Nory Ryan's Song Read online

  “Oh, Anna,” I said, and swung my legs out of the straw. “I will go to Ballilee with it to sell.” I sat on the edge for a moment. It was a long walk and I felt shaky even after the apple.

  Patch struggled up out of the straw. “I will go with you, Nory.”

  Anna grabbed my wrist. “Be careful,” she said sharply. “Don’t let strangers see you with any money. Spend it wisely. Buy only what’s necessary.” She looked angrier than I had ever seen her. But I knew it wasn’t anger. The lines and furrows in her face had to do with worry.

  “I will be careful,” I said. “I will buy what we need and then come back. Will you …”

  “… take care of the little one,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “No.” Patch began to cry. “We will buy a penny bun.”

  I swooped down to give him a hug, but I didn’t stop to tell him he couldn’t go with me. I just went, listening to his crying.

  It was a beautiful day, the sea laid out flat and gray, and in back of me the sun coming up over the cliffs. I walked slowly, the shawl hidden under my petticoat. But no one was on the path this morning. Scavengers were at the water’s edge where nothing would wash up. The land was bare as well. Even the grass was sparse because people had pulled up huge clumps to suck on. Nothing else grew, except the razor-sharp sea grass on the sand dunes near the water.

  I kept walking, planning. How much would I get for the shawl? Whom would I sell it to? What was the most important thing to buy afterward? And I thought of the package in the post office.

  I reached the main street at last. People filled the street, people with no money for a shawl, no money for food. They stood in front of the bakery, waiting, coughing, holding each other up. Others were at the hotel, hands out, swaying a little. Their eyes were huge in their bony faces. And even though the day was cold, some of them wore almost no clothing, just pieces of rags. One woman had only her petticoat. They must have sold whatever they could, I thought, to buy a bit of food.

  I pushed through them to the door of the hotel, and I waited too, looking through the lobby window.

  Inside, women were sitting in front of the hearth. One of them wore a ribboned hat that dipped and bobbed as she spoke. A woman with a brooch and rings sparkling as she moved. Lord Cunningham’s wife!

  She was holding a thick piece of brack to her mouth. But a man guarded the doors; he was so big I’d never be able to pass him. I held up the shawl so the people around me couldn’t see it, but I hoped the woman in the hat did.

  I stood there for a long time watching her take delicate bites of the brack, wondering how it must be to have so much food. At last she wiped her buttery fingers on a piece of cloth and turned toward me. She looked at the shawl, then motioned to the guard.

  He opened the door just enough to take the shawl for her. The woman held it up, feeling the ribs of it, running one finger over the pattern. The hat bobbed once again. She reached into a small red purse and gave coins to the guard.

  I saw him put one in his pocket before he opened the door, but he dropped three others into the palm of my hand.

  I took the steps down from the hotel, pushing my way between two women with babies, and the children who were sitting in the street. I darted around the side of the hotel and sank down in a quiet spot. The coins were of different sizes; how much were they were worth?

  I thought about bread, or a handful of oats. But most of all I thought about the package that lay on the shelf in the post office. If I could have it in my hands, it would be better than a loaf of bread. It would be like having Maggie back with us in Maidin Bay.

  But Patch needed food more than a package that might be anything, or almost nothing. What would Maggie do?

  I stood up at last, feeling dizzy, hungrier then I had ever been, and started up the street, walking around the groups of people. I had never seen so many before. Some of them lay against the walls of the shops, looking as if they’d never get up, their eyes sunken in their heads. They were almost like skeletons. And it was quiet now, so quiet. I pulled my shawl over my mouth and made my way around them to the post office.

  The window was filthy. I peered through the dirt at the shelf with the box and its bits of colored paper, and the R for Ryan. But Patch’s face was in my mind, and Anna’s. Suppose there was no food in that box or nothing that could be turned into food? But there was something inside that Maggie thought we wanted or needed. What?

  I leaned against a piece of glass in the window to stop the pounding in my head. It was cool and I hated to move. But I went through the alley to the back of the bakery with the coins tight in my hands.

  At the doorway, I held out one of the coins the way I had held out the shawl, covering it so only the baker could see what I was holding. After a while he came to the door and reached for the coin with his dusty white hands. He came back with a knob of flour in a twist of paper and a handful of oats in a small bag.

  What else could I buy? I hurried, head down, to the main street again with the package under my shawl. I had to find something that would last.

  A man holding a can blocked my way. “It’s milk,” he said, “the last from my cow before they took her away.” He bit his lips, chapped as Celia’s and mine were, but there was something about him, his eyes almost hidden under straggly hair, that made me think of Devlin. I took a step away.

  He followed me. “The whole can for a coin.”

  My headache was worse; I was dizzy, trying to think of what to do.

  Should I buy it?

  Would I spill the milk on the way home?

  It had a strange color after all, almost like one of Biddy’s eggs. I shook my head and took another step and another …

  … and backed into the doorway of the post office.

  I was dizzy, thinking of Maggie’s face in front of me. She shook her head, no, and Celia said, “You never think of what you’re doing.”

  I should put this coin into Anna’s hand. Instead I put a coin on the counter. I couldn’t even speak. I just pointed up. Somehow I knew Anna wouldn’t mind.

  The postman looked down at the coin. He shook his head, so I put down the last coin. And then the package was in front of me, and I was putting my N on a lined piece of paper. “To say that you received it, you know,” he said.

  I went out the door, holding it, weighing it in my mind, not heavy, not light. I ran my fingers over the bits of color, red and green, and the writing. I could even pick out my own N, and Celia’s C, as well as the R for our Ryan. But I didn’t stop to open it. I took the narrow twisting road that circled Maidin Bay and led toward home. Through my dizziness I could still see us, the three of us, around Anna’s hearth. We’d have a dollop of stirabout each and enough flour for a tiny loaf of bread that would last us for days. And maybe by that time Celia and Granda would be back, and Da with coins in his pocket, and I would tell him, “Anna first.”

  As I reached the top of the hill, I saw her house below. My head was full of my packages and how I would put them on the table and what Anna would say and what Patch would do. I hardly felt the rain as it pelted down on me, covering the road and the rock walls on each side. I hardly noticed the fog as it blotted out the cliffs.

  By the time I heard the footsteps it was too late. I felt a hand on the back of my neck, felt the push. I threw my hands out to stop myself from falling, but it didn’t help. There was a sudden pain as I went down and a rock tore open my forehead.

  I looked up to see the man running with my packages under his arm, his hair streaming out in back of him. His can of milk rolled down the hill, splashing milk as it went.

  I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see anything else. Celia was right. I didn’t think.

  It seemed as if my eyes were closed for only a minute, even though it was dark when I opened them and I lay in the straw of Anna’s bed, shivering. Anna and Patch crouched on the floor next to me, both watching.

  Anna held up my head and poured something into my mouth. Something
bitter, fuafar. And even though I could hardly think, I knew the herb: comfrey.

  “Nory is sick,” Patch said, but Anna shook her head. “Not sick, shocked. Something happened to her.”

  The sound of a cloth being ripped, cool water on my head, the smell of comfrey. I was asleep, and then awake, listening to Patch ask for food, to Anna as she made a soup for him and tucked him in beside me, still listening as Patch’s breath slowed and thickened in sleep.

  Anna’s hand was on my cheek. “It’s all right,” she kept saying. “It will be all right.”

  I opened my eyes once, and then, at last, I really slept.

  CHAPTER

  19

  How long had I slept? Was it hours or days? For the first time I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t cold, either. It was as if I’d been leaning against the sunwarmed rocks at Patrick’s Well in June. Deep in the straw I could feel the roundness of Patch’s heel against my back.

  But there was something I had to think about. What was it? I turned, just the smallest bit, but it was enough to lose the warm spot I had made. I folded my arms over my chest and curved my back, digging my chin down, folding myself into a ball.

  The thing to think about: maybe it was just a sneeze coming. I wiggled my nose, but the straw was old, settled. It wasn’t that. I had a quick picture of Da standing outside our doorway one summer, the rick of hay caught on the edge of his pitchfork. “New bedding,” he said, and the dust of the hay had swirled in the sunlight like a shower of gold. Ah, Da.

  It came back to me, as Patch moved again, whimpered. I had lost everything. Patch was going to die, and Anna. We were all going to die, the three of us, here in the straw, warm and cozy, but without food.

  And then the other thing. The thing I’d been pressing out of my head. The cliffs. The sound of them, almost as if they were alive, screaming in the wind, and far below, the pounding of the surf with the spray shooting high into the air, and falling back and back, taking bits of rock and stone, and anyone who was clinging there.

  Pale light came in under the door. We’d slept half the morning away. I reached out, and Patch moved closer in his sleep. Could Anna be asleep too?

  Up on my elbow, I peered across the room at the other straw bed. If I had seen her that way last year I would have been sure she was a witch: wisps of white hair, wrinkled cheeks, long fingers clutching the coats that covered her.

  I rolled out of the bed, my head throbbing, and felt her eyes on me. I went first to the hearth to blow the fire into life. Then I leaned over her. “Are you sick?”

  She shook her head, but I wasn’t satisfied. “Do you have something to eat in the house?” I asked. “Is there anything for you at all?” But I knew the answer before she told me. The coin, the milk, the apple. I had taken them all.

  “My fault,” I said.

  She shook her head and said something to me, but she was mumbling. I caught the word song and then Tague. She reached up and patted my sleeve. Then she was quiet again, sleeping.

  I looked back at Patch. There was nothing to him but a small fold under the clothes. The hand against his cheek was nothing but bones.

  We had to have something to eat. Something more than water with roots and leaves Anna had saved. We had to have real food.

  Anna spoke without opening her eyes. “They are starving to death in their houses,” she said.

  “Yes,” I told her, a tap of pain in my forehead.

  “We would have had enough,” she said, “even without the potatoes, if the English had left us the animals, the grain.”

  I thought of Biddy and her sisters laying warm brown eggs in their baskets, Muc to have piglets one day. All gone down to the harbor and across the sea to the English.

  Only the birds that flew over the cliffs in Maidin Bay were left.

  I swallowed. It was there again. A picture of the cliffs, great monsters with the wind screaming, tearing.

  I sat back on my heels, thinking I couldn’t do it, that no one could do it. But I heard Maggie saying, “You will know what to do yourself. Great girl, a stór.”

  “I know a way to get food.” I reached out to touch Anna’s forehead. She had a fever. I went to the table and mixed the greens together, stirring as I watched her. A moment later I put my arm under her, lifted her, and made her drink. A sip, two sips. I hoped it would be enough.

  I boiled water next, and put a handful of herbs to float in it for a soup. I raised Patch’s head to give him some, then left the rest of it on the floor next to him. “I will be gone a long time,” I told him, “and you will stay here.” I bit my lip. “Stay right in this warm bed.”

  Outside I picked up two stones, one triangular and one perfectly round. I went back inside and left them for Patch to find next to the soup; then I wrapped my shawl around my shoulders and went across the field, thinking of Celia and Granda, wondering if they were alive. When I reached the Mallons’ house, I stopped. It was almost a miracle. Sean Red was huddled outside on the step in the pale sun. His head was down, but he looked up as I called, “Dia duit.” He smiled when he saw who it was.

  I sat beside him, looking at his face. Something had happened to his teeth. They looked huge in his face. And then I saw that his teeth weren’t different but his face had changed. His cheeks were sunken and flat like Granda’s; his eyes were deep in his head. He looked at me and I knew he was thinking I looked terrible too.

  “Oh, Sean,” I said. We moved closer, leaning against each other.

  “I know where there is food,” I said slowly, the way I had to Anna. “Enough to keep us going. Maybe all of us. Your mother and Granny …”

  “Granny’s gone.” He raised one hand toward the cemetery.

  I shook my head. “But we didn’t pray over her.”

  No wake, no funeral. And then I thought about it. No money for the food and the poitín at the wake. And who was left to come? People were trying to get a ship to America, or they were sick lying in the streets of Ballilee, or just wandering out on the road as Devlin put them out of their houses.

  Sean looked as if he didn’t have the strength of Patch, but I couldn’t think of that now. “How are your hands, Sean Red?” I asked. “Are they strong enough to hold me on a line?”

  His head was down again, his hands dangling.

  “I am going out on the cliffs,” I said. “Like Tague. I’ll take the eggs of the wild birds if I can find them.”

  Still he didn’t answer. But wasn’t that like Sean, hating to open his mouth? I began again. “Do you think I like to talk to the top of your red head?” I tapped his shoulder. “It’s not your head I need, it’s your hands.”

  He put out his hands and showed me the palms: red and purple, bruised, cut, and blistered. He couldn’t even bend his fingers.

  I bit my lip so hard I could taste the blood. He’d never hold a rope; he couldn’t hold anything.

  “They wouldn’t let me work on the road anymore,” he said.

  I knew what that meant. The Mallons had no way of getting food.

  I grabbed his sleeve, feeling the long bones of his arm underneath. “We will find a way,” I said. “We’ll have food for you and your mother, for Anna, and Patch, and we’ll hold ourselves over until we plant again, or until my da comes back.”

  “And someday we will go to Brooklyn, New York, America,” Sean said.

  “Smith Street,” I whispered.

  In my head I saw the box with its bits of colored paper and the R that stood for Ryan.

  “You can’t go down on a rope,” he said. “Tague was killed that way. You know that.”

  “Do you think I’m going to die for want of food,” I asked, “when it’s there on the cliffs waiting for me?” But even as I said it I wondered if I could do it. I looked up across the fields. I could almost see Da there, and Celia and Granda, coming to save us.

  CHAPTER

  20

  “We can’t,” Sean said again.

  “Will you say this all afternoon?” I asked him. “Until th
e sun falls away from us and the birds go back to their nests?”

  He made a sound, but I didn’t listen. “First we’ll get the ropes,” I said. “Then we’ll go up to the cliff.”

  “I will never hold you,” he said, putting his hands up to his face. “But you could hold me.”

  “And how would you carry the eggs without breaking them?” I tried to smile.

  He nodded. “We’ll tie the rope to my waist then and to the rocks. If we cover my hands with cloth, I will manage somehow, Nory.” He looked into my face. “I will never let you fall.”

  “I know that, Sean Red.”

  He looked back at the door of his house, a quiet house without the sound of his mother’s scolding. Was she lying in her bed, as sick as Anna?

  I looked across the field. A small shape tottered toward me. I stood up. “Patch.”

  “I’m coming, Nory,” he called. “Coming to find you.”

  My hand went to my mouth. What could I do with him?

  “We can’t take him,” Sean said.

  I shook my head. There was no time to go back to Anna’s. And there was only silence in Mallons’ house. “We can’t leave him.”

  “He’ll fall.”

  I ran my tongue over my dry lips. “We’ll lash him to a rock. We’ll make sure he doesn’t fall. Somehow we’ll do that.”

  He sighed. “Yes, all right.” He walked away from me then, going around the side of the house for his brothers’ fishing ropes, reaching for the cart to carry them, using his wrists rather than his hands.

  He leaned into the cart, pushing it with his body, and stopped at the end of the yard so I could find a place for Patch on top of the ropes, a place so small that his feet grazed the ground. “I’ll pull it,” I said.

  The climb was almost a dream, the rocky road under my feet, the road rising. The wind was just a breath at first, and then it tore at my face. There was a blast of it as we reached the top. I am Maeve, I thought, remembering the day I had twirled over the rocks singing, with nothing to worry about, with Maggie still home and the potatoes growing green in the field.