Men of No Property (7 page)

“I wish you great good luck in America, Dennis Lavery,” he said, extending his hand.

“I’ll have it, and not be beholden even for the wish. Take a laugh at that while you’re howlin’.” He dug one hand into the palm of the other behind his back.

“You’re acting a child,” Farrell said, “which is why I laughed. If I offended you, I’m sorry.”

Dennis tried a laugh himself. “It’s a wonderful thing, collectin’ the apology of a gentleman. It’s somethin’ I’ll be tellin’ my grand-childer’.”

“If you live to have them,” Farrell said. “I know very few gentlemen who wouldn’t knock you down for that.”

“Would you have a try at it, sir?”

“I would not. You’d better go below now.”

“Ah, for the guts of Young Ireland,” he sneered.

He saw Farrell take the steps between them, almost dancing steps and he gathered into his muscles the strength he knew of yore, the joy of it quick and brief, for as he thrust his shoulders forward, he saw that Farrell was not before him at all, but waist-high to him. He felt in the same instant the thrust as of a wedge, parting his knees, and a great clamp around his thigh and under one buttock. He was off his feet and doing a backward somersault down. He landed on his back in a stretch of ship’s sail which a quartet of seamen were mending. They bounced him out of it into the arms of the emigrants who flocked from the rail at the excitement.

Hellos and how-are-yous, thanksgivings and commiserations flooded over him and drowned his sense of time and direction. Farrell, when he looked up, was still at the bridge, and catching his victim’s eye in search of him, lifted his hand in salute. Dennis put his thumb to his nose to him, and Farrell laughed. Dennis could hear the laughter above the rumble and mumble of the people and the deprecations of the sailors whose work he had flown into; and playing an obbligato to it, another laugh chased after Farrell’s. She was at the rail apart, a book in her hand. While Dennis watched her, she lifted the book as she might a kerchief in a gesture of greeting to the man above. Farrell saw her and bowed.

“Father! Father, come down quick!”

It was Norah Hickey calling up to Farrell. Vinnie Dunne was beside her, holding a bucket.

“He’s no priest,” Lavery shouted. “Aye, worse than that if he had his way there’d be no priesthood at all and no church in Ireland!”

The eyes that had welcomed him a moment before turned cold on him now, cold and pitying as though he’d taken leave of his senses. To Farrell they looked back with pleading and affection.

“Will you come, Father?” Norah said again, and others added a pleading.

The man on the bridge came quickly down the steps and made his way through the people to the emigrants’ hold.

Lavery ran to Norah and caught her arm. “It’s the truth I said, Norah.”

“What’s the truth to a dyin’ man,” she said, “except that he’s dyin’ truly?” She laid her hand lightly on his arm. “Ah, Dennis, don’t come back to us bitter. Our days was bitter, too, and the worse without you to jolly us. Have you no cheerful words?”

“None,” he said. “But I’ll keep the black ones to myself.”

“Dennis,” said Vinnie, “I’ll give back the sovereigns.”

“Now here’s an idea, maties,” said one of the seamen re-mending the canvas. “If we could stitch me a petticoat out of this, I’d have an archdiocese.”

“And,” said his partner, “if you didn’t have balls I’d marry you.”

“H
EY! HO! HALLELUJAH! WILL
you get up and glorify God in the dawn! There’s the promise o’ land in it truly!”

The emigrant swung by his hands from the brace of the hatchway, shaking his legs out as though they were things had been stored in a box and were now at last to be useful.

The whisper and cry of “Land!” rose from one mouth and then another. A dream it was to some, a prayer to others: a prayer, a plea, a demand. There was in their way of saying the word a beseechment for life, a rant against delusion.

“Did you see it with yer own eyes or dream it, man-up-there?”

“I seen a light and there’s a name on it, Fire Island. It’s burnin’ bright and no star at all, but land truly.”

The children were tumbled into the middle aisle and their tattered nightshirts peeled from their bare behinds. Clean clothes were put upon them and the caution not to stir. The women hauled out the best they owned and laced each other into corset and bodice.

Dennis Lavery swore at his breeches which, in his haste, seemed to have but one leg. “Worry the clothes they fashion a man,” he said, “I’d as soon work my way into a bagpipe.”

“Eee, think o’ all the legs ye’d need to fill it,” Vinnie said. He had no trouble dressing, wearing the same rags night and day.

“Have you no clean things to put on and meet your father decent?” said Dennis.

“Mind yer own business,” the boy said. He jerked himself up from the slouch and walked off to the hatchway.

“Aw, for the love o’ God wait up for a man and don’t be so touchy,” Dennis cried, but the boy was gone. He had just managed his own clothes in time to hear Norah calling his name.

“We’ve made a wee outfit for Vinnie out of a plaid shawl. Will you put it where he’ll find it?”

“Bless you, Norah Hickey, I will.”

“I’d no way to measure him save with my eye, so if the fit’s bad will you coax him into it and go between us till it’s right?”

“I will, but I’m warnin’ you, Norah, there’ll be small thanks but abuse.”

She sighed. “The times in my life I’ve taken that for my thanks.” She looked up then and laughed. “And glad to get that itself.”

They were together on deck, the Dunnes, the Hickeys and Dennis Lavery, when the first American boat showed its sails in the dawn. A fishing vessel, it scudded between them and the misted shore, its bell and
The Valiant
’s ringing a thin change in the vastness. At the bell’s tolling, realization of the peril they had gone through touched the people like a cold wind. A ship’s bell sounded no more on it than the tinkle of a spoon on a wine glass. Everyone sang out hallos to drown the fears of fancy. Those with feet to warm as well as hearts tried the deck for clogging.

The mist lifted and there was the land as surely as trees need soil to root in. Husbands kissed wives, their own first and others as soon as they could reach them, and on the way the virgins. Children were lifted up that they might see and the captain volunteered to every drinking man aboard a measure of wine for toasting and half a measure to the women.

Other ships, from schooners to steamers, passed them, the Boston packet, the Charleston packet and the packet to New Orleans; U.S. gunboats, Navy frigates and a great square-rigger bound for Marseille. Soon the waters were studded with every manner of vessel afloat. A tender put aboard men from the New York morning press. They announced themselves from the captain’s bridge, and bade the voyagers welcome. Farrell stood beside them, and introductions passing, got his hand well shaken. There was long talk between them and the sad nodding of heads which might have meant “Alas! poor Ireland,” to them below had they been watching. But land itself, villages, farms and island forts were better watching than sad men.

There were moments in the day which everyone might recollect: a customs officer waving his hand like a benediction over all the huddle and muddle of immigrant imports without so much as a peek beneath the lid of a basket; the tug steamer hitching onto the tired
Valiant,
its paddle wheel churning up water like a terrier digging a badger; the coming of land to either side of them, past twin forts as they entered The Narrows, the first ferry boat with waving, bonneted women, and men, slower by far with their hands in welcome; rafts of corded wood, trailing one another like a string of sausages; then Quarantine and land dear and dread at once beneath unsteady feet, examinations to the skin in rooms so disinfected clean as to be foul with the smell of cleanliness, and a white ticket for most which entitled them to carry on with
The Valiant;
then their first sight of New York City, a great sweep of humped and hewn structure seeming to rise and fall as though it had the movement and not themselves, and slowly defining itself to their searching eyes: the spires of dozens of churches and scarcely a cross topping one of them, great pillared buildings and flat ones looking piled one on another and capped with turrets like crowns; a thousand masts on as many ships and keel rows for more in the making, a great green park and half a circle of slumping trees like so many women letting down their hair at the water’s edge; a raft made of spit and a blister with two white-suited black boys on it dancing and whooping to catch their attention, the first dark-skinned people they had ever seen, and a sign on the raft: STOP AT MRS. O’REILLY’S BOARDING HOUSE: the lettered amongst the passengers read it aloud, and another: MR. O’REILLY WILL MEET YOUR BOAT, and someone muttered, “I wonder which one is O’Reilly.”

The sounds were as medley as seeing: the hissing of steam from the hoists in every slip they eased by, iron crashing on iron, the grinding of capstans, whistles, and an undertone that might be the clatter of a hundred thousand hoofs and as many wheels over the cobbled and paving-stoned streets; church bells, the clamor of cargo alive from geese to squealing pigs; the scrape of boat against boat in the crush at docking and the great loud curses of the men who poled them; the roar of cascading coal down a slide to the carts and the whinny of horses in fright; a mournful accordion striking a sudden Kerry reel at their coming, and “How can they tell we’re Irish?”

The immigrants were herded down then for a last clap in the hold while the deck was cleared and the rigging hauled. They listened and measured every groan and turn of
The Valiant
as she was brought round and crammed into her slip. When they came up it was to a screaming pack of runners who swarmed aboard from the dock, their shirts open at the throat where the force of their lungs might have burst them, their faces streaming sweat and from their mouths the brown spray of tobacco as they shouted; train tickets they were hawking and lodgings for a shilling a night, a free cart for your baggage and that in their hands already; the girls were tapped for employment, but only the pretty and strong, and men tried to lock arms with the free ones while a black-cloaked evangelist shouted, “Beware!”

Vinnie clung to Dennis who, in the miscellany of faces, could not tell his own if he saw it, much less his brother’s, and clinging to Vinnie was Norah, the child mute in her arms. But Peg winnowed through, a spit full in her mouth for the eye looking sharp on her and her nails set for the hand a fool might lay on her. She took the measure of the star breasted policemen at the quay’s end and chose one to her liking.

“Are you nailed down there, or can you help a girl?”

He came near to losing his hat in the river in his haste to salute her.

“They’re near murderin’ my poor sister and her infant. Are you all savages over here?”

“No, Miss. Come along and I’ll clear off the leeches.”

He shouldered his way through hustlers, runners, carters, lookers-on and lookers-after, Peg at his coat tail marveling at the breadth of his back and the map the sweat through his coat made there.

“Hallo, I’m bringin’ help!” she called, waving wildly.

But at that moment, Dennis came roaring down the gangway, his trunk on his back. He shouted abuse at an unfortunate carter who was trying to make an honest shilling amongst the rogues. The man was burthened with the whole of Peg’s and Norah’s baggage, and stumbled at bay with it while the runners bated him, trying to coax him into connivery. Dennis made free with his toes and his elbows, driving them off, and with the sharp edges of his trunk as he swung it around like a sledge on a pivot. Norah was in their wake, and Vinnie in hers, sweating less with the weight of his bundle than the heat of his new wool suit. It was a snug fit in the jacket, but the trousers looked in front as though his behind might have the chance there it obviously did not have in the back of them.

The policeman charged through to them at Peg’s bidding and drove the scoundrels off.

“Dennis Lavery!”

“Here!” Dennis shouted. He turned to seek the voice. The face of the man coming to him was as clear to his memory then as the taste of salt to his tongue.

“A roar like that,” his brother called out as he came, “and I knew another Lavery had landed.”

Dennis heaved his trunk from his back, flung the coat on it and opened his arms. “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin.” The one thing coming back to Dennis as he hugged his brother was seeing him at the bottom of a hill outside Dublin when as a child he thought himself lost in a storm at the top of it. His heart beat now as it had then when he had run with all his might and been caught up and carried home in Kevin’s arms.

The two men pushed away from each other to measure the change since their last meeting.

“You’ve grown twice the size of a man, Denny!”

Kevin looked his ten year start, but in a fine, settled way. “You’re startin’ to gray already!” Dennis exclaimed.

“I’d of stood still and willin’, if the Lord had let me. How’s the old lady?”

“Middlin’, middlin’ good.”

“Norah, are we to stand here and gawk till we’re caught in the dark?” Peg demanded.

Kevin jerked his head toward them, aware for the first time of their presence. Dennis felt the heart in him sinking. He glimpsed the sullen, tense face of Vinnie.

“Where do you make inquiries here?” he said to his brother.

“What did you lose?”

For the instant, Dennis wished he had lost all of them. “These are friends of mine, Kevin,” he said, “and I’d like you to know them: Miss Norah Hickey, Miss Margaret Hickey. The little one’s Emma.” He laid his hand on Vinnie’s shoulder thinking it might put some starch in the boy. “And this here’s my best friend, Vincent Dunne.”

The boy squared himself and took the hand Kevin offered him. Kevin bowed to the girls, sweeping his wide-brimmed hat to his waist with the grace of a dancing master.

“We’ve to find Vinnie’s father,” Dennis said. “He’s meetin’ the boat.”

“He missed it,” Vinnie said. “I’ll take me oath he missed it. He didn’t want us out in the first place, so why ’ud he meet it?”