The Big Wind

by Beatrice Coogan

‘What about Pakie Scally? There’s more to this than meets the eye. What else did Cousin Maurice say to you?’

  ‘I told you before. He asked about my parents—’

  ‘And what did you tell him?’

  ‘What could I tell him?—and he asked about my book learning. He said it was wasted here, that there was scope for it outside—that—Come, they’ll be getting up beyond.’ He threw his bag over the gap then climbed up and reached his hands down to draw her up. They balanced on the wall a second, enclosed in the silence of an earth sleeping. A thrush yawned a sleepy trill but a little wind made a husheen-husho in the branches and sent it back to sleep.

  The unexpected little bird-note had sharpened the poignancy of the moment for Thomas. It was such a homely, everyday sound belonging to all that had been part of him; the little bird so sure and snug in the nest that it would fly out from in the morning—and all other mornings.

  It had stirred Sterrin too. ‘I wish that bird had kept its demned beak shut,’ she quavered. ‘Oh, Young Thomas,’ she cried huskily. ‘No matter who I have waved goodbye to from this gap the loneliness seemed to go from me once I went back to you. I thought I would always have you.’ She bent her head. It was so unreal; a most shameful thing to be crying like this. Fancy crying when Mickey-the-turf went to America! She hadn’t cried even when Joseph the footman had died of famine fever. But Thomas was so different. That was one of the things she had wanted to say.

  He put a hand beneath her chin and lifted up her face. ‘You will always have me, asthore,’ he murmured. ‘But if I were to stay here forever and a day I could never have you. There is a whole world between us. It is only by going away from you that I can bridge that world. Do you understand, Sterrin?’

  She wasn’t sure that she did. Everything was blurred by her sense of loneliness. But she did notice that for the first time in her life he had called her Sterrin without the Miss! He had taken the first step across that bridge which divided their worlds.

  He went on looking down at her, waiting for her to say she understood. He was still holding the hand she had given him to help her up. At last she nodded.

  ‘Then it is not goodbye. It’s au revoir. I’m coming back and I mustn’t waste another minute till then.’ He pushed back the tiny curls from her forehead and in their place he left a kiss. ‘God keep you, grá gal.’ He released her hand and straightened up, but she put it on his shoulders and strained on tiptoe to kiss him on the lips. And with that kiss went all the aching pressure of words unspoken.

  The same with Thomas. The surging joy of that sudden kiss drove out all sadness. No regrets for Kilsheelin and the memory of his life there, could equal this parting moment. Brightness radiated from his face as he looked at her, dazed with joy. Then he sprang down. He wanted to rush out into the world on the tide of the strength that was flowing from his gladness. She stood there in the wall gap completely still. The castle knife boy had gone; her lifelong companion. But the desolation had gone out from her too. The tall figure striding so purposefully down the Sir’s Road was someone else; someone who had brought a new element into her life; an indefinable something—that held wonder.

  At the turn he stopped and looked back. The wall on either side of her rose up and held her as in a niche. He let the picture of her sink in. The long school cloak made her look tall. Her hair drawn back out of sight with a black ribbon increased the impression that she might be sixteen or more instead of a fourteen-and-a-half year old girsha with hair still slinging.

  He doffed his hat and held it high in the air. She raised her hand in return. For one dear moment they stood like that; their thoughts spanning the strip of road that was now the only barrier between them. Then he turned and was gone. Her calm broke up and the heart inside of her gave a wild plunge that bade her jump and follow him through the world. But it was Thomas himself who calmed her as he had always done. The sound of his singing came back to her and she stopped to listen. The sleepy birds listened too and when the last note faded beyond the crossroads seemed to take it up, though not a one of them but Sterrin’s own self knew the words—

  I love my love in the morning

  And I love my love at noon—

  For she is bright—

  As the Lord of light.

  Yet mild as Autumn’s moon

  And I will love my darling one

  Till even the sun shall fade...

  When she sprang back the little track they had made, the two of them, had gone. The finger of sun that had reached out across the eastern turret had sopped up the dew drops that had marked its way. What matter! A new path had started.

  * A homely threat, a ‘holy murder’.

  35

  Thomas had never envisaged himself growing old in the service of Kilsheelin like the other servants. At night in his room, he dreamed of a brilliant career on the stage. He would contrive to get some employment at a theatre. One night, perhaps, some actor declaiming Shakespeare would forget his lines and Thomas, somehow, would be the one to prompt him. His knowledge of Shakespeare and his ability to memorise would create such an impression that he would be offered a part. Or perhaps the actor playing Richard III might hurt his arm and, miraculously, at the last frantic moment it would be discovered that the obscure call-boy was versed in swordsmanship.

  He could never quite get the acclaiming audience to its feet. Invariably, at that juncture he would be disenchanted by a voice ordering him to do something like removing the turf ash from the drawing-room fire.

  Now that he had left Kilsheelin he was determined to make his fortune. America beckoned grandly. First Liverpool, then America. But once in Liverpool, he was forced to find work in a textile mill to augment his meagre savings. The work was hard and the spectacle of girls working half naked shocked his sensibilities. When one of the girls got caught in a machine and was mangled, Thomas could no longer hold his tongue. He began to exhort the workers to demand decent working conditions. ‘I would have the workman be the master of his toil,’ he said, ‘not its slave.’ Those words lost him his job and very nearly cost him his liberty as well. Men had been jailed for twenty years for saying less. A fugitive from justice, Thomas managed to find passage on a convict ship bound for Australia. Thomas quailed at the prospect of journeying down the slopes of the world to the far-off land of Australia. But that was where the ship was going and fugitives from the law could not be choosers. It offered escape.

  Often on that deadly voyage he cursed the folly of his outcry. To have jeopardised his hopes, his dreams, his very liberty, for a pathetic dead girl who had repelled every instinct in him but his pity!

  In the Red Sea when pestilence levelled passengers and crew the Captain pressed Thomas into duty. As food supplies went low the winds rose higher. Gales sent the boat rocking off course, until it came within bowing distance of the white bergs of the bleak Antarctic. It bowed so low that at times Thomas didn’t see how it could stagger up the sides of another wave. A party of old men and women from County Clare abandoned all hope of meeting the sons and daughters who had gone ahead to purchase the wealth of Australian acres for a few shillings a hundred. Resolutely they struggled into their death habits and lay waiting to go, suitably garbed, to their Creator.

  Thomas worked with a will until the day that he refused to add more salt to the salt beef that, with a few scraps of hard biscuits, made up the emigrants’ principal meal. Thomas had noticed the salty beef being resalted before each meal and thought it was to maintain its freshness. Soon he discovered that it was an unscrupulous ruse to force the emigrants to pay out money from their pitiful savings for each sip of water for their parched throats.

  He reminded the Captain that he was a passenger. He had paid his fare.

  The Captain narrowed his eyes and reminded him that he had come aboard in an almighty hurry. The Captain had assessed the anxious haste of the well-spoken young man who boarded the ship at dark of night. Some nob, he had thought, making a getaway from trouble!

  Thomas
wavered. Just then a child with swollen tongue and staring eyes gasped out something. Its words were drowned in the insane din of men whose starved bodies were reacting to the inferior grog that the Captain doled out at an exorbitant price.

  ‘I won’t do it,’ he said doggedly.

  He was dragged off, fighting like a maniac. They chained him to a fever-stricken convict. ‘At least,’ said the Captain genially, ‘you will have the distinction of being the only one amongst the convicts who has paid his own fare to prison.’

  As Thomas lay exhausted, gazing up at the sullen sky, he swore that if liberty was vouchsafed to him ever again he would never risk a moment of it in the lost cause of human pity.

  The storm blended day and night. Time lost its significance. Days were chaotic periods of space hurled out from eternity. The buffeting winds changed and carried off the sick moanings to which he was fettered. He became disorientated. The creaking timbers turned into the rending of trees. The pinnacle lamp swinging crazily sent flashes that became the sparks from the red burning turf he had held on the pike staff. In their flying glow the Sir guided his horse away from the falling trees to seek help for her Ladyship. The trailing clouds became tendrils of hair. In their suffusion, a face formed; nearer it floated until it touched his lips.

  Dear God in heaven, what kind of an eejit was I to have flung away my life after receiving such a token! He lashed in impotent fury. The chain bit into his flesh and tugged the sick man into feeble protest. May the devil ride buck-hunting with Mr. Maurice O’Carroll! Why the devil’s father did he think a body had acquired learning! White, shadowy, the face floated back in answer. As its lips reached his a rough voice asked him what the effing hell did he mean by lousing down there in comfort and the ship floundering for want of hands.

  The speaker was Mr. Jed Ballantyne, the First Mate. He was now in control of the ship. Captain Ebenezer Lancing had the fever.

  Thomas raised himself from a clanking chain of dead and half-dead convicts and pointed out the inconsistency of the question.

  When they unfettered him he sprang to his feet then landed sprawling on his back. The chains had paralysed his legs into numbness. Once he had massaged them back to life, he forgot everything but the consciousness of freedom. It didn’t trouble him that he had to do six men’s work.

  The sight of land, of the lovely green lowlands of Tasmania’s peninsula stirred no glad emotions in Thomas’s heart. He had worked hard enough to wipe out his insubordination about the salting of the meat, but he was still not sure whether the Captain really meant what he said about handing him over.

  He was ashamed at the relief with which he heard from Mr. Ballantyne that the Captain had died of the fever.

  ‘The old man’s snuffed it.’ Mr. Ballantyne was beside him.

  ‘Dead!’ The Second Mate had died, the Surgeon, emigrants, but somehow Thomas could not imagine the invincible Captain being dropped over the side in a whirling pollution, like that straw!

  ‘What will become of—of the ship?’ Thomas almost said, ‘What will become of me?’

  ‘What’ll become of her?’ The First Mate spat. ‘What became of her these last nine days? There was naught wrong with my skipperin’. And, for that matter, you didn’t do too bad yourself. If you’n me was runnin’ this ship she wouldn’t have gone twelve days off her course.’

  ‘We couldn’t have controlled the weather.’

  ‘Weather! ’Twarn’t weather; ’twar bad seamanship. That’s what ’twar. He claimed in black and white in the newspaper, for all to see, that he was familiar with the coast of Africa, America and Australia; that his ship was sound and seaworthy and provisioned with the finest vittles to last for more’n three months. You saw the kind of vittles them critters got.’

  Thomas had seen; to his cost.

  Mr. Ballantyne removed his jacket and proceeded to put on the Captain’s dress reefer for state occasions. ‘Good thing he didn’t wear it this voyage. No contagiousness.’

  He saluted with an extravagant air. ‘Captain Ebenezer Lancing, at your service. You can forget that I was ever Jed Ballantyne. He was out off in the bloom of youth, so to speak.’

  ‘What! But that would be a most serious offence. ’Twould be criminal.’

  ‘Gettin’ very law-abidin’ ain’t yeh? You should know all about what’s criminal. ’Twarn’t for the good of your health you came aboard.’ He swept his hand towards the shore. ‘Take a look at your hotel waitin’.’

  The great black fortress was well in sight. The young man’s heart lurched. ‘Yes, its nice’n friendly,’ jeered the Mate. ‘Lackeys will be comin’ to take your portmanteau; comin’ with their lashes an’ muskets. There isn’t a convict aboard that has a leg that’d hold a chain.’ He looked down at the bronzed well-turned legs beneath the short, ragged trousers. ‘Barrin’ your own!’

  The young man took a long stride as though to assure himself that the chains that had manacled him to a rotting corpse no longer hampered him. He came back to the new Captain. ‘What about the other prisoners? Are you going to hand them over?’

  ‘Don’t worry about them. We’ll fatten them up when we get provisions here. They’ll make good seamen yet. Then we’ll set sail for Australia before this wind drops. Australia! There’s good cargoes there, and there’s men there ready to give lumps of raw gold for a passage to the new gold find in California. Seems once they handle that there gold they’ll go to the ends of the earth for more. What about it? Are you goin’ to put your scruples over the side or are you goin’ to put them purty legs into irons? Take yer choice, and take it quick.’

  The fortress was looming nearer and groups stood on the shore watching the approaching vessel. ‘All right. It’s not a question of choice. It’s a question of caution. It would not be manacles if this were discovered. It would be muskets—for all of us. To fail to report the Captain’s death could bring us under suspicion of murder—and then there’s the question of the Company, the shipowners...’

  ‘The shipowners!’ Ballantyne spat. ‘Have done with this insubordination if you know what’s good for you. Get below and cover them bare shanks. Surgeon Black’s clobber will fit you nicely. He was no more a surgeon than yourself, but old Ebenezer warn’t askin’ no questions as long as the regulations had a wisp of coverin’.’

  The young man grinned. The breath of freedom was sweetening the air. ‘Aye, aye, sir.’ He hurried below but a second later his head came round the bridge rail. ‘Excuse me—Captain,’ he added with pleasing deference, ‘there’s just one other point, if I may refer to it.’

  The new title made such pleasing hearing that its owner had no objection to listening to any points that followed its sound. ‘Be quick about it,’ he said.

  ‘What about boarding officials, Captain? Inspectors from the Board of Health, that sort of thing?’

  The new Captain guffawed. ‘Health inspections, did you say! Look at them. They’re holdin’ their handkerchiefs to their noses already. With this following wind I’d wager that the whole island has been stunk out this half hour. They won’t be too keen to come aboard; ’taint as if ’twas a regular convict ship. Just fill yer nose with that stink, it’s the best friend you ever had. Trust that—and me—and we’ll get by.’

  And they did. They dropped anchor within good smelling distance and formalities were slim and brief. In the dark hour before dawn they set sail for Australia with fresh provisions and a few fresh faces. For the new Captain’s consent had been tacit but sure when a few sturdy ticket-of-leave men from the provision boat—prisoners granted a certain amount of freedom for good conduct—had clambered aboard in the darkness.

  The new skipper was always in good humour. The remaining handful of Welsh and Irish emigrants came alive under the vigour of fresh water for their bodies and fresh-washed clothes that had danced in the sun-heated breeze.

  In the velvet darkness of the First Watch, Mr. Thomas came to know the fate he had escaped. From the four men who had slipped aboard in the darkness,
he heard tales that chilled the warmth of the sub-tropical night. ‘Eighteen and twenty hangings I seen of a fine morning,’ said a Yorkshire man who had not poached for thirteen years. ‘’Twas like as if Ma had forgot to take the bodies out of the washing of a Monday morning,’ he chuckled.

  An Irish ticket-of-leave man with a scarred face was the only one of the four not anxious to reminisce. The new First Mate watched as he went silently to his tasks, sail-shifting, rope-slicing, hammock-scrubbing. Once when an improvised ball of paper was tossed in his direction he raised his deck-scrub and diverted the ball in mid-air with the skill of a hurler and the splendid teeth showed suddenly in a smile that betokened an earlier gaiety.

  As the ball rebounded, Thomas grabbed a brush and caught it aloft with a matching skill that astonished the ticket-of-leave man. ‘I shouldn’t have thought you were Irish, much less a hurler,’ he said. He looked curiously at the First Mate.

  Gradually, in the dark of the Night Watch, the scarred man, Bergin, relaxed. He told of a January morning when he was nineteen and very gay and the local lads had clubbed to hire the waggonette for the Carlow Races. They were all wagering on the certainty of a one-eyed horse belonging to their landlord—a lady who had reduced all their rents that Gale Day because she had given birth to a son after ten daughters. Even the brake horse was in a mischievous mood. It couldn’t be held from presumptuously galloping abreast with the fine carriage horses of a gentleman who was rumoured to be the wealthiest landlord in Ireland.

  ‘’Twas he gave me this,’ said the ticket-of-leave man, pointing to the scar on his cheek. ‘But he wasn’t content with that. He got me seventeen years at the next Assizes.’

  ‘It was a savage sentence!’

  The scar-faced man turned to him. ‘It was a sentence to turn a man into a savage.’ There was savagery in his voice. Then it resumed its tonelessness. ‘There was a little girl peeping from one of the carriages. Queer, the way a simple thing like that sticks in one’s memory! To this day I can see the horror on her face when I got the gash.’