Men of No Property Read online

  “Peg, for the love of heaven, hold your tongue. Have you no modesty left?”

  “I’ve more modesty than money. You seen to that.”

  Norah drew away, easing herself along the bunk, her feet not touching the floor for fear of the dankness there.

  Dennis extended his hand. “We’ll be friends, Peg. We know our enemies, you and me.”

  She grasped his hand firmly and clung to it to pull herself out of the bunk. With him and the boy, she made the rounds of the quiet, fearful people.

  They ranged one side and then the other of the wide aisle, barking ankles and knees on the barrels, boxes and bundles heaped there. The women and children had one side and the men the other. Many a man was the more sullen for the thought that he might see his wife only in the daylight. And the girls amongst them were the more apprehensive for thinking that one bunk was like another in the darkness, and maybe one woman were she sleeping. Fierce tales had come home of unholy crossings. The air was already foul, stale with the dampness of a quick wash after too many long, crowded voyages.

  The screech of the anchor chain suddenly broke over the muffled talk.

  “Mother o’ God, we’re collapsin’,” a woman cried.

  “We’re weighin’ anchor,” Lavery shouted. “We’re throwin’ off our chains! To hell with England, and God deliver us safe to America!”

  The Valiant gave her first great heave toward the sea and Lavery raised his voice above the lamentation of the women and the muted clang of the harbor bells. He sang the words of an old hymn which came to him first, and remembered all of a rush his mother fastening the stiff white stock about his neck for Sunday Mass. Even in the dankness he could recall the smell of fresh bread about her, for she baked on Sunday mornings, and he could remember the softness of her bosom as she pulled his face into it. It was better than the last sight he had of her, her eyes watered with the thought of his going. Louder he sang until his voice was near cracking.

  “Holy mother, heav’nly queen,

  List while thy children pray thee.

  Guide us through the shoals of life

  And o’er its storm-tossed sea…”

  Margaret Hickey joined a fine soprano voice to his, and some then mouthed the words tunelessly while others had the tune but not the words. Soon everybody joined in the hymn.

  The long night’s singing blended into talk, and through it the rumble and grind and even the motion of the ship grew familiar. Those not possessed of too great a stomach misery clung together. The quickest friends to all the emigrants were those who spun aloud legends and dreams of New York, the wages and homes they hoped for, the sights they expected…New York, where beeves were herded by the hundreds into a dozen markets every dawn, where the streets were crowded with stalls, and the stalls spilling with greens, the barrels bursting with treacle and honey; where milk came in buckets and meal by the bushel, where potatoes rolled in the streets overflowing all measure, where you could drink your choice and your fill for a thrup’ny bit; where no man was more than your equal and no woman beyond your hope, where the gaslights spun around in circles, and music crowded the stars into daylight; where they vied on the dock for your service, paying cash and the work not begun; where they hoisted the green flag of Erin alongside the stars and stripes, and sent runners to meet every emigrant ship, shouting and waving and crying out, “Welcome home!”

  3

  FROM THE SECOND DAY out the emigrants whispered amongst themselves at the wonder of a priest aboard who wouldn’t show himself amongst them. All of them able to go up to boil their water saw him at one time or another, walking, always walking the few paces there was room to walk on deck, and he would smile at them; a sweet, sad smile the women said which led some to speculate on whether he was not fleeing the temptation of a woman, for he was a handsome one, and Margaret Hickey said out in her quick way she would be tempted to tempt him herself. Others put his aloofness down to politics: there were priests, albeit only a few of them, with strong sympathies for Young Ireland, until a bishop put down his foot on them.

  But before they were a week at sea many of the voyagers fell ill and lay upon their hard bunks day and night without rising and the captain was often sent for. His presence was the best part of his medicine, for he assured the ailing they would soon see land. One unfortunate, however, would have none of his assurances. Mary Dunne said that she was dying and asked for the priest.

  “He has no powers on the high seas,” the captain said, and Peg thought it a strange thing, for a priest was supposed to be a priest the world over.

  “Please, sir,” Norah said, holding the child Emma whose care had fallen to her, “tell him it’s not his powers but himself is needed.”

  “Take that word to Mr. Russell, sir,” the captain bade the seaman who made the rounds of the sick with him.

  “Russell, Father Russell,” the name was whispered among the emigrants.

  The man was not long in coming, though by the way he stood groping near the steps he could not come quickly. He was blind from the light of day. Margaret Hickey caught the captain’s lantern from his hand and went to guide the priest.

  “Her name’s Mary Dunne, Father,” the girl said, “and she’s terrible troubled, takin’ her grandchildren to their father, and thinkin’ now she won’t live till it’s done.”

  “Thank you. I shall do what I can for her…and I’ll be as true to her faith as God gives me the power.”

  For an instant their eyes met over the lantern, and Peg said, “Come, Father Russell,” although she was sure now he was not even a Catholic.

  The ship’s captain made way for him. “I’ve done what I can for her,” he said. “I’m not a medical man.” He held his hand out for his lantern, but instead of giving it to him, the girl put it into the hand of the priest, and the captain went up in the dark.

  Norah Hickey, holding the infant, pulled her sister into the opposite bunk beside her. “Do you want us to leave, Father? We can go some place else, but here’s the child.”

  He nodded for them to stay. He lifted the lantern between his own face and the old woman’s as he knelt down beside her and took the puffy hand in his.

  “Is it the priest?” she whispered.

  “God bless you, Mary Dunne,” he said, and when he looked about for a place to set the lantern, Margaret Hickey leaped from the bunk and held it for him. He rubbed the swollen hand gently as though he would summon warmth into it. Yet on his own face the sweat was shining. “You’re a strong woman, Mary Dunne, to have come this far. It may well be you’re stronger than you know and will take the little ones safely on.”

  “If I was an ox I’d never get up from here, Father. There’s a weakness in my bowels spillin’ the life out o’ me.”

  “Tell me then what I can do,” he said, for the very smell of death hung about her.

  “Go under my head and get my rosary.”

  He groped about the damp pallet and drew the beads out. When he closed her fingers about them she lifted them up before her eyes. He dipped a rag lying by her face into the bucket of water beside the bunk and brushed her forehead with it. She thrust her hand toward his face then, her fingers poking into his cheek for she could not judge the distance between them, but he did not flinch. When he saw that she was trying to better see his face he took the lantern and held it close to him.

  “Do you know, you put me in mind of my Tom a little? You’re awful young to be a priest.”

  “I’m twenty-seven,” he said.

  “Ah, ’tis me that’s awful old.”

  Her eyes lost their cogency and presently she tried to move her body. The weight of it was beyond her strength. She began wandering in the mind then, sometimes scolding, sometimes crooning.

  “Be easy, Mary Dunne,” the man said, trying to hold her hands. But they were the only part of her body she could move and the holding of them so chafed her he let them go.

  She groaned and threshed her arms about. “I’m heavy, heavy and the pains is co
min’ fast,” she cried. “Tom, run for your father, run!”

  “She thinks she’s with child,” the man said, gazing up at the wide-eyed girl who held the lantern.

  “Are ye never comin’, Tom?”

  “I’m comin’ sure.”

  “Father Russell” bowed his head. The words were spoken from the foot of the bunk where Vinnie Dunne had come to answer to his father’s name.

  She grew easier then and searched the man’s face with her eyes, her imagined recognition warming them. “You’re a good boy, Tom. I don’t know whatever I’d ’ve done without you.”

  “Mother, mother,” he said quietly and she managed a smile. He called for the children and drew the boy close while Norah brought the little girl. The old lady tried to look from one to the other of them. Then, giving up the struggle, she closed her eyes and died.

  “Father Russell” said the prayers for the dead and only his careful saying of the words might have distinguished him from a parish curate, Peg thought. There were not many men in Ireland after the years of famine who had not heard them often enough to know them by rote.

  “Will you bring the children up?” he said then to Norah, rising from his knees. And seeing so many faces peering silently into his as he gazed about, he called out: “God bless all here!”

  At the steps he took the child from Norah’s arms and carried her up. Vinnie followed and Norah after him. At the hatchway he told the mate that Mary Dunne was at rest.

  Peg bit her lip and set to the chore of laying out the dead woman while the living hung back in fear of what she might have died of. She had no more than put a comb to the woman’s hair, however, when two grim-mouthed seamen came down with their rude winding sheet and thrust her away, attending the body themselves. The emigrants were often too fond of their dead, and Mary Dunne was given a quick burial with only her family attending.

  Peg waited and waited for Norah to come down. She’d been pining the voyage, Peg thought, to go to the priest and now wasn’t missing the chance. Some went up and some came down when the hatchway opened, but Norah was not among them, and presently the word came down that the priest wanted Dennis Lavery. Hard then were the eyes of the women upon her. Well Peg knew what they thought of her, with their men sighing after her when she passed and doing their best to come on her in a tight place so she’d need to squeeze by them, and never the men were blamed but herself only, the women plaguing Norah with their accounts. They’d sidle up to her with a bit of goose grease for the baby and a tongue lathering to tell some new tale of Peg’s immodesty. Sitting snug with Dennis Lavery, they’d say, pretending to teach him his letters as though ever a woman taught a man aught but temptation. Ah, this was their favorite tune, the tempting of Dennis Lavery, for they knew that in her heart Norah herself was cherishing him. A plague on the lot of them, Peg thought—a parcel of creepers, as Young Ireland called them. And the devil a care she had for Lavery either, save the pleasure of seeing him lap up the learning.

  Norah came down then, snuggling the child as though she had borne her. What a thing it would be to part her from that when they got to New York, Peg thought, as hard as parting her from the old man, drunk as he was, the morning they skipped Ireland.

  “I thought you’d leave her with the priest,” Peg said.

  “And what’d he do with her?” said Norah.

  “Did you ask him?”

  “I did not. Dennis is keepin’ the boy with him till we get there.”

  “And you’re not keepin’ her any longer, mind,” said Peg. “What did the priest have to say to you?”

  “He’ll give you a book if you go up to him, Peg.”

  “Was it me you confessed to him?” Peg cried.

  Norah put the child into the bunk and gave her a bit of sugared rag to suck on. “I needed to tell someone what we did to Pa,” she said, “and I’m easier for it now.”

  So, Peg thought, she had confessed to a man who was no priest at all the sin of escaping Ireland, how they had sold one thing and another out of the house, and counted the old man his share, never letting on to him what they planned to do with theirs while he spent his on the drink. “I wonder,” she said in bitter sarcasm, “is Pa the easier for it.”

  And that set Norah into a burst of tears. She pounded her fists on the hard straw pallet. “Oh, Peg, I keep thinkin’ of him gropin’ round the house with the candle to see are we home yet.”

  “Put it out of your mind!”

  “I can’t. I try but I cannot.”

  “Then I’ll give you the picture to drive it out, him foulin’ himself on the stoop of a Sunday mornin’.”

  “Stop it, Peg! You’re possessed of the devil.”

  “Then stop it yourself. You’ve a wonderful way of forgettin’ the bad and mindin’ the good. I’ve not and I’ll never forget it. I’ll never forget Jimmie Dolan comin’ round to walk me to church and runnin’ off when he seen him. There wasn’t a decent thing in him my mother didn’t nail there. He fell in a heap when she went, and for all of me he can lie there till he rots.”

  “I hope you’re never in as much need as him,” Norah said fiercely.

  “If I am, I hope they’ve the sense to let me lie in the gutter. I’m goin’ up now and take the air.”

  “Peg, you don’t understand. You’re too young to know what a man suffers.”

  “Am I?” She swung around the post and whispered: “Then I’ll learn first what a man pleasures, thank you.”

  Norah flung the flat of her hand at her.

  Peg dodged it and said: “What did the priest have to say to your blather?”

  “He was in it with you,” Norah said, “more’s the pity. He said pa was beyond savin’.”

  “And I suppose you had an answer to that with your conscience?”

  Norah lifted her chin. “I asked him why we were beyond tryin’. And he said God Himself would have to give me the answer to that, and it maybe the riddle of Ireland altogether.”

  4

  DENNIS LAVERY HAD BEEN standing at the ship’s rail marveling at the great wide cleanness of the sea. He was a good sailor. There were some in the ship’s belly who had not been up since the sailing. They should be forced up and not down, he thought, for his own strength doubled when he faced the wind. The wonder to him now was that he had not run away to sea as a boy. He had dreamed of it often enough. But the furthest from home he had ever ventured was the ride in a tinker’s caravan into the Wicklow hills. He would likely not be going to America at all if a brother were not there ahead of him.

  Still, he had known a wonderful transformation the day he made up his mind on America, and with every step toward it, he became more of a man than he had known of himself before. He tested the strength of his back with every challenger, and with the very day of sailing he had tried the power of his tongue, and to his own satisfaction he had bested a born agitator parrying words with him on the Liverpool dock. What a discovery that for Dennis Lavery! There was no more to becoming a leader of men than a man’s declaring himself a leader. There was no more to speaking than spitting the words out. What had prompted that first rise in him, he did not know. No more than restlessness, perhaps, or the lumped dumbness of them he was amongst. Perhaps it was the fire in the eyes of Margaret Hickey daring him to be more than the rest of them for he had seen her the moment she stepped on the dock. A shiver of pleasure ran through him with the thought of her.

  He had known one girl only and her a gypsy’s half-wit who took to him when he was fifteen. She had tortured him to be a man to her and scalded the manhood out of him. Now he had it back again, and time at twenty-three. Nor was her lithe sweet body all he saw in Peg, he reasoned. Oh, she was fair, with the fine high forehead, the brown hair with the gold in it flowing out like a silk shawl when she loosed it, the quick smile and the gleaming teeth; but it was the proud word that won him, and her generous heart. Her wit provoked the clown in him and set him dancing. The green daring of her eyes stung him to long plans of a world he could ma
ke which even she would wonder at. Even now while she taught him letters, he gave her words for them she had not dreamed the sweet sound of. And, he hoped, seeing her turn them over in her mind to better get a hold on them, he was himself settling more deep inside her with every one she cherished. Oh, mother of the world, he thought, I could leap from mast to mast at the promise of a sight of her, dry the ocean with the heat she kindles in me.

  He watched now, his mind no longer to the glory of the sea but to the image of Peg’s rising out of the hatchway. He willed her coming. No games would she play with him, no giddy, giggling games like the rest of them, pretending to chance upon him when all the while they had plotted their course.

  Margaret Hickey, he whispered into the wind, I want you. I’m thinking of you and nothing but you. Put down the nonsense you’re scribbling for some poor cuddy. He wouldn’t know a rosebud from an egg of horse dung or he wouldn’t be down there. Come up, Peg. My heart is calling you.

  And, as often happened, when she came into his vision close upon the white heat of his dreams, her presence, after the first leap of his heart, chilled him. He cursed himself for his fears. Love was a torturing thing. It turned a man into a croaking toad when he wanted a golden tongue. He turned quickly back to the rail and himself played the game he scorned in women, pretending not to have seen her come up.

  By the flounce of her skirts seen from the corner of his eye, he could tell she was in a temper and bringing it to him.

  “Fancy it!” she said to his back as though she cared not whether she spoke to him or the sea. “That fine, high sister of mine went to the priest about me.”

  He turned and smiled, secure himself in her temper with someone else. “I’d love to’ve gone to a priest about you myself,” he said slyly, hoping she would find the kernel of earnestness in it.

  If she heard him at all, she did not let on. She frowned and shaded her eyes against the shock of sunlight on the water. He tried to think of another way to pursue it when she cooled off.