Crooked Branch (9781101615072)

by Cummins, Jeanine

  “She gave me all this money, she wanted to take him with her.”

  “To America?”

  Ginny nodded.

  “Where is she now?” he asked.

  Ginny turned and started walking back toward the gate, and Seán followed, but she stopped before they got there. She gripped his arm before she said the words out loud. Her voice was a wobbly whisper.

  “Seán, I think I killed her.”

  His jaw flickered and his eyes gave a start, but he said nothing.

  “I think I killed her.” She said it again, but she hoped it wasn’t true. She knew it was.

  Seán was shaking his head. “You couldn’t. You couldn’t, you maybe just . . . what happened?”

  She closed her eyes. “We were fighting. We were arguing over the baby. Maire was holding the baby, and she gave me money—Mrs. Spring did. She gave me all this money, and said she was going to take him, and I told her no. I threw the money back in her face, and then she went for Maire. She hit Maire over the head with the pie plate while she was holding Raymond.”

  Seán took Ginny by the hand, and backed her in against the rock wall so she could lean into it.

  “All right,” he said. “All right. Where are the children?”

  “They’re inside, they’re all inside.”

  “And where is Mrs. Spring?”

  Ginny took a deep breath and heaved her body away from the wall. Together, they went to the gate, and she hadn’t latched it. It was hanging halfway open. “She’s there,” she said, pointing uphill.

  Seán pushed the gate in and stepped up the slope in front of Ginny. When he reached the top of the ridge, he could see the small heap of purple taffeta beyond.

  “My God,” he said.

  He returned back down the slope to the gate, where Ginny was waiting. He stared back up the hill.

  “She had Raymond,” Ginny said. “She said she was going to hurt him. She said Don’t make me hurt him. Let me take him. And she had his little head in her hand like a nut. I thought she was going to kill him. Seán?”

  He turned to face her.

  “I didn’t mean to kill her. I didn’t think. I just. I hit her with Ray’s hurley bat.”

  He stood staring at her for what felt like a full minute. Then he stepped past her and back out through the gate. Her heart hammered after him. Where was he going? She wheeled on her feet to follow him.

  “Where are you going?”

  He strode to the carriage and reached beneath it. He pulled out a horse blanket and handed it to her. Then he hefted out one of Mrs. Spring’s trunks. Ginny followed him back to the gate, where he tied the blanket across the hinges and the latch, so no one would come in. He closed it behind them.

  “The times that are in it, Ginny,” he said. “God help us, but who will notice another body? Who will miss her?”

  Ginny was stunned. She tried to take it in, what Seán was saying. “Well, I have to tell . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t go to the constable. But Father Brennan at least.”

  Seán cocked his head at her. The tears were back in her eyes. She blinked them away.

  “God forgive me,” she whispered.

  “Ginny.” Seán grabbed her arm. “Never mind all of that right now. Listen.” He gripped her roughly by the shoulders and looked her full in the face. “You did nothing wrong. You protected your children. It was a horrible accident.”

  She nodded. “So then, Father Brennan . . .”

  “If you need to confess it to clear your conscience, you may think of that later, but for now, you should not involve Father Brennan.”

  “But if you really believe . . .”

  “No matter what I believe, Ginny. The damned English have already hanged half a dozen Irish for killing landlords this year. What will happen to those children if you’re the next?”

  Ginny dropped her breath in her chest and closed her mouth. He was right. They climbed to the top of the ridge and then down the other side, Seán carrying the heavy steamer trunk the whole way. When they got into the yard, he set it down beside Maggie’s cairn. He went down on one knee and unlatched the trunk, pulled out a silken, lemon-colored gown that was all stitched and embroidered with golden threads. He handed it up to Ginny, who gathered it into her arms. It weighed more than her baby.

  “Go in and take care of the children. Stitch up Maire, if she needs a stitch. Then pack whatever ye need for the journey, and put that on.” He nodded at the flood of silk in her arms.

  He was still rummaging around in the trunk, and now he pulled out an envelope stuffed with documents and more money. He stood up.

  “You’re Alice Spring now. You’re going to New York.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  NEW YORK, NOW

  Why didn’t I bring Kleenex? I should know better than to travel anywhere without Kleenex nowadays. In the Rose Reading Room, I click pause on my laptop, and unzip every empty pocket on my backpack. There is no Kleenex. I shrug off my jacket and then dab at my eyes with my shirtsleeve, try not to sniff too loudly. Under no circumstances will I look up, in case I make eye contact with another human. I look up. The young, black-clad tourist from outside is standing by the History of Civilization and Culture shelves. Without her enormous sunglasses, she looks impossibly Midwestern and fresh. She is staring at me. I am red-faced and puffy; my cheeks and armpits are damp. I am an authentic New Yorker. She reaches into her black Armani bag and pulls out a tidy packet of Kleenex. She pulls a few loose and steps forward, hands them to me.

  “Thanks,” I say, without removing my earbuds.

  She shrugs and only half smiles. Her mom is standing behind her, and when she turns back, the mom reaches and squeezes her hand. The daughter doesn’t pull away. She doesn’t shrink. They walk like that, holding hands, past the catalog room and into the North Hall.

  I clean myself up before I turn back to my laptop. I click play again. Raymond Doyle has just finished telling the professor his mother’s story.

  “What a remarkable tale,” the professor says, and his voice has dropped its academic armor. He sounds truly full of awe.

  “My mother was a remarkable woman,” Raymond Doyle says simply.

  I sniff loudly, and a man who is sitting at the other end of my table shifts uncomfortably, but doesn’t look up.

  “Indeed, indeed,” the professor says, and I can feel him casting about for a thread to follow. There are so many questions.

  “So she assumed Mrs. Spring’s identity then?”

  “Only for the passage over,” Raymond says. “As soon as we were off the boat, she ditched the traveling papers, and we disappeared into the streets of the New World. She was always Ginny Doyle after that.”

  So that’s why my mom couldn’t find evidence of their passage in her genealogy records.

  “And did anyone ever discover what had happened to Alice Spring? Did her husband go looking for her?”

  Raymond sighs heavily. “I donno,” he says. “I never really cared to find out. Seems unlikely, though.”

  “And your mother took this secret to her grave?”

  “Not exactly. I mean she told the authority that mattered to her. She made it right with God. But that’s not to say she ever forgave herself. She lived with an awful weight of guilt on her, the poor woman.”

  “If you’ll forgive me saying, it seems odd that she would’ve shared the story so freely with you, if she was as ashamed as you say she was. Are you certain she wasn’t proud of herself, in some way? That she got away with it?”

  “Nah, no way. She never spoke of it. Never once in her life. She was haunted by it. She hated what she did.”

  “So then, how was it that you come to know the story?”

  “My sister Maire would tell it. She always thought Ma had a tremendous heroics about her, after that. They were very clo
se. But it wasn’t only Maire. Seán would tell it, too. He was a little more reluctant because he knew it made Ma uneasy, but he knew everything.”

  “Yes . . . Seán,” the professor says. “What became of him? Did he accompany you, then, on the passage? He stayed in touch with your mother?”

  “You could say that. They were married not long after we arrived in New York. He was a good man. Taught us all our letters, and that was no small thing in those days. He even taught Ma how to read and write.”

  He taught her to write! Of course—the handwriting. On the table, I open the diary to its inside cover and trace my fingers along her name, Ginny Doyle, where it is written fourteen times in that childlike scrawl. She wasn’t crazy; she was practicing.

  “Seán worshipped my ma,” Raymond Doyle says.

  “Did they have any more children?”

  “Three more. My two younger brothers and one sister.”

  “Are any of them still living?”

  “Only my baby sister, Alice.”

  “They named her Alice?”

  “They did.”

  “Fascinating,” the professor says. “And have you any family photographs? Of your parents?”

  “Nah, that was for rich people back then. There wasn’t any photographs.”

  “But they must have been well enough off, with all of Alice Spring’s money.”

  Raymond snorts. “They hardly had all of it, Professor. Most of her money was in the land, in Ireland. Or it was with her husband, in New York or London, or wherever he was off gallivanting. It’s true that she had some traveling money, and then Ma was able to sell the horses and the carriage in Galway. But she used most of that to buy us traveling clothes, to disguise us as rich kids, and then buy our passage over. There wasn’t much left when we got here, only enough to get us on our feet. She worked hard.”

  “Mm,” the professor says. And then there is a long pause and the static takes center stage. “It’s been such a pleasure to talk with you. Is there anything else you’d like to say, anything you’d like to record, before we finish?”

  “Yeah,” Raymond says, and he clears his throat. “You know, growing up in Queens. I remember getting into scraps with some of the other kids around. I remember one time a kid taunting me, saying how much the Irish loved their mammies. He said it like it was something shameful. You Irish boys love your mammies.” Raymond’s voice grows clearer and stronger for a minute. I imagine he is sitting forward in his chair. He sounds younger. “They had no idea. What we went through, what our mothers went through. In those famine days.”

  Raymond clears his throat again, or he tries to. He sounds strained now, and tired.

  “That is something that has always stuck with me,” he says quietly. “My mother, she did penance for the rest of her life. She could have been a wounded soul, she could have crumbled. But she didn’t. She didn’t let all that guilt and sorrow defeat her. I never knew such strength, never saw the like of it in another human being, not even in my own beloved wife, God rest her soul. Even after everything Ma lost, everything she suffered—she carried on for us. She lived life. For us. Everything she did was for us.”

  I try not to sniff, not to irritate my tablemate. I breathe deeply, use the Kleenex to sponge the tears out of my eyes before they spill.

  “Raymond Doyle, thank you,” the professor says. “It has been my honor and privilege to talk with you. Thank you for sharing your stories.”

  Raymond Doyle says, “Yeah, sure,” and then the static stops. The earbuds fall silent. I lean forward and rest my forehead on Ginny Doyle’s diary at the edge of the table. My tears splatter softly onto the red tile floor beneath my feet. I take the earbuds out without lifting my head. I dry my eyes, sit up, and open the diary to the passage that has haunted me. The passage that convinced me that Ginny Doyle’s malevolent DNA would make me a terrible mother. I read.

  25 April 1848

  Dear God, I killed her. I killed her. It is late now, and the children are asleep here, and I was awakened by that horrid crunching, and it was so vivid, the sound of it, that it brought me right back there. . . .

  The cottage. That last day in the yard, under the blackthorn tree. I can see myself, almost as if from above. Like I’m that magpie in the tree looking down. And there’s the other me down in the yard, the ferocious me. The baby is there. Maire is watching. Oh the horrors my poor daughter has seen in her short life.

  I’m holding the hurley bat in both hands, and I’m swinging it down over my head. How does my face look in this instant? Is it pained, twisted, demented? Demonic, with the power coursing through me? I am about to take a woman’s life—a woman who was only kind to me until this last day, these last moments.

  She is dead now.

  Would that I could wish myself back to that moment, and stop it there. To drop that hurley bat to my feet, to hear its soft clatter in the dust. But instead there’s an almighty crack like thunder as I bring it down on her skull, and she drops, heavy like a bag of clean, dry praties. The baby nearly falls with her, but I catch him, I catch him, by one dangling arm. Her eyes and her mouth stay open, and Maire’s eyes, too, wide open at my back. Her voice is windy. She calls me mammy.

  There are shards of the blue Wedgwood china on the ground, and they crunch beneath my feet, like the sound of bones snapping. Maire’s cheeks have gone a sickly white. There are pieces of the pale blue china strewn through the dead woman’s hair.

  Why I remember this crunching, above all else, is a maniac question. Perhaps it’s easier than the rest, than Maire’s intrepid voice, and the baby crying after. It stays in my ears like a disease, that crunch. It robs my sleep.

  God forgive me, God forgive me. I can still see her dead and ghastly face.

  I close the cover of the book softly and clasp it to my chest. I misjudged everything. I lean back in my chair, place the earbuds back in, close my eyes, and listen to Raymond Doyle’s story all over again.

  • • •

  “You seem different,” Dr. Zimmer says, leaning back in her red chair.

  “I feel different,” I say.

  “So is the Ativan helping?”

  I nod. “Maybe it is.”

  Dr. Zimmer doesn’t respond.

  “Okay, it’s probably not, because I’m not taking it,” I say. “But maybe it’s like you said. Maybe just knowing it’s there is helping? Like a safety net?”

  “That could be,” she says. “It could also be that your hormone levels are beginning to shift back to normal on their own. Or that you’re just getting the hang of your new life, that you’re beginning to adjust.”

  I shrug.

  “You don’t think so?” Dr. Zimmer asks. “You know you’re very hard on yourself. You’re much more judgmental toward you than you are toward other people.”

  “Only out loud,” I say. “In my head I’m hypercritical of everyone. I’m a total bitch.”

  Dr. Zimmer smiles. “Did you just call yourself a bitch?”

  “Dammit.” I hate it when I prove her point.

  “So give yourself a little credit,” she suggests. “That could go a long way. If you feel like you’re doing better, that can become part of your new narrative for yourself, and you can build on that. You are healing. You’re doing it yourself.”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  “You think it’s something else?”

  “You know the diary?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Zimmer says.

  “Well, I found out the whole story about that ancestor. One of her sons did a folklore project at the New York Public Library, and I went and listened to the whole thing. He told her whole story. And she wasn’t awful at all, that Ginny Doyle. She was like this amazing, heroic woman who saved her kids, and then felt guilty for the rest of her life because of what happened.”

  Dr. Zimmer is frowning. “But there was a m
urder, yes?”

  “No, no, it wasn’t really a murder. It was totally self-defense. She was just protecting her kids. It just seemed like a murder, the way she wrote it in the diary, because she felt so guilty.”

  “Mmm.” Dr. Zimmer seems less than convinced, but I don’t really care.

  “Anyway, I just feel like I know the truth now. Like maybe I’m not so destined to fail after all. Maybe that sort of maternal malfunction isn’t hard-coded into my genetics.”

  Dr. Zimmer nods. “Sometimes we have to make these sorts of discoveries for ourselves in order to truly believe them. And how did you make this discovery? How did you find out about this, what was it, a recording?”

  “Yeah, it was a recording. My mom called and told me about it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know how she found it. She’s really into the genealogy stuff, and she found out about the recording, and called to tell me.”

  “So you’ve been talking to your mom about all this?”

  “Yeah, a little.” I shrug.

  “And how is that? Does she listen?”

  “Yeah, she does.”

  “That’s good. Very good.”

  “Well, she’s interested in it,” I say carefully. “It’s not like it signals a sea change in our relationship. But something else might.”

  Dr. Zimmer raises her eyebrows and waits.

  “So I have this friend Jade, this new friend. And she was telling me this theory that when people talk all the time like my mom does, but don’t really listen, it usually means they are hiding a bunch of pain about something, and they’re trying to distract you from sniffing it out.”

  “Jade sounds like a psychiatrist.”

  “She’s like a maharishi, except she cries all the time.”

  “So you think your mom is like that, that she’s trying to conceal some deep pain?”

  “She is.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I asked her.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, I was pretty surprised, too. I didn’t really plan it. I sort of pushed her into it during a moment of frustration, but she copped to all of it. She’s been through some horrible shit. Stuff she’s never talked about. I had no idea.”