by Hazel Gaynor
It was the first wedding Maggie had been to, and although she would attend many others in her lifetime, she would never forget that particular wedding, because of that remarkable sky and the unexpected invitation to dance.
She was just turned sixteen at the time and felt as though she had already loved Séamus for most of her life. He was nineteen, the son of a labourer, the grandson of a labourer and a labourer himself. His crippling shyness was the thing which defined him, the thing which most people noticed about him. But not Maggie. She’d noticed his gentle manner, the freckles on his bare arms, his unusually long eyelashes, the way his feet turned inwards slightly when he walked, the way he licked his lips when he was nervous, the way he cared, uncomplainingly, for his sick father. She noticed all of this from a distance; too shy herself to acknowledge the feelings she had for this inconspicuous young man.
The wedding day had brought with it a sprinkling of snow and a rousing hoolie, family and friends travelling from the outlying villages of the parish to join in with the céilí and the craic late into the night. Maggie’s heart had fluttered when she’d noticed Séamus amongst them.
She knew him from school and from Sunday Mass in the parish church. For as long as she could remember, she’d admired him at Wednesday market and the annual summer fairs. She knew that he always walked the three miles from his home to Ballysheen; his father being unable to afford a donkey and cart, and she knew that he sold his sheep at market and sold their wool for the Foxford Mills. She knew that he played the melodeon well and that he had once ridden a horse faster than anyone else during the races in Michael Philbin’s field. She knew all this about him, and had often wondered if he’d noticed her at all.
How her heart soared as they danced together that evening, her entire body seeming to lift skywards with the whirling, soaring music, spiralling high up into the rafters along with the stamping of feet and the clapping of hands in time to the beat of the bodhran as Séamus guided her awkwardly in the dance. She knew then that she never wanted this man to leave her side. He never would; it was she who was leaving.
It was exactly a year to the day since they’d danced at the Brennan’s wedding when she finally found the courage to tell him.
‘I’m goin’ to America Séamus,’ she’d told him, as they sat by the fireside playing cards on a wet, dark January evening. ‘It’s all decided. I’m to go with Aunt Kathleen to Chicago. Peggy Madden, Katie Kenny and the Brennans are to travel with us, and some others.’ The crackle and spit from the fire filled the silence which descended upon the young couple then. Séamus didn’t speak. ‘We’re to go in the spring.’
The rain lashed against the windows. There was no other sound. Even the fire seemed to momentarily hush itself.
‘We’re to sail on a new liner called Titanic. They say it’s the biggest, finest, safest ocean liner there’s ever been built,’ she added, more to break the unbearable silence than anything. She felt silly then. Why had she told him this? Who cared about the ship or how big it was? That was the sort of stuff Peggy Madden and Pat Brogan were interested in, not her. To Maggie, the ship they would sail on was an entirely insignificant fact amid the reality of what the departure meant for her and Séamus.
He maintained his silence, throwing another peat brick onto the fire which sent a wave of moist, earthy smoke billowing across the room.
‘Would you think of coming too?’ she added hesitantly, already knowing his answer.
He looked at her, this man she adored with the uncomplicated certainty of youth, his cheeks rosy from the warmth of the flames. ‘Ah Maggie, you know I can’t. Not with Da so sick an’ all. Anyway, we haven’t a shillin’ to our name. I could never be affording one of those boat tickets, never mind two, even if he had been well enough.’
They’d talked before about the prospect of emigrating, it being a common occurrence in the Parish. Séamus had a brother in Philadelphia but with his mam dead and his da ill, he knew that a trip to America would not be his for the making. Maggie’s fate in the matter lay entirely in the hands of her guardian, her aunt Kathleen, who had first made the trip to America herself twenty years ago and was completely enamoured with the place and the opportunities it offered. She’d written often to her niece about the prospect of joining her in Chicago, but one thing or another had always prevented it from happening. This time she had made up her mind; Maggie would go back with her in the spring and no matter how much this arrangement might break Maggie’s heart, there was no changing Kathleen Murphy’s mind once it was made up.
‘Well, what of it then?’ Maggie’s voice was tinged with anger, frustration and despair. ‘What are we to do with me set on goin’ and ye set on stayin’?’ Her eyes filled with tears, the flames of the fire reflecting in them.
‘I don’t know Maggie, sure I don’t.’ Séamus sighed, placing his cards down on the fireside. He stood up, seeming so tall in their small cottage, his head nearly touching the beams. ‘You’ll be able to write me. You’re good with your letters and words and I’ll enjoy readin’ all about your adventures. You can write those stories you’re always talking of.’
Maggie smiled, unable to sustain her anger at him. It was an impossible situation they faced, their destinies shaped, not by their own decisions, but by nature and economics and politics and things they were too young to even understand.
‘And if I do write, you must write back Séamus Doyle, you must, or what will I know of you in years to come?’ She stood also, and moved to his side. He wrapped his strong arms around her and she lent her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
‘I’ll try Maggie, but I’m not the best with my words, you know that.’ Gazing into the flames over Maggie’s shoulder he desperately wished that their circumstances could be different. ‘Maybe I can ask Bridie to help,’ he added, as an afterthought.
Maggie pulled back from his embrace and looked at him now, seriously. ‘Yes, do that. Get Bridie to help with your letters ‘cos I don’t know what I’ll do if I don’t hear a word from you. Promise me you’ll do that?’
‘I promise.’
They’d stood then in their fireside embrace for a few moments longer, until Kathleen entered the house and reminded Séamus that it was getting dark out and he should be making his way home to his Da.
Over the following days, weeks and months, Maggie and Séamus hadn’t talked again of her impending journey to America, continuing with their usual routines and meeting under the sixth blossom tree on a Wednesday after market. They talked of the passing of the Home Rule Bill, the sowing of the potatoes, the cutting of the turf, the hurling and the Gaelic League. They watched the snow fall on the mountain tops, the buds form on the blossom trees and the lambs frolic in the fields. Maggie would usually enjoy these predictable, seasonal events which marked the passing of the months better than any calendar ever could, but now the natural rhythms of nature she observed in every melting snowflake, each budding leaf, brought her and the thirteen other residents of their small community closer to the day when they would leave Ballysheen; closer to the day when she would leave Séamus.
They’d said their final goodbyes after Sunday Mass; the last the would-be travellers would attend in their local church.
‘I’ll not be comin’ to any American wake Maggie,’ he’d told her, aware of the traditions and plans to see off the fourteen travellers over the next few nights with music and drinking. ‘I’ll not be mournin’ you until you’re dead in a box on the kitchen table. So this will be my goodbye.’
He’d pressed a set of rosary beads and a silver hair comb into her hands and promised that he would write. ‘And when you come back Maggie Murphy, I’ll be waiting, under our tree.’
That was where he stood now; under the sixth blossom tree.
Maggie watched a slow, sad smile spread across his lips as she gasped and raised a hand to her chest at the sight of him. She walked forwards in a daze, hardly noticing the traps which she passed or the horses nuzzling into their nosebags
and kicking impatiently at the ground.
‘You came.’ Her voice was barely a whisper, her hands trembling as they reached out to take hold of his. ‘You came after all.’
They stood and looked at each other for a moment, neither one of them able to move, neither one of them knowing what to say.
‘Yes, Maggie. I came. But I’m not saying goodbye again. I just wanted to give ye this.’
He handed her a small package wrapped in brown paper and tied with a single piece of fraying string.
She turned it over in her hands. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s my letters Maggie.’ She looked at him, not understanding, tears pricking her eyes. ‘These are my letters to you in America. I’ve been writin’ them for the last while, y’know, on quiet evenin’s and when I had a moment free. I asked Bridie to help me. I wasn’t sure how long a letter would take to get to America, so I figured that this way you can read them whenever ye like and won’t have to waiting on any deliveries.’
The sudden cry of a cockerel nearby made one of the horses skitter, the metal fastenings on the harness jangling noisily against its sturdy flanks until the jarvey shushed and soothed it.
‘But Séamus, I….’ Maggie’s emotions washed over her now, all of the despair, all of the supressed worry and uncertainty about the journey ahead suddenly overwhelming her. She allowed her tears to fall freely as she clutched the simple packet of letters in her hands.
‘And when you’re planning on coming back home, you can write to tell me,’ Séamus continued, grasping the tops of Maggie’s shoulders to impress his words upon her. ‘I’ll wait here for you as usual. Every Wednesday after market. I’ll wait until you come back Maggie Murphy.’ He paused, righting himself to stand tall and taking in a deep, long breath. ‘You will come back one day won’t ye? Come back and be the girl I remember? Be the same Maggie Murphy; the girl who came home?’
‘I hope so Séamus Doyle, I do. I hope so.’
Their last, tender embrace among the falling blossom was one of many which took place that morning in their small village and in homes across the parish. Promises to keep in touch and sentiments of love were exchanged on almost every doorstep; mothers wept for their departing sons and daughters, sisters held onto sisters, brothers grasped brothers, friends embraced friends and neighbour held neighbour.
Kathleen Murphy stood for a moment in the doorway of her Irish home. She watched a spider in the doorframe, wondering how long it had lived among those cracks in the wood, cracks she hadn’t noticed until now. She wondered how much of this house, of this parish she would recall in the future, aware that with Maggie in America with her, there would be little reason to return here again. She wondered whether those who dwelt in this home in years to come would ever know the names Maggie and Kathleen Murphy; ever know that they, and twelve others, had departed from this small village on a calm spring morning in search of a better life.
With the last of the luggage loaded into the traps, the fourteen travellers took their seats. Still clutching the packet of letters, Maggie climbed up to take the last seat in the last trap alongside her aunt Kathleen. With a final blessing of holy water and a prayer for protection from the Parish Priest, the jarveys gave a sharp tug on the reins. The horses and donkeys skittered to attention, the harnesses jolted taught and fourteen hearts lurched as the carts rumbled slowly forwards.
CHAPTER 4 - Chicago, April 15th, 1982
Grace Butler gathered her long black hair at the nape of her neck and held it loosely to one side as she bent forward to blow out the twenty one candles on her cake. The bright flames swayed in mesmerising unison as a light breeze drifted in through the open kitchen window, the motion reminding her of the late-summer cornfields around their small farm. One last dance before harvest time her father had said to her one August evening, as they sat on the old gate and watched a beautiful sunset turn the ripe cornfield to a dazzling display of liquid gold. One last dance.
As a man of few words, this unexpectedly beautiful remark had stayed with her ever since. She remembered those words again now as she blew out her birthday candles; remembered him, as the small group of friends and family who had gathered in her mother’s kitchen sang Happy Birthday and clapped with love and admiration for a girl who had come of age; for a girl who had returned to this humble, family home two years earlier to bury the father she adored.
Until that very dark jolt, life had been satisfyingly predictable for Grace; safe and unremarkable. Hers had been a contented childhood, spent playing in the hayfields with her twin brother Art and the kids from the other smallholdings around their Illinois River Valley home. She had fond memories of lazy summer days spent splashing her bare feet in the cooling streams and running her fingers through the crystal clear waters of the rivers which flowed around their farmland, catching sticklebacks and bullheads in jam jar aquariums, eating honeysuckle flowers and rubbing nettle stings with the large, flat dock leaves which nature had cleverly planned to always grow nearby.
The rivers which meandered and intertwined across the countryside, lazily in the summer and more violently after the winter rains and snow, were as much a part of Grace’s life as they were a part of the landscape. For as long as she could remember, she had felt curiously drawn to the water; entranced by the sight of it, soothed by the sound of it and intrigued by the dangers and mysteries hidden within it. Grace knew that just below the gentle, inviting surface there were dangerous eddies and deceptive currents, which even a strong swimmer like her would not be able to kick against. She respected the water for this, never underestimating its power and admiring its beauty with a cautious eye.
Her father had once told her that water has a memory; that every rock, every stone, every grain of muddy sediment leaves something of a fingerprint in the water which flows over it. Grace liked this idea, imagining the water of the great lakes and oceans of the world to echo with the memories of the places, people and events which it had passed on its meandering journey.
Grace, Art and the other kids were a familiar sight in their neighbourhood; at one with the wildlife and nature around them, free to roam at will until the inky blue skies of dusk signalled that it was time for them to trudge home along the dusty pathways forged by the tractors and heavy machinery of harvest time.
From the carefree life of a farmer’s daughter, Grace had settled quickly into the routine of school, excelling academically and socially. During the summer of ’75 she’d blossomed, quite literally overnight, into a stunning teenager, her natural beauty and developing female form not going unnoticed by the hormonally-charged boys in her class. She’d had her first kiss that fall and lost her virginity the following spring. Sam Adamson was his name. They’d locked themselves into a barn one rainy afternoon and fumbled with zippers, buttons and bra straps on the dusty floor while a chicken pecked at husks of grain in the corner. It was all over in minutes. She couldn’t see what all the fuss was about.
With her almost luminous, fair skin and velvet-black hair, there was little doubting Grace’s Irish heritage. It wasn’t spoken of very often in the family, but she knew that her Great Nana Maggie (her great-grandmother on her mother’s side) had travelled as a teenager from Ireland to America, as indeed had her great-grandfather James, the man who Maggie had married soon after settling in Chicago. There were very few photos of Maggie as a young girl, but in the rare ones that did exist, Grace could see the unmistakeable likeness between them, particularly since she’d hit her teenage years. It was her dream to travel to Ireland one day to see the country of her origins for herself. She’d been planning the trip with Jimmy when her life suddenly fell apart.
She met Jimmy Shepard at the University of Illinois where they were both enrolled to study Journalism. He sat next to her in their first lecture and asked her if he could borrow a pen. She’d spent the next forty minutes trying to sneak a better look at him out of her eye corner, catching just the occasional glimpse of his sandy-coloured hair, broad jawline and long, dark eyelashes
. In reality, she’d spent most of the lecture admiring his battered Converse sneakers. By the time the bell rang for recess, she hadn’t written one word on her notepad and had absolutely no recollection of anything the Professor had said. Jimmy returned her pen, along with a piece of A4 paper on which he’d scribbled Thank you gorgeous. Can I buy you a coffee? They’d been inseparable ever since.
The vibrant, cosmopolitan existence she experienced as a nineteen-year-old in her first semester at university couldn’t have been further removed from the tranquil, innocent days of her childhood, but self-assured and poised as always Grace excelled in her new life. While she loved her old school friends for their uncomplicated lives and their reliability, she grew to love her new student friends for their complex lives and their spontaneity. They introduced her to different music, new, innovative writers and completely new fashions and she realised how sheltered her life had been until then. Jimmy himself was a revelation to Grace; a city boy, he was self-assured, witty, street-wise and a far cry from the awkward, uncertain fumbling’s of Sam Adamson in the barn.
She was a popular girl in her dorm and her talent for writing had not gone unnoticed by her Professors. ‘You have a genuine gift,’ Professor Andrews had told her towards the end of the fall semester of her first year. She liked Professor Andrews. He was a tall, narrow man with angular features and a crooked smile; he reminded Grace of her Grandpa. She coughed as he wiped the blackboard vigorously, sending dust flying around the room. ‘Yes, you have a real talent young lady,’ he continued. ‘So, tell me, who do you get it from, mom or dad?’
Grace thought for a moment. ‘My dad, I guess.’ She felt a little embarrassed then, afraid that he might think her dad was a successful writer himself. ‘But he’s just a farmer. He doesn’t actually write anything himself.’