The Law of Dreams

by Peter Behrens

  “Where are they all going?”

  “Liverpool and America.”

  He’d heard of them but had no sense of where these places were — across the water, he supposed. Men went across the water to navvy the canals, or harvest wheat in Scotland, but they always returned, as his father had returned.

  Billy Butler handed each drover a little tobacco, then went off looking for a buyer.

  Intimidated by the noise, the crowds, and the piercing complex of Dublin smells, the drovers retreated shyly to the cattle pen to stand among the warm animals, puffing their pipes.

  Fergus walked out on the quay. The caustic disorder was stimulating, the noise a relief from his thoughts. A steamer lay along the quay breathing from a pair of iron chimneys. The steam smelled of moss.

  He peered down the black river, trying to catch a glimpse of the sea.

  BILLY BUTLER came back with a buyer and went wading through the herd of bullocks, sorting animals with a stick. Fergus watched the two men bargaining then slapping hands for the sale.

  “Yes, yes, he’s taken the whole bunch for Liverpool,” Butler told them. “Come along now, lads, let us run ’em aboard old Nimrod, then I’ll treat you to breakfast.”

  The crowd of emigrants waiting on the quay began to stir when they saw a gangway run out from the steamer. A few passengers tried to force their way aboard but the deckhands beat them back with tarred rope-ends. A group of deckhands poured down the gangway and ran across the quay to the cattle pens, shouting and swinging their rope-ends, clearing a way through the crowd.

  Billy Butler shouted at Fergus to run the gate open. They began driving the braying, shitting bullocks across the quay and up the gangway onto the deck, where they trampled neat coils of rope and overwhelmed every inch of deck space.

  As soon as the last was run aboard, the gangway was hauled in. People on the quay were waving tickets and begging to be let aboard but the men standing guard along the rail ignored them.

  “Nimrod has sold five hundred emigrant tickets but she won’t have space for fifty.” Billy Butler shook his head. “Ah well, they’ve no business leaving their own country.”

  A TURF fire glowed in the beer shop. Each drover had a pot of porter in front of him. Billy Butler had gone upstairs with the fat woman owner.

  It felt strange to be in a room.

  Fergus studied himself in a mirror that was mostly a painting of a ship, with little strips of looking glass up and down the sides. A pauper’s black face glared back at him. His cheeks almost to his eyes were covered with greasy, downy hair. Another patch sprouted in the middle of his forehead. Hunger fur.

  A woman brought out plates with bread and butter.

  “It’s a proud thing, English food,” said the drover sitting next to him. “They said if I’d come to England, I’d eat bread and butter.”

  “Isn’t England here, you poor lost sheep.” The woman laughed.

  The drover stared at her. Her size and boldness were impressive. “What is it then?”

  “You must cross the water for England, as every Christian knows. Dublin’s Ireland!”

  Ireland. One winter after his right eye had been sore and red for weeks, his mother had taken him to a holy island for a cure, after first attempting to heal the inflammation with poultices of potato peel and juice. As they were rowed across she had dropped a coin and bits of glass into the water. For a long time he had thought Ireland was only the small island in that gray lake. Even now his associations with the word were eye pain, damp, and the smell of lake water infused with rotting wood.

  The woman next brought out a kettle of soup. Bits of red floated in the liquid.

  “What is it, missus?”

  “Fish and treacle.”

  “The red bits, missus?”

  “Pimiento.”

  He did not know what that was.

  “Never seen such a woman,” the drover beside him whispered. “She is bigger than a king.”

  They were slurping soup and chewing wheat bread when Billy Butler came downstairs, accompanied by five girls in shawls. “Here you are, men. Very decent girls, and only a shilling apiece.”

  One girl immediately sat on Fergus’s knee, kissed his forehead, and dipped her fingers in his soup. He could feel her thinness, her bones scraping on his thigh.

  “That one’ll eat you alive,” Butler laughed. “Here it is, sir, your wages.”

  The dealer laid four coins in Fergus’s outstretched palm.

  The woman licked soup from her fingers.

  “That’s but four,” Fergus said.

  “One for the girl.”

  “You said five.”

  “You’ll get a bath and a lovely jab if you go upstairs.”

  “Hear him,” the girl said to Fergus, poking a bony finger in his chest.

  “A bath and a clean girl.” Butler smiled. “All for a shilling.”

  “No. Five, mister, give me five; you said five.”

  Butler shrugged and dropped a coin on the table. Fergus seized it. The other girls were helping themselves to food and porter, overwhelming the helpless drovers. The girl sitting on Fergus’s knee gave up trying to kiss him and began soaking bread in the soup and cramming it in her mouth. Perhaps she had forgotten how hungry she was until she smelled the food. He’d had enough for now. He slid out from under her and stood up, coins in his fist.

  “Interested in a passage?” The fat serving woman pulled a sheaf of tickets from her apron, fanning them out. “Here’s a passage to Liverpool on Ruth. She’s leaving Eden’s Quay this morning, she is. Have you across the water tonight. Nowhere in this world so rich as Liverpool. Halfway to America.”

  Red tickets the color of blood.

  “How much?”

  “Three shillings for the bright world.”

  Sometimes your heart cracks and tells you what you have to do.

  PART III

  City of Stone

  LIVERPOOL, DECEMBER 1846 – JANUARY 1847

  Crossing the Water

  Ruth was smaller than Nimrod. He stood on the quay with a crowd of passengers clutching tickets, watching anxiously as flocks of sheep were driven aboard the little steamer. The tide had gone out and her deck, already crammed with wailing sheep, lay well below the quay.

  “We won’t get aboard by waiting. We’ll have to leap for it,” said the young man next to him. He wore greased boots like a navvy and carried his belongings bundled in a red handkerchief.

  “We’ve paid our tickets,” a woman said. “They can’t leave us here.”

  “They can’t — but they will.”

  With the last flock driven aboard, the deckhands left the gangway to passengers, and a mob began crushing to get aboard.

  Would he be a different person on the other side, with different things in his head? What would feed him, and who would care?

  Ruth’s black funnels were smoking merrily. He could see dockers throwing lines off the iron bollards on the quay.

  “That’s it, she’s pushing off,” the navvy announced. “Anyone wants to get aboard had better jump for it.”

  The deckhands were hauling up Ruth’s gangway, and passengers caught halfway across were scrambling for their lives back to the quay.

  The navvy carefully pitched his stick and his bundle down onto Ruth’s deck, then looked around. “No one else for it? Well, good luck, you poor sheep, and happy days in Dublin town.”

  He cleared the gap with his leap and landed hard on Ruth’s deck. Fergus watched him scramble to his feet, retrieve his stick and bundle before the deckhands could interfere, and mix quickly into the throng of passengers pouring off the gangway.

  More lines were cast off — Ruth was beginning to glide off the quay. He stared down at the gap of black water widening. Those aboard were jamming the rail and screaming at wives, husbands, and children on the quay, begging them to jump for it.

  No one begging you.

  The world moved, that was the law. Moved on itself like a wheel.
r />   He jumped for the deck, landing hard. Shaken, he got to his feet, afraid the deckhands would grab him and pitch him overboard. He couldn’t see the navvy. The deck was jammed with passengers and howling sheep. No one was bothering about him and he decided he was safe. They were drift out, passengers shouting and waving at relatives left on the quay and the deckhands busy laying out their fastidious coils of dripping rope.

  He made his way forward as Ruth churned downstream, steam snapping from her funnels and the paddle wheel churning. The noise was deafening. No one looked twice at him. The deck was slippery with sheep manure.

  Reaching the bow, he stood on a pile of chain, watching the river open to the sea.

  You carry everything inside. You carry it with you.

  Ruth flailed through the waves, her bow rising and falling sickeningly. He vomited the last of the fish soup, treacle, and scarlet specks of whatever it was. When the wind grew too cold to stand in the bow, he joined the other deck passengers herding around the funnel for warmth.

  “Where’s our country now?” an old man kept asking.

  They had lost sight of land. The ocean was all around, green and silver, wild as nothing. They huddled around the funnel like cattle in a storm and the crash of the paddle wheel and the screaming wind made his ears roar.

  “Plenty warm below!” Ruth’s master shouted. “Shilling a head buys an hour down below with the engine! Men, think of your women! Fathers, think of the bairns. Down below it’s cozy as a cabin. Sure you won’t have your people suffer such inclement, nasty conditions for the sakes of a coin? Do the manly thing, gents. Shilling a head.”

  Spray lashed over them, soaking them. Tempted, Fergus took out his two remaining shillings. He was staring at them in his hand when the navvy touched his arm.

  “Hold on to your money, man; you’ll want it on the other side. And it only feels the colder after you come up.”

  “I’ll have you whipped! You close that lid of yours!” the master cried.

  “Get away or I’ll flip you like an egg.”

  The master glared and muttered and began herding below those who’d paid the fee.

  “Where has our country gone?” the old man asked.

  As it grew dark, it grew even colder. “Sure we ought to climb in the pens,” the navvy announced. “Nice and warm in with the woollies.”

  “The master will throw us in the sea,” a passenger said.

  “He’d like to but he won’t.”

  The others were frightened of the master’s wrath; Fergus was the only one to follow the navvy, climbing into one of the sheep pens where they stood among the bulky, butting animals, absorbing their heat.

  The navvy unwrapped his bundle and shared his cheese and bread. “Now you know what you are — an Irish animal, only not worth near so much as a decent breeding ram.”

  The other deck passengers began climbing into the pens as cold overcame their fear, and when the master came on deck and screamed at them they stolidly ignored him, hugging the sheep.

  “Spike them Irish blaggers out of there, you fellows!” the master ordered his deckhands. “Get the women, get the brats! Hear what I say, you damned Irish mikes, my boys will crack you very sharp and drop you in the deep if you don’t step out of the pens! You shall not roost with my cargo!”

  The navvy stood among the bawling animals, gripping his stick. On his face, the thin, light smile of a fellow who knew he could put up a fight.

  If the deckhands tried to clear them out, the navvy would violently resist, expect Fergus to fight alongside him, and where would it end? With the two of them being dropped overboard? A long silent plunge through a sleek depth of black water. A swallow of death.

  Terror; the world is terror. Terror stinging in your fingertips. Inside your mouth, the back of your throat. Terror like a cloud in your head. The world is just kills.

  But the hands ignored the master and refused to come near any of the pens and the master, screaming, “Blaggers! Criminals! Ireland’s well rid of you!” gave up and went below, leaving the passengers standing amid the packed pens of butting, shitting animals.

  It was barely warm enough among the bumbling sheep. He distrusted their bitter black hooves. The wool on their backs stank like lamp oil. Hungry, thirsty, the animals seemed resentful of the intrusion, blatting out furious cries, kicking and prancing and trying to stab his feet.

  He was too uncomfortable to sleep although his head was heavy. His stomach growled and spat as Ruth’s bow rose and fell, breaking the waves while her paddle wheel whipped the trailing sea to lather hour after hour, until it seemed unlikely the passage would ever end.

  After dark the breeze faded and the rolling waves flattened. The steamer kept whacking ahead, her bow plowing up the sea as if it were a turnip field, and he realized the passage must be ordinary to her, no matter how extraordinary it seemed to him.

  After a while he caught a weird aroma that prickled the hairs in his nostrils, so dark it spooked him, like smoke to a horse. Rich, thick, heavy as a club. He hoped he might be dreaming it — but he was surrounded by howling sheep, and certainly awake.

  Even amid the rancid wool he could smell it; there was no doubt the scent was real, not a product of dreams. “What is it? What is that smell?” he asked the navvy.

  “Land,” the navvy replied.

  The smell of earth, it was. But so ferocious and fresh, as though he had never smelled ground before.

  Floating over the sea, it had smelled like an open grave, weird and distinct.

  “The ground of England,” said the navvy. He stood up, puffing his pipe, surrounded by bleating ewes. “We’re coming in, so. Go up forward, an mhic, and have a look.”

  Hoisting himself out of the pen, Fergus ran along the wet planking to the prow, where he stood inhaling the scent of the ground of England as it came writhing across the dark.

  Ruth was entering the mouth of a river. Standing on anchor chains in the bow, he watched shore lights closing in. The other passengers were climbing out of the sheep pens and crowding along the rails.

  The banks of the river were sheathed with stone. Forests of black masts and spars rose up from the stone basins where ships lay.

  When Ruth’s engine suddenly cut, the stillness was a shock. Picked up by a steam tug, she was warped through a narrow water gate into a basin packed with three-masters, surrounded by stone quays and stone warehouses. As soon as lines were thrown, passengers began heaving baggage over the rails, leaping ashore and passing down wailing children without waiting for the gangway. Fergus joined the people climbing over the side.

  Shepherds in white smocks laughed and jeered at the emigrants staggering on the quay. After the sway of the ship it was difficult readjusting to the firmness, the fixity of ground, English ground.

  The English were yelping at them, teasing them that they were drunk. “I’d like a drop of what you’re having, Mike! Any Irish whiskey for me?”

  Runners shouted the names of lodging houses and prices. He saw runners tearing baggage from people’s hands, flipping it into their barrows and racing off, emigrants stumbling after them helplessly.

  He caught sight of the navvy leading a group of passengers who had closed ranks to fight off the runners. Forcing his way through a flock of wailing sheep, Fergus ran to catch up.

  Night Asylum

  NIGHT TRAFFIC BEHIND the quays was harsher and more violent than Dublin. Carts rumbled up and down the road, iron wheels grinding and snapping on the cobblestones. It was snowing lightly. The group was straggling. Some of the Ruths were having trouble keeping up.

  “Not far now,” the navvy said, looking around. “Keep together. Liverpool’s full of thieves.”

  Fergus stared down the dark streets they passed.

  Another city made of stone.

  “There she is.” Stopping at a corner, the navvy was pointing to a stone building across the road. “Fenwick Street Night Asylum.”

  A long line of people had coiled around the building. />
  “Is it the workhouse?” Fergus asked.

  “They give out soup, so what do you care?” The navvy laughed. He was already walking away. Fergus longed to go with him but didn’t have the strength to keep up, and was afraid the navvy would laugh at him if he tried to. He crossed the road and joined the queue.

  They were all emigrants off the steamers. He could tell from the shawls and red cloaks women wore, the shapes of men’s broken hats.

  A soldier in blue uniform stood at the front door admitting people in groups of four or five. The queue advanced slowly.

  He smelled soup each time the door opened. He was trying not to think of Luke, who was crowding his mind: her voice, her pale eyes, her bones.

  What you wanted must keep you going.

  “No talking inside,” the soldier warned, holding open the door. Once inside the queue moved slowly down a brick passage to a table where a clerk sat scratching names in a ledger and handing out tickets for soup and a bed.

  The scent of soup was intense; he could see the steam of it shining on the bricks. Hunger wetted his mouth.

  Poised with his pen, the clerk did not even look up. “Name? Where from?”

  “Ireland.”

  “Whereabouts?”

  He hesitated. “Dublin.”

  “What ship?”

  “Ruth.”

  Gas lamps hummed with light. He could smell the steam and the food. He had never felt so alone.

  THE EMIGRANTS fed at long tables. The great room was quiet except for crying children and the scrape of spoons. He was allowed to take a lump of bread from a basket.

  The soup was yellow, with scraps of fish. He crumbled the bread into his bowl, looking about him as he ate. Everyone else was concentrating on their food. Even the small children were eating vigorously.

  Finishing his soup, he suddenly felt clipped with weariness, and rested his head in his hands. A cramp shot through his belly. When it subsided, he took a breath, then another cramp shot through.