The Walking People (23 page)

"You know what this means, don't you?" She was calm now, even happy. Something had occurred to her in the miles since she left Greta in the dust. "This is all I was waiting around for. There's no more wages to be earned here. Not in Conch, not in Ballyroan, not even in Galway, if what I hear in town is true. Nowhere."

After the first time that Johanna had gone out the window to meet with Michael Ward, Greta had not asked any questions. She woke up each and every time she felt Johanna leave their bed, and she could never fall back to sleep until Johanna was tucked in beside her again. She wondered what they talked about for so long in the middle of the night and if Lily's warning had come true for Johanna. She hated to see them both in the kitchen at breakfast on mornings after these nighttime visits, acting as if everything was as it should be. Sometimes, when Johanna was short with him—if he used the last of the milk or took a second egg—and he reacted as if she'd struck him with a switch—startled, ashamed—Greta wanted to shout at him. But when she tried to think of what exactly she would say, her mind felt too full to pluck out one single thought.

"And did you ever think what would happen to me if I stayed?" Johanna asked. "The four of us in that cottage looking at each other until we die? No sir. No way."

"And what about me?" Greta asked.

"Oh, Greta," Johanna said.

***

The most recent letter from Jack, written on behalf of himself and Padraic, had said nothing about coming home. They'd met girls, Australian girls, and Jack asked his to marry him. This is what he wrote to tell his mother. He was getting married in a few weeks time, nothing big, nothing fancy, just a few of their friends and the girl's family.

Reading it, Lily knew it wasn't as if he'd thought about asking her to come and, after discussing it with Padraic and the girl, had decided against. No, he simply couldn't imagine that Lily would ever leave Ireland, not for her eldest son's wedding, not for anything. Sitting on the back step with the letter in her lap, alone except for the sound of the dog yipping at a bird down by the river, she envisioned herself packing a suitcase, catching the bus to Shannon Airport, boarding one of those jets that now zoomed daily over their heads, and walking in on the ceremony as though it required no more thought on her part than taking the bus to Galway. They'd faint cold on the spot. She smiled. They'd cry. She'd tell Padraic he was getting a little tight in the belt—he'd been starting down that road before he left—and she'd tell Jack his hairline was just like his grandfather's. Before she left, she'd take the girls into Galway to help her pick out a dress. Pale blue. Periwinkle. Peach. She hadn't been to Galway in years. The girls could pick out gifts for their brother, tokens, really. She wouldn't let them spend too much, and on the way out they'd stop for tea in that hotel they'd been to the day Greta got her glasses and was like a little baby bird who'd been pushed out of the nest.

She folded the letter and slipped it back into the envelope. No, she was sure they hadn't meant to exclude her. And she was just as sure neither of them would ever come home. "They're right," she said aloud, looking up at the sky. "Why should they come back?" She had suspected herself of feeling this way for a little while now, but she had managed to push it away by insisting that she felt the opposite. She said to the empty yard, "They have cash money where they are, and why shouldn't they stay and find good women and build fine houses for themselves?" For the first time, she wondered if she'd been wrong to keep Little Tom from going with them.

Their situation in Ballyroan was grim, whether the children realized it or not. This is what she hadn't wanted to wake up and face after
Big Tom died, and at times she wanted to return to that long slumber, her days a dull repetition of eating, sleeping, one of the girls helping her into the basin, handing her a washcloth, returning again and again with the red-hot kettle, and pushing her knees and shins out of the way while the steaming water poured in. But now that she had managed to step out from under the cloak of Tom's death and take a look around, it was impossible to look away. The biggest problem was that they needed a new cottage. The kitchen was decent because the daily fire dried out the walls, but the rest of the rooms were rotting away. It was getting difficult to breathe, and everything she laid her hand on seemed weighed down with dampness—the furniture, the sheets on their beds, the pictures hanging on the walls. Little Tom and Greta were oblivious; she could see it in the way they talked and went about their chores and flopped down in their chairs at the end of the day, as if those chairs would always be there, that roof always over their heads. Johanna was more aware of the road they were traveling and was the one who pointed out that Conch, their lifeline to the world for so long, was not the same as it was when she was a girl. She reminded them at dinner one night a few weeks ago. "Didn't there used to be farmers' markets? Fairs? Where has everybody gone to?" Now Conch was almost as quiet as Ballyroan. It was rare to see a group of young people standing together anymore. Shops closed for hours in the middle of the day while the old ones who tended them went home for a sleep.

Lately Lily had developed the habit of shooting ahead in time. She didn't do it on purpose, and she wished she could make herself stop. She'd be doing everyday things, chores she'd done her entire life, throwing grain down for the chickens, pulling the udder of a cow, and her mind would leap ahead twenty years, thirty years. She didn't see herself in these images—dead, most likely, and that sat just fine with her—but the girls and Little Tom, two sisters and a brother stranded in a forgotten place. Little Tom would go completely silent because his sisters always knew what he wanted without having to be told, and the girls would go weird, Greta especially. Johanna would get cranky and let her hair go long and loose like a banshee. She'd take out every little thing she felt on the other two, and they'd take cover when they saw her coming. They would have no husbands, no wife, no
gasúir
running around to populate the place. Johanna would swim in the ocean in her knickers until she was an old woman, with only her gray hair to cover her. They'd make no effort to go to Galway and walk among the people, because one foot in the city would remind them that they'd been left behind.

 

Michael met Johanna down by the river twice a week for six weeks. At first there was no more word of New York. She'd simply leaned into his arms and played her fingers at the back of his neck. She kissed his mouth, kissed his throat, kissed the top of his chest where she unbuttoned his shirt. Half a dozen times now she'd put her hand inside his pants. She took off her blouse and the thin gansy she wore underneath. She slid out of her skirt and stood in her underpants, turning for him with her hands up in the air like a film star. She let him cup her breasts while he kissed her, and later, when he had more courage, she let him inspect them with his eyes and his mouth. She was always the one to start with the kissing and pulling, and he was always the one to guide her down to the ground, where they could press closer together than they could standing up or sitting. He'd stopped asking himself why she'd picked him, and after the first time, the question had seemed foolish. Who else was there? Like Dermot told him, he was handsome. The women had said so.

Once Johanna and Greta were let go from their jobs at the inn, the nighttime visits to the river were transformed. Michael would place a hand on Johanna's thigh, but she'd move her leg away and remind him that there were plans to be made. He'd move behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, pressing and kneading in the way she liked, but she'd shrug him off and stay rigid until he moved back to his place beside her. She'd made written inquiries about the medical tests they'd have to have done, and she'd written to Shannon O'Clery asking her to sponsor them. "The sponsor thing is a bit of a joke," Johanna explained, already feeling wise to the ways of America. "She tells the immigration people we'll live with her and that she'll help us find work, but it's really just to get us over there. She'll claim I'm her first cousin and that she has a friend who will give me a job minding her children while she goes to work. But I'm not her cousin, and there is no friend,
and once we're there, we're on our own. With both of us working and sharing a flat and splitting expenses, I think we'll be grand."

Michael decided that Johanna was prettier by moonlight than she was during the day. She had a nice voice, something he hadn't noticed until they started their secret meetings. Her tone was serious, but that voice seemed to ask him to move closer, to put his arm around her.

"Are you listening?" Johanna asked, looking at his hand as though it was a child who'd spoken out of turn. "How long until you think you'll have enough for the fare? Tom gives you a little something now and again, doesn't he? Have you been putting it away? Do you have anything from before?"

Michael shrugged, shook his head. Tom gave him a pound once in a while, but he was mostly paid with a place to sleep and three meals a day.

Johanna sighed. "Well, that's another thing to figure out. If worse comes to worst, we'll go by ship instead of by air. It's far less dear."

And far easier to sneak aboard, Michael thought, thinking how many times he'd watched the foreign ships leave Cobh, the scene a swirling mess of hats, hugs, luggage, tears, families allowed to escort ticketed members to their cabins, even in second class, where the cabins were little more than closets with bunks and strangers roomed together. He could slip on board and crouch in a dark corner until the ship was at sea. Dermot once told him he had a talent for making himself small. Once, on the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool, he'd hidden in a compartment below the thin planks of the wagon floor for eight hours as the ferry carried them across the Irish Sea.

Johanna started every sentence having to do with America with the word
We.
We'll hitch to the airport or to the Galway dock, depending on how we go. We'll stay with Shannon for one month, and then we'll get a flat in Woodside because Shannon said there's a lot of Irish there. We'll get jobs. We'll see the Atlantic from the other side. Michael wondered if he'd let her go on too long to stop her now. She'd be angry. She might even tell Lily about their river visits and make it so Lily blamed him, Lily who had given him a seat by the fire on that wet day and three hot meals every day since then. He asked her if Greta had refused to go with her and if that's why she'd asked him to go instead. "Greta? In New York City?" she'd asked, as if Greta Cahill and that great city was the most far-fetched combination a person could come up with.

Michael had laughed. "Am I any more likely to get on there? Are you?"

"Me?" Johanna had said in a huff. "Worry about yourself. You don't know Greta. Something would happen to her, and I'd always have to be tracking her down and checking on her and helping her with things she can't figure out." Her voice softened. "I'll miss her, don't get me wrong. And maybe once I'm settled and know my way, I could bring her out. If she would come, that is. I can't see her straying too far from here, to be honest."

"I think she's wiser than you think," Michael said. He wondered how much Greta knew about Johanna's plans. She seemed troubled lately, quiet and attentive. At supper she took everything in, every word, every look, as if she was organizing what she observed and had plans to file it away.

Johanna's portrait of life in America was vivid, tempting, and sometimes Michael forgot that he was ninety-nine percent sure he wasn't going to go. Eighty percent sure. Fifty. And even if he did go to America, why would he want to stop in New York? There were other places to see, much more appealing places than New York City. He imagined New York to be worse than Dublin, with its smells and crowds of people and car horns blaring all day long. Dublin, where no matter how long he stood next to Dermot and listened along with the crowd as his father seemed to sing every Irish song ever written, no one dropped a single coin in his hat. He'd heard of huge tracts of land in the states of Montana and Wyoming and Colorado, places he'd meant to ask Johanna to look up on a map, but couldn't now, not the way she was going on about New York City and using the word We.

"When is liftoff?" he asked, careful to leave out reference to himself.

"October. What do you think?"

"October is my favorite month of the year," he said, and slipped his hand under the wide sleeve of her sweater, all the way up to her shoulder.

***

Greta found Shannon's letter among Johanna's things. Inside was a note to Lily, which Johanna had not passed on. Greta read both letters and put them back exactly where she found them. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the second dresser drawer—Johanna's drawer—for thirty minutes. After thirty minutes she couldn't recall having a single thought except to cycle into town and visit Norton's shop.

In the shop, while Mrs. Norton searched the back room for a tin of condensed milk, Greta walked quickly down the middle aisle and plucked a packet of powder yellow stationery and matching envelopes from an upper shelf. She'd had her eye on the set for weeks, thinking how nice the yellow would look against her blue fountain pen and how thick and important the letters she wrote to Jack and Padraic would feel thanks to the heavy stock. She also liked the packaging—the envelopes stacked on top of the stationery inside the handsome navy blue cardboard box, everything tied together with a crisp white bow. She shoved the box under the waistband of her skirt, the bottom corners doubly secure by the waistband of her underpants.

"I'm out, love," Mrs. Norton said as she emerged from the back. "The only can I have is dented, and I wouldn't risk it."

"I'll check back this day week," Greta promised, and walked out of the shop feeling much better.

Poor girleen, Mrs. Norton thought as she watched from the window with the dented can of milk in her hand. If only she could lose that peculiar way of walking. If only she wasn't as odd as two left feet.