Tears sprang to my eyes at the thought of my da lying in that terrible place.
Tommy touched my arm and asked if the man was a relation of mine. When I nodded, he said he was sorry and that if he had known that — and known me — he would not have taken it.
“So it’s only strange countrymen that you steal from?” I asked.
He was silent, then after a moment he said that leaving home did not turn out to be the salvation his ma dreamed of. Nor his da.
That was true enough. He asked me if I was alone.
“I have a brother, but …” Tears stung my eyes. “He thinks I died in the fever sheds. I know he’d be looking for me if only he knew I still lived. And I have been trying to find out where he is. But I have found employment with a family near Sherbrooke. I’m leaving for there tomorrow.”
We reached our destination at the water’s edge. He lifted the handles of the cart and dumped the straw into the water below. Then he insisted on pushing the cart back for me. On the way he asked me to tell my story, and I did, from the time we set sail, to my time at Mrs. Johnson’s, and my hope that Mrs. Hall would turn out to be a better employer.
“In my time here, I’ve met a lot of people from back home,” he said. “What’s your brother’s name?”
When I told him, he said that if he ever saw Michael, he would tell him to look for me with the Hall family outside of Sherbrooke. He wished me luck and left.
August 26, 1847
On my last morning in Montreal I packed my meagre belongings — my little book; a fresh stub of pencil that had been given to me by the sisters; an old apron and a worn coat, also gifts from the sisters — all caught up in a bundle and tied with strips of rag, and stood waiting at the gate early in the morning. I had said my goodbyes to those who mattered, not a soul among them kin to me.
A wagon came by after a while. In the front sat a man and a woman I did not recognize. Immediately behind was Mrs. Hall with two young girls. In the back was a third, older girl.
The man, the woman and the older girl were Mr. and Mrs. Fenton and their younger daughter Fanny, who is a year older than I. The two little ones were Mrs. Hall’s children, Lucy, just five, and Catherine, not yet a year old and plumper than Patrick had ever been. Mrs. Hall smiled when she saw me. Mrs. Fenton sniffed the air when I was introduced, as if she expected to smell some unpleasant odour lingering on me. She told me that I might sit at the very back of the wagon. I climbed up and we were off.
We had not travelled far before Fanny crawled back to sit beside me. Almost instantly her mother called for her to come away. Fanny protested, but her mother’s voice was sharp. Groaning, Fanny did as she was told. Mrs. Fenton did not lower her voice when she told Fanny that she should stay clear of me because I was one of “those Irish” who were spreading disease all over the city. Mrs. Hall protested and said that I was quite healthy, but Mrs. Fenton said that she was being foolish by taking someone like me into her home. My ears burned, but I kept my mouth shut and refused even to turn around and look at Mrs. Fenton. Instead, I pretended that I had not heard a word.
I watched as we crossed the city and took the ferry across the St. Lawrence River, and later on the Richelieu. It was late in the day when the wagon turned off at the roadside, where we spent the night at what Mrs. Fenton called a most disagreeable inn. For myself, I found it not so bad. I helped Mrs. Hall with the little girls and slept on a clean straw mattress on the floor with a blanket to cover myself. We passed another long day on the wagon, and many times got off and walked where the road was bad or had been washed away. Fanny sometimes walked with me and Lucy. She chattered about her visit to Montreal and the pictures she had seen of the latest fashions in England, and did not seem to mind how quiet I was. I did not know what to say to her. In some places the road consisted of logs laid side by side, making it far too spine-jarring to ride. It is a wonder the wheels were not shaken off the wagon. At long last we found another inn, this one more to Mrs. Fenton’s liking. She deemed it cleaner and the food more palatable. The next day Mr. Fenton left Mrs. Hall, the children and me at the Halls’ house.
The house stands in the middle of a clearing. Mrs. Hall says that it took her husband and many men more than two years of chopping trees to make the clearing as large as it is. The house has two storeys, with stone around the bottom to as high as my waist and then clapboard the rest of the way up. The roof, like all roofs in this country, is very steep because of the snow. A veranda runs across the front of the house, and there is a kitchen garden at the rear where Mrs. Hall grows vegetables. She also gathers berries when they are in season and makes jam out of them. I have never tasted jam, but I did not tell her that.
The house is far from any town — it is a walk of several hours to get to Sherbrooke — or any neighbour other than the Fentons, but it is clean and bright and pretty. The walls in the drawing room are painted yellow and the window frames black. At the back of the house beside the drawing room is Mr. and Mrs. Hall’s bedroom. Across from the drawing room is a dining room, and behind that another bedroom where Mrs. Hall’s two little girls sleep. At the very back of the house is a kitchen that is as large as the one at Mrs. Johnson’s house, but much sunnier, as it is not in the basement.
The second floor, which is smaller than the first, consists of three tidy little bedrooms, one of which is to be mine. It is scarcely as big as one of the cupboards in Mrs. Johnson’s house, but it seems quite snug. And it is mine and mine alone! I can hardly believe it. The other two rooms are for the cook, Mrs. Lyons, and a man that Mr. Hall hopes to be able to hire for at least part of next year. In addition there are several storerooms where Mrs. Hall keeps trunks and boxes and Mr. Hall keeps scraps of wood, boxes of nails, and other carpentry supplies.
Mr. Hall came in before supper. He is a tall man, very handsome, with a trim moustache, soft brown eyes and an easy smile. He delights in his small daughters and Lucy clearly dotes on him. She laughs and giggles as soon as she sees him and runs to him, her chubby arms thrust up for him to catch her and hoist her above his head. He seems as eager as she is and happily obliges her.
August 31, 1847
I have been so busy, there has been no time to write.
I slept three nights ago in my very own room for the first time ever with my very own bed and a mattress filled with straw. There is a big slit halfway down the mattress cover so that I can reach in and even out the straw when it gets lumpy. I also have linen and a blanket. When winter comes, Mrs. Hall says I am to have a quilt to keep me warm. She says it gets very cold in this part of the country and that it may come as a shock to me.
My head is stuffed with all the things I have learned. I have been left largely in the care of Mrs. Lyons these past days. She makes sure I pay sharp attention to everything she does and warned me that I must be prepared to work hard, for there are six men expected for the next several days to help Mr. Hall build a barn for his team of oxen, his four cows, his six sheep with lambs, and his pigs. At present they are occupying a small shed that he and Mrs. Hall lived in when they first arrived in this country. Mrs. Lyons says that these men will be very hungry and must be fed good wholesome food.
September 1847
September 1, 1847
Mrs. Lyons was right. The workmen are hungry, and they eat so much I can hardly believe it! They dined today on beef and pork with vegetables from Mrs. Hall’s garden, a hearty pea soup, bread with butter, and tea with sugar. This will mean much cooking and baking, both on the cookstove and over the hearth. It is much harder work even than at Mrs. Johnson’s, but Mrs. Lyons is much gentler than Mrs. Coteau, although she does seem particular about how she likes things done. She told me never to guess how a thing is done or where an item goes, but to ask instead. She says things will go much more smoothly if we pull in the same harness like a pair of well-trained workhorses.
In addition to the cooking, I have been helping with the little girls, especially Lucy, who is always eager to play chase-about. I am so gr
ateful for my little room. I fall into my bed each night, so tired I cannot keep my eyes open.
September 2, 1847
I am too weary to write.
September 3, 1847
After the evening meal, Mrs. Hall asked me if I knew how to knit. I said yes, although I am not very good at it. I learned when I was small, but times got hard and we could not afford the wool. I am horribly out of practice.
Mrs. Hall gave me some yarn and some needles and asked me to show her some stitches, but I forgot how to cast on! My cheeks burned as I fumbled with the yarn. Finally Mrs. Hall said she would show me. She did not seem at all annoyed or angry. After that, I knitted a few inches. I was so nervous that my knitting got tighter and tighter, so that the square I was working on started to look like a triangle. Mrs. Hall laughed, but in a nice way, and said she used to have the same trouble whenever she worked with a new pair of knitting needles. She pulled out all the stitches and told me to start again. This time I cast on by myself and got it right.
September 4, 1847
Mrs. Fenton and Fanny came to visit together with Fanny’s elder sister Elizabeth, who married last year and is on her way to meet her husband in Montreal. While they sat and talked, I amused Lucy and Catherine. Mrs. Fenton criticized my work, saying I was allowing them to be too noisy. She spoke as if I were working for her instead of Mrs. Hall. I was glad to be sent to the kitchen to help Mrs. Lyons get tea ready.
Fanny appeared a moment later, and I braced myself for some new criticism. But instead she helped me with my work and asked me if it was true that I had come to Canada because of the famine in Ireland. When I said I had, she asked so many questions about my family and my life back home that it made me quite melancholy. I think she must have sensed that, for she changed her tack and said that she would take me walking one afternoon when Mrs. Hall could spare me, to acquaint me with the countryside. She seems nice and I enjoy her happy chatter. She reminds me a little of Anna, who was always full of talk, usually wishing for things she had heard about but never seen. (Most of all, Anna wished for a gown made out of golden thread.)
September 6, 1847
I do not think that Mrs. Johnson would last even two days if she changed places with Mrs. Hall. Mrs. Johnson merely orders people about. Mrs. Hall supervises Mrs. Lyons and me, but she also works hard herself. This morning she sent me to the garden for vegetables. I took Lucy with me. She begged to help me, and I allowed her to do so even though I had to watch constantly that she did not trample any of the plants. When I returned to the house, Mrs. Hall and Mrs. Lyons had the bread in the bake oven, soup stock on the stove, and had started to prepare the meat for the workmen’s dinner — and were keeping an eye on baby Catherine, who slept in a basket in the corner.
Mr. Hall works as hard as Mrs. Hall. For the past week he has been with the men raising the new barn. In the evenings — at least before the barn raising started — he works on some project or other. He is making a small chest of drawers, which Mrs. Hall says is to be for my use. I am knitting a simple shawl while Mrs. Hall cuts down an old coat for me. She says I will need both for the coming winter, and that the one the sisters gave me will not be warm enough. Mr. Hall also spares time for his daughters. When Lucy begs to be picked up or to ride him as if he were a pony, he obliges no matter how tired he is. He also picks up little Catherine and rocks her in his arms until she falls asleep. Mrs. Hall looks at him the way Ma used to look at Da before things got bad.
September 10, 1847
The barn is finished and the workmen have gone. Mrs. Hall is greatly relieved. Not only was it unending work to keep them fed, but it was a great expense. Mrs. Hall calculates that they ate more than 150 pounds of beef in the ten days they were here and five loaves of bread every day in addition to buckets of soup and great quantities of butter and tea and sugar. Mr. Hall laughed softly as he often does and said that the new barn will pay them back a hundredfold.
I have started my very own quilt. Mrs. Hall has a great bag filled with scrap pieces of fabric. She collects them from the ends of clothes that she makes or remakes. On her last trip to Montreal, the one when she engaged me, she paid a visit to a woman who is known to her family in England. This woman gave Mrs. Hall a large sack of scrap fabric — torn and worn-out items of all kinds — in every colour you can imagine: red and blue and yellow and green, purple and pink. I am cutting out some pieces longer than they are wide and will stitch them in a pretty pattern.
September 13, 1847
I don’t know what has come over me. I have been melancholy since morning despite the brightness and business of the day. I have been thinking of Michael since morning and wondering what has become of him. I think also of Connor and wonder if he has seen Daniel or has discovered what became of Kerry. I wish Ma and Da were with me and that we had our own cosy house with a cow in the barn, and chickens, just like the Halls. Mrs. Hall says that with plenty of hard work, anyone can succeed in this country. No one is as hard a worker as my own dear da. He would have succeeded. I know it.
Today I helped with the laundry. Mrs. Hall used to have a woman come in to help her, but now she is teaching me. It is hard, hot work. Mrs. Hall says I must be careful not to waste any soap, for she had it made by a woman in the area. She supplied the candle stubs, grease from pot skimmings, and old bones. As payment, the woman kept part of the soap to sell.
Also, I have discovered the secret of maize. The Americans sent maize to Ireland for the starving, but it was so hard and difficult to digest that it made people ill. Now I know why. It was not properly prepared. First you have to boil the kernels. Then you have to drain them and dry them before the fire until the skin starts to split. Then you tie the maize in a bag and beat it with a stick — Mrs. Lyons showed me how — until the bran, which is the outside of the kernel, falls off. Finally you boil the maize until it is soft. The result is very pleasing, especially when it is served with hot milk.
September 15, 1847
Fanny came today just to see me! Mrs. Hall said that she thought she could spare me for an hour, and we went walking in the woods together. Fanny started by showing me different trees and plants and telling me their names, but soon we started talking about other things. She is very curious about Ireland and about what happened to my family. Before I knew it, I didn’t feel shy anymore and was telling her everything — how first Patrick and then Ma had died, how Da had fallen ill on the way to Montreal, how I had learned of his passing, until finally all I had left was Michael. When she learned that Michael had left because he thought I was dead, she hugged me. And when, despite my best intentions, I cried for fear that I would never see him again, she hugged me even more tightly. She promised to come and visit again as soon as she could get away.
September 18, 1847
I have started working on my quilt in my spare time. I can sew straight seams, as I often helped Ma remake clothes. But I have not done much fancy work and Ma usually showed me exactly what she wanted me to do. Also, the seams did not show, the way every single stitch on a quilt does. I find that my stitches are different sizes, which does not look nice. Mrs. Hall showed me how to keep them neat and small. It looks easy when she does it, but I have to concentrate very hard to make mine look as perfect as hers. Still, I know I am improving because at first Mrs. Hall tore out most of my stitches and said it would be better to start again. Now she makes little comments and corrections. I haven’t had to tear out any stitches for days.
September 21, 1847
A friend of Mr. Hall’s sent over two bushels of apples. Some will be kept in a barrel in the root cellar. The rest had to be dried. Mrs. Fenton and Fanny came over to help core, peel and slice the apples and then hang the pieces on strings to dry. Mrs. Lyons says that in some parts of the country, apple-peeling is an occasion for get-togethers and merriment. She says girls try to peel an apple in one long strip and then throw the peel over their shoulders. Whatever letter the peel makes when it strikes the ground is supposed to be the first letter
of the name of the man they will eventually marry.
Fanny said we should try it. Her peel formed an S or an N, depending on how you looked at it. We shouted out every name we knew that began with those letters, but Fanny rejected any boy she knew with those names and wanted to try again. It took me forever to get a peel off in one strip. When I tossed it over my shoulder, it made the letter C, and I thought immediately of Connor. I had a picture of him and Daniel happily together and, although I know it is wrong, I was jealous. Where is Michael?
September 23, 1847
Mrs. Hall was busy all day nursing Catherine, who is feverish and vomiting. I have been too busy helping her to write more than just this little bit.
September 24, 1847
Catherine is a little better, but she does not want to play. She clings to Mrs. Hall.
September 25, 1847
Catherine is feeling better. Mrs. Hall is much relieved. So am I, for seeing the wee thing so ill reminds me of Patrick, and that reminds me how much I miss Ma and Da and Michael. Mrs. Lyons told me that Mrs. Hall lost her last baby, a little boy, to fever.
September 26, 1847
A man I do not know came by yesterday and gave Mrs. Hall some letters and parcels from the post office in Sherbrooke. Mrs. Hall was busy putting Catherine down for a nap, so she set them aside without even looking at them. I was beside myself waiting for her to return to the parlour and go through the letters in case there was something among them from Sister Marie-France or even from Michael. But when she finally came back out of the bedroom, Lucy claimed her attention, and the little bundle of mail stayed where she had left it on a bench near the front door. I kept eyeing it and wondering if I should ask her about it. Mr. Hall finally came in from pulling stumps, saw it and sorted through it, calling out to Mrs. Hall who each letter and parcel was from. I held my breath to the very end, hoping and praying. But there was nothing for me. I hid my disappointment and cried when I was in bed.
A Sea of Sorrows Page 7
