The Ohana (3 page)

Ireland-Boston-Kohala Plantation, 1850-1914

Patrick O’Malley lost his childhood at the age of ten. It was the year his family fled Ireland for America by way of Liverpool. The “Great Hunger”—
an Gorta Mor
as the Irish called it – had taken the lives of more than a million people in only five short years. In the year of our Lord, 1850, Patrick’s family loaded their belongings into a wagon to join the hungry exodus. His father bid Ireland goodbye. “May God grant us a life worth living in America,” he said.

Along the way, Patrick saw hundreds of wagons leaving a country ravaged by starvation and cholera. Abandoned houses and the stench from wagons full of corpses lay like a nauseous shroud over his beloved land. Scores of lifeless people were flung like abandoned rag dolls across the land, their mouths agape and stained green with the grass they ate to try to stave off the hunger. Patrick journeyed past thousands of listless children who stared at him vacantly as they waited to die, their jaws distended, their bodies twisted and misshapen.

When they finally arrived in England, Uncle Mick met them at the pier where the ships sold passage to America. Uncle Mick warned his father, “They be calling the Atlantic Ocean the bowl of tears, Joseph. On account those greedy captains shove more than a hundred people into a ship made for ten passengers. Coffin ships they are. I hear most people don’t make it to America alive.”

“It’s dying here or on a ship. We have little choice,” Patrick’s Da replied.

The O’Malley’s stayed in Liverpool until they sold everything they couldn’t take aboard the ship. His mother cried when her marriage chest, fine linens, and family china were purchased. They wrapped the rest of their belongings in faded blue cloth.

As they boarded the ship, his mother started coughing.

The ship was packed. None of the adults could stretch out to sleep. Patrick worried about his mother. Her cough worsened in the dank air below deck. After four days at sea, her trembling and alarmingly hot body woke him up in the middle of the night. His father wept through his mother’s moans. Patrick sat up and saw her head in his father’s lap. After awhile her body stopped shaking and her skin turned gray. His father clutched her to his breast and wailed. Patrick heard the same sound all around the bottom of the ship.

The next day some of the crew descended into the dank hole to gather the bodies of the people who had died during the night. His father grabbed his sister and shoved Patrick into the sea of people rushing onto the deck where the relatives of the dead screamed and wailed as the sailors tossed the rigid bodies overboard.

Patrick’s last memory of his mother as she plunged into the foaming sea was the peculiar way her cheeks and eyes had caved into her face and the eerie pallor of her skin. He pressed against his father fearfully. She no longer looked like his mother in the merciless daylight.

Tears streamed down his Da’s face. “Oh, it’s sorry I am, Mary. To die out here without a priest to say last rites and not even a coffin or shroud.” He wept openly for a long time.

After that, a coffin ship appeared in every one of Patrick’s nightmares.

By the time they arrived at Constitution Wharf in Boston, Patrick had passed his eleventh birthday and was big for his age. His sister Katy’s growth had been stunted by starvation and the famine had temporarily taken her voice.

“All she needs is to eat normal and she’ll be fine,” their father pronounced as the ship neared its port. “She’ll get plenty of that in America. Thank God.”

Patrick noticed gangs of young men waiting at the docks. When pretty young women disembarked, the men snatched them and disappeared. The fathers, brothers, and husbands of the young women chased the villains with a howl. But weakened by hunger and the inactivity aboard ship, the men were easily overpowered by the thugs who beat them and stole their possessions.

“Dirty, rotten emigrant runners!” A man waiting at the docks shook his fists at the villains. He turned to Joseph, looked down at Katy, and nodded. “You be keeping an eye on that one. Those poor girls will never see their families again. The scoundrels be taking them to houses of prostitution. Most of the prostitutes in Boston and New York be innocent Irish girls taken by gangs of Irish boys gone bad. ‘Tis a disgrace, it is.” The man spat on the ground.

Patrick saw his father’s grip tighten on Katy.

The O’Malleys settled in the North End slums in a dilapidated rooming house. Their neighbor’s baby had died a year before and she happily cared for Katy, freeing Patrick and his father to look for work. They saw signs posted everywhere: “No Irish or Catholics Need Apply.” Below one of the signs someone had scrawled, “The man who wrote this wrote it well, for the same is written on the gates of hell.”

Joseph shook his head. “Sure and I didn’t come over the sea for this.”

Patrick and his father signed on as day laborers on reclamation projects around Boston. There he met Timmy, who was a year older. Timmy was a handsome lad, but he had a club foot and walked with a limp. He was also smart and tough. Being they were both from Ireland and close to the same age, they became friends.

One evening, as they sat around the wharves, Timmy spied a group of teenagers coming toward them. He took Patrick by the arm and dragged him away. “The first thing you need to know,” Timmy whispered as they ducked into a dark alley, “is the natives hate us.”

“The natives?”

Timmy put his hand on Patrick’s mouth, silencing him. When the teenagers were out of sight, Timmy said, “The natives are them Irish born in America.” He nodded in the direction of the group. “They be the True Blue American gang. Stay away from them if you value a sound body and your life.”

“Why do they hate us?”

“Because we’re not natives,” Timmy put his arm around him. “Just stay away from them.”

It wasn’t easy. It seemed they lived to provoke the immigrants. Patrick learned their faces in order to stay away from them. His only protection was to join a gang of Irish immigrants. Since Timmy belonged to the Plug Uglies gang, Patrick joined, too.

In the meantime, Katy gained weight and found her voice again. It worried Patrick that she was growing up so pretty. He shuddered as he looked around at the brothels, where most of the whores were pretty Irish girls. Even Timmy was beginning to eye his sister.

Not that Katy noticed. Over the years, she had grown attached to Elizabeth, their neighbor. When Elizabeth’s husband was killed in a barroom brawl, Joseph soon found himself in her arms. It made sense. An Irish woman alone had no chance, and Joseph was a lonely widower.

“My only sorrow,” Elizabeth said to his father at dinner one night, “is I can’t give you a bairn.”

“That’s a relief,” Joseph answered. “The bairns here are only born to die.”

Patrick wondered about his own future. Although he was happy for his father and liked Elizabeth, he felt like an intruder. He was almost grown and needed to find his own way.

When the Civil War began, he was drafted into an Irish brigade from Massachusetts, Col. Thomas Cass's "Fighting Ninth" regiment.

“I can’t fight in the war yet,” Patrick told Katy. “I’m still a boy.”

“A boy as big as a man,” Katy put her hand on his arm. “Is it worried about me, you are?”

Patrick looked away. Katy squeezed is arm. “Patrick O’Malley, you listen to me. I can take care of myself.”

He turned to look at his sister. She was pretty like their mother. It hurt him to think of where she might end up without him here to protect her.

She finished his thought, “Without ending up in a brothel.”

“Who’s to make sure you don’t? There be far too many scoundrels afoot…”

“They’ll all be drafted. There will be no one left under thirty.”

“Da’s too old to watch out for you,” he warned.

“Timmy’s not,” Katy turned and looked him straight in the eye.

Patrick’s eyes widened. He was afraid of that. But he knew Katy had to marry somebody someday.

“He’s the one for me. With his foot, he won’t be going to war.”

“Katy…”

Katy patted Patrick’s face with her hand. “He’s your best friend. You know how good he is and he loves me. He’s not like the other boys around here who just want to lie with me.”

Patrick hugged her. “He’s a fine man, Katy. It's happy I am.”

“So now you can go off and be a hero and not worry about me.” Katy laughed.

Patrick laughed, too, but it didn't change his concerns.

On July 1, 1862, Patrick and the rest of his brigade distinguished themselves by winning the Battle of Malvern Hill. But Patrick lost his friend Sgt. Driscoll in the fight.

Sgt. Driscoll loved to drink as much as he loved America. At forty, he was the oldest man in the brigade, but no one was better with a rifle—unfortunately. When the brigade was unable to continue up Malvern Hill because of an aggressive sharpshooter, Captain Conygham needed a skilled marksman to take down the young Confederate sniper.

“Leave that to me,” Driscoll volunteered.

After a few rounds, the sound of a rifle reporting back from Malvern Hill ended.

“I think he’s dead, Captain,” Driscoll yelled.

“Make sure he’s dead,” Captain Conygham ordered.

Sgt. Driscoll walked up the hill to the clump of trees where the sniper lay on his stomach. Following close behind, Patrick saw Driscoll turn the boy over. A raspy word of surprise came from the young Confederate officer before the boy closed his eyes and died.

“Da.”

Driscoll dropped to his knees, clutched the dead boy to his chest, and wailed. As he rocked back and forth, his screams pierced the countryside. Patrick put his arm around Driscoll’s shoulder. Before Patrick could stop him, Driscoll grabbed his rifle and ran up the hill, shooting and swearing.

Within the hour, the Irish took Malvern Hill. Sgt. Driscoll died a hero from multiple gunshot wounds. Patrick buried father and son side by side.

After the war, Patrick sent a letter to Katy, Timmy, and his father to tell them he had signed on as a crew member on a ship bound for the Orient. He wanted to get as far away as possible from his memories of the war and of Boston.

At twenty-nine Patrick decided to make a life in the Hawaiian Islands. After eleven punishing years at sea, he wanted to feel the land beneath him. Maui brought him peace and contentment. It was a raw new land full of mystery. Not unlike the mystery he saw in the cocoa-colored girl he fell in love with and married, Kehaulani Chang. Strong, grounded, and unafraid, she possessed an innocent shamelessness and an almost spiritual connection to the sea.

“I am descended from Mako, the shark god,” she told him as she swam in the warm, clear water. “When I was a baby, my mother threw me in the ocean. I swam before I could walk. I draw my strength from the sea.”

Tuberculosis took her at twenty-six years of age. They had no children and he never remarried. Despite this tragedy, life was good in Hawaii for white men, or what the natives called
haole
. He started as a plantation foreman,
luna
of a fine sugar cane field. After that, he progressed to section
luna
and then finally manager of a plantation even further away from Honolulu and past Maui. Being far away from the plantation owners suited him just fine.

If not the best of managers, Patrick O’Malley was by far the most popular. Having worked for both fair and cruel sea captains, he felt happy employees worked harder than unhappy ones. The philosophy worked. There were no union rumblings on the Kohala plantation O’Malley managed. The work got done more or less on schedule, and the profit margin held steady.

Patrick O’Malley was content. Compared to previous lodgings, his gingerbread-styled plantation home was a mansion. The high-ceilinged rooms and polished
ohia
wood floors the color of warm molten gold made him feel like a king. He spent much of his time sitting on the porch that wrapped around the house enjoying the sloping manicured lawns shaded by giant kiawe and monkey-pod trees. He closed half the rooms and rearranged the furniture in a hodgepodge manner, mixing rattan with overstuffed Victorian sofas, enormous wing-backed chairs, and a four-poster koa-wood bed. The pipes and ashtrays scattered throughout the house gave him a sense of ownership. Everything else belonged to the plantation.

Patrick had a head housekeeper, a cook, two maids, a handyman, and a gardener. When indoors, he liked to light the logs in the lava-rock fireplace, lean back in his koa-wood rocking chair, and gaze out the bay windows at the gently waving cane spilling languorously down to the ocean. He thought himself lucky, a bandy-legged Irishman with no education living like a lord. He had his own kingdom, and answered only to the Ritchies, the plantation owners who lived across the water in Honolulu.