Cursed! Blood of the Donnellys

by Keith Ross Leckie

  A moment after they entered, a lamp was lit in an open stall and Jim and Mick found themselves standing before Johannah Magee in a hooded cloak and her housekeeper, Miss Rafferty. Jim had known Rafferty as a forthright woman, an aunt of one of his boys, and although she worked in Magee’s house, he hoped and assumed she could be trusted. There were two horses, one of them the milky Cuchulain, saddled and waiting. The lantern burned between them and Johannah’s beauty distracted Jim for a moment as she came closer.

  “You were right about my father and what he did to the families. It was just as you said.”

  “Yes.”

  Johannah put her arms around him and they embraced each other tight and kissed to prove their love and Jim felt such joy, made less only a little by their current circumstances.

  “Jimmy, you have to run,” she whispered to him. “They’re after hanging you all now for killing the soldier.”

  “I’m sure they are. We can fight them.”

  “No, you can’t. Half the Limerick regiment is on its way.”

  “There’s only one chance,” Raffy asserted with authority. “You have to get out of Ireland. You have to get on a ship in Dublin.”

  “I can’t go to England. They’ll arrest me. There’s Europe but I don’t speak French.”

  “Then America. Or Canada,” Raffy continued. “Ships leaving every day.”

  “Canada?”

  “If you stay here, they’ll hunt you down and hang you, Jim,” Johannah agreed. “You and Mick both. All your lads if they can. You can just make it there tonight.”

  Mick agreed. “She’s right, Jimmy. We have to go.”

  “I can’t.” He turned to Johannah. “I can’t leave you. You’ve just come back into my life again, Jo. You’re all I think about. I can’t lose you again.”

  “Then I’ll come with you.”

  Jim stared at her.

  “No.” Raffy appeared stricken.

  “Would you really come with me?” Jim asked softly, searching her eyes.

  Johannah stayed quiet for a moment as she weighed the idea. Her face flushed.

  “A new life together in America. Yes. Yes, I will come.”

  Johannah looked to Raffy. The old woman turned on Jim.

  “And just how would you propose to keep her? You who can’t hold a job. All very clever with your tricks and ideas but in the New World she needs a real man, an able one.”

  “I will provide for her. I promise you that.”

  “And what about your violent ways? Sure you’ll get there and have a temper and someone’ll beat you senseless or dead and then what will she do?”

  “I promise her…” Jim turned to Johannah. “I promise you, I’ll never fight again if you’ll have me.”

  Johannah looked again to Raffy. Tears filled Raffy’s eyes but her face remained stern as she asked Johannah the question. “Tell me again if you truly love him?”

  Johannah went to Jim and took his hand and answered without hesitation. “Yes, Raffy. I do.”

  “Then you should go.”

  “And you promise there’ll be none of this fighting over there? We’ll leave all these troubles behind, yes?” Johannah asked him.

  “Sure. Over there, what could there be to fight about?”

  “Promise me!”

  “I swear it,” Jim told her with all the gravity and conviction he could muster. Then he smiled into her eyes. His dreams were within reach. “Come with me, my love. We’ll make a life in the New World.”

  “All right, then.”

  Johannah turned to Raffy and embraced her with all her might, suddenly tearful.

  “Thank you, Raffy.”

  “God’s speed, Miss.”

  “Cuchulain can take us both,” Jim reasoned. “Mick, you on t’other.”

  As Johannah was about to mount, a figure appeared in the open doorway, a silhouette confronting them again in the moonlight. Magee held a double-barrelled shotgun in his right hand and his pistol in the left. The shotgun was aimed at Jim.

  “Donnelly! Murderer. You have taken everything else from me. You won’t take my daughter.”

  Mick swung his musket up to fire but Magee’s shotgun moved and exploded first, hitting Mick squarely in the chest, blowing him back against the gate, his body collapsing limp on the stable floor.

  “Mick!” Jim made a move toward his friend, but Magee had the shotgun and the pistol trained on him again.

  “Leave him!”

  Jim froze. Johannah was remarkably calm.

  “Da. I can’t stay here with you. I’m going with Jim to America.”

  “Never.”

  “I love him, Da. I have to go. I’m strong. I’ll be all right.”

  Raffy warned them, “The soldiers could have heard the shot.”

  Magee turned his attention and the barrels of his guns toward Raffy, furious.

  “Shut up, you stupid cow! You’re a part of this, aren’t you?”

  Johannah stepped in front of Raffy, facing her father in defiance.

  “Da, there is nothing here for me. I’m leaving now with Jim. If you have any love for me, you’ll let me go.”

  Magee turned his attention to Jim. “Well then, there seems a simple remedy for this situation. I should have done it six years ago.”

  Prepared to fire, he raised his shotgun and aimed at Jim’s chest, but before Magee could pull the trigger, a pistol shot rang out. In Raffy’s hand, the little pistol was smoking. A small flowering of crimson blossomed from Magee’s chest and the shotgun fell from his hands to the stable floor as he stared at Raffy in disbelief. His body crumpled and he collapsed on his side.

  “Da!” Johannah went to him and fell down on her knees. Magee stared at her in pain and panic. Then his features calmed as she held his head and brought her face close to his. “Da, I’m so sorry.”

  Her father raised his hand and touched her cheek. His lips moved, but then his body went still. Johannah offered silent tears. Raffy beheld the body of her master in confusion for a moment. Jim stared down at Magee, for so long the object of his fevered hatred and desire for retribution, now gone. His death left Jim strangely empty. But then the image of the grieving Johannah transformed his former hatred into a greater love and he had the overwhelming desire to survive.

  “We have to go, Johannah. The soldiers will come now and we’ll lose our chance.”

  Johannah nodded tearfully in her grief and with a gesture of determination, she stood up from the body. Raffy bent down, her joints cracking with the effort, and put her little pistol in Mick’s dead hand. She looked to Johannah for endorsement and Jo nodded through the tears at the practical choice. Johannah ran into the house to quickly grab a bag of clothes and personal items and her mother’s string of pearls, some odds and ends, before she left Borrisokane for good, then returned to the stable. Raffy guided her up onto Cuchu­lain and Jim mounted the second horse. Raffy opened the stable door a crack to see if the way was clear, then pushed it wide open to let them out.

  “I’ll tell the soldiers you were here and that you rode west to Galway.”

  “Thank you, Raffy. Thank you for so much.” Johannah leaned down and kissed her. As Jim watched, the sacrifices they were making on his behalf were not lost on him.

  “Wait one moment,” Raffy stepped out into the yard where smooth flat river stones had been brought from the Ballyfinboy and spread as gravel to keep the earth firm. She bent down and chose one she could just enclose in her palm, cleaned it off on her skirt and gave it to Johannah.

  “A piece of home for you, so you won’t forget.”

  “I won’t ever forget, Raffy.”

  In the distance from the north beyond the rise of the road came the sound of approaching horsemen.

  “Go!” Raffy commanded.

  As Raffy watched them in the moon
light, they rode abreast out of the stable. Then they were away to the southwest, the nimble hoofbeats of their fresh horses sounding as one on the road to Dublin.

  * * *

  Jim and Johannah stopped twice that night to rest and water the horses, saying little to each other. Never once on that long ride did Jim see Johannah’s determination flag, or a sigh escape her, nor was a second thought betrayed on her pretty, resolute face. And that night, considering all the demands he was making of her, the life she was sacrificing, the lot she was throwing in with his, he fell into such love with her all over again and swore that he would rise to deserve what God had given him.

  The Voyage

  Jim and Johannah left Borrisokane with little in their pockets, then sold the horses and saddles to a Dublin livery for a small fraction of their worth and could only afford steerage fare on an aging barque named the Naparima that was to sail that day. Johannah needed to steal herself to say a quick goodbye to Cuchulain, hugging his strong neck for a moment, knowing she would never see him again. On that day they sailed from Dublin, they stayed as long as they could at the railing on the undulating deck, breathing in the salty air, hearing the unfamiliar cries of the wheeling gulls, still holding firm to the promise of freedom in the new life they had entered into, as the grey North Atlantic stretched out before them.

  It was hardly the grand adventure Johannah had always imagined such a trip to be, the triumphant leave-taking to spite her father and fulfill her dreams. It was more a desperate escape, with her father dead and herself a fugitive, aboard an old ship in dire need of refitting. In brief moments her resolve failed, when thoughts flooded in of her father’s body on the stable floor, and she had to fight back her grief and shame. She leaned into Jim harder and they watched in bittersweet silence as Ireland’s darkening shore fell away behind them and Jim slipped an arm around her waist to hold her tight.

  In her pocket, Johannah felt the smooth river stone that Raffy had given her. She took it out to inspect it and found it was gray with flecks of green, gold and red pyrites. She held it out for Jim’s perusal.

  “There are colours.”

  “Yes, the green bits for Ireland, I guess, and the gold for our fortunes and red ones…for the bloodline you and I will begin,” Jim told her.

  “This stone is a million years old and will last a million years more after we’re gone.”

  “Johannah…you’re a brave girl coming with me. You must love me after all, or think you could. I’ll do everything I can to make it up to you.”

  Johannah put her hand on his cheek and caressed the edge of his sad smile.

  “We’re in it for good and all, Mr. Donnelly. Our grand adventure together has begun. No turning back now.”

  “No turning back.”

  And they kissed each other with a passion that matched their first kiss on the cemetery wall.

  * * *

  When they finally took their few belongings into the gloom below decks, the hatches were closed tight for the night and the stench of smoke, mildew and human bodies hit them like a tangible wall. Johannah held a handkerchief over her mouth and nose as they ventured deeper into the hold, trying to keep their balance with the movements of the ship, lit only here and there with a few thin candles. There was a narrow corridor with rough boards forming little “pens” against the curved damp hull, each filled with bodies, faces watching them pass. Two babies cried in exhausted protest. A woman was whimpering, but most were very quiet—eerily so, for the entire hold was packed with people and stunned faces looked out in tiers two storeys high, and yet all was quiet. Johannah had stopped and stared around in shock at what appeared like the image she had imagined of Dante’s hell. She was here and must deserve to be here.

  “Come on, Jo. We’ll find some room.”

  Jim led them deeper, past the silent faces, to discover a couple of feet of space behind a bulwark near the bow, against the thick hull timbers of the old ship. Here and there, sea water seeped through the broken deck boards into the bilge below. People shifted away a little to give them room to slide in, all joined together in the misery of their first night on what would prove a very long voyage.

  After midnight the wind increased—they could feel the power of the rising north Atlantic swells and the ship began pitching violently, fighting a growing storm, the planks of her hull beneath their bodies creaking under the strain. Jim and Johannah sat holding onto each other in the oppressive darkness with only a frugal candle burning. She looked around again to glimpse the sick and fearful faces, men, women and children huddling in small groups. Many of them had not seen the sea before, let alone been at its mercy, and the full storm began to rage outside. The crewmen made sure the leaking hatches were as secure as possible, while others worked the long levers of bilge pumps. The ship rolled brutally and people gasped and groaned. A few began to be seasick and threw up in the few available buckets. Many missed as the ship plunged, or sometimes a bucket tipped over on a rolling wave, and the floorboards were soon awash in vomit. Despite Johannah’s initial refusal, she finally made use of a bucket nearby. Children were too traumatized to cry and men cursed in helpless frustration as the vessel pounded against the northwest waves. There was nothing they could do but hold on for endless hours in the filthy, crowded, suffocating hold.

  The first tempest lasted three days. On the third day, when the storm’s heaving abated long enough to move around without being knocked off one’s feet, Jim ventured from their spot. He found and paid for a better spot for them near the stern, where the vessel’s pitch was felt less, a small berth on a platform. He was anxious for Johannah, who had not eaten and had drunk very little. He held a tin bowl of clear fluid over a candle to heat it and then presented the broth to her.

  “Try a little. If you get it down, it’ll settle your stomach.”

  Johannah turned away from it. He held up a second cup.

  “There’s still a bit of the water ration left.”

  When Johannah didn’t respond, he held the cup to her lips as if she were a child or an invalid. She took some then and some ran down from her mouth. He scooped the drops from her chin into his own mouth and searched his imagination for any words of encouragement to help her.

  “Storm can’t last much longer, Jo. We’ll get through it,” he offered again lamely.

  Each time the ship heaved and the sound of moaning and retching increased, Johannah could not shake the image of the hungry sea about to swallow the vessel whole. She imagined the waves closing over them as the ship with all passengers and crew left the sky behind and began the rapid decent to the utter darkness of the ocean floor. And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. She closed her eyes and hung on to face another night.

  By the morning of the fourth day, the storm had passed and the sea, though still troubled, was kinder to them and the old vessel seemed to finally be making decent headway. Johannah found herself sitting up staring numbly at the deck boards in front of her, but with the calming of the storm she could relax a little. Jim slept quietly beside her. She began to look around at the other passengers, as if for the first time. Most were asleep and there was a chorus of multi-registered snoring. Nearby, a sallow-faced mother tended her two little girls, both of whom appeared feverish. The mother held a damp cloth against their cheeks and whispered little stories to them. Across the hold was an old woman with desperate eyes looking after her weak, aged husband, his breathing ragged, who also exhibited signs of fever. Nearby was a grubby young boy about fifteen lying on a stained pallet, semi-conscious and alone. They were all ill and a new fear of fever came over Johannah. And though she tried at first to resist, her thoughts went to the comforts of her home in Borrisokane, the warm affections of Raffy, her school chums in London and the parties and social affairs she attended there.

  What would they all think of her now? How had she come to this state, living among these people? Even Jim. She watched him sleeping beside h
er and despite all her valiant words to the contrary and her declarations of love, doubts began to emerge and grow heavy. Was she a complete fool? Could this man provide for her? Protect her against evils? Apparently not. Perhaps this was all a terrible mistake. She withdrew from everyone around her, all of them, in disgust, forcing herself into a narrow space behind a bulwark, trying to avoid breathing their air, or touching or even looking at them.

  Suddenly Johannah winced and examined her shoulder, where she felt an unusual pinprick. Her hand slipped inside her bodice to her collar bone. There was another pinprick on her breast. Holding her shirt open, she looked down to discover tiny black specks on her skin and tiny pink bites all over her chest. She gasped, stifled a scream and pulled her outer blouse off her shoulders and started to undress, mindless now of those around her. Jim woke up.

  “What? What is it, Jo?”

  “I don’t know. What is this?”

  After a brief inspection Jim told her, “Fleas.”

  She fought not to become hysterical.

  “Fleas? I have fleas!”

  Jim attempted to cover her from the others as she took off her outer blouse, loosened her undershirt and took off her skirt. He pulled the sheets around them and tried to help her be free of the infested clothes.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “I’ll get water…soap…”

  Jim left their berth and hurried up on deck to find what was needed. Clothed only in her light undershirt and slip, Johannah put her hands over her face and collapsed in tears.

  “What have I done?”

  After a few moments, Johannah stood up. She moved to the gangway and climbed to the deck level. Though it was not the time allotted for passengers to come up on deck, she walked with determination across to the railing and looked down at the troubled surface of the sea, mesmerized. What did the poets call the ocean: The cradle of life? Life and death in equal parts? It is all the same. And her mind kept flashing to images of her dead father’s body. She missed her mother. She did not belong here.