The Banished Children of Eve (41 page)

They spoke in Irish. “The boy has nothing,” the one searching his pockets said.

Jack said, in Irish, “I'm starving.”

The knees came off his back. A hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him close to the fire. The smell of the meat was intense. He could hear the sizzle of fat dripping onto the hot coals. On the pile of rocks set around the fire was a tin plate with cooked meat on it. He reached for it. One of the men grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back. Jack cried out in pain. The knife was right in front of his face, and the metal reflected firelight.

“What's your name?” one of the men asked.

“My name is Sean,” Jack said. The man tightened his grip on Jack's hair.

“And what are you looking for, Sean?”

“Food. I'm starving.”

“And where are you from?”

“Donegal,” he said.

The hand tightened its grip on his hair. “Where are you walking from? How long have you been following us?”

“I haven't been following you at all. I was sleeping by the roadside and I saw the light. I'm starving.”

“A terrible thing, starvation, we've all seen a lot of it, but this isn't a relief station, boy, so why don't you be on your way, and may God be with you.”

The man let go of his hair, and Jack put
his hand on his head and rubbed the soreness on his scalp. He got up on one knee, then stood. He was almost lifted off the ground by a kick that caught him square in the middle of his rear.

“You heard me,” the man with the knife said. “Be on your way.”

“I need food,” Jack said in English. He started to cry, he couldn't help himself, and he blurted out the English words, unthinkingly, in a flood: “I'm desperate, please, anything, I'll go but just give me some scraps, I'll die out here unless you help me, in the name of Jesus, all I'm asking for is just a mouthful of food.”

“You have the English, do you?” one of them asked, in Irish.

“I do,” Jack said. “I speak it as well.”

The man grabbed Jack by the shoulder and pulled him back over to the fire.

“Do you know where we are?”

Jack lied. “I do.”

“Where?”

“The border is twenty miles to the south. Over to the west is a town called Cumberland.” He made it up as he went along. “I was working there, but the authorities came searching for any of the Irish who ran away from Grosse Isle, so I set out to reach the United States.”

The man pressed the knife against Jack's temple. “Don't lie to me.”

“I'm not lying.”

“If you've been working, why do you still have these ship's rags on you?”

“Was only there a day or so before I had to flee. I left in the middle of the night, without food or my pay. I had no choice.”

“And you know where the border is?”

“I know the way and where to cross. It
was explained to me by an Irishman in Cumberland, a safe route so I wouldn't be stopped. It's fearsome, he said, the way the Americans are guarding their border, turning back any immigrant who doesn't have money or a bond guaranteeing him against becoming a public charge.”

“You know where to cross?” The knife pressed so hard against his skull that Jack cried out again.

“I swear by the Holy Trinity I do.”

The other man said, “He might really know. Besides, he speaks English like he was one of them. We've got nothing to lose by finding out if he's telling the truth.”

They let him have some meat. He ate, then lay down by the fire. In the morning he could see that the two men were as ragged as he was. They carried a canvas sack filled with provisions that Jack guessed they had stolen in the same way he had stolen the biscuits. They made him walk in front of them, and they ducked into the woods at the sight of a house or a horseman. On the second evening of their walking, they told Jack that the border had better be close or they would teach him about the consequences of telling lies. He swore once again that he was telling the truth. He woke while it was still dark and went through the sack they were carrying. He took some of their biscuits and a piece of cooked meat. He ran to the road and kept moving as fast as he could, alternately running and walking, until the sun was high overhead. He stopped in the woods to let a wagon go by. It was drawn by six horses and carried a great pile of logs. He ran behind it, pulled himself up, and hid among the logs. He rode all day, and when the wagon stopped at an inn he jumped off and slept in the woods. In the morning, unseen by the teamster, he jumped back on for another day's full journey.

He saw that the settlements of houses were closer together and the farms seemed more prosperous. On the third day they came into a valley, and the wagon stopped at a mill outside a substantial village. Jack started walking again. He climbed a hillside, hoping to see the American flag flying from some mast, but saw the Union Jack fluttering above a redbrick building. He kept walking. That afternoon he stole a shirt and a pair of pants that were strung out from a line in back of a farmhouse. He threw his rags into the woods. He put on the stolen clothes. The shirt was too big and the pants too short, but they were comfortable and clean, unpatched, without holes, and Jack felt less conspicuous than before. He ate apples from an orchard, the first he had had since the sailor had shared one with him on the ship.

The next morning he passed a small, neat cabin. A pair of boots were on the porch. He crept up to the
porch and tried them on. He left behind the lumps of cracked, torn, perforated leather that had been his shoes.

He walked across meadows full of cows and through fields of furrowed earth, and his boots made him feel tall and fully grown and he imagined himself a Yankee farmer striding across his lands, a journey that would take all day. He found another road, and after about a mile he came around a bend. There was a white building with a steep roof and a pole jutting from it with a banner of red and white stripes, and white stars on a field of blue. Jack danced right there in the middle of the road, his boots kicking up small clouds of American dust.

There were wagons and carriages pulled up around the building. Jack looked through a window: Some sort of auction was going on inside. Men stood around what looked like a courtroom; some draped themselves over chairs, their legs dangling over the arms. They talked in loud voices and walked around as if they owned the building. They displayed none of the cap-in-hand hesitation that any tenant farmer in Ireland would have shown in entering such a place, eyes cast down, a proper deference in his voice,
Yes, milord; no, milord; I beg your pardon, milord.
These men sounded like the sailor from Troy, but there was an even more pronounced twang to their speech, and also something more American, even more direct and clipped and assertive.

The auction ended, and the men strolled out of the building and began to get into their wagons. Jack walked away and stood by the roadside, where the driveway met the
road. A farmer with a gray-streaked beard pulled up next to him.

“Where ya headed, son?”

“Troy,” Jack said.

The farmer laughed loudly. “Better get started. I'd say you got a ways to go.” Jack nodded. He didn't know why
Troy
should sound so funny. He started to walk to hide his embarrassment. The farmer said, “Get in.” He held out his hand and helped Jack onto the driver's bench.

“Where ya from?” the farmer asked.

Jack tried to imitate the tone of the men he had just heard talking, tried to speak like an American. “From Cumberland.”

“That a town?”

“A small town. Most people never heard of it, even in Canada.”

“Where ya from before that?”

Jack realized he hadn't done a very good job of disguising his accent. “I was born in Scotland. I came to Canada with my parents three years ago. Cumberland is mostly Scots.”

“Where your parents now?”

“Still in Cumberland but my father's been sick and can't work, so they sent me to stay with my uncle in Troy.”

The farmer looked over at Jack, then snapped the reins and made a loud
cluck cluck
noise. The horses moved faster. “Them parents of yours didn't send you with much, did they? No clothes but what's on your back? No food?”

“Oh, they did, but I was robbed.”

“Robbed?”

“Two men with a knife. Happened day before last. They came on me at night. I offered to share my food, but they took everything I had, said I should be grateful they didn't slit my throat.”

“Paddies, I'll bet anything. They were Paddies, am I right?” He looked at Jack again. Jack nodded. “For sure,” he said.

“Pug-nosed louts, ain't a farmer in the country hasn't had something swiped by them, clothes,
food, boots. They'll take anything.”

Jack looked the farmer in the eyes, unblinkingly. He was unsure whether the farmer was playing with him the way a cat does with a mouse. He considered jumping off the wagon and running away, but decided against it.

“Know the worst part of it?” the farmer said.

“What might that be?”

“They're a warning from God, a plague sent on us so we might learn to hear His word: ‘Yea, there came a grievous swarm of flies into the land, and into its houses, and the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies.' It's the plain truth. Swarming in our ports, swarming over the border, no doubt about it, and unless we return to godly ways of thinking and acting we'll be struck down just as sure as old Pharaoh was.”

Jack let him talk. Obviously, the farmer had no idea of who was sitting next to him. They came to a crossroads, and the farmer stopped the wagon. He pointed straight ahead. “I'm going this way.” He motioned with his thumb to his right. “That way is Troy.”

“How far?”

“Two hundred miles, more or less, if ya run your finger straight across a map. Three hundred, I'd guess, on the road.”

Jack was exhausted. He wanted to lie somewhere and sleep, sink down and not think about getting up. He was tired of being hungry, of walking, of seeking the walls of Troy. He remembered the emotionless plunge of the redheaded boy down into mist and water, no sound of struggle.

The farmer seemed to know what was on Jack's mind. “You got most of the state of New Hampshire and all of Vermont. Didn't your pappy give ya some idea of the distance ya had to go?”

“He said it was a long way, but I don't think he knew the distance.”

“Well, I got a proposition for you. Been looking to hire a hand. Can't pay much, but I can give ya a place to sleep and your meals. Maybe ya can save up
something to make up for what them Paddies stole.”

Jack accepted the offer. The farmer, who lived alone, worked him hard, but he had a place to sleep in the barn, and there were milk and eggs to eat, peaches and apples, bread and cornmeal and chicken. He ate whatever he was given, gobbled it down, lying back afterward to enjoy the sensation of a full stomach.

One day, after the midday meal, Jack was on the barn roof hammering on new shingles when he saw two men coming up the road. He knew right away who they were. He flattened himself against the roof. He heard the farmer come out the front door of his house. He peeked over to watch. The farmer was carrying a musket, and his dog raced ahead and ran circles around the men, who stood there, their hats in their hands, their eyes on the dog. They looked older and smaller than Jack remembered. They were caked with dust, and their shirts were stained with dark pools of sweat. They were shoeless.

“Sir,” said the one who had held the knife to his throat, “could you spare us water?” Jack heard the obsequiousness in the voice, the tentativeness of someone speaking in a language not his own, the man's eyes traveling from the dog to the farmer to the ground, his hand worrying the brim of his relic of a hat.

The farmer cradled the musket in his arms. “Sorry, boys,” he said, “ain't got nothing I can spare.” He shooed them with his hand, as if they were flies. “This is private property, so you best be getting along.”

They walked back the way they had come. The farmer trailed behind them. He stood by the gate until they disappeared around a turn. He came back into the yard and called Jack down from the roof.

“Jack,” he said, “there are Paddies in the neighborhood, so you have to keep an eye out and make sure none of them tries to sneak around and steal what he can.”

By September, Jack felt rested and strong. He told the farmer he thought it was time he resumed his journey to Troy, and he asked for his pay. The farmer gave him two dollars for two months' work. Jack felt he was being underpaid to the point of being cheated, but he was eager to be on his way and said nothing.

“I got
good news for you, Jack,” the farmer said the next morning as the boy prepared to leave. “A cousin of mine is hauling freight down near Boston. He says he can take you as far as Manchester, and that will leave you in shooting distance of Troy. Says he'll do it as a favor to me.”

The cousin came by in his wagon in the early afternoon. He introduced himself as O Ahaziah Fry. Jack climbed aboard. They traveled a pitted, rutted road and were jolted up and down. Jack wasn't sure he had heard the name correctly. The cousin repeated it. “O Ahaziah Fry. Second Kings, chapter nine, verse twenty-three,” he said. “‘And Joram turned his hands and fled, and said, “There is treachery in the land, O Ahaziah.”'”

The roads were so bad that Jack thought the wagon might break apart. O Ahaziah said nothing more until they reached a smooth stretch.

“This will cost you a dollar.”

“Your cousin said it was free. Said you were doing it as a favor to him.”

“My cousin don't speak for me, nor me for him. And that dollar is payable now.” Jack handed it over.

“I got apples and cheese in the sack behind you,” O Ahaziah said. “Since you're a paying fare, you got a right to help yourself.”