The Exile Breed

by Charles Egan

  *

  As Luke unhitched his horse one night, Roarty came up to him. ‘You’re going down to the river tomorrow.’

  ‘The river?’

  ‘The Gatineau. We’ve got too many logs in this station. Got to start taking them down. Two days down with the logs, sleep at the dock, then pork and flour back.’

  ‘Fine so,’ said Luke.

  Before dawn, Luke was working on assembling a sleigh load of smaller logs, then they hitched four horses. Luke climbed on top of the logs.

  ‘Just follow Breslin here,’ Roarty said, ‘and you’ll see how to do it.’

  Luke flicked the reins, and fell in behind another sleigh, gliding effortlessly over the compacted snow.

  It was easy enough at first, but it did not last. As the downward slope steepened, the sleigh in front started to accelerate. Luke reined in his horses at the top and watched as the other sleigh went faster and faster to the bottom of the slope, and was then reined in.

  He flicked the reins and started forward. He was horrified to see the gap between the sleigh and horses shortening, and knew within seconds their legs would be crushed. He heard a scream from Breslin.

  ‘Faster, for Christ’s sake, faster. You’ll wreck it all.’

  Faster on a downward slope? He could not believe it, but he flicked the reins hard, and the horses galloped. He felt terrified, and tried to hold the reins at the same time so as to hold the horses in from the side. He was at the bottom of the slope and started to rein the horses in, careful that it did not catch up with the horses legs. He brought the sleigh to a stop behind the other.

  ‘That’s mad,’ he shouted at Breslin.

  ‘Mad? How else would ye get them down?’

  Luke shook his head. ‘Damned if I know, but not like that.’

  ‘Arra, don’t you be worrying about it. Just give the horses their head. They’re well used to it, they know what to do.’

  ‘They’d surely need to, because I didn’t. You should have warned me.’

  ‘Well, now you know. Come on, let’s move.’

  When they arrived at the dock, Luke worked at unloading the logs. When he was finished, he unhitched the horses.

  ‘And they deserve their rest,’ Breslin said to him.

  ‘They surely do,’ Luke said.

  He followed Breslin towards a shanty, but one of the gangers stopped him. ‘Where do ye think ye’re going?’

  ‘Get a bite to eat. We’re hungry enough.’

  ‘Right so, but you’ve got fifteen minutes.’

  They went into a shanty and ate near the camboose.

  ‘Good pork, anyhow.’

  ‘It is.’

  Then they went down to the dock, unloading and reloading barrels. Luke saw his own sleigh go back up the trail.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ the ganger said. ‘We’ll have another one down for you by tomorrow.’

  He worked on. There was a shout, ‘Luke.’

  ‘Conaire! Where the hell…’

  Conaire came over.

  ‘Where? I’ll tell you where. I’ve been working here for the past months. They still won’t let me near the horses.’

  There was a scream from the boat. ‘No slacking…’

  ‘Damn it to hell,’ Luke swore and went back working.

  That evening they sat in the shanty, listening to the singing and fiddle-playing. Then the buck-dancing began. Because there were no women, some of the men wore blankets around their waists and kerchiefs over their heads, playing the part of the women in the dances.

  The jigs and reels went faster as the night went on. There was a thick fug of tobacco and men’s sweat. It was hot.

  Luke went outside. He always enjoyed the dancing, but to him there was always an under-current of fear. He remembered the night he had been attacked by the Molly Maguires gang in Brockagh. Men dressed as women! The beating had been savage. Still, here it was all innocent with no violence.

  The river was frozen, the trees black against a starry sky on the opposite bank. Far to the north, he could barely see the flickering lights of the aurora, shimmering in green and blue.

  He heard voices and went around the corner. Conaire was there with four other men, speaking quietly. He saw the four were newcomers, and recognised their accents as Mayo.

  ‘I haven’t met these fellows yet,’ he said to Conaire. ‘Mayo I’d guess.’

  ‘All over the county,’ Conaire said. ‘All excepting Donohoe here, a Roscommon fellow, but there’s none of them lads around here, so he stops with us.’

  ‘So which way did ye all come?’ Luke asked.

  ‘The most of us came through Killala,’ one answered. ‘And maybe we shouldn’t have. From all accounts, the Westport ships were better.’

  ‘They were,’ said Luke. ‘I’d half thought of going out through Westport myself. But like the eejit I am, I went by Liverpool instead. The Centaurus into Quebec.’

  ‘The Centaurus!’

  ‘No less. Over a hundred dead before we reached Quebec.’

  ‘By Christ!’

  ‘So which were ye?’ Luke asked.

  ‘The Yorkshire Lass. Five dead on the crossing. And while five is bad enough, it’s nothing like what ye had. A hundred, by God.’

  ‘More. Much more.’

  ‘As bad as the Ashburton so?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Luke said. ‘That one arrived in Quebec just as we were leaving for the forests.’

  ‘Some big land-owning fellow up in Sligo sent it over. Palmerston was the name to him.’

  ‘I’ve heard his name before,’ Luke said. ‘Supposed to be something in the Government in London.’

  ‘That’s right. He chartered the Ashburton, and sent them all off on it. They say he promised them five pounds for clothes on their landing. Anyone’s seen them will tell you, they’ve no clothes at all. And there sure wasn’t five pounds waiting for any of them. And it wasn’t the first from that son-of-a-bitch either. The Carrick of Whitehaven. That was a Palmerston ship too.’

  ‘I didn’t hear of that one,’ Luke said.

  ‘A wreck, a total wreck. Most all of them drowned. Weren’t many got through to Quebec.’

  The dancing had ceased. They returned to the shanty. Already a sound of snoring was coming from some of the bunks.

  One of the men took a bottle of whiskey from his bunk. ‘You’ll join us,’ he said to Luke.

  ‘You’re very generous.’

  Carefully, he tasted the whiskey. Good quality. American. ‘But what of yourselves?’ he asked. ‘Were ye evicted?’

  ‘Now what do you think?’ the man answered. ‘Of course we were. Clanowen, he’s a right brute. A bitter man.’

  ‘Clanowen!’

  ‘You know of him?’

  ‘Dead right, I do’ Luke said. ‘After they shot his agent, I reckon he went half mad for vengeance. There were evictions enough around our area too. Clanowen got his revenge, that’s for certain.’

  ‘Where’s that you were?’

  ‘Kilduff. You know it?’

  ‘I’ve heard of it. So you were evicted too?’

  ‘Not me,’ Luke said. ‘I’d worked with fellows on the railways in England before all this started. A number of them moved over to Pennsylvania, working on the railways there. When they heard I was still in Mayo, they told me the chances were better on the American railways. And after the past two years, I was inclined to believe them.’

  ‘You’re just like Conaire, then,’ said one of the men. ‘He wasn’t evicted neither.’

  ‘Not by the landlord,’ Conaire said. ‘It was hunger that evicted me.’

  ‘Arra, they’re all evictors, them landlords,’ said another. ‘Out west, wasn’t that where Lord Lucan evicted any number of them?’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ Conaire said, ‘but our landlord is Catholic. Wouldn’t evict people, Mr. Walshe wouldn’t. That’s for sure.’

  ‘That’s what you think,’ the man replied. ‘They’re all evictors, the whole damned lot of them.�
��

  ‘You may hold your opinion,’ Conaire said, ‘but not all men are the same, even landlords.’

  ‘So he’s a better class of a man, aye? What did he feed you during the hunger? You tell me that.’

  Conaire did not respond.

  ‘I’ll tell you what he fed you, if you can’t,’ the other man continued. ‘Nothing. And what were ye left to feed on? Grass? Seaweed? Whales even…?’

  ‘There were no whales then,’ Conaire responded.

  ‘There you are so. Grass and seaweed. Isn’t that it?’

  Again, Conaire did not respond.

  ‘I may not be from Erris,’ the other said, ‘but I’ve met men who were. And the stories they told of men, women and children starving to death, eaten by rats, their little tigíns pulled down over them. Or buried in the sand for later generations to find them.’

  ‘Arra,’ Luke said, ‘would you stop being at him like this.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ the man said. ‘There were good things too, down Torán and Blacksod. Men who had fire in their bellies, enough to go after the corn ships on the ocean. And not just corn coming in either. Corn that was being sent out from Ireland over to Scotland, they took that too. How did the Scots need it more there than we did? No, for me the Erris men had courage. They had the courage to empty the ships on the ocean and the courage to defy the Royal Navy, or anyone else Her Majesty’s Government could send against them. And they had the courage to die.’

  Silence.

  A pack of cards was taken out.

  Another man came over. ‘Deal me a hand,’ he said.

  ‘Fair enough.’

  He sat across from Luke, watching him closely. At the end of a deal, he put his cards down sharply.

  ‘Luke Ryan, I’m sure of it.’

  Luke was startled. ‘What if I am?’

  ‘A murderer, a bloody murderer. Lisnadee. I remember you well. By Christ, the gangers here are bad, but you were the worst.’

  ‘I was only doing what I had to,’ Luke said. ‘If you didn’t have gangers, you wouldn’t have eaten, and you know that as well as I do.’

  ‘Forcing people to work, even when they were starving. Freezing to death too. It didn’t have to be like that.’

  ‘They wouldn’t have it any other way,’ Luke said. ‘Castlebar…’

  ‘And the piecework. Who brought in the piecework? You did, you bastard.’

  ‘It wasn’t me ordered it. You know that too.’

  ‘This man is a murderer,’ the other man said. ‘Men, women and children, forced us all on the Works to freeze to death.’

  ‘There was no forcing…’

  ‘You’re a liar.’

  ‘Leave him be,’ Conaire said abruptly.

  ‘You knew this fellow,’ the other man said. ‘You knew he was a ganger?’

  He stood up, and left the table.

  Conaire said nothing as the man stalked off. The cards were dealt again, one hand less.

  Next morning, Luke and Conaire were loading sleighs.

  ‘I’m sorry about that last night,’ Luke said.

  ‘Arra, pay them no mind,’ Conaire said. ‘Ganger or not, sure it’s all in the past now.’

  ‘It is, but there’s many men won’t forget it. And now I’ve got you in trouble too. There’s men here won’t talk to you now.’

  ‘Sure leave them be. They will in time.’

  Chapter 21

  Mayo Constitution, January 1848:

  Death from Starvation. Last week a poor man dropped dead, from hunger, at Antigua, near this town. For want of a coffin his body lay for some days, we are told, in the open air, when decomposition having nearly exhausted itself, Mr. William McAdam got a coffin and had what remained of the wretched victim, interred. Thus within a mile of the town, with Relieving and Deputy Relieving Officer, and two Workhouses within musket shot of each other, has a human being been allowed to die of starvation – and afterwards let to manure the earth and impregnate the air with the odour issuing from the putrefied corpse.

  All across Ireland, corn was running low.

  ‘We’ll need corn, mother,’ Winnie said. ‘I’ll go up to the town.’

  ‘I’ll go with you,’ Eleanor said.

  ‘Indeed, you will not. And don’t say otherwise.’ She took the purse from the cupboard and left.

  When she arrived back, Eleanor was washing potatoes, softly singing.

  ‘You got enough,’ she said.

  ‘I did,’ said Winnie, putting the sack of corn on the table. She began to cry. Eleanor came over and sat beside her, her arm around Winnie’s shoulders.

  ‘What’s wrong, alanna? Why are you crying?’

  ‘Well, I’ve no need for laughing,’ Winnie said.

  ‘But what…?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. It’s a body I saw on the road.’

  ‘That’s not nothing.’

  ‘And there were dogs. They were fighting over, tearing parts off it, and fighting each other at the same time. It was so badly destroyed, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. I took a stick and tried to drive them off, but they only growled at me. Then one jumped me, and…Oh, God, I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘No, alanna.’

  ‘It’s just…can’t you see what’s going on all around us?’

  ‘I know. Sure can’t I see it with my own eyes, anytime I go to town? And even staying here, the carts going past with the dead bodies, and the state of them too. So hush there, alanna.’

  Winnie said nothing.

  ‘There’s other things too then,’ Eleanor said. ‘That’s not the only thing that’s worrying you.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Winnie said. ‘The fever worries me too. They say there’s fever in Quebec.’

  ‘He’s a strong fellow, Luke is,’ Eleanor said. ‘You’ve got to remember that. He’s had fever as a child, and if it didn’t get him then, it won’t get him now. You know that.’

  ‘But it’s not just the fever. It’s what’s inside his head too. He broke once…’

  ‘No he didn’t,’ Eleanor said, sharply. ‘It’s like the fever. He came close to breaking right enough but if that didn’t break him, nothing will.’

  ‘The hatred they had for him…’

  ‘Yes. But he lived through it all. He would never give in. He won’t now.’

  Winnie poured water into the skillet pot. She placed it on the crane by the fire, swung it over the flames, and began to carry potatoes across.

  ‘Maybe you’ve the right of it,’ she said. ‘You’re always right…’

  ‘Musha, go on out of that.’

  ‘No, it’s not just that. I come back, and there you are, singing, and not a care in the world.’

  ‘No,’ Eleanor said, ‘it’s not that. It only looks that way.’

  ‘All the pain and the dying. Doesn’t it get to you in the end?’

  ‘I don’t let it.’

  ‘So what’s your secret?’

  ‘Between us women, there’s no secret,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s only a secret from the men because they don’t understand it, they can’t understand it. It’s a secret I learnt from my own mother many years ago, when I saw my little brothers and sisters on the Mountain, dying. All through the desperate pain of watching that, and you know what fever is like yourself. You’ve seen it in your own family, I’m certain of it. And I’ve seen it twice in this family. The last time was when Alicia died, the screaming pain in my own daughter. I told you that. But it’s at times like that you cannot let yourself break. All a mother can do, all she must do, is stay with the child, hold her hand even when she no longer knows her, watch her face going black and mop the fever with cooling water, and sing. Soft songs, lullabies, old laments. Whether the babies hear you or not, it doesn’t matter, but the rest of the family hears, and it quietens them too. Yes, they think you’re singing for the child, that’s what they would think. And Alicia wasn’t the first – my first son, he died too. Half my children, I buried half my children. And then what did
I do? I came back home each time, fed the chickens, milked the cows, they don’t understand a woman’s pain. Or maybe they do, maybe they could sense it. I don’t know. But one way or another, the pain is always there, it lessens a little with time perhaps, but it never stops. A woman needs strength for that, a strength a man will never have. That’s what my mother taught me on the Mountain, and by all that’s holy, we needed strength on the Mountain. The famine, twenty, thirty years ago, back in the 1820s, that was a terrible thing. Another little brother died, and they threw his body on the cart along with all the others going down from the Mountain to the graveyard in Kilduff. But they never got there. They were all buried in a bog. Better than many others though. Hundreds had their houses pulled down around them, never got a chance of burial, in a bog or elsewhere. And when you think – that was only the Mountain. It was like that all over. All around Baile-a-Cnoic and Árd-na-gCaiseal was nothing but the stink of death. Yes, we saw all that, Winnie. We saw death all across the Mountain, the same then as it is now. But my mother taught us the women must have strength, and more important, they must hide it. Never let on we’re stronger than the men. Gentle, loving and kind, that’s what we must be. Stop the terrors of the children. And the men too, though they’d always deny it. They don’t know we’re the stronger, and we always will be. ‘Soft power’, that’s what my mother called it. Always gets your way in the end, in such a way that the men thought that they had won. Look at Michael now. He thinks the idea of educating Brigid was his idea. It takes time, but slowly he forgets how strong he was against it. He didn’t want us to adopt Brigid either after Nessa’s death, but now he thinks it was his idea too. They think we just accept our fate, but never understand how we shape it, for them and for us. Love and kindness that hides our strength. And singing. As long as we sing, they think we’re happy. And you, Winnie, you’ll learn to sing. Hide your strength, and believe me, you are strong. Yes, you’ll have your baby. You’ll take it across the Great Ocean. Then you’ll meet Luke and set up a new home in America. That takes strength, it all takes strength. But you have it, I know it.’

  On the Friday, Eleanor was feeding Brigid at the table, as Winnie and Michael were eating. The door opened.