Captains and The Kings (3 page)

Daniel's brother, Jack Armagh, had gone to America five years ago and worked on the steamcars in the State of New York and he, in solicitude, though poor himself, had sent Daniel some dollars in gold and Daniel had exclaimed with joy and had cried, "Sure, and I never lost hope and here is the Mercy in our hands, and all will be well!" He had then gone to Limerick on the coach and had returned with a basket of bread and some eggs and a little lamb and bacon and a few gnarled vegetables, and he was as ebullient as ever though the dead lay buried at the bottom of his garden, unshriven and as dry as juiceless twigs, mother with babe in her withered arms, old husbands and wives pressed together. Daniel remembered them at Mass each morning, but it was as if they had never truly lived and had died in his barren barns.
Chapter 2
Joseph, now sitting on the edge of the bunk where his little brother slept with tears on his wan cheeks, remembered all the dolorous suffering of Ireland and his father who waited for his family. He remembered, also, that the English Queen had contemptuously offered multitudes of the Irish free passage to America to escape starvation and oppression; it was evident that she considered America still a penal colony as her grandfather had so considered it, and still a British possession though a worthless one. The multitudes who had no alternative but death and brutality and starvation had fled their stricken land, with weeping. But Daniel's brother had sent passage money for the steerage. Daniel, hopeful always, had hesitated. Sure and matters were not so evil now in Ireland. Some farms were producing again. It was "best to wait." The Sassenagh was tiring of his vindictiveness. Then the little family was evicted for taxes and a cousin of Moira's in Carney took them into his crowded small cottage. For once Daniel was more discreet. He did not squander the passage money. He shared a portion of it with Moira's cousin for necessary bread and a handful of vegetables -half-rotten-once a week, and a slab of bacon. When that was gone, and the passage money in danger, Joseph had confronted his father. Moira had not told her husband that only yesterday an English soldier had accosted her in the main street of Carney, that little village, and that when he had dragged insistently on her shawl she had struck him in the face with her last strength. He had punched her, then, in the breast until she screamed in agony, and then had kicked her to the stones, and had left her, shouting with mirth and execrations and foul epithets. Moira's cousin's wife had seen this, and had assisted the weeping crouched woman home, and Moira had begged her not to tell Daniel, and Joseph had heard. The shawl was moved aside, and the buttons of the ragged bodice opened, and Joseph saw the black and purple bruises on his mother's young white flesh, so shrunken with starvation now, and he had clenched his fists and he had known his first lust to kill. So Daniel, packing his few clothes in a black cardboard portmanteau, had left his country with tears in his eyes, and had glanced for the last time at his son, Joseph, who seemed to him to be an old and unrelenting man and not a child, and the innocent reproach in Daniel's eyes had not touched Joseph at all. For fear that his father might turn back at the very last Joseph had accompanied Daniel to the pub in the stark cold wet dawn, and there had waited with him for the coach to Queenstown, and the ship. The rain struck their faces and Daniel had tried to whistle, but it was a sad sound. When the coach rumbled up, and Daniel had thrown his luggage on the roof, the father had turned to his son and said, "Ye will be the father to your mother and Scan, Joey, and bring them to me in America." "Yes, Dad," said the boy. He looked at the four great horses, steaming and stamping in the half-light, their hides agleam with water and sweat, and at the white faces staring through the running windows at the new passenger. The coachman cracked his whip and it was a cutting sound in the village silence, and Daniel had hesitated for a final word, and then had smiled his radiant smile, climbed into the coach, and was gone. It was as if, to Joseph, a charming but incompetent older brother had departed, and he shook his rain-wet head and smiled a little in love and reluctant indulgence. He knew that the charming and the lovable had their place in life, but it was a trivial place and the first to be shattered when disaster struck. It was a village of gingerbread, where they lived and had their uncertain being, and the roofs were only sugar-icing. They were like flowers, the adornment of gardens, and so were not to be despised, except when life demanded that food be planted in their place for sustenance. If they were then uprooted, it was sorrowful but inevitable. Joseph did not fault them. They had been born so. Now, as he sat with his little brother, Scan, who was fitfully sleeping, he feared that Scan was too like the father and he vowed in his desolate and emptied heart that he would teach Scan to face truth without fear, and despair with resolution, and to despise false words of hope. The world was an evil place, and did not he, Joseph, know it surely? It was a dangerous place. Only courage and will could conquer it or at least cow it so that it withdrew from a man's throat with a snarl and crawled away for a time on its belly. But it always waited and lurked for a moment of weakness on the part of its victims, a moment of expansive optimism and buoyancy and belief in a rainbowed future. Then it struck the fools to the death. Joseph had read his father's books, not with Daniel's interpretation that man became better and nations more civilized as time passed, but with cynical understanding. Tyranny was man's natural mode of government and his secret desire, and liberty was always threatened by men, themselves, through their governments and through their easy acquiescence and lack of fortitude. On realizing this, Joseph became a man and was no longer a child or even a youth.
Joseph sat in the deepening cold of the men's portion of the deck, and thought. The sick moaned in their pain-racked sleep. The men no longer sang, but sat mutely side by side on the lower bunks, their heads and hands hanging, or they, too, slept. The ship groaned and creaked. The cattle below lowed uneasily. Joseph sat near his sleeping little brother, his eyes fixed, almost without blinking, on the gritty deck beneath his feet. Where would they go, now? Where would they be permitted to land, if ever? Joseph knew of the many little ships that had put out from Ireland during the Famine, only to be broken on reefs or to founder in the ocean, or to bring a dying cargo back to the stricken shore. He knew that a half or more of those who had sailed for America on great ships had died before their arrival of disease and Famine Fever and slow starvation, and had been buried at sea. (Many of those on this ship had suffered that and had been lowered quickly into the water at night, accompanied only by the prayers of the old priest and the Sisters.) The survivors, he had learned, had been forced to take shelter in cold sheds on the wharf, there to suffer or die without food or water or warm clothing, until "authorities" could determine whether or not they were a danger to the cities with their cholera and "consumption" and fever. The healthy, and the lucky, then had been permitted to join relatives and friends who waited for them and who could take them to warmth and fires and food. The dead were shoveled into mass graves, anonymous and forgotten. Many of the ships, too, had been turned back at various ports in America. They were not wanted. They were the destitute and the starveling, and they were "Romans" and Irish and trouble-makers and strange. The Religious were especially despised and secretly feared.
Was Daniel Armagh still waiting for his family on the wharf in New York? Did he know they had been rejected, and could not land? It was winter: Was he standing at the door of one of the sheds and staring hopelessly at the big anchored ship with its slack sails and its wet fortress-like hull? Was he doing, thought Joseph with an acrid taste of bitterness in his mouth, anything at all for his imprisoned family except praying? Did he know that hrs young wife was dead? Dead. Joseph squeezed his dry eyes shut and his chest became tight and smothering with his huge hatred and sorrow. Oh, Mum, he said in himself. They could not consign her to the ocean in the harbor. They would wait until they were at sea, again. They would bind her in a ragged blanket and fasten her body to a thin frame of wood, and she would go into the cold and blackness of the water just as her soul was in the cold blackness of nothingness now. But he dared not think of this yet. There was the immediate calamity to be faced. Would they be returned to Ireland, and would they then all perish inevitably on the way back, or on landing? Joseph did not ask himself: "Is there no pity and mercy among men, no help for the helpless, no justice for the innocent?" That question was for men like his father and those who had unrealistic hope, and the weak and sentimental and stupid. The real question confronted him: How was he to assure the survival of his brother and his infant sister, and himself? If he were alone or had only Scan to consider he might contrive, in the morning just before dawn, to steal from the ship when it moved to the wharfs to unload the cattle and the passengers who comfortably traveled on the upper decks, from which steerage passengers were excluded. Authorities were not too difficult to circumvent, if one assumed a confident and assured appearance and was clean and quiet. However, there was the baby, and even the dullest of authorities would be curious about a youth with an infant in his arms, and accompanied by a young child also, with no apparent guardians. Though he, Joseph, could doubtless manage to provide some food and shelter for two boys, the little girl needed womanly comfort and care, and where were these to be found for the derelict? A sick man nearby began to cough violently, and at once the suffering and restless sleepers about him stirred and began to cough also, in tearing and rasping and spitting chorus. One by one the convulsion of misery spread through the men's quarters, then was taken up by the women and children beyond the jute curtain, until the dolorous echoes went back and forth incessantly. Only one lantern had been left lighted in the men's quarters and it enhanced the cold and shifting dimness rather than relieved it. Joseph remained unaware, except that he tucked the blanket closer about his sleeping brother. He, himself, had not put on his thin coat; he sat in his shirt and traced, over and over, a stain on the knee of his pantaloons with his index finger. His mind was one intensity and focus on his predicament. Weeks ago, at the beginning of the journey, he had felt compassion for his fellow travelers, especially the children, and fear that his family might acquire one of their diseases. But now his compassion was ruthlessly quelled in his own struggle to survive. He had no time even for grief or despair. The four portholes began to emerge grayly from the gloom as dawn approached. The stench from unwashed and dying bodies and from the latrines filled the cold dank air. The wooden ceiling dripped. The sawdust on the floor was smeared ominously with the blood from diseased lungs. Joseph traced the stain on his knee with rising quickness. His strong and russet hair hung in ragged points over his forehead and ears and neck. He felt a touch on his shoulder and looked up with blank and sunken eyes. Old Father O'Leary was standing before him, in his long nightshirt. "You haven't been to bed," said the priest. "Sure, and you will be sick, too, if ye do'not rest, Joey." "How will we let my father know we cannot leave the ship?" asked Joseph. "In the morning, I will go ashore-it is permitted for me for an hour- and I will find Danny and tell him, and we should know, then, where we are going. It is to Philadelphia, I think, and let us pray that they will permit us to land. Joey, you must rest for a bit." "Philadelphia?" said Joseph. "Is it far from New York? It has a pretty sound." The old priest smiled painfully, his ancient and haggard face falling into deep gray lines. His shock of white hair was disheveled and as ragged as Joseph's, and his nightshirt dragged on his skeleton body. "Philadelphia," he said. "It means the City of Brotherly Love. Pray they will have some 'love' for us, Joey. We must trust in God-" A flick of wild impatience touched Joseph's eyes. "If it is far, hovj; then will my father reach us and take us home to New York?"
"Trust in God," said the priest. "Nothing is impossible with Him. Joey, there is some hot tea the women are brewing, and I will bring you a cup, and then you must rest awhile." "We will travel to New York," said Joseph. "I have fifteen dollars, which my mother gave to me for keeping." It was as if he were speaking aloud to himself, and the priest's face trembled with sorrow and pity. "It is a lot of money, Joey," he said. "Be comforted. I have spoken to a seaman and he will bring some milk for the baby before the cattle are taken ashore, if he can manage to steal below. I gave him four shillings." "I will repay you, Father," said the boy. He looked down at his sleeping brother. Was the child's face flushed with fever? Joseph touched his cheek. "When will they throw my mother into the sea?" asked the boy, raising his head and staring at the priest. "Joey," said Father O'Leary, and he felt a pang of fear for the boy, for this dead composure was unnatural. He had not shown a tear or displayed any anguish. "It is only your mother's body, but her soul is with God and His Blessed Mother. Let that comfort you, that her earthly pain and striving are over, and she is at peace. I have known her since she was a babe, and I baptised her, and never was a sweeter colleen and a woman. Her memory will bless you, and from the radiance of heaven she sends her love to you." "It will be when we sail, will it not?" said Joseph. "You must let me know." Nothing stirred on his face nor in his dark blue eyes, so gritty now with black fatigue. "I will, that, Joey," said the priest, and again he touched Joseph's shoulder timidly. But it was like touching rigid stone. "Will ye join me in prayer for your mother?" "No," said Joseph. His young voice was the voice of a man, and indifferent. "It is that you believe she has no need of prayer, my child?" "There are sreamcars from Philadelphia to New York, are there not?" said Joseph.
"To be sure, Joey. All will be well, if we trust in Our Lord. Joey, it is cold. Put on your coat. And the seamen will be bringing our breakfast before we sail."
He helplessly patted the boy's shoulder, then sighing he turned away, for a sick man had weakly called him in his extremity. He wore old carpet slippers and he shuffled on the sooty floor. Out of exhaustion, the coughers were now quiet and some were lifting themselves on their elbows, or rising and shambling to the latrines. Joseph felt for the packet which hung on a string around his neck, and against his chest. The gold certificates were safe. Fifteen dollars. Three pounds. It was a lot of money which his father had sent to the family before they had left Ireland. And his wages were but two pounds a week. It had taken Daniel Armagh several months to accumulate such a sum.