Flying With Amelia

by Anne Degrace

  “Tom Ginger is here?” asks Agnes sleepily, awakened by the voices.

  “ ’Course. He came with us, didn’t he? To see we made it safe ashore.”

  “Will he sing us a lullaby, then?” Bridget asks.

  It’s quiet for a bit, and then Catherine lifts her voice quietly in song, a gentle crooning, and across the way, through the darkness, I hear Paddy Murphy begin to cry.

  IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII II

  THROUGH THE LONG days and nights there is nought to do but think. There are some who live on the edge of madness, for they have lost loved ones, and no longer believe that this will end, believing instead they have been consigned to purgatory. Last night a squall sent the ship pitching so wildly I feared we would not see the light of day again, and in that time I heard sins confessed I am only glad my children couldn’t understand. When the swells subsided we were left in the darkness and stench with the ghosts of our sad admissions and our pitiful thoughts.

  This night is gentler. Beside me sleeps Eliza, who has not uttered a word for two days, now. I put my head down to hers, whisper in her ear: All will be well, my darling, you’ll see, but she turns her head away, and I can’t tell if she hears me or has turned in her sleep. On the other side is Daniel, and I can see in the dim light that his eyes are open, and that he is thinking just as I am.

  At first we talked about what things we might do to earn a living on shore. Niall has learned the craft of fishing, and has told Daniel there is work for him there. Niall does not know about the runaway horse that bolted down our lane and through the smithy, nor how Daniel, when he tried to catch the animal, caught his hand in the tangle of its traces to be crushed under the weight of the great, terrified beast as it tried to fight its way to freedom. Daniel’s hand — its crushed and broken bones healed as well as could be hoped — is good for little. Can a man fish with one hand?

  Now, we don’t talk about how we will live or what we will do. Like Eliza, we barely talk at all. I know his hand pains him, but he doesn’t say. But with no words spoken, I know what he says to me now, as he turns his face towards mine.

  IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII III

  WE HEARD THE shouts from above at dawn; land! And crawling up from below we emerged into the light, all of us shades of brown, blinking like vermin caught in sudden light, smiling with all of our grey and wobbling teeth.

  Land.

  Below us, the stinking hold, thirty-three marks scratched into the wood of our berth. I think about the ones lost, the ones we leave behind as we turn our backs to the sea and our faces towards the distant shape on the horizon that is our future.

  Land.

  Behind us, in Ireland, our fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers, and the countless bones of our ancestors. Ahead of us, in this new country, our dreams, the dreams that our children, and their children, have yet to dream. We stand at the rail, all of us together. Young Tom Murphy catches my eye as if to say: Aye, we made it; now what? And if he asked it aloud, I’d not know what to tell him.

  Sally holds Henry in her thin arms, and I think I should take him from her, so weak she’s become, but she holds him firm enough and smiling, she is. On the faces around me, looks of wonder, or joy, or something like fear. It’s a curious thing, but I can feel the hearts of us all beating just now.

  Catherine holds Bridget Murphy by the hand, and I catch Paddy not looking at the land ahead, but looking at my sister, his wife not two weeks gone, and yet it’s as if lifetimes have passed for us all. I look at Catherine and I think: she won’t need to change her name, then, will she? And then I laugh, because there is so much to think about, and I’m thinking of this.

  “Will Tom Ginger be there?” Fanny asks, and Eliza, standing alongside, looks down, her small face serious, and I wait to see if she will answer.

  “Of course he will,” she tells Fanny after a moment. I lay my hand on her head.

  Henry reaches his hands out to his Papa, and Daniel takes him from Sally and holds him close, then catches my eye over the top of his small head.

  Around us are the others who’ve survived. One hundred and seventy-six began this journey thirty-three days ago, and now, how many stand on this deck? I lost count of the dead taken up. Perhaps forty or more, hopeful souls whose earthly bodies will not know land again. I can feel the swell of emotion around me, the swell of the waves beneath, and at my back, the whisper of what we’ve left behind.

  Land.

  I am full of hope, and I am terrified.

  TWO

  STATIC

  ·1901·

  IT WAS A pounding on the door that started it off, and the call from the other side: any mummers ’lowed in? and I turned to see Mum there with her eyes bright and her smile wide, and my dad hauled open the door with a ho ho! The first one caught me up and picked me right up off my feet, saying: ’es a big one ’e is, better get the pot boiling. I tried to see who it was but he had the sheet over his head and tied at the neck with a striped muffler and with his voice all disguised — well, it might’ve been Mr. Kelly but I was laughing too hard to say anyways.

  And then the fiddles started up and the kitchen was full of rubber boots all stomping and spinning, men dressed as ladies and ladies dressed as men and my mum and dad dancing with this one and that one, and then finally with each other. There was the smell of beer and the screech and wet wool from melting snow. One had mitts on his feet and the thumbs flopped around like fish, jigging across the kitchen floor like live things.

  I think and I think and it seems like that was the last time I recalls laughing in our house. Because right after was when the accident happened. And somehow the drinking followed, and Mum said she could cope with the accident but not the drinking and after a while there was not laughing nor dancing nor even talking. And ’tis near time for the mummers to come again, and it’ll be a cold kitchen they comes to.

  IT WAS AT the butcher’s I first heard about the job. I was there getting bones for the dog, or at least that’s what I told Mr. Walsh, who wiped his big hands on his bloody apron and then started piling bones onto a pile of newspaper and wrapped them up with twine. Then he looked at me with his bald head and jowls making him look some old bulldog himself, and told me about the Eyetalian, a scientist he said, setting up a laboratory up by Cabot Tower, might need someone to sweep up and be useful.

  “What are ye, twelve, Willie b’y? Could be something for your pocket.”

  I knew he meant money to help out at home, but wouldn’t say. Folks in St. John’s don’t. Everyone’s got hard times and good times, and nobody says a thing either way. Once I heard Mrs. Kelly say about us that “it’s a good thing they just got the one,” because between them they could hardly keep me fed. Most families have seven or eight kids who run in packs and stick up for one another. I had no brother to stick up for me, and no sister to defend, and I heard my mum say once to Mrs. Kelly that ’twas a disappointment. I didn’t know if ’twas me she meant, or that there was no babies come after. I suppose it turned me quiet. If folks were thinking I didn’t amount to a hill of beans, well then I supposed they must be right.

  Back home I put the package of bones in the root cellar, because sure enough we have no dog, then made myself scarce before Mum found me something to do. Some would say I should’ve been in school, but I never cared for it much. And I used to help Dad jig cod and dry and salt it before the accident, and nobody minded much that my desk was empty most days — not the priest, nor the teacher — because lots of kids were out. You can’t do schooling when your stomach’s growling with the hunger, anyways.

  The notion of a job, ’specially a job with a foreigner, sounded good to me, because St. John’s folks don’t have much to pay but a foreigner was likely rich. So I thought I’d best get up there ’fore some other bugger got there first and took my job.

  The walk up the hi
ll from the Battery was a miserable thing, with the wind off the harbour like ice, but it was the walk past Deadman’s Pond that set my heart to pounding. For it was on the rocks above they’d set the gibbet to hang the bodies of the poor fellas who was executed, to hang there until they rotted and then be packed in a barrel with some rocks and rolled over the cliff and into the pond below. They say the pond just goes on and on, no bottom at all, and that it was the ghosts of all those hanged men reached up their bony hands and pulled down two sisters out skating one winter just like this one, grabbing their ankles through a hole in the ice. So between the wind and the cold and my heart a-pounding, I was fair wore out by the time I got there.

  I could see nobody in the tower at first when I’d made my way up the hill, and I walked around her twice looking for what I imagined a foreign scientist might look like, but I didn’t see a soul. So I finally asked a man in work clothes coming out of the old Fever Hospital, a place that gave me the shivers, so gloomy it was, but I went up to him anyways and asked if he might know. And he did!

  “Look for the fella looks like a for’ner,” the man told me. “I seen ’im, with two other fellas, mustaches like nothing you ever seen, b’y. He dresses like a for’ner, too, right fancy.” And he stumped off down the hill, probably to his dinner, which made my stomach growl just thinking of it, and me with none.

  I found Mr. Marconi in a dark wee room, oil lamp so dim I missed it the first time, which is when I realized I wasn’t likely to get rich after all. He was alone — the two other fellas somewheres else I figures — unpacking wooden crates. Inside, packed in sawdust, were things I couldn’t make out. Looking around the room I saw there was a stove with a bit of smoky wood burning, and a cot in the corner. He looked up at me from where he crouched, caught in the light from the one salt-washed window, and he looked at me like he didn’t see me, like he was coming up for air from the bottom of the harbour. He wasn’t so much bigger than me, and not so strong, but his clothes were better and he looked like someone with the learning. He stood up, and I saw his coat was no coat for a winter in St. John’s. I told him why I come.

  “Yes. I could use an extra pair of hands,” he told me, holding up his own, blue with the cold. His speech was funny, but his English was good. “Come tomorrow. We start early. The days are so short.”

  FOR THE FIRST two weeks I swept up, pushed crates into place to be tables and benches, brought in firewood, and tried to stay out of the way when Mr. Marconi and Mr. Paget and Mr. Kemp fiddled with wires and coils and tubes and whatnot. Every so often Mr. Marconi would walk out to where the hill looks across the pond t’wards England. He would walk while the wind howled off the Atlantic, and more than once I thought he’d be blown fair away and that would be the end of my job. And that would be a sad thing indeed, because before I go home each day I get two pennies, big and brown and warm in my palm as I run down the hill.

  Sometimes I’d get to hold something — a pinching tool or a wire or clamp. Mr. Marconi would tell me: “Stop fidgeting, William. Stand still, now,” and I’d stand as still as I could, pressing my boots on the plank floor as if I’d glued them together and to the boards at once so as not to move an inch. I s’pose I wanted him to find a use for me more than sweeping and wood chopping, even if I couldn’t make sense of the marks on the papers he has spread out on the table, all lines and arrows and letters, or what it means when the needle on the dials would go like the weathervane on our shed.

  Mr. Marconi paid no attention most times, like I’s one of the mice runs up and down the walls. But after I’d helped him he sometimes put a hand on the shoulder, and I’d feel good because lately there hadn’t been much of that at home.

  It was January last when Dad fell down a well shaft when he was out shooting hare; said he couldn’t even see any house left nor figure why anyone would’ve ever built in a scrub bog never mind dug a well in all that peat, but there it was under him and down he went with one leg rammed into a crack between a couple of rocks and broken in three places. I heard my mum say to Mrs. Kelly that “my own grandfather came over from Ireland short the use of one hand and struggled they did, my mother told us time and again. And now here’s my John, one leg useless and Lord knows what’s to become of us now.” I remembered my Granny Eliza: a grumpy old thing who’d tell me what a lucky lad I was, making me feel bad for wanting a sweet. My own mum sounded a bit like her, then.

  There’s no sweets for me now that it’s most of a year gone with Dad hobbling around with a cane and not good for much says Mum, especially when he spends what money Mum earns, doing the laundry and the sewing, on the screech or whatever it is Donny Cummings is making this week in his back shed. What Dad don’t know is that Mum’s been hiding away some of her sewing money. I seen her putting coins into the English marmalade jar she’s been saving since one of the mummers left it last Christmas, filled with whisky when he came and empty when he left, and she could hardly return it since she wasn’t supposed to know it was Duncan McCurdy all dressed up. It’s a fancy jar, and we don’t have so many nice things, as Mum is fond of saying.

  When Mum saw me watching her, she said: “Willie, this is our secret, now. Something for a rainy day.” And I nodded because I knew sure as she did that if Dad found the money, he would drink it.

  ’TWAS AFTER ABOUT a week of working for Mr. Marconi that I went home to a storm. You could hear the yelling all the way from O’Brians’, and what do you know but there was Mrs. O’Brian herself sticking her old grey head out her door and when she caught sight of me she gave her head a shake as if to say: sorry for what you’re walking into. I may not have the schooling, but I’m not stupid. I stayed outside, pressed up against the siding by the kitchen door, listening.

  “Enough with you,” my mum was shouting. “You come home blind drunk, every penny I’ve earned this week into your glass and nothin left for food and I’ve traded the last of the salt cod. We’ve nothin in the larder and the root cellar’s near empty and here ’tis, calendar’s just turned December and months of winter to go.” Her voice was shrill, spitting angry but cracking at the edges, too.

  “Mind your mouth, now, woman,” my dad said, but there was no threat to it, and no edge to the words, either, softened at the sides as they were by the drink. “I got some work for Fergus, promised me he did, carvin buoys. Can do that on me arse.”

  “Arse forwards, that’s you, by Jayzus. Fergus won’t be payin any help, that’s certain. You can’t put that one on me, John Harvey. And if he did ye’d drink it sure enough, and Willie needin shoes, and me needin —” and that was when I heard something break, a dinner plate sounded like, and we had few enough of those. I didn’t need to be lookin in the window to know that Mum had thrown it, if not at Dad, then close enough to make it clear she meant business if t’weren’t clear before. So I ran back to Cabot Hill. I didn’t know where else to go.

  Mr. Marconi was still there, making a click click sound with something on the table, then writing something on the paper beside him. There was almost no light from the window, late as it was, and with just the one bulb in the ceiling. He looked up when he heard me at the door, his face annoyed, and then he saw mine, I guess, the way I must’ve looked, and his mouth changed.

  “Come in where it’s warm, boy,” he said, ’though it wasn’t.

  “My mum smashed a plate,” I said, surprised myself when the words came out. I can’t say why I said it, but there ’twas.

  “Did she.” Mr. Marconi put his hands on his knees and looked at me, waiting. But I’d said enough, I figured, with my mum’s words in my ears: we keeps our business to ourselves, Willie. I stood in the doorway wondering what I’d been thinking, coming up here.

  “Close the door, William,” he said. “The winter is coming in.”

  I sat on a crate near the stove watching my pants steam. We were both quiet for a while, and then he said: “When I was a boy, I broke an entire set of dishes.
”

  I waited, listening to the dry wood pop in the stove.

  “An experiment. My mother was very angry. But it was my father who was really furious. He forbade me to do any more experiments. In fact, he insisted I put it all aside and enter the Naval Academy.”

  “The navy?” He didn’t look to me like the seafaring type.

  “I didn’t pass the exams. I did very badly. Just as I had in school.”

  “You did?” Mr. Marconi’s shoes were shiny, a thing that made no sense in St. John’s. Eyetalian leather, by Jayzus, I’d heard Mr. Walsh say to Mrs. Kelly over the counter in Mr. Walsh’s shop.

  “I stopped going,” I admitted.

  “Well, so did I. There was nothing interesting for me there. And you?”

  “I — lots of kids got to work. And I never liked it much. When I made my letters, my teacher hit my knuckles with the ruler. And the girls laughed.”

  “Ah.”

  I heard the wind pick up outside, and the sound of something blown about hitting the wall outside.

  “My mother, she helped me,” Mr. Marconi went on. “She gave me a room in the attic, and we kept it a secret from my father. That was how I was able to continue my experiments. Sometimes, I think secrets are necessary.”

  I thought about that a minute. “Where are the other fellas?” I asked.

  “My engineers? In the pub, I expect. They’re becoming a little impatient with me, I think. But it has to be just right. We cannot fail.”

  I must have looked confused. I never knew what it was he was doing, not really.

  “We will receive a signal sent all the way from England, William. Do you know where that is?”

  “ ’Course.”

  “Yes, of course you do.” He stood up. “Do you see this?” He pointed to a small glass tube filled with what looked like metal dust. “When the electrical current comes through, the particles cling together, and the current flows through, here —” there were two pieces a little smaller than a tin can, wrapped in copper wire “— and here is the coherer, and here is the Morse receiver. When we pick up the signal from Poldhu, it will have travelled all the way across the ocean. There are those who think that the signal won’t carry because of the curve of the Earth, but it will. The signal will be three taps, and they will come here,” he pointed to the receiver. “Communication across the entire Atlantic Ocean.”