by Kalyan Ray
Yet at the end of those six months, I thought to save enough for a fine shop and a small house in Sligo itself, so I waited. I confess that never having earned, my ability to make money had become a heady draught, sending my good sense a-slumber. In the second year, you will recall, I accompanied you on my first venture into the interior of Burma, so far from civilization, where you and I acquired those great stretches along the Irrawaddy River for the timber trade. Before I knew it, the third year had ended. Now my Elliot Road house was being built. I was prosperous, thanks to your counsel.
Each month I promised myself I would write, and each month passed with a new addition to the house, or some luxury within it. I would picture my mother, a grand lady at last, and my sweetheart here with me. What cupidity overtook my mind, as if the rapidly passing time was of no consequence, and things at home exactly as I had left it! How I ever imagined that luxuries could outweigh the solace of my news, I cannot fathom now. Mea culpa, Doorgadass Babu. I am heartsick with guilt for breaking their hearts, and now my own.
I had already made arrangements: In the spring of 1848, I was certainly going to fetch my mother, and bring back my wedded wife. In my obdurate pride, I dreamed of the astonishment I would cause when I finally burst upon Sligo unannounced, after more than a four-year absence, making my grand way to Mullaghmore, with my gold-headed cane, my full sea-chests carried behind me, a great man come home.
I had paid small heed to the earlier gossip around the ports of troubles in Ireland, for I had thought like a fool that these were the usual travails. But on Christmas morning in Calcutta, at the sailor’s publican house near Jaan bazaar, I ran into Declan Clooney, a Sligo sailor of my own age. He had heard tell that my mother had fallen afoul of tax collectors and her house lay abandoned. That was all he knew. I scoffed at him, knowing that my mother’s cottage and lot was, by some means, exempt. But Declan swore by our Lady of Benada and everything else besides. Now the world crumbled around me, and I would not, could not, stay.
Also, there was a girl I loved. Brigid, her name was, and in all ways, except for the church, I was her true husband. I knew she would wait for me to the end of her days, as would my mother. Declan, when I met him in Calcutta, was in the drinks and a-sobbing for Ireland, so full of bad news and old songs he was. You, my good friend, had returned to set up the Burma teak depot in Rangoon. Thus I had no one from whom to seek good counsel.
I took the very next ship to Liverpool, on the day after Christmas itself, carrying a mere satchel and my ample purse. With fair winds, it took only four and a half months, far shorter than it usually does to go there in this season. Yet, for me, it was months too slow.
From Liverpool, I immediately took another ship, the first that would take me to Sligo Harbour. It made stops along the way, at Wicklow and Wexford, Cork and Tralee. I thought I would go mad, driven by impatience and my anguish. By the time we sighted the shores of Connacht, I was near tearing my hair out. But the wind grew favourable—a gentle easterly one. The ship sailed sweetly past the mouths of Killala, and into Sligo Harbour.
I believe I was the first off the ship, on the seventeenth of May, and I ran towards my village. Alas, Doorgadass-Babu, something had utterly changed, changed terribly. The grass and the golden gorse were the same as ever, like the thriving rhododendrons. I could see piles of Donegal stone for a great building going up near Classiebawn—some wasteful folly of Lord Palmerston, who owns everything here.
I raced past roofless huts, grass and weeds choking the holes which had been smashed into the miserable walls. I could see all that, and yet perceived nothing. I met no one I knew. The only people I saw appeared huddled and bent, looking suspiciously as I ran on recklessly as if some demon, perhaps Time itself, was pursuing me. They took a look at me, and such I appeared to them that they crossed themselves and hid away.
When finally I turned the familiar curve of the path to my home, I stopped abruptly as if I had been gut-hit. My mother’s cottage stood doorless, its roof buckled above its cracked walls. There wafted a faint aroma of honeysuckle, and creepers had grown right over it. Ample cobwebs stretched over the lintel. Her well-tended garden was gone as if it had never existed. I ran inside, and stood there thunderstruck, for here was not a stick of furniture, nothing but filthy straw and the unmistakable stench of human ordure, as if beasts and vagabonds had ill-used it for long. My home-proud mother! She must be dead, I knew for a certainty now.
Declan was right, although he had been drunk with misery. I wept and cried aloud in torment, nothing holding me back now in my mad grief. When I looked up, I saw a grotesque face regarding me. I thought I was imagining the creature through my tears. So I turned away, trying to come to terms with what I had found. Damn Daniel O’Connell, I cursed, damn Alexander Blackburn. Then the thought struck me that I was now paying for what I had done to Blackburn. What Lord above—or lord below, I thought in my misery—had decided that I was to pay such a harsh price for something I had not intended. I wept aloud. I composed myself before emerging from the broken shell of my childhood home, the proud cottage of my mother, her neat shop where everything was so tidy like. I felt a tug on my sleeve.
I looked down and saw beside me a short gnome-like creature. Its hair was matted and it scratched at its filthy dugs with its other hand, an unsightly mad thing. But it was smiling, and wriggling its body about, as a puppy would. I stared in consternation—and then I recognized her: Odd Madgy Finn!
She was the poor demented daughter of a drunk about Sligo who had drowned years ago. Her scalp appeared patchy as if some vicious person had, on a whim, pulled off clumps of her hair, leaving skin like a dried ripple of silt on a riverbed. A vivid scar marked her face which was a simpleton’s, a broken mirror ever ready to reflect a smile. She kept tugging my hand. I wanted to free myself, for I was disgusted. Her nostrils brimmed with green phlegm, her skin was riven with open sores, her mouth agape and the few teeth she had left, yellow with filth. I had come these thousands of leagues, and this the only familiar person destined to greet me!
“Get away from me,” I gestured, for the creature could not speak.
But that served no purpose. She kept pointing up the hill. I shook my head. I was in no mood to humour anyone. My world had collapsed. But she clung about my knees now, and kept pointing. I understood suddenly that she knew something. She had been living in my mother’s broken hut, and wanted to show me something—or someone—my heart shouted.
I made as if to follow her. The moment she realized what I was doing, she released me and ran ahead. One of her legs was shorter than the other—and she looked as if she were lolloping, gambolling—trying, in her eagerness, to run ahead of herself. I found myself panting, keeping up with her absurd flipflop speed.
As she climbed upward, my mind had been utterly focused on simply following her. Now, in an instant, I knew where I was headed. It was to Mr. O’Flaherty’s school. Had my family sought sanctuary there in the hard times?
My mind soared. I ran along with her, who seemed now no idiot—for a great smile broke upon her stained face. How could I have thought this misshapen creature a dolt, for she could read my heart’s language. I took her soiled hand—and she gave it to me as readily as a lady—and the two of us ran like children to the schoolmaster’s house. As we came up to it, I saw that it had been added upon. More people had come here to live! The tree still stood in front of the house—I recalled that Madgy Finn would sit under it for all the length of our schooldays. That tree had split, but both parts had survived. I knocked on the door, then banged on it, but no one ansered. Everything looked as if it had been well tended until a few months ago. Nothing was dilapidated, but now the wild creepers were beginning to take over. Climbing roses and morning glory had spread over parts of the window. There were even a few twigs and furze that could have been gathered to be used for the fire; these may have been lying by the door since winter.
I would break open the door. For a second, I stood stock-still. What would I find
behind the door? The dead? Skeletons? No one?
I gathered all my courage, all my strength, and pushed. The door cracked open, and in the bursting, took me with it and I fell to the floor. I could see nothing but the shaft of light that speared into the empty schoolroom. The room was clean, with a few things lying about. Then I noticed dusty books—a number of familiar tomes which my old schoolmaster used in the classroom. Also a broken armless doll, lying discarded under a table. On it sat a dry inkpot, a child’s pen, and next to it a sheet of paper, all over which was written in a childish hand, over and over again: MAEVE. Then I noticed the wall. Using charcoal, someone had written hurriedly—I would have known that hand anywhere in this wide world:
Padraig, we are starving to death, so the only way to survive is to leave Ireland. Your mother is dead. I am sorry indeed. So is Brigid in childbirth. But your little Maeve lives. She is but four years old and looks your twin. Mr. O and we are going to the ship Rose of Erin for Canada. If you read this, you are alive, bless God. Come and find us there.
The creepers snaking through the window had swallowed up his name after that. But there was no need—no need in the world—for me to stay and read that name. O Brendan, Brendan, I thought. I wept like a child when I thought I would never see my ma again. Then I roused myself and raced down the hill towards Sligo Harbour, my mind a tumult. My Brigid dead, and I—a father! Breathless, I sat momentarily on the ground, my heart pounding. I wish I could tell you, Doorgadass-babu, what sensation coursed in my heart. I thought of the creature upon earth now who had, without my setting eyes on her, changed the meaning of my life itself. Nothing was going to be the same anymore. Now Brendan and Mr. O’Flaberty were with her in Canada. O my Brigid, O my Ma, my heart wept and sighed. My Ireland is full of death, I thought. I must find life, and now I knew where to seek it—in the new land of hope—no country I had thought of before this instant. I would cross the Atlantic.
But first, I must go to the shipping office and find when the Rose of Erin sailed and where it ported in Canada. It must have made many trips in the meantime—so I must be sure to find on which voyage my old schoolmaster, with a young man named Brendan McCarthaigh, and the child Maeve had sailed.
My lungs were fit to burst as I ran, but I needed to reach Sligo port and find the Portmaster to study the shipping records before the sun set. I went with all the haste I could muster, but found that the office had shut its doors for the day. I would have to cool my heels till it opened in the morning
I took myself to the tavern at the edge of the harbour and gave a whole loaf to Madgy, who would not come in and curled up on the pavement stones like a puppy. When the tavern was about to close, I asked the innkeeper, Jim Gwynne, if I might stretch out by the fireplace for the night and offered to pay him generously.
“Nay, no need for that. You are a Sligo boy looking for his kin. Is’t not? So be my guest for one night.”
I was moved to tears, but all I could say was, “Thank you, Mr. Gwynne.”
I lay down by the fire, but Doorgadass-babu, sleep would not come to me. Jim Gwynne sat with me over a bottle.
“Can you tell me about the last few years, Mr. Gwynne?”
“You’ll have to call me Jim,” he said, “for we can’t call each other mister and talk of things that’ll make both of us cry over the whiskey.”
“Padraig,” I said.
“Aye, Padraig,” said he. “I knew your mother, Maire Finnegan, by sight. A beauty she was, Padraig—such beauty as none of us ever saw, I say with respect.”
“Aye, Jim, she was that,” and I raised my glass.
“I know she died some years ago, God give her peace. More, I do not know.”
And beside that fireplace, watching the embers, Jim Gwynne talked about those years of suffering.
“During the Great Hunger, I survived by the custom the sailors brought here, but saw so much misery that I began to get terrible sick headaches. No swig of the bottle could rid me of it, no bruising fisticuffs, not even the occasional rut, I beg yer pardon—but that’s the whole truth. Then, I don’t know what came over me, I started to scribble and draw what I saw about me. I drew as I saw them—as they stayed in my head and would not be shook away. The trudging folk with their bundles, sitting by the roadside like wing-broke birds, the children bent over, bloated with the hunger, the women with their falling-off hair and filthy helpless feet. The sleeping children slowly dying around their mothers, the dogs watchful, the lowering looks of the boys that had lost their play and had taken to the stony paths. The only way to keep all these sights from bursting my head itself, see, was to catch them on paper.”
By that inn’s fireplace I looked at sheet after sheet of pen and charcoal drawings. I had heard in India about the Irish Hunger, but only now was I was face-to-face with our starving Ireland. I asked to keep a couple of them.
“Take them, Padraig, take them,” he said without hesitation. I was bent over in tears, and the two pictures grew dim as I held them in my hands.
In the morning, Madgy reappeared, and I had another loaf for her, which she munched on with a right good will. I made for the Portmaster’s office and sensed Madgy Finn stop as I strode inside. The man looked up and saw that I was dressed prosperously.
“I am a County Sligo man who has been in India,” I said.
“India?” he exclaimed. “Bless me! They raised a good sum in that worst year.”
“I came to enquire of the ship Rose of Erin, which sailed with the schoolmaster Mr. Malachi O’Flaherty, my friend Brendan McCarthaigh, and a small girl child. Will it please you, sir, to look up your records and tell me which port in Canada they sailed for?”
“Ahhh,” he said, drawing a long breath, “you’d want to know that, would you?” He drew in his breath again and asked, “And sir, who are you to want to know that, if I may ask?”
“Is it privy information I ask, sir?” I said with some heat. But then, as I have learnt from you, Doorgadass-Babu, I cooled my tone. You taught me that when I need information, and fast, I should never raise my voice. I took out a sovereign—aye, a full gold one—and fingering it, said, “I have an interest in that ship, sir.”
I have noticed the British crown stamped on round yellow metal arouses respect and piety in the beholder, but unaccountably, Mr. Scully’s face grew bleak. A shadow had fallen across the open doorway. I turned around and saw Father Conlon.
“So it is Padraig Aherne I see, is it?” he asked as if in great dudgeon.
“What is that to you?” I countered, too bitter even to say his name. My impatience had the better of me, Doorgadass-babu. This interfering bullyman was responsible for my Brigid being spirited away by her feckless da, that last time I had seen her upon this earth. This priest had foiled my hopes of happiness. My anger had found an object on which to place my burden of pain.
“I will tell you all you need to know,” he began. “You will not need Seamus Scully for that. Keep your coin away, man,” he barked.
“You had gone off without a word, Padraig, and left your mother mourning till the day she died,” he thundered at me. I had no answer. I had. I did. I lowered my head now, struck anew by guilt.
“You whored a child on Brigid Shaughnessy, and she died in the agony of that childbirth,” he declared as if it were a verdict, a tone of satisfaction in his voice.
“I was going to marry her, Father, for I did love her truly.”
“Aye, love her you did,” he said, making it sound sordid.
I felt the surge of my rage, could feel my fists ball up, the sudden fire in my blood. He was a coward, using his collar to browbeat me in my shame and grief.
“I mean to go to find my child, my friend, and my old teacher. I shall take care of them, so help me God. They shall not want for anything.”
“They shall not want, eh, Aherne?” the priest sneered. “You take the tone of God Himself to ensure that wee bastard’s future and fortune, do ye?”
Try as I might to control my rage, I caught him
by his throat and hurled him upon the door. His head rebounded off the thick oak, and he slumped on his knees. It was unthinkable that I had struck a priest, but Madgy chortled with glee. I watched him get up and climb down the stairs unsteadily. He walked a dozen steps away, then turned and glared at me, a stain of blood marking where his cheek had struck the metal bolt. His eyes were steady now, and he looked at me with malevolence.
“Go to your damnation, Padraig Aherne,” he spat.
“And you to yours, priest,” I shot back.
“The Rose of Erin never reached Canada. It struck an iceberg and sank. The know-it-all schoolmaster, his pupil Brendan McCarthaigh, and your bastard drowned in the ocean.” With that, he turned and walked away, as my world turned black. I stumbled up the stairs and banged on the door.
“Tell me, tell me, Mr. Scully,” I cried, “Open up or I will break down this door.”
“ ’Tis true, ’tis true,” Scully screamed from within, “the Rose of Erin was lost at sea.”
I hammered blows upon the door until he opened it an inch. As I barged in, pushing with my shoulder, the man fell back shivering in fright. He skulked behind his desk, on which lay thick ledgers. I pointed at them. “Yes,” he said hastily, “the Harbourmaster’s records.” He scurried to look for the relevant one. I could scarcely breathe. The news is false—it is just Father Conlon’s malice, I told myself, forcing myself to hold still.
Scully opened a large volume. There it was: the entry record of the sinking of the Rose of Erin. I forced myself to read it, uncomprehending at first, letters coiling inextricably into each other, until they finally settled, firm and final as gravestones.
Scully picked at my sleeve. He was holding a torn page from an old newspaper which had been kept as a memento between the pages. I snatched it from him and read: The captain and some crew of the Rose of Erin had been found on a drifting lifeboat by an English merchant ship a few days sail from Canada. They had all perished of cold and thirst. The newspaper did not mention any other survivors.