The Rebels of Ireland (115 page)

“Yes. Yes they are. And to our father and mother. They are all together with God now.”

“Where is God?”

“He is in heaven, Daniel.”

He had nodded slowly, as if this explained something.

“I did not think He could be here.”

And she knew she should have told him that He was, but she had not the strength just then.

When Mr. Smith came by to say that he was going, she had been very calm and polite. And after he had gone, she had looked after
him for a long time, wondering what was to become of them now that the soup kitchens were closing. And as his figure receded along the road, she had felt a terrible sense of loss, and a longing for him to return, or even look back, as if, in him, their hopes themselves were departing.

So she had been startled by Daniel's voice at her side.

“I wish you could marry Mr. Smith, Maureen.”

“Oh.” She had given a little laugh. “Don't be foolish, Daniel,” she said.

She had not foreseen what Nuala would do.

In the days after the soup kitchens closed, they had waited anxiously to see what would happen. They were able to buy a little food in the market, because Nuala had some small savings. Nobody was sure how the new regime would work. But one day she had noticed that her sister was looking thoughtful.

Since her sister had started her present occupation, Maureen had always had one fear. It was only natural. What if she caught something from one of her men? She knew that girls in the town had suffered this fate, and the hospital would usually refuse to help them. Some girls had committed petty crimes and got themselves caught deliberately, just so they could get sent to jail. Once you were in jail, if they found you had any sort of venereal infection, they put you in the prison sanitarium until you were cured. It was the best way, if you were poor, of getting treatment. Had this happened to Nuala now? Was she thinking of getting herself put in jail? And if so, apart from the shame of it, where would they be then? A day passed, and she was summoning the courage to ask her right out, when Nuala opened the conversation that evening. It wasn't what she'd expected at all.

“We've got to get out of here, Maureen.”

“I don't see how.”

“If we don't get out, we're all going to die. I know it.”

“What are you saying?”

“I can get us all out.”

“How?”

“I've a man who'll take me. He says he doesn't mind if you and Daniel come, too.”

“But your merchant lives here.”

“It's not him. Another fellow. He's going back to Wexford. He says it's not so bad there. At least you could get fed.”

“He's going to marry you?”

“I didn't say that. It doesn't matter, Maureen. If he'll just look after me for a while…”

“How long have you known him?”

“A few days.”

“Oh, Nuala. What would we be getting ourselves into? I can't take little Daniel away on such a promise as that. We'd be better off here.”

“No, you wouldn't. You won't be fed. You won't even have a roof over your head. It's the chance we have, Maureen. We have to take it.”

“Let me think, Nuala. I'm sure I can't. But let me think at least until the morning.”

“I'm leaving in the morning, Maureen. I'm sorry, but I have to. I'm not going to die here.”

In the morning, they spoke again, alone.

“I can't, Nuala. Perhaps I haven't the courage, but it doesn't feel right.”

“That's what he said you'd say.”

“I wish you wouldn't go.”

But a hard look had come into Nuala's face.

“Here's ten shillings, Maureen. It'll see you through for a little while. It's all I can spare.”

“Shall I get Daniel, for you to say goodbye?”

“No. You can tell him what you want. Goodbye, Maureen.” And she was gone.

Later in the morning, Maureen told Daniel with a smile, “Nuala has a job. They will keep her away for a while.”

“But we'll see her again?”

“Of course we will.”

“Is she in jail?”

“She is not,” she cried indignantly.

“That's good,” said little Daniel.

In the days that followed, she wondered if she had done the right thing. Without Nuala, there would be no money coming in. That meant that unless she tried to follow the same path as her sister, she wouldn't be able to pay the rent on the cottage for much longer. And in any case, she'd rather conserve what tiny money they had. The place filled her with dread, but she went to the workhouse to find out what help she might get there. Despite the three hundred new places added, there was not space for a single person more inside. She could come again tomorrow, and there might be a little food, they told her; but there was no guarantee.

The next day, there was an argument between two of the relief officers about her status. “She isn't a widow,” one pointed out. “And she's able-bodied.” The other took a more generous view. “She and the little boy are clearly orphans. They can be fed.” But there seemed to be little food available, and there were hundreds more at the gates. They gave her a little meal, but there was no promise as to whether this would be repeated.

“There is a plan to take over the old soup kitchens if we can ever get organised,” the more kindly of the two said. “As you see, everything's at sixes and sevens just now.”

During the next week, they hardly seemed to get any better.

The day before the next rent was due, she noticed the cabin. It was only thirty yards from her own door. There had been a family in there, but they had gone. It was a hut, really, with a roof made of branches and stalks, caked with mud. But it kept out the rain. Someone had built it there, and if the patch of ground had a landlord, nobody had ever seen him. It was free accommodation.

“We really don't need so much space now, you and I,” she told Daniel. “We'd be just as well in here.” So the next day, when the
agent came by for the rent and declined the opportunity to let them stay where they were without paying for a while, they moved across, easily enough, into their new accommodations.

Then she waited, along with everyone else in Ennis, to see what would happen next. “After all,” she remarked to one of her neighbours, “they can't just let everybody starve to death.”

It was curious how you could survive, she thought, as the days of September went by. Partly it was a question of listening for news, partly of being lucky. The workhouse system was in a state of shambles. One day there was food at the old soup kitchen in Mill Street, another there wasn't. Some days they were helping people at the workhouse gates, and the next, when hundreds arrived there, they were all turned away. She heard of a shipment of food and clothing from the Quakers arriving at a nearby parish. She went up there and the priest, though he really wanted to feed his own parishioners only, took pity on her and gave her some rice and peas. On another day, early in October, she heard that some men had commandeered a cartload of grain and were passing it out near the new bridge. She left Daniel at the house and ran up there as fast as she could. She came back with five pounds of grain. That kept them alive for more than a week.

The refusal of the workhouse to feed any of the able-bodied men had two results. It encouraged them to go out and rob the grain shipments. That, she thought, was a good thing. But gradually, you could also see many of them, even some of the best, subsiding into a kind of apathy. As October continued and it became colder, it seemed to her that all around her, each day, her neighbours were starting to look a little thinner and weaker. And looking at her own arms one day, and realising how thin they were, she understood that she must look the same to them.

It was halfway through October that Daniel became sick. It wasn't anything serious, fortunately. Something that he had eaten must have disagreed with his stomach, though, and for two days he was prostrated with diarrhoea. She tried to give him liquids and put
something in his stomach. It passed, and she thanked God that his constitution was so strong. But it left him pale, and much weaker than before. She wondered what she could do to put a little more colour back into his cheeks.

A kindly neighbour told her what to do. The first time she did it was the hardest. She selected the place with care—you had to, with the farmers watching their fields like hawks. She went out at dusk, so that she had just enough light to see what she was doing. There were three cows by a stone wall. She crept along the ground like a snake, taking her time. When she reached the cows, they glanced at her, but she let them get used to her before she made her move, and she took things very slowly. She had her sharp little knife and a wooden bowl.

All you had to do was to find a good place on the leg and make a tiny cut. If you did it successfully, the cow would hardly feel it. But the blood would come trickling out all right, and you could cup it into a bowl, just like a doctor bleeding a patient.

She held her breath, felt the leg, praying the cow would not suddenly move, and, with a tiny push, made a cut. The cow stirred, but only very slightly. She held the small wooden bowl against the leg. She didn't want more than a trickle, because she didn't want the cow to bleed too much; with luck, the farmer need not notice what had been done. When she had enough, she tied a cloth tightly over the top of the bowl, wiped the cow's leg clean, and crept away.

Back in the cabin, she diluted the blood with water, mixed it with gruel, and, with some difficulty, persuaded Daniel to get it down. “It's good for you, whether you like it or not,” she said.

A few days later, she did the same thing again. But this time, she fumbled the cut and the animal bled far too much. On the last day of October, on the eerie and magical eve of Samhain, she went to the field a third time. But as she walked along the path beside the wall, she saw the farmer waiting at the edge of the field. He had a blunderbuss. He was watching her suspiciously, so she gave him a polite good evening and went upon her way. She'd done Daniel some good, she was sure of it. But was it enough?

The month of November was bleak. A cold, raw dampness set in. And now, try though she might, she couldn't get enough food. She had conserved a few shillings of the money Nuala had given her, and she did her best to buy food in the market. At the workhouse, not only were there growing crowds outside the door, but she plainly heard one of the relief officers say to another: “What are we supposed to do, when we have no money?”

By the end of the third week, it was clear to her: Ennis was collapsing. The process was strangely quiet. Nothing was said. Nothing was done. There were no sudden alarms, no shrieks, no cries. Just a cold, dank silence, while the world slowly sank into lethargy, as though life itself had shrunk, along the muddy streets, into a frozen stiffness. She stopped taking Daniel with her into the town now, because she didn't want him to see what she saw. There were families sick and dying all along the way. More than once, she had been obliged to step over corpses in the street. She could not hide it when the family next door became sick. She could only try to keep him away from them.

Then came the rain, followed by a day of icy wind. And then, on the twenty-second, Daniel caught a fever.

She didn't know what it was. It could have been any of a dozen conditions, a random infection. It did not matter. The boy was burning up. She tried to cool his brow and feed him liquid. She stayed by his side. She could feel him burning, hotter and hotter, though she swathed his whole body in a damp blanket now to try to draw the fever. She knew he was strong. That was the most important thing. On the twenty-third, she thought perhaps the fever might break. He was pale now, his eyes staring in a way that she had never seen before.

“You must fight now, Daniel,” she said. “You must be a brave boy, and you must fight.”

“I am sorry, Maureen,” he whispered. “I will try.”

Then, the next morning, the rain returned. A miserable, grey rain, falling incessantly, like a dirty shroud, wetting equally the liv
ing and the dead. And as the rain fell, she looked into Daniel's eyes and saw what she dreaded, that look she had seen in the eyes of children before, when they have given up.

What could she do? There was nothing she could do. But she could not rest there, she could not just hold his hand while he went—he, the last thing she had to call her own in all the world. So she wrapped him in a shawl she had, and carried him out into the rain, and she ran, as best she could, all the way to the fever hospital, where she showed them the boy at the door and begged them: let us in. But they were full, and besides, they had too much else to do, and they told her: “Go to the workhouse. They may help you there.” So once again she set out in the falling rain and stumbled, almost staggered with the weight of him, through the mud until she at last came in sight of that grim, grey bastion. But there were hundreds of people there also, for the doors had been firmly closed, and she could not even get through them.