Cursed! Blood of the Donnellys

by Keith Ross Leckie

  “Two times the fun!” Jim declared in the face of Johannah’s apprehensions and she tried to embrace his rosy optimism. Johannah was confident the old woman was right and there was a babe of each sex growing inside her. She spoke to them often with words of encouragement, and of her impatience to meet them—but only when they were ready. She sometimes whispered a Celtic chant Raffy had taught her to save their little souls from evil. And she whispered things to them she would tell no one else, the truth of her own hopes and fears. It was bad luck to say a child’s name out loud before it was born but Johannah had always thought “Lucy” was a beautiful name and whispered it sometimes. Lucy, Luce, Lucille. The boy? Well, no rush to decide on a name there. It was a guilty truth she spoke more to the girl than to the boy, for girls had to be smarter in this world and her dreams were already caught up in her daughter’s future. She could see her face, feel her touch, almost hear her voice. Her only regret was that the baby’s grandmother would never meet her.

  * * *

  One night after they had been trapped in the quarantine camp for several more weeks, Jim waited in the food line in the mess tent to get some dinner for the others while his anger began to rise. This was a fine thing, stuck on this godforsaken island in the middle of this grey river, with his woman only short months away from giving birth, surrounded by desperate souls and contagion on every breath and no progress from day to day to day. As the bitter winter weather advanced, numbers taken by fever grew, usually the very young or very old, and his concern for Johannah and the lives she carried fed his humiliation and feeling of helplessness. As he came to the servers with his three bowls, he faced the usual thin soup and dry biscuits, handed to him by the surly staff. Jim appraised the offering and glared at the server.

  “Is there no meat? No fruit? My wife is growing two babies inside. Is every meal to be soup and biscuits?”

  A server looked at him and replied dryly as he filled the three bowls, “No. Tomorrow, just for a change, we’ll have biscuits and soup!” The servers all laughed at the stupid old joke, but Jim wasn’t laughing and it was all he could do to keep his fist from the man’s rancid mouth. At the mess tent door, Jim confronted one of the senior guards, well fed and holding a baton to discourage the greedy.

  “If we can’t get decent food here to keep our strength, let a few of us go to shore, to the towns along the river, to find work and pay for it ourselves.”

  “You are in quarantine. You don’t go off the island. You will be shot if you try,” the guard told him, hefting his baton and glancing at a British soldier standing near them. The soldier had overheard them and added his unrequested opinion. “You people are full of diseases.”

  “I’ll give you a disease, boy,” Jim told him.

  The soldier unslung his rifle and made a move toward him. “You get back inside and behave yourself, Paddy. You make trouble, we’ll put you in the stockade.”

  Jim stood his ground, barely containing his temper. The uniform was like a red flag in his face. British soldiers in Borrisokane, the damn Protestant British soldiers here in the new world. Was there no escaping the sons of bitches? But finally he looked down at the bowls of soup in his hands and backed down. He returned to his tent.

  That night Jim went to have a quiet talk out beside the latrines with a couple of men who had been quarantined on Grosse Île longer than himself. He had discussed Irish politics and history with them and they knew how things worked around the camp. Jim explained to them his need to get off the island and they introduced him to a third man, a Frenchman named Drapeau who did maintenance on the island through the week but lived weekends with his large family across on the north shore. They met outside the latrine where the stink discouraged any eavesdropping lingerers. Thankfully the man spoke English.

  “I can have a boat here to take you, but how will you get past the soldiers?” Drapeau asked him. “They patrol the fences all night and will shoot if you try to climb them or dig underneath.”

  “You leave that to me.”

  “All right. I will send a boat two nights from now. She will come in on the north shore of the island an hour before dawn. The weather will be calm. Half an English pound to me now, another half to the boatman when you meet.”

  “Agreed.”

  Jim gave Drapeau what was almost the last of their money and the Frenchman walked away inspecting it.

  Later that night when they were settled in their small patch of hard floor in the quarantine shed, as another covered body was taken away and a wife and child cried in grief, Jim turned to Johannah and Vinnie, pulled the paper-thin curtain around them and spoke with quiet determination through the din of outside conversation.

  “I’m wasting time, Jo. I have to get out of here. You need some decent food, meat and fruit for the babes. And I have to make some money so we can buy land when we are free.”

  “And just how d’you plan to do that? You can’t even swim,” she pointed out. It was a fair question.

  “I met a man who’s going to help get me to shore. In a boat.”

  Jim glanced out through the curtains, worried he had spoken too loud.

  “When is this?”

  “In two days.”

  “I’ll come with you!”

  “No, it could be rough out there. You stay here and grow the childer. I’ll make some money and be back.”

  “How long would you be gone?”

  “Shhhhhhhh,” he cautioned her and continued in a whisper. “It could be some weeks, but I’ll be back before the babies come.”

  “Oh, Jim. I don’t know…”

  “You’ve got Vinnie here to help you.”

  Vinnie nodded encouragingly. Johannah looked into Jim’s eyes.

  “Will you be careful? Will you keep yourself safe?”

  “Yes. I will, love. I’ll be very careful.”

  “All right. If this is what we must do, I’ll be fine.”

  “Good girl,” he told her.

  “Just be back before the babies come.”

  “I promise.”

  Two days later, late in the evening, as others around them were sleeping, Jim kissed Johannah a final goodbye. Vinnie was awake but turned away to give them a vestige of privacy in this moment. Johannah took Jim by the shoulders and gave him a little shake.

  “Be careful. Remember your promises. No fighting—you swore it—and be back before the babies.” Her eyes were shining, imploring him.

  “I’ll remember.”

  Jim touched Vinnie’s shoulder and the boy turned back to them. “You’ll take good care of her.”

  Vinnie nodded. Jim held some old burlap bags and waxed thread.

  “All right, then. Get me ready.”

  It was cold, near midnight when two men in cloth masks entered the shed carrying a stretcher. Vinnie had gone to inform them of Jim’s demise. They always took and buried the bodies at night if they could, so the immigrants would not know the growing number of dead. They arrived at the cubicle and pulled back the sheet to find Johannah sitting beside Jim, weeping convincingly. Vinnie was sewing up the last few stitches of a burlap shroud around his still body, face last. The men waited, bored. Vinnie finished up his stitching, loosely covering the face, leaving a vent.

  “Terrible thing, a man such as this, noble and kind, cut down in the prime of his life. Yes, a noble man…could be rather pig-headed at times but it’s a great loss. May the Lord have mercy…”

  Vinnie tied the knot and bit off the thread. The men placed Jim’s body on the stretcher and took him away.

  The burial crew was excavating graves by lamplight for the newly dead in the quarantine cemetery outside the fences. Four wrapped bodies had just been laid side by side a short distance from the woods, awaiting burial. Jim’s body was on the end.

  Through the vent in the burlap and through the weave of the sacking, he could see men a sho
rt distance away labouring on behalf of his mortal remains, digging a long trench in the pasture beside the woods, one that matched in size a dozen long parallel mounds filled in beside it. He tried not to shiver noticeably in the cold. With a slight cock of his head he looked back toward the camp and saw Vinnie at the wire fence, a blanket over his shoulders against the cold, keeping an eye on him. Jim could see Vinnie’s breath in the chilled air and he suddenly worried that the same could be true of him. Could a puff of vapour betray him to the soldiers? Could they catch Jim breathing, when as a corpse he had no right to be doing so?

  The soldiers were facing away from Jim, the diggers were intent on the difficult task of breaking the frozen ground and he still had the cover of darkness. The time was right for him to make his move. He rotated himself slightly onto his side, settled back, then rolled again right over and kept on going. His body began to tumble down the incline toward the woods. The ground was earth and stones and would cause him some bruising but no one noticed as he continued to roll into the rough bushes and finally came to lie still and hidden in the brush. Standing near the fence, Vinnie had seen Jim’s successful escape and it was all he could do to stop himself from laughing out loud.

  Jim trusted no one had seen him and now that he was concealed in the dark woods, he took out his knife and sliced open the burlap from within. Staying low, he emerged from the sacking, kicking it into the bushes, then looked through the brush toward the soldiers and the gravediggers. They were still facing away from him. They had not noticed they had lost one of their dead. Jim stood and scrambled deeper into the trees and, with the aid of the light of a thin moon, began to cross the wooded island, less than a mile to the other side.

  Down at the rocky north shore, a fair-haired young boy in a very small rowboat waited for him, the boat’s nose secured into the pebbly beach, stern bobbing gently in the river’s current. Jim looked up and down the shoreline, then turned around to look behind him for sentries. He had not been spotted. The boy called to him with a cheery smile.

  “Allez, Irlande. On n’a pas toute la nuit!”

  Jim approached the boat, slipping a little on the icy rocks as the river tide was out. The boy did not speak English but gestured to him to come quickly and Jim climbed aboard. He gave him the half pound. The boy smiled again at him, then, releasing the painter and using one oar, he pushed the boat out into the current, placed the oar back in its lock and started to row for the north shore of the river. Out in the middle of the wide blue-grey St. Lawrence in the tiny boat, Jim held on anxiously to the gunnels, terrified of the water, as he could not swim, but his fears were overridden by his determination to get to the mainland and make some progress for the future of his family.

  The New Land

  One cold winter morning, when Jim had been gone for nine days, Johannah and Vinnie waited, as they did twice a day, every day, in the food line with the others at the kitchen tent on Grosse Île, for the thin soup to be ladled out as usual by the server into cold tin bowls that took any heat away from the gruel in a moment. Johannah was growing bigger each day, almost alarmingly so. She had suffered a few bouts of morning sickness. Thankfully that had passed, but her feet were swollen and the long food lines were hard on her. Soon Vinnie would have to bring her meals to her. But this morning, the French server noticed her and stopped them.

  “Donnelly?”

  Johannah nodded and he reached under the table for a burlap sack and gave it to her, keeping it low and passing it without flourish in front of the others. He told her it was from “votre mari,” and this was no sooner done than he ignored Johannah and Vinnie totally to keep spooning his anemic offering to the others.

  Knowing that Jim was safe, she wanted to shout with relief. But knowing that discretion was in order, Johannah made little of it, put the sack under her shawl and returned to their lodgings.

  “He’s all right!” she whispered as they left the tent.

  Back in their own space, she and Vinnie pulled the curtains across and, opening the sack, pulled out their prize. A full roasted capon chicken! And also some cooked potatoes and carrots and a small loaf of oat bread, plus a short sharp knife with which to cut it.

  “Such wonderful things!” Vinnie exclaimed for both of them.

  “Oh my God, we will feast like royalty.”

  And their conversation was reduced to moans and sighs as they ate well beyond their fill.

  Throughout the next month, the special food came to them in the small sacks, a small roast of beef or leg of lamb two or three times a week, and they found private places behind the sheds or in the latrines to eat unseen. No one questioned them about it, but both of them stayed healthy and strong and Johannah’s belly continued to grow.

  A few more miserable ships came into quarantine before the river froze. Though in constant conflict with filth and contagion, the camp’s inhabitants found a routine of life and with occasional acts of kindness they were kept, all of them, just above desperation. Vinnie played football with some mates he had met on the ship and others found in quarantine, and when a large puddle froze on the flats, local workers showed them how to set up goals and knock a stone around on the smooth icy surface with sticks. Johannah was able to borrow books to read from women with whom she made friends. They commented kindly on her swelling belly and she told them her husband had been able to go on ahead and she would join him after quarantine. She even found paper and a pencil and began to draw designs of the house she hoped one day to build with Jim. She quietly described it to Lucy inside her and promised to keep the pictures to show her when she decided to join them on the outside.

  It was a lean Christmas in the camp but spirited in that so many of the immigrants were devout, and the passengers of the Naparima were that much closer to the end of quarantine in the early spring. They had the crossing of the sea behind them, like Moses and his people, and before them was the future of a promised land.

  * * *

  Late that fall and into the winter, a hundred men had worked on the railway bed that cut through the Quebec forest and would soon open western land to settlement. Jim had arrived and joined the line of labourers looking for jobs and they approached a young hiring clerk in a waistcoat and old top hat who reminded him for a sad moment of Mick. The clerk sat at a table near the end of the track, writing down workers’ names, hiring some on the spot and telling others to come back, but there was never an argument. Most of the navvies in line were older, hard-bitten men, Irish and French. In the distance, the team was laying down track. Jim had watched them with interest, having never seen rail track being laid before. He was about to know the process intimately, though, for the clerk hired him then and there.

  Construction of the regional rail line continued through the bitter winter, like no winter he had ever experienced in Ireland for cold and snow, needing pick axes more than shovels to break the diamond-hard ground, but the pay was 20 percent higher at that time of year and they lived in crowded but cozy log cabins. The monotonous process was to create the elevated bed, lay cross ties and fill, then ten men would pick up and drop each long rail onto the ties, and it would be riveted to the last one. Then twenty spikes each side of the rail, one man holding, one man hammering them down with a sledge, three or four blows to drive them to the hilt tight against the apron base of the rail.

  “Sure you’ve a keen eye, Quinn,” Jim complimented his partner at the end of an hour’s labour—not once had the hammer missed the nail head or grazed his hand. Quinn was a big man, grizzled and red faced. Despite having worked there for five weeks, Jim had never teamed with him before.

  “Doing it so long I can do it in my sleep. Where you from then, Donnelly?”

  “Borrisokane…Tipperary.”

  “Really? I’m from Birr!”

  “Birr! We were neighbours. Well, good to meet you.”

  They shook and the man from Birr’s hand was like a vice. An acquaintance of Qui
nn’s came up to them. He was a large mean-looking piece of work, even bigger than Quinn.

  “Donnelly. This is Kavanaugh. He’s from across the county line in Limerick. Hey Kavanaugh, the lad’s come for the three wishes and the treasure. He’s from Borrisokane.”

  “Borrisokane? That shite hole? You poor bastard.”

  It was Quinn who took offense. “You can’t talk to the lad like that, so far from home.”

  “What’s it to you? I’ll talk to him any way I want.”

  “You’re an awful rude bollocks.”

  “You just found out? But I always knew you were an arsehole.”

  Quinn swung a seriously deadly shovel at Kavanaugh, barely missing his head and almost clipping Jim. Kavanaugh moved in and punched him in the face. The two men got into a clutch and went at it, wrestling and pounding each other’s faces with their fists. Despite the frivolity of this encounter and the question of where the men got the energy for this contest near the end of a hard day, Jim felt his blood rise, for it had been a while since he had been in a good fight.

  “Gentlemen. They’ll fire you,” Jim tried to tell them, but they were hearing none of it. As Quinn began losing badly to the bigger man, the French foreman and two burly assistants approached.

  “Separez ces putains de Paddies! Virez les deux!”

  With substantial effort, the assistants pulled Quinn and Kavanaugh from each other’s embrace and dragged them off. The foreman studied Jim to gauge the level of his involvement in the skirmish, if any. Jim lowered his eyes and went back to work with great enthusiasm, keeping to himself.

  * * *

  It was one of the first mild nights of late winter when a gentle southwestern breeze began to soften the snow on the ground and Johannah could hear the water under the river ice around Grosse Île and catch the first muddy scent of spring, which would mean their release from quarantine. Close after midnight, she had her first hard contraction. It was much too soon—she wasn’t due for several more weeks—but her water breaking confirmed it was true. Vinnie lay on his mat on the other side of their small pile of belongings.