Maggie's Door (5 page)

TWELVE

NORY

She wondered at herself that she could do this, leave the plank on the side of the road, put the weight of her foot on those hard stones, carry Patch, her bag slung over her shoulder, and keep going hour after hour. A day. Two days. But she did do it, and she knew she would reach the port.

She thought of Mrs. Mallon taking that long walk back to Maidin Bay. Did she have the strength for it?

It was almost dark now, and she sang for Patch as she walked, the sound in her throat dry at first, but gathering strength:
“Wee melodie man, the rumpty tumpty toddy man.”

She wanted to cry for Sean, but something had happened to her eyes. They were dry and burning, and the tears that would have bathed them wouldn’t come. And always there were pictures in her mind of Mrs. Mallon handing her the papers for the ship, papers that were like the ones Da had sent her.

Sometimes Patch spoke a few words in a rusty little voice, and she tried to question him. “You saw an Englishman?”

“Yes, with boots,” he said. “And I too . . .” His voice trailed off.

She finished it for him. “Yes, someday in America you will have boots.”

What had Sean said?
“I will have fields and I will give you cabbage and a clove of garlic.”

“And what did the Englishman tell you?” she asked.

“He would give us food,” Patch said. “I think colcannon.”

Nory closed her eyes, remembering her sister Maggie as she stirred milk and butter into soft white potatoes and cabbage.

“Tell the rest of it,” she said as she tried to shift his weight.

Patch grasped her shoulders with both hands. “No rest of it. No colcannon, and the cart turned over.”

He was quiet then. His head went down against her back and she knew he was asleep. She went on, head bent, watching for rocks and stones in the road, telling herself she could take one step and another, just one more, just two more, climb the next hill, inch her way down the other side. Her shoulders ached from the weight of Patch, but the cut on her foot was healing, and in spite of everything she felt happy, glad that Patch was with her, glad that she had found him. But how sorry she was that Mrs. Mallon hadn’t come with them.

Once she sank down at the side of the road and fed him the rest of the meat. The next day she pulled the stitches from her cape until the small coin that Anna had given her dropped into her fingers. From an old woman she exchanged it for a stale piece of brack, which she and Patch shared.

On the third day he was awake again, pointing. “Look, Nory.”

“Galway,” she breathed.

Below them houses leaned together on the streets. More houses than she had ever seen before! Flickering flames from candles glowed in windows so that everything shimmered. And the tart smell of peat fires was everywhere.

She stood there, Patch in her arms, wondering at the size of it all. Then she walked on until the road curved and the port was spread out in front of them. Da had told her about that port and the fishing ships he had sailed, wresting the great cod out of the water to bring in the rent money. But Da had made her imagine it in the light of day with the sun dancing on the water and white sails shimmering like the wings of that great seabird.

Instead she stumbled onto the pier with Patch in the middle of the night to see water, ghostly in the fog, the hulks of ships anchored outside the harbor, and strange shapes everywhere like the
bean sídhe
who warned of death.

But somewhere there, right in front of them perhaps, was her family: Celia with her turned-up nose, Granda with his white beard and his head full of stories for her, Da with his smiling eyes.

The day before he had left for the fishing trip she had walked with Da. A bone cold day it had been, and she had slipped her hand in his, feeling the size of it, the warmth. He had promised her it would be only months until he’d be home with pockets jingling.

He had never been able to come, though, not in more than a year, but he was waiting for her here.

Bundles were piled in doorways and out in the open. Nory stumbled against one of them and realized the bundles were alive. People were sleeping there, whole families.

“Da,” she said as loud as she could, and Patch said it too, his soft breath against her neck. She called until her voice was hoarse, and the bundles around them stirred angrily, but no one answered her. People began to mutter and she knew it was the sound of her voice that kept them awake. Someone threw a stone that glanced off the side of her bag and hit a wall in back of them.

At last they sank down in a rough spot at the corner of a building. Nory pulled her bag in between the two of them, and she held Patch’s hand across the top of it to keep it safe. Patch was asleep almost at once, his pale eyelashes down over his cheek.

She watched him, remembering when he was just beginning to walk, his cheeks round, his legs sturdy, as she held him up. But now his cheeks were sunken, his freckles standing out in that white face, and his legs were nothing but bones.

Tomorrow,
she told herself.
Somehow . . .
Her eyes fluttered closed and she slept until just before dawn, when the harbor came to life.

Bundles moved, changed shapes, people called out to each other. “A ship,” someone cried.

Nory turned. Their ship?

It had been on Nory’s mind all the time she had walked from Maidin Bay. Shining, clean and white, sails billowing. A sight that would never be forgotten.

But this? Anchored just outside the harbor, dirty gray, pails of bilge water cascading over the side. That couldn’t be her ship, could it?

She leaned over as a man went by. “Where is that ship going?”

He looked after it. “Where most of them go. First to Liverpool, and then to America or Canada.” He shrugged. “Or down to the bottom of the sea.”

“Will there be food?” she asked.

“Not yet,” the man said. “The ship will take you to Liverpool first, and you must have your own food until you board the ship there that will take you to the Americas.”

Nory’s stomach lurched from hunger. Next to her Patch had awakened too. His lips were dry and his head was back against the building. He had to have something to eat. It would have been better, she thought, if he had pulled at her skirt and cried for food, but he was too weak even for that.

A long, ragged line was forming at the edge of the quay. Small boats kept filling with people; then sailors rowed them out to the ship.

Where was Da? she wondered. Where were Granda and Celia?

At the head of the line an old woman screamed as a sailor tried to push her onto one of the boats. Nory could see she was terrified of the rough water that splashed up between the quay and the small boat. And to get onto the boat she’d have to jump that distance.

The woman grasped a wooden post with one hand. “I can’t,” she wailed.

“How do you think you’re going to get out to the ship, old shawlie?” the sailor asked, laughing. “It’s not going to scrape the bottom of the harbor to come in for you.”

Still the old woman hesitated.

“You’re holding us up.” He grabbed her arms and in one motion tossed her into the boat.

Nory’s hand went to her face as the woman landed painfully in the bottom and lay there sobbing, her long skirt soaked with the filthy water that sloshed back and forth between the seats.

“This is just the beginning.” The sailor shrugged. “What do you think it’s like on the ocean with waves thirty feet high?” He called across to another sailor, “It will take hours to get these people out there. Like frightened rabbits they are, not one backbone in a hundred.”

Patch pulled on her hand. “On our ship, Nory,” he asked, “will we have food?”

Was that their ship? She felt for the pieces of paper in her bag and held them out to the sailor.

He shook his head, barely looking at them.

She leaned against a cold stone building, almost in a daze for want of food and trying to decide what to do.

Rough men wheeled heavy barrels around her. Women begged for food, hands out. Another ship, smaller than the first, had come into the harbor, and knots of people had somehow become another uneven line waiting to board. She held out the papers to another sailor, only to have him brush past her. “No,” he said.

She watched all of what was going on for a long time, eyes half closed, until someone threw a pail of water out the window over her head. She jumped when it splattered in front of her, and Patch began to cry, a small whimpering cry without tears.

Women begging for food.

They had been hungry, all of them in the little house outside of Ballilee. One after another they had left that house until at last Nory had been alone with Anna. She had scaled the cliffs for eggs. She had gathered wee bits of grass and leaves and stirred them into something that couldn’t even be called soup, but never once had she thought of begging.

Begging.

“Don’t move,” she told Patch. “Sit right here in this space. I’ll be back soon.”

She moved closer to the line of people boarding the small boats and stood to the side, one hand out, looking at each face as the line meandered past her. “Please,” she said, hearing the shame of it in her voice. “Help me.”

Someone pushed a shawl into her hand. It was a colorless wrap, thinner, older, dirtier than the one she wore. “Take it, poor creature,” the woman said.

Nory thought of what her sister Celia would say:
Don’t touch that, it’s filthy.
Fuafar!

She took a breath. “Food?” she asked the woman. “Do you have just a bit for my wee brother? He doesn’t need much.”

The woman shook her head, gathering two of her own children around her, and moved away.

One woman put a small cracked cup into her hand. “We won’t need this,” she said. “We’re going to start over.”

Nory looked down at the cup. She would take it with her. Poor cup that no one wanted. She’d set it on Maggie’s table at 416 Smith Street in Brooklyn and tell her sister all that had happened.

Nory felt hands on her shoulders. Slowly she raised her own hands to touch those hands, and knew without even lifting her head who it was.

Had she not seen those hands all her life? Hands baiting the hooks to catch a fish for their dinner. Hands digging the potatoes in the field, turning over the earth. Evenings of storytelling as he tamped weeds into his old pipe.

The woman’s shawl slid out of her hand, and she caught the cup just in time. She turned and her arms went around the tall man with the untrimmed beard. But how thin he was, rail thin, his frame nothing but bones under her hands.

“Granda,” she said, her face buried in his frieze jacket.

They stood there holding each other, Nory crying as Granda whispered to her, “I have searched every face for you and for Patch. I knew I would find you.” He patted her shoulder. “I have not slept, so anxious I was to find you in the midst of all these travelers.”

She took a breath. “Da,” she said, “and Celia. Where are they? I can’t wait to see them.”

He shook his head. “I must tell you about them.”

She nodded slowly. Something was wrong. She reached down for the shawl that lay against her feet. “I will take you to Patch,” she said.

THE SHIP

THIRTEEN

NORY

After they found Patch, Granda took the filthy shawl she had gotten from begging and dropped it into the water. It bobbed along, a bubble on the foam. “Fleas,” he said. “Tiny insects that crawl out of seams and devil and bite.” He patted Nory’s face. “The cup with its wee roses we’ll keep for a sip of tea at Maggie’s.”

“But what about Da and Celia?” she asked at last.

She felt the tears in her eyes as Granda traced the same route she and Patch had taken with his broad fingers against her bag. “It was here,” he said, “that your sister Celia and I rested, here that a man gave us a piece of fish, just gave it to us and went on, and here that Celia cried for you and wanted to turn back.”

He patted Patch’s head. “We found your da at last on the road overlooking the port.”

Nory closed her eyes as she heard the story of Celia and Da twirling together, laughing, sobbing, dancing.

“Where are they?” Nory said.

Granda leaned forward. “Ah, they have gone ahead days ago.”

Nory sat back. She couldn’t believe it. Gone to America? Gone without them?

“But why?” She kept shaking her head, waiting for Granda to say he was only teasing.

“Days were written on those bits of paper,” Granda began.

“The tickets,” she said.

“And those days had come, the ticket seller told us. Two had to go. One could stay.” He held out his broad hands. “Each of us wanted to be the one to wait for you, your da saying he had thought of seeing you every day for a year, Celia saying it was her right as your sister.”

He smiled at her. “But we all knew your da shouldn’t delay. He had to get to America, find work to take care of us all.” He reached out to touch her shoulder. “I would be the one who waited. Who could love you and Patch more? I told them I would find you and take care of you with all the strength I had.”

He took Nory’s hand in one of his and Patch’s hand in the other, his face grim. “And now we’ll go to the ticket office.”

The building was a poor shack, Nory thought. It looked as if it had been slapped up in a moment. Inside there were so many people in line or leaning against the walls that she wondered if the whole thing might collapse.

But Granda somehow got them through and up to the very front, where a man sat in back of an iron cage.

At first he didn’t look up. He fingered the piles of tickets, stacks of papers, and rows of shiny coins piled up on one another. Then at last he told them to slide their own tickets through a space in the bars. Nory glanced up at Granda. Suppose this man took their tickets and never gave them back?

But they did as he told them. The man took the tickets, turning them one way and then another.

“There are extra papers there,” Nory said. “Not used. They were for my friends. Can I give them to someone?”

“Useless,” the man said. “All of them. The time has passed for these.” Before Nory’s eyes, he slipped all of the tickets into a drawer. He turned to Granda. “Do you have money?”

Granda closed his eyes as Nory looked up at him, holding her breath. Suppose they were in this place forever?

She could feel herself trembling. She clenched her hands tightly together. Suppose they were left here on this quay, too far to go home again, left to starve.

But Granda reached into his pocket. “I have a few coins,” he said, and slid them under the bars.

“We have come so far,” Nory said at the same time, “all the way from Ballilee, on our way to Brooklyn, New York. And the rest of our family has already left.”

The man looked at the coins again. He paused, then finally said, “There’s a ship leaving from Liverpool called the
Samson.
”

“Where do we go?” Granda asked. “Which line?”

“Yes, the
Samson,
” the man said. “A couple from the Glenties, near Ballilee, just came through.” He pointed. “The woman has a hat with roses. You see? Going across the quay. You can follow them right along.” He swept Granda’s coins into his tray and pulled three papers in front of him.

Nory was filled with such relief she felt her legs grow weak. She held on to the bars to keep herself up.

Just then as the man bent over to scribble on one of his papers, someone leaned over Nory’s shoulder; a thin hand reached through the ticket seller’s bars and with one finger scooped out two coins.

Had Nory seen that? Had she really seen someone steal money right under the ticket seller’s eyes? Next to her Patch gave her hand a quick tug. He had seen the same thing!

She turned to look over her shoulder straight into the dark eyes of a girl.

That girl.

The one who had stolen her food and left the plank.

The girl raised her eyebrows, staring back at her, but the man pushed three tickets out at Granda. “Find the line for a trip to Liverpool,” he said.

“But we’re going to Brooklyn,” Nory said.

Granda took her arm to lead her away. “Liverpool is on the way.” He bent over to whisper to her. “Strange people, these English. Their ships go all the way back to England before we sail to America.”

“I have money,” the girl was saying in her harsh voice. “I want to pay for a ticket.”

“Where are you going?” the ticket seller asked.

“To my brother Owen,” she said. “I think he’s in a place called New Jersey.”

Nory covered her mouth with one hand. The girl was buying a ticket with the ticket seller’s own money. But Nory didn’t have time to think about it. Granda was rushing them along the quay, following the woman in the hat with the roses.

Up close Nory could see the hat was ancient. It was drenched with rain, the roses faded and drooping. The woman and her husband were surrounded by bags and old boxes.

“Casey is our name,” the woman said.

It was the Caseys who got them through that terrible trip from Galway to Liverpool on the deck of a rusty, listing boat that must have been years older than Granda. They found a spot out of the wind and huddled together. Mrs. Casey comforted them. “In America it will all be different. We will sleep on a silk mattress with the softest pillows made of goose feathers.” She laughed. “Do we know that America has geese? They might have other fowl, even softer.”

All the while she was holding a bag.”Put your hand in this bag, my girl,” she told Nory.

“Not I.” The bag moved and jumped as if it had a life of its own.

The Caseys laughed, and Patch leaned forward, watching as Mrs. Casey took Nory’s hand and guided it carefully into the cloth bag.

It
did
have a life of its own! Inside was a soft snuffling snout and small pointy ears. Nory felt the papery tongue and the mouth that nibbled on her fingers.

She pulled out her hand. “What is that?”

“One wee piglet,” Mrs. Casey said. “I scooped her up from the landlord’s sty.”

“Stole?” Nory asked.

“Ah, no. It was a runty pig and the landlord gave her to me. He thought the pig wouldn’t last a day.”

Mrs. Casey threw back her head, her gray hair swinging. “He was wrong. I fed the pig better than I fed the landlord himself.”

Nory put her hand back into the bag to scratch the pig’s wiry little neck, then gave Patch a turn. “We had a pig,” she said. “A great pig.” She sighed, thinking about the
swish-swish
sound as Muc rubbed her sides against her pen. Poor Muc, gone to the English to pay the rent.

“I earned this pig,” Mrs. Casey said. “I worked in the man’s kitchen from before light in the morning until it was so dark I couldn’t see the table in front of me, scrubbing, cutting, chopping, boiling, baking. But no more.”

Mrs. Casey leaned closer, her pale blue eyes gleaming. “The pig and I walked out. Now the landlord will have to cut and chop and boil his own meals if he wants to eat.”

Through the rain that spat at them on the rusty deck, the Caseys told stories about the landlord and the Glenties. And even after they arrived in Liverpool and waited to board the
Samson,
they talked of the fairs they had been to before the potatoes had failed, and how Mrs. Casey had found her hat on a fence post years ago.

And then at last they were wedged in their berths on the
Samson,
the ship that would take them to America: Granda on top with the Caseys, Nory below with Patch and a girl named Lally who was going to be a maid in a great house in New York.

That first night Nory drifted off to sleep thinking nothing could happen with Granda there. And hadn’t she always loved the sea? The ship would glide through it and at last she’d be in Brooklyn with everyone she loved.
Celia and Da twirling in the road.
How lovely to think of it.

She wasn’t even that hungry. When they had boarded the
Samson
they’d been given food. A thin-faced boy with jug ears named Garvey had handed them bags of meal and biscuits.

No matter that they’d waited in line for hours to cook the oatmeal on the passengers’ stove on the foredeck. No matter that all of it had been gone in moments and they had licked their fingers, wishing for another mouthful.

One tiny bit of the meal was left on the side of Patch’s cheek. Nory had reached out with her finger to slide it into his mouth, then patted that cheek.

“Is this the only food we will have for the whole voyage, your honor?” Nory asked the boy with the huge ears.

Garvey plucked at his red shirt, looking important, but then he laughed. “I’m not your honor,” he said. “I’m just a steward—not even that, cook’s assistant. And there will be a little food in the morning. Every morning.” He’d leaned forward. “But the meal will be full of bugs.”

What are a few wee mealy bugs?
she thought.

“There will be stoves on the deck, not many, but you may be able to cook your meal.” He smiled, pulling at one ear. “And the wee bugs as well.”

And then they were moving, with a terrible grinding. By morning there were other sounds that never stopped: so many people, women sighing, crying out in their sleep, babies wailing, one of them day and night, and poor Granda coughing. But the worst was the vomiting that went on and on.

And once, just for the barest beat, the
Samson
seemed to pause in the waves, to lurch like a man with a cane. Patch, next to her, held her arm with a strength Nory couldn’t believe was his. “Are we sinking?” he asked, his teeth clenched.

Nory was so terrified she couldn’t answer.

“We are just out of the harbor,” Granda said. “It’s all right.”

The next day Nory felt a lurch in her own stomach. The light was dim in the moving, rocking cabin; nothing was still. Everything had a terrible smell of old food, or old clothes, and someone must have been sick. Seasick, she told herself.

She wouldn’t think about the slosh of water against the side of the ship, the smells, the swaying from side to side. She’d lie still so she wouldn’t wake Patch next to her; she’d try to stop rocking with the ship. Her forehead was filmy with sweat and her hands were damp. She was going to be sick too. But there was no place to be alone.

She sat up, her head hitting the top of the bunk, and slid onto the floor. In one terrible moment she lost the food that Garvey had given them. A terrible burning was in her throat and a harsh wrenching noise came from deep inside her. And then Lally, the girl who shared her berth, was up and holding her forehead, gagging as she did it.

“How long?” Nory asked when she could speak.

“Forty days,” Lally said. “Maybe even longer.”

Nory closed her eyes. Forty days was more than she could count.