Galway Bay
This book is a work of historical fiction. In order to give a sense of the times, some names or real people or places have been included in the book. However, the events depicted in this book are imaginary, and the names of nonhistorical persons or events are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance of such nonhistorical persons or events to actual ones is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Mary Pat Kelly
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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ISBN: 978-0-446-54507-5
Contents
PART ONE: The Before Times—1839
PART TWO: The Great Starvation 1845-1848
O
THER
B
OOKS BY
M
ARY
P
AT
K
ELLY
FICTION
Special Intentions
NONFICTION
Martin Scorsese: The First Decade
Martin Scorsese: A Journey
Home Away from Home: The Yanks in Ireland
Proudly We Served: The Men of the USS
Mason
Good to Go: The Rescue of Scott O’Grady from Bosnia
For Honora’s children down through the generations
We wouldn’t die, and that annoyed them. They’d spent centuries trying to kill us off, one way or another, and here we were, raising seven, eight, nine of a family on nothing but potatoes and buttermilk. But then the blight destroyed the potato. Three times in four years our only food rotted in the ground. Nothing to eat, the healthy crops sent away to feed England. We starved. More than a million died—most of them in the West, which is only a quarter of the country, with Ireland itself just half the size of Illinois. A small place to hold so much suffering. But we didn’t all die. Two million of us escaped, one reaching back for the next. Surely one of the great rescues in human history. We saved ourselves, helped only by God and our own strong faith. Now look at us, doing well all over the world. We didn’t die.
—H
ONORA
K
EELEY
K
ELLY
, born 1822. Told to her great-granddaughter Agnella Kelly, Sister Mary Erigina, born 1889, and reported to the author, Honora’s great-great-granddaughter.
The Before Times—1839
Dawn, St. John’s Night—June 23, 1839
A
H, THE SUN
. Rising for me alone—the only one awake to see dawn fire the clouds and watch Galway Bay turn from gray to blue. Thank you, God, for this perfect summer’s morning, for the sand of the Silver Strand growing warm under my feet, for the larks and blackbirds tossing their song into the sky and the sharp fresh smell of the sea. Please, Lord, let the weather stay fine for my sister Máire’s wedding.
Now, I’d better hurry along the shore to the stream near St. Enda’s well and wash my hair or it won’t dry in time. Of course, if you’d given me feather-light curls like Máire’s instead of this stick-straight mass . . .
I wonder, will the nuns cut it the very first day? Miss Lynch told me they won’t shave my head. That’s a Protestant lie. My being accepted into the first convent allowed to open in Galway City since Cromwell, two hundred years ago, is a great honor for the whole family, Miss Lynch says. Mam’s over the moon. It was a near thing, though. The scene came back to me as I followed the shoreline away from Bearna village into the woods.
“Honora Keeley is my best pupil,” Miss Lynch told Mother Superior two weeks ago, Mam and I with her in the parlor of the Presentation Sisters Convent, keeping our eyes down. “She speaks perfect English, has studied Latin, history, literature, geography, and mathematics.”
Mother Superior nodded, telling Miss Lynch what a great woman she was to teach the daughters of her tenants, opening the Big House to us. Admirable. Not many landlords would do that.
“Thank you, Mother,” Miss Lynch had said to her. “I realize you don’t usually consider girls, girls . . .” Then she’d stopped.
Ah, spit it out, I’d thought. Say: Girls like Honora Keeley, too poor and too Irish. Not like you Lynches, who’ve bobbed and bribed your way through the centuries to stay rich
and
Catholic.
I am a Keeley, an O’Cadhla, Mother Superior, I’d wanted to tell her. We ruled Connemara long before the Lynches and the rest of their Norman relatives set foot in Galway. My Granny Keeley says, “What are Normans anyway? Only Vikings with manners put on them!” But if I’d said anything at all like that, Mam would have collapsed on the spot.
So. I’d spoken up very politely in my best English and said that I was proud to be a fisherman’s daughter. My da was born into knowledge of the sea, I told her, and can gauge winds and tides, steer a clear course through Galway Bay, and follow the gulls to a school of herring.
Mother Superior nodded, so I’d gone on to explain how the fishermen along Galway Bay—men of the Claddagh as well as those from Gleninna in Clare and Connemara—went out together, and then we women sold the catch under the Spanish Arch in Galway City. “We’re very good bargainers,” I’d said, “and also patch the sails and repair the nets.”
And why did I think I had a vocation to the religious life? Mother Superior asked me. I told her I’d always felt close to Our Lord and His Blessed Mother. I admired St. Bridget and all the holy women who’d helped St. Patrick bring Christianity to Ireland, studying and teaching and praying in the great abbeys for a thousand years until the English wrecked them all. And now that the nuns were back, I’d be honored to join them. “My granny says that you’re standing up to the Sassenach,” I’d told her. And then she’d questioned me about my studies and I’d recited prayers in Latin and English and we’d finished up talking about what a great time it was for the Church now that Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, had made the British government get rid of the last of the penal laws that had outlawed our religion and Catholics could go to school openly, build churches, own land, vote even.
“A new day,” Mother Superior had said. And she would be happy to find a place for a girl like me in the Community of the Sisters of the Presentation. I would enter in September and undergo a two-year trial period, she said. I’d be called a novice and wear the black habit, but have a white veil. I’d start my studies immediately. My family could visit four times a year. I would miss them, Mother Superior said, but I’d get the needed grace.
Now less than almost three months until Entrance Day: September 15, 1839—my seventeenth birthday.
I stepped through a gap in the hedge, crossed to St. Enda’s well and Tobar Geal, the clear, cool, fast-flowing stream beside it. Flowers covered the bank—féithleann (honeysuckle), fraoch gallda (St. Dabeoc’s heath), and fearbán (buttercups). I named them to myself in Irish but translated them into English as if reciting for Miss Lynch or Mother Superior.
I pulled up my skirt, knelt on the soft grass, inhaled the lavender scent of the soap Miss Lynch gave Máire and me for Christmas, then undid the three hairpins—careful, mustn’t bend them. I leaned over, ducked my loosened hair into the water, and then lathered the soap into bubbles, digging my fingers into my scalp.
“Rua and donn,” Mam called my hair. Red and brown. Mixed. Better that way. A redheaded woman brought bad luck to fishermen. If Da met one on the road, he’d go back home and not fish at all. So not red and yet not brown. “Mixed hair,” Mam said, “and nothing wrong with that.”
“Everyone can’t be blond like me,” Máire had said. Máire resembled Mam and her family, the Walshes—a tiny waist and curves above and below. “Péarla an Bhrollaigh Bháin,” my Snowy-Breasted Pearl, Johnny Leahy, the groom, calls her, she’d told me. “Don’t let Da hear him,” I said, but she thrust her chest out at me and said, “Some have brains and some have bosoms,” then crossed her eyes and I had to laugh.
I take after Granny and Da and the Keeleys—tall and thin with green eyes, “but they see as well as your blue ones,” I told Máire.
Lather and rinse, lather and rinse, then a long third rinse. I shook my hair back and forth. Drops of water caught the morning light—rainbows in the air. How close to the scalp will the nuns clip my hair?
Round pebbles turned under my bare feet as I followed the stream’s channel out of the woods and down to the sea where my rock waited, a small squat tower on the strand, layered with seaweed, dulsk.
I peeled off a bit and spread it out in the sun. Dulsk tastes best dried where it’s picked. Now, I’ll sit, eat my dulsk, and enjoy a sweet hour of quiet. Bearna will be stirring soon enough.
The easily found seaweed was gone already, the rocks stripped of winkles and barnacles, the shellfish on the shore taken. The farming people had come down from the hills looking for food for the hungry months, July and August, when the potatoes dug last fall have been eaten and the new crop isn’t ready.
Mam tells the women, “Cook those cockles and mussels. Don’t eat them raw, they’ll kill you.”
“Thank God we have fish to sell,” she’d say to me. “Once the farmers give their wheat and oats to the landlord for the rent, they’re left with only potatoes to eat. Those women never touch a coin. Some are married to poor laborers who work for nothing but the use of a one-room cottage and a scrap of a potato garden. We know how to deal and dicker in the market, get real money. A fisherwoman has a better life than the wife of a farmer or laborer.”
Perhaps, but we too depended on the pratties. Our food came from the field the fisher families shared. Money went for rent. And the farm women never know the fear we do when the mist rolls down from the mountains, the Bay dissolves into the sky, and the sea goes wild. Nothing to do but try to pray the boats home safe. Every year, some men lost. The land might be hard, but it didn’t kill.
Galway Bay . . . so calm and quiet. But I know your moods. Turn my back and you could be raging and rolling. At least the land stays still. But what farm woman’s heart lifts as mine does when our Bearna boats join with the Claddagh fleet and the Clare men? Hundreds of hookers and púcáns move together down Galway Bay, their red sails full of wind, following the Claddagh Admiral’s white sail out to the sea. The Bay’s empty now, though. No fishing for two days, not on St. John’s Night or his feast day tomorrow. So, a good time for Máire’s wedding.
Well, I won’t be the wife of a fisherman, watching my husband away, praying him home as I had always expected. A bride of Christ, Miss Lynch says.
I wondered, did Miss Lynch pick me because she’s still fond of Mam from when Mam was Mary Danny Walsh from Bearna village, working in the Big House and the same age as the landlord’s daughter? She might have stayed there, but John Keeley and his mother arrived from Connemara, and Mam fell in love with Da and married him. And when Máire, her first child, was born, she asked Miss Lynch to stand as godmother. Miss Lynch accepted. An honor for us, Mam says.
When Miss Lynch started the free school for girls, Máire and I were in the first class. I was five and Máire seven, creeping up to the attic classroom in Barna House, afraid we’d meet the landlord. Ten of us came from the fisher cottages and ten from the farming townlands, scrubbed clean and ready for the learning. All of us were shy but Máire. She’d been cheeky enough to correct Miss Lynch and ask her to pronounce her name “Mah-ree”—the Irish way.