Maggie's Door

by Patricia Reilly Giff

  There was no one in the room, and the woman’s walking stick was gone. He slid the tray onto the berth, glanced at the shelf where the book lay, and then quickly looked back at the door. His hands felt as clammy as they had when he used to gut fish for Liam.

  What would happen if he touched the book? They would think he was a thief. He would be beaten, he was sure of that, and perhaps the cook really would throw him overboard. And who would know if the cook dragged him up to the deck at night?

  But still he reached out and ran his fingers over the soft leather on the back of the book. Almost without thinking he pulled it toward him and opened it.

  There were too many pages to find the words he knew, he could see that almost immediately, but he looked for the letters in those words, and the letters of his own name.

  “What are you doing?” a voice said.

  Sean spun around, almost dropping the heavy book, felt his heart reach up into his throat. He hadn’t even heard the cabin door open.

  It was the girl. His mouth was suddenly so dry he couldn’t say anything. He looked at the door in back of her, but it seemed so far away that he couldn’t imagine taking those few steps around her to escape back into the hallway.

  “You can’t read that book,” she said in English.

  “I was just . . . ,” he began, hearing his voice, which didn’t even sound like his own.

  “You can’t read at all, I think.” She took a step forward. “How can that be?”

  He noticed that her cheeks were red and her curls twisted. She reminded him of Nory when Nory was eight or maybe nine. “I know the letters,” he said slowly, thinking that she would surely tell her father. But if she didn’t, if by some miracle he managed to get out of that cabin, he’d never go back in there again. He’d ask Garvey to bring the tea for him instead.

  She pushed at her hair. “It’s windy outside,” she said. “My mother is afraid of it, but I like to look at the water. It bunches up and up, and just when it seems as if it will go over the ship it flattens out again.”

  She walked around him now and it seemed as if he’d be able to escape, but she picked up her own book. “It’s called Aesop’s Fables,” she said. “I could teach you some of the words.”

  He shook his head again, looking back at the door. “That’s all right.”

  She waved her hand. “No one will mind.”

  He thought about the door just a few feet away, but she was waving the book at him. “Look at the cover,” she said. “Aesop is the name of the man who told the fables. They’re all about animals: foxes and crows and cranes and wolves. The foxes and wolves are always bad.”

  He took a step forward as she opened the book and began to read, running her fingers under the lines. She read in a loud voice, sometimes stumbling a bit over the words.

  He was caught up in the story of a fox who was trying to get a piece of cheese away from a mouse. He saw the letters of the fox turn into a word, and the ones for mouse and cheese as well. And then that first story was finished and she began to read one about a wolf who was chasing a lamb.

  Sean watched as she read that story, trying to grab on to the words. Then suddenly he remembered. The cook would be waiting. How long had he been gone? He could feel the rush of fear in his throat again.

  “I must go,” he said, backing toward the door.

  He backed away from her, then opened the door and went out into the passageway.

  He turned and there was the cook, blocking the way.

  SEVENTEEN

  NORY

  The girl lay in the berth, her heavy hair covering her face. Nory swept it back, and the girl reached up in her fever to tangle her fingers in the long strands of it. At last Mrs. Casey came with a scissors. A scissors! Anna kept a small one on her table, but there had never been one in Nory’s house. Together they snipped the long hair so the girl would be more comfortable.

  Later they found that her name was Eliza. And from the first time Nory mixed the dried flowers into the boiled water and fed it to her from the small cracked cup, she became stronger. By the tenth day she was on her feet, weak, tottering, her face the color of cheese from Mrs. Mallon’s goat, but alive.

  That morning she held on to Nory’s sleeve, raising her eyes to the hatch cover as it opened. “Help me up,” she said. “Help me out.”

  Nory looked doubtfully at the steps, which were already lined with people. They held pots and cups and small pans to fill with meal as Garvey doled it out to them.

  So many people! Sometimes she remembered running along the cliff path in Maidin Bay, arms stretched out as far as they could go, feeling the mist on her head and her shoulders. But here on the ship, even on the deck, there was no room to spin or even to turn without bumping into someone or stepping on someone’s bare toes. She was never alone. Everywhere she turned someone was talking, or sleeping, or fighting, or sick.

  She turned to Eliza. “Maybe you’d better stay in your berth. Let me get food.”

  But Eliza was moving toward the steps. Nory hesitated, looking toward Granda’s bunk, and in the dim light she could see he was still asleep, and Patch too, in the filthy straw on the berth beneath.

  In Brooklyn everything would be clean, she thought. Clean straw smelling of sunny fields, clothes washed, hands washed, faces washed.

  She took Granda’s bowl and stood in line with Eliza as they climbed onto the deck. There was a strange cast to the sky this morning, and after Garvey filled her bowl with a cup of meal she found a small empty place out of the wind for the two of them to sit while they waited to use the makeshift stove.

  A fierce red ball of sun had hurled itself over the horizon, and she squinted uneasily at it and that greenish light in the distance.

  Eliza’s head was back, her eyes closed. “You saved my life. I’m not sorry I left you the rest of your food when we were on the road.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you take it,” Nory said, smiling because they both knew she couldn’t have stopped her.

  Eliza opened her eyes. “I am here because of an apple.”

  Nory shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “I climbed the wall of the squire’s garden,” she said. “One apple hung there, the only one. It had held on all winter, green and hard, and I had the feel of it in my mouth. Every morning I passed under the wall and the tree and that apple holding on to it, and I thought if I could just put my teeth into it, I wouldn’t care what happened afterward.”

  Nory could feel the taste of it in her own mouth. She remembered Anna finding them an apple last winter. She and Patch had eaten it, skin, pulp, even the core.

  She looked down at the meal in her cup. The grains shifted almost like the sand at the base of the cliffs when it was invaded by tiny summer fleas. The meal was filled with insects.

  She thought about the meal Maggie would have for them in Brooklyn, golden grain she could run her fingers through, clean and clear and softened in pure water.

  Eliza was still talking in that harsh voice. “I wasn’t strong enough to put my feet in the chinks of the wall to climb it, but one day the iron gate was open and I slid inside.”

  She and Sean had done that, Nory remembered, feeling the ache of wondering what had happened to him.

  “I took the apple,” Eliza said. “I climbed the tree on the squire’s side of the wall, and I saw his children. Fat. Can you imagine that? They had food, all the food they wanted, and I had to steal a winter apple.”

  Nory didn’t answer. She patted Eliza’s arm absently as she looked up. She had seen a sky like that before, shot through with green, but she couldn’t remember when.

  “I picked up a stone,” Eliza said.

  Nory turned. “You threw it at the children?”

  “At the window. At the great square window.” Eliza’s eyes were closed again. “I can hear the sound of it, the glass shattering, a piece left in one corner. Someone came after me, and I ran, just ran.”

  Nory sighed. She could almost tell
the rest of the story herself. Eliza had not gone home again. If she had, the rest of her family would have been out on the road, their house tumbled.

  “There were eight of us at home,” Eliza said, “and I’m thinking I won’t see any of them again but my brother Owen in America.” She shook herself. “There’s a storm somewhere.”

  That’s what it is, Nory thought. A storm in the distance. Around them the sea seemed peaceful enough; the swells were large, but they were smooth. There were no crashing waves, no great white arcs to the water.

  “A bad storm,” Eliza said, her eyes opening now. “But it will stay far away if we have luck.”

  Somewhere on the ocean, Nory thought, far to the west, or was it to the south?

  And in her memory . . .

  The door to their small house rattling, rattling, blowing open, no rain, but the sky! That terrible sky. Mam trying to hold the door against the wind. Sean Red’s father far out in the bay fishing and Mrs. Mallon standing on the hill, hands pulling at her skirt. Da looking up at the sky. “If the storm doesn’t turn, Mallon will never survive.” And the rain had come then, and Mr. Mallon and his small boat had disappeared.

  “I’ve seen a sky like that before,” Nory said, trying to find comfort in Eliza’s words: “Maybe it will stay far away.”

  She shaded her eyes, looking toward the horizon. Da and Celia were on a ship somewhere ahead of them. Surely they hadn’t reached Brooklyn yet. Was the storm threatening them?

  She could feel the ship rising, rising, then settling back again. Nory shivered. Underneath that great rolling mass were giant shadowy fish that swam silently in the darkness, and hulls of sunken ships that held skeleton sailors with their bony arms outstretched.

  Garvey shook his head at the horizon too, reaching for the water pail. “Have to douse the fire in the stoves,” he said.

  “Wait,” the next person in line called, and in a moment people were pushing Garvey away from the stoves, so many people that Nory could hardly see him in the midst of them. Two sailors came, pushing and shoving too, and one man was thrown down the steps into the hold. Others lost their balance and slid down on top of him. Those who were left still tried to get the last bit of heat from the stove as Garvey poured the water over it and wisps of steam rose into the air.

  A jagged streak of lightning shot across the sky, and Eliza nodded. “It might be that it will take the ship.”

  “Don’t say that,” Nory told her.

  “If it isn’t the storm,” Eliza said, “it will be something else.”

  They climbed down into the hold listening to the moans of the man who had fallen, and went to Nory’s berth. Patch was sitting on the edge, his legs crossed under him. “Do you remember potatoes?” he said. “Do you remember Maggie boiled them for us?”

  Maggie with the rush pot filled with potatoes, the boiling water spilling out the bottom on the doorstep.

  Nory took a breath.

  The day the potatoes failed. Every field in Maidin Bay covered with oozing plants, that terrible smell.

  Nory reached out to give Patch the meal that she had softened with water. “There will be potatoes in Brooklyn, fine white ones,” she said. “But in the meantime I will take this meal and stir it with water even though it won’t be warm.” She tried to sound cheerful.

  Eliza moved Patch’s feet out of the way and sat on a corner of the bunk. Lally, lying there, whispered, “No room,” and was back to sleep in an instant.

  Eliza ran her fingers through the faded little ribbon she wore around her neck. Nory smiled, remembering that she had had a ribbon like that once, remembered Sean chasing her on the cliff top, and heard an echo of the words Eliza had said about her family: “I’m thinking I won’t see any of them again.”

  She’d never see Sean again either.

  Nory raised her hand as Eliza stared back at her, both of them realizing there had been a change in the movement of the ship. Instead of plowing straight through the water, the force of the waves pulled it to the side.

  Nory thought about Sean’s brother Liam in his open fishing boat. “The thing of it is, Nory, to keep her straight into the waves. She’ll want to turn, but if you let that happen, she’ll be hit by one of those waves and roll over.”

  “People are going to die,” Eliza said.

  Nory glanced at Patch, his thumb in his mouth, his large eyes staring. “Don’t,” she said, angry that Eliza would frighten him.

  “Look around you,” Eliza said. “It’s not only the storm, although I think we’re in for it, but there will be fever. No air, no food, and people are coughing.” She lowered her voice, leaning forward, pointing. “They are coughing out bad spirits that swirl around us. I can feel them. They call it ship fever.”

  Nory took a breath. “That is not true.” If only she had salt, though, even a grain to throw over her shoulder, she wouldn’t have been so uneasy.

  Eliza took a strand of Patch’s hair and ran it through her fingers. “Your granda with the white beard. There’s nothing left of him.”

  Patch pulled away from her. “We’ll start a farm in Brooklyn. Granda has said so. We’ll build a barn as big as Lord Cunningham’s. There will be sheep, and a cow.” He looked up. “Isn’t that right? And I’ll name the cow Biddy after our poor old hen.”

  But all the while Patch was talking, Nory was thinking about Granda. The skin between his shoulder bones was so sunken she could put her fingers deep inside those hollows. And yesterday when they had been up on deck, she had seen how gray he looked, how dull his blue eyes were.

  He had looked over the sea that rolled and tilted. “When I was young,” he’d told Nory, “I sailed this sea, but I knew at the end of the voyage I’d be sailing east to Ireland, not west to a strange land.”

  They had gone to a fair long ago in Ballilee. Someone had played a fiddle, a rollicking song that made her feet tap. Granda had lifted her high into the air, dancing with her to the music so her legs swung out, and when they stopped finally, breathless, people clapped and asked for more. And so they had danced once more, Granda patting her shoulder and telling her how much she looked like her mam.

  Was that the same Granda who stayed in his bunk all day, his thin coat draped over him? How could that be?

  “Are you all right then, Granda?” she called suddenly.

  “It’s just a small nap I’m taking,” he answered.

  “We will build a barn, won’t we?” Patch said.

  “A barn with piles of new hay,” Granda began, but he wasn’t able to finish.

  They never felt the wave, just the roll of the ship that seemed to go on forever. Boxes and crates shifted; something split open with a wrenching sound. And then the ship righted itself only to begin another roll, turning deeper and deeper into the sea.

  Nory was tossed out of her bunk with Patch and Eliza in back of her, and Granda from overhead. It was as if everyone’s mouth opened at once in one long scream.

  EIGHTEEN

  SEAN

  With the first wild crosscut of the sea, there was frenzy in the galley with the cook shouting orders to them and sweeping things off the table into drawers below.

  Between the smash of the waves that sent them sliding on their backs from bulkhead to table, Sean and Garvey managed to douse the fires under the huge pots of soup. Another roll and they lashed the leather straps across the cabinet doors over the bags of meal, the tea, the nests of bowls, and the cook’s knives.

  Before the third, they slammed down bin tops over thick turnips. A cabinet door opened again, as though it had a life of its own, and Sean pushed against it, pushed hard to close it.

  The cook, wild-eyed, rolled into his great trundle bed muttering to himself. Sean and Garvey were left to fend for themselves. Sean could imagine what it was like to drown. Hadn’t he seen that green world under the surface of the sea? Hadn’t he felt himself choking in that terrible water?

  But this time it seemed worse, so much worse. He’d be trapped deep inside the ship a
s the water rose; he’d scramble to find air to breathe where there was none. At least if he was outside on the deck, he’d have a chance to float to the top, catch a few gulps of air, find something to hang on to.

  Garvey must have been thinking the same thing. He pointed and they scrambled out of the galley into the cabin hallway. Ahead of them was the book man’s cabin, the cabin the cook had told him he was never to set foot in again.

  Just the thought of the cook blocking his way last week was enough to send a thin thread of fear running through him.

  The cook had clenched his hand on Sean’s shoulder, squeezing so tightly Sean felt as if his bones were being crushed.

  “What were you doing in there?” The cook’s face had been so close Sean could see the smear of food across his mouth. “Answer me.”

  But even if he had wanted to say something, the pain was so great he was unable to open his mouth.

  “Stay out of there.” The cook had shoved him against the bulkhead. “If I see you in that room again, it will be the end of you.”

  Now Sean rushed down that passageway in back of Garvey, his arms out to steady himself, his bare feet slipping on the wet floor, seeing tiny rivulets of water running along the floorboards. All he could think about now was to reach the outside where he could breathe, where he wouldn’t be trapped.

  The stairway was just ahead of him. Garvey was reaching for the handrail, already climbing, as Sean passed the book man’s cabin. The door swung open wildly.

  Inside, the book man’s wife was huddled in her bunk, eyes wide, terrified. “Boy,” she called. “Help me.”

  Sean looked toward the stairway where Garvey had disappeared, then back toward the galley, where one of the soup pots had escaped from its strap and was clattering across the floor.

  “Please,” the woman called.

  Now Sean held on to the edge of the doorway, wondering where the book man was.

  “My husband is searching for Elizabeth,” the woman said. “We can’t find her anywhere.”

  Elizabeth, he thought. The girl’s name was Elizabeth.