The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
hands’. ‘Labour!’ they called, winking and smiling at the wide-eyed Irish girls. Seeking to seduce with smiles, as much as with dollars, those they considered ‘sober of habit, sound of limb and with good strong backs’ – as they had been instructed. One man’s ‘sanitary evil’, it seemed in America, was another’s ‘strong back’.
The children’s heads turned at every step, gawking at this and that, each new sight and sound of Boston a greater wonder to them than the one before. Like the gaudily bedecked sailors of various hue, reeking of spices and perfumes from the far reaches of the Orient, chattering in unintelligible tongues. Or a few freed slaves from the South silently bullocking the heavy cargo. She had to prevent them from staring.
‘But that man … he’s all black, what happened to him?’ Mary couldn’t contain herself.
‘He’s a Negro – from Africa,’ Ellen hushed her.
‘But will it rub off?’ Mary persisted.
‘Only if you shake hands with him, Mary,’ Lavelle cut in solemnly.
Mary’s eyes opened even wider, craning her neck to see this man who would change colour at a touch.
‘Mr Lavelle should have more sense, Mary, ignore him!’ Ellen rejoined. ‘Some people have a different skin to ours, that’s all – and it doesn’t rub off!’ she stated emphatically, more to Lavelle than to Mary. Nothing she had told them about America had ever prepared them for this, for Boston’s Long Wharf.
And the Irish. Everywhere the Irish; shouting, laughing, crying, mobbed by relatives who had crossed the Atlantic before them. Others, solitary young girls clinging to their carpetbags – no one to meet them in this throbbing kaleidoscope, this frightening place. Like motherless calf-whales they were, these daughters of Erin floundering unprotected in the great ocean of America. Easy prey to the welcoming smile, the outstretched hand, the familiar lilt; to their own, the Irish crimpers and ‘harpies’, who would flense them of everything.
‘I can see that Boston is as busy and bustling as ever,’ she said to Lavelle, full of being back in the place.
‘And bursting at the seams – thousands have arrived these past months – mostly Irish,’ he replied. ‘The bosses are happy; “green hands” from Ireland mean cheap labour,’ he continued, ‘but the City Fathers are not, thinking pauperism and Popery both will sink Boston!’
She didn’t care much about either bosses or Brahmins. Boston, bursting or not, was such a far cry from what she had left; the tumbled villages, a famished land; silence – no hope. Here there was hope. To her, the city with its crowded chaos, its cacophonous quay-life, rang out with the very music of hope.
‘Stop, Lavelle! Stop here!’ she called out of a sudden, almost forgetting. ‘I want them to see it!’
Lavelle ‘whoaupped’ the big bay mare he had hired for the day and had scarcely pulled them to a halt, when gathering up her skirts she leapt from the trap-cart.
‘Come on, come on!’ she beckoned to the children, shepherding them across the mouth of the busy wharf.
Lavelle stayed where he was. She was as impetuous as ever, he thought, watching the long straight back of her weave through the crowds. He smiled to himself – the factory bosses would be glad of a back like that! Three months since she had left and he had thought about her every day, wondering what awaited her in Ireland. Wondering when, if ever, she would return. Then, these past few weeks, scouring the pages of the Pilot for shipping intelligence and hoping for a fair wind to bring her back.
She looked a bit racked, he thought. Her face, the way she didn’t smile as big as he remembered. The furrow above her lips – the one he could never help watching, fascinated at how its fine fold rose and fell with the cadence of her speech. It didn’t fall and rise so much now, as if she was holding it back, keeping it in check. Still, it was a wonder at all that she looked as well as she did. She must have been too late to save them both, whatever had happened. That must have near killed her, would eat away at her for ever, he knew. This one, Mary, with the dos of wild red hair on her – how like Ellen she looked. Going to be tall like her too. He could see it now, as together they rounded the corner of the building away from him. The girl was quieter, less impetuous, more of a thinker. But maybe that was down to the foreignness of the place and him being present. And all that had happened.
The boy had made strange with him. With his unruly black head and sallow skin, he looked more like he’d come off a ship from the Spanish Americas, than Ireland. He was unlike her in every feature. Lavelle wondered about the boy’s father, her husband. It was her strong attachment to his memory that was holding back her affections. He had been hoping that when she stepped down from the ship, she would be wearing the scarf he had given her. But she wasn’t. He wondered what she had told the children. Or, if she’d thought much on him at all these past three months?
And the girl – the one who said nothing, only taking you in with those big brown eyes. Where had she appeared from? Maybe she was a neighbour’s child, orphaned by famine. Nearly more orphanages than groggeries in Boston too, so fast were they springing up. She’d probably put the girl into one of those – run by the Sisters. He ‘gee’d’ the horse, threading it gingerly after them, glad that he’d painted the sign. It would be a surprise for her. She was standing in front of it, her finger outstretched, reading aloud the strange-sounding words to the children. She turned, hearing the clip-clop of the horse.
‘Mr Lavelle’s been busy painting, I can see,’ she said to them. But it was meant for him, he knew. ‘“The New England Wine Company”,’ she read out the larger letters again, then the smaller ones underneath, ‘“Importers of fine wines, ports and liqueurs”. That’s us!’ she said to them with a little laugh. Even Patrick seemed impressed, looking at her, then at the sign over the warehouse, then back at Lavelle, trying to piece it all together.
‘You’re a merchant, Mother!’ Mary said, flushed with pride in her, yet seeming not in the least bit surprised.
‘I … I suppose I am,’ Ellen replied, never having thought of herself in that way.
They went inside, Louisa remaining close by her, Mary and Patrick going from rack to rack examining the cradled bottles and the labels with the unusual writing wrapped round them.
‘Fron-teen-nyac, pair ay fees’ – Frontignac, Père et Fils – she tried to explain, ‘the people we get the wine from in Canada. Frontignac, Father and Son,’ she went on, watching them watch her as if she was some stranger. And in truth she was. Their memories of her were as far removed from the woman now before them, explaining French wines, as Massachusetts was from the Maamtrasna valley. An ocean in the heart’s geography. It would take time.
‘Bore-dough,’ she pointed to a ruby rich red, ‘the place the wine comes from in France.’
It was a strange thing, Patrick thought, for her to know about, her and the ‘fancy man’ that kept watching him and kept smiling at his mother.
Ellen was well pleased at what she saw. Lavelle had kept the warehouse solidly stocked against the coming season and the winter closing of the St Lawrence river. Furthermore, he had secured her new accommodation.
‘In Washington Street between Milk and Water Streets, near the Old Corner Bookstore,’ he told her. ‘I know you like to be at the centre of things, and it’s bigger, more suitable now with the children.’ She had surrendered her old lodgings, not knowing how long she would be away. Her belongings Lavelle had stored in the warehouse, and more recently moved to the new address, paying the rent to secure it against her return. He himself continued to live where he previously had, in the North End, though it was ‘now being over-run with the poorest of our own’.
The Long Wharf led them into State Street, New England’s financial heart, its temples of commerce close to the city’s importing and exporting lifeline – the wharves. Lavelle took them left at the Old State House, down along Washington Street, its patchwork of buildings, filled with apothecaries, engravers, instrument-makers and ‘Newspaper Row’. Signs