The Whitest Flower

by Brendan Graham

  They didn’t hear her!

  Out through the slatted timber, she could see the Canadian sky. She could see arms – strong hairy arms, the arms that lifted her, covering part of the slats at each side, blocking out the light. The movement stopped and she felt herself being lowered, heard the thud of timber on timber, as her box was placed on the one beneath it. She tried to raise herself up, put an eye to the slat above her. If they couldn’t hear her, then perhaps somebody would see her looking out at them – and stop it all!

  She could only raise herself a bit. There were people outside – she could see their feet. She made one great effort to lift herself.

  Yes – she made it!

  Now she could see. The feet with the black shoes had white stockings and long black skirts above them. The hands of those in the skirts were holding prayer books. Their faces still hidden from her.

  The other feet, the ones with boots, had rough trousers tied up with pieces of string. The hands of the boot-people had spades in them.

  The owners of the small bare feet were more difficult to see because they were over to the side. She strained her neck. Children! Children, their hands joined in front of them, praying, crying. Now she could see their faces and she realized that the children who prayed for the repose of her soul, their faces reddened with tears, were her own.

  She shouted out their names:

  ‘Patrick!’

  ‘Katie!’

  ‘Mary!’

  They kept on praying and crying. They had not heard her. She shouted their names again and again. Still they did not hear her.

  Then, with a soft clatter, the clay sprinkled over the wood on top of her. It darkened the sky, cutting off the faces of her children. Then, the choking taste of it was in her mouth. She spat it out.

  If she shouted louder they had to hear her.

  She did, driving out the screams of desperation, trying to compete with the incessant sound of the clay falling, darkening her space, blanketing her in. Again she banged frantically with her hands and feet against the walls of her coffin. Then lifted herself up to bang against its roof with her head.

  Anything, anything to make more noise, to make them hear her.

  But something was holding her back, keeping her pinned to the floor. She struggled and struggled, but she could make no ground against the force which held her.

  Then voices.

  ‘Reverend, I think she’s coming out of it!’ an Irish voice said.

  ‘Yes, Father, thanks be to the Good Lord!’ an English voice said. ‘But hold her yet, lest she harm herself.’

  Then, a third voice: ‘Ellen, Ellen – it’s me, it’s me!’

  She stopped screaming. She tried to focus on this third voice. The pinioning hands relaxed their hold on her. Now she could sit up, start the banging again. But no wooden coffin confined her movement.

  And the sound of the clay falling – it too had stopped.

  Had she gone beyond this life? Or somehow escaped?

  She opened her eyes fearfully, the perspiration stinging them as she did. Her whole body was drenched in it. She blinked to clear them, to identify the shapes that still spoke to her.

  Lavelle! Lavelle was beside her. She felt his hand on her own.

  She was alive!

  She tried to manage a smile at him. And the others – Reverend Bonney and Father McGauran – who stood by her bed, beaming at her.

  ‘Ellen, you’ve come out of it!’ The young priest looked gaunt and tired, yet his face was lit with joy.

  ‘Yes indeed, Mrs Coogan, a remarkable recovery by a remarkable woman!’ his Anglican counterpart added. ‘How fortunate that we were here, that Father and I had just come to visit and pray with you a while. The Lord is all powerful!’

  Lavelle, overwhelmed with happiness, embraced her. The two clergymen continued to beam with delight at the husband and wife, reunited in life.

  ‘I’ll be fine now, Lavelle,’ she said – the confusion of the moment making her forget who she was supposed to be. The two reverend gentlemen looked at each other, bewildered.

  Lavelle saved the day. ‘It is a name by which Mrs Coogan calls me in our private moments!’ he said, without a hint of a smile.

  The two priests looked at each other and nodded almost in unison. ‘Oh, yes … of course,’ they said, slightly embarrassed. Thereafter the beaming resumed.

  ‘Eight days now you have been in the grip of the fever, Mrs Coogan,’ the Reverend Bonney informed her.

  ‘Yes, Ellen, and now you must rest here in Hôtel-Dieu for a while longer,’ his Catholic counterpart added. ‘Maybe then, when you have recovered sufficiently, we will remove you to the Blue Store for a period of recuperation.’

  ‘The Blue Store?’ Lavelle asked.

  ‘Yes, Mr Coogan,’ the priest answered. ‘The Blue Store is a large warehouse here in Quebec where healthy relatives of those who remain on Grosse Île await their safe release.’

  ‘Grosse Île …?’ Ellen asked, latching on to the words, slowly remembering.

  ‘The situation is still serious there, Mrs Coogan. The ships continue to come, but not so many now. The timber season draws to an end,’ said Reverend Bonney.

  ‘We still do what we can to ease their suffering, but it is a daunting task,’ Father McGauran added. ‘One wonders if they are better to be kept at home to die, instead of on a foreign shore, or in the foul hold of a coffin ship. It is a cruel choice, indeed. Anyway, you must not worry about that. Reverend Bonney and I will leave you now with our blessings and see you in a week or so,’ the priest concluded, brightening at the prospect of her recovery.

  And so, in the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, Ellen Rua O’Malley joined her hands and closed her eyes to receive the joint blessings of the Church of Rome and the Church of England.

  A week later, when Father McGauran returned, she was much stronger. Immediately she saw the priest’s troubled face she knew something was wrong.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Father. Dia dhuit!’ she greeted him.

  ‘Dia’s Muire dhuit, Ellen,’ he returned. ‘I’m afraid I have sad news,’ he added, coming closer to her.

  ‘What is it, Father?’

  ‘It’s the Reverend Bonney … I am sorry to relate that he contracted the illness and could not be saved.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, unable to take the news. ‘Oh, no … Will it never end, these afflictions?’

  Father McGauran took her hands. ‘He was truly a most holy person, Ellen. He is gone to his Maker. He is at peace.’

  ‘Oh, Father, he was … He was so kind to me, though we did not agree on everything,’ she said, thinking of the long hours of conversation they had had. Thinking of how he had worked among the sick and dying, until he almost keeled over from exhaustion. Now, his devotion had brought upon himself the thing he had sought to warn her of.

  ‘Yes, I know. He told me of your “theological” talks.’ Father McGauran gave a little smile. ‘I think you had a great influence on him, Ellen. Throughout his illness, he often spoke your name, enquiring as to how you were.’ The priest paused, remembering their mutual friend. ‘He asked me to give you this …’ He handed her the well-worn leather-bound copy of the Old Testament that she had seen the Reverend Bonney use so lovingly.

  She clasped it to her, and said, ‘Thoughtful of others even in his own suffering. I will treasure this all my life. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a anam.’ She smiled to herself, certain that the soul of the Anglican clergyman would be at the right hand of God, but wondering by which gate it was that he had entered God’s Kingdom.

  They talked a while of Ireland. News from there continued to be dire. Thousands upon thousands still died. The hospitals were unable to cope. The workhouses were bankrupt, and the people continued to be cleared from the land – to die, or take the boat. Often it was one and the same thing.

  ‘The land is now labourless,’ Father McGauran told her, ‘and the production of food decreased. The Crown, instead of sending relief, sends more forces
to protect the traders and merchants, and to quell riotous behaviour at the ports as food leaves the country.’

  ‘The country will be brought to its knees before it will be let stand again! And is the Church doing anything?’

  ‘Well, at last the bishops are moving,’ he answered. ‘Archbishop MacHale of Tuam seems to be the driving force. But their hands are tied. What can they do except write to Her Majesty and the Government demanding aid and reform?’

  ‘First, they could stop blaming the people for what has befallen them,’ she answered. ‘It is not the Hand of God but the hand of man, in London, which has brought this horror down upon Ireland.’

  She stated this with such conviction that Father McGauran knew she was well on the way to recovery.

  ‘I see you are getting stronger, Ellen!’ he said, with a smile. ‘I will arrange for you and Mr Coogan to have accommodation at the Blue Store for a week or so. But if you are to see Boston this year, you must go quickly before ice closes the St Lawrence. You are in no condition to travel overland,’ he advised.

  ‘Father, there is something I would ask of you …’ she broached.

  ‘Ask,’ he said.

  ‘That you would hear my confession.’

  He looked at her, wondering what it was that troubled this woman who had all but sacrificed her life for others.

  ‘Of course, Ellen!’ He bowed his head beside her face, his ear close to her lips.

  There, in the Hôtel-Dieu – the House of God – she whispered her sins into his ear.

  She held nothing back, told him her whole story: Michael, the children, Sheela-na-Sheeoga – the Slám – Pakenham, Coombes, Annie, Wiwirremalde, Lavelle, and McGrath. It seemed to her that she traced out all her recent life to the young priest.

  He listened attentively, silently, never once lifting his head. When she had finished, he waited a few moments and then said to her: ‘You have made a good confession, Ellen. God has forgiven you your sins, and, in His name, so do I … As for your penance, this you have already done by your work amongst the dying and through your own suffering. I only ask that you pray for the happy repose of Reverend Bonney’s soul … and that, also in your prayers, you remember your confessor.

  ‘And now I absolve you. Ego te absolvo peccatus tuus …’ And he made the sign of forgiveness over her.

  She lowered her head to accept it. Freed at last of her burden

  Book Four

  Boston

  47

  Boston did not like the Irish. Especially if they were Catholic, and poor.

  In fact, Boston hated them with a bitterness and revulsion that was evangelical in its zeal. The very day she and Lavelle disembarked on Boston’s Long Wharf, they overheard the remark: ‘St Patrick’s Vermin bringing with them the twin scourges of pestilence and Popery.’ The man who made it, probably a merchant, seemed not to care who overheard him. His was a view that was widely held in the New England capital. The Puritanical Bostonians, staunchly Anglo-Saxon, despised the Irish for threatening their well-ordered society – and they were not slow to say so.

  But Boston was also booming. It had the best of all worlds. The city – gateway to America – took on the learning and wisdom of the Old World, yet had the enterprise and spirit of the New: travel, communication, invention. The New England city was at the forefront of the railroad industry, developing routes throughout America, whilst new shipping routes were the avenues to increased trade and commerce with the rest of the world.

  Boston’s education system, she learned, was the most advanced in the new continent. Here Patrick and the twins could study anything they wanted: history, philosophy, finance, business – anything. The city was moving towards a free school system so that its citizens could develop the mental disciplines and economic skills to see Boston into a prosperous, well-ordered future.

  For all its bigotry and hatred of things Irish, Boston was still the place for her. If she could make something of herself here – break through that barrier – then Boston, she knew, would hold no limit of opportunity for her and her children.

  They had left Mr and Mrs Coogan behind when they left Grosse Île, and both felt much more comfortable having reverted to their own identity. Smartly dressed and having money at their disposal, they managed to acquire comfortable but separate lodgings at opposite sides of the street from each other in Boston’s South End, despite the proliferation of signs stating: ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’. It was a lesson for Ellen. ‘Few will bite the hand that feeds them,’ she remarked to Lavelle. Money, if you had enough of it, would overcome most prejudices. Which left them with only two such prejudices to surmount in Boston: poor, they apparently were not – Irish and Catholic they would always be.

  Boston was about three to four times the size of Melbourne. Of a population which the newspapers put at 120,000, a quarter were Irish. The women went to the clothing factories, working all the hours God sent for five dollars a week. But five dollars a week was better than ‘five potatoes a week or none’, and the women were luckier than the men.

  Many of the Irish men were forced to head west to find work on the railroads. Building America with shovel and pick, and sweat and blood, moving wherever the work and the railroads went.

  Those who came to Boston with nothing had to work hard, or be inventive. She noticed how plentiful Irish pedlars were, their stock on their backs needing little money to start up.

  ‘Everything is dollars,’ she said to Lavelle. ‘That’s the way it is here.’

  Dollars and business and busy-ness. Everybody bustled and hustled, scrabbling and scraping for the next dollar.

  It was good and it was bad. It gave you a chance, a start at life. But it left you with no time for each other – not like it was back home. No time to stand and talk, or just look at a thing. No time for anything, only dollars. And surviving.

  It wasn’t so, she knew, for the ‘Scotch-Irish’ or the ‘Ulster-Americans’, as they liked to call themselves. Ellen thought that strange: they didn’t want to be labelled as Irish, yet they didn’t want to be Americans. They wanted to stand apart, be neither one nor the other, but above both. They were the chosen ones, but she – like the rest of the Irish Irish – knew them for what they were: ‘Cromwell’s children’. The ones who sold out their own for land in Ireland. Then later sold out their country for union with Britain so they could hold on to that land – and get more of it.

  It was the same here in Boston. They were a close-knit bunch, who mixed only with each other. Along with the ‘purer-than-pure’ English-Americans, they handed down the laws of the land, and the laws of God. As Lavelle said of them, ‘The Ulster-Americans speak only to God, and then only to speak down to Him!’

  She would have to deal with them, these people who spoke down to God, and the old-line English. Knew she would come into conflict with them if she and Lavelle became too visible – too successful. It would be a battle, like her and Michael against Pakenham all over again – only this time the enemy would be even more powerful.

  Only this time, there would be no Michael.

  Her first experience of Boston’s Ulster-Americans came sooner than expected.

  On 5 November, Guy Fawkes’ Night, it being a Friday, the gathering for the annual celebration and fireworks was bigger than usual. Ellen was not inclined to go, and only relented after Lavelle talked her into it, saying it would be a good opportunity to ‘see what they get up to here’.

  But in Boston the celebration of Guy Fawkes’ attempt to blow up the English Parliament had, for large sections of the population, turned into something quite different: ‘Pope’s Night’.

  The parade, a colourful and noisy spectacle, wound its way down King Street led by fife and drum, marching to the tune of ‘The Battle of the Boyne’. The banners of the Protestant Associations of Boston unfurled alongside those of King William of Orange. The King was depicted on his steed, sword aloft, smiting the reviled Catholic Jacobean army. Now, a hundred and fifty years later and in a
different land, the victory at the Boyne was still cherished and celebrated as if it were yesterday.

  ‘It’s even worse than Melbourne,’ she whispered to Lavelle.

  ‘Much worse,’ he replied.

  Other banners – the slogans stitched in orange thread from Boston’s clothing factories – proclaimed: ‘King Billy was right! King Billy for Boston!’

  Ellen and Lavelle were further shocked when the band struck up ‘Thank God I am no Papist’, and the marchers yelled and jeered and chanted:

  The Pope’s a whore!

  The Pope’s a whore!

  Lays down with the biddies

  On St Patrick’s shore!

  Then a large banner titled ‘the Whore of Babylon’ appeared, held aloft by two of the marchers. It portrayed the naked breasts and heavily-rouged nipples of a harlot. Printed in large letters above one of the nipples was ‘Rome’, while above the other the word ‘Ireland’ was emblazoned. The face of this Whore of Babylon was a caricature of the new Pope, Pius IX, enthroned the previous year. On his head sat a green pontifical hat; in his hand was a green mitre, pointed like a spear, on which was impaled an orange-coloured serpent – obviously implying papish regard for anything of Protestant lineage!

  Other banners with ‘Anti-Christ’ slogans showed the Pope with satanic horns and cloven feet. And the phrase which Ellen had first heard on the Long Wharf was now proclaimed on a banner headed ‘Saint Patrick’s Vermin’. It presented the Pied Piper of Boston all regaled in orange colours and playing an orange flute, leading scores of green-coloured rats past a sign which said, ‘Long Wharf rat drowning – this way.’

  The crowds loved it. The more they were taunted by the parading Orangemen and Nativists, the more they loved it. The more they were incited by the Know Nothings’ chanting of:

  ‘From Ulster-Scot

  To Yankee Brahmin

  Boston says “No”

  To Saint Patrick’s Vermin.’

  Next, the ‘Whore of Babylon’ banner was wedged between the topmost timbers of the traditional Guy Fawkes’ bonfire, to shouts of ‘Burn the whore! Burn the whore!’