“The weather is sweet, ain’t it, miss? You are lucky to have such a run.” Stuffing the tobacco in his pipe, the sailor went off to the galley in search of a light, and Molly handed one of the little fish to Fergus, wrapping the others in a handkerchief.
“Aren’t you hungry yourself?” he asked.
“Not so very.”
She sat back, closing her eyes.
“My head’s not in order. I wish I could get the letters faster,” he complained.
“You’re saying you are stupid, but I don’t believe it.”
He heard the bos’n’s pipe twittering. The wind had shifted. Looking up, he watched sailors running up the ratlines. Looking at the men so high, he thought of the weird, silver days high on the Pass, hiding from dragoons. The air had a clean taste up there, when he’d lived so bare and rigorous; so narrow in his thoughts. Sucking herbs in his mouth, until they were soft enough to chew. Not letting his mind hold anything.
The sailors up highest, near the peak of the main, were bending royals, the smallest, uppermost sails.
“A deck looks very small from so high.”
Fergus saw it was Ormsby who had spoken, the old man standing by the rail in his velvet coat and rawhide slippers, carrying a cane with a silver knob.
“The sea seems enormous,” he continued, “and the ship seems like nothing at all.”
“Have you been up yourself?” Fergus asked.
“When I was young.”
“Perhaps I shall.”
“No!” Molly said. “You’ll break your head.”
He looked her.
“I see it clear. I can! You’d fall and break your head and where should I be then?”
“I won’t fall —”
“Don’t you even say it. You’d leave me alone, wouldn’t you? For the sake of nothing, for a stupid boy’s game?”
He felt embarrassed in front of Ormsby by her passionate intensity. “Molly —”
“Promise you won’t try it. Promise me, man.”
“Molly . . .”
“It’s no good, you should never have said it, you should never have thought it nor looked at it — now you must promise. Swear it.”
“It really isn’t so treacherous —” Ormsby began.
She cut him off. “Swear it, Fergus, you must.” Reaching out, she grabbed his hand.
“All right, all right,” he said peevishly. “Though I tell you I could have —”
“It spooks me, man, it does. I wish you’d never said nothing of it, that old stick, or looked up it, now we’re so close. Now we’re nearly to the other side, and I won’t have you fall. I won’t.”
“All right, all right.”
She kissed his hand.
“Will you introduce me to your friend?” said Ormsby.
Fergus introduced him and the old man made a bow to Molly, tipping his hat. “You run a very neat game, so I hear, miss.”
“Neat enough. Neat and clean.” She sounded irritated.
“Perhaps we might have a flutter sometime. Thirty One, trente-et-un, do you play?”
“You’re a gentleman, mister. You’re high stakes. I’m not that sort of a game.”
“We might play a few hands very lightly. Just to pass the time.”
She shrugged. “If you like.”
“Excellent.”
The beaky old man seemed to have nothing else to say, but he lingered by the rail.
“Are you an American?” Molly asked.
“I’m not a Yankee, miss, but I’ve spent most of my life on the other side.”
“Tell us what it is like, then.”
“What do you wish to know?”
“Can we get a farm?”
“That depends. Land can be cheap enough, rough land especially. It’s clearing it and farming it that requires capital.”
“Clearing?” Fergus said. “You mean drive the tenants off?”
“No, no — clear the timber.”
“And the tenants? Are there tenants?”
“The tenants, if you call them so, are Indians of one kind or another.”
“And they must be cleared? Is that what it takes to get a farm?”
“Farmers will clear Indians, yes, or sickness does the work. Cheap land is nightland, the backwoods of Illinois, or the Huron Tract. Pulling stumps and getting in a crop to feed animals over the winter, even if it’s just Indian corn. You can acquire one hundred sixty acres cheap enough but you’ll find it’s rough work to farm.”
“I don’t want ground that’s been cleared!”
“See how you feel when you have the cash.”
Was it true? It would be terribly easy to make any piece of ground seem your own, by working it. It always had. As much your own as your hand or fist or head.
“How much capital do you reckon it takes to go farming?” Molly asked.
“Three or four hundred pounds. To start in a small way. My advice to you, miss, is try the cotton mills. Lowell, Saco, Woonsocket, and Fall River — the mills seem to have an endless appetite for hands.”
“I could have stayed at Derry to be a hand! I wasn’t born for mills, mister, I’d lose my mind.”
“Well, when we get to Quebec, you’ll see ladies on the quays, looking for girls —”
“Looking for slaveys?” she said bitterly.
“Yes — a lady’s maid or some such.”
“And how much wages do they get?”
“Oh, a dollar a week, perhaps. A couple of louis. Three or four shillings. German servants always preferred to Irish.”
“I’m not nice enough for a slavey! I want the sweet wide-open, mister! I want land!”
“Then don’t get snagged in the large towns. Start west, and keep going. If you’re far enough ahead of the crowd you’ve done well. Go too far, of course, you stand to lose your hair.”
“Lose my hair?”
“The savages on the western plains count coup by lifting a scalp. That lovely shade of yours would be valued considerable, so take care you keep it.” Ormsby turned to leave, then stopped. “Shall we play a hand or two, miss, tomorrow afternoon? Cards on deck, right here in the lee, if the weather stays fine? I’d invite you both into the aftercabin, but Mr. Blow would make himself disagreeable.”
“Here is good,” she told him curtly.
Ormsby nodded, tipped his hat, and resumed his strut around the ship.
“He’s a funny little bird,” said Molly. “Lose my hair, indeed! Never I shall. Sell it, more likely — I wonder what they’d pay.”
“He says he will follow a river like a wide road to the west, and if I go with him, I’d find a place in the trade, he says, the fur trade.”
She studied him. “And what did you say?”
“That I couldn’t accept.”
“Why not?”
“On account of you. Because of you and me, Moll.”
She was stuffing the bowl of her clay pipe. Not looking at him, tamping the tobacco with her thumb. Perhaps she thought him a fool for turning down Ormsby’s offer.
Looking at her profile, her brown cheeks, small nose, small mouth — the strong jaw and mess of dark reddish hair streaked and filigreed by the ocean sun — he wondered what she’d have done if Ormsby had offered her a clear chance, an opportunity. Would she have left him — easily, lightly — as she had along that road in Wales?
Sheltered between the bulwark and the deckhouse, the wind cut very little. The planks were warm in the light, and a pungent, sweet scent of tar hung over the deck.
“Tell me, man,” Molly said suddenly, her voice small with intensity. “Tell me what it is, tell me what will happen, tell me something, because it’s getting fucking near, and I’m scared, I can’t stand those navvy camps again.”
“I am thinking we’ll buy horses, Moll.”
He had not framed a plan in words. Desperation, the pressure of her anxiety, had sprung the notion out of him. Almost instantly he could see it whole.
“Horses?”
“I
trust my horse eye, Molly. I’d choose old stringers I could turn into something. Pick them carefully, looking for the bones, and get them cheap. Feed them up to sell at a profit. I reckon we could do worse than trading in horses.”
“There it is, there it is,” she murmured, “a fellow with a plan.”
Taking up his hand, she brought it to her lips and kissed it.
He still had the herring in his other hand and ate the little fish in two bites, licking salt and oil from his fingers.
“We might move along, so.” He felt the pressure of her hand squeezing his. “Build up a string. Might have a cart. Find the fairs. You could whirl them with a pack of cards. What do you think, Moll? Trading horses, and a pack of cards.”
“It’s good,” she said firmly, keeping hold of his hand. “Might build up a stake that way.”
Keep moving, he thought.
Horses and a girl.
ROLLED UP in her cloak, she lay with her back to him, asleep in the berth, while the ship creaked and sighed.
With the stake from Pharaoh, they could begin a string by picking up two or three cheap, sound animals, selected carefully, and a cart. He would graze them along the roads until they were worth more than he’d paid. All the while moving west. Selling animals to farmers. Buying more. Feeding them up and selling to carters, to liverymen.
Plow horses, cart horses, dray horses. Carriage steppers, saddle mounts.
Hunters.
Big roan hunters if he could get his hands on any.
Martin Coole was snoring in the berth above.
Lumps of sea ice bumped and scraped against the hull, very near their heads — perhaps a warning not to think so far ahead so glibly. You never knew what was coming.
But he couldn’t sleep. His mind piling up riches, adding and accumulating.
With profits of trading, he’d keep adding to his string, until he was driving a herd of one or two hundred animals, like the hunting chiefs.
He could hear old Brighid snoring in her uppermost berth above the Cooles. Somewhere in the hold an infant was stirring. Not full-throated crying, not yet anyway. Only a little scratch of noise.
If life is so valuable, why is it invisible, practically weightless, like a cup of air?
He touched the blackthorn stick with his fingers. The wood felt cool and smooth.
Cold sank down the hatchway and was sidling through the hold, through the thick atmosphere of people sleeping. Their breath made white plaque along beams.
People coughing.
Horses, land. You want everything opening.
Her.
You want everything.
The Labrador Current
THE AIR HAD TURNED COLD, and the sea ran dark, nearly black. With the Cooles they were standing at the rail, peering over the side, looking for fish, when Fergus heard cries and, looking up, saw seabirds circling above the peak.
Martin Coole insisted that the cold, the birds, and the black water were all indications Laramie had struck the Labrador Current. “We shall be passing the rock of Newfoundland any day now. A few days more and we’ll see Quebec.” Coole put his arm around his wife, hugging her. “You’ll see — we’ll establish our school in Indiana — we’ll bring the learning to their red minds.”
“I’ll not see my own mother again, that’s all I know. I want my garden — and your children want shoes more than red men need books! We’re thrown upon the world, thanks to you, like a pack of cabin johns — I hate America!”
“You’re weary of the passage, dear.” Coole tried to embrace her but she wriggled free, grabbed her children by their hands, and fled for the hatchway.
The schoolmaster watched his family disappear below. “She’ll have a sweeter garden in America, sweeter by far, than ever she had in north Tipperary.”
“How do you know, mister?” Molly asked.
“I have faith.”
“Perhaps she won’t have nothing so again. Perhaps she’s right and there’s nothing there, not even a pair of shoes.”
“I don’t believe that and you don’t either, miss, or you’d not be aboard.”
She was silent for a moment, considering. “I believe nothing’s for sure and nothing comes as you think you want it.”
Coole shook his head and turned to the rail, resting his elbows and gazing out to sea.
They had lost the blue of the western ocean. The sky was low, streaked with gray and yellow light. Fergus met Ormsby stalking the deck, wrapped in his fur coat.
“Nasty waters here, ice as big as houses,” the old man said. “ Desdemona out of Dublin was smashed by an ice castle in the Lab Current. Went down so quick, there was only six or seven of them and a monkey that survived.”
THE FIRST ice castles appeared on the following day, butts of white ice as big as the ship, cruising gently in the black, calm water. Laramie had lost the hard wind, the strong way, of the western ocean. With a wintry thinness in the air, sails were loose, the yards creaking and squealing as they swung aimlessly, banging in stays. The sun was weaker than mid-ocean, and there was plenty of bitter fog. The rigging was sheathed in white ice, and the sailors smeared their hands with sticky tar before going aloft, and wrapped rags around their feet.
The cold, thin air seemed to exhaust Laramie. She was sluggish.
He couldn’t smell America, all he could smell was ice on the wind, but Nimrod said the country lay close enough now. “If the old barky don’t run into an ice castle and break up and drown us, you shall see the corner of Newfoundland any day, if it ain’t for this wretched fog. If we don’t get caught in pack ice in the gulf, but find the leads and the open water, we’ll slip the mouth of the St. Lawrence soon enough. Then it is only a matter of beating the current and the tides on the pull up to Quebec.”
It began to snow. By the time the cabooses were lit for supper, heavy wet snow dazzled the ship, thickening on every sheet and shroud, piling up on deck, drifting into knee-deep piles against the bulkheads.
Sailors kept lookout during the night. Fergus stood with Nimrod Blampin in the foredeck, peering through the thickly falling snow, trying to spot ice castles looming. The sea was flat and the ship was moving very gently on cold, weak air, almost adrift. Ranged along both sides, the lookouts smoked their pipes and sipped hot coffee. “By the time we see anything, it’s too late to change course,” Nimrod told him. “We’re hardly making way enough to steer.”
But Laramie crept through the night safely and the next morning a wind came up to blow the snow off the ship, shake the ice from the rigging, and rustle the sky clear.
Crossing the Mountains
THE OLD MAN GAVE Molly a buffalo robe to wrap herself in, and they played cards sitting on deck, in the lee, in bright, cold sunshine. She dealt Pharaoh, but the old man soon tired of that game and taught her to play trenteetun for penny stakes. The play was even, the coins going back and forth.
Ormsby paid the black cook to bring them hot tea from the galley, and plates of toasted biscuits, slathered with Irish butter and honey from Ormsby’s own supplies.
Fergus sat on another buffalo robe, working at the letters, using the Dublin Universal, frequently breaking off to watch the sailors aloft, fascinated by the shifting pattern of canvas being set and taken in; the speed and daring of men so high.
Ormsby was taciturn, drinking tea, smoking cigars, and dourly flipping cards. But he paid attention to the weather, looking up every time there was a change in the wind’s force or direction. Fergus realized Ormsby was feeling the ship, anxious for her — as he was himself. He loved to feel they were grabbing every scrap of wind.
The buffalo robes were only a small part of Ormsby’s baggage. “I have all my silver and china down below, ready in canoe packs. Forty-two panes of glass sunk in molasses barrels — I’ll own the first glass windows in the Athabaska country. I only hope I reach Montreal in time to catch the brigade.”
“Are your friends in America?” Molly asked.
“My friends are dead, miss.”
It was warm enough in the sun. The buffalo robes smelled of old dust. Every now and then a shear of ice broke off the rigging and shattered on the deck.
“You don’t have any people?” Molly asked the old man.
“None left.”
Looking aloft, Fergus watched the seabirds circling. For the past few days they had been spattering the decks with white globs of dung.
“Shall I tell you how I met my wife?” Ormsby asked.
“If you like.” Molly was dealing the fresh hand.
“I was leading a brigade from the bay across the Rocky Mountains. Bringing twenty packs of otter skins to the Russians in California. In those days, the Russians allowed the Company certain rights on their territory, and we paid in otters.
“It was October, late in the season for crossing the mountains. At Jasper House we fitted out a string of packhorses and started climbing for Howse Pass. However, the winter came in. The horses were no use in snow, and we were too far to turn back. We had to turn the horses loose and drag everything on sleds. At the top of the pass, the air was gray with snow. It was driving so hard, you could barely open your eyes.
“You don’t often meet Indians in the mountains, but we came across a party of Peigans. Some on foot, others leading their ponies. How they got them up there, I do not know. They were not people we traded with. None of the grass nations are much for trade. The furs are of little value, and the people are brave, daring, and restless, never to be insulted with impunity.
“At first, I supposed it was a war party — until I saw they had women with them.
“They had been trading for tobacco with the Flathead Indians, on the western side of the mountains.
“We all took shelter there in a little notch, and brewed up tea. Not that it was a good place to stop, but some Indians, especially the grass nations, will prick easily if you don’t do the right thing.
“She was wearing her winter robe when first I saw her. She was small, she was fine, and right there I appealed to her father, old Yellowtail, a famous horse thief. ‘Why, I will have your daughter for my wife,’ I said. ‘I’ll pay you an excellent gun, a barrel of powder, three pounds English money, a case of tea, treat her well, and honor to your family.’ We smoked a good pipe on it, and she was mine.”
The Law of Dreams Page 32