Wild Geese

by Caroline Pignat

  EPub edition copyright © September 2011

  Copyright © 2010 Caroline Pignat

  5 4 3 2 1

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  Published by

  Red Deer Press

  A Fitzhenry & Whiteside Company

  195 Allstate Parkway, Markham

  ON L3R 4T8

  www.reddeerpress.com

  Edited by Peter Carver

  Cover design by Alan Cranny

  Cover images: photograph of the author’s eyes courtesy of Marion Pignat;

  remaining images courtesy of Alan Cranny

  Text design by Tanya Montini

  Acknowledgments

  We acknowledge with thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pignat, Caroline

  Wild geese / Caroline Pignat.

  ISBN 978-0-88995-432-8

  eISBN 978-1-55244-298-2

  1. Grosse Île (Montmagny, Québec)—History—Juvenile fiction.

  2. Immigrant children—Ontario—Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  PS8631.I4777W54 2010 jC813’.6 C2010-904508-4

  Publisher Cataloging-in-Publication Data (U.S)

  Pignat, Caroline.

  Wild geese / Caroline Pignat.

  Sequel to Greener Grass.

  ISBN: 978-0-88995-432-8 (pbk.)

  eISBN: 978-1-55244-298-2

  1. Irish – Canada – Migrations – History – Juvenile fiction. 2. Canada – Emigration and immigration – History – Juvenile fiction. 3. Ireland – Emigration and immigration – History – Juvenile fiction. I. Title.

  [Fic] dc22 PZ7.P5463Wi 2010

  To Mom and Dad for giving me roots and for giving me wings.

  I love you.

  Where are the swift ships flying

  Far to the West away?

  Why are the women crying

  Far to the West away?

  Is our dear land infected

  That thus o’er her bays neglected

  The skiff steals along dejected

  While the ships fly far away?

  – Thomas D’Arcy McGee

  THE CROSSING

  CHAPTER ONE

  I should be dead by now. Some days I wish I was. My eyes have seen enough sorrow; I just want to close them to its sting. But there is something inside me that pushes on. A heart that beats no matter how battered or broken.

  I suppose we all have that desperate determination, all us steerage passengers. Huddled in tattered groups around small cook fires Captain MacDonald allows us to burn on deck, with nothing to our names but the tales we tell, great comfort comes from the warm glow on our faces and the hot tea in our bellies after so many days in the dark hold. And it’s only been two weeks. We’ve another four to go yet. So long. But what choice have we?

  Standing, I face the wind gushing over the prow as the ship charges into the gaping black. My inspiration is out there … somewhere. Mam, Jack, and Annie sail ahead of us on the Dunbrody bound for Quebec. Maybe they’re standing on their deck, watching this same whittled moon, thinking of me. Or maybe they think I’m long dead. They don’t know I’m only days behind them. For all they know, the Lynch lads found me and dragged me to jail for trying to poison Mr Lynch.

  The salt air scuffs my cheeks and I breathe it in. Let it scour the places in me where hope has gone stale from long hours in the musty hold.

  No. We will find each other. We will be together again. Even when I see nothing but emptiness ahead. I have to believe it. For a glimmer of hope is all I’ve got.

  It boggles the mind to think that the Captain navigates this massive ship by a star’s twinkle, or so Mick says. As though Mick knows a lick about sailing. Just because he’s working as a sailor for his passage, doesn’t mean he knows a blessed thing about the sea. Sure, all he does is scrub decks or get sick over the ship’s rail. But with nothing to see but water and sky, maybe the heavens are giving us some direction. It’s hard not to think of the storms ahead, the depths below, or the folk left behind, but survival means fixing our eyes on that glimmer as the darkness closes in.

  “Douse them fires,” a sailor’s voice calls as he rings the ship’s bell. Though we’re let up on deck to cook when the weather’s fine, it’s time now to return to the hold. I will wait until the last moment to be back in the ship’s belly. The night sky spans from horizon to horizon, a dark field lush with stars. I choose a few and commit them to memory, a slipping of sky tucked in my mind for those long, long hours with nothing before me but dirty berth boards.

  “Time to go, Kit,” Mick says, appearing behind and gently touching my elbow.

  I nod. Jealous that he gets to stay. To feel the wind on his face. To have a sailor’s hammock and meals for himself, while I have to get stuffed in my berth like a forgotten weed on Lizzie’s shelves, uprooted and withering for want of air. I can’t look at him. I should be thanking him for bringing me; I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Mick. But on those long days of darkness, when the sea pounds the other side of the planks, hungry to swallow me whole, I huddle in my corner of the hold and cry. I should be praying. But I can’t. All I can think is: I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Mick O’Toole.

  I dawdle the length of the ship to the hatch. The last one down the wooden steps, I glance back for one more look at the sky, the twinkling sky framed by the hatchway’s darkness. Da used to take me to the top of the hill on nights like this, when the fishhook moon hangs from a net of stars. ’Tis as if he is standing here next to me now. Don’t be afraid of the dark, pet. For that’s when the stars shine brightest.

  My glimmer of hope is like that, too. I hold it tight. For without it, I’d be utterly lost.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Old Murph notches another day on the berth post as we settle for the night. But those little scratches just aren’t happening fast enough.

  “Two weeks already,” Murph says with a grin.

  Two weeks. It feels like two months since I first came down those stairs into this horrible hold. I remember the terror I felt. Before my eyes could adjust, my nose told me all I needed to know. Without a window or door, other than the hatch at the top of the stairs, the air hung heavy, thick with the stench of fear. With every step, it swallowed me. My heart thudded in my chest. I had to get out. I couldn’t stay here another minute.

  “Let me through!” I had cried, pressing against the wave of passengers spilling into the hold. “I can’t … I have to … let me out!”

  Murph saved me that first day. “Are you traveling by yerself, son?” he’d asked. At first, I didn’t think he was talking to me. I’d forgotten I’d disguised myself as Kenny O’Toole, Mick’s brother, to get on board. ’Twas Mick’s idea. Otherwise
the Lynch lads would surely have caught me and dragged me back to Wicklow Jail. I am a wanted criminal back home. As the crowd swept me back into the darkness, I remember wondering if a quick hanging would have been better. Some days I still do.

  “Name’s John Murphy,” he’d said. “But everyone calls me Murph.” He’d offered me a corner of his berth, and so I’d followed him through the crowd, past the long tables that ran the length of the hold. There were hundreds of us down there, jostling for space in the murky light of a few lanterns. Fights broke out as people claimed their bags were there first, while others scurried like rats eager to shove their bundles in shelves stacked three high, running the length of the ship.

  At the farthest corner, in what must have been the very back of the ship, Murph stopped and nodded to the upper shelf.

  “That’s us here.” He’d climbed up and disappeared into the dark. Stepping on the bottom shelf, I had peered after him. ’Twas nothing more than a few bare boards covered with a bit of straw.

  Six feet square, if that, and only eighteen inches head space.

  “We’re staying here?” I’d asked. “Aren’t these storage shelves?”

  “That they are,” he’d chuckled. “You’d best be storing yourself up here, lad. The place is filling up quicker than a thimble in a storm.”

  He’d introduced me to his grandchildren, Joe, a lad about my age, and wee Brigid who was four, as well as Mrs. Ryan, an older woman traveling alone who shared the berth. They were nothing but dim shapes huddled in the darkness. Strangers, really. But God knows where I’d be without them.

  “Only two weeks?” Joe whines as Murph puts his knife away.

  Two weeks wasn’t even halfway there.

  “It feels like we’ve been in this hold forever,” I mumble, lying on my back and staring at the long planks that run the length of the deck, trying to hold on to my scrap of sky.

  “Enough of your moaning, now,” Murph scolds. “As penance, you’ve to tell me three things you’re glad of at this very moment.” He did that every time we bellyached. We’d been doing “penance” a lot lately. “And no repeating,” he adds.

  “I’m thankful we have this corner berth,” Joe starts. “Even if it bloody stinks down here.”

  “That’s awful close to bellyaching, wouldn’t you agree, Kenny?”

  “Definitely,” I say.

  “I’m thankful we get to go on deck again soon, I hope,” Joe adds. “So I can get away from you lot.”

  “Bellyache,” Brigid and I reply.

  “And three,” Joe says, “I’m thankful it’s so dark in here you can’t see me sticking out my tongue at you.”

  “Nor I at you, Joe,” little Brigid adds.

  I laugh. “I’m thankful for Brigid’s sense of humor.”

  “And?” Joe teases.

  “And I’m thankful for Joe, even if you are a right bellyacher.”

  “Oh, come on, Grandad. That’s a bellyache if I ever heard one. And besides, that’s only two.”

  “All right then,” I stare at the boards above. “I’m thankful for … friends.”

  “I’m thankful for you, too, Kenny,” Joe adds.

  “Oh, I wasn’t talking about you, Joe,” I say.

  Joe punches my arm as Murph and Mrs. Ryan chuckle in the shadows.

  I can’t imagine this trip without them. Lying side by side, all night and most of the day, talking, laughing, listening to them breathe reminds me of home, of sleeping with Annie and Jack in the settle bed or nattering by the fire. It makes being stuck in the hold almost bearable.

  “I’m thankful Da’s waiting for us in Richmond,” Joe says then.

  I think of Mam, Annie, and Jack. Will they wait for me? My stomach clenches at the thought of never seeing them again.

  Brigid twiddles a piece of straw in her fingers. “Mammy and wee Mary were supposed to be coming with us but … the fever … and well, you know ...”

  Murph rests his hand on the girl’s shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I murmur. “I know.”

  I know all too well. Famine, disease, loss. Sadly, my story is no different than the hundred others stacked on these berth shelves. I’ve heard so many these past two weeks. Homes destroyed. Families torn apart. Around the cook fires and in shadowy berths, we talk about our villages, our loved ones, the way it was. We sympathize. But it doesn’t change anything. Our stories are what they are. And after a while, we stop telling them.

  I close my eyes and try not to think of the deep fathoms, the bottomless sea that churns on the other side of a few creaky boards. I never liked the sea. Not even when Don Kelly treated me and Millie to a ride in his fishing boat last spring. Not being able to swim is probably part of it, but if you ask me, people no more belong on the sea than they do in the sky. Each day I fear we are going to sink to our watery graves.

  Twelve months, not even, since I sailed in Don’s boat, since my whole family gathered around the hearth. It seems so much longer.

  I close my eyes to the ship’s darkness and see myself there … home. I can almost feel Annie’s weight in my lap, almost hear the knitting needles click in Mam’s hands as baby and blanket grew, see the sparkle in Jack’s eyes as Da told his tales. “You are the sons and daughters of the kings of Ireland,” Da always said.

  I believed so many things back then. Da’s stories. Mam’s faith. And where did it get us? Our home burned to the ground. Our family divided. Mam’s spirit broken. Da gone. Oh, Da. The thoughts rush at me, dragging me under. Drowning me in their sorrow.

  The rumble of conversation dwindles away for the night. Cramped in their berths, every man, woman, and child lies thinking of all they’ve left behind, fearing the unknown ahead. A few people cry, the cover of shadows their only comfort as the great ship rocks side to side, and I cry with them.

  It comes then, warm and strong. A voice in the darkness.

  I’m bidding farewell to the land of my youth

  and the homes I love so well

  In the shadows, Murph rests against the berth post, eyes closed, singing from his heart.

  And the mountains so grand round my own native land,

  I’m bidding them all farewell.

  Somewhere, from the front of the boat, a whistle joins in, then two fiddles from the side, and a bodhran softly beating as our quiet voices unite.

  With an aching heart I bid them adieu

  for sadly I’m sailing away,

  O’er the raging foam for to seek a home

  on the shores of Amerikay.

  Music fills the hold and for that moment, fills our hearts with a much-loved sound.

  The sound of home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “When are they letting us on deck?” Joe asks two days later. “I could eat the legs off that bench. And that’s not a bellyache, Grandad. It’s a fact.”

  “I can’t say, Joe.” Murph glances at the hatch where people are lining up, waiting for the order from Captain MacDonald. He rubs his knee. “But he best be doing it soon. I daresay there’s a storm coming.”

  “Poor old Widow Delaney hasn’t long in this world,” Mrs. Ryan’s voice interrupts as she climbs back into our berth. It takes her a few tries and grunts, but Murph gives her a hand. She glances around and lowers her voice. “Folk are talking. Saying she’s red with rash, that she has the fever. Only her son Brian will touch her. But, says I, wasn’t Widow Delaney inspected by the doctor just the same as us? Surely to God they wouldn’t let a sick woman on board … would they?” She looks to Murph for reassurance, only, he’s staring off, deep in thought. No doubt thinking the same as me. Folk can carry the fever for days before the signs show. Any one of us could have brought it on board.

  “Has she any swellings in her side?” I ask. “How far has the rash spread?”

  “Listen to Doctor Kenny, here,” Joe chides, and I realize a young boy like I’m supposed to be shouldn’t know about such things.

  Mrs. Ryan shrugs and wraps her shawl about her. “I wasn’t getti
ng close enough to see.”

  “Fancy a walk, Kenny?” Murph asks.

  I nod.

  “You’re mad, the pair of you,” Joe mutters as he flops onto his back.

  We travel the hold, past the bundles and buckets by berth after berth. Many folk have hung ragged blankets or shawls as curtains, making what privacy they can in such cramped quarters, but most call out to Murph as he walks past. I daresay he knows each by name. Finally we reach the Delaneys’ berth in the front corner. Widow Delaney lies still under a tattered blanket with a sick bucket nearby. A man sits on the edge of the berth while eyes peer from shadows in the berth above.

  “Brian,” Murph rests his hand on the man’s shoulder. “How’s your mother?”

  “Resting now,” Brian says, nodding at the bit of oatcake beside her. “She won’t eat.”

  As if a woman in her state would.

  “She needs water, not food,” I murmur, loud enough for Murph to hear.

  Back home, Lizzie once showed me what signs to look for if it’s fever: sweating, a swelling in the stomach, a rash that doesn’t go white when you press against the skin. By the sheen on her face, even in this dim light, I can tell Widow Delaney’s hot to the touch. The telltale red speckles travel the inside of her arms. She moans but her eyes stay shut.

  “I feel so helpless,” Brian says.

  “Maybe get her to drink a sup of water,” Murph offers.

  Taking a few dried sprigs from the small bag Lizzie gave me the day we left Killanamore, I slip them into Murph’s hand and whisper in his ear. Murph nods and gives them to Brian. “Here. Steep these in a tea and get her to drink as much as you can. It might help with the pain.”

  “God bless you, Murph.”

  “If you need anything,” Murph says, nodding the length of the ship, “sure, we’re only down the road. ’Tis no distance at all.”