Flying With Amelia Read online

  ALSO BY ANNE DEGRACE

  Treading Water

  Wind Tails

  Sounding Line

  For my children, who are making their own stories

  FLYING WITH AMELIA

  ANNE DEGRACE

  McArthur & Company

  Toronto

  First published in 2011 by

  McArthur & Company

  322 King Street West, Suite 402

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5V 1J2

  www.mcarthur-co.com

  Copyright © 2011 Anne DeGrace

  All rights reserved.

  The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the express written consent of the publisher, is an infringement of the copyright law.

  The author is grateful for permission to use an excerpt from Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada by Mark Satin.

  Reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  DeGrace, Anne

  Flying with Amelia / Anne DeGrace.

  ISBN 978-1-55278-979-7

  I. Title.

  PS8607.E47F59 2011––C813’.6––C2011-904290-8

  eISBN 978-1-77087-030-7

  The publisher would like to acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for our publishing activities. The publisher further wishes to acknowledge the financial support of the Ontario Arts Council and the OMDC for our publishing program.

  Design and composition by Ingrid Paulson

  Author photograph by Tam Forde

  eBook development by Wild Element

  www.WildElement.ca

  FLYING WITH AMELIA

  ONE

  ACROSS THE ATLANTIC

  ·1847·

  III

  WE COUNT THE days by making scratches in the rough wood of our berth, as if we are in prison, and prison it is, even if freedom lies at the end — if end we reach. The ship heaves and rolls, creaks and sighs, as do we all: one hundred and seventy-six souls below decks. We are but one family: Daniel and I, our four children, and my sisters — Catherine, eighteen, and Sally, two years her junior — amid so many others. The children fall asleep against us, and we, sometimes, against each other, like a pile of barn cats but not so well fed — although a cat would do well in this hold. It would need to be a big cat indeed so as not to be devoured itself by the rats.

  Fanny, awake, leans against me, her body hot and damp, as the others sleep. We have been talking, remembering the ginger tom that could sometimes be seen sitting on our wall of an early morn. I hold Fanny curled in my lap, Finn and Henry sleeping with their small heads against my skirts, and whisper about that big old tomcat. I wonder aloud what he’s doing now, and if he misses us. Eliza, who thinks herself too old for such tales (herself the eldest at just seven years), pretends not to listen, but I know she does. For the telling of stories makes the time pass.

  WHEN I FIRST SAW the hold in which we were to travel across the Atlantic, I thought: as bad as things were in Waterford, this is worse. Rows and rows of rough berths lined with a bit of straw, trunks and cases now doing duty as tables, and everywhere, families trying to sort themselves into cramped quarters the like of which we could not have imagined. At first it was something of an adventure for the children, who ran about between the rows, but that changed within hours of sailing, as the roll of the sea made us all sick, with buckets soon full and nothing to be done about it.

  That first day I watched as Daniel spoke with the husband and father of the family whose berth is next to ours. Each berth is barely long as a man is tall, and as wide as that again. We were assigned two berths for our family: two berths between the eight of us, and my heart fell at the thought of it. And yet the Murphys next to us were given just one berth for two parents and six children, the oldest son almost as big as his father.

  I looked over at Martha Murphy, standing with her children around her, and looked away, torn between being the good Christian I wanted to be, and knowing that the journey is long, and space will be precious. There was nothing to be said once arrangements are made, as Daniel’s word is final. The youngest Murphy girls — twins Jane and Agnes, and two-year-old Bridget — would share our upper berth with Sally and Catherine. Daniel and I and the children would share the lower. Martha and Paddy Murphy would now share their berth with their three older boys.

  “It’s the right thing, Mary,” Daniel told me quietly, and I nodded. Now, the distribution of human bodies is fairer. And fair my Daniel is, which is a fine quality, and the one that makes me love him most. He was fair enough to pay passage for Sally and Catherine, and it means the world to me.

  We had to say goodbye to Da, who would not leave his Eire. True enough he urged us all to go, as Mama would have done were she still with us, God rest her soul. There was never a sadder day than that, and it pains my heart to think of it. Da stayed in Waterford where our cousins have taken him in. We said goodbye and then made the trip to Dublin, and from Dublin to Liverpool across the cold Irish sea, to huddle together in the hold of a ship we prayed might be seaworthy while we waited for the hatch to close, and the journey to begin.

  As we settled in on that first day, Martha Murphy caught my eye and her thin smile was grateful, as she knew as well as I the value of this gift. Now, I wonder: would I have been so charitable, had I known?

  IIIII II

  THE DAYS HAVE been fine, and we spend as much time as we can above decks. The children play with others, but the rules are clear: there’s to be no running about where a child might fall through the rail, and in any case, the crew keeps us to our area, for there is much to be done to keep us on our course.

  I watch Eliza, hoping she will find a playmate among the children. She is a serious child, especially since she saw her father cry in pain when the accident happened, and understood our talk as we sold one thing, and then another, to pay for the doctor. She stays close by, and is a help with her brothers and sister, but I would that she would play just a little.

  At night we must stay below decks — the Master’s rule — and last night there was a fiddle and a pennywhistle and someone had a pan and a wooden spoon, and there was dancing. Two young men from the crew came down and brought with them three barrels of beer — the Master could not have known — struggling down the ladder, and with help from the reaching arms of our men below. For they are Irish like ourselves, and when they heard the music they wanted to join the fun.

  The lads danced with the ladies, and the children dance amongst themselves, and before long the beer was gone, for it was not so much amongst so many men. But the presence of it made them merry just the same, and the women for seeing the men cast their worries aside for a bit.

  And now it is night again, and the once-calm sea is calm no more, and there’ll be no dancing tonight.

  IIIII IIIII III

  THE HATCH HAS been closed two days, the better to keep us from drowning as the storm-ravaged sea sweeps the decks above, but it’s hard to imagine a fate worse than drowning in our own foul mess. Not a fortnight into the voyage and so many sick with the dysentery, and worse. The straw does nothing to stop the contents of stomach or bowels from seeping through top bunk to bottom for those too weak to reach the buckets, which in any case overflow and will not be emptied ’til the storm abates. The stench is not something I will soon forget, the dank air close with the heat of un
washed bodies. Some have the Ship’s Fever, with the aches and chills and pain and sores, and I hold the children close and pray.

  Sometimes I hear Martha do the same. She is a frail thing, with skin so white as to look like china, and eyes too big for her face. But she has a lovely smile, and better teeth than my own. She worked as a serving girl in a big house, she told me, until the mistress died and the master’s new wife brought her own people. When she told me, she sounded wistful, but I’d not want a life in service such as that. My Daniel had his own shop, and worked for no master.

  My sisters and I are Murphys too, like the family who shifts and whimpers in sleep nearby — or at least, a Murphy I was until Daniel McGrath took me for his wife. And so we have a name in common if we are not related in some way, as most of Ireland is, I suppose. It’s something to have, this bond, however small, as we voyage in this heaving, tossing, stinking, ship across the Atlantic to what we hope will be a better life.

  Most on the ship have had passage paid by their landlords, who’d sooner see them gone for a few pounds’ passage than have to look at them starving on the land, the rent unpaid, potatoes black in the fields. We were near as hungry as the rest of them, with starvation not so far ahead. It’s a terrible thing to have a hungry child and not a crust to give him.

  “We’ll go while we have our health, Mary,” Daniel said. “There’s nothing for us here.” He’d received a letter that day from his brother Niall in Newfoundland, and indeed it seemed that in such a place we might make a life.

  “Tell us about Ginger Tom,” whispers Finn now, his dirty thumb in his mouth, and I do, because it will help pass the night until, the Lord be with us, the day is fine tomorrow and we can go above decks, wash ourselves in seawater as best we can, and let the sun fall upon us. The pitch has subsided, now, the worst of the storm passed.

  “Well, he was a big old cat,” I begin, and my Daniel reaches over and rests his good hand on my head where it lies, warm and comforting. I feel something crawl beneath his fingers, then feel his fingers in my hair, searching for pests to pinch, knowing there is no point but doing it just the same.

  “How big?” Finn’s eyes are wide in the dim light from the swinging lamps as he turns his head around to see me, and I smile just a bit, for the cracks in my lips make it hurt to smile more.

  “Bigger than you,” I tell him.

  “Bigger than Eliza?”

  “Oooh, twice as big,” I tell him, and I can feel Eliza shift; she’s listening, even if she won’t let on. She seldom speaks these days, and now I wonder when I last heard the voice of my oldest daughter, who has shrunk into such a sad wee thing. “He grew so big the mice weren’t near enough to keep him.”

  “What did he eat?” Fanny, now. She has Henry curled in her lap, and she whispers so as not to wake him, even though around us are the sighs and groans of people and the creaking beams of the ship. From far above comes the crack of sails in the wind, and across the hold a pennywhistle plays a mournful tune. It is eerie quiet of late, as it was not when we began this voyage eight days ago. The children no longer play, and with the rough seas and the sickness, no one has the will to sing or dance as we did in the first days, when we were happy to be on our way at last, and, despite our hardships, full of the promise of a new life.

  Daniel, beside me, scratches at his own hair with the two remaining fingers of his right hand. Whatever will we do in the new world? “Pigs,” he says, and it takes me a moment to remember the story I was telling.

  “Pigs?” I hear a small laugh from below, and it’s Catherine. I am grateful, again, for Daniel being the kind of man he is, buying passage and provisions for my sisters as well as us with the sale of the blacksmithy and the money Niall sent from St. John’s. The sound of Catherine’s laugh warms me.

  “Pigs,” Daniel continues. “That Mr. Ginger started hunting the pigs, right under Lord Richbugger’s nose, for who would think an old tomcat would be stalking such a thing as a pig? He began with just a small pig, mind you. Just to start.” Below, the shift and sighs of Catherine, Sally, and the Murphy girls, and in Fanny’s lap Henry stirs, waking.

  As Daniel tells the tale of how the ginger cat got the pig despite the best efforts of its foolish owner, in my mind’s eye I can see the fields of Eire, the green, gentle-looking hills belying the misery of those who toiled upon them. In Waterford we were a little better off than the tenant farmers: we had two small rooms, and a shack for the smithy, there on the edge of town. When our own small plot of potatoes turned black we’d already got wind of the blight and the hunger that followed, but oatmeal could still be had in trade: a wagon refitted for someone with more than ourselves, a bit of work here and there. And then came the accident.

  “. . . and, being such a good old kitty, he brought the tender piglet — carried it he did over his shoulder like a sack o’ spuds — to the McGrath home, for wee Henry had been kind to old Tom Ginger all the while, as Henry always loved God’s creatures. Don’t you, Henry?”

  “Yes,” says Henry.

  “And all of the children — Henry and Fanny and Finn and Eliza — danced a jig, and Mama made a grand feast for us all.”

  From the berth beside ours, in the darkness, I hear a soft cluck of disapproval.

  “You should not be talking so. It makes us all hungry,” whispers Martha.

  “All the better to dream,” I tell her, “for sure enough dreams are all we have.”

  She doesn’t answer. I’m not angry with her; I know that gnawing longing as we all try not to think about the hole we feel inside. In the darkness I can hear her sigh, and then her steady breathing. She is sleeping, and for that I am envious.

  IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII II

  THERE IS LITTLE left of the provisions we brought with us. They said the trip would take twenty-one days, but I heard two of the crew talking, a couple of the mates — not so much older than young Tom Murphy — saying that the storm which kept us shut up those two long days took us well off course. The water we have to drink is brackish, but there is enough, yet. We have food for a day or two more, and the portions will be thin, sure. After the accident, and everything we had gone to pay the doctor, we knew hunger, but not like we know hunger now.

  The hatch opens, and light and air stream in from above, the salt air sweet, and Daniel takes his knife and carves one more mark in the wood. Another day, and we are all still here.

  Henry cries as I splash him with the cold water, but it’s a fine day and the sun is warm, and if we stay sheltered from the wind it will dry him soon enough. Daniel is talking to Paddy Murphy, and there is a seriousness to their faces, and all at once I realize that Martha is not above decks. It’s Catherine and Sally washing the Murphy girls, not Martha. Colum and Liam splash seawater at one another, but there is no joy in it.

  I search for Tom, at thirteen the eldest Murphy boy. When I saw him first, when this voyage began, he was a good-looking, freckled lad, just growing into the man he will someday be. He is leaning on the rail, his head down, thin and pale and small.

  “Tom?” I touch his shoulder.

  “Leave me. Leave us,” he mutters, his voice flat. “There’ll be no help for us.”

  Eliza has the wee ones in hand. I go below, and there I find Martha with the fever, and she does not see me at all.

  IIIII IIIII IIIII IIIII IIII

  YESTERDAY, MARTHA MURPHY died. I heard the wail, and though it was hard to fathom as human, I knew it to be Paddy. Afraid as I was for myself and my family, I smoothed her hair and straightened her dress and Daniel alerted the crew; three dead were taken up this morning from the hold in canvas slings that served as coffins as they were slipped overboard, with a prayer to the Virgin for their safe passage to heaven. I did my best not to think of the dark water or the things that dwell there.

  There is more room, I suppose, in the Murphy berth now.

 
Sally and Catherine keep the Murphy girls with them, and Paddy has the boys, and we keep our children close, but there is no escape from filth and disease, the smell and the sorrow. The Murphy boys have taken to Catherine as well, and I suppose that with their mother gone a woman’s touch is a comfort. I see Tom, his chin on his hands, listening to every word. Like Eliza, he’s spoken little of late.

  Catherine’s picked up the Tale of Ginger Tom, spinning broader and broader yarns to the delight of all. Catherine was a storyteller from the moment she could talk, for I was six years when she was born, my mother having lost two between, and I remember well. I sit above and listen, and when the ship begins to sway with the swells that speak of stormy weather, I let her voice wash over me as I try to keep my stomach in its place. There is nothing for it to give up, anyway.

  Daniel has used most of what little money we brought to purchase biscuits and water from the Master’s stores, paying terrible prices for hard things made of flour and sawdust. Some have weevils, and I tap them out so the children will not see. Paddy Murphy has traded the family broach that Martha had treasured so. We share our food, the Murphys and the McGraths, as if we were one family. It is not so everywhere in the hold, where one desperate moment of thievery led to murder two nights ago. The Ship’s Master is a cowardly man, and has left us to ourselves.

  We are still days from port.

  I look in the faces of my children for the healthy, happy things they once were. I wonder at my own face. Daniel and I seldom look at one another, so painful is the sight. And yet, we are better off than many. There are still a few biscuits from the Master’s cupboard, stored now in the tin I keep tightly closed, nestled amid the foul straw. There is still water in the jug.

  “Feel the sway, Bridget?” I hear Catherine ask, her voice drifting up, weary-sounding, from below. “We’re in a cradle, we are, like babes, and that’s Old Tom Ginger, rocking us off to sleep.”