The Banished Children of Eve (40 page)

The people passed beyond panic and anger. As the deaths mounted, a resignation settled over many of them, there was no way out, God's will be done. Occasionally wild rumors about an approaching army of Young Irelanders, a well-armed force with abundant supplies of food, would rouse the neighborhood, but the rumors were invariably false, and though they continued to circulate, they ceased to be listened to. Only a miracle could save them from starvation, and in the middle of winter, with the government relief stations shut down and the potato crop totally putrefied and every chicken and pig long ago consumed, the miracle arrived. His Lordship's agent offered passage to America to all those of his tenants who would surrender their holdings. It was a gesture of His Lordship's concern over the reports of the grievous distress on his estate that had reached him in London, a two-year-long series of reports that had gone unanswered until the agent had appended a note explaining that under the operation of the amended poor law, His Lordship was personally responsible for poor rates on all holdings below a four-pound evaluation. The agent explained that by his calculations it would cost the estate three pounds per annum to
support a person in the workhouse, while for a single charge of five pounds that same person could be transported to North America. His attention drawn at last to the suffering of his tenantry, His Lordship, remembering their innocent and happy ways when he had visited among them several years before, authorized the offer of emigration to Canada.

Jack and his remaining younger brother and sister were in the first group to go. They were loaded on the
Duke of Cumberland.
A rotting antique hull that had been launched in the last year of the Seven Years' War, the
Duke of Cumberland
in its prime had carried a company of 120. Given the exigencies of conditions in Ireland, 230 of His Lordship's tenants were put aboard.

The weather was bad from the day they embarked, rain and clouds obscuring the land so that they barely had a sense of leaving. By the second day the pitching seas left most of them sick, and willingly forgoing the ration of barley and pease they were given to eat. By the end of the first week the deaths started.
Fiabhras dubh,
typhus, the black fever. People's skin turned dark; they appeared to be drunk. The quarters became rank with liquid stool and vomit. The crew disappeared and then one morning reappeared and roused everyone out of their wooden bunks and splashed the place down with buckets of seawater. Jack's sister died that night; his brother the next afternoon. They were put in a single canvas sack, which was weighed down with Belgian blocks, ballast intended as paving stones for the streets of Montreal, and tossed overboard. People lay listlessly in the bunks, rolling back and forth against one another, and since they had ceased reporting deaths to the captain, there was a daily inspection by the crew to find and dispose of the corpses.

Jack lived on deck. The mates kicked him and tried to force him to go below, but every time they threw him down he climbed back out until they finally gave up and simply ignored him. He slept under the stars and spent all day watching the sea. One of the mates befriended him. He gave Jack an apple to eat, and when he was on the night watch he allowed Jack to stand with him. In the beginning Jack found it hard to understand the mate's speech, but gradually it became easier and he came to love the sound, American speech, faster than the English spoken in Ireland, more clipped and to the point, and spoken through the nose. The mate came from a city called Troy, on the river Hudson. He was the man who baptized Sean Mulcahey “Jack.” “Sean,” he said, “ain't a name for an American boy, and John ain't much better, you'll never meet an American boy going around calling himself John. No, it's going to be Jack, that's what you are going to be from now on.”

In late June, five weeks since
leaving Ireland, they saw land. Forty-eight people had died on the passage over, one fifth of those who had sailed. Many were still sick, but everyone came on deck to see the coast of North America, the shores of Canada. They carried up the infirm and those too frail to walk, and their spirits were lifted by the sight of the green shore, the wooded headlands of the great continent. When they entered the mouth of the St. Lawrence they could see the land at close range, and the trees seemed so much larger than anything in Ireland, the forest so untamed, that they watched with equal parts awe and anticipation. The American mate told Jack that before they proceeded to Quebec they would have to stop at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle, where the sick would be treated and those well enough transported westward.

They arrived at Grosse Isle while the river was covered with mist. It was morning and the weather had turned extremely warm. Jack saw the masts of other ships poking above the mist. They dropped anchor. The air was filled with a foul odor that Jack assumed was a river smell, stagnant water, rotting leaves, and wood. Anyone who was still fit came up from below. Strung across the rigging of the nearby ships was what looked like a collection of pennants that had been shredded into rags by the wind. Jack climbed up onto the railing of the
Duke of Cumberland
for a better look. The pennants turned out to be trousers and shirts and shawls and skirts, the laundered tatters of the other ships' passengers. The
Duke of Cumberland's
captain, who had hardly been seen through the voyage, appeared on deck. He ordered a boat to be lowered, and four crewmen rowed him off into the mist.

The stench of the river
had become almost overpowering. Jack yelled over to the nearest ship. Nobody answered. He yelled again and heard the echo of his own voice. There was a ghostly quality to the other ship as it rode at anchor and slipped in and out of the mist. Jack put his legs through the railing and sat with his chin resting on his forearm. After a few minutes, someone appeared on deck. Jack called out. A boy his own age appeared on the opposite railing, a redheaded skeleton, shirtless, his trousers tied with string.

“What ship are ye?” Jack yelled.

The boy stood silently. Jack yelled louder. The boy stepped up onto the rigging. He stayed there for a moment, then let go and went down feetfirst into the water. Jack leaned over as far as he could to watch the boy swim, but the mist was thickest above the water and obscured his view. He listened, but there was no sound of swimming, only the water lapping against the sides of the ships. He waited and watched a long time, but there was never any sign of the boy.

When the captain returned, he had a loud argument with the crew. They demanded to be paid and allowed to make their own way to Quebec. They said that their work was done and they wouldn't go near Grosse Isle. The captain refused to pay them, and they disappeared into their quarters.

The passengers had brought up from below everything that they could carry, and the deck was littered with clothes and bedding. The sick lay all about. In the late morning, the sun burned away the mist and they could see that the river was crammed with ships, as many as thirty between them and Grosse Isle. The sun became burning and intense, and a swarm of flies and stinging insects descended, driving the people back down to the quarters they had just left. An official in a blue jacket arrived and went about the entire ship, poking into every corner, sweating profusely as he went. He went over the passenger
lists and wrote down names in a small book he carried. He said that a boat would be sent to bring the sick to the island, where they would be temporarily held in quarantine, but that the bodies of the dead must be brought there immediately. The captain said that the crew wouldn't go, so the official suggested enlisting some of the passengers. Jack and three others volunteered. They brought up the bodies of a small boy and an old woman who had died the night before. The bodies were wrapped in canvas and tied tightly with thick rope. The volunteers put the bodies into the bottom of the boat and rowed toward the island. They didn't have to strain, the current moved them along quickly, and Jack kept turning to glimpse where they were headed. He could see a large number of tents that stood out against the trees and made the place seem festive and inviting. The river smell became sharper as they neared the shore.

There were three rows of bodies laid by the spot where they landed, twenty bodies in a row. From a distance Jack had thought they were black men, but when he jumped ashore and helped pull the boat up, he could see the swelling, darkened corruption of bodies left too long in the sun. The flies made a frenzied hum in the air. Jack and the others took the canvas-covered bodies from the boat and moved up a slight incline toward the tents. The ground was covered with bodies. Jack presumed they were all dead, but then he saw that many of them were breathing and moving. Another man in a blue jacket walked down to meet Jack and his fellows. He asked what ship they were from and ordered them to follow him. They picked their way through the maze of bodies on the ground until they came to a shed, where the official gave them shovels and led them to a tent with open sides. Inside were rows of crudely made double-tiered bunks, two, in some cases three, people sharing a single space. The official went over and lifted a man by the shoulder. He told Jack to grab the feet. The man was dead, and so was the woman next to him. Above was a woman delirious with fever, praying and cursing in Irish. Her bedding was soaked through with diarrhea,
which had dripped down onto the corpses beneath.

Jack and his shipmates tried to dig graves in a field behind the tent, but the ground was so stony that they couldn't dig past the topsoil. They scraped and clawed at the earth with the shovels, rolled the bodies into shallow graves, and piled dirt and stones on top. The official said to keep at it, that he would return in a short while. As soon as he left, Jack and the others dropped their shovels and walked quickly back to the boat. The current was against them and they had to row hard before they reached the
Duke of Cumberland.
Jack lay on the deck. He ached. He knew it would be only a matter of time before he got sick.

That night, Jack made a raft of three planks lashed together. He stole a canvas bag, into which he put his shoes, and a tin of dry biscuits he had taken from the ship's hold. He had hoped to talk to the American sailor about Troy and how to reach it. He loved the sound of it:
Troy.
The mother of exiles. Great stone towers above a great river. But the American had disappeared with the rest of the crew. Jack would find his own way.

A bright, white moon made the river shine. Jack tied the canvas bag to the raft, which he then threw off the back of the ship. He ran the length of the deck and climbed up onto the railing. The raft turned in a slow circle, collided with the side of the ship, and moved into the current. Jack jumped, feetfirst, into the water, the blackness enveloping him, the brutal coldness stunning him. He sank helplessly for a few seconds, then he moved his legs and feet as rapidly as he could and pulled with his arms toward the surface. The moonlight surrounded him. He sucked in air, flailed around for the raft, and sank back into the darkness. He moved his arms and legs, struggling to rise, breaking into the moonlight again, gulping for air and getting a mouthful of water that made him choke. The river drew him down. It grew colder as he sank. His lungs felt as if they were about to burst. He reached up with his arms, his legs scissoring the water, and felt the raft sliding by. He lunged for it, grabbed the wood, and pulled himself up. He lay gasping. After a few minutes he began to
shiver violently from the cold. He lay on his stomach and kicked his legs, gliding down the river, steadily moving closer to the southern shore.

He was exhausted, and fell asleep in the tall grass along the riverbank. The heat of the sun woke him. He stood up. He couldn't see the ships. He ate some of the biscuits he had stolen and set out on his way, southward, on a wide dirt road; he hid in the bushes whenever a wagon went by. He had already made up his mind that he wouldn't stop moving as long as he was in a country where the Union Jack flew: the double crosses of Saint Andrew and Saint George, the empire of hunger and servitude, the realm of eviction and emigration, a kingdom where the ability to discern the presence of death had ceased to matter because death was everywhere, around every head, death from starvation, fever, dysentery, from a sheer unwillingness to face any more of life, death in workhouses, on roadsides and in ditches, in the holds of ships, the dead lined up along the shore, in canvas bags weighed down with paving blocks, the anonymous dead already as forgotten as his brothers and sisters or the red-haired boy, Her Majesty's superfluous Paddies.

He slept in the fields, and although the days were hot, the nights were chilly. The country was immense, a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen, great forests that spread out as far as the horizon, endless meadows of wildflowers, with farms only rarely to be seen. He drank water from streams and husbanded his biscuits, walking until he lost track of the days, always half expecting to see the towers of Troy sticking out above the tree-tops, the American flag flying from the highest spot. Finally his biscuits ran out. He debated what to do. He was sure that a farmer would take one look at his rags and alert the authorities that some diseased immigrant from Grosse Isle had drifted into the area; they would try to send him back. But he knew he had no choice. It was either make himself known or starve to death. He decided to stop at the next farmhouse but walked all afternoon without seeing a sign of any settlement. He stopped by the roadside, exhausted and starving. The sun was
setting. He sat with his back to a large rock and fell asleep.

When he awoke, it was pitch-black; he had no idea where he was. He lay still and listened. He stood up. Off in the woods, a few hundred yards away, he could see a campfire. He started walking toward it and caught the smell of roasting meat; the scent killed any sense of caution. He called out “Hello!” and walked faster until he was running. There was a silhouette standing before the flames, and just as he got near, he felt an arm around his neck. Someone had come behind him and pressed the sharp point of a knife into the flesh beneath his chin. The figure in front of him approached, silently. Neither did the person holding the knife speak. They brought him over by the fire and forced him to lie down. One of them knelt with his knees on Jack's back, and the other went through Jack's pockets and shirt.