by Kalyan Ray
I felt powerless to question destiny.
Brendan
1846
It was late when Mr. O’Flaherty came back home from Mullaghmore. He walked slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground as if he was memorizing every bit of the road’s surface and curve, and he was entering blindness and preparing for it.
We sat before our meal which I had prepared. Maeve wanted to say the prayer, which she did with a great sense of importance. The meal for which we so elaborately thanked our Lord was half a potato for Mr. O’Flaherty and a glass of water; one potato I had cut into squares, triangles, and one star, and some diced tiny pieces that were put into the shape of a conical hill for Maeve, together with her small glass of sweet buttermilk; I had made a mash from my potato and had poured myself some ale. Maeve was delighted with her meal, while I calculated how many more we would have before we all starved. I put what was left of the buttermilk by Maeve’s pillow, on the bed I made for her near the last warmth of the fireplace, in case she got hungry at night. That, and a glass of cool water.
As I was putting the meal together, Mr. O’Flaherty had spoken in a low voice with Maeve. Maeve did not ask about Padraig’s ma anymore, as she had done all day with me. As she knelt before bed with Mr. O’Flaherty by her side, I heard them pray together for the safe voyage of Mrs. Aherne’s soul.
Over her head, his gaze met mine and held it. It was a bitter struggle for me to stay silent and not cry out in my heart’s pain for the loss of what had been left of my own childhood. My meek mother gone, the strong and beautiful Maire Aherne dead, my reckless friend Padraig lost and likely under the heavy earth, and I, sick at heart and bereft.
• • •
WE BARELY SURVIVED 1846, with no rent to pay and only three mouths to feed. Winter set in, and with it hard rain and sleet. We knew that dread times were come to our very doorstep. We were a fort besieged.
The reports were getting more ominous across our ravaged land. Mr. Rafferty came by again and stayed with us for a day. He told us that in a village near Clare Abbey, a man with a gun came out of a ditch and confronted the overseer face-to-face. The overseer was accompanied by five soldiers just a few steps behind him. After shooting the overseer, the man from the ditch coolly told them to hold off, as he had done all he wanted, that is, to shoot only the overseer. Then he disappeared into the night, the soldiers standing frozen. The overseer, howling with pain, stumbled the better part of a mile to get himself home, around which had gathered a great number of local tenants, laughing aloud and letting it be known that far from going for a doctor, they did approve of the ninety pellets in his sorry hide. But such acts had dire consequences, for the English authorities turned out nine hundred tenants on the streets, tumbling their homes. That is, ten tenants for each pellet.
The Great Hunger was now in plain sight here in County Sligo. Half-naked mothers, shivering and pale, rooted amid dead turnip fields like flocks of blackbirds. Children and emaciated men lined the lanes, young boys crouching by road signs to Boyle and Collooney, too weak to stand. In Sligo, Ned Behan told me that every morning there was the unthinkable sight, growing more common in village lanes: the gaunt dead, and the hovering and bold morning crows.
I had begun to wake up with angry headaches. Their only remedy for me was to walk them off, alone. I would trudge down to the wharf and sometimes stare at the water for hours together. At Sligo harbour, where ships had returned from other parts of Ireland, Ballyshannon, Tralee, Killala, and Dublin, I heard the sailors talk of unbelievable sights by busy quaysides, where waiting to be shipped out from our Ireland to English ports were mighty piles, bales and boxes full of peas and lard, honey and seed, herring, wheat and rye, and butter in hundreds of huge firkins, not to mention great numbers of sheep and beef-cattle waiting to be boarded. Grain was being sent to Scotland for making whiskey. How could Ireland be dying of hunger?
By the wharfside I once found an old discarded London newspaper. Mr. O’Flaherty and I read it, every column on each page. We tried to discern from these worn pages what the English thought of the panorama of hell unfolding all over Ireland. But there was nothing about our starvation in the pages; the biggest news and controversy, it seemed, was the shifting of the venue of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race from Henley-on-Thames to Putney.
Ireland might not exist after all, judging from these pages. I understood then that we lived on a separate island, surrounded by water, indifference, and death.
• • •
FAMINE FEVER MADE its appearance now, all over the starving counties. As people fell ill, their faces swelled and the fever grew and intensified, their hands jerked about uncontrollably, and their faces turned unaccountably black. We began to hear that some of the sick—so burning with the fever they felt—jumped into icy waters. Many threw themselves from their windows in delirium. Some were sore tormented by a virulent and disfiguring rash, so many called it the spotted fever. The odour was so loathsome that even dear ones were abandoned and left to die, lying in their detritus, which smelt hardly worse. When the doors were forced open, the malodour was so powerful that the officials pitched back into the streets, a-covering their faces, spitting and retching to get away.
Mr. Scully at Sligo harbour told me what he had heard from travelers about the horrors in Skibbereen, once an agricultural centre west of the fine harbour at Cork. He showed me an outraged letter which Nicholas Cummins, the respected magistrate of Cork, had written to the Duke of Wellington, an Irishman himself, which was printed in the Times on Christmas Eve, 1846, about the numerous famine dead here and the state of the land. An English official wrote that where he went, skeletal figures descended on him and tore open his clothes begging and gibbering. At one point a woman, naked but for a rag around her bony loins, handed him something. He looked down and saw a dying infant, its umbilical cord still attached.
There was another odd item in the papers: Through some quirk of nature, mostly in County Clare, children in the extremity of starvation were growing long facial hair, sometimes as much as grew on their heads, causing some mirth among passing officials from England who speculated about their undoubted superiority to the Irish species.
Back home, I had begun to dread the arrival of Mr. Rafferty in his cart. He invariably stopped by to see Mr. O’Flaherty and bring us news, all of which was bad. Now he told us what been perpetrated in Ballinglass of County Galway, a prosperous village with sixty-one houses, built and kept by the tenants. Besides, by their own labour they had reclaimed four hundred acres from a neighbouring bog. Here a certain Mrs. Gerrard had all her tenants summarily evicted although the rent money was not unpaid. But we Irish had no rights. That is why we curse Elizabeth, curse Cromwell, curse history, and our fate. Captain Brown of the Forty-ninth Infantry and numerous police constables threw them out. The women wailed and clung to their doorposts, from which they were dragged away, the children bewildered and screaming with fear. The families dug holes in the ground, roofing them with sticks and sod. There they stayed the next few nights. These were called “scalps.” The ones that were deeper and wider were called “scalpeens.” Ah, the depth and marvel of our Irish words!
Some blackened their faces at night and took to the killing of small landlords, who were no longer easy on their beds.
“The great ones, like our Palmerston,” said Mr. O’Flaherty, “make sure they are out of reach.”
• • •
THAT WINTER I sodded over the seaward wall, but the cold would finger its way through every crack, quivering the wick-flame of the candle. The path outside our cottage grew hard and slippery as a mirror, as it had taken turns to sleet and rain and sleet again.
One dead night, an enormous moon stood overhead and gloated on the Bulben until everything froze over, and the tree in the front yard cracked down the middle. That tree would surely die, turning skeletal. It seemed an omen.
I tried to keep a cheerful face, and in the last months spent time reading or telling Maeve stories. When she asked about
her father, we told her how he had bravely set out for travel, and that seemed to merge into all the other stories of journeys and voyages to far lands. She loved to draw on a slate board while Mr. O’Flaherty wrote, and when I read, Maeve would pretend to do the same.
So, I thought, I’d turn my thoughts from hunger and slow fear and teach her to read. Mr. O’Flaherty watched with his usual twinkle. I knew he was letting me take all the decisions of raising Maeve myself, as if it were a benign apprenticeship, a vocation for life in an era of death.
I took her to church with me on the Sabbaths, but Mr. O’Flaherty in the passing days seemed not to want to go, and when Maeve begged to stay back with him in our garden and listen to his stories instead of the weekly hectoring and thundering of Father Conlon. When it troubled me, I remembered how Padraig’s ma too had chosen thus.
In September of 1847, while Ireland starved, my lost friend Padraig’s daughter Maeve, our joy, perfectly mastered her letters two months before she rose to four years of age.
• • •
A FEVERED FLIGHT from Ireland, the stampede of the starving and the well-nigh dead had started, and having started, became a roaring stream westward. The great Lord Palmerston had let it be known through all his wide holdings in County Sligo that he had made fine arrangements to transport his tenants across the sea on comfortable ships, with ample provisions for one and all, adequate drinking water and ale. Upon landing in Canada, we were told, we would be met by his lordship’s agents, who’d give us seed money to buy fertile farmland there, masters of the land we tilled. Such tidings came to us in waves of rumour, despair, and hope.
“What better offer can there be?” I asked Mr. O’Flaherty, when I brought back this bit of news from Sligo harbour, “and why would he even offer us this?”
Rubbing his hands over the small flame, Mr. O’Flaherty explained to me, “We shall be ballasts, Brendan. The ships which bring over the Canadian timber have little to take back. If you remember that his lordship will pay the ship-owners three pounds twelve shillings per passenger to be transported to Canada, it is the cheapest way to clear the tenants who have rented and tilled his land for generations. If they were to continue living here—and he were to do his moral duty—the cost of keeping one person in the poorhouse is seven pounds three shillings per year. His lordship’s grasp of arithmetic is impeccable. And if large numbers of his starving tenantry took up arms in their dying hands, it would be an embarrassment, for Palmerston is on his way to becoming the Prime Minister of Britain. Aye, Brendan, we shall have to see what fine greeting awaits us in the Promised Land.”
I surveyed his unsmiling face. The coins that Mrs. Aherne had left us had gone in buying what we could at exorbitant prices. We were facing stark hunger now.
I voiced my fear. “But if we wait, things are going to get worse. As bad as surely the ships are, they will become worse. What if the free transports stop?”
With a grimace, Mr. O’Flaherty said, “Ah, with the luck of the Irish, a gust of fevered wind could easily carry all three of us away.”
Mr. O’Flaherty had been eating little, pleading lack of appetite, and I had lost all of mine from sheer worry. Maeve ate little enough. Some mornings I could scarcely get out of bed, but would drag myself to the wharfside in Sligo, for it had become the source of all the news I managed to glean.
• • •
WHEN THE FIRST of these famine ships, the Eliza Liddell, reached St. John, with its starved shipload, a storm of protest broke out from the Canadians. The few Dublin papers that reached us reported that when the Richard Watson arrived, carrying Palmerston tenants, including one woman completely in a state of nature, the Common Council of the City of St. John accused Palmerston by name for deporting his tenants completely unprovided for in the New Brunswick winter.
It was common knowledge that an untold number had perished on the high seas, thrown overboard into the swallowing Atlantic. The ships kept no account of them: The senders did not, nor the land they never reached, though there were exact ledgers for all the convict ships that left for Australia, transporting the hapless ones England called criminals, to Botany Bay. But we were free Irish, free to leave and die. If ever in the future any relatives were to make queries, there would be few answers to be found.
Upstream on the Garavogue, our prosperous merchant Peter O’Connor’s ships, which brought in Canadian lumber all the way to his great sawmills, were being used. Many other ships were coming to Sligo port. I read, plastered on harbour walls, Notice to Passengers, full of descriptions of the comforts on board. But around the ports, amid eddies of muddy water and ship detritus, floated other stories—of supplies running out on ships overloaded with all manner of cargo, water scarce or so tainted that none who drank it could remain hale. We heard of criminals who preyed upon the old and the children, the sickness that crouched waiting in the ship’s holds.
Yet such was the beauty of our Sligo coast, such the majesty of Ben Bulben and the gorse-laden slopes, that I clung to our cottage, holding off the decision to leave. Aye, I was no Padraig. I was that afraid of the unknown, if my heart’s truth be told. I dared not speak to myself of the time I would lose my country, tree by tree, rock beyond rock, hill after green hill. I sat, gluttoned upon grief, emaciating.
Where was the great Dan O’Connell now, him with his great talking of liberty and justice and rights, when all that we be asking are not even whole potatoes, but gruel and horse oats perhaps, or the glutinous paste of American maize?
On Maeve’s fourth birthday this November of 1847, although we had little stock of victuals left, I made her a small cake with the very last of our flour. I painted a small tin box in merry colours. Maeve’s smile lit our cottage that evening.
• • •
THREE DAYS LATER, I forced myself to prepare Maeve. “Do you . . .” I began, but could find no more words. I looked haplessly at Mr. O’Flaherty, who smiled bleakly at me.
“Maeve dear,” he said, reaching out to hold her palm, “will you go sailing with us?”
“Do we have to?” she asked, looking at him.
“I did not want to,” said my teacher, “but now I have changed my mind.”
“Nobody comes here to play anymore,” said Maeve. “Will there be other children on the ship?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I am sure.”
“Where will we go?” she asked both of us. Before I could say anything, Mr. O’Flaherty said, “We’ll go to America, Maeve.” Well, that was easily done, I thought, when Maeve asked, “Why do people go to America?”
“I think different people go for different reasons,” I ventured, not sure what I meant.
“Are we looking for something?” she asked. “When shall we come back?”
I stared at the floor.
“We don’t know, Maeve. Sometimes we do not know what we are looking for, until we find it,” said Mr. O’Flaherty, making it sound like a children’s riddle.
Maeve did not smile. “Is that what happened to my father? When will he know if he’s found it?”
We sat silently. Then Maeve’s face broke into a smile. “Do you think my da is there, waiting for us?”
“America,” said Mr. O’Flaherty so softly that he must have been speaking to himself.
“Shall we stop moving about after that?” Maeve persisted.
We nodded. “Yes, Maeve. If that is what you want,” Mr. O’Flaherty added.
“Do you promise?” She was asking me directly.
“What if you want to travel more, Maeve?” I asked her. “People sometimes grow up and change their minds.”
She shook her head, “I am sure.”
“All right,” I said to her, “I promise, if that is what you wish.”
“You won’t change your mind?”
I shook my head, “I promise you, child.”
“I promise too.” She spat in her palm, and we shook hands. I did not know what promise this child was making, and to what end. But for the nonce, that seemed e
nough.
Ach, but Padraig? What if he returns? whispered my tormented heart.
• • •
ON THE WATER, cormorants dipped and flew amid the rancid kelp. We stood by the quayside, waiting to board the Rose of Erin, probably the last ship to sail out so late this year. I would have preferred to await spring and a better passage, but knew we could not survive winter. We were shabby beyond belief. I glanced back to look at those staying behind. I spied a woman near the inn behind the harbour, gesturing to the sailors. She stood in wretched profile, her hands folded over a concave stomach, her groin protruding, a pathetic dribble of hair between her legs clear as the wind pressing into her sorry shanks. ’Twas the stark prose of what was happening to our land.
I looked at our bundles. In a pile were Mr. O’Flaherty’s books and my Bible. Maeve held her tin box with a hand-painted picture of a rose on it. Its two clasps were painted gold. I could hear the rattle of her coloured chalks with every step she took. I had brought two porcelain bottles with cork stoppers for water. They promised us a fair ration of water every day, but I knew that if they failed, we would have something to store a little in—even if it were rainwater saved—for lack of water can make a child wilt and die, and an old man too. I was now, without being so, the son of one and father of the other.
Maeve played at the water’s edge, her fist full of wet pebbles, while I waited for her to select a few for her little box. She would be carrying a wee part of Ireland, I thought, picking her up to walk the creaking gangplank onto the ship. Mr. O’Flaherty followed us with slow steps. Mr. Rafferty brought up the rear, and we exchanged a bleak greeting.
In the hold, I made sure to find space near a porthole which was waist-high. I knew the child needed fresh air, and the light that came in would bring what small cheer could be had in the belly of this ship with its odour of mould and foetid air. There was no sign of the rose in our ship so bravely named.