The Law of Dreams (16 page)

“
Nimrod
has sold five hundred emigrant tickets but she
won't have space for fifty.” Billy Butler shook his head. “Ah well,
they've no business leaving their own country.”

A TURF
fire glowed in the beer shop. Each drover had a
pot of porter in front of him. Billy Butler had gone upstairs with the fat woman
owner.

It felt strange to be in a room.

Fergus studied himself in a mirror that was mostly a painting of a ship,
with little strips of looking glass up and down the sides. A pauper's black face
glared back at him. His cheeks almost to his eyes were covered with greasy, downy hair.
Another patch sprouted in the middle of his forehead. Hunger fur.

A woman brought out plates with bread and butter.

“It's a proud thing, English food,” said the drover
sitting next to him. “They said if I'd come to England, I'd eat bread
and butter.”

“Isn't England here, you poor lost sheep.” The woman
laughed.

The drover stared at her. Her size and boldness were impressive.
“What is it then?”

“You must cross the water for England, as every Christian knows.
Dublin's Ireland!”

Ireland
. One winter after his right eye had been sore and red for
weeks, his mother had taken him to a holy island for a cure, after first attempting to
heal the inflammation with poultices of potato peel and juice. As they were rowed across
she had dropped a coin and bits of glass into the water. For a long time he had thought
Ireland
was only the small island in that gray lake. Even now his
associations with the word were eye pain, damp, and the smell of lake water infused with
rotting wood.

The woman next brought out a kettle of soup. Bits of red floated in the
liquid.

“What is it, missus?”

“Fish and treacle.”

“The red bits, missus?”

“Pimiento.”

He did not know what that was.

“Never seen such a woman,” the drover beside him whispered.
“She is bigger than a king.”

They were slurping soup and chewing wheat bread when Billy Butler came
downstairs, accompanied by five girls in shawls. “Here you are, men. Very decent
girls, and only a shilling apiece.”

One girl immediately sat on Fergus's knee, kissed his forehead, and
dipped her fingers in his soup. He could feel her thinness, her bones scraping on his
thigh.

“That one'll eat you alive,” Butler laughed. “Here
it is, sir, your wages.”

The dealer laid four coins in Fergus's outstretched palm.

The woman licked soup from her fingers.

“That's but four,” Fergus said.

“One for the girl.”

“You said five.”

“You'll get a bath and a lovely jab if you go
upstairs.”

“Hear him,” the girl said to Fergus, poking a bony finger in
his chest.

“A bath and a clean girl.” Butler smiled. “All for a
shilling.”

“No. Five, mister, give me five; you said five.”

Butler shrugged and dropped a coin on the table. Fergus seized it. The
other girls were helping themselves to food and porter, overwhelming the helpless
drovers. The girl sitting on Fergus's knee gave up trying to kiss him and began
soaking bread in the soup and cramming it in her mouth. Perhaps she had forgotten how
hungry she was until she smelled the food. He'd had enough for now. He slid out
from under her and stood up, coins in his fist.

“Interested in a passage?” The fat serving woman pulled a
sheaf of tickets from her apron, fanning them out. “Here's a passage to
Liverpool on
Ruth
. She's leaving Eden's Quay this morning, she is.
Have you across the water tonight. Nowhere in this world so rich as Liverpool. Halfway
to America.”

Red tickets the color of blood.

“How much?”

“Three shillings for the bright world.”

Sometimes your heart cracks and tells you what you have to do.

LIVERPOOL, DECEMBER
1846 –
JANUARY
1847

Ruth
was smaller than
Nimrod
. He stood on the quay
with a crowd of passengers clutching tickets, watching anxiously as flocks of sheep were
driven aboard the little steamer. The tide had gone out and her deck, already crammed
with wailing sheep, lay well below the quay.

“We won't get aboard by waiting. We'll have to leap for
it,” said the young man next to him. He wore greased boots like a navvy and
carried his belongings bundled in a red handkerchief.

“We've paid our tickets,” a woman said. “They
can't leave us here.”

“They can't — but they will.”

With the last flock driven aboard, the deckhands left the gangway to
passengers, and a mob began crushing to get aboard.

Would he be a different person on the other side, with different things in
his head? What would feed him, and who would care?

Ruth
's black funnels were smoking merrily. He could see
dockers throwing lines off the iron bollards on the quay.

“That's it, she's pushing off,” the navvy
announced. “Anyone wants to get aboard had better jump for it.”

The deckhands were hauling up
Ruth
's gangway, and
passengers caught halfway across were scrambling for their lives back to the quay.

The navvy carefully pitched his stick and his bundle down onto
Ruth
's deck,
then looked around. “No one
else for it? Well, good luck, you poor sheep, and happy days in Dublin town.”

He cleared the gap with his leap and landed hard on
Ruth
's
deck. Fergus watched him scramble to his feet, retrieve his stick and bundle before the
deckhands could interfere, and mix quickly into the throng of passengers pouring off the
gangway.

More lines were cast off —
Ruth
was beginning to glide off
the quay. He stared down at the gap of black water widening. Those aboard were jamming
the rail and screaming at wives, husbands, and children on the quay, begging them to
jump for it.

No one begging you.

The world moved, that was the law. Moved on itself like a wheel.

He jumped for the deck, landing hard. Shaken, he got to his feet, afraid
the deckhands would grab him and pitch him overboard. He couldn't see the navvy.
The deck was jammed with passengers and howling sheep. No one was bothering about him
and he decided he was safe. They were drift out, passengers shouting and waving at
relatives left on the quay and the deckhands busy laying out their fastidious coils of
dripping rope.

He made his way forward as
Ruth
churned downstream, steam
snapping from her funnels and the paddle wheel churning. The noise was deafening. No one
looked twice at him. The deck was slippery with sheep manure.

Reaching the bow, he stood on a pile of chain, watching the river open to
the sea.

You carry everything inside. You carry it with you.

Ruth
flailed through the waves, her bow rising and falling
sickeningly. He vomited the last of the fish soup, treacle, and scarlet specks of
whatever it was. When the wind grew too cold to stand in the bow, he joined the other
deck passengers herding around the funnel for warmth.

“Where's our country now?” an old man kept asking.

They had lost sight of land. The ocean was all around, green and silver,
wild as nothing. They huddled around the funnel like cattle in a storm and the crash of
the paddle wheel and the screaming wind made his ears roar.

“Plenty warm below!”
Ruth
's master shouted. “Shilling a head buys an hour down below
with the engine! Men, think of your women! Fathers, think of the bairns. Down below
it's cozy as a cabin. Sure you won't have your people suffer such inclement,
nasty conditions for the sakes of a coin? Do the manly thing, gents. Shilling a
head.”

Spray lashed over them, soaking them. Tempted, Fergus took out his two
remaining shillings. He was staring at them in his hand when the navvy touched his
arm.

“Hold on to your money, man; you'll want it on the other side.
And it only feels the colder after you come up.”

“I'll have you whipped! You close that lid of yours!”
the master cried.

“Get away or I'll flip you like an egg.”

The master glared and muttered and began herding below those who'd
paid the fee.

“Where has our country gone?” the old man asked.

As it grew dark, it grew even colder. “Sure we ought to climb in the
pens,” the navvy announced. “Nice and warm in with the woollies.”

“The master will throw us in the sea,” a passenger said.

“He'd like to but he won't.”

The others were frightened of the master's wrath; Fergus was the
only one to follow the navvy, climbing into one of the sheep pens where they stood among
the bulky, butting animals, absorbing their heat.

The navvy unwrapped his bundle and shared his cheese and bread. “Now
you know what you are — an Irish animal, only not worth near so much as a decent
breeding ram.”

The other deck passengers began climbing into the pens as cold overcame
their fear, and when the master came on deck and screamed at them they stolidly ignored
him, hugging the sheep.

“Spike them Irish blaggers out of there, you fellows!” the
master ordered his deckhands. “Get the women, get the brats! Hear what I say, you
damned Irish mikes, my boys will crack you very sharp and drop you in the deep if you
don't step out of the pens! You shall not roost with my cargo!”

The navvy stood among the bawling animals, gripping his stick. On his
face, the thin, light smile of a fellow who knew he could put up a fight.

If the deckhands tried to clear them out, the navvy
would violently resist, expect Fergus to fight alongside him, and where would it end?
With the two of them being dropped overboard? A long silent plunge through a sleek depth
of black water. A swallow of death.

Terror; the world is terror. Terror stinging in your fingertips. Inside
your mouth, the back of your throat. Terror like a cloud in your head. The world is just
kills.

But the hands ignored the master and refused to come near any of the pens
and the master, screaming, “Blaggers! Criminals! Ireland's well rid of
you!” gave up and went below, leaving the passengers standing amid the packed pens
of butting, shitting animals.

It was barely warm enough among the bumbling sheep. He distrusted their
bitter black hooves. The wool on their backs stank like lamp oil. Hungry, thirsty, the
animals seemed resentful of the intrusion, blatting out furious cries, kicking and
prancing and trying to stab his feet.

He was too uncomfortable to sleep although his head was heavy. His stomach
growled and spat as
Ruth
's bow rose and fell, breaking the waves while
her paddle wheel whipped the trailing sea to lather hour after hour, until it seemed
unlikely the passage would ever end.

After dark the breeze faded and the rolling waves flattened. The steamer
kept whacking ahead, her bow plowing up the sea as if it were a turnip field, and he
realized the passage must be ordinary to her, no matter how extraordinary it seemed to
him.

After a while he caught a weird aroma that prickled the hairs in his
nostrils, so dark it spooked him, like smoke to a horse. Rich, thick, heavy as a club.
He hoped he might be dreaming it — but he was surrounded by howling sheep, and
certainly awake.

Even amid the rancid wool he could smell it; there was no doubt the scent
was real, not a product of dreams. “What is it? What is that smell?” he
asked the navvy.

“Land,” the navvy replied.

The smell of earth, it was. But so ferocious and fresh, as though he had
never smelled ground before.

Floating over the sea, it had smelled like an open grave, weird and
distinct.

“The ground of England,” said the navvy.
He stood up, puffing his pipe, surrounded by bleating ewes. “We're coming
in, so. Go up forward,
an mhic
, and have a look.”

Hoisting himself out of the pen, Fergus ran along the wet planking to the
prow, where he stood inhaling the scent of the ground of England as it came writhing
across the dark.

Ruth
was entering the mouth of a river. Standing on anchor chains
in the bow, he watched shore lights closing in. The other passengers were climbing out
of the sheep pens and crowding along the rails.

The banks of the river were sheathed with stone. Forests of black masts
and spars rose up from the stone basins where ships lay.

When
Ruth
's engine suddenly cut, the stillness was a shock.
Picked up by a steam tug, she was warped through a narrow water gate into a basin packed
with three-masters, surrounded by stone quays and stone warehouses. As soon as lines
were thrown, passengers began heaving baggage over the rails, leaping ashore and passing
down wailing children without waiting for the gangway. Fergus joined the people climbing
over the side.

Shepherds in white smocks laughed and jeered at the emigrants staggering
on the quay. After the sway of the ship it was difficult readjusting to the firmness,
the fixity of ground, English ground.

The English were yelping at them, teasing them that they were drunk.
“I'd like a drop of what you're having, Mike! Any Irish whiskey for
me?”

Runners shouted the names of lodging houses and prices. He saw runners
tearing baggage from people's hands, flipping it into their barrows and racing
off, emigrants stumbling after them helplessly.

He caught sight of the navvy leading a group of passengers who had closed
ranks to fight off the runners. Forcing his way through a flock of wailing sheep, Fergus
ran to catch up.