Miserere

by Caren J. Werlinger

  “Hey,” said Will, “just like Caitríona.”

  Conn had been thinking the exact same thing, remembering the journal Eilish had given to her younger daughter. As she accepted the journal from her mother, lifting it to smell the leather, she felt a sense of continuity and suddenly wondered if Caitríona’s journal still existed.

  They whiled away the remainder of the dreary, rainy day – Will lost in his Hardy Boys adventure, Conn up in her bedroom writing in her journal. At first, she had stared at the empty pages, not sure what to write, but then she thought about the day the Marines came to the house, and it seemed her pencil could not move fast enough to keep up with her thoughts.

  She glanced up as her mother knocked on her bedroom door and peeked in. Conn quickly closed her journal and sat up on her bed.

  Elizabeth smiled. “You don’t have to worry. Journals are meant to be private. I would never read yours without your permission.”

  Conn nodded.

  “You’ve been up here all day,” Elizabeth said. “Hungry?”

  Conn realized her stomach was rumbling. “I’m starving,” she said. She hopped off her bed and accompanied her mother downstairs. “What have you been doing?”

  “Oh, catching up on letters, reading a little. It seemed like a good day for that sort of thing.”

  Conn sniffed as she followed Elizabeth into the kitchen. “Boy, that smells good. What is it?”

  “Johnny cake and beans,” Elizabeth said, stirring a large pot of beans on the stove. “Nana used to make this. I’d forgotten, but I found an old cookbook with some of her recipes. It sounded good today.”

  A short while later, she laughed as Conn reached for a third piece of Johnny cake and spooned a generous helping of beans over it. Even Will had had seconds.

  “Well, I guess we’ll be having this for dinner more often. But I have a feeling,” she said with a wry expression, “that within about twelve hours, you’re going to be very glad we have an indoor bathroom.”

  §§§

  Winter came to the plantation with leaden skies and many days of cold, dreary rain. The upper floors of the house were kept clean and ready for the master, but no fires were lit in the bedrooms. Unfortunately, this meant that by the time Orla and Caitríona got up to their room at night, it was freezing. The tiny coal stove in their room eventually made it tolerable, but the girls learned quickly to heat water in the kitchen and fill glazed crocks to take upstairs at bedtime to use as bedwarmers.

  “One good thing about having six of us in a bed,” Caitríona said one night, her teeth chattering, “was we kept each other warm.”

  Orla sighed. “Oh, all right then. Come on over.”

  Caitríona quickly padded over to her sister’s bed and slipped under the covers.

  “Your feet are like ice!” Orla yelped.

  Caitríona’s shivers gradually calmed as she warmed up. She startled Orla with a sharp intake of breath. “Orla, do you know what day this is?”

  “Of course I do. It’s Monday,” Orla said groggily.

  “No, silly.” Caitríona slipped back out of bed and lit a candle which she placed in the window. “It’s Christmas Eve.”

  She crawled back under the covers. “Nollaig Shona Duit, Orla,” she said softly.

  “Nollaig Shona Duit, Caitríona.”

  Caitríona’s candle was the plantation’s only acknowledgement of Christmas. Work continued unceasingly through the short, dark days. Most afternoons, Caitríona slipped away for an hour to meet Hannah and continue her reading lessons. With the master and Batterston both gone, Caitríona had felt brazen enough to borrow books from the house’s library.

  “They’ll never miss one book at a time,” she insisted when Orla warned her not to do it.

  The library’s selections were somewhat limited, with mostly dry histories and accounts of military campaigns, but there were a few volumes of Milton, Chaucer and Shakespeare. Hannah could not yet read these by herself, but Caitríona read aloud to her, sitting up in one of the stable’s lofts, huddled together with a horse blanket wrapped around their shoulders.

  “If anyone finds out, we’ll both be in trouble,” Hannah reminded her often, but Caitríona didn’t care. The hours she spent with Hannah were the happiest she’d been since leaving home.

  One day, a wagon rattled toward the plantation in the midst of a fierce wind blowing from the north. The horses pulled with lowered heads while the driver sat shivering on his high seat, wrapped to his eyes with heavy wool throws. Burley rushed out to meet him and help unload the sugar, flour and salt he had brought.

  The driver gratefully accepted Burley’s invitation to unhitch the horses for the night and come into the kitchen for some hot food and drink.

  “The river and canal are iced over,” the driver told them as he shoveled some of Dolly’s chicken and dumplings into his mouth. “Most like, won’t be no more traffic till spring. Oh,” he added, reaching toward his coat and pulling out an envelope from an inside pocket. “I near forgot.”

  Burley took the envelope, and then, in surprise, handed it to Orla. It was addressed simply, “Orla & Caitríona Ní Faolain, Lord Playfair Plantation, America,” in rather scratchy handwriting.

  As mail was such a rare thing, Orla was surrounded in the kitchen as she broke open the seal, which looked like plain candle wax.

  “It’s from Colm,” she said, frowning. She read aloud, “Dear Orla and Caitríona, I hope and pray this letter gets to you. I am writing to tell you the sad news that Mam and the new baby died…” Orla’s voice caught as her hand flew to her mouth.

  Caitríona gently pulled the letter from her sister’s shaking hand. “… died 3rd September. Da is drinking worse than ever. Mary and I have been trying to take care of the wee ones, but I may have to leave soon to find work as we have no money and no food.” Her voice also faltered.

  “Oh, my poor dears,” Ellie said, near tears herself. Everyone else in the kitchen was silent. She wrapped a matronly arm around Orla’s shoulders. “How old are the other children?”

  Orla brushed tears from her cheeks. “Colm is twelve and Mary is eleven. And there are four younger,” she said.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” Ellie said.

  Caitríona stood abruptly. “I’m going to cut more kindling for the fire.”

  “Leave that,” Burley tried to object as she pulled a heavy wool cloak off a hook near the door, but as she yanked the door open, she heard Orla say to him, “Let her go.”

  Orla found her nearly an hour later, out in the bitterly cold wind, still trying to cut wood with hands so numb they could barely hold the axe.

  Gently, Orla pulled the axe handle from her sister’s frigid fingers and led her into the wood shed. Orla’s eyes were red from weeping, but Caitríona’s were dry. They sat on a stack of split wood, and Orla waited.

  “He sold us for land he’s not even working!” Caitríona exploded at last.

  “Maybe he will, now,” said Orla calmly. “He’s just grieving for Mam.”

  “He’s no time to grieve,” Caitríona said angrily. “He’s got six living children to feed.”

  They sat in silence for a while, until Caitríona moaned, “If they’re going hungry, if they end up in the poorhouse after everything, what was the bloody point of it all?”

  §§§

  Elizabeth rushed into Conn’s dark bedroom, having been awakened by the sound of her daughter crying.

  “Hey, hey,” she said soothingly, brushing Conn’s hair off her sweaty forehead and trying to wake her from her nightmare.

  Conn sat up, sobbing, and clung to her mother, still crying.

  “It’s okay,” Elizabeth murmured. “Whatever it was, it’s not real. It was just a dream.”

  She held Conn, rocking her and humming until her crying stopped. She laid Conn back on her pillow, brushing her face again.

  “What was it?”

  Conn rubbed her red eyes, sniffing. “I dreamed… I dreamed someone told me you were dead,” s
he said.

  “Oh, honey,” Elizabeth said, softly. She leaned forward and kissed Conn’s forehead. “I’m right here. I’ll always be here.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The melancholy Conn felt after that vision hung on, like a cloud that wouldn’t leave her. It felt like someone she’d known had died. She wandered the house listlessly, wishing she could go back to the tunnels, but after her conversation with Mr. Greene, she wasn’t sure she should do any more exploring on her own. Jed hadn’t been by, though she didn’t know if it was because he was working with Mr. Greene or if it was because of the continued rain.

  As soon as the rain let up, she slipped out of the house alone. Picking her way through the woods, she went to the cabin. Her legs were soon soaking wet from the drenched vegetation, water running in rivulets down to her socks, soaking them as well. Shoving the door open on its rusty hinges, she entered the cabin.

  “What am I missing?” she asked the emptiness. “What happened to all of you?”

  She sat down on the low hearthstones, looking around the room. She tried to picture the people who had lived in this cabin, but had a hard time imagining that Caitríona would have been content to live in the big house, even just the log portion, and leave her friends to live here. She shifted on the stones, and her heel caught the edge of one of the flat stones stacked up to build the hearth. It slid out of position a tiny bit. Reaching between her knees, she grasped the stone and wiggled it. With a scraping sound, it slid out into her hands.

  Excitedly, she dropped down to sit on the floor, setting the stone beside her, and peered into the opening where the stone had been. Something was in there. Reaching in, she felt a piece of cloth. She pulled gently and disengaged an object wrapped in a piece of old oil cloth. Carefully, she unwrapped the cloth to reveal a stack of pages. Her heart was racing as she flipped through them. Most of the pages were covered by sketches done in charcoal and pencil. There were drawings of a house she recognized as the plantation house at Fair View. There were several drawings of Caitríona and Orla, and some other people Conn recognized from her dreams – Ruth and Henry, Burley and his wife Ellie. The drawings were very good – Conn knew from her visions what these people looked like and the sketches were accurate likenesses.

  Scattered amongst the drawings were some short journal entries, beginning in 1856. The letters were crude and uneven, describing ordinary events of the day – chores, reading lessons. Conn realized this must have been Hannah’s. Later entries in 1858, with better handwriting and grammar, indicated that Lord Playfair had come to the plantation for a few months, but after he left, his son was still there. Subsequent entries mentioned Deirdre, but no further mention of Orla. There were references to the war in 1861 and 1862, and one more detailed entry about Hannah’s excitement over the Emancipation Proclamation. Conn flipped through the last pages which contained less frequent entries. The very last one was dated 8th August 1863.

  Tomorrow we leave here. Ruth, Henry and I will go with Caitríona and Deirdre to West Virginia. God help us.

  Conn sat there. She felt as if she held a bit of Hannah’s life in her hands. She had touched these papers. She had made these drawings. And she had hidden them away – to keep them private? Or to keep anyone else from knowing that she could read and write? Carefully, she wrapped the oil cloth back around the sheaf of papers and replaced the hearthstone. Tucking the precious package under her arm, she let herself back out the door of the cabin.

  She picked her way through the tangles of trumpet vine and the brushy undergrowth beyond. Rounding a large tree, she was nearly bowled over by a man coming from the opposite direction. Startled, she looked up into a dirty, unshaven face. The man’s bloodshot eyes peered at her blearily. There was an overpowering odor of stale sweat and alcohol about him. Conn knew immediately who this was.

  “Yer the girl what lives in old lady Cook’s house, ain’tcha?” he growled through the tangled beard obscuring his mouth.

  Conn nodded.

  “Where’s m’boy?”

  “I don’t know,” Conn answered.

  “He ain’t with you?” Mr. Pancake asked, squinting about as if Jed were here somewhere just out of sight.

  “Obviously,” Conn nearly retorted, but stopped herself in time, sensing that sarcasm might get her a smack across the face. Instead, she replied, “I haven’t seen him for a few days.”

  Mr. Pancake swayed a little as he looked around. “Wait’ll I git my hands on him,” he mumbled as he lurched past Conn and crashed through the woods.

  Conn stood there, her heart racing, trying to decide what to do. She ran home, pausing to stash Hannah’s drawings in the barn, and then on to the house. She found her mother doing laundry in Nana’s old-fashioned washing machine with wringers.

  “This is going to be the next thing we replace,” Elizabeth was grunting as she tried to wrest a pair of Will’s pajamas from the jaws of the wringers which had eaten the legs of the pajama pants.

  “Mom,” Conn said breathlessly. “Where’s Mr. Hardy’s farm?”

  “Why?” Elizabeth asked, still tugging on the pj’s.

  “I just ran into Jed’s father, and he’s looking for him,” Conn explained. “He looked mad. We should warn Jed.”

  “Ohhh…” Elizabeth ceased tugging. “And Mr. Greene. Come on,” she said, abandoning the pajamas and calling for Will.

  They all climbed into the station wagon, Will sliding into the front seat between his mother and sister, and Elizabeth drove them out their lane, away from town in a direction Conn had never been.

  “If he guesses where they are and heads across the fields,” Elizabeth said worriedly as she drove, “he could get there before us.”

  After a mile or so, she turned onto a smaller dirt road that bordered a large pasture surrounded by four-board fencing. Across the field, they spied two figures. Elizabeth parked the car and the three of them climbed the fence and made their way through the tall grass to Abraham and Jed who were digging a new post hole.

  “Mrs. Mitchell?” Abraham asked in surprise as he straightened.

  “It’s Jed’s father,” Elizabeth explained. “He’s looking for you,” she said to Jed, “and we wanted to warn you, both of you.”

  Jed, still wearing his patched overalls without a shirt, swiped a sweaty arm across his sweatier face, leaving a streak of grime smeared across his forehead.

  “He don’t know where I am, does he?” he asked in alarm.

  “Not yet,” Conn replied.

  “Jedediah,” said Abraham, “if you are – unsure – about going home, you may come stay with me.”

  Elizabeth cleared her throat pointedly. “Excuse me, Mr. Greene, but I can’t think of a situation that would put you both at more risk.” She turned to Jed. “Jed, you may come home with –”

  They all turned as they heard a roar like a bull. Mr. Pancake was charging across the field toward them. Abraham laid a hand on Jed’s shoulder and Elizabeth stepped forward as Jed’s father drew near.

  “What do you think yer doin’?” he bellowed. “Workin’ with this nigger what took my job!”

  “Stop right there,” Elizabeth commanded, holding a hand up like a traffic cop.

  “Who’re you?” Mr. Pancake asked, peering into her face with his reddened eyes. “I know you,” he mumbled.

  “You should know me, Samuel Pancake,” Elizabeth said boldly. “I slapped your face when we were fourteen because you were acting like a bully. And I’ll do it again if I have to.”

  She actually stepped closer to him, forcing him to back up.

  Samuel blinked down at her. “My boy, workin’ for that…”

  “Your boy is more of a man than you are,” Elizabeth snapped. “Mr. Greene was good enough to take him on, and he’s doing more work than you’ve done in years. He’s working to put food on the table – something you should be doing, not him.”

  Conn could hear Jed’s sharp intake of breath at anyone speaking to his father like that.

 
Elizabeth turned to Jed and asked, “Jed, do you want to come live with us?”

  Jed looked from Elizabeth to his father and back again. “No, ma’am,” he mumbled.

  “Very well,” said Elizabeth, turning to face Samuel again. She pressed a finger into his chest and said, “But if you lay a hand on him again, you will answer to me, Samuel Pancake, and Jed will be coming to live with us. Now, go home and clean yourself up while your son gets back to work.”

  Samuel Pancake blinked down at her a few times as her words slowly sank in. He glanced at Abraham and muttered, “Ever’body knows there’s somethin’ funny between you an’ him anyhow,” as he turned and lurched back across the field.

  Frowning, Elizabeth turned back to Jed and Abraham. “And I meant what I said. If he beats you again, if he touches you, you will be coming to our house.”

  “Yes’m,” Jed said, looking at her in awe.

  “And unless you have other plans, you are both expected at our house for dinner this evening, cleaned up and hungry.”

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Abraham asked, pulling a checkered handkerchief from his back pocket to mop his face. “You heard what he –”

  Elizabeth silenced him with the fierce expression on her face. Conn grinned as Abraham’s crooked smile tugged his face to one side and he said, “Yes’m.”

  CHAPTER 18

  “Well, young man,” Dr. Jenkins pronounced as he listened to Will’s lungs, “I think you are well enough to do anything you want to do.” He folded his stethoscope and tucked it back inside his black bag. Turning to Elizabeth, he added, “He’ll be a while building his energy back up. Make sure he gets to bed early and gets plenty of sleep, but other than that…”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” Elizabeth said.

  “We were lucky,” Dr. Jenkins said philosophically. “He was a very sick little boy, and there wasn’t anything I or you or anyone else could do about it. If you want to thank anyone, thank God.”