Galway Bay (48 page)

“I don’t care who—”

Máire interrupted me. “The young fellow throwing the knife’s the leader of the Hickory Gang. The boys’ new friends,” she said. “We have to go careful, Honora. We’re two lone women with six sons. Good boys, but if we challenge them too directly, they’ll defy us.”

“They wouldn’t,” I said.

“You saw what happened. Remember our brothers? Da had to put manners on them at a certain age.”

“Our brothers. If only they were here.” Molly said people found relatives by putting ads in newspapers all over Amerikay and even in Canada. Expensive, that. “Of course, our fellows have an uncle. Patrick Kelly,” I said.

“As far as
he
goes . . . ,” Máire started.

Molly came out of her room and down the hall in her nightdress, a blanket wrapped around her.

“Would you ever quiet down, girls, the fellows need their sleep.”

“I’m sorry, Molly. I didn’t realize we’d raised our voices,” I said.

“Now, I wasn’t listening,” Molly said, “but I couldn’t help hearing and—”

“You couldn’t?” Máire said.

“I could not,” Molly replied, annoyed.

Dear God, can’t have Molly taking offense.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Good night. Come on, Máire.”

I took her arm, but Molly stopped me, putting her hand on my shoulder.

“Easy now, I’m only trying to help. I saw your boys at McKenna’s—”

“Our sons are good boys,” I started.

“Whist, Honora,” Molly said. “Children grow up fast in America. Mine learned the way of the place while my husband and I were still scratching our heads. My sons ran with the Hickory Gang—many a night I didn’t know where they were. At home there’d been a whole web of people watching over them, but here?” She shrugged. “No grannies and aunts and uncles, no schoolmasters.”

“No fathers, even, for our lot,” Máire said.

“There’s that,” Molly said. She looked at me and held up her hand. “I’ll not start telling you two to find husbands again, but—”

“School,” I said. “A strong schoolmaster can be an important influence. If Jamesy and Daniel could go, maybe we could do lessons with Paddy and Johnny Og and Thomas at night.”

“Jamesy and Daniel could try Bridgeport School,” Molly said.

Máire said, “We couldn’t afford—”

“Bridgeport School is free,” Molly said.

“Free?” I said.

“Taxes,” Molly said. “I pay them. McKennas do. Anybody owns a house, though not many of our children go there.”

“Why not?” asked Máire.

Molly started to explain how the poorest families needed their children to work or take care of the younger ones. No time for school. Better-off people in Bridgeport preferred to send their boys to St. Patrick’s, where the brothers taught, and the girls to St. Xavier’s, the school that the Sisters of Mercy had started. “Better to pay fees at a Catholic school than put up with the teachers at the public school,” she said.

I didn’t hear the warning, only the word
free
. Tomorrow. I’ll go tomorrow. Máire can watch the little ones. Not the packinghouse for Jamesy and Daniel. School. A chance.

Chapter 25

B
RIDGEPORT SCHOOL
stood on the corner of Bridge Street and Archer Road, beyond our square-mile world of Molly’s, McKenna’s, Hough’s, Stearn’s Quarry, the canal, and Bubbly Creek—the south branch of the Chicago River.

“Why do they call it Bubbly Creek?” I’d asked Molly.

“Remember I told you the packinghouse tosses parts of animals into the river here?”

“I do—hearts and livers, and the boys dive for them,” I said, shuddering.

“The bits not worth fishing out send up bubbles as they dissolve,” she said. “That’s why it never freezes.

“Follow Bubbly Creek to Archer Road,” Molly had said, “and don’t be frightened if you see cattle being driven to the packinghouses.”

Molly must think me very skittish. Afraid of cows. Then I turned onto Archer Road, and just like that I was smack in the middle of a mass of cattle. More than I’d ever seen in all my life.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Help me!” I shouted.

They came at me—shoulder to shoulder, hooves tromping and tramping. Hundreds of steers filled the wide road, stretching back as far as the open prairie beyond Bridgeport.

I ran into the doorway of a tavern, standing as far back from the street as I could.

Men on horseback rode alongside the herd.

One passed close to me. He waved his wide-brimmed, battered hat at me. “Morning!” he shouted over the stomping and snorting.

Who are these fearless fellows? I wondered. Cowboys! Of course—the fellow on the
River Queen
, off to be a cowboy.

“Don’t worry,” he shouted again. “Stock pens just ahead. Get ’em past soon enough! Don’t be afraid. They’re all tuckered out.”

I saw now that the cattle were only plodding along—heads down, obedient, knackered after their long journey. Still huge, each of them. How Mr. Lynch or Rich John Dugan would have goggled at their size. These big fellows could trample those cowboys and destroy half the saloons on Archer Road. Instead, they let themselves be led to the slaughter.

Paddy had seen one steer go wild. The killing blow had only stunned the big animal. He’d charged out of Hough’s with all the butchers chasing him. “Took a volley of musket balls to bring him down,” Paddy said.

The frozen ground crumbled under the pounding hooves. Clouds of dirt and dung blew toward me, settling into my hair and onto the shawl Molly had lent me. A right mess I am to meet the schoolmaster. And late, too.

“Move these fellows along!” I shouted at a cowboy.

Molly had told us that the stockyards and slaughterhouses were to move out of Bridgeport beyond Archer Road onto the other side of Healey Slough, to the town of Lake. Can’t be too soon for me.

No one stopped me as I walked into the Bridgeport School and down an empty hall to a door marked “Principal, Mr. Jeremiah Lewis.” Teachers and students all in class, I thought as I knocked. After a few moments, I knocked again.

A fat fellow, his eyes squeezed between his cheeks, pulled open the door. “What do you want?” he said.

“I’m Mrs. Michael Kelly, and I’m here to enroll my son and nephew in your school.”

“Kelly,” he said. “Irish. Catholic, I suppose.”

“Catholics, surely.”

“All right. Come in.” He sat down behind a big desk. I started to sit on the chair in front of it, but he held up his hand. “No need. This won’t take long. We have requirements for entrance.” He closed his pale blue eyes and sniffed as if there were a bad smell in the room. “Your children must speak English,” he said.

“They do,” I said.

“Some of you people tried to enroll children who could speak only some peasant patois.”

“Is that the Irish
language
you’re referring to? What do you call French or German?”

He leaned over his desk toward me. “Americans speak English. Period. End of sentence.”

“But surely, sir, students with other languages bring a great advantage to your school.”

“No foreign tongues here. You people have overrun our country. The least you can do is conform to our ways. Or get out. Go back.”

I could only stare at him.

He flicked his eyes over my patched skirt, down to the wooden clogs Sheehy’d traded me for my New Orleans shoes.

“Our students must be properly dressed and wear shoes, Mrs. Kelly . . . shoes. I’ve had children come to school barefoot. What is wrong with the parents? No shame.”

“No money for shoes, I’d say.”

“We also require three dollars from each student for paper, pencils, and the use of the books.”

“Six dollars?” I said. “Isn’t this a free school?”

“It is. You couldn’t expect us to pay for your children’s supplies as well? If you can’t afford—”

“I have it right here.” I reached into my waistband, pulled out the oilskin pouch, and put our last six silver dollars on his desk. “Please write down their names: James Kelly and Daniel O’Connell Leahy,” I said. Máire’d decided her boys would not be Pykes in Amerikay.

I passed the two new scholars on the way back to Molly’s. They were sliding along on the frozen surface of the canal with a load of Bridgeport children, most with feet wrapped in burlap, all laughing and shouting. Shoes or no shoes, our young ones are able for you, Mr. Puffed-up-Toad Lewis.

I went up the long flight to our attic room. Bridget played some game with Stephen and Gracie on one straw mattress. Máire lay stretched out on another, her eyes closed.

“Aunt Máire’s sleeping?” I said to Bridget.

“Thinking,” Máire said. “Come here.” I sat next to her. “We have to find a better place to live. I sent the boys out because they were driving Molly mad, running up and down the stairs. But the weather’s getting colder every day. To think of months spent shoved in here together all day . . .”

“Máire, Jamesy and Daniel will be going to school,” I said.

“You got them in? Good on you, Honora.”

“Except . . . ,” I said, and told her how I’d had to give over our last six dollars. And we had to buy them school clothes somehow.

I thought she’d get angry, but instead she lay back down. “That decides it. I’m going to work,” she said.

“Of course. And I will, too. Molly says there’s day jobs cleaning and doing laundry at the Big Houses,” I said.

“You can’t work with the baby coming. Besides, who would mind the children? And I don’t fancy being a servant. Low wages. And employers with wandering hands—I had enough of that at the Scoundrel Pykes.” She sat up, looked over at the children. “Out in the hall,” she said to me.

We stood on the landing. “A fellow who saw me at McKenna’s called by this afternoon. He offered me a place. Good money.”

I waited.

“At Ma Conley’s in the Sands.”

“But that’s a brothel, Máire! The nerve of the fellow. What’d you do? Hit him with Molly’s broom?”

“I said I’d think about it.”

“But you can’t. You wouldn’t!”

“Why not? He said in a month I’d have enough to rent a flat. He told me that a woman as, well, good-looking as me would have her own special clients. I’d be in charge of myself. I could get our boys out of the packinghouse, put them
all
in school, wear decent clothes instead of rags from Sheehy’s. There’s a flat with five rooms going to be available at 2703 Hickory. The McLaughlins are moving farther south. We could move by Christmas.”

“You don’t want to do this, Máire,” I said.

“I don’t, Honora,” Máire near whispered to me. “I do like to tease you and play the floozy a bit, but to really . . .” She stopped.

I put my arms around her. “You sacrificed yourself once. You don’t have to do it again. I’ll go back and get the six dollars. Promise me you’ll forget about Ma Conley’s. Something will happen. Mam always said, ‘God’s help is closer than the door.’”

“Mam,” Máire said. “Are she and Da even alive? We don’t know.”

“Máire, Máire . . .” I hugged her. “Please, please, don’t you despair. You can’t.”

“I feel so hemmed in, Honora. To come all this way, leave everything, for this?”

“Is it New Orleans? I suppose we could think of some way—”

“Catch yourself on, Honora. We’re stuck here.”

“I’ll get the six dollars back.”

“But I want the boys to go to school. I want—”

We heard the front door bang, the boarders on the stairs.

“Listen to that, Máire. Each of those fellows escaped with as little as we had. And now they’re earning good wages and sending money home. So will we.”

“They do earn good wages, don’t they?” She fluffed out her blond curls. “I’ll be back,” she said, and walked down the stairs.

“No need to worry about money for school clothes—all done and dusted. The boarders will take up a collection for the boys. Thank the Pearl,” Máire said. “She asked the fellows and gave them nothing more than a smile.”

“Thank you, Máire. Thank you, Pearl,” I said.

Barney McGurk made a speech as he handed us the money in Molly’s kitchen the next evening. “Now the teachers can’t pass remarks.”

Barney came from people who’d scratched a living from the mountains of Tyrone for generations. He’d left years before the Great Starvation. His wages had probably kept his family at home alive. A quiet fellow, older than the others, no chat or banter. Was it his flinty home place or Amerikay that taught him silence? Pleasant-looking, a long face, a grizzle of graying hair, brown eyes.

“A secret there,” Máire had said.

But words spilled out of Barney tonight as he gave us the four dollars that had been collected. He told Jamesy and Daniel that the teachers would say bad things about the Catholic Church. “You won’t be treated as well as the Protestant boys, the Americans,” he told Jamesy and Daniel. They nodded, though they had no notion what he meant. “I served in the American army, fighting in Mexico, all of us dressed in the same uniform, and we Catholics got singled out for punishment. Americans are Englishmen. They hate our faith. Don’t forget it. Be on your guard.”

“But, Barney, a school is different, surely,” I said. “And even if the principal’s ignorant, surely the teachers will be glad of children so hungry for learning.”

“I hope so, missus,” Barney said, “but get these boys ready-made trousers, and buy them in Chicago itself.”

Molly agreed to watch the little ones and told us not to be frightened of the city. So the next day, with Thomas as our guide, we set out for Chicago.

“Mr. Hough’s clerk said I could take the day to help my mother and auntie,” Thomas told us.

He wore a jacket and trousers that had belonged to one of Mr. Hough’s sons, a gift from Mrs. Hough. “She says I’m charming, Mam,” Thomas had told us. He’d met her while taking the messages. “I’ve learned the whole city,” he claimed.

It was the first week in December, and the wind sliced at us something fierce. Jamesy and Daniel plodded along, shielding their faces with my skirts. Four miles to Chicago proper, but Thomas shortened the distance by cutting across patches of prairie, going through tall grass, dried now into brittle stalks. We turned onto a wide road where the mud had frozen into ridges frosted with ice.

“We’re lucky,” Thomas said. “When the mud’s soft it covers my ankles along here.”