Unspeakable (22 page)
Authors: Caroline Pignat
Was he right about that, too? Maybe, but I couldn't see Mam's face, couldn't call her to mind. His wrath had burned any trace of a father's love and taken with it the true memory of my mother.
What could I say? He was right. Even if I'd known my mind then, I wasn't allowed to speak it. All I knew for sure was that things would only get worse once I started to showâmy sin, his shame, growing bigger every day. How would I ever make it right?
I cringed at the judgment in his hard eyes, the contempt. “I can't even look at you.” He turned to the window and stood, his back to me, in silence. “Get out.”
I paused, unsure of what he meant. Was he sending me to my room? “I'm sorry, Father. I never meant forâ”
“Get out of my house!” He slammed his hand on the desk beside him.
Surely he didn't mean that. “But whereâ”
“I don't care!” he yelled. And I knew that he didn't. “I don't care where you go. But you are not welcome here. Get from my sight.”
I don't remember running out of the room or packing a few things in a bag, emptying my piggy bank for my fare. I don't even really remember the ship over to Liverpool or why I came here. I hadn't seen her in years, not since my mother died. I suppose I had nowhere else. No one else but Aunt Geraldine. I don't remember much of what happened after I told my father, but I'll never forget the face of Aunt Geraldine when she opened the door to see me clutching my bag on her step, soaked from my walk from the pier in the December rain. I'll never forget her eyes, the disappointment in them when I told her what neither of us ever thought I'd say:
I'm expecting
.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
IF I WAS HOPING FOR SYMPATHY
from Aunt Geraldine, I was sorely disappointed. She did take me in, she even left me blanketed in my sorrow while I burrowed in bedâhiding for days from the truth. But after a week or two, she'd had enough, I suppose, and she took me to Liverpool's Magdalene Asylum, a four-storey building of looming stone and slate. Home for troubled girls.
And it was anything but a home.
'Twas a slave house, a jail, really, run by nuns. They had them in England and Ireland, these asylums. I'd heard of them before. But never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd end up in one. Magdalene Asylums locked away all manner of family secrets. Some daughters were abused; many, pregnant; others were simpletons, not
with
child, but seemingly with the mind of one. A few were even locked away, not because they were promiscuous, but because their beauty tempted others to it. Trouble, plain and simple. That's
all we were. The family shame, one more easily ignored or denied when hidden behind stone walls.
I supposed we deserved no better.
Some of the girls were very far along, their big bellies pushing out their aprons. They'd stop their chores from time to time to stretch their aching backs, but their delicate condition didn't seem to matter to the nuns. Every one of us had to do our share, be it scrubbing the dormitory floors with a wire brush, washing corridors, or preparing the mealsâthough we barely ate. A bit of bread and oatmeal, that was it. And we all did laundry. Load after load after bloody load of it. The upper class paid to have their washing done, but we never saw a penny.
Those days were terribly hard. Lonelyâfor we weren't allowed to talk. Not that any of us wanted to, really. We didn't even know one another's names. For whatever one the sisters called us was not our own. They stripped us of ourselves, berated us, shamed us, sure this penance was for our own good. The days were long, but so were the nights as we slept in our bunks in the dark dormitory. Silently crying for home. For the lives we'd lost.
Each day started with mass and then chores in silence. Then we were marched up to the laundry to scrub in our wash basins until our knuckles were raw, as though it were our sins we were washing away and not someone else's filth. We prayed. We scrubbed. We wrung and starched and ironed. We starved.
And yet despite it all, our babies grew.
I remember the night I felt it move for the first time, the tiny fluttering, even as I lay still. I put my hand on my
stomach, and in the darkness it dawned on me that this wasn't a sinâthis was a baby.
My
baby. My own. Declan didn't even know it existed. And never would. This baby was truly all I had in this world.
And I was all it had, too. A small hope flickered inside me.
Things changed after that. Or maybe I had. And as the spring months passed and summer came, I knew I was ready to be a mother. Whatever that meant. I'd do it. I'd do what I had to for my child.
Though I'd grown up around stables and seen many a foaling, my labour terrified me. I cried for my mother, and as the pains racked me, I truly thought I was dying. The midwife gave me no comfort or reassurance, and after what seemed an eternity, my daughter was born. Her fierce cry filled the stone room. Filled my heart.
“Can I see her?” I asked the sister wrapping her in a blanket. But she only turned from me, her dark robes swishing on the floor as she left with my child. The cry grew distant as it echoed down the hall.
“My babyâ” I tried to get up from the bed, but I'd no ounce of strength left. “Can I hold her? Please, I need to hold herâ”
But they didn't answer. They never even let me see her.
Later that day, Aunt Geraldine came and sat in the wooden chair next to me. She told me the baby had died. Her words clanged in my hot head like a stone in a pot but made no sense.
She couldn't have died. She was alive. I heard her. Her voice was so strong
.
When I looked back, Aunt Geraldine was gone.
After the fever passed and I'd my wits about me, I felt I might lose them forever. Many of the young women had their babes in arms or toddling about their skirts. But not all of us. Not me. And the more I saw them, the crazier I felt. I feared I'd end up like one of those simpleton girls, staring into the dirty water until one of us nudged her to keep scrubbing. I wondered if they came here in that state. Or if what happened here did it to them.
By November, four months after my daughter died, and nearly a year since she'd committed me, Aunt Geraldine sent for me. As he drove me back to Strandview Manor, Bates chit-chatted to me from the front seat as though I'd been on a vacation these long months and not in a living hell. His newly hired granddaughter, Meg, met me at the door and showed me to my room. She fussed over me, but I didn't want her pity.
Though it was midday, I took to the bed, burrowing under the covers, never wanting to get up again. But Aunt Geraldine had other plans for me againâonly this time as a stewardess aboard the
Empress of Ireland
.
STEELE HANDED ME A HANKIE
. I didn't realize I'd been crying. Or that someone was knocking on the front door.
“Would you mind answering it?” I asked. “Lily and Bates are out and I don't think I canâ” I dabbed my eyes.
“Of course, of course.” He stood and left the room. His voice mumbled at the front door as another man's replied.
I'd never told anyone about my experiences at the Magdalene Asylum. Not my aunt. Not even Meg. I never wanted to talk about it, not that they asked. It was my burden to carry, my unspeakable shame. And though I was spent from the telling, somehow there was a lightening, of sorts, in sharing it. Still, I hadn't meant to go into such detail. I hadn't meant to tell him so much.
What if it all ended up in his newspaper story, a headline two weeks from now? I should never have trusted him with it.
“Who was it?” I asked, pressing the handkerchief to my eyes as he returned.
“Oh, just another reporter looking for Ellie Ryan.” He waved his hand in dismissal and rolled his eyes. “Relentless bastards, aren't they?”
I laughed through my tears. Surprised that I could. Surprised at the range of emotions this man drew out of me. But if Wyatt Steele did anything well, it was that.
Chapter Thirty
STEELE MADE US SOME TEA
, gave me time to compose myself. He carried the tray back into the front room and set it on the coffee table. I poured.
“Are you sure you want to do this now?” he asked.
“Yes.” Why delay? It had been a long road to this point, and I just wanted to reach the end. To know for sure what happened to Jim. I braced myself for the truth.
He hesitated, and I feared that I'd been duped into telling my story. What if all this time he really had nothing more than the diary?
“I found him,” he continued, “in Ireland.”
“Jim?” I interrupted, a volt of hope surging through me.
“No, Sampson,” he said, almost apologetically. “William Sampson, the chief engineer. I'd tried to get an interview with him while he was in the hospital in Quebec, but security wasn't letting any reporters in. Sampson had been on every one of the
Empress of Ireland
voyages, a tough old guy, in his eighties. I knew he had a story to tell.”
He pulled out a different notebook and flipped through it. “Here we are.” He smoothed the page and held it out to me. “I pretty much transcribed word for word. The guy was a natural storyteller.”
I took it from him, and as I read the old man's words, his voice filled my head.
Eight years I've been sailing with the Empress. She was a sound ship, a tight one, and don't let anyone say any different. We were about nine and three-quarter hours out of Quebec, just past Father Point. I'd just gone off duty, barely reached my cabin astern of the engine room. Not a great jarring or nothing, but I felt it in my own bones. I knew she'd been hit. And let me tell you, there's nothing as terrifying. So off I run to the control platform yelling at the men to close the bulkhead doors. But sure, I needn't have bothered, didn't the lads see the water themselves? A great swirling gush of it running from the after boiler room. If the ice cold of it didn't chill you to the core, the sight of it surely would
.
I clattered down the ladder, but even before my feet hit the bottom, the watertight door to the boiler-room door thundered down, narrowly missing Farrow as he slid through from the stokehold. He was Lucky, all right, that Lucky Farrow
.
I thought that one watertight door was enough. True, she was pitching badly starboard side, but most of the water had drained into the bilges below. Surely the danger was over. Then I see the face of Farrow beside me. He's black with coal dust from the stokehold and I can tell by the look on him, it's bad. Very bad
.
“She's pierced amidships,” says he. “From Shelter Deck to her double bottom.”
I prayed to God the rest of her belly was sound, but O'Donovan rushes in to tell us both stokeholds and boiler rooms were flooding. We're talking a space the size of St. Patrick's Church. A hundred and seventy-five feet of it
.
As if on cue, down go the needles on all my steam gaugesâevery bloody one of them dropping to a stop. I rang up to the captain, “For heaven's sake, try and beach her.” She hadn't much leftâhe had to run her aground on the Gaspé shore, for a ship with no steam is dead in the water
.
He told me to do the best I can. And I did. Gave him all I could. We got the cranks turned over a few more times, but you can get neither blood from a stone nor steam from wet coal. There was no two ways about it. I called the bridge again with the news, “The steam is gone.”
The lights dimmed as I hung up the phone, the dynamos were winding down, the Empress was dying, and we along with her if we didn't act soon. There wasn't much time
.
Where I should have heard engines there came a deep roar, and sure enough a flood of water came rushing in. A great wave of it. So there we were on the bottom of the ship, eight levels down, well below the waterline, and she is listing something fierce as the water's surging in
.
“Clear out!” I yelled at the lads. “You've done all you can. Save yourselves!”
I tell you, there's no harder order to give than that, but if you're not man enough to give it, you've sealed the fate of every young lad that relies on you. And there were about
forty of us down there that night. Engineers, firemen, trimmers, and greasers. All of them bravely standing at their posts. They scrambled for the leering ladders and hauled themselves up. Already, the water swirling at the bottom rungs and rising fast, so fast I can hardly stay ahead of it
.
Now, my mind is as sharp as everâbut I'd not be behind the door in telling you that this ol' body has seen better days. By the second platform, I hadn't the strength to haul up and I'd a long way to go yet. And as the water climbed the ladder below me, all I could do was sit gasping for a bit of air, sure my heart was going to give out
.
“This is it, Will,” says I. “This is how it ends.” And I thought of my wife I'd never kiss again. And my children
.
Then he appeared beside me, Lucky. “Come on, Chief,” he said, taking my arm and lifting me up. “You can do this. We're getting out.”
“Go,” I said, pushing him away. “Save yourself, lad. While there's still time ⦠That's an order.” But he wouldn't hear of it
.
“I'm sorry, sir. I can't. I won't. I'm not leaving you.” And I knew by the look of him, he meant it. He had heart enough for the both of us, that lad. I'd lived my life, and a good long one at that, but there was no way I'd let him lose his. Not if I could help it. He gave me the strength to keep going
.
We finally made it out of the hold, up the five floors to the Boat Deck, but by now she's rolled a good forty-five degrees. And we, along with every other soul who'd made it to top deck, had to grab whatever we could get our hands on just
to stay on board. Clinging like spiders on the wall, we were all of us crawling up the tilting floor to the rail rising high overhead. Most passengers were in their nightclothes and I gathered they must have been from the upper decks, from the left side of the ship. It all happened so fast, I doubt the others even had the time to get out of their beds before the river rushed in upon them. Still, making it deckside was no guarantee of survival for any of us
.
A few women and wee ones clung to a gate by me; I'll never forget the terror in their eyes. Jesus. And even as I saw their fingers slipping, even as I reached out, away they dropped. Their bodies slid down the deck and smashed into the capstan before they flung out into the night lost in the black river. 'Twas horrific
.
Anything and everything that wasn't bolted down hurtled as the Empress tipped: cargo boom, gear, all manner of metal contraptions, including a few portside lifeboats. Two tons each they were, the lifeboats thundered carnage down the sloping deck toward us like a runaway train. Lucky pulled me from their path just in time. But others, many others were not so fortunate. There one minute and gone the next. Imagine thatâbeing killed by a lifeboat, the very thing that's meant to save you. Word has it that many of the corpses later found were dead of their injuries, not of drowning. And every one of them a story that will never be told
.
One of the last things I remember on the ship was a young lad giving his mother his lifebelt. Leonard was his name. I'll never forget how she called after him when he
jumped in the water. I don't know if either of them survived. I don't know how any of us did
.
Then the Empress keeled over, her great twin stacks crashing down in the water, and we were tossed out into the dark by the force of it, like peas flicked off a spoon. As I came up for air, I found myself lashed to the wreckage by wires, a web of it dragging me under. Lucky pulled me free. I can't kick, says I. My leg, I think it's broken. And he told me to float on my back while he swam us both to the nearest lifeboat. Honestly, I never thought we'd make it. But we did. Finally, we gripped the gunwale, but we were not saved yet. Not by a long shot
.
“You'll drown us all!” a man aboard the lifeboat shouted hysterically. He swung the oar like a great flyswatter. For here he was, the only hope in a swarm of desperate souls pulling and scrabbling from all sides
.
I suppose you can't blame him for trying to save himself. For weren't we trying to do the very same? And maybe his wife was on boardâor his child
.
Water lapped over my hand and into the boat. I had to let go. So did Lucky, but he wasn't giving up. Not yet. He pulled me away from the horde and after swimming and dragging me behind for a bit, he finally heaved me onto a deck chair floating by. I flopped onto it like a load of wet laundry, completely wrung out
.
“They'll come,” says I, my breath in foggy gasps. In the distance, I saw the lights of a ship. “They'll come for us.”
Lucky shrugged off his coat and flung it across me. “We can't wait,” says he, grunting and kicking in the water
.
I remember the cold. The pain in my leg. The waves lapping against the wood. And I remember his voice
.
“Hold on,” he said, as he pushed me toward the light. “Just hold on, Da.”
The next thing I know, I'm on the deck of the Storstad, Lucky's coat gripped in my fist, and a woman is splinting my leg
.
I never saw him again. I never got to thank him. But I'm sitting here talking to you today because of Lucky Farrow. He saved my life, so he did
.
I'm the lucky one, broken leg and all
.
