Galway Bay (18 page)

“I could.”

“And we could camp out under the stars.”

“We could. Of course the winter’s coming. Cold,” he said.

“And we’d never see Knocnacuradh again.”

“We wouldn’t, not if we were hiding Máire and her children. Wouldn’t you miss Galway Bay and your mam and da and your brothers? Don’t despair, Honora. Máire will find a way to get home. My mother used to say, ‘It’s a long road that has no turning.’”

“That’s what Granny says, too—and my mam.”

“Do they say, ‘What God has for you won’t go past you’?”

“They do.”

And, ‘This too will pass.’”

I laughed. “That, too.” I suddenly was very, very sleepy. “This too will pass. Winter will go, spring will come. And the corncrakes will be back.”

“They will be,” he said. “And the lark, and all the singing birds of heaven.” He stroked my head. “They won’t destroy us, Honora. There’s too many of us.”

I closed my eyes.

“Go to sleep now,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll start digging the pratties. When the pit is full to overflowing with potatoes, food for the winter and beyond, when the grain is harvested and the rent is paid, we’ll have no need to fear any man.”

I yawned. “The family will be coming up tomorrow if the fog lifts.”

But fog still smothered Knocnacuradh and the surrounding townlands that next day—no digging, however much Michael wanted to get started. Nearly ten hundredweights of potatoes to harvest.

Those first twenty ridges he and Patrick had set out had become sixty now. Each had forty plants, and each of those would yield twenty to thirty potatoes apiece. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them. A generous plant, as Patrick said, but in need of care. Michael had fertilized the plants with seaweed, quicklime burned down from oyster shells, and he’d added a bit of Champion’s manure. He’d made sure every scraw was tapped down, fitting together perfectly. No blackbirds or rats disturbed the ridges of Knocnacuradh.

For some of our neighbors, Michael represented a kind of reaching above that made them uneasy: his skill as a piper, his victory in the Galway Races, the breeding of Champion and selling her foals, his dream of a forge. But John Joe Gorman, the Tierneys, the McGuire brothers, and even Neddy Ryan understood what it took to set a ridge and bring forth a ton of potatoes. And no one cut turf in the bog faster or piled it more neatly than Michael. The men of the townland appreciated Michael’s skills and looked to him as a leader—an accomplishment for a fellow here only six years.

And this year we’d have our biggest yield ever. But the potatoes were ready
now
. They could go mealy if left in the ground.

The next morning, a fine drizzle broke up the fog.

“Come on, Mam!” said Paddy. The boys stood at the door, eager to start the digging.

“Where’s your da?”

“The great giant Finn McCool’s off to take his morning piss, Mam.”

“Paddy!”

“That’s what Da told us.” He and Jamesy started to laugh—were still laughing when Da, Granny, Mam, Joseph, and Hughie arrived. Dennis stayed in Bearna with Josie, near her time now.

“God bless all here,” Da said.

The other families from the townlands had started toward their fields, too, and called out to us—“Good morning, missus!” and, “God bless—a decent day for it, finally!”

And the sky was clearing. We should get a lot of the potato crop in today.

“I’m running ahead with Joseph,” Paddy shouted. “He’s giving me a go with his hurley.”

At eighteen, Joseph was still five feet nothing. Paddy’s nearly up to his shoulder, with the height he gets from the Keeleys and Kellys both—muscled already. A sturdy lad, halfway up the hill, with Jamesy puffing behind. Hughie, good boy that he was, swung Jamesy up on his back and took off after Paddy and Joseph. More like brothers than uncles to my sons.

I walked between Mam and Granny, carrying Bridget. Da and Michael were just ahead, deep in talk of some kind. They get on so well. Michael’s part of the Keeley men now, with his own fine children, his loneliness filled.

I took Granny’s hand. “Our own pratties,” I said. “And nothing to do with Jackson or the Scoundrel Pykes or anybody but us. Michael says they keep us safe.”

“They do,” Granny said.

I heard Joseph and Hughie shouting down to us, but I couldn’t catch their words. And then Paddy and Jamesy were shrieking, “Da, Da, Da!”

Michael started running.

The boys sounded frightened. I saw Michael reach them, then fall down to the ground. What’s he doing?

Where’s that awful smell coming from? Has something died up here? The stench seems to rise from the land itself.

Mam and Da and Granny and I were at the ridges now. Paddy ran to me. He lifted up his hands to me, covered in black muck.

“The pratties, Mam,” he said. “They’re gone!”

Michael and Joseph and Hughie were tearing at the ground.

“Here, Mam, take Bridget,” I said, and knelt down next to Michael. “Where are the potatoes?” I said. “Where are they?”

He pulled out a great stinking glob and held it out to me. “Here. This.” He shook the filth off his hands, wiped them on the grass, and kept digging.

The stalks of all the plants, green the day before, were black and blasted, with slime instead of potatoes under the ground.

“This can’t be!” I said. “How could they all die in one night?”

“Here, Michael, here’s a good one,” Joseph called, “and another, and another—five solid potatoes up here.”

“And a sound ridge over here!” Da shouted. “Look, green patches among the black.”

Michael stood up. “Dig the potatoes from the green ones—fast, fast!—before whatever’s doing this spreads. Hurry! Hurry!”

Paddy ran to Michael.

Mam knelt next to me. Granny carried Bridget a few steps away. Jamesy came to stand at my shoulder.

“Mam, Mam, listen.”

“I can’t, Jamesy. I’m digging. Help me.”

“Listen, listen!”

“What?” Now I heard it—echoing from glen to glen. . . .

“Keening,” Granny said.

Wailing voices came from every hillside—the neighbors—their potatoes dead and dying, too.

The sound stopped us. We were frozen, kneeling in the muck and mire.

Michael recovered first. “Dig! Dig! Dig!” he shouted, heading for the high ridge.

I crawled to another patch and plunged my hand into the foul-smelling mess. I felt a hard lump—a good potato. But when I grabbed it, the potato fell apart in my hand, oozing through my fingers.

“We must dig faster!” Michael yelled. “Get any whole potatoes out! Carry them to the stream, scrub away the muck.”

“Michael!” It was our Joseph. “Up here, at the top! They’re all sound!”

“Get them out! Get them!” Michael shouted.

Granny took Bridget and Jamesy away. A hard rain started. Rivers of evil-smelling mud flooded the ridges, soaking us through. We dug and dug, gagging on the smell.

We stopped only when the last of the light went.

We carried any whole potatoes to the stream near our cottage to wash them, then rubbed them dry on our clothes and stacked them in the pit. All that we had saved barely covered the bottom.

We staggered into the cottage.

Granny had boiled up some of the early potatoes, dug up last month.

Michael looked into the pot. “Sound! These were sound! And the fields were healthy yesterday. . . . What could have happened? What blight could have hit so fast? How could the potatoes rot overnight?”

“We must eat and sleep,” Granny said. “Take one prattie each.”

Michael usually eats ten.

We ate. I put Mam, Da, Granny, and the children on the straw pallet, and the rest of us collapsed on the floor. I lay down next to Michael.

“The ridges behind the long acre might be sound,” he said.

They weren’t. Two days of digging and the pit wasn’t half-full. Only the potatoes on the very highest ridges—the ones Michael and Patrick had planted first—had survived the blight.

Not enough. Not near enough.

A wake the next night. We sat up together, my family staying at Knocnacuradh, Owen and Katie Mulloy and their children joining us. Half of their potatoes were gone, too.

We had talked ourselves into silence now, the night was almost gone, the children asleep. Owen and Michael stood leaning against the wall. Mam and Granny sat on the two rush stools. The rest of us slumped on the floor. I held a sleeping Bridget, and Katie rocked her new baby, James, two months old. Da paced.

Numbers ran through my head: twenty potatoes per day for Michael—five each for the boys and ten for me . . . forty per day. Last year we had pratties enough for ten months. How many? Ten thousand? Twelve thousand? What was in the pit now, a thousand, maybe?

What else can we eat? Nuts from Barna Woods, maybe, winkles from the strand, seaweed from the rocks. There will be catches to sell. But winter fishing’s chancy. Bad weather keeps the boats from going out.

I saw Michael looking at me, hearing my thoughts.

“We’re panicking,” he said. “This is bad, but it could be worse.”

“Fields ruined for miles around,” Owen Mulloy said, scratching his bald head. “Unheard of. The whole district, the whole country, maybe. I’ve seen Rusheen, Shanballyduff, Cappagh, Derryloney, Truskey East and West, Ballybeg, Lachlea, Corboly—all the same—more than half the pratties destroyed.”

Granny stood. She lifted her head, the green eyes I’d inherited looking at each one of us. “We are going to face this like the people we are. Now, Honora.”

“What, Granny?”

“Pray. You lead us.”

“Me?”

“You are the woman of the house,” she said.

“All right. Hail Mary, full of grace . . .” I stopped. Too formal. “Mary, Our Mother,” I started. “Listen, please. You know our needs. Year after year you’ve given us lovely white potatoes, but now they’ve turned black and—”

“May I make a suggestion?” It was Owen Mulloy. “Every man-jack in Ireland’s praying at the feet of Our Lady, God bless her and keep her, and all sobbing and moaning about the potatoes. It might be as well for us to go straight to the Man Himself.”

“Jesus?” I said.

Mulloy shook his head no.

“God, our Father?”

Again, a negative.

“Saint Patrick,” he said. “You know his prayer—give us a blast of the Breastplate.”

I began, “I bind to myself today the power of God to hold and lead me. Christ be with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ to the right of me, Christ to the left. In the radiance of the sun.” I stopped. I’d lost the words. “Dear and Glorious Saint Patrick, Apostle of Ireland, please help us,” I finished.

“Amen,” they answered.

“And let us pray,” Mam said, “to our patron Saint Enda, who chose our own townland for his holy well, and who loves our green fields and our beautiful Galway Bay.”

“Honora,” said Granny, “we’ll make a vow to Saint Mac Dara.”

“What?”

“Ask his help. Promise to visit his island on his feast day in the summer.”

“We’ll do that,” Da said.

“And now the rest of you,” said Granny, “repeat after me: Oh, Saint Mac Dara, the fisherman’s friend . . .”

We said the words.

“Fill our nets, still the winds, calm the seas,” said Granny.

We prayed with Granny.

Then Michael went to the loft and brought down the pipes. He played a lament—the music pushing away thought for just that moment.

Chapter 11

T
HE BLIGHT OF
1845 has caused a partial failure,’ the
Galway Vindicator
says. So will we only ‘partially’ starve?” Owen Mulloy asked. It was two weeks after the disaster, and Owen quoted from the newspapers he’d gotten from some friend in Galway City. “‘A patchwork of destruction, one field black, the next green,’” Owen read. “Scientists are puzzled as to what caused the devastation.”

All kinds of explanations were considered in the columns of the
Vindicator
. Was it the heavy rain, that strange shrouding mist, the electricity in the air from lightning? John Finerty, the editor, wrote alarmed editorials.

“The fellow’s a Catholic,” Owen said, “and the paper supports O’Connell, so we can believe him when he says no one knows what brought the blight.”

“Whatever about why it happened,” I said. “What’s to be done? Any reports on that?”

“Does it say there’ll be roadworks, any way to earn money?” Michael asked.

“Loads written about how the Liberator’s roaring at them in Parliament,” Owen said. “‘Ireland’s in a state of emergency and the government must act.’” He stopped. “Ah, damn him . . . listen to this: ‘Prime Minister Peel responded, “There is such a tendency to exaggeration and inaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting upon them is always desirable.”’ That old Orange Peel—O’Connell’s enemy and Ireland’s, too. Exaggeration, is it! Jesus Christ, let him try to survive on pratties turned to muck!”

“But, Owen, the English and the landlords don’t eat potatoes,” I said. “The blight didn’t hurt the grain harvest.”

“Crops are being loaded onto ships in Galway City right now,” Michael said.

“Going to England,” Owen said, “along with cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens. There’s so much food passing through our hands, but none for us. We could starve surrounded by plenty.”

“I could sell Champion and Oisín,” Michael said.

After selling Champion’s first two foals back to Sir William Gregory, he and Owen kept the third, a colt they called Oisín. Here was the horse they’d been waiting for, Champion’s spirit, the Red Rogue’s speed, Bess’s endurance, combined with the strength of Barrier, the stallion sire. Selling him would mean abandoning their dream of a stable of victorious racehorses named for Ireland’s heroes, Irishmen taking their heritage back from the Sassenach and landlords. But now . . . Owen was shaking his head.

“Better to hold the colt until the panic is over. We’ll get no price for him now anyway. Keep Champion, too—she’s an asset. At least we have good grazing for the two of them,” he said.

Owen got up to go. “We can’t despair,” he said. “The sin against the Holy Spirit.”

“You’re right, Owen,” I said. “We’ve our faith and half a pit of potatoes.”

That evening, I sent Paddy out to the pit for five pratties—two for Michael, one for each of the boys and me. My milk still fed Bridget.