Song of the Silent Harp

by BJ Hoff

  “I’m thinking of sending Daniel John for the doctor tomorrow,” she said. “Tahg is getting no rest at night.”

  The old man turned around from the window. His face was glum. “And how is it we will be paying him?”

  “He’s been kind enough to take fresh milk before. I’m sure he’ll do so again.” Nora paused, then ventured her next words with care. “I thought we might have him take a look at you as well.”

  “Well, keep your thoughts to yourself, woman. There’s not a thing wrong with me that a good meal wouldn’t cure! And as for the fresh milk—the cow is going dry, and well you know it! She can’t live on roots and rocks any more than the lot of us.”

  Groping for patience with the irritable old man, Nora stopped the wheel and gave him a level look. “Sure, and weren’t you the one recently reminding me that this winter will not last forever? ‘Spring will come,’ I heard you say only days ago.”

  He uttered something unintelligible and crossed the room with a stiff, unsteady gait. “I’ll sit with our boyo a bit,” he said, disappearing behind the curtain.

  Once he was out of sight, Nora wiped a hand over her eyes to blot the tears of weakness and frustration she’d fought to hide. The raking dryness of her palm caused her to frown at her hand with distaste. She had always been vain about her hands, had done her best to keep them smooth and soft while Owen lived, for he had liked to hold them between his when they sat by the fire in the evening. Now her skin was as rough as tree bark, her nails peeled and broken.

  Again she lifted a hand, this time to her hair. Another vanity, God forgive her. It was still long and thick, but had grown dull and felt nearly as dry as her skin. What more? she wondered wearily. What more?

  Merciful God, don’t let me lose my teeth, too!

  She shuddered against the sudden thought, then just as quickly breathed a prayer to ask forgiveness for her wicked vanity. Of course, she would eventually be toothless. These days more women were than not, at least those she had seen in the village. The Hunger spared no one from its ravages, not even foolish women with forbidden pride.

  “Nora! You’d best come!”

  Her father-in-law’s cry from Tahg’s room shocked her out of her thoughts, and she knocked the stool over in her haste to get up. Old Dan was holding the boy awkwardly by the shoulders as Tahg writhed and choked in the throes of a coughing spasm.

  Nora went to him, forcing a note of calm into her voice as she took Old Dan’s place by the bed. “Here, now, asthore,” she crooned, bending over to take him in her arms. Holding him gently, she grieved at his appearance. At fifteen Tahg looked more like a man in his middle years, so great had been the toll of his illness. The angry flush on his hollow cheeks, the wildness in his fevered blue eyes, the limp strands of dark hair falling raggedly over his forehead gave him a peculiar, deranged look. Gripped as he was with a furious fit of coughing, he seemed even weaker than usual. The look of him tore Nora’s heart and stabbed her with fear, but she forced a smile and continued to make small sounds of comfort until the spasm passed.

  Finally he drew an easier breath, then another. A thin ribbon of blood trickled from the side of his mouth, and he lifted a frail hand to wipe it away. When he finally looked up at her, his eyes were still glazed with pain, and for an instant Nora thought he didn’t recognize her. But after a moment his lips moved with the effort to smile, and he whispered, “I’m fine now, Mum.”

  At her side, she was aware of the old man shaking his head and mumbling a prayer.

  “God have mercy on him,” Old Dan murmured. “Ah, dear God, have mercy on him…”

  And on us all, Nora added silently. And on us all.

  4

  Michael

  I am come of the seed of the people,

  The people that sorrow,

  That have no treasure but hope,

  No riches laid up hut a memory

  Of an ancient glory.

  P. H. PEARSE (1879-1916)

  New York City

  Michael Burke loved New York—except, that is, in the winter. In the spring the city was a capricious, blood-stirring flirt of a lass, but in the winter she turned to a bad-tempered woman, spitting her nastiness and flaunting her ill breeding as if to put a man off. Her sky became a grim, pewter shield, her avenues teemed with dirty snow and frozen refuse, and her sullen harbor waters churned with ice and floating debris.

  January in New York meant driving snow and bitter wind, and today had brought a relentless attack of both. It was still snowing hard as Michael turned down Pearl Street and headed toward home. He pulled the collar of his greatcoat higher about his throat, feeling uncommonly relieved that his watch was over.

  He was tired, bone-tired. Fridays were always the worst of his week, but this one had been even more trying than most, with two murders, a series of knifings, and a vicious attack on Sal Folio, the grocer—all within the last three hours. One of the murder victims had been a newsboy, a small, scrawny lad who routinely turned over his wages to one of the countless gangs that ran the streets day and night. More than likely a member of that same gang had done the killing, but since the incident had gone unobserved, the chances of ever catching the murderer were slim indeed.

  It was becoming increasingly difficult these days for the police force to make any real mark on the wave of violent crime sweeping the city. The force had grown appreciably, but was still far too small for a city of New York’s size. Until ’44, there hadn’t even been a professional police force—merely two constables, a small group of appointed marshals, and a “watch” made up of men who patrolled the streets at night. Even with the significantly larger new force of day and night policemen, the city’s lawlessness remained out of control. Jails were badly overcrowded, laws remained inadequate, and widespread corruption existed throughout the entire legal system.

  More and more these days, Michael found himself angry and frustrated with his job, discouraged one minute and furious the next at the way the entire force seemed to be losing ground to the criminals. Even worse, a rising number of Irish immigrants were to be found among the thugs roving the streets. Hundreds of his own were fast becoming the very kind of predators from which they’d thought themselves to be escaping when they’d fled the auld sod. Once they found the golden streets of their dreams to be paved with garbage instead of gold, and once they learned that the good jobs were seldom if ever available to anyone whose name began with Mac or O in front, they often turned on the city with a vengeance and seized whatever they could from her.

  A bitter root was taking hold in the leprous tenements these days, a root Michael knew would yield even more hatred and a vast new crop of crime and corruption. It had been bad before, but never more so than in the months since Ireland and other parts of Europe had been devastated by famine. They were coming by the thousands now, arriving hungry and ill and desperate, and neither New York nor any other American city was prepared to handle the problems the people brought with them. The streets were filled with a variety of races and nationalities, and there seemed to be no end to the continuing flood of immigrants deluging the shores of the East.

  Michael’s eyes took in his surroundings. A crush of people crowded along the gaslight-lined streets. Nobody seemed aware of the lateness of the evening or even the bitter wind and stinging snow. There was such a busy, noisy stream of bodies, he felt certain every nation in Europe must be represented somewhere amid the throng. Over there was the fez of a Mohammedan; just ahead the brimless hat of a Persian; farther up a cluster of Italian women with brightly colored shawls and heavy skirts. Mixed in among them were Irish newsboys, Negro laborers, Germans and Spaniards and Orientals—they were all here in the streets, making their fortunes, chasing their dreams, loving and marrying, robbing their countrymen, even killing their neighbors. What was to become of them all, he couldn’t imagine.

  He was nearing Krueger’s bakery now, and he managed a pallid smile for Margaret O’Handley, who worked for the German. As was often the case
lately, the woman appeared to be waiting for him, giving him one of her long-toothed grins and a coquettish wave as she watched his approach. Michael instinctively quickened his step as he passed by the storefront, anxious to avoid an encounter.

  He was hungry and could smell the bakery’s delights, but his step didn’t falter as he hurried on. The widow O’Handley had taken to pushing small packages on him once a week or more, insisting they were the leavings from the day and that he “might just as well take them home to the boyo.” The leftover pastries were always grand, but Michael was determined to avoid any further kindnesses from the woman.

  Some had hinted that he could do worse than consider Margaret O’Handley as a wife. But it was impossible for him to think of the stout, eager-eyed woman as a replacement for his Eileen. Not only did he suspect the widow O’Handley to be considerably older than himself, but he saw a certain meanness in her nature that made him wary of her outward geniality. In short, he simply did not trust the woman.

  Aside from his mother, Michael had loved only two women in his thirty-six years, and he wasn’t at all convinced he had it in him to attempt a relationship with another. Perhaps his Eileen had been no beauty, but she’d been fair enough in her way, small and sweet-natured, with a quiet voice that gentled his world and an adoring smile that never failed to make his heart leap. He had loved his wife, truly loved her. Her death from the stillbirth of their second child would have crushed him had it not been for the need to go on and look after their son, Tierney. Gone ten years this winter, Eileen still warmed his memories like the tender touch of sunlight on a bitter day.

  Before Eileen there had been only Nora Doyle—Nora Kavanagh—but they had been little more than children when he’d fancied her.

  Besides, she had never been able to see him; Morgan Fitzgerald stood ever in the way. Except for those times when a brief letter from Morgan would send his thoughts straying back to Killala, he had given Nora little thought over the years.

  From time to time he considered marrying, but mostly out of concern for Tierney. His son wasn’t a bad boy, just motherless since he was four. Growing up as he had, in a city that viewed all things Irish with contempt and in a neighborhood that keened with the endless sorrows of its people, it was small wonder that the lad inclined toward rebellion. A woman’s touch might just be the thing to bring some gentling to Tierney’s fiery spirit and volatile temper, but only the right woman could ever hope to—

  A cry from the midst of the dense crowd just ahead brought Michael to a dead stop. It took him only an instant to spot the trouble and take off running, shouting as he went.

  A sandwich-board man—one of the numerous fellows who walked about with two advertising signs slung over his shoulders—was down in the street, shrieking at the top of his lungs. A row of young toughs had formed a menacing circle around the poor man, who lay on his back, a virtual prisoner of his signboards. The thugs—four of them, Michael noted as he ran—were kicking the man and brandishing knives as they taunted him and jeered at his terror.

  “Here, you!” Michael shouted. Twirling his stick from under his arm, he blew his whistle and took off running, pushing pedestrians out of his way as he went. Some scowled or cursed at him, and one dark-skinned Arab spit in his direction.

  A crowd had gathered to watch the assault on the sandwich-board man, and the press of their bodies kept the thugs from seeing Michael until he was nearly on top of them.

  “Leave off, scum!” he roared at the largest of the four. This one was whipping a knife dangerously close to the sandwich-board man’s horror-stricken face.

  “Copper!” The warning shout was from one of the punks, a small, ferret-faced boy with freckles.

  Michael lunged for the big brute first, clubbing him with a fist as he waved off the other thugs with his stick. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the other three take off and go darting down the street. There was nothing to do but to let them go and concentrate on this one.

  The crowd was cheering vigorously, and Michael wasn’t surprised to realize that the cheers weren’t for him: they were rooting for the tough with the knife. A piercing flash of hot rage surged through him as he hurled himself at the wild-eyed thug and knocked the knife from his hand.

  Pressing his stick across the throat of the pimply-faced youth, glaring into his defiant eyes, Michael was tempted to inflict a well-deserved blow. Instead, he fought for control. “It will require no effort at all on my part to snap your scrawny neck if you’ve a mind to resist arrest,” he grated out in a tightly controlled voice. “It’s your decision entirely, punk.”

  At that moment Denny Price, another policeman, parted the crowd, approaching Michael and his captive. “Thought you might need some help, Sergeant, but I can see you don’t. I’ll tend to the sandwich-board man.”

  The sandwich-board man seemed shaken, but otherwise unharmed. Price helped the man to his feet, straightened his signs, and turned back to Michael.

  “Sure, and your watch is over, Sergeant. Why don’t you go along home and let me take this worthless pup in for you? I can manage him without a bit of help at all.”

  Too tired to argue, Michael gladly took Price’s suggestion. As he resumed his trek homeward, he wondered, not for the first time, whatever had possessed him to take on this thankless job.

  The answer, of course, was the same as always: It was one of the few decent jobs available to an Irishman in New York City.

  5

  Do You See Your Children Weeping, Lord?

  Pale mothers, wherefore weeping?

  Would to God that we were dead—

  Our children swoon before us,

  And we cannot give them bread!

  LADY WILDE [SPERANZA] (1820-1896)

  Killala

  The road to the Fitzgerald cabin was a highway of the dead and dying. Frozen corpses lay heaped in ditches on either side. Some, Daniel knew, had died of starvation and the cold; others of fever. Meanwhile, the living continued their death march, limping silently down the snow-pitted road. Few expected to escape their inevitable doom, but simply wandered in a bewildered haze of aimlessness and dejection.

  They fell when least expected, one by one or at times as an entire family. Many died on their way into the village in search of food or shelter. Others died as they left Killala to seek survival elsewhere.

  Encountering former friends and neighbors dead along the road was almost past the bearing, and yet there was no escaping the evidence of the famine’s unyielding hand. Daniel’s heart was laden with feelings so heavy he thought the weight of them would stop him in his tracks. He always seemed to carry with him a bitter mixture of fear, confusion, and anger.

  He did stop now, standing off to the side of the road, his gaze falling for a moment on the round tower on Steeple Hill. Its dark silhouette thrust into the late afternoon sky filled him as always with a mixture of wonder and yearning. Again he found himself questioning how long it had stood there, this monument to a past no man could date. What battles had it seen throughout the centuries? How many generations had it watched from birthing to burial?

  The past beckoned and tugged at Daniel’s imagination. He longed to look across the years and see what had gone before, study it, and perhaps preserve its memory as a part of his own.

  In truth, he believed there was no real separation between past and present and future. He felt that somehow, in a way known only to God, the three were one and the same. Mere humans were incapable of seeing things from beginning to end, and so they had to isolate the times, one from the other. But God, he was certain, had no need for such distinctions; He could undoubtedly view at once everything that had ever been and everything that would ever be.

  He had once attempted to explain his thoughts to Morgan, who’d had a word for his theory. Morgan had a word for everything, of course, but this was a particularly grand one, which Daniel had never forgotten: panorama. “God’s panorama,” Morgan called it, saying, “I believe, lad, you may have excavated a grea
t truth for yourself, one well worth a measure of careful study.”

  Now, as Daniel stood staring at the tower, he was convinced that if God were sharing this moment with him, He would more than likely be seeing not only a black-haired boy gazing at a round tower but the mysterious builders of that curious structure as well. Morgan said the towers scattered throughout Ireland had long been a source of controversy among the scholars and the poets. For his part, Morgan held that the ancient buildings had been watchtowers from which the approach of the enemy could be seen in advance. Probably, he said, they had once served as places of refuge, into which the monks could retreat when the barbarous Norsemen invaded the island.

  But, wise as he was about most things, even Morgan could not be certain of the towers’ origins. God did know, however, and Daniel thought that was a wondrous thing indeed. God could see the giants and the heroes who had walked the land before the coming of St. Patrick, the ancient warriors and mythical creatures from which the great legends and epic poems had arisen. God could see the inhabitants of the raths—the stone ring-forts, where hundreds of jagged stone stakes enclosed the dwellings of pre-Christian inhabitants. God knew all about the clan chiefs and the druids, the high kings and the bards, and He could see the French fleet landing in the bay during the ill-fated rising of 1798.

  Knowing that, believing it, Daniel also had to assume that God saw the corpses of the children and the elderly lying along the road, the starving infants in the dim, unheated cabins, and all the dreadful atrocities taking place beneath the watchful eye of the old round tower. What puzzled him was how God could see it all and do nothing about it. The very One who could end the suffering and the dying in a whisper of an instant made no move to do so.

  Knotting his hands into tight fists, Daniel thrust them deep inside his pockets. Life is life and God is God, and it’s nothing but folly to confuse the two.