The Walking People (21 page)

"Just left?" Johanna asked.

"Just got on my bicycle and left."

"Were they against it? Were they angry, after?"

Michael shrugged. "I was gone."

"So you didn't give them any warning," said Johanna. A statement instead of a question. She understood enough now to fill in the blanks. He'd defied them, gone against their wishes. They'd had ideas about what he should do with his life, about what was possible, and he'd matched them with his own ideas. Giving warning would have only made the process more miserable for both sides. No, the only thing to do was to up and leave. It wasn't that he didn't love them—anyone could see that.

Johanna had high color in her cheeks, and Lily poured her another glass of milk. Gradually the Cahills and Michael Ward went back to their salted potatoes, except for Greta, who continued to stare. There was a question no one had thought to ask.

"Will they have you back if you change your mind?" she asked after watching him shovel a few forkfuls into his mouth.

"They might. But they mightn't either," Michael said. "Only one way to find out."

To try, Greta thought. To cycle all the way back the way he came and ask to be let back in. She couldn't see it happening, not with the way he'd made himself at home at their table.

 

In bed that night, Greta felt a rare power. Johanna wanted to talk, was busting to talk, but she didn't want to apologize for not telling Greta that her skirt was caught up or for laughing. Plus, she still felt she deserved her own apology for Greta's not telling the whole story about that first day Michael Ward had come around. The trouble was that Greta could wait forever. As Lily liked to say, Greta had a little thing called patience. Lily said the word as if it were a virtue, when really it was the most frustrating quality a person could have. Especially when Johanna was dying to talk and Greta could wait and wait and wait.

"So I was thinking," Johanna began, holding the bait above Greta's side of the bed, willing her to flip over and engage.

"Hmm," Greta said, no lilt of a question mark at the end. She was pretending to be half asleep and didn't care one bit that Johanna knew she was pretending.

"Are you listening?" Johanna asked, moving closer to Greta's side, leaning her face toward Greta's neck. She couldn't stop herself. She exhaled a long, hot breath next to Greta's ear and bit her lip to keep from laughing as she braced for Greta's arm to fly around and smack her.

"No," Greta said, no sign of drowsiness in her voice, no sign that she'd even felt Johanna's breath. After a minute or so, to prove one had nothing to do with the other, she shifted closer to the wall.

Johanna flipped over to her back and sighed. "Come on now, Greta. I was just having a laugh," she said.

Greta shot up. "What about me? Those underpants had a hole, you know. And what if they'd been stained? And what if they'd been riding up? He must've gotten an eyeful. He just about fainted."

"So what? That man could use a shock. He can barely put a full sentence together as it is." And again: "It was a laugh."

"No it wasn't."

"Yes it was."

"I would never have done it to you."

That was true, but what did that have to do with anything? "Maybe you should. Then we'd both have a laugh once in a while."

Greta lay back down and turned to the wall. The conversation was over if Johanna did not do what she had to do.

"I'm sorry," Johanna said finally to Greta's back.

"You're not a bit sorry," Greta said.

"I swear to God."

"You should say you're sorry for swearing to God as well."

"Ah, but my rule is one apology per day."

"It only counts if you're really sorry. And you're not. You'd do it again tomorrow if you had the chance." Greta sat up once more and faced her sister. "Wouldn't you?"

"No!" Johanna insisted. "I've learned my lesson. Cross my heart hope to die."

Greta sighed, tumbled back down toward her pillow, and Johanna knew it was over. She began again. "So I was thinking."

"Yes?" Greta said. "Jesus. Now I have to coax it out of you?"

"I'm getting to it, and here it is. I've been thinking, and I've decided it wouldn't be so hard to go to America and get a job and a place to live like Shannon said."

It was the moment Greta had been bracing herself for, and now that it had arrived, she couldn't think of a single decent response. The energy pulsing from Johanna's side of the bed lit up the dark room as thoroughly as the electricity that hummed through the wires and the walls. Greta blinked, reached up to adjust her glasses before remembering they were safe on the top of the dresser until morning. Johanna waited for her to say something.

"What about Mr. Breen?" Greta asked, but even as the words came out, she felt how feeble they were.

"Don't be thick, Greta. I'd say we're about two months off from being told to hit the road. Sooner, if he gets up the courage. We don't do a goddamned thing all day. Come to think of it, I've been meaning to tell you to be more grateful when you get paid. Get absolutely
sickening about it, how much it means to you, and say things like this will keep you afloat for the week, and your family afloat, and bless him a bit and say Mammy includes him in the family prayers and all that. Don't say all the same things I say, so listen to me when I do it. I've been doing it these last few weeks, and he goes absolutely green, but I think it buys us another few weeks."

"God, you're wicked," Greta breathed into the space above their bed, already feeling a tightness in her chest about what she would say to Mr. Breen in two days' time. So far, they'd spent most days avoiding each other.

"Mammy would never let you go."

"No, I'd say she wouldn't," Johanna agreed.

"So?"

"So I thought I might take a page from Michael Ward's book and just leave."

Greta felt the tightness in her chest spread down her limbs to the tips of her fingers, her toes. She felt heavy, sunk into the mattress, attached to its corners by her ankles and her wrists. She'd need help when the time came to get up.

"You can't just go. There's paperwork." Greta didn't know exactly what getting to America entailed, but she knew it was complicated. Whenever she'd heard the process described, she felt like pushing the information away with both hands, denying it entrance to her brain where it would only take up room and give her a headache. She was often amazed at how people knew how to do things, which offices to contact, where to show up, what papers were required, and then how they kept all of those things in order, ready to be presented whenever asked. She knew there were trips to Galway, doctor's visits, health certificates. Passport must be applied for, picture taken, contacts made on the other side, a sponsor found, money saved or acquired. It had been complicated enough when the boys went to Australia on short notice, but it was worse now, just a few years later, and going to America was more of a production than going to Australia. Everyone knew that. If you managed to get inside America's boundaries, sometimes it was impossible to come back.

"If so many other people managed to figure it out," Johanna said, "so can I."

The reasoning was typical Johanna. There were many things other people had figured out that Greta was quite certain she couldn't. As she considered what her sister was telling her, she told herself the plan wasn't real yet, just a notion that might pass by morning. It was best to stick to the practical questions: How? When? In answering, Johanna might see that she hadn't thought things out at all, that the actual leap to New York would be far more difficult than anything she'd imagined.

"When are you aiming for?" Greta asked. But before Johanna could answer, Greta added, "Mammy would be heartbroken."

"I know," Johanna said, "and you'll have a big job consoling her."

"And what about me?"

"You?" Johanna grabbed Greta at the ribs, managed to tickle her for a few seconds before she twisted away. "You'll be heartbroken too, but I'll visit. I won't be one of those who goes forever. I promise. And you'll have to be reminding Mammy of that every day."

Greta saw herself from Johanna's side of the bed, no more capable of wandering outside the realm of the familiar than she'd been as a little girl, one hand sweeping along the rough surface of the stone wall that led her from the farthest field back to the cottage, counting the steps in her head. Maybe she was right, Greta admitted. But it would be nice to be asked. It would be nice for someone to think she could manage it, even if she wasn't sure herself.

"No, Johanna. I mean, what if I want to go too?"

"You go? Now, Greta, please. Don't be silly."

"Wouldn't you rather have me with you than go by yourself?"

Johanna was quiet, and more telling than her silence was the way her body went still. She quit switching between her side and her back, stopped plumping the pillow, stopped tugging at the nightshirt that always got twisted up around her waist.

Making an offer to go to America with Johanna, hinting at a secret wish to go didn't make the possibility of actually going any more real. It will pass, Greta told herself. Tomorrow she'll have another idea.

"What if I wasn't going alone?" Johanna asked.

"Excuse me?"

"What if I already had someone in mind? Someone who's seen a little more of the world than I have, has been to London, has had all kinds of jobs, isn't afraid of work, who might be willing to strike out with me."

No, Greta thought. It will never, ever happen. Michael Ward barely knew Johanna, barely knew any of them, had expressed no desire to leave Ireland. Greta had seen him that morning, way off in the distance, as she waited outside the cottage for Johanna to find a rag to wipe water off the seats of their bicycles. He'd been working on the stone wall, squatting to pick up one of the largest stones, getting under it with his legs and then his hips, heaving himself and his burden in such a way that they appeared across the sun-starved fields to be one body struggling against an invisible force, the Atlantic wind, or the suck of the rain-soaked ground. When he turned back for the smaller, gap-filling stones, he took one in each hand, palms up like a human scale, before finding a place for each one.

And the way he talked about oysters caught down around Clarenbridge and Brady Bay, how they tasted of the sea if the sea were reduced to a single perfect mouthful, and how the shells slid and clacked together whenever he added one more to the pile. Greta had listened to his stories at the table, had watched him relax into these memories as he told them, and as she watched him and listened, she felt herself coaxed into forgetting about small worries. This was not a person who would be lured by the train that rushed over people's heads straight to the Statue of Liberty. No, Greta insisted as Johanna's warm legs scissored beside her. No, he would not go. He was not as grown or as travel-wise as he'd seemed at first, when he'd pushed his broad back close to their fire. Sometimes he seemed to Greta even younger than she was, though he was Johanna's age. After being called for supper, he often stood at their back door as if he wasn't quite sure what to do, whether to push his way inside or knock or call out and ask to be let in. But even as she told herself that he'd never go to America, no more than Little Tom or Lily or Greta, she felt the pinprick reminder
that he'd already proved his willingness to up and leave everything he knew.

Johanna would not sleep for hours, thinking of America, wondering how Greta could be so calm when her news was so big. And while Johanna ticked off cities in her mind—New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles—Greta, shoulders turned square to the wall, chest rising and falling in what she hoped was a convincing rhythm, discovered that it was possible to be homesick for a place she'd never left.

M
ICHAEL WARD FELT
Johanna's eyes following him, just as he had the last time he was in Ballyroan. She was no better at being sly about it now than she'd been back then, and it struck him after a few weeks that maybe she wanted him to notice, wanted him to approach her and ask if there was something she wanted to talk to him about. They spoke only at supper. He ate breakfast long before her, and she and Greta took their tea at the inn. At supper she always took the seat directly opposite him, and she looked away whenever he glanced up. Sometimes he'd catch her eye as he was passing the carrots or the bread, and he'd get the sense that she'd been looking at him for a long time. Conversation, when she initiated it, was meant for everyone to hear.

"Did you make much progress on the shed?" she might ask. Or "Did the heifer's fever break?" Questions like that couldn't possibly be what was on her mind when she stood in the lane with her bicycle for thirty minutes, watching him run one of Little Tom's razors down his cheeks, an old, spotted hand mirror Lily had lent him angled to catch the light.

He would answer yes or no, and Little Tom would chime in with his half-talking, half-miming way of communicating; then Greta, who laughed in that childlike way she had at any funny story, would contribute her little bit and, unlike Johanna, never look away whenever he caught her eye.

Lily had taken to sitting in Big Tom's chair while they ate, leaving room at the table for the young ones. She told them that age was claiming her appetite and that the bits she put in her mouth while she was getting supper together were enough to make a meal. She didn't point out that it was easier to see every look that passed between them from the chair by the fire—or what those looks told her. She too had observed Johanna's behavior toward Michael at the supper table and decided that the girl was trying to impress the boy by acting grown up. Lily was more interested in what she observed in Greta, the flitter of flirtation here and there, the way she tried to tame the wilds of her hair. And once, during the boy's first week with them, she'd come to supper without her glasses, claiming she didn't really need them, only to have to go fetch them when it came time to peel spuds. Poor girl doesn't even know to pretend disinterest, Lily thought as she watched her youngest glance at Michael Ward, then down at her plate, then back at Michael even when he wasn't speaking. Lily watched Michael's reactions carefully and decided there was nothing to fear.