by Peter Quinn
When the captain returned, he had a loud argument with the crew. They demanded to be paid and allowed to make their own way to Quebec. They said that their work was done and they wouldn’t go near Grosse Isle. The captain refused to pay them, and they disappeared into their quarters.
The passengers had brought up from below everything that they could carry, and the deck was littered with clothes and bedding. The sick lay all about. In the late morning, the sun burned away the mist and they could see that the river was crammed with ships, as many as thirty between them and Grosse Isle. The sun became burning and intense, and a swarm of flies and stinging insects descended, driving the people back down to the quarters they had just left. An official in a blue jacket arrived and went about the entire ship, poking into every corner, sweating profusely as he went. He went over the passenger lists and wrote down names in a small book he carried. He said that a boat would be sent to bring the sick to the island, where they would be temporarily held in quarantine, but that the bodies of the dead must be brought there immediately. The captain said that the crew wouldn’t go, so the official suggested enlisting some of the passengers. Jack and three others volunteered. They brought up the bodies of a small boy and an old woman who had died the night before. The bodies were wrapped in canvas and tied tightly with thick rope. The volunteers put the bodies into the bottom of the boat and rowed toward the island. They didn’t have to strain, the current moved them along quickly, and Jack kept turning to glimpse where they were headed. He could see a large number of tents that stood out against the trees and made the place seem festive and inviting. The river smell became sharper as they neared the shore.
There were three rows of bodies laid by the spot where they landed, twenty bodies in a row. From a distance Jack had thought they were black men, but when he jumped ashore and helped pull the boat up, he could see the swelling, darkened corruption of bodies left too long in the sun. The flies made a frenzied hum in the air. Jack and the others took the canvas-covered bodies from the boat and moved up a slight incline toward the tents. The ground was covered with bodies. Jack presumed they were all dead, but then he saw that many of them were breathing and moving. Another man in a blue jacket walked down to meet Jack and his fellows. He asked what ship they were from and ordered them to follow him. They picked their way through the maze of bodies on the ground until they came to a shed, where the official gave them shovels and led them to a tent with open sides. Inside were rows of crudely made double-tiered bunks, two, in some cases three, people sharing a single space. The official went over and lifted a man by the shoulder. He told Jack to grab the feet. The man was dead, and so was the woman next to him. Above was a woman delirious with fever, praying and cursing in Irish. Her bedding was soaked through with diarrhea, which had dripped down onto the corpses beneath.
Jack and his shipmates tried to dig graves in a field behind the tent, but the ground was so stony that they couldn’t dig past the topsoil. They scraped and clawed at the earth with the shovels, rolled the bodies into shallow graves, and piled dirt and stones on top. The official said to keep at it, that he would return in a short while. As soon as he left, Jack and the others dropped their shovels and walked quickly back to the boat. The current was against them and they had to row hard before they reached the Duke of Cumberland. Jack lay on the deck. He ached. He knew it would be only a matter of time before he got sick.
That night, Jack made a raft of three planks lashed together. He stole a canvas bag, into which he put his shoes, and a tin of dry biscuits he had taken from the ship’s hold. He had hoped to talk to the American sailor about Troy and how to reach it. He loved the sound of it: Troy. The mother of exiles. Great stone towers above a great river. But the American had disappeared with the rest of the crew. Jack would find his own way.
A bright, white moon made the river shine. Jack tied the canvas bag to the raft, which he then threw off the back of the ship. He ran the length of the deck and climbed up onto the railing. The raft turned in a slow circle, collided with the side of the ship, and moved into the current. Jack jumped, feetfirst, into the water, the blackness enveloping him, the brutal coldness stunning him. He sank helplessly for a few seconds, then he moved his legs and feet as rapidly as he could and pulled with his arms toward the surface. The moonlight surrounded him. He sucked in air, flailed around for the raft, and sank back into the darkness. He moved his arms and legs, struggling to rise, breaking into the moonlight again, gulping for air and getting a mouthful of water that made him choke. The river drew him down. It grew colder as he sank. His lungs felt as if they were about to burst. He reached up with his arms, his legs scissoring the water, and felt the raft sliding by. He lunged for it, grabbed the wood, and pulled himself up. He lay gasping. After a few minutes he began to shiver violently from the cold. He lay on his stomach and kicked his legs, gliding down the river, steadily moving closer to the southern shore.
He was exhausted, and fell asleep in the tall grass along the riverbank. The heat of the sun woke him. He stood up. He couldn’t see the ships. He ate some of the biscuits he had stolen and set out on his way, southward, on a wide dirt road; he hid in the bushes whenever a wagon went by. He had already made up his mind that he wouldn’t stop moving as long as he was in a country where the Union Jack flew: the double crosses of Saint Andrew and Saint George, the empire of hunger and servitude, the realm of eviction and emigration, a kingdom where the ability to discern the presence of death had ceased to matter because death was everywhere, around every head, death from starvation, fever, dysentery, from a sheer unwillingness to face any more of life, death in workhouses, on roadsides and in ditches, in the holds of ships, the dead lined up along the shore, in canvas bags weighed down with paving blocks, the anonymous dead already as forgotten as his brothers and sisters or the red-haired boy, Her Majesty’s superfluous Paddies.
He slept in the fields, and although the days were hot, the nights were chilly. The country was immense, a landscape unlike anything he had ever seen, great forests that spread out as far as the horizon, endless meadows of wildflowers, with farms only rarely to be seen. He drank water from streams and husbanded his biscuits, walking until he lost track of the days, always half expecting to see the towers of Troy sticking out above the tree-tops, the American flag flying from the highest spot. Finally his biscuits ran out. He debated what to do. He was sure that a farmer would take one look at his rags and alert the authorities that some diseased immigrant from Grosse Isle had drifted into the area; they would try to send him back. But he knew he had no choice. It was either make himself known or starve to death. He decided to stop at the next farmhouse but walked all afternoon without seeing a sign of any settlement. He stopped by the roadside, exhausted and starving. The sun was setting. He sat with his back to a large rock and fell asleep.
When he awoke, it was pitch-black; he had no idea where he was. He lay still and listened. He stood up. Off in the woods, a few hundred yards away, he could see a campfire. He started walking toward it and caught the smell of roasting meat; the scent killed any sense of caution. He called out “Hello!” and walked faster until he was running. There was a silhouette standing before the flames, and just as he got near, he felt an arm around his neck. Someone had come behind him and pressed the sharp point of a knife into the flesh beneath his chin. The figure in front of him approached, silently. Neither did the person holding the knife speak. They brought him over by the fire and forced him to lie down. One of them knelt with his knees on Jack’s back, and the other went through Jack’s pockets and shirt.
They spoke in Irish. “The boy has nothing,” the one searching his pockets said.
Jack said, in Irish, “I’m starving.”
The knees came off his back. A hand grabbed him by the back of the neck and dragged him close to the fire. The smell of the meat was intense. He could hear the sizzle of fat dripping onto the hot coals. On the pile of rocks set around the fire was a tin plate with cooked meat on it. He reached for it.
One of the men grabbed him by the hair and jerked his head back. Jack cried out in pain. The knife was right in front of his face, and the metal reflected firelight.
“What’s your name?” one of the men asked.
“My name is Sean,” Jack said. The man tightened his grip on Jack’s hair.
“And what are you looking for, Sean?”
“Food. I’m starving.”
“And where are you from?”
“Donegal,” he said.
The hand tightened its grip on his hair. “Where are you walking from? How long have you been following us?”
“I haven’t been following you at all. I was sleeping by the roadside and I saw the light. I’m starving.”
“A terrible thing, starvation, we’ve all seen a lot of it, but this isn’t a relief station, boy, so why don’t you be on your way, and may God be with you.”
The man let go of his hair, and Jack put his hand on his head and rubbed the soreness on his scalp. He got up on one knee, then stood. He was almost lifted off the ground by a kick that caught him square in the middle of his rear.
“You heard me,” the man with the knife said. “Be on your way.”
“I need food,” Jack said in English. He started to cry, he couldn’t help himself, and he blurted out the English words, unthinkingly, in a flood: “I’m desperate, please, anything, I’ll go but just give me some scraps, I’ll die out here unless you help me, in the name of Jesus, all I’m asking for is just a mouthful of food.”
“You have the English, do you?” one of them asked, in Irish.
“I do,” Jack said. “I speak it as well.”
The man grabbed Jack by the shoulder and pulled him back over to the fire.
“Do you know where we are?”
Jack lied. “I do.”
“Where?”
“The border is twenty miles to the south. Over to the west is a town called Cumberland.” He made it up as he went along. “I was working there, but the authorities came searching for any of the Irish who ran away from Grosse Isle, so I set out to reach the United States.”
The man pressed the knife against Jack’s temple. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not lying.”
“If you’ve been working, why do you still have these ship’s rags on you?”
“Was only there a day or so before I had to flee. I left in the middle of the night, without food or my pay. I had no choice.”
“And you know where the border is?”
“I know the way and where to cross. It was explained to me by an Irishman in Cumberland, a safe route so I wouldn’t be stopped. It’s fearsome, he said, the way the Americans are guarding their border, turning back any immigrant who doesn’t have money or a bond guaranteeing him against becoming a public charge.”
“You know where to cross?” The knife pressed so hard against his skull that Jack cried out again.
“I swear by the Holy Trinity I do.”
The other man said, “He might really know. Besides, he speaks English like he was one of them. We’ve got nothing to lose by finding out if he’s telling the truth.”
They let him have some meat. He ate, then lay down by the fire. In the morning he could see that the two men were as ragged as he was. They carried a canvas sack filled with provisions that Jack guessed they had stolen in the same way he had stolen the biscuits. They made him walk in front of them, and they ducked into the woods at the sight of a house or a horseman. On the second evening of their walking, they told Jack that the border had better be close or they would teach him about the consequences of telling lies. He swore once again that he was telling the truth. He woke while it was still dark and went through the sack they were carrying. He took some of their biscuits and a piece of cooked meat. He ran to the road and kept moving as fast as he could, alternately running and walking, until the sun was high overhead. He stopped in the woods to let a wagon go by. It was drawn by six horses and carried a great pile of logs. He ran behind it, pulled himself up, and hid among the logs. He rode all day, and when the wagon stopped at an inn he jumped off and slept in the woods. In the morning, unseen by the teamster, he jumped back on for another day’s full journey.
He saw that the settlements of houses were closer together and the farms seemed more prosperous. On the third day they came into a valley, and the wagon stopped at a mill outside a substantial village. Jack started walking again. He climbed a hillside, hoping to see the American flag flying from some mast, but saw the Union Jack fluttering above a redbrick building. He kept walking. That afternoon he stole a shirt and a pair of pants that were strung out from a line in back of a farmhouse. He threw his rags into the woods. He put on the stolen clothes. The shirt was too big and the pants too short, but they were comfortable and clean, unpatched, without holes, and Jack felt less conspicuous than before. He ate apples from an orchard, the first he had had since the sailor had shared one with him on the ship.
The next morning he passed a small, neat cabin. A pair of boots were on the porch. He crept up to the porch and tried them on. He left behind the lumps of cracked, torn, perforated leather that had been his shoes.
He walked across meadows full of cows and through fields of furrowed earth, and his boots made him feel tall and fully grown and he imagined himself a Yankee farmer striding across his lands, a journey that would take all day. He found another road, and after about a mile he came around a bend. There was a white building with a steep roof and a pole jutting from it with a banner of red and white stripes, and white stars on a field of blue. Jack danced right there in the middle of the road, his boots kicking up small clouds of American dust.
There were wagons and carriages pulled up around the building. Jack looked through a window: Some sort of auction was going on inside. Men stood around what looked like a courtroom; some draped themselves over chairs, their legs dangling over the arms. They talked in loud voices and walked around as if they owned the building. They displayed none of the cap-in-hand hesitation that any tenant farmer in Ireland would have shown in entering such a place, eyes cast down, a proper deference in his voice, Yes, milord; no, milord; I beg your pardon, milord. These men sounded like the sailor from Troy, but there was an even more pronounced twang to their speech, and also something more American, even more direct and clipped and assertive.
The auction ended, and the men strolled out of the building and began to get into their wagons. Jack walked away and stood by the roadside, where the driveway met the road. A farmer with a gray-streaked beard pulled up next to him.
“Where ya headed, son?”
“Troy,” Jack said.
The farmer laughed loudly. “Better get started. I’d say you got a ways to go.” Jack nodded. He didn’t know why Troy should sound so funny. He started to walk to hide his embarrassment. The farmer said, “Get in.” He held out his hand and helped Jack onto the driver’s bench.
“Where ya from?” the farmer asked.
Jack tried to imitate the tone of the men he had just heard talking, tried to speak like an American. “From Cumberland.”
“That a town?”
“A small town. Most people never heard of it, even in Canada.”
“Where ya from before that?”
Jack realized he hadn’t done a very good job of disguising his accent. “I was born in Scotland. I came to Canada with my parents three years ago. Cumberland is mostly Scots.”
“Where your parents now?”
“Still in Cumberland but my father’s been sick and can’t work, so they sent me to stay with my uncle in Troy.”
The farmer looked over at Jack, then snapped the reins and made a loud cluck cluck noise. The horses moved faster. “Them parents of yours didn’t send you with much, did they? No clothes but what’s on your back? No food?”
“Oh, they did, but I was robbed.”
“Robbed?”
“Two men with a knife. Happened day before last. They came on me at night. I offered to share my food, but they t
ook everything I had, said I should be grateful they didn’t slit my throat.”
“Paddies, I’ll bet anything. They were Paddies, am I right?” He looked at Jack again. Jack nodded. “For sure,” he said.
“Pug-nosed louts, ain’t a farmer in the country hasn’t had something swiped by them, clothes, food, boots. They’ll take anything.”
Jack looked the farmer in the eyes, unblinkingly. He was unsure whether the farmer was playing with him the way a cat does with a mouse. He considered jumping off the wagon and running away, but decided against it.
“Know the worst part of it?” the farmer said.
“What might that be?”
“They’re a warning from God, a plague sent on us so we might learn to hear His word: ‘Yea, there came a grievous swarm of flies into the land, and into its houses, and the land was corrupted by reason of the swarm of flies.’ It’s the plain truth. Swarming in our ports, swarming over the border, no doubt about it, and unless we return to godly ways of thinking and acting we’ll be struck down just as sure as old Pharaoh was.”
Jack let him talk. Obviously, the farmer had no idea of who was sitting next to him. They came to a crossroads, and the farmer stopped the wagon. He pointed straight ahead. “I’m going this way.” He motioned with his thumb to his right. “That way is Troy.”
“How far?”
“Two hundred miles, more or less, if ya run your finger straight across a map. Three hundred, I’d guess, on the road.”
Jack was exhausted. He wanted to lie somewhere and sleep, sink down and not think about getting up. He was tired of being hungry, of walking, of seeking the walls of Troy. He remembered the emotionless plunge of the redheaded boy down into mist and water, no sound of struggle.
The farmer seemed to know what was on Jack’s mind. “You got most of the state of New Hampshire and all of Vermont. Didn’t your pappy give ya some idea of the distance ya had to go?”