Maggie's Door
Contents
TO HAROLD REILLY,
WITH LOVE
GLOSSARY
THE PEOPLE OF MAIDIN BAY
T
HE
R
YAN
F
AMILY
Granda
Da
Maggie
Celia
Nory
Patch
T
HE
M
ALLON
F
AMILY
Mrs. Mallon
Mary
Francis
Michael
Liam
Sean
T
HEIR
N
EIGHBOR
Anna Donnelly
THE HUNGER
A terrible stench drifted over the land. The potato crop had failed. For the families who lived in Maidin Bay it meant that nothing but a little fish, seaweed, or a few leaves boiled in water was left for them to eat.
They had to leave or starve. One by one they took the road to Galway. Ships waited there, ships that might take them across the sea to America.
Nory Ryan was the last of her family to go. . . .
LEAVING
ONE
NORY
Nory hadn’t gone far, just over the rise, when she heard it.
A voice?
“Ocras,”
it screamed.
“Ocras.”
Hunger.
Nory took another step and stopped. On one side of her were the dunes, on the other the great ocean. A strange place she was in, with wisps of fog drifting across the road. And again that sound.
The wind, she told herself, even though she knew it wasn’t.
Granda had told her of selkies, half seal, half human. When they lived on land they wept bitter tears for the deep; when they returned to the sea they mourned for lost loves on the land.
Was that it? The cry of some poor selkie woman? Such an eerie sound.
The crying stopped and Nory began to walk again. One foot in front of the other. Away from home, away from that empty house with the door banging in the wind. The trip just beginning.
The sand drifted across the road, grains of it sticking to her bare feet. The crying reminded her of her little brother, Patch, and the last time she had seen him, his arms flung out to her from the back of her friend Sean Red Mallon’s cart.
And where was that cart now, Sean pulling its heavy weight while Patch leaned against Mrs. Mallon in back? How far had they gone along that winding road toward the port of Galway?
She quickened her steps.
Don’t think about Patch, or the Mallons, or the rest of the family, all gone ahead to find a ship,
she told herself.
Just keep going. Nearly at the crossroads.
“Ocras, ocras,”
came the cry again, and with it the sound of powerful wings.
That was what it was, then, not a voice but the call of a great seabird.
It swooped down over her head, too close. She dropped her bag and clutched the top of her head with both hands. As the bird rose she saw the snow-white body, the huge wingspan, the curved beak, and eyes that were strangely human.
She had seen such a bird once when she and Granda had walked along the cliff ledge. Granda had thrown it a piece of dulse from his pocket. “Travelers must give the white bird food. It will bring luck until the end of the journey,” he had told her.
“But we’re only going home,” she had said. “Only a few steps.”
“Ah, still.”
Granda. How she missed him!
But what could she give the bird?
She had so little—papers Da had sent that would get her onto a ship, and a coin from her neighbor Anna sewed into her shawl, and what was in her bag, the bits of things Anna had managed to put together for the long trip ahead of her: herbs for illness, a biscuit so hard it had to be soaked in water, a bit of meat, and two pieces of brack, rock hard as the biscuit.
The bird circled over her, higher now. Nory dropped to the ground, scrambling for the bag, and reached deep inside for the biscuit. Anna’s voice was in her ear:
“There are only these bits of food between you and starvation. Guard them.”
She held the biscuit in her hand as the bird wheeled over her head once more, but it was too hard to break into pieces. Suppose she threw all of it?
Between you and starvation,
the wind said.
“Traveler’s luck,”
Granda whispered in her head.
What should she do? Her mouth tingled with the thought of that biscuit, the softness of it when she’d find a stream for dipping, the taste of it on her tongue.
There was no time to think or the bird would be gone.
She took a step forward, reached over her head, and tossed the biscuit high into the air.
Effortlessly the bird swooped to catch it in its beak. It climbed high over the dunes with it and headed out over the waves that broke at the edge of the strand.
“It’s the whole biscuit,” she called. “For my whole family. Remember that.” Her hair blew into her face and she raked it back impatiently so she could see where the bird went. “We’re all of us traveling.”
And that voice in her head again:
But you, Nory, are alone.
The bird skimmed over the surf, but then, just before it was out of sight, it dropped the biscuit into the sea.
Nory’s hand went to her mouth, hard against her teeth.
Foolish girl,
Anna would have said.
You needed that food to stay alive.
Nory cupped her hands around her mouth. “Don’t forget us. All of us. Da. Granda and Celia. Patch . . . and my friend Sean Red Mallon. Don’t forget Sean.”
The bird was almost out of sight. “We are trying for America,” she called after it. “We want to stand at Maggie’s door in Brooklyn.”
TWO
NORY
Up ahead was the crossroad. What had Da said?
“The road to the ships winds around like a ball of yarn let loose. Just stay on that road.”
It was the one to the right, the one that hugged the sea all the way to the port of Galway. Every year Da had taken it to find a fishing boat. But the other road, the small winding muddy boreen, led only to Patrick’s Well, up and up, and the well almost hanging off the edge of the cliff.
How could she leave without one last look?
She had been to the well a day ago to say goodbye. But this was forever. She’d never be back. She’d never see it again, not any of it.
She stood there hesitating, then shrugged off the bag she carried over her shoulder. Tucking it into the high grass where no one could see it, she went past the small cemetery where Mam had lain since the week Patch was born, and up to the well, where she could look back and see her house. There the wind blew itself fiercely across the wide stone flags, and far below, the sea spread itself out like a great gray plate against a pewter sky.
Above her head the tree branches rattled in the wind. She closed her eyes and it seemed she could see the faces of all her family:
Da, deep lines around his eyes, squinting as he waved goodbye on his way to fish last year.
Months later Granda and her sister Celia leaving their small house desperate to find Da, to tell him the potatoes had failed.
And Patch. Back to Patch again. Only a few days ago she had put him on Sean Red Mallon’s cart. “You must go,” she had said as he tried to hold on to her. “You must have that chance.”
How strange it was. A year ago it had been only her big sister Maggie who was going across the sea to America with her new husband, Sean’s brother Francey. Now the whole family was going, one by one, trying to escape the hunger that gnawed at their stomachs and even their bones.
Nory opened her eyes, remembering the bonfire they had lighted the night of Maggie’s wedding a year ago. Great flames had leapt up against the sky, sending shadows against the stones of their house.
“Dance with me again, Nory,” her friend Sean Red Mallon had said, his red hair as bright as the bonfire, his hand out to her.
“Do you think you’re the only one I’ll dance with this night?” Her feet had tapped to the sound of the fiddle.
Sean had leaned forward, laughing. “Then you’ll have to dance with your granda, and I’m better at it than he is.”
Better than Granda perhaps, but still Granda, tall and thin and white-bearded, had danced the night through, danced with Maggie, who wore Mam’s wedding dress, danced with Nory’s second sister, Celia, danced holding little Patch on his shoulders.
And Maggie, glowing, happy: “Don’t be sad, Nory. Da will come home from his great fishing trip. And sometime you’ll all join me at 416 Smith Street, Brooklyn, America.”
“It will be years,” Nory had said. “It will be forever until then.”
The wind howled around Nory now, and birds screeched as they flew over the well and out to the sea. But not the great bird with her biscuit.
Nory sank down on the rough wall, and it seemed that a terrible smell rose up around her, though it had been carried off months ago by the wind.
The smell that had changed their lives forever.
The potatoes.
She turned to look back over the fields that curved down to the sea, fields that in some winters were covered with a thin blanket of snow, and in the growing season a riot of purple potato blossoms.
But not last year.
Not this year.
The blight had turned those potatoes to mush, to ooze, leaving everyone hungry. Starving.
Still now over Patrick’s Well hung bits of cloth, prayers that people had left. There was one of her sister Celia’s shifts.
Ah, Celia with the turned-up nose.
“I will stay alive,” Celia had said when she and Granda left, her dress huge on her bones. “Granda and I will get to the ships. We will find Da and send for you and Patch. Together we will get to Maggie’s door in America.”
Another sound now.
The fall of a rock behind her. Not a bird this time. She spun around. “Anna!”
Anna Donnelly, her neighbor. Anna, who had taught her about cures and healing, and who had taken her in with Patch when everyone else had gone.
Anna stood there in her white cap, her skirt ruffling in the wind, her face as wrinkled as the potatoes had been. She put her hands on her hips, angry. “What are you doing here, Nory Ryan?”
Nory slid off the edge of the well. “A last look.”
Anna’s eyes were fierce. “And where is your bag?”
“In the sea grass below. Safe,” Nory said, glad that Anna didn’t know about the biscuit.
“You are wasting time,” Anna said. “You must go now and never look back. Take that road.”
Nory looked down where Anna pointed, at the same road that Da and Granda and Celia had taken, that Patch and the Mallons were following.
Patch, her little brother, stick-thin legs dangling from the back of the cart, fine pale hair flattened to his head by the spring squalls that spat across the road.
“How can I leave you, Anna? You have been so good to me.” Nory reached out to her. “How can I go alone?”
“I belong here.” Anna’s mouth was a thin line. “But you must save yourself.”
For one quick moment Nory held Anna to her before she went back down the boreen to reach for her bag and sling it over her shoulder.
It was only a moment to the crossroad.
“I’m going to find them, all the people I love,” she called to the wind as she turned, and to the bird that had long disappeared. In her mind suddenly was a picture of Sean Red Mallon, her friend since they were younger than Patch. She thought of Sean’s blazing red hair, and his height, and the way he smiled when he looked down at her.
“Dance with me, Nory.”
What would Sean say if he knew she was just days behind them?
She began to hurry.