Song of the Silent Harp

by BJ Hoff

  While they worked, they talked sparingly, speaking in low, strained voices. Mostly they watched one another with anxious eyes. Daniel was more than a little worried by Katie’s appearance. In spite of the food Morgan had managed to provide, she appeared to be failing at an alarming pace. She was wretchedly thin, so slight her bones seemed to protrude through her skin, all sharp angles and knobs. She wheezed with every breath, as if the slightest movement required great effort.

  He tried his utmost to be cheerful as they worked, making frequent efforts to reassure her. But his own mounting anxiety about his family, combined with a nagging whisper of guilt, made it nearly impossible to keep his mind on what he was doing. While Morgan had not pointed a finger of blame, Daniel knew he had set something in motion during his ill-fated encounter with George Cotter. Apparently, his actions were going to exact a dear price from them all—and for that he was deeply grieved and ashamed.

  “Daniel John?” Katie’s soft voice tugged him back from his troubled thoughts, and he looked over at her.

  “What did you mean when you said Cotter had made your mother’s decision for her?”

  Forcing a note of brightness into his voice, Daniel replied, “Just that she can’t very well refuse to go to America now, since after today we’ll have nowhere else to go.”

  Katie tucked a small vial of ointment in between some dressings. “But you don’t really want to go, do you?” she asked.

  Daniel shrugged, avoiding her gaze. “This is not the time to think of what I want or don’t want,” he replied. “From what Morgan told your da, we’ll either go to America or go on the road.”

  “I never thought it would happen to us,” Katie said in a choked voice. “I suppose I’ve always thought that somehow Uncle Morgan would keep it from happening to us.”

  Her eyes seemed enormous as she stared into the distance, biting her lip. Daniel fumbled for words that might ease the haunted look about her, but his own throat was treacherously swollen. “Your uncle Morgan has done all he could, and more,” he said lamely. “At least our passage is paid, and our families will be crossing together.”

  “But Uncle Morgan isn’t going,” said Katie dejectedly, dragging her gaze back to his. “And nobody seems to understand why.”

  “I don’t suppose anyone but Morgan could understand that,” Daniel said. “He is tied to Ireland in a special way, a way that only he can fathom. It’s almost as if his heart is somehow…chained to the land itself.”

  “I—I really don’t want to go either, you know,” Katie said in little more than a whisper. Clutching at the knuckles on both hands, she added, “I suppose I’m afraid.”

  The woeful expression in her large green eyes told Daniel this was no time to play the brave man. “To be sure, I might be a bit afraid, too.”

  Her quick, grateful look made him glad he’d been honest. “Are you, Daniel John? Truly?”

  He nodded. “I am. But I’d rather be afraid in America and have some hope for a future than to stay here in Killala, and have to be afraid every day of dying on the road. That would be a harder thing, I am thinking.”

  As he spoke, he absently touched the harp on the end of the table. The sight of the ancient instrument that had been passed down through so many generations made him wonder if his youthful ancestor, Eoin Caomhanach, had also suffered this same unmanly fear at the idea of leaving his home for an unknown land.

  Katie seemed to consider his words. “It helps me to know that you will be going with us,” she said with her usual directness. “I’m sure I won’t be quite as frightened with you there.”

  Daniel wished he shared some of her confidence in him. He didn’t think he’d ever been quite this frightened, except perhaps the day Cotter had caught him trying to loot the agent’s garbage barrels.

  “Daniel John…why is this happening?”

  “What do you mean, Katie?”

  “The Hunger. So many people starving and dying, losing their homes—I don’t understand. Doesn’t God care about us at all anymore?”

  Staring down at the open box in front of him, Daniel shifted from one foot to the other. He had no answers for Katie, none for himself.

  When he made no reply, she continued. “I once heard your mum tell mine that maybe God had placed a curse on Ireland,” Katie remarked gravely. “She said the Hunger might be His way of punishing us for our sins.”

  Daniel looked at her. Her eyes were glazed, her skin a waxen white. Even as they stood there, scarcely moving, he could hear her laboring wheeze. He wished for a cheerful answer to give her, but could think of none. His mother often spoke of punishment and sin, and he was aware that she believed Ireland to be suffering the hand of God’s wrath. He wasn’t at all sure he agreed with her—at least not altogether. He still had a problem with the thought that a God who loved enough to send His own Son to die for depraved sinners would just as easily punish innocent babes.

  At times even Grandfar had seemed to chafe at his mother’s grim comments, actually scolding her upon occasion for such “talk of doom.” His da had known best how to deal with what he called her “dark moods,” had always seemed to know instinctively when to tease, when to cajole, or when to simply leave her alone until the despondency passed.

  “Is that what you believe, Daniel John?” Katie asked, snapping him out of his thoughts. “That we are cursed by God?”

  Slowly, Daniel shook his head. “No, in truth I don’t,” he said, feeling a faint nudge of guilt, as if he were somehow betraying his mother. “Da used to say it was England who had cursed us, not God.”

  “I never knew a country could curse another country,” said Katie skeptically.

  “It’s more that they condemn us, I should think. By keeping us slaves on our own land and taking the very food out of our mouths—food we have grown ourselves—they’ve condemned us to poverty and hopelessness.”

  Closing the lid of the medicine box, Katie looked at him thoughtfully. “You sound just like Uncle Morgan.”

  Daniel gave her a faint, sheepish smile. “Well, in truth, they are his words, not mine.”

  “Why do the English hate us so, Daniel John?” she asked abruptly. “They don’t even know us, not really. How can they hate us so fiercely when they don’t know us?”

  Daniel looked into the dead fireplace. “Morgan says it isn’t so much hate as indifference.”

  When he turned back to her, Katie was staring at him with a blank, uncomprehending look.

  “It’s as if they don’t consider us—worthy,” he tried to explain. “We’re not so much human beings in their estimation as we are beasts. Animals. They believe us to be wild and ignorant savages that must be kept in our place. They’ve always held that Ireland belongs to them, you see, not to the Irish. They colonized a part of it, and so as far as they’re concerned, they have every right to do whatever they please with their own land.”

  “But it’s not their land, it’s ours!”

  “Aye, Katie, but what we look at from one side, they look at from the other—and neither they nor we are seeing the entire picture.”

  “That sounds like Uncle Morgan, too,” she said testily, running her hand over the top of the wooden box.

  Daniel shrugged. “What do you think?”

  She gave him a long, burning look. “I think,” she replied fiercely “that I hate England! It’s an evil country entirely.”

  Tying a rope around the box to secure it, Daniel glanced over at her. “I don’t know that an entire country can be evil,” he said carefully. The last thing he wanted, with her feeling so poorly, was an argument, but she was obviously cross with him.

  “Well, people can be evil,” she countered, “and I think the English people must be very evil indeed!”

  “Sure, and the English have no sole claim on wickedness, lass.” Thomas had crossed the room and now stood at the end of the table, watching the two of them. Bracing both hands on the back of a chair, he added quietly, “Evil abounds wherever the old, sinful nat
ure rules the heart, and many are the places throughout this world where that is the case, Ireland being no exception. You both must know by now that only our Lord can change hearts, and change them He does, Katie Frances. Even English hearts, at that.”

  Katie shot him a skeptical look. “That may be so, Da,” she muttered grudgingly, “but soon there will be neither good nor evil folks in Ireland. They will all either be dead or gone to America.”

  Daniel felt a chill skate down his spine. There was no denying the bitter truth of her words. He was grateful when Thomas ended the exchange, calling everyone to gather around the table for a time of prayer.

  Hearing Thomas Fitzgerald pray was much like listening in on an intimate conversation between good friends, Daniel thought. Thomas never so much seemed to talk to the Lord as to talk with Him. So forthright, so earnest were his words—and so frequent his silences—that at times Daniel found himself trying to imagine what the Lord might be saying in response.

  At the moment, however, he was finding it nearly impossible to keep his thoughts focused on Thomas’s prayer. The day had simply been too much. He felt as if he had been swept up in a rolling ball of thunder, a storm hurtling faster and faster toward destruction. He was almost ill with fear: fear for his mother, for Tahg, for Katie and her family—and for Morgan. It was a new kind of fear, an overwhelming, cloying sort of terror that seized both his mind and his body and held them prisoner. He had never felt quite so young and utterly helpless in his life.

  “…Aye, preserve our young, Lord God, that they might have many tomorrows to live for You…”

  As Thomas’s quiet words finally penetrated the turmoil in Daniel’s mind, he willed himself to listen, to focus his attention on the simple but fervent prayer being lifted up. Gradually, his pulse stuttered and slowed to a normal beat. Catching a deep, steadying breath, he now added his own silent assent as Thomas went on praying.

  “Guard us all and see us safely through this night and the days to come, Lord. Protect Nora and young Tahg and the courageous Englishman who is risking himself to help us. Shelter Daniel John and all the rest of us as well in the shadow of Your love, and see us safely to Your appointed destination. And, as always, Lord God, I pray for the soul of my brother, Morgan, who has not yet recognized the fact of his love for You or the depth of his need for You, but who is, without even knowing it, a man much like Your chosen prophet, the sorrowful Jeremiah, whose great heart was broken by his own country…”

  Surprised, Daniel’s eyes shot open. Moved at the look of intense pleading on Thomas’s good, plain face, he found himself wondering if Morgan had any idea at all how very much his brother loved him.

  Then he thought of Tahg, and quickly added a fervent prayer for his own brother. He was convinced that Tahg, more than any of the rest of them this night, would need the merciful intervention and protection of a loving God.

  The silence inside the Kavanagh cottage was broken only by the sound of anxious breathing. Nora had heard the horses ride up, followed by the muffled sound of men’s voices. Evan had no time for anything more than a whispered warning to the widow to stay close to her ailing son, advising that it might be good to “hover over him and allow her maternal concern to show, as instinct might indicate.”

  Instinct had indicated nothing at all to him as yet, and he was uncomfortably close to panic. Glancing across the bed of the barely conscious boy, he met the gaze of Nora Kavanagh. Her morose gray eyes were wide with fear, and her hands had caught the bedding in a death grip. Given the terrors this woman had endured, Evan wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had shattered into a fit of hysteria.

  From the first, Nora Kavanagh had struck him as a timid, weary woman whom life had beaten down one time too many. Lovely as she was—for she possessed a winsome beauty that even the ravages of the famine had not been able to destroy completely—she nevertheless bore the appearance of one wholly exhausted, physically and emotionally depleted. Moreover, she gave off a sense of unmitigated despair, much like a cornered animal whose only choices ran to a hunter’s gun or a trap.

  Evan had not missed the fact that her eyes darkened with suspicion each time she so much as glanced in his direction. There was no telling what she might do. That uncertainty, added to his own impending panic, made Evan wish, at least for an instant, that he had never heard of this wretched village or its inhabitants.

  He looked at young Tahg Kavanagh and was immediately ashamed of his own cowardly selfishness. Pity coursed through him as he took in the boy’s smudged, sunken eyes, glassy with fever and heavy with weakness. The youth’s skin was waxen and pale, except for an angry flush blotting his cheeks.

  “What will we do?”

  Nora Kavanagh’s slightly shrill question made Evan straighten and pull in a deep breath. “I will answer the d-door,” he said, clearing his throat. “You…stay with your son and just…say n-nothing.” He stopped, then added, “I believe I, ah, would perhaps feel somewhat b-better about things if I knew you were p-praying while I’m…talking with these fellows.”

  “Mr.Whittaker?”

  Evan darted a startled glance at the boy. It was the first time he had heard him speak, and the lad’s voice was little more than a hoarse whisper.

  “I…will pray, too,” young Tahg managed to say, moistening his parched lips. “I can still…pray.”

  Unexpectedly, Evan’s eyes filled, and he blinked. Nora Kavanagh bent over her son, bringing her lips close to his ear to whisper an endearment and give his shoulder a gentle squeeze. When she straightened, Evan thought the fear in her eyes might have abated, just a little. “Yes, we can do that much, at least, Mr. Whittaker. Both Tahg and I will be praying.”

  Evan was surprised and reassured to see her struggling for—and seemingly gaining—her composure. “Th-thank you, Mrs. Kavanagh. It helps me to know that.”

  Just then a furious pounding began at the door. Evan and Nora locked eyes for another instant before she sank down onto the chair beside her son’s bed. Gently tugging the boy’s hand out from under the bedclothes, she clung to it, saying softly, “We are praying, Mr. Whittaker…we are praying.”

  Feeling oddly bolstered, Evan nodded and started for the door, then stopped. Turning, he checked the curtain to be sure both the woman and her son could be seen from the kitchen.

  After a hurried stop at Thomas’s cabin, Morgan had left the village by the back road. Now he sat his horse, looking down on the village from the crest of the hill one last time.

  A deadly quiet covered the hillside, the only sounds being the horse’s snorting and the rain dancing off the tree limbs. He could still make out Nora’s cottage, though at this distance the horses in front scarcely looked real, more like tiny brush strokes on a painting.

  But they were real enough, all right, as were the thugs to whom they belonged.

  Morgan was aware of his own labored breathing—not from exertion, but from his burden of dread for Nora and others. Now that he was out of Whittaker’s presence, he wondered what had possessed him to set such store by the man. What had he done, leaving Nora and her ailing son to the questionable protection of a frail-looking Englishman who was a stranger to them all? How had the thin, bespectacled Saxon managed to inspire his confidence and capture his trust so quickly? He had left everyone he loved at the mercy of this slight, stammering Britisher who had no reason at all to care one way or the other whether they lived or died.

  And yet Morgan had sensed that Whittaker did care, and cared a great deal. He shook his head as if to rid himself of the sudden doubts that threatened to stop him in his tracks. He had done all he knew to do, and in truth the Englishman was the only hope they had.

  Something stirred within him, and he recognized it reluctantly as fear. He did not frighten easily, for the very fact of his size and its effect on others had made it easy to assume a certain invulnerability over the years. Without ever meaning to, he had long ago relegated fear to the distant fields of childhood.

  But this wa
s different. This present dryness of his mouth and racing of his heart had nothing at all to do with little-boy terrors or childish nightmares. This was the very reality of fear—close-up, tangible fear for the only people in his life he really cared about, the only people in his life who cared, at least a little, about him. It was a fear borne of his own helplessness, for when all was said and done he was only a man, even if a bit larger and stronger than most. A man vulnerable, with limitations and weaknesses and all too little hope.

  How long has it been since I have prayed? he wondered abruptly. Really prayed, with a desperate heart and a longing soul…and enough faith to send my pleas heavenward?

  Years. Years of wandering and doubting, years of bitterness, denial, and an unrepentant spirit. Years of ignoring God because he was sure that God had chosen to ignore him.

  And yet something inside him was rising up and fighting for a voice, fighting to cry out, to be heard, to make its pain known.

  Fighting to pray.

  He yanked on the reins so savagely the little mare squealed and reared up, then surged forward as if to free herself of the wild giant on her back.

  “Oh, God!” Morgan roared, his face locked in a fierce grimace of agony as he galloped furiously into the slashing rain. “God! Do You remember me? After all this time and all my sin, do You even know my name? Does Morgan Fitzgerald still exist for You?

  “Do You see me, do You see my people? We are Ireland, God! Do You remember Ireland? Do You?”

  21

  A Gathering of Heroes

  O brave young men, my love, my pride, my promise,

  ’Tis on you my hopes are set.

  SAMUEL FERGUSON(1810–1886)