The Year We Sailed the Sun

by Theresa Nelson

  And then I was flying down the porch steps and bolting into the sunlight; in another ten seconds I’d be free as any bird. . . .

  “Stop that girl!” George Washington shouted. “Get her, Sister Bridget!”

  Sister Bridget?

  What—another one?

  They’d left her outside to mind their horse and buggy. Ah, hell. I should have beaten it out the back. And didn’t I know her somehow or other? An interfering freckle-face, that’s what she was—wearing white, not black like the old ones. Which meant she was still just a trainee and really only half a nun, though she looked twice as tall as the other two put together.

  “Whoa, girlie!” she said, and before I could blink, Sister Bridget had caught me by the collar and would have dragged me into the buggy itself, if I hadn’t grabbed hold of the lamppost in the nick of time.

  “Let go, Julia,” they all kept telling me, till it made me sick to hear it, the old ones clomping down to circle like buzzards, while the half-a-nun tugged away. The sleeves of her habit had fallen back, and you could see that her arms were just as pink and freckly and baby-fied as her face, but they had some string in ’em for all that. So I held on tighter, that’s what, though it felt as if my own arms were getting yanked right out of their sockets. I wrapped them around that post and gritted my teeth and shook my head no, no, no!

  “Come on, now, pet, there’s no use fighting,” said Sister Bridget, just as smooth as apple butter. As if she wasn’t squeezing the life out of anybody in particular, only sitting in some meadow, picking daisies. “I’ve got eight brothers at home, and not a one of ’em’s bested me yet. So let’s just take it nice and slow, why don’t we? Easy does it, now. . . . That’s right. . . . That’s better. . . . Nobody’s going to hurt you, not in a million—ow!”

  “Merciful heaven!” cried the head nun. “She’s bitten Sister Bridget!”

  And then everybody was tugging and talking at once, and a crowd was gathering on the sidewalk:

  “It’s all right; it’s nothing. . . .”

  “Your hand is bleeding!”

  “. . . barely broke the skin . . .”

  “Come and lie down, Sister. . . .”

  “No, really, I’m fine. . . .”

  “. . . like a mad dog entirely . . .”

  “She’ll have to be tied. . . .”

  “It’s nothing. . . .”

  “You want me to fetch the clothesline, Mama?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Julia, stop it!” This time it was Mary talking. Looked like she’d got back her powers of speech and movement, finally, and had joined the others at the lamppost. “That’s enough, now. Just let go.”

  “No! They ain’t takin’ me to that place! They’ll have to shoot me first!”

  “Don’t tempt me.” Aunt Gert’s eyes shrunk up to mean little pinpoints. “Yes, Otto, get the clothesline, please.”

  “Yes’m. . . .”

  “Oh, no, surely not! That won’t be necessary, will it, dear?” Was that the pigeon cooing? And who was it trying to peel my fingers from their death grip, one by one? I didn’t know for sure; I’d shut my own eyes tight now and was kicking out blind as a bat and shaking my head harder. No, no, no. . . .

  “Stop that, Julia!” Mary again, no question. “Look at poor Sister limping. Do you want ’em to put you in the loony bin?”

  “Now there’s an idea. . . .”

  “Possibly we should come back tomorrow. . . .”

  “Don’t just stand there, Otto!”

  “I AIN’T GOIN’ TO THEIR DAMN ORPHANAGE!”

  “Julia? Mary—what the devil is this?”

  “Bill!”

  Thank God.

  Chapter 2

  And if our great-great-great-grand-something-or-other (Brian Boru himself, High King of the Irish) had come charging down the sidewalk, flags flying, in my eyes he’d have rated a sorry second to my brother Bill. Not that the family armor was exactly shining at the moment. He still had on the good shirt he’d worn to the funeral, but it had lost all its starch, and his collar and tie were stuffed in the pocket of his trousers. And there was dirt on his left cheek and dried blood on his lower lip and a brownish stain—fist-shaped?—on his shirtfront, about heart high. (Which wasn’t proof positive he’d been fighting again, necessarily. Could be it was nothing more than a splash of innocent coffee—or a bit of beer, more likely, though God knows he was scarcely fifteen and shouldn’t have been drinking at all.) And he wasn’t wearing any plumed helmet, neither, but his usual old mud-colored cap, cocked sideways on his raggedy crop of blazing-red hair.

  “What the devil?” he asked again now, as I let go of the lamppost finally and threw myself into his arms. So Mary opened her mouth to explain, but Aunt Gert and the old Sisters were talking at the same time, and the half-a-nun was putting in her two cents, and over all the babble I kept saying, “I ain’t goin’, I won’t go, don’t let ’em take me, Bill; you won’t let ’em take me, will you?”

  “Hold on there, J, hush. . . .”

  “Don’t let ’em take me, Bill!”

  “You ain’t hurt, are you? If anybody’s hurt you . . .” He was nearly twice my size, but he knelt right down on the sidewalk by me and I had him ’round the neck now; I was sobbing into his shoulder. “Tell ’em, Bill. They’ll listen to you. Tell ’em to take Mary—she don’t mind.”

  “Well, I like that!” Mary sniffed.

  “Take her where?” Bill asked.

  “To the orphan girls’ home!” Otto piped up cheerfully. “And you’ve got to go live at the priest’s house with the orphan boys!”

  “Like hell I will,” Bill muttered. I heard it in my good ear, and my heart swelled with pride. But then they were off again—all the voices—with Aunt Gert complaining and Sister Maclovius explaining and Sister Gabriel cooing and Sister Bridget saying, “Ah, come on, love, no use beating a dead horse. . . .”

  When all of a sudden a hush fell, and the crowd on the pavement parted, and caps were doffed, and amid respectful mumbles of “Hello, Father; lovely day, Father; God bless you for coming, Father,” a tall figure in black came striding our way.

  “Father Dunne!” said Sister Maclovius. “Thank heaven you’re here.”

  My stomach sank to the sidewalk. I looked at Bill. His eyebrows had puckered together in one fierce red line.

  “No,” I began again. “We won’t go!”

  “Hush, J.” A muscle twitched in his jaw. “Let me do the talking.”

  We both knew Father Dunne, of course. Everybody knew him. He was famous for his goodness to the downtrodden. “A saint on this earth,” Gran herself had called him, when he’d taken in Jimmy Brannigan six months earlier. This was after Jimmy’s house had burned down, with all his folks in it, and him alone spared but with his right leg shattered due to jumping from the second story. And now Jimmy was one of Father Dunne’s boys, like all the rest, the lot of ’em hauled in from every stinking rat’s nest in the city: cleaned up and set straight and given three squares a day and a decent set of knickers, then trotted out for the whole world to stare at.

  Poor beggars.

  They got preached about in pulpits. They won citywide spelling bees. They put out their own newspaper and then had to stand on street corners, selling copies. (I’d spotted Jimmy only the week before, leaning on his crutch over by Healy’s Dry Goods. He’d turned beet-red and pretended not to know me.) And just in case—after all that—you’d somehow still managed to miss ’em, at Christmas time their choir came around to the churches and sang like the bleedin’ angels. Last year at Saint Pat’s, after the bucktoothed kid hit the high note in “O Holy Night,” even Skinflint Gert had handed over a nickel.

  “Charity cases” was what they were. Bill wouldn’t be caught dead with a gang like that.

  “Hello, Bill,” said the priest. He put out his hand.

  Bill hesitated, then shook it. “Afternoon, Father.”

  I shot him a look: Careful, Bill, they’re full of traps; watch out f
or the con. . . .

  His left hand tightened on my right shoulder.

  Aunt Gert cleared her throat. “Thank you for coming, Father,” she began, pushing her way through the gawking strangers. “As you can see for yourself . . . that is, as I told you in my letter, these unfortunate children have been left in—”

  “Look out for the little one!” somebody shouted.

  “She’s a biter!” yelled somebody else.

  “In my care,” said Aunt Gert, heaving a sigh. “But of course with my own to tend to, and times being what they are, well, much as I’d like to—”

  “Did you bring a muzzle, Father?” called a man in the street behind him, puffing smoke rings from a fat cigar.

  The crowd hooted at that. I’d have spit at every last one of ’em if Bill’s fingers hadn’t been cutting clear through to my collarbone. But Father Dunne held up his hand for quiet, and they shut their traps. He was looking at me and Mary now. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said.

  He took off his hat.

  He was younger than I’d thought, up this close. Younger and bigger. If it weren’t for the priest duds, you might peg him as a dockworker, or a farmhand, maybe. He had jug ears, and a long neck, and a headful of brown hair, kind of bristly looking. His wrist bones stuck out of his cassock sleeves like he’d only just outgrown ’em this morning.

  “Thanks,” said Bill.

  “Thank you, Father,” Mary murmured. Ah, crikey. Was she blushing, for Pete’s sake? I gritted my teeth and waited for him to go on about Gran being up with the angels. But he just stood there looking at us, holding his big black hat in his two big hands.

  “We’re prepared to take the girls, Father,” said Sister Maclovius, squinting severely at me down her great beak of a nose. “If they’re ready to behave themselves.”

  “No,” I said.

  Mary elbowed me in the ribs.

  “I can take care of my sisters,” Bill said.

  “Of course you can,” said Father Dunne. “When you’re a bit older, why then—”

  “I have a job.”

  The priest smiled. “I know you do, son. But two dollars a week—”

  “Three and a quarter.”

  “Is that right?” Father Dunne looked impressed.

  “I’ll be top of my shift by January; that’s three fifty, guaranteed. I’m the fastest button-fitter on the floor, next to Mickey Doyle.”

  “Well, that’s fine, Bill. Highly commendable. Still, even three fifty—well, it doesn’t go as far as it used to, I’m afraid. Rent alone will set you back the better part of it, and then there’s food to buy, and fuel for the fire, and of course with winter coming on, the girls will be needing new coats and shoes. . . .”

  Bill’s eyes followed Father Dunne’s to my boots, blast the both of ’em. There was a hole in one, and the sole flapped loose on the other. Not that I cared a lick! Still, I wished I’d wiped off the mud, like Mary. Her boots were no newer than mine but looked clean enough to eat.

  She started to say something, but Bill shook his head. “Delaneys don’t take charity.”

  “Charity?” The priest put his hat back on. “And who said anything about charity? I’ve got a paper to run, sir! This is nothing but a temporary arrangement—isn’t that so, Sisters?—a hand till you’re ready, that’s all. Why, when you’re earning a grown man’s wages we’ll be kicking you out on your ear, won’t we, to make room for them that need it. We’ll be knocking on your boardroom door, asking you to contribute to our building fund.”

  I waited for Bill to smash that argument all to blazes, but he took his sweet time, for some reason.

  “Go on, tell ’em,” I said.

  He was studying my boots again. They’d been clean as a whistle when I found ’em sitting under my bed last Christmas. Bill had acted more surprised than anybody, though the writing on the note was in his own hand:

  To J. C. Delaney, from S. Claus, Esquire

  “Tell ’em, Bill!”

  He looked at Mary. She touched his arm. “We don’t have a choice,” she told him.

  I tugged on his other arm. “Sure we—”

  He didn’t let me finish. “Look, J,” he began, and then he stopped and pulled me aside, away from all the nosy-noses. One old lady was bent nearly double, trying to catch every word. Bill lowered his voice. “It wouldn’t be for as long as they’re saying. Only a little while, a week or two, that’s all. Just till I can get enough together to—”

  “No! I won’t go! I won’t—”

  “Stop that, now. Do you suppose I’d leave you with that bunch? Just a couple of weeks, I promise—no, now, listen to me, Julia—a month, tops. There’s ways, all right? We got plans, me and the fellers—”

  “What fellers? Not that Mickey!”

  “You’ll be all right; you’ll have Mary looking out for you. I’ll spring you loose from there before you know it. You only have to make ’em think you’re staying; you can do that much for me, can’t you?”

  I shook my head again, no, no, no.

  “Yes, you can; I know you can. It’s the only way, Julia. We can’t fight ’em right here with the whole world watching.”

  “Sure we—”

  “Listen to me, J! We’ll have a signal, all right? Keep your head down and your eyes wide open. You’ll be just like Madame What’s-Her-Name in the peep boxes, that lady spy you liked so much—”

  “Madame Marvella?”

  “That’s the one! She fooled ’em all, didn’t she?”

  It was true. Marvella was a wonder. Hadn’t I spent the past four Saturdays in Monaghan’s River Arcade and Pawn Shop, watching her death-defying adventures on the story reels? You had to know how to sneak past Doc Monaghan himself, of course, high and mighty in the ticket window, but fortunately he did his own sneaking away every hour or so, to wet his whistle at Egan’s Saloon. And once you were in, the moving picture boxes were a cinch to jimmy. So then you peeped in the peephole and cranked the crank, and there would be marvelous Marvella, just like magic, wearing one disguise after another, riding camels and dancing on elephants’ backs, slipping secret messages to the Maharaja, swimming down the black waters of the Nile with a knife in her teeth. Like to see ’em keep her cooped up in some convent!

  Still . . .

  “I’ll send you a sign—”

  “No, Bill!”

  “And as soon as you see it—first minute they ain’t looking—you and Mary come away quick as you can. You got that? You stick together like nothing doing and go straight to our old meeting place, and I’ll be there waiting for you, just like always.”

  “But what if you aren’t? What if you can’t—?”

  “You ever know me to go back on my word?”

  I stared at my boots.

  To J. C. Delaney, from S. Claus, Esquire . . .

  “Julia?”

  I swallowed hard. “What sort of a sign?”

  Chapter 3

  “It won’t be so bad as all that,” Mary whispered, as the swaybacked horse pulled us away, clop-clop down Biddle Street and bump over the trolley tracks.

  I didn’t bother answering. My throat ached and my heart hammered and the blood shrieked in my bad ear. Sounded for all the world like a pair of cats fighting over a fishbone.

  “Sister says they have bunco in the parlor on game nights.”

  Dear God in heaven. Bunco with the orphans.

  But what was the use talking about it, with us already packed tight as ticks in a buggy full of nuns?

  The freckled strong-arm was up front driving, the reins in her left hand, Father Dunne’s big handkerchief tied around her right. The pigeon and the president sat directly across from Mary and me, fingering their rosary beads. Our eight boots rested on the pair of boxes Aunt Gert had wedged in at the very last second. Tap-tap . . . went Sister Gabriel’s, keeping time: Mother of God . . . tap-tap . . . pray for us sinners . . . tap-tap . . .

  What was it she’d said when Aunt Gert told her my name? Had she really danced i
n Dublin once? I wondered. A terrible picture rose up in my head: a whole row of fat little nuns with their black beads jangling and their habits flapping and their veils all askew, hopping and bobbing to the music—my music—“Julia Delaney” herself.

  The First Joyful Mystery . . . tap-tap. . . the Annunciation . . .

  “ ’Tis your lucky reel, Julia,” Gran would say, “and your father’s before you.” That was how she always started the story. “Wasn’t it the selfsame tune he was playing when he first laid eyes on your mother, the night of his very own funeral?”

  Our Father . . . tap-tap . . . who art in heaven . . . tap-tap . . .

  “But he wasn’t dead yet, was he, Gran?” I would ask, knowing my part, and she’d wipe her eyes and say, “Ah, no, not a bit of it. He was as healthy as a horse, my Cyril was, before the drink got hold of him. But he was leaving for America the very next morning, sailing clear to New Orleans on a cotton steamer, then working his way up the Mississippi to St. Louis, where the boatyards were hiring. Four thousand miles from Edenderry, for a job painting smokestacks! Who could say when we’d ever lay eyes on him again, this side of the grave? So seeing as how it might be our last opportunity, we got his cousin Father John the Jesuit to say him a proper Requiem Mass, casket and all—though without your father in it, of course; that was only a hank of his lovely black hair, tied with a ribbon. And afterward we all went down to the Queen of Heaven Hall and gave him a first-class American wake—new potatoes with butter, Guinness flowing to beat the band, the entire butt end of a roasted ham, to boot. And someone handed Cyril his fiddle, for old times’ sake, and Father John called for ‘Julia Delaney,’ as he always did: ‘Our great-grand-seventh cousin’s sister-in-law, God bless her!’ Which only proved he’d had a pint or two, as usual, since even God couldn’t remember that far back, or if the girl in the music had ever existed in the first place.”