A Walk Through a Window

by kc dyer

  The man sighed and pulled a tiny black bottle out of his pocket. “I know you to be right, Alice-girl, but what will we say? Things are so bad at home in Sligo, to tell them all of how they are here will only take away the last shred of hope they may have.”

  She clenched his arm more tightly and Darby could see her pale face flush a little. “Mam’s gone now, Pádraig, and if Da thinks that sending them away on the ships will mean a better life for the small ones, he will do what he can to get them aboard.” She shook his arm a little. “They must not come, brother. Not until the transport is safer.”

  “I’ve heard tell the American ships are better,” he said. He tried to say something else, but was overcome by a fit of coughing. A look of alarm crossed the woman’s face and she helped him smother the coughs in the blanket.

  Darby edged away a little. Could ghosts catch cold? She didn’t want to learn the hard way.

  By that time he had stopped coughing, but his eyes were streaming. Darby could see a little blood on the blanket where he had wiped his mouth. Just what kind of a cough was it, anyway?

  “The American ships would not take us to Sligo,” she said. “The price of the passage was far too dear and our landlord only had enough coin for our fares on the Elizabeth.”

  “Or so he claimed,” said Pádraig, and his mouth twisted bitterly.

  She picked up the small bottle from where he had dropped it, pulled the lid off and held it out to him. From an inside pocket he pulled out a slim wooden stick with a bit of a metal point stuck on one end and dipped it into the bottle.

  “If they would not have us, they will not take the others. Now, say the words as you put them down, brother,” the woman said urgently. “I want to be sure we make everything clear.”

  Things were starting to make sense for Darby, at last. Not a married couple, then, but a brother and sister, writing a letter home. And from their accents, home must be Ireland—or maybe Scotland. Darby had trouble telling the difference sometimes. She leaned in a bit closer to listen.

  The woman closed her eyes. “You know, odd it may be, but I swear that as I think of home right now I can smell the apple trees in bloom.” She opened her eyes and looked at her brother. “Do you think we’ll ever see them, again, Pádraig? Or smell the scent of the laurel in the spring?”

  “It feels to me that I’ll never get the stink of this ship out of my nose,” he said bitterly. “I don’t know what you are talking about, with all your nonsense about the scent of apples, Alice. Let’s just get this letter written and be quit of it.”

  She dropped her head a little and nodded. “You are always so sensible, brother. I know in my heart we will never make the passage back to Ireland again, but perhaps there will be apples in the British colonies?”

  Darby nodded to herself. Ireland, after all.

  He smiled at her then, and squeezed her in a bit of a hug. “All right, Alice, I will pray there are apples, if only to still your talking of them for a while. Now, how shall we begin?”

  He dipped his pen and wrote across the top of the page. Darby leaned forward and puzzled out the words upside down: Aboard the Elizabeth, August 1847.

  He looked at Alice expectantly.

  “Dearest Da,” Alice said immediately. “Alice and myself are well and happy.”

  “You want to say we are happy? I don’t feel very happy, Alice. I thought we were going to tell him the truth about the passage on this dreadful ship.”

  “We are, we are, but if he thinks we are safe, he will at least rest easy in his heart for us. Just write it down.”

  Pádraig obediently scratched a few words onto the page. “I do not even know if we can trust the captain to put this in with the post,” he muttered, dipping his pen again.

  “I will give it to that cabin boy. He will ensure it travels well to make it home to Da,” Alice said.

  Pádraig shook his head. “Do not put your hopes in the boy,” he said softly. “I saw him sent below decks just after dawn this morning and have not seen him again since.”

  “Perhaps he has not sickened. It may be only the rough waves as we neared land that made him ill.” Her voice was hopeful, but she stopped speaking when she looked into his face.

  “Ay, durn’t be a fool, Alice. His skin was dark. He has the black typhus just like the rest. He will be tossed overboard before two days have passed.”

  “But the Elizabeth will surely be in dock by then. The captain must value his crew, even if he treats his passengers so poorly. He will find a doctor to treat the boy when we are ashore.”

  The man lifted a hand to shade his eyes and looked out over the ocean. “I am not so sure we will reach land as soon as that. I believe there is a fair long sail up the St. Lawrence River before landing in Montreal.”

  Suddenly, a small child scampered along the deck, dragging a bit of broken wood as she ran. Alice leaned forward and called to her.

  “Young Ellen—here! Come here, girlie.”

  The little girl changed direction and ran over, a grin splitting her face from ear to ear. She was missing at least four teeth and was wearing not much more than a bit of old sack. Still, she beamed happily at Alice and jumped onto her lap. Alice wrapped the corner of the blanket around the little girl.

  “Hello, Mr. Pádraig,” Ellen said shyly. Her lisp made it sound like “Mith-ter.”

  “Hello yourself, Miss Ellen,” he said, smiling back at her.

  Darby was smiling at her, too. She couldn’t help it. The little girl was like a ray of sunshine. A dirty little ray, but all the same …

  “What have ye been doing with yerself this morning, darlin’ girl?” asked Alice.

  “I’ve been staying out from under Mama’s skirts,” Ellen said as if she was reciting the words. “The new baby is all over spots, but Mama says I mustn’t tell the crew.” She looked thoughtful. “You won’t tell the crew, will you, Miss Alice?”

  Alice gave an alarmed glance at Pádraig. “What kind of spots, dear one?” she asked, her voice filled with worry.

  But the little girl had caught sight of Pádraig’s pen and ink. “Ohh—are you writing a letter? Mama says that in the colonies, when I am a big girl I will go to school and learn my letters.”

  “Yes, we are writing a letter home, but never mind about that now, Ellen. Tell me about the baby’s spots. Is it a rash from his clout?”

  Ellen shook her head. “No, no, no,” she sang. “Not a rash on his bottie.” She roared with laughter at the word.

  Darby shook her head. This kid was as hard to get information out of as Gabe. She watched as Alice took Ellen’s dirty little face in her hands.

  “Darling girl,” she said. “Tell me about the baby’s spots.”

  Ellen’s eyes grew crafty. “Will you give me a sweetie if I do?” she asked Pádraig. “Mama says that the shops in Montreal are filled with sweeties.”

  “Yes, yes, I promise to give you a sweet in Montreal,” said Pádraig. He was obviously less patient than Alice. “Just tell us about the damned spots.”

  Ellen smiled, her objective attained. “Did you see that man who got thrown in the ocean yesterday? Baby Sara has spots like those ones,” she said in a matter-of-fact kind of way. “All bloody.”

  She jumped back to her feet and, still dragging her bit of wood, ran off again.

  Pádraig folded his letter in two and slipped it into his pocket. “It’s true, then,” he said in a flat voice.

  Alice struggled to her feet, and Darby slid down the wall a little to get out of her way. “It cannot be true,” she cried. “The captain said it was contained. He said he kept that woman in strict quarantine. He locked her up, Pádraig. There is no way it could have gotten out.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  He shrugged. “And yet it has.” He squinted his eyes, staring out at the strip of land coming ever nearer on the horizon. “Look how close we have come to our dream, Alice. Or perhaps it was only Da’s dream—but he wanted it for us.”

  He stood up and put a han
d on her arm. “There will be no letter, unless it is a letter of goodbye, my dearest sister. We can keep our bodies washed with seawater and stay away from the holds where the lice that carry the typhus hide, but we cannot survive both typhus and the pox as well. From this day on, this ship carries none but the dead and those who wait to die.”

  He jammed his hands into the pockets of his threadbare trousers and left his sister leaning against the rail, weeping. Darby didn’t know what to do. She trailed after Pádraig for a minute, but he turned and went down a set of rickety stairs. After what he had said about lice in the holds below, she didn’t have any interest in following him.

  The deck began to curve toward the front of the ship. As she walked around, Darby could see that the bow of the Elizabeth was open to the sky, and almost every plank of the deck was covered with passengers. People, mostly wearing clothing that made Gabe’s rags look good, were sitting or lying around on the deck. Many were wrapped in threadbare blankets like Alice’s. All around the edge of the open area were small ovens that had been built into the sides of the ship. Many of them had tiny fires going inside, which was pretty alarming when Darby thought about it, considering the boat was made of wood. What if a spark got out? The ovens themselves looked rickety, like someone had just hammered a few pieces of wood into place, slapped down some stones and called it a fireplace.

  Behind Darby on the deck above, another group of crew members sat with their legs stretched straight out in front of them, working away on huge piles of sailcloth. They wore large thimbles strapped to their thumbs and sewed the cloth with some kind of strong thread. One crewman was standing off to the side with a coil of rope, carefully dipping the end into a bucket of some kind of thick, black goo.

  She felt a breeze lift the back of her hair and turned to look out over the water. The sun was getting a bit lower on the horizon, and Darby realized that the afternoon had slipped away while she listened to Alice and her brother talk. The waves around the ship had little whitecaps on them and she had to grip the wooden handrail tightly to keep her balance. Some of the passengers were getting tossed around a bit, but no one showed any sign of wanting to put out the little fires. Darby could see jellyfish sailing along on top of the waves, looking like the caps of giant pink and purple mushrooms, floating on the sea.

  She sidled up beside one small group, mostly because they were squabbling instead of just staring blankly at the sky like so many of the others.

  “I’m hungry,” wailed one of the children in the group. Darby was shocked to see a woman reach across the body of a sleeping man and slap the child hard in the face. “We’re all hungry, Sammy,” she snapped at him. “Now quiet down or ye’ll wake himself, and you know what he’ll do if ye snivel.”

  Darby shook her head in disbelief. This little trip was giving her a whole new appreciation of her own parents’ disciplinary skills. She cast her eyes back to poor Sammy.

  He had curled up in a ball, popped a thumb in his mouth and looked up at the sky. But his tears had an effect, after all. The mother, if she was Sammy’s mother, dug her elbow into the ribs of the sleeping man. “Git yerself over, ya great lummox,” she said. “The children are cryin’ for their food. It’s time for me to make the cakes.”

  The man snorted and rolled out of the way, only to go back to sleep in what looked like the most uncomfortable position possible, face down on the hard deck. He didn’t even have a rag for a pillow. The woman got to her feet and marched over to some kind of hatch flipped open on the deck. She yelled something down the hatch, and presently a man came stumping up a nearby set of stairs with a wooden crate in his arms.

  This created quite a stir on the deck as the passengers formed a quick, untidy line in front of the man. Most of the women in the line held out their skirts or their aprons and he scooped a quantity of some kind of dried flour right onto their clothes. A couple of the passengers held out small wooden bowls and got their servings in those. Darby waited to see what else they would be eating, but the man just walked away. That was dinner? A handful of dry flour?

  Several quarrels began to break out around the deck, and Darby realized the passengers were fighting over their food. The so-called cakes that most of the families ate were nothing more than the flour mixed with a little water and baked on rusty iron pans. From her vantage point they looked pretty much like small pancakes, burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. No fruit or vegetables to be seen, or even milk. Maybe the cook handed those things out in the morning?

  The main deck was now crammed full, more passengers having staggered up from their berths downstairs, so Darby scrambled over to the ladder leading to the deck above, where many of the sailors were watching the events down below. Some were even laughing, and she got the feeling that for some reason they didn’t see the passengers as real people at all.

  Gabe sat over to one side, well away from the other crewmen. The giant Alec was nowhere to be seen, and Gabe made a quick gesture to Darby. She ran around the edge of the deck, to keep as far as possible from the crew. It was windier up above, and from where Gabe sat, she couldn’t hear the voices of any of the passengers or the crew at all.

  “Put your knees up,” Gabe hissed at her as she sat down beside him. She pulled the sailcloth over her knees, and hunched down underneath.

  “If anyone sees me moving under this sheet, they really will think I’m a ghost,” Darby whispered to him. He grinned and pulled the sailcloth right up over his head.

  “It’s meal time,” he said in a low voice. “They’ll all be busy for at least an hour—the passengers eating and fighting and the crew watching and laughing. We’re as safe to talk here as anywhere.”

  “Where’s the rest of the food?” Darby asked.

  He shrugged. “That is all they have. The cook hands out half a pound of cornmeal for every adult, twice a day in the morning and evening. Sometimes he has bread, so they get that instead of the meal. There used to be a barrel of water with an iron cup they all shared, but since supplies have been running low, the cook doles that out, too.”

  “And they cook their food in those fireplaces?”

  Gabe nodded. “Yes—they are stoves, really. Specially built for the passengers. The captain said that food was to be provided for crew only—passengers were to look after themselves. But so many boarded without any food at all, he’s been forced to give out the cornmeal so they don’t starve.”

  “I can’t believe they don’t starve, even with the cornmeal,” Darby said. “No wonder everyone looks so weak and sleepy.”

  Gabe twitched the sailcloth aside, and she could see that the few remaining crew members were climbing down the ladder. “Some of the passengers boarded with small containers of herring, and one man even had a little bacon, but anything extra was gone within the first week. The rations are even less for the children, and I’ve seen mothers and fathers go hungry so that their children can at least have a bite of the burnt bits of cake they make in the ovens.”

  Darby wriggled around to make herself as comfortable as she could on the hard surface of the wooden deck. “This is just terrible,” she said. “I’ve walked around a lot today and I’ve figured a bit of it out, but I still have a million questions.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?” he said, and his face crinkled a little. Darby could see that it hurt him to smile.

  “I don’t understand why you are going through this, Gabe,” she said, pointing at the bruise on the side of his face. “That man really hurt you.”

  “Ah, but if it wouldn’t make me red as a beet, I’d show you my ribs,” he said jokingly. “They are all the colours of the rainbow after my taste of Alec’s big boots.”

  “Quit joking around, you idiot,” Darby said. “This seems like it could be dangerous to you—it is dangerous to you,” she amended.

  “We’ll handle that sort of question later, thank you very much,” he said, but at least his tone was more serious. “Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve learned on board tod
ay?”

  So she did. Darby related the whole Pádraig and Alice tale, and all about Ellen and her baby sibling. He sat quiet, listening.

  “I know this ship is sailing to Canada,” Darby concluded. “But I don’t know why. The people are from Ireland, that much I know. Pádraig said he was from Sligo.”

  “Some are from Sligo, which is a port town in Ireland, but most are farmers who worked on the land until it failed them,” he said quietly. “Part of the problem was that the people of Ireland had a massive crop failure, and because they relied so much on that crop, there was a terrible famine.”

  The light from the setting sun shone red through the white sailcloth, and Gabe leaned over on one elbow.

  “Was it potatoes?” Darby asked.

  “Yes. Potatoes were a crop that grew very well in Irish soil—so well that many farmers grew nothing else. In the fall, the farmers began to dig up their crops. In some places, the blight didn’t spread until the potatoes were all in the storage bins. It was a terrible disaster. One day they would have stored a full crop and the next day they would find their crop was nothing but black and rotting mush. In typical damp Irish conditions, one bad potato could infect a whole crop.”

  “Why didn’t they just grow something else?”

  “Things just didn’t move that fast at the time. They had no ability to change crops quickly. Most of the farmers didn’t even know about crop rotation to protect the soil. So they planted again, and prayed to God. When the second crop went bad, many people began to starve.”

  “But was there no other food in Ireland?”

  Gabe looked at Darby steadily. “There was,” he said quietly. “Barley, rye and even wheat. But many of the landlords of Ireland were Englishmen and they had the other crops earmarked for markets in Europe and at home in England. They would lose their profits if the food went to feed hungry people who could not pay.”