the heartiest crop of oats I ever did see,” Ray said.

“Isn’t it strange, to have the oats that thick and the blight won’t touch them,” Ginny added, “when the potatoes are all in ruin?”

On a good year, they wouldn’t save but a small stock of oats for their family—they sold nearly all of them, and the pig, to pay the rent. They lived all the time on potatoes, with the odd turnip or cabbage from the kitchen garden, a few eggs from the hens. They were better off than most of their neighbors because they had the old cow for milk. But she wouldn’t last, not now. “That’s all our food for the next six months,” Ginny whispered, looking out over their scalped field. “Gone.” She snapped her fingers. There were tears in her eyes, she couldn’t help it.

Ray squinted off into the foggy damp. “We haven’t sold them oats yet, Ginny. We have the pig, still, and a decent crop of turnips and cabbage besides.”

“And we owe most of that to Packet,” she said. “You know what’ll happen if we don’t pay.”

Every year on the gale days, there was always a family or two who couldn’t manage the rent for whatever reason, whatever hardship had befallen them. Packet took no pity on those people. His agents and the constables would be dispatched to drag whole families out of their homes. Those men would tumble the cabins down into the road before the very eyes of their inhabitants, never mind the wailing of the women, or the wild panic of the screeching babbies. A rope would be fixed to the roof beam, and the whole house just tumbled down in front of them, until all that was left was a mess of stone and thatch, a big, choking hot cloud of dust. The neighbors would be warned against taking the family in, and the poor wretches would be destitute then. They would take out to the roads in misery. Ginny shook her head.

“Whatever happens, we’ve got to pay.”

Ray nodded. “You’re right. If we’re going to be hungry, we may at least be hungry with a roof over our heads.”

The stink from the pratie pit was so sharp they could taste it, bitter in the backs of their throats.

“We’ll get a good price for the oats,” Ray reasoned. “We can keep a decent stash back from that.”

“We can sell the cow,” Ginny said. “We’ll manage without milk for the winter.”

“We’ll get by,” Ray said.

They tried to believe each other.

•   •   •

The children loved going into Westport town. They never minded what reason, or the long walk. Poppy, Maggie, and Michael skipped on ahead, flailing their loose, warm baby limbs around them. But Maire kept solemn watch beside her parents. Ray held Ginny’s hand and tried to quell her fear, so Maire wouldn’t sniff it out. You couldn’t hide anything from their eldest daughter—if you wanted her to believe something, you had to believe it yourself.

Ginny squeezed Ray’s hand, and started talking for a distraction. “Michael’s getting a bit big for the petticoat.”

The boys usually wore them only until they were eight or nine years of age. Michael was on the small side for his age, but even so, his lean legs were beginning to stretch out beneath the skirts. He looked more like his father every day, the only one of the children who’d inherited Ray’s half-moon eyes.

“I reckon that’s right,” Ray said, watching their son on the road ahead.

“He’s nearly ten now. Time for some knee breeches and a coat and vest, like a proper little man.”

“He needs a hat, too, Mammy,” Maire said.

“He does,” Ginny agreed. “But sure, he’ll be grand in that getup for now anyway. Won’t do him the bit of harm.”

The roads were eerily quiet, only for the sound of their gathered footsteps falling against the packed dirt of the road, and the high voices of the children in the distance. It was a mild, clammy day, and the rain wasn’t falling, but it was hanging in the air so you had to walk through it nonetheless. The ends of Ginny’s hair were damp when she tucked them in under her bonnet. She looked out from under its brim at the fields on the sides of the road, usually a heavy, bloated green at this time of year, just ready for harvest. Now they were a cankerous, weeping brown, and the stink of blight was so strong you could nearly see it hovering over the land. The farms they passed felt abandoned of their food and people, the fields empty of living things. On a stile in the distance, a lone figure sat up, curled over himself, with his head in his hands. Ginny called the children back to her, and they turned and skipped toward their parents, till they all approached the sitting figure together. It wasn’t until they were upon him that they recognized him.

“Well.” Ray stepped out away from his family, extending his hand. “James Madigan. How’re you keeping?”

The man lifted his head from his knees and looked up wild-eyed at Ray. They knew him well—he was a young enough fella, with a family of his own, but the way his scraggly hair stood out from his head put the weight of years on him. His knee breeches were worn soft, and patched. His coat was frayed about the cuffs and collar. He was unshaved, and he kneaded the knuckles of one hand with the other. Ray’s hand was just hovering there in the air, until finally James took it in his own.

“Sorry, sorry there, Ray, I nearly didn’t see you there,” he said.

Maire snapped a look at her mother, but said nothing.

“Are you right there, James? You look awful shook,” Ray said to him.

James’s eyes fled from Ray’s face to Ginny’s, and then, in turns, to the children. He opened his mouth, but made no reply. He rocked himself a small bit, turned then to look back over his shoulder, to his own decimated field. And then his hands were in against his scalp, pulling at his hair, and the tears stood in his eyes as plain as day. Ginny looked down at her feet, to give him a moment. Poppy was pawing at Maire’s skirt, and Maggie and Michael were inspecting a grasshopper who’d emerged from a gap in the wall.

“It’s all gone.” James’s voice was a choked whisper.

“Ah, here,” Ray said, but James was shaking his head, still kneading his knuckles with his fingers. His eyes were pink and rheumy.

“No,” he said. “There’s nothing for it. When gale day comes, we’ll have nothing to give Packet. He’ll throw us out.”

“Ah, James,” Ray said. “Surely there’s something, something you could sell? Or maybe Packet will give you credit until the spring rents?”

“Ha!” James spat into the road. “You’d sooner get credit from the devil himself.”

Ray drew up his hand and scratched his chin. “Things being what they are now, surely the landlords might compromise. They can’t drive the whole population into destitution. They have to see reason.”

But despite these hopeful words, a look of desperate resignation passed between the two men. They knew the absentee landlords over in London didn’t care about the natives, so long as their plum Irish land continued to yield hearty profits, so long as the grains and cattle they extorted from Ireland continued to fetch their English fortunes.

“He’ll take my house.” James Madigan’s miserable voice climbed in pitch while he talked. “That blaggard Packet will turn my family out into the roads. We will starve. My hand to God, my children will starve!”

Maire drew in a sharp breath, and Ginny turned to her, steered her over toward Maggie and the grasshopper.

“Never worry, love,” she said to her daughter.

“Never worry?” Maire looked at her mother like she was mad. “We’re well past that, Mammy.” Maire lifted her chin, just enough to remind Ginny that there was no baby fat left there. She was slimming down in her jaw and her cheeks, and the lashes grew longer and softer over her pale blue eyes. Soon she would be a young lady.

“All right, so.” Ginny nodded at her.

“Look, Poppy,” Maire said then, crouching down to her little sisters. “See the way its back legs are bent, for jumping?”

Raymond wasn’t long talking to their neighbor, the men’s heads bent toward each other, Ray with his hand on James’s shoulder, James with his arms folded gravely across his chest. Ginny talked loudly to the children, hoping they wouldn’t hear the notes of hysteria in the poor man’s voice. He slipped inside the stile and was staggering off through his bald field when Ray returned. They walked on to Westport town.

“The poor man sowed no oats this year,” Ray said quietly when the children were out of earshot.

Ginny could only gasp in response.

“They’re in a bad way, Ginny. It’s the road, for them.” He shook his head. “God save them.”

“You don’t think Packet will postpone the rent for them, just this once? Give them a pass until spring?”

Ray didn’t even bother answering; he didn’t need to. He just looked at Ginny with one eyebrow arched.

The road before them wound down through the fields, and then pitched itself steeply uphill again as it narrowed into the town. The children dropped back and gathered in around Ray and Ginny as they entered the streets. There was a bustle in Westport, people hurrying all around, some with a horse and trap, or a donkey, but mostly on foot. Poppy was tired from the walk, so Ginny lifted the child onto her hip, and carried her as they crossed over the Carrowbeg River onto Bridge Street.

In town, the noise of the people was frantic, as if all their voices had been drawn out of the surrounding farms and fields with a thirsty dropper, and then unleashed like a wild thing into the clamoring streets. The urgent volume pressed in and gave Ginny a fright. She drew in against a shop wall to collect herself for a moment. People streamed past in frenzied clusters and her red petticoat flittered on the passing breeze. She grabbed Maggie by the hand. Raymond was talking, but in the din, Ginny couldn’t make him out.