The Year We Sailed the Sun

by Theresa Nelson

  Oh! Fair Thomas Egan, too bad you’re going to hang,

  Though no one but your mother dear will mourn ye;

  If you were only sick in bed, she’d never mind at all,

  But a noose around the neck will soon adorn ye.

  And he’s in fine voice, and it’s a fine song, though why would they be hanging Mr. Egan? And how could they be hanging him, when he’s sitting right there in the corner, smoking a fat cigar? I know it’s him; the whole world knows it. Pop used to play his fiddle at Egan’s Saloon. Sometimes he took me with him, and I’d dance on the bar for pennies, and if I did the jig proper, Mr. Egan would laugh and give me a silver dime.

  Only he ain’t laughing now, or hauling out his change purse, neither, and when Pop stops to draw breath there’s a hush in the room. And then a huge man with a crooked nose grabs the fiddle away and grabs our father by the front of his shirt and says, “Go on with you, ye drunken fool. Do you want to get yourself kilt? What’re you doing singing a song like that with Mr. Egan right there looking at you, for the love of God, and hearing every word?”

  And I’m afraid he’s about to slug Papa, so I latch on to the large man’s leg and Mary gets him ’round the waist and Bill tugs on his arm and says, “Please, mister, let him alone, it’s our pop, he didn’t mean it; our mother died and he’s out of his head; please let him go, mister.”

  But Papa’s looking at Thomas Egan. “I meant every word,” he roars. And he’s struggling to get loose, but the man only tightens his grip. He’s looking at his boss now, too—

  Who raises an eyebrow . . .

  And taps his cigar ash onto his plate . . .

  And shakes his head just a little.

  And then the big feller shakes his own big head—as if he finds this disappointing—and shakes the three of us off like flies, and says, “You’re one lucky son of a duck, Cyril Delaney, with children such as these. And if you know what’s good for all of you—the whole family, if you see what I’m sayin’—you’ll count your blessin’s and mind your tongue.” And he turns our father loose.

  Papa dusts off his coat sleeves and straightens his tie, though his fingers seem all stiff now for some reason. Not sure of themselves, like they were just a minute ago on the fiddle strings. So he gives it up finally, and looks at the three of us looking at him, and puts his hand on my hair. “Every word,” he mutters. And Bill takes his arm—ever so gentle—and says, “Come on, Pop, let’s go home.”

  But I start pulling him the other way. “Not yet, Papa! Don’t you remember? You said we’d go to heaven. You promised.”

  “Hush, Julia,” says Mary. “You don’t know the first thing about it. It’s only a boat ride, for pity’s sake.” And she yanks me toward her, trying to shut me up, while Bill keeps saying, “Please, Pop, let’s go home.”

  But our father won’t listen to either of ’em. “A promise is a promise,” he says. And he takes my hand and leads me out of the Alps, stumbling a little, and we retrace our steps down the brick street, all the way back to the door with the legless angel, where the Shouting Man is still shouting: “See the secrets beyond the tomb! Enter here if you dare, ye mortals! Ride with Charon the Boatman and have yourself the time of your afterlife!”

  So we go to the ticket booth and wait for Papa some more, while he pulls the insides out of his pockets, hunting for nickels. His legs are all wobbly and he keeps dropping things, so Bill has to help him. And I can hardly breathe, thinking of heaven, so close now, and how Mama will smile when she sees us, and once we find her and the twins, we’ll put ’em in the boat with us, and then we can take ’em home.

  But when we go to climb aboard, it’s the giant in the hood who’s rowing, and he turns the wrong way and takes us straight to hell instead, with ghosts moaning and chains clanking and fire leaping and sinners shrieking and skeletons jumping out of nowhere and scaring us out of our wits. And wouldn’t you know? When I pry my eyes open again, there’s the devil himself, horns and all. He’s pokin’ a scrawny little feller with his pitchfork, over and over. He’s roasting him on a red-hot spit and pokin’ him till the sparks fly; I swear you can hear ’em sizzle. “Ye big bully,” Papa growls. “Pick on someone your own size. And wipe that grin off your mug, or I’ll wipe it off for you.” But the devil just keeps grinnin’ and pokin’, pokin’ and grinnin’, and the next thing you know, Papa’s jumped out of the boat; he’s knee-deep in the River of Death. He’s splashing through the black water till he’s standing in the middle of hell itself, shaking his fist at Satan. “Where’s Two-Bits, Thomas Egan? Where’s the poor dead lad who trusted you? Why don’t you kill me too, ye bloodsucker?”

  So now Bill’s clambering over the rest of us and out of the boat, and the giant in the hood’s right behind him; they’re both going after Papa, trying to drag him back. “Stop it, Pop!” Bill begs. “He ain’t real; it’s only a wind-up man!” But Papa never hears him. He punches the devil in the stomach, and the devil topples backward and falls into the flaming pit.

  And while the Great Here-After is crashing and burning, Mary holds me so tight, I can’t move, and all around us ladies in other boats are screaming like banshees, and more men in hoods come running and try to lay their hands on Papa, and he’s punching right and left. “Kitty!” he’s shouting now. “Dear God, where’s Kitty?” But no one will give him an answer. And finally they wrestle him to the floor and kick us out altogether, and that’s the last thing I remember about the Fair: Papa smashing up hell, and never getting to heaven at all.

  Chapter 12

  “Pssst! Julia! Can you hear me?”

  The straight wooden chair wasn’t built for sleeping in, but I must have been sleeping in it anyhow. There was a sour taste in my mouth and a line of drool starting at the corner, when the voice at the Sin Room door made my head jerk up.

  “Mary? Oh, Mary!” I was on my feet in a flash. “I’m here! I’m right here! Open the door; they’ve locked it from the outside—can you open it from there?”

  “Shh! You’ll wake the whole house!”

  “Just open it, Mary! Try harder; maybe it’s only stuck or—”

  “I’m trying—I tried—it won’t budge. It’s not just a latch; there’s a keyhole, see there? Is there a key, Betty? There must be a key.”

  “Betty? Betty’s with you?”

  “Shh! She brought me here. The key, Betty—do you know where they keep it?”

  A faint chuckling, rustling like the wind itself . . .

  “Is she nodding?”

  “She’s nodding.”

  I could hear my heart beating—

  And then the soft pad of footsteps, running away.

  “Dear God,” I whispered. “If they catch her—”

  But they didn’t catch her. And unless she had wings I didn’t know about, she couldn’t have gone far, because she was back in no time, and then the key was clicking in the lock and the knob was turning and the door was opening—oh thank heaven, it was open—and I’d have been out of there like a shot, but now Betty had me around the waist; she was hugging me so hard I couldn’t move a muscle, and Mary was no better; she was pushing her way in and pushing us back and closing the door behind her.

  “Ah, no, what are you closing it for? Let’s go, Mary—”

  “Will you hush for once in your life?” She gave me a shake. “Do you want ’em to hear you?”

  “But we’ve got to go!”

  “And where would we be going? It’s the middle of the night, Julia! And raining fit to float the ark, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “Ah, but—”

  “They’ll let you out tomorrow; Marcella says they always do. You only have to say you’re sorry—”

  “Ha!”

  “And promise not to do it again. You can stand it till tomorrow, can’t you?”

  “No!”

  “Sure you can. What’s a few more hours? It’ll be morning before you know it.”

  I lunged for the door, Betty and all, but Mary was still blockin
g it. “There’s nowhere to go, Julia! You’ll catch your death out there in the wet. Do you want to end up in the hospital with Bill? Is that what you want?”

  I stepped back. She knew about Bill? “What did you hear? Did he wake up? Is he all right?”

  Mary shook her head. “His arm’s broken, for sure, and maybe a rib or two. But they say it could have been worse.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody says. The whole House was talking. Sister Bridget heard it from Sister Gabriel, and—well, what are you asking me for? You should know; you were there, remember? Just like old times, the two of you, out gallivanting to ball games, and me wondering if you’re dead in a ditch.”

  She was trembling all over.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I had to find him. I thought—”

  “You didn’t think. You never think.”

  Betty looked anxiously from me to Mary, from Mary back to me. Then she pointed to Mary’s apron pocket.

  Mary brushed at her eyes. “Well, eat something, anyway.” She took out a lumpy parcel wrapped in a handkerchief: two rolls and a bit of sausage. A half an apple. A piece of cheese.

  The smell of it made my stomach curl.

  “Not hungry.”

  “Sure you are. You never had your supper.”

  “I don’t want supper. I just want out of here, please, Mary; they’ll put you in the laundry! We can go home; who cares if we get a little wet? We can stay in the toolshed, remember? Aunt Gert never goes back there. She won’t even notice. Just till Bill gets better—”

  Betty pointed to the door.

  Tap, thump . . .

  Someone was coming.

  Tap, thump . . .

  Down the stairs.

  Tap, thump . . . tap, thump . . . tap, thump . . .

  And then it stopped.

  Dead still.

  Not a sound but the rain on the sidewalk.

  Whoever it was, was listening.

  Ten seconds. Twenty seconds. My chest nearly busting for want of a breath. Then—

  Tap, thump . . . tap, thump . . .

  Back up the stairs . . .

  Tap, thump . . .

  The kitchen door creaked above us . . .

  And shut with a click.

  “You see?” Mary whispered. “I told you they’d hear!”

  “All right. I’ll be quiet. Can we go now?”

  “Go where? Go home? For pity’s sake, Julia, you know we can’t live in the toolshed!”

  I opened my mouth to say yes we could, but before I could say it, Betty was tugging at me, her brown eyes big as bird’s eggs. She was pulling me toward the door, then going back for Mary and grabbing her arm and tugging her, too.

  “No, Betty, we can’t—don’t you understand?” Mary began, but it was no use. She couldn’t stop two of us at once. No sooner had she got her arm loose than Betty had the door open and I was through it in a heartbeat, and there was nothing Mary could do but follow us into the great looming cave of a room on the other side. And the dark was even darker here, by the dim red glow of the furnace, and smelled of starch and sweat and soap cakes, and now we were running through the shadows past sheet presses and folding tables and flatirons standing on the stove near their ironing boards and washtubs waiting on metal stilts, like four-legged spiders.

  “What’s that sound?” Mary whispered, taking hold of my elbow again.

  “What sound?” I whispered back. But I stopped just long enough to cock my good ear and there it was, all right, a low sort of burring, buzzing, thrumming in the air around us, as if the walls themselves were breathing. Saint Chris on a crutch . . .

  Then I saw Betty pointing to an alcove at the far end of the cellar, filled with narrow iron bedsteads, side by side. It wasn’t the walls that were breathing. It was only the laundry girls, sighing and snoring in their sleep.

  I looked at Mary looking at ’em. The sun would be coming up soon. “Happy birthday,” I whispered.

  “Thanks,” she whispered back.

  And then we were running again, chasing after Betty, who was already in the coal hole, waiting for us, waving us over under the window with the built-in coal chute, where the wagons dumped their loads. The bottom of the contraption was a good four feet over her head, but she’d pulled a stepladder out of the shadows, like magic—as if she’d done it all a thousand times before—and now she was humming a little tune while she propped it on the pile of coal beneath her.

  “The coal chute?” said Mary, trying to drag me back again. “Ah, for the love of Mike, Julia—”

  But I was up the ladder before she could stop me, and squeezing into the chute behind Betty, who was at the top in no time, shoving its lid open. The rain came blowing in and beating on our faces, but we didn’t care a lick. And now we were scrambling up through the rusty porthole to the alley outside, and Mary was following, though it was a tighter fit for her; she had to push off from the ladder so hard that it went crashing down behind her. But she made it. We’d all made it. We were covered in dirt and coal dust, and the rain was streaking the whole mess down our cheeks and necks, but we were out, we were free, we were breathing the sweet, wet air, and Betty was laughing out loud and lifting her arms to the pouring sky and spinning around and around, until I couldn’t help it, I had to spin with her; the puddles sloshed in my boots and froze my toes and set my teeth chattering, but I didn’t care. We were out, we were free—

  “Julia,” said Mary. Just “Julia.” That was all. She wasn’t fighting us anymore, only standing there, watching us. But there was something in her voice that stopped our spinning. And I guess the string must have gone out of her legs then, or her bones had turned to butter; whatever it was, she seemed to just give way. She had her back pressed against the house like it was holding her up, but now she started sliding down slowly, down and down and down until she was sitting in the mud itself. And there was water in her eyes and streaming down her face, but of course it was raining, that was all; it was only the rain. Still—

  “Mary? What’s the matter? What are you doing, for Pete’s sake?” I knelt down beside her and tried to pull her up. “Come on, now, let’s go; they’ll find us! We can’t stay here, Mary—”

  But I couldn’t budge her.

  “I don’t feel so good,” she said.

  Chapter 13

  “Ah, now, Julia,” said Sister Bridget, “cheer up. It’s not the end of the world. The doctor says it’s only a mild case. Half the girls in the House had the chicken pox last month, and not a one of ’em died.” She rolled up her habit sleeves, lifted a bucket of oats from the barn floor, poured it into Hyacinth’s feed bag. And then she tipped me a wink. “I hear Sister Gabriel spoils ’em rotten in the infirmary. She’ll have Mary feasting on pheasant and cream cake.”

  I didn’t bother answering. I was too busy shoveling horse manure.

  Sister reached for the currycomb and started working it over Hyacinth’s hide. “So what do you say, Miss Delaney, shall we make a bargain? No more running off every five minutes. The Strayaway Queen, the girls are calling you. Great gobs, the racket when that ladder fell! They say they heard it clear to the attic. Of course Marcella’s dead jealous. You broke her record, did you know that? Even she never got out twice in twenty-four hours. And down in the cellar, Julia—sweet mercy!—we thought it was Armageddon!”

  Which was why Sister Bridget’s face had scared the wits out of us, appearing like an astonished ghost from the top of the coal chute. I never knew she slept in the cellar with the laundry girls! But lucky for us she did. If it had been Sister Maclovius who’d found us first, we’d be dead ducks.

  “Not intentional?” she’d roared.

  Betty and I had been all the way in the kitchen with Sister Genevieve, getting the soot scrubbed off, but even then we’d heard every word:

  “Let me see if I’m understanding you correctly, Sister Bridget. You say they stole the key, broke out of the Sin—that is, the reparation room—confiscated the stepladder, and then c
limbed out of the coal chute . . . unintentionally?”

  “Yes, Sister,” said Sister Bridget. “That’s it exactly. In a manner of speaking. Mary had taken ill, you see, and Betty only wanted to help, but—well, you know Betty—sometimes she gets things a bit muddled. . . .” And by the time the half-a-nun was done explaining it all, the muddle had grown so massive and Sister Maclovius’s gout was giving her such misery that she’d washed her hands of the lot of us and gone to soak her foot in salt water.

  Leaving our punishment to Sister Bridget.

  “I’ve got just the cure for the both of you,” she’d told us when she’d brought us out to the buggy barn. “There’s nothing like working with a good honest horse to clear a girl’s head.”

  She was half-right, at least. Betty loved it out here. She had an arm ’round Hyacinth’s patchy old neck now and was nuzzling his face and feeding him an apple, babbling soft Betty sounds to him while he chomped away. I didn’t see Sister Bridget handing her a shovel.

  Though I didn’t mind, really. I hadn’t forgot so soon who it was opened the Sin Room door.

  But all of that was last night, when we were a hundred years younger. And today—well, we were stuck again, weren’t we? Every one of us, like flies in molasses—Bill and Mary in their sickbeds and me and Betty in this smelly old barn and even the horse and the half-a-nun. (They just thought they were happy.) And the rain was still raining and the wind had a whining sound to it, and the moonstone in my pocket was only a rock.

  “That’s fine now, Julia. That’s lovely. Clean as a whistle. Just push your wheelbarrow over by the barn door, will you? We’ll take it out when we’re done, once this rain eases up. I imagine Betty’s friend here will be wanting a stroll in the clover. Won’t you, boy? All right, now, ladies, come and help me with his new hay. Try to spread it around the stall nice and even. That’s it. That’s the way. Careful, Betty, don’t be getting under his feet there. And mind his tail end, the two of you! You don’t want to startle this old fellow. He could kick you from here to thunder, if he cared to, though he’d never hurt a fly on purpose. Would you now, boy? Well, of course you wouldn’t. You’re a lovely horse, aren’t you?”