by Peter Troy
In the morning they’ll insist that they carry the plates, or that he leave them behind, and he’ll have to refuse with the kind of force he’d summoned the mornin’ before. But he knows that it’ll be difficult to do with The Hunger eatin’ at him this way. They won’t have anything to eat until they reach Newry, and he isn’t sure he’ll be able to carry the plates that far, weak as he feels now. So without thinkin’ much about it, he reaches one hand out across his blanket, grazing it over the grass an arm’s length away. Then he pulls off the tops of a few dew-covered blades, placing them quickly into his mouth. The bitterness explodes over his tongue, and it’s like tryin’ to chew and swallow little bits of string. But after the third or fourth handful, he doesn’t notice as much. One handful after the other he stuffs into his mouth, chewing as little as possible, until it’s like a battle between the angry lion and the bits of string travelin’ down his gullet to take him on. The lion almost wins as Ethan gags two or three times, feeling like the green string is all comin’ back up. But then he sits up, slouching over at the shoulders and pulling his knees into his chest, and the lion gives way for now. Before he’s off to sleep again, he makes sure to brush his sleeve across his mouth and teeth several times, to remove any green marks that might be left behind. Back home the people with green mouths and teeth were never very long for this world, and he doesn’t want to give Mam and Aunt Em a scare when they wake in the mornin’.
He’s up again not long after first light, and as he sits up, he notices that the small pile of books has grown by one during the night. Milton’s Paradise Lost sits on top of the other two, and Ethan picks it up and brushes his hand across the cover and can’t help but smile.
Aunt Em went an’ found it last night, Mam whispers. She left right after ya fell asleep an’ walked back an’ found it.
Ethan feels a wave of gratitude toward his Aunt, and both he and his Mam look over at her and smile with closed mouths and heads that shake slightly side to side with a sense of reverence toward her for havin’ walked two extra miles in the dark just to retrieve the book. But then Aunt Emily rolls slightly to her back and lets out a gargled snore, and it’s all they can do to keep from laughin’ so hard they wake her up. And still, it’s a moment to be treasured between Ethan and his Mam, like they’re both aware there won’t be many more of them anytime soon.
They make Newry with an hour to spare, and by the time they board the ferryboat, their bellies’ve been relieved with a little fish and potatoes, and bread with just enough butter to remind them of better days. The crowd on the boat to Liverpool sits silently along the deck, shoulders hunched, faces gaunt, their hair disheveled, their clothes torn and dirty. Some of them’re glad to leave, but others mourn like they’ve lost a loved one. When the boat pulls away from shore, some look back and begin to cry and a few even muster up the strength to join in an old song Ethan’d once heard Mr. Hanratty sing, about a man who’s sent off to Australia for stealin’ some food. As the Irish coast begins to disappear from view two hours later, Ethan stares back at the brown mass in the distance. He’s always found it strange to hear men like Mr. Hanratty describe Ireland as she or her and not it, but at that moment of final goodbyes, he understands better and grows sad at the thought of never seein’ her again.
Liverpool is another matter altogether, and when they set foot off the ferryboat, he can’t imagine that anyone would ever look back at this place and grow sad at the idea of leaving. With its tall factory smokestacks spitting forth endless clouds of black coal dust until everything—the buildings, the streets, the people, even the sky—takes on a shade of dark gray, it’s clear to Ethan that Liverpool’s the kind of place that’ll always be an it, never a she.
Of course, there’s not a bit of time once they land since it turns out there’s a ship leaving for New York that very mornin’. Aunt Em rushes off to buy the ticket for Ethan while Mam looks over the people standing in line waiting to board the Lord Sussex. She strikes up a conversation with one woman, but Ethan doesn’t pay any attention to it, busy as he is lookin’ over the ship and watching the men roll great wooden barrels up a gangway into the side of the vessel. And then there’s Mam introducing Ethan to this one woman named Mrs. Quigley and her husband, who Mam says have promised to look out for him. Ethan’s angry with his Mam for thinkin’ he needed anyone to look out for him, when here’s himself having been the man of the house for more than two years now.
Sure ain’t he the spittin’ image o’ Seamus, Mrs. Quigley says, and then her husband puts his arm around her shoulder long enough for a single squeeze. We lost our boy to the fever just this winter past …
And her voice trails off like so many voices from back home would when they talked about such things. Mrs. Quigley looks far too old to have a son Ethan’s age, and Mr. Quigley looks almost as old as Mr. Hanratty, but then she explains that their son was the sort of miracle that John the Baptist bein’ born to Elizabeth in the Bible was, and Ethan can’t help but feel sorry for them. He decides not to argue with his Mam for his own independence, figuring he can as much look after the Quigleys as they will after him. And it’s sealed when Mam tells them about havin’ lost Aislinn to the fever too, and there’s all three of them, Mister Quigley even, with the water in their eyes.
When it comes to the farewells not even an hour later, Aunt Em hugs him and gives him a long kiss on the cheek, then hugs him some more, and smiles as much as she can force herself to do. But there’s no such smile on Mam’s face. Hers is a look he can’t quite understand at first, worse than the one he remembers from when Seanny and Da left, and different from the one at Aislinn’s funeral. Her face has the look of defeat, as if sayin’ goodbye to her last child is all she can bear, and he wonders if she’ll become like Mr. Hanratty now, with all the life and joy poured out through her cupped hands. She tells Ethan to keep readin’ an’ be a good boy, and tells him how much she’ll miss him. It’s unusual talk and he begins to suspect that maybe she thinks she’s sayin’ goodbye for the last time. But it’s a thought he’ll not allow himself to consider as she puts her hands on the back of his head and whispers in his ear.
Be happy, she says three times softly, before kissing his cheek and releasing him.
They separate for a moment, but then she quickly pulls him closer and kisses him one last time. And then it’s up the gangway alongside the Quigleys, with just a final wave to Mam and Aunt Em, each of them with one arm wrapped so tightly around the other that it’s impossible to tell which one is holdin’ the other upright. As their free hands brush the water off their cheeks, Ethan tells himself that this isn’t so much a fare thee well like in one of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays, but rather a simple s’lahng that’d be uttered along the Lane back home … the kind that carried with it the understanding of seein’ each other again. And soon.
ETHAN
SUMMER 1847
Numbers are cold and impersonal things, efficient, absolute. So it was no wonder then that they’d become Ethan’s near-perfect refuge after Aislinn’s death, what with the way he’d count everything he could to keep from thinkin’ about her, about The Hunger, about everything else that was beyond his control. By the time he and Mam and Aunt Em’d left for Newry, Ethan already knew that the distance from the Brodericks’ stables to Mr. Hanratty’s cottage was about fifteen hundred of his normal steps, though he’d once made it in one thousand three hundred eleven, taking the longest strides he could. It took about two hundred strokes to properly groom each horse, three hundred seventy-seven horseshoe nails to fill the wooden bucket at the stables, and two hundred forty-seven dry oats were as many as he could hold in one hand.
So as he followed the Quigleys down into the cargo bay accommodations of the Lord Sussex, with people pushing and shoving and even fightin’ each other as if staking out a claim to their own small bit of land, it made perfect sense for Ethan to turn to numbers once again. He counted the support rails set up every six feet or so, the ones that held up the long rows of planking that ran
practically the whole length of the bay, two of them on each side with about four feet of space between them. There were fourteen support rails per side, and as the passengers scrambled for spaces by the bow where there was a trickle of light comin’ down the stairway, Ethan walked slowly to the stern alongside the Quigleys, defeated just like they were, and counting, so as not to think of how he’d have to live here without enough light to read.
By the time they reached the fourteenth beam, they were at the dark stern at the end of the bunks and next to eight makeshift latrines. Eight latrines meant eight big wooden buckets set on the floor about two feet above three planks, with the hole cut into each one of them for doin’ the necessary. They looked clean, but it was hard not to wonder what they’d be like when all these people were doin’ their necessary in there all day long. It was a sad place, and Ethan wanted to go back above deck, to leave the ship altogether and go find his Mam and Aunt Em to work with them in the mills until they could all go to America together. But then Mr. Quigley told him the sliver of space up on the top level of planking would be his, and as Ethan climbed up, the old man stood there with a content smile on his face like he’d done his manly duty. All he’d really done, Ethan thought, was surrender straight off and consign them to the darkest corner of the whole ship, and Ethan placed his satchel down along the front edge and buried his head on top of it. Within an hour they were on their way, and there’d be no turning back, no findin’ his Mam and Aunt Em or workin’ in the mills. Just a dark corner of space next to the latrines that was to be the greater part of his world for the duration of the voyage.
It turned out life aboard the Lord Sussex was all about numbers, even if you weren’t purposely tryin’ to find them. For starters there was the number sixteen, as in sixteen ounces of food per passenger, per day. Might be some stale bread or uncooked rice or potatoes, or even a bit of fish, but whatever it was, it was always sixteen ounces and never a fraction more. And though they’d never weighed their food back home, it was easy to see that the ship’s ration was less than what they’d had in Aunt Em’s cottage, even durin’ The Hunger, even when it was four of them instead of three. On the third day, when they were fully out to sea, the bouncing ship turned Ethan’s stomach in knots. He walked to one of the latrines and didn’t even have time to close the door before his stomach started heaving and his mouth opened wide on instinct. But nothin’ came out. Behind him was the old man Donnegan from across the aisle. And Donnegan let out a bitter laugh and said to Ethan sixteen ounces ain’t wort’ de effort of throwin’ back up.
Then there was the number six, as in six pints of water per person, per day, or six paired with two, to make six feet by two feet of bunk space for each person. Of course, one of the crewmen informed them right off that the water was for drinkin’, washin’, and cookin’, not in that order, haha, and that ration’d be cut unless they saw some rain on the trip. But the more rain they saw meant the food stores’ll rot faster, so there ya go, haha. As for the bunk space, it was more like six and twenty, as in six feet by twenty inches per person, because two hundred didn’t stand for the number of passengers aboard the Lord Sussex the way it was supposed to. Donnegan said the crewman counted out two hundred and fourteen rations of water each day for the passengers, which explained the tight fit in the bunks.
Donnegan took to callin’ the Lord Sussex a Coffin Ship after what that same crewman told him was the common reference to these converted cargo vessels carrying desperate emigrants across the sea. The crewman said it was pretty common that such a ship sailing from Liverpool, Dublin, or Cork wouldn’t arrive wit’ all its cargo intact, and it took Ethan a minute to realize that they were the cargo.
More important to Ethan than sixteen or six or two, or any other number set rigidly in place, was the number that was constantly movin’, constantly shrinking toward its ultimate, beautiful destination. It was the countdown of time until noon each day when sixty, as in sixty minutes above deck, became his favorite number. When noon arrived, Mrs. Quigley gathered their rations together to cook in one of the communal pots, and when it was done, she poured out a little of the used water for Ethan to wash his face and hands. The washin’ and the eating took only ten minutes right in the middle of the hour, and the remainin’ fifty minutes were Ethan’s to wander about, exploring the ship and takin’ in the spectacle of the infinite ocean landscape. It was his time to read, from The Odyssey mostly, thinking about Odysseus driftin’ over the sea for twenty years, and comforted by the thought that their voyage would only be about five weeks.
Ethan kept the daily count waitin’ for the hour above deck, and then there was an even more important count he kept, broken down into the hours and minutes ’til ten o’clock Sunday mornin’ and the start of seven continuous, glorious hours above. By the second Sunday, nine days out to sea, the smell of the cargo bay was so foul that it lingered even after the latrine buckets were emptied each evening, and the thought of seven hours in the fresh ocean air made the anticipation all the greater.
Services in ten minutes! Ten minutes! was the call they’d all been waitin’ to hear.
Then came a rush for the stairs, and within a few minutes most of the passengers and crew were assembled for services in front of a makeshift altar made from the same table used to distribute rations every day. The Father they had onboard was no Father Laughton, what with how his sermons ate up so much of their precious time above deck, but finally the Mass was done and Ethan was free for the nearly six hours that remained. Mrs. Quigley set up with the other women around the buckets full of brown water that’d been used to wash the decks. They pulled out torn clothes from satchels and dropped them in, hoping to take some of the smell out of them before hanging them over the sides of the ship to dry. But Ethan cared little about any of that, walkin’ up to the bow and settling himself in his new favorite spot behind a pile of thick mooring rope.
The sun was almost directly overhead by now, its rays dancin’ off the crests of the waves in brilliant flecks and sparkles. And Ethan took in the sea air with deep breaths, imagining that this must’ve been somethin’ like what Mr. Hanratty described about the glorious spring of ’98, when an Irishman could know what it was like to experience true freedom. Opening his book, he began to read slowly, stoppin’ after every page or so to look up and take it all in again, reverently, thankfully. When five o’clock came, it was back down below and startin’ the count until noon the next day, nineteen hours … eleven hundred forty minutes … sixty-eight thousand four hundred seconds.
BY THE THIRD SUNDAY OF the voyage, Ethan had a new number to count. Many of the people in the bow of the cargo bay got sick after drinkin’ water from a barrel that’d been used to store salted fish. One seven-year-old girl seemed to take the worst of it, and for four days her fragile body rejected everything she was fed, throwin’ it back up as soon as it hit her stomach. Then during the fourth night her chest heaved and she made strange noises as her mother woke everybody up with her screams. Before long it was just the sound of the mother’s screams, as the little girl lay still and lifeless across her Mam’s lap.
The next mornin’ the Father said a few words about her before the Mass, but her Mam wouldn’t go above deck for it, sayin’ she didn’t feel loike a god who’d take anudder choild from me deserves any more o’ me Sunday mahrnin’s. And all the ladies blessed themselves and took a step away from her when she said it. Ethan spent much of the Father’s sermon thinking of the number one, as in one passenger who’d been tossed into the abyss of the ocean, one person who’d never get to see America wit’ the gold nuggets in the streets and the stuffin’ yerself ’til ya can’t stand. One … so far, he thought.
He had Paradise Lost with him that Sunday, feelin’ on this somber occasion that he should read something a little more religious in nature than The Odyssey. Ethan settled into his usual spot in the stern, but before he read a full page, he was startled by a deep voice comin’ from just behind him.
Enjoy dat reading, young
man. You will not have much for two, maybe t’ree days.
Turning quickly around, he saw a large black man standin’ on the other side of the mooring ropes. Ethan’d seen him before, usually at the top of the mainmast, tyin’ off and adjusting the sails while the captain on the bridge shouted orders. The man had very dark skin and powerful arms and stood at least six feet tall, but his smile eased some of Ethan’s fear.
A storm come from de northwest, the man said slowly and clearly. It is a few days before de wedder is good for reading on deck.
A nod was all Ethan could manage for a response.
What book is dat? the man asked.
Ethan closed the book, keepin’ his finger on the page he was reading, and stared down at the faded cover, as if there was anything to read there.
Para … he began, then cleared his throat and spoke in a voice just above a whisper … Paradise Lost.
I never hear of dat one. It is Irish?
Ethan shook his head, then murmured … English.
Oh. What is de story of it?
Ethan looked up from the book and at the man’s face. He’d never spoken to or even seen an African before this voyage, and was surprised, seein’ him up close, that there were no strange rings through the man’s nose or ears. He wore regular clothes that covered his whole body. He had shoes on too, and didn’t carry a spear, and Ethan decided that there must be two types of Africans, the ones he saw an illustration of in one of the English histories he and Aislinn used to read, and another group who were normal, just like Irishmen or Englishmen except for their skin and the way they talked. And out of that second group came the likes of Hannibal and Othello and this man who was askin’ him the story of Paradise Lost.
