No Country: A Novel (19 page)

I was startled from my contemplation by a frantic shaking, and saw that it was Maeve, her face contorted with pain. Picking her up, I felt about her, wrapped as she was in the large and unwieldy blanket. I thought she had somehow been hurt. I had heard nothing, seen nothing that could have possibly harmed her. She was trying to speak, but unable to say anything at all, except for a terrible gasping. I thought she might be choking.

At the same time I became aware of all the people around me shouting, shrilly, hoarsely, in a variety of ways. From the corner of my eye I saw someone trying frantically to set fire to a pile of broken timbers from the mast. I was jostled about, but kept my hold on the frail and tormented child. I felt her thin bones beneath my searching palms and could see her sharp cheekbones, blue skin stretched over eyes tight shut.

I knelt on the hard ice, trying to gauge if anything was stuck in her throat. She opened her eyes, which were bloodshot, a terrible thing to see in a child.

“Where does it hurt, child, where is your pain?” I screamed in panic.

She shook her head. I was now sure she had had a bad dream. How can you avoid that, when being awake itself had become a nightmare? I still could not understand the uproar among all the people. Was the ice breaking up?

Maeve seemed to have calmed somewhat, her eyes not so flush with redness as a moment ago. As I struggled to find words to soothe the child, she reached out her small palm to stroke my cheek, trying to comfort me.

“Maeve?” I asked her.

“I will always be with you, Papa Brendan,” she said.

“I know,” I responded, wonder filling my mind at the words of this child. I looked over her head and now understood.

There, on the captain’s chair, sat Mr. O’Flaherty—as he had through the night—head tilted as if he were still reading the book on his lap, calm and dead.

•  •  •

A
LL ABOUT US
the furor grew until it turned into an unbearable cacophony. I held Maeve in my arms. Through a veritable forest of swaying arms, swinging pieces of clothing, amid logs lit and smoking like impromptu flambeaux, the pig snorting and cavorting underfoot, I finally saw it: a large ship, with all its sails bulging, bearing straight for us.

The
Beatrix
could not get close to our shelf of ice. When they lowered a boat, there had been a general stampede to the edge where they all stood screaming, though there was now no need to do so. Maeve and I stayed beside Mr. O’Flaherty on his chair.
The pig kept going back and forth, snorting, running and wheeling back, unable to make up its mind.

The ship was Dutch, flying its flag, and its passengers, well fed and curious, lined the deck, watching. Among us, many were pushing to get on the rowboat, but the officer in charge, a small, pink man in a blue coat with two rows of shining brass buttons waved them back. He chose the women with young children first. As they pushed off towards the ship, the men began to get restive. Were they going to take us all? Just the women and children? It was a slow procedure getting the women—weakened by hunger, with children clinging to them—up the rope ladder.

The captain now sent two rowboats, and he himself came out in the second boat. As he made his way to us, at the middle of the ledge, I noticed how long his shadow was on the white expanse. Maeve, held the blanket around herself, and with great composure, said, “Good day to you, sir.”

An enormous smile broke over his face, revealing a gold tooth which glinted momentarily in the sun. I struggled to my feet and steadied myself, holding the edge of the table. He was an immensely tall man, with a golden beard, eyebrows like gilded wires, and brown eyeballs as large as coins. He spoke in a strange lisp. It was clear that he thought of our threesome as a grandfather, father, and child.
We are that
, I thought and did not offer any explanation. I did not have any Dutch, and given his English, I doubt I could explain much.

He beckoned Maeve to come, but she did not want to leave my side. Observing this, he gestured discreetly at Mr. O’Flaherty, unsure whether I realised that he was dead. I simply nodded my head to indicate that I already knew.

“Komm,”
he said to me and led the way. I held Maeve’s hand and followed him, sensing the urgency. The rowboats came back
quickly for the last trip. The short officer was also there: Meinherr Hoogstraaten, who spoke fluent if broken English, lightly accented. He gestured at Mr. O’Flaherty. I stepped aside with him, and explained what I wanted. Then I took Maeve and boarded the rowboat.

Hot black tea was being handed to us as we came on board. One small piece of bread had been given to each, and curiously enough, a tiny lump of salt.

“Captain DeLeeuw asked me to tell for you,” said Officer Hoogstraaten, “welcome on board. You eat this little bread and tea only now, because your stomach needs to get used. The salt help your health. Don’t throw away.”

On the deck behind us, snorting after its meal, was the pig, which had also been rescued and seemed to have chosen us, especially Maeve, as his companions. We were, we had just been told, only two days’ sail from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, and from there it was but a short way to Grosse Isle, Quebec, where the
Beatrix
would disembark us.

From its deck, as the
Beatrix
sailed away, I began to discern the shape of the great white mass from where we stood: Its height, its great level top, and the steepness that led to it, was exactly Ben Bulben itself. And below this floating and evanescent Ben Bulben, in the now deserted and temporary sloping valley, on a chair facing the open sea sat Mr. O’Flaherty.

On his lap lay the book I had seen him read so often in my school days, his battered copy of Cicero. I had picked up the book to glance at what he had been reading:
et ex vita ita discedo tamquam ex hospitio, non tamquam e domo. Commorandi enim natura devorsorium nobis, non habitandi dedit.
I put the book back on his lap. I have often thought of these words in later years.

Hand in hand Maeve and I stood by the deck rail as long as we
could see Mr. O’Flaherty on his chair, until the receding Atlantic withdrew him from our lives. She was too young yet to understand the words our schoolmaster, Padraig’s and mine, had been reading:
And I quit life as I would an inn, not a home, for nature has given us lodging for a sojourn, not a permanent residence.

•  •  •

H
AVING BEEN RESCUED
from certain death, we should have thrived on this hospitable ship. But almost a dozen of our rescued shipmates could not get up even for their meals the next day. Their febrile faces pale, all dangers seemingly past, they began to falter from something within themselves. How strange it is, I thought, that had our goal been the far end of the new continent, these doughty ones would have trudged doggedly on, across hard mountains. If the aim had been the Pacific edge, they would begin to wither as they approached that far coast. I wondered if I were making a fool’s observation, or whether we are all allotted the full measure of journeys that will exactly wear us out.

I could not help but wonder every so often where Padraig could have gone. He might have gone heedlessly to see England or France perhaps, but why, in heaven’s name, would he not send word! He knew surely that Brigid would return. And what of his mother? Nothing could ever come between Padraig and his ma. Nothing, I thought with a shiver, but death. If he is alive, he will have a heartbreaking journey when he thinks to return. Brigid gone, Mrs. Aherne dead, his world swept away, and he not even knowing all that—or his own daughter.

•  •  •

A
LARGE AND
twittering flock of birds came winging, and rested on the masts and halyards. I could not tell you how pleasing and strange at once this felt. It was as if I were Noah of the old times. I observed the gabble and clucking of the great seabirds, ogling quietly from the riggings high overhead, the oozy splat of their guano, their yawping cry when I could see their pink open mouths. Behind the masts was a sky frizzled with clouds, and the morning breaking like milk over the waters. It seemed inconceivable that it was the same sky I had looked at the other night, with the stab and twinkle of the stars overhead.

I cannot say how many times I opened my mouth to speak to Mr. O’Flaherty, and then remembered. But Maeve was full of questions at every turn, and all that I could, I answered.

The weather turned in the evening. The fever and pitch of the waves brought back all the dread memories. The strong Mr. Sweeney was stricken by the fever. Perhaps the first time I saw him, big-boned and mighty, carrying his poor wife cradled in his arms, his innards might have been turning mouldy with the eating of black potatoes, boiled or no. He had been taken with a sharp turn, and his great frame now looked hollowed out by the misery, yet he laughed at my look of concern and said, “I’ll eat that pig yet.”

As we were nearing the dreaded Mingan Rocks which lie at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, we heard a commotion on deck. Maeve went in a flash—and there was the pig, cornered by three Dutch sailors who had begun by pestering it, and when that obstreperous beast snorted and turned the corner on them, were determined to make sausage of him. But Maeve’s shrill protestation must have reached Mr. Hoogstraaten’s ears, for he appeared in his nightshirt, but hat in place. He said something rapidly and angrily to the sailors, who slunk away. Then Officer Hoogstraaten
told Maeve in his stilted English that her pig was safe, and he was guaranteeing its safe passage. At that moment, the enormous stud pig became the child’s property, and no one did challenge it.

•  •  •

T
HE NEXT MORNING
we saw Canada. The land unfolded before our enchanted eyes, richly wooded and green. The northern bank seemed more rugged, but both sides remarkable for their beauty, with a sweet slope visible along the southern bank. Every once in a while a church steeple rose from the surrounding green, white farmhouses, and there was a palpable sense of peace. In front of us and behind, the wide and majestic river gleamed under a sky of sunshine.

From the deck I saw what looked like charred timber floating past. Then I realized these were cadavers consigned to the river. The bodies looked wasted and contorted, utterly naked. I made some excuse to draw Maeve away, and she quietly said, “I do not want to see all this.” How much had she seen, I wondered, and how much resilience are we born with?

We had reached the island where we were going to be quarantined. This was where all the Irish went. I could hear people speak the name Grosse Isle in tones of dread. The Dutch passengers would stay on board, to be taken directly to the City of Quebec, where they would be received in a very different manner.

Some of my fellow Irish were beginning to excoriate the captain, but it was hardly generous to hold him at fault, forgotting that without him we would all have perished. His Dutch passengers had become alarmed with all the fever deaths, and had insisted that now the sea rescue was over, we Irish were to be put on land at once.

So we arrived, Maeve and I, accompanied by her pig and little else. The officer, Meinherr Hoogstraaten, had stepped over to us before we disembarked and spoken very formally to Maeve.

“I would like you to this doll have,” he said gravely. “Is something from Delft, nice place.” With that he handed a small figure, a doll-like object, to Maeve. Then he bowed. Maeve took it from him without shyness and coyness. She bowed back as formally and said, “Thank you kindly, sir. You have been a grand gentleman to Papa Brendan and me.” She shook his hand very properly and returned to me.

On shore with Maeve and the pig, I got a better look at the figure. It had the exquisite porcelain face of a white-haired old man, with a genial half-smile, dressed in quaint Dutch clothes; on his feet were wooden clogs. But the face, the posture, had a familiar, unmistakable likeness.

“He is very like Mr. O’Flaherty,” said Maeve.

•  •  •

T
HE DECREPIT LANDING
dock stood on long legs as unsteady as any seasick man’s. Around it swirled swollen straw mattresses discarded overboard, human ordure, and other putrid matter. One ship, obviously from Ireland, was waiting to unload its human cargo. I noticed with horror a sailor lowering a bucket into this filthy Lethe for an impatient group on deck who were obviously at the extremity of thirst.

We were the talk of Grosse Isle. Our time on the iceberg had made us famous. But as long as I live I shall think of this island as the native place of Death itself. The isle lay in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, damp and rank, its greenery extending down to the water itself. In the interior, on higher ground, a church
building was out of bounds. Although we were not allowed to step off the perimeter of the quarantine, men from Quebec came to ogle the strange and sickly Irish as at a zoo.

Beyond the rickety landing dock were two long sheds which housed a series of bunks. No fire or any such provision had been made. In dismal rows, people lay in different stages of their journey to death, off ship after ship from Ireland.

One of the first men to meet us was an Anglican priest who gave Maeve an apple. Alan Chisholm was a Scotsman who had come to Canada many years ago, as a child. He had a thin, ruminative face and a shy smile, and was so disarmingly gentle that I wished for more of his kind among our priests, with their hectoring rant of sin and damnation.

Mr. Chisholm told me that the hale lying among the sick in the sheds quickly fell ill. This was simply spoken, an observation. I know an intelligent man by his quiet talk and had learnt to listen, and so I resolved for us to lie at the far long end of the second shed, away from the crowd. There were rows of empty bunks between us and them. I soon understood the reason for this crowding when they brought in a small cauldron of soup. They began distributing it from that end, and it was gone before we got near it.

Maeve and I tried to sleep while the pig went off to root somewhere but came back soon. It seemed to have realized that if it was captured out of our sight, it would end up cooked and eaten, and its best chance of survival was to put itself under the patronage of our Maeve. We woke after a fitful and hungry slumber. Mr. Chisholm appeared, tending to the gravely ill. By the time he made his way to us, it was past noon.