by Peter Quinn
“Well, dere, Mister Bones, I hear you been trabelling,” Mulcahey said.
“Oh, yeah, I trabel all de time,” said Bones.
Mulcahey watched Squirt follow the text with his finger. Eliza had taught Squirt to read. Mulcahey thought she was wasting her time, too much of the squirming, fidgeting darkie in the boy, but Squirt had amazed everyone with the ease and skill he demonstrated. Read everything he could get his hands on. Nothing seemed too difficult for him.
“Where you trabel dis time, Mister Bones?”
“I was up at de famousest resort in dis whole world. Got de best food I eber tasted, and de accommonations was widout paralong.”
“Oh, I see, you been to Saratoga!”
“Saratoga? Who say dat? I been in Sing Sing!”
One of the minstrels strummed his banjo. Mulcahey pumped his floorboard castanet. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat.
They weren’t laughing, at least not very hard. Mulcahey strummed his banjo and tapped the castanet again. Give them another song. All you delineators of the Sable Race of the South, up! Out of your seats! Move dem feets! Keep the show movin’! The minstrels moved in unison, a synchronized shuffle, up on the toes, slap the left foot on the floor, slide the right foot forward, back, without lifting it from the floor, now the other way around. In chorus they sang:
We New York niggers thinks we’s fine,
Because we’s drink de genuine,
De Dixie niggers dey lib on mush,
And when dey laugh, dey say, “Oh, Hush!”
Mulcahey put his banjo on his chair. He moved out in front of the other darkies, right in front of the prompter’s box, and let his legs follow the music that came from behind him. He spun around in a circle and fell to one knee:
I’se de nigger dat don’t mind no troubles,
Cause dey ain’t nuffin’ mor’ dan bubbles
De only ambition dat dis nigger feels
Is showing de science of da heels.
He got back on his feet, and they all made another parade around the stage. When they returned to their seats, there was a new altercation over who sat where, Flossum and Fingers trying to squeeze into one chair, and Flossum landing on his rear. Mulcahey looked down at the prompter’s box. At first he thought his vision had retained the intense whiteness of the footlights, creating the glow that surrounds the first object seen after looking into a bright light. He closed his eyes for an instant, then slowly opened them. The glow remained around Squirt’s head, that same incandescence that had hovered around Wehman’s. Mulcahey realized that the stage was silent. He picked some notes on his banjo. He waited for something to come to mind. From inside the prompter’s box, Squirt whispered something. Mulcahey looked at him. The light came from inside Squirt’s head, that’s the way it seemed, hovering around his skull, a perfect outline. Mulcahey searched his brain for a joke, but there was only a translucent blankness.
Squirt raised his voice: “Mister Flossum, you eber been in lub?”
Mulcahey repeated it.
Flossum said, “You means, has I eber felt my heart burn?”
Mulcahey knew the next line by himself: “I don’t means does you likes yer gal’s cookin’, I mean lub …”
The light persisted, Mulcahey the Prophet. The Boy Seer. He had been born with the caul, the inner fetal membrane had covered his head at birth. The women attending his mother had rushed out to tell his father, and the news spread throughout the whole village: a child born with the veil. His father buried the membrane beneath the doorstep. A blessing on this family. A child who could see things hidden from mortal eyes.
“Be a long time since I been in lub,” said Flossum.
“How long?”
“Oh, since about half past eleben dis mornin’.”
“But how you know it lub and not infatunation?”
“When I’se in lub, I’se always does de same thin’. I goes over to de gal dats caught my fancy and I’se whisper somethin’ soft in her ear.”
“Somethin’ soft?”
“Yes, siree, I’se put my big lips rights next to her pretty little ear, and I sez, ‘Mashed pertaters.’ “
“And dey likes dat?”
“Likes dat? Why, my gals lub mashed pertaters!”
Squirt was mouthing the words, looking down at the text, then up at Mulcahey. Squirt’s head was in constant motion, but the light remained.
At first Jack Mulcahey had been a disappointment to the villagers. Although born with the caul, he could tell them nothing about the future. At night, when they came back from the fields, some of the old men and women would sit by the fire in his father’s cabin and wait for the small boy to start uttering prophecies, or at least to tell them what kind of weather or crops to expect. But the infant Jack never rewarded their patient silences, and in time they stopped coming.
The summer he was twelve, his father died of pneumonia and the following fall Jack joined men from the townland in the annual migration to Scotland for the potato harvest. The morning they left, the men were silent as they gathered in the yard in front of the chapel, but Jack and the other boys his age were filled with excitement. Some of them had received their first pair of brogues for the trip, and ran ahead amazed at how heavy and awkward their feet felt. They walked all morning carrying their small bundles of clothes and food before they reached the port where they were to find passage to Scotland, the newly shod already limping because of the way the leather rubbed against their skin. They waited by the pierside in the sunshine, the boys wrestling with one another, the men sitting and smoking their pipes. A procession of livestock was loaded into the hold, and when the loading was complete, the crew called to the migrants in English, and they ran up the gangplank and sat in the middle of the deck, out of the sailors’ way. One boy had brought his fiddle and played a tune. A few of the gentlemen passengers stood on the upper deck and watched them impassively.
About an hour away from land, the sky became dark and the sea began to roll. The migrants lay down on deck, and the crew flung them a huge piece of canvas, which they held above their heads. The sea grew more turbulent and the waves began to break over the deck. The rain lashed the canvas. From down below, in the safety of the hold, they could hear the fearful lowing of the cattle and the constant movement of hooves as the animals tried to keep their balance. Jack became wet to the skin, and grew so cold that he shook uncontrollably. One of the men gave him a drink of whiskey, but he vomited it. They put a blanket around him; it was soon as soaked as everything else. He was in a stupor. They were talking to him, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying. The man who had given him the whiskey went up and pounded on the door of the pilot’s house. A mate stuck his head out and said he was sorry but there was nothing he could do, regulations were regulations, and none of the potato pickers was to be allowed anywhere but on the deck of the ship. The others huddled around Jack to give him the protection and warmth of their bodies, and rubbed his arms and legs. He surrendered to an overpowering exhaustion. He lay in utter darkness. Slowly he became aware of a soft hiss, the inhaling and exhaling of something so close that its warm breath touched the side of his face. He sensed that whatever it was was hunched close to the ground like an animal set to pounce, and he held himself perfectly still, sure that the slightest sign of life would be a provocation. When he awoke, he was next to a fire. The others had taken him into a fishing shanty on the Scottish pier where the boat had landed, wrapped him in a dry tarpaulin, and put him as close as possible to the fire.
In the morning he felt weak and light-headed, and there was a buzzing in his ears that would persist for several days, but otherwise he was recovered and walked with the others in search of work. They broke into groups and spread across the countryside to offer themselves to the local farmers. It was a good crop and there was plenty of work. They moved from job to job. Most times they were allowed to sleep in the barns, but one farmer insisted they stay in an old half-wood, half-brick bothy, or shed, that had iron bars on the windows.
The first night, after they were inside, the Scotsman barred the door behind them. They threatened to quit. The farmer said that being locked in was for their own good, that there was a great deal of local resentment in the neighborhood over the horde of ragged pickers, some of whom had stolen money and goods from their employers. They could be the objects of a misdirected retaliation, he explained. The men insisted that they wouldn’t stand for being caged. They said that they weren’t criminals and wouldn’t be treated as if they were. Then begone, said the farmer, and since their work was unfinished, he would pay them nothing.
In the end they agreed to stay. There were nineteen of them, twelve men and seven boys, including Jack. They worked hard to get the harvesting done and be on their way. On the day they finished, they went to the farmhouse to be paid. The men went ahead, and Jack followed with the other boys. It was dusk, a red black sky with a long, low streak of final sunlight on the horizon. Too tired to talk, they walked with their heads down. When Jack first saw the glow around the other boys’ heads he thought it was from the twilight, but as they moved on he realized it was radiating from each head. The men took their pay, and tired as they were, rather than suffer the indignity of another night in the latched bothy they decided to set out on the road and sleep in the fields. The boys chose to stay. They would catch up with the men in the morning. Jack stood with the men. Aren’t you going to stay with us, Sean? the boys asked. We’ll have some singing tonight, a good sleep, and tomorrow we’ll be ready for the road. Come join us, Sean.
He could perceive the presence of death. The thing ready to pounce. He knew who its victims would be. The judgment was already sealed. It couldn’t be appealed or changed, he understood that as well, and the very fact that he could choose to leave meant the verdict didn’t include him, that all he could do would be to stay and see it executed on the others. He left with the men. Reaching the ridge of the far hill, he stopped and turned. In the last light he could see the farmer barring the bothy door. God’s mercy on them. In the morning the news reached them on the farm where they had found work that six young pickers had died in a fire in a bothy, a tragic accident.
On the way back to Ireland the weather was clear, the opposite of the journey over, and the men sat and smoked and talked about the boys who had died. They dreaded bringing the news to the families. We’d all be better off in America, one of them said. Such things don’t happen there, unless of course the Indians should get you, but even then you’d die a free man defending what belonged to you.
They had a little money in their pockets and enough to eat. The sea was calm. They dreamed the bigger dream of a journey across the Atlantic, a place where they would no longer be migrant pickers, papists, tenants, men with a value less than cattle. In America you would own the land and everything it produced. In America there were no landlords, no tithes, no rent. The great open spaces of America lay over the horizon, exile in a distant, foreign land away from everything they knew, the people, the earth, the sky, an unreal place, a place that existed only in stories, and even if they would go, where would the passage money come from?
The Famine began the next year, and it killed any speculation about America. The people clung to what they had, desperate to keep it. Jack’s family survived the first winter on what could be salvaged from the potato crop and on the livestock they slaughtered. The following winter Jack’s mother died from the fever, and his two youngest brothers and sisters, and his granduncle, Malachi. The light was everywhere he looked, a country filled with people marked for death, and Jack feared he was marked as well. He kept a broken shard of mirrored glass that he had found and looked anxiously every day to see if the helmet of light had formed around his head. All he saw was his thin face, a soft down forming on his forehead, his sunken, fearful eyes.
The people passed beyond panic and anger. As the deaths mounted, a resignation settled over many of them, there was no way out, God’s will be done. Occasionally wild rumors about an approaching army of Young Irelanders, a well-armed force with abundant supplies of food, would rouse the neighborhood, but the rumors were invariably false, and though they continued to circulate, they ceased to be listened to. Only a miracle could save them from starvation, and in the middle of winter, with the government relief stations shut down and the potato crop totally putrefied and every chicken and pig long ago consumed, the miracle arrived. His Lordship’s agent offered passage to America to all those of his tenants who would surrender their holdings. It was a gesture of His Lordship’s concern over the reports of the grievous distress on his estate that had reached him in London, a two-year-long series of reports that had gone unanswered until the agent had appended a note explaining that under the operation of the amended poor law, His Lordship was personally responsible for poor rates on all holdings below a four-pound evaluation. The agent explained that by his calculations it would cost the estate three pounds per annum to support a person in the workhouse, while for a single charge of five pounds that same person could be transported to North America. His attention drawn at last to the suffering of his tenantry, His Lordship, remembering their innocent and happy ways when he had visited among them several years before, authorized the offer of emigration to Canada.
Jack and his remaining younger brother and sister were in the first group to go. They were loaded on the Duke of Cumberland. A rotting antique hull that had been launched in the last year of the Seven Years’ War, the Duke of Cumberland in its prime had carried a company of 120. Given the exigencies of conditions in Ireland, 230 of His Lordship’s tenants were put aboard.
The weather was bad from the day they embarked, rain and clouds obscuring the land so that they barely had a sense of leaving. By the second day the pitching seas left most of them sick, and willingly forgoing the ration of barley and pease they were given to eat. By the end of the first week the deaths started. Fiabhras dubh, typhus, the black fever. People’s skin turned dark; they appeared to be drunk. The quarters became rank with liquid stool and vomit. The crew disappeared and then one morning reappeared and roused everyone out of their wooden bunks and splashed the place down with buckets of seawater. Jack’s sister died that night; his brother the next afternoon. They were put in a single canvas sack, which was weighed down with Belgian blocks, ballast intended as paving stones for the streets of Montreal, and tossed overboard. People lay listlessly in the bunks, rolling back and forth against one another, and since they had ceased reporting deaths to the captain, there was a daily inspection by the crew to find and dispose of the corpses.
Jack lived on deck. The mates kicked him and tried to force him to go below, but every time they threw him down he climbed back out until they finally gave up and simply ignored him. He slept under the stars and spent all day watching the sea. One of the mates befriended him. He gave Jack an apple to eat, and when he was on the night watch he allowed Jack to stand with him. In the beginning Jack found it hard to understand the mate’s speech, but gradually it became easier and he came to love the sound, American speech, faster than the English spoken in Ireland, more clipped and to the point, and spoken through the nose. The mate came from a city called Troy, on the river Hudson. He was the man who baptized Sean Mulcahey “Jack.” “Sean,” he said, “ain’t a name for an American boy, and John ain’t much better, you’ll never meet an American boy going around calling himself John. No, it’s going to be Jack, that’s what you are going to be from now on.”
In late June, five weeks since leaving Ireland, they saw land. Forty-eight people had died on the passage over, one fifth of those who had sailed. Many were still sick, but everyone came on deck to see the coast of North America, the shores of Canada. They carried up the infirm and those too frail to walk, and their spirits were lifted by the sight of the green shore, the wooded headlands of the great continent. When they entered the mouth of the St. Lawrence they could see the land at close range, and the trees seemed so much larger than anything in Ireland, the forest so untamed, that they watched with equal parts awe
and anticipation. The American mate told Jack that before they proceeded to Quebec they would have to stop at the quarantine station on Grosse Isle, where the sick would be treated and those well enough transported westward.
They arrived at Grosse Isle while the river was covered with mist. It was morning and the weather had turned extremely warm. Jack saw the masts of other ships poking above the mist. They dropped anchor. The air was filled with a foul odor that Jack assumed was a river smell, stagnant water, rotting leaves, and wood. Anyone who was still fit came up from below. Strung across the rigging of the nearby ships was what looked like a collection of pennants that had been shredded into rags by the wind. Jack climbed up onto the railing of the Duke of Cumberland for a better look. The pennants turned out to be trousers and shirts and shawls and skirts, the laundered tatters of the other ships’ passengers. The Duke of Cumberland’s captain, who had hardly been seen through the voyage, appeared on deck. He ordered a boat to be lowered, and four crewmen rowed him off into the mist.
The stench of the river had become almost overpowering. Jack yelled over to the nearest ship. Nobody answered. He yelled again and heard the echo of his own voice. There was a ghostly quality to the other ship as it rode at anchor and slipped in and out of the mist. Jack put his legs through the railing and sat with his chin resting on his forearm. After a few minutes, someone appeared on deck. Jack called out. A boy his own age appeared on the opposite railing, a redheaded skeleton, shirtless, his trousers tied with string.
“What ship are ye?” Jack yelled.
The boy stood silently. Jack yelled louder. The boy stepped up onto the rigging. He stayed there for a moment, then let go and went down feetfirst into the water. Jack leaned over as far as he could to watch the boy swim, but the mist was thickest above the water and obscured his view. He listened, but there was no sound of swimming, only the water lapping against the sides of the ships. He waited and watched a long time, but there was never any sign of the boy.