The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham
loss, separation, Famine. It unnerved her the way the girl never asked anything of her, just was there like a conscience. But, given a little time, she might make a companion for Mary. Not that anybody could replace Katie; it wasn’t that. But maybe Mary might find some echo of her own unvoiced loss in the silence of the mute girl, some small consolation in her companionship on the long journey across the Atlantic.
Now, Ellen prayed across the waters of the Carrowbeg to the House of God that she would not have to change that decision. She closed her mind from even having to think about it. Instead, she tried to recall what it was Faherty had said about the church opposite. About the inscription from the Bible that its foundation stone carried?
‘This is an awful place. The House of God.’
Faherty knew all these things.
The days dragged by. Each day she trudged with the children to the quayside and scanned out along Clew Bay for the tell-tale line against the sky. Each day they returned dispirited, almost as much by what they had witnessed on the way, as by the lack of a ship. Was there to be no let up in the calamity? The scenes of despair and deprivation seemed to her to have worsened. Droop-limbed skeletons of men – and women – hauled turf on their backs through the streets, once work only for beasts of burden. When she mentioned this at The Inn, they laughed at her naïveté.
‘There’s not an ass left in Westport that hasn’t been first flayed for the eightpence its pelt will bring, then its hindquarters eaten,’ a well-cushioned jobber jibed. ‘Now the peasants who sold them have to make asses of themselves!’
She was shocked at the indifference of the commercial classes to the plight of ‘the peasants’.
Nervous of everything, she kept the children close by and was cross with them if they wandered, terrified that she’d lose them. That they’d be swallowed in the hordes of the famished who filled the streets with the smell of death and the excrement of bodies forced to feed inwardly upon themselves.
Once she traipsed them with her to Croagh Patrick. They climbed to where they could look across the dotted archipelago of the bay, out past the Clare Island lighthouse. She could see no tall ships, only boats far out, maybe tobacco smugglers, or those ferrying the contraband Geneva, an alcoholic liquor flavoured with juniper and available from under the counter – if asked for – at The Inn.
They climbed higher for better vantage, Ellen straining her eyes against the gold and green of sun and sea. Here, on this age-old mountain, St Patrick had fasted for forty days and forty nights. ‘Those who worship the Sun shall go in misery … but we who worship Christ, the true Sun, will never perish.’ In the writing of his Confession the saint had denounced the sun and its worshippers. Now she prayed to the sun to bring them a ship. Sun-up or sun-down, it didn’t matter, as long as it came. To the west her eye caught a rib of white stone rising heavenwards against the bulk of the mountain. A ‘Famine wall’ going nowhere, built on the Relief Works to exact moral recompense from the starving stone-carriers. They in turn given ‘relief’; a few pence in pay, a handful of soup-tickets.
She remembered how on the last Sunday of summer, Reek Sunday, as it was widely known, the Clogdubh – the Black Bell of St Patrick – was brought there for weary pilgrims to kiss, for a penny. Black from the holy man pelting it at devils, they said. She had never kissed it. For tuppence, those afflicted with rheumatism might pass it three times around the body, for relief. Another superstition of the shackling kind that bred paupers to pay priests. Like the legends about the reek itself. Legends, she guessed, grown to feed misery and repentance, to keep the people out of the sun.
She thought of ascending the whole way – making the old pilgrimage, beseeching the high place where the tip of the mountain disappeared into the lower heavens, to send a ship. But what was it, anyway? Only a heap of piled-up rocks, only a mountain. And what could a mountain do? Still, she called the children and followed the path to the First Station. Seven times they shambled around the cairn of stones intoning seven Our Fathers, seven Hail Marys and one Creed. She wondered why once of everything wasn’t enough, why it had to be seven times.
Then she turned her back on St Patrick’s mountain, angry, yet disquieted by her rejection of it, and dragged them down the miles with her to Westport. Westport, relic of the anglicization of Ireland. A Plantation town of well-mannered malls, the canalized Carrowbeg outpouring the grief and suffering of its hapless inhabitants.
St Patrick and the Protestant Planters could have it between them.
Whether her anger had moved the sullen mountain, or whether it was merely favourable winds, the next morning produced a miracle. A ship out of Londonderry – the Jeanie Goodnight – had rounded Achill Island under cover of darkness and now sat at the quay: and she was Boston-bound. Word of the ship’s arrival had spread like wildfire, igniting all of Westport into frenzied quay-life once again. The Inn emptied.
Ellen left the children behind her in the room, admonishing them not to leave it. Wild with excitement, she threw off her shoes and ran bare-stockinged all the way to the office of Mr John Reid, Jun., the dress hiked up behind her like a billowing sail and with every stride storming Heaven that she wasn’t too late.
The quay was teeming with people. Would-be travellers clutched carpetbags to their breasts – food and their entire earthly possessions within. Many were young, single women, who vied for ground with barking agents and anxious excise men. While late-arriving jobbers had their own solution, jabbing at obstructive buttocks with their knob-handled cattle-sticks.
Already the ship agent’s door was mobbed, cries of ‘Amerikay!’ ascending at every turn. Call the damned at the Gates of Hell. Like it was their last hope.
It was her last hope. If they didn’t embark on this ship, who knew when another would come. She and her children would be fated to stay in Ireland. Her money would run out, and in time they would sink lower and lower, until they, too, ended up on scraps of pity and charity and the off-cuts of ass-meat. She lunged into the crowd, all thought of her gender put aside. Nor did the opposite gender give ground to her, unless she took it. Pushing and elbowing, she scrimmaged her way forward until she reached the front.
‘Mr Reid! Mr Reid!’ she shouted, money in her fist, shaking it above her head. ‘Passage for four to Boston!’ she beseeched.
At last he beckoned her forward, she banged down the money onto his desk.
Fifteen minutes later she left, four sailing tickets to Boston clenched like a prayer between her two hands.
Their passage was secured.
The children were overjoyed, Mary more restrained than the others, at the thought of leaving Katie behind. Ellen wondered if the silent girl really understood what all the excitement was about. Sometimes, you just didn’t know with her. But the girl clapped her hands, looking from one to the other of them, her hazel-brown eyes shining, her pert little nose twitching with delight.
Thrice daily, morning, noon, and at eventide, Ellen went to check on the Jeanie Goodnight lest the ship slip out again unexpectedly, just as she had ghosted into the western seaboard town.
Three days later they were headed out into the bay, Westport behind them in the mist, like a shaken shroud. She hated the place. Its workhouse which had taken Michael; the hordes of its hungry, clawing to get aboard the ship ahead of her, the lucky ones, their passage paid by land-clearing landlords.
Once aboard, she had changed her clothes, shaking the stench of Ireland out of them, then boiled them. As the Jeanie Goodnight threaded its way through the drumlin-humped islands, she was aware of the Reek to her left, the cursed mountain always looking down on them, whichever way you went, by