May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel (5 page)

He’s up again not long after first light, and as he sits up, he notices that the small pile of books has grown by one during the night. Milton’s
Paradise Lost
sits on top of the other two, and Ethan picks it up and brushes his hand across the cover and can’t help but smile.

Aunt Em went an’ found it last night, Mam whispers. She left right after ya fell asleep an’ walked back an’ found it.

Ethan feels a wave of gratitude toward his Aunt, and both he and his Mam look over at her and smile with closed mouths and heads that shake slightly side to side with a sense of reverence toward her for havin’ walked two extra miles in the dark just to retrieve the book. But then Aunt Emily rolls slightly to her back and lets out a gargled snore, and it’s all they can do to keep from laughin’ so hard they wake her up. And still, it’s a moment to be treasured between Ethan and his Mam, like they’re
both
aware there won’t be many more of them anytime soon.

They make Newry with an hour to spare, and by the time they board the ferryboat, their bellies’ve been relieved with a little fish and potatoes, and bread with just enough butter to remind them of better days. The crowd on the boat to Liverpool sits silently along the deck, shoulders hunched, faces gaunt, their hair disheveled, their clothes torn and dirty. Some of them’re glad to leave, but others mourn like they’ve lost a loved one. When the boat pulls away from shore, some look back
and begin to cry and a few even muster up the strength to join in an old song Ethan’d once heard Mr. Hanratty sing, about a man who’s sent off to Australia for stealin’ some food. As the Irish coast begins to disappear from view two hours later, Ethan stares back at the brown mass in the distance. He’s always found it strange to hear men like Mr. Hanratty describe Ireland as
she
or
her
and not
it
, but at that moment of final goodbyes, he understands better and grows sad at the thought of never seein’ her again.

Liverpool is another matter altogether, and when they set foot off the ferryboat, he can’t imagine that anyone would ever look back at this place and grow sad at the idea of leaving. With its tall factory smokestacks spitting forth endless clouds of black coal dust until everything—the buildings, the streets, the people, even the sky—takes on a shade of dark gray, it’s clear to Ethan that Liverpool’s the kind of place that’ll always be an
it
, never a
she
.

Of course, there’s not a bit of time once they land since it turns out there’s a ship leaving for New York that very mornin’. Aunt Em rushes off to buy the ticket for Ethan while Mam looks over the people standing in line waiting to board the
Lord Sussex
. She strikes up a conversation with one woman, but Ethan doesn’t pay any attention to it, busy as he is lookin’ over the ship and watching the men roll great wooden barrels up a gangway into the side of the vessel. And then there’s Mam introducing Ethan to this one woman named Mrs. Quigley and her husband, who Mam says have promised to look out for him. Ethan’s angry with his Mam for thinkin’ he needed anyone to look out for him, when here’s himself having been the man of the house for more than two years now.

Sure ain’t he the spittin’ image o’ Seamus, Mrs. Quigley says, and then her husband puts his arm around her shoulder long enough for a single squeeze. We lost our boy to the fever just this winter past …

And her voice trails off like so many voices from back home would when they talked about such things. Mrs. Quigley looks far too old to have a son Ethan’s age, and Mr. Quigley looks almost as old as Mr. Hanratty, but then she explains that their son was the sort of miracle that John the Baptist bein’ born to Elizabeth in the Bible was, and Ethan can’t help but feel sorry for them. He decides not to argue with his
Mam for his own independence, figuring he can as much look after the Quigleys as they will after him. And it’s sealed when Mam tells them about havin’ lost Aislinn to the fever too, and there’s all three of them,
Mister
Quigley even, with the water in their eyes.

When it comes to the farewells not even an hour later, Aunt Em hugs him and gives him a long kiss on the cheek, then hugs him some more, and smiles as much as she can force herself to do. But there’s no such smile on Mam’s face. Hers is a look he can’t quite understand at first, worse than the one he remembers from when Seanny and Da left, and different from the one at Aislinn’s funeral. Her face has the look of defeat, as if sayin’ goodbye to her last child is all she can bear, and he wonders if she’ll become like Mr. Hanratty now, with all the life and joy poured out through her cupped hands. She tells Ethan to
keep readin’ an’ be a good boy
, and tells him how much she’ll miss him. It’s unusual talk and he begins to suspect that maybe she thinks she’s sayin’ goodbye for the last time. But it’s a thought he’ll not allow himself to consider as she puts her hands on the back of his head and whispers in his ear.

Be happy, she says three times softly, before kissing his cheek and releasing him.

They separate for a moment, but then she quickly pulls him closer and kisses him one last time. And then it’s up the gangway alongside the Quigleys, with just a final wave to Mam and Aunt Em, each of them with one arm wrapped so tightly around the other that it’s impossible to tell which one is holdin’ the other upright. As their free hands brush the water off their cheeks, Ethan tells himself that this isn’t so much a
fare thee well
like in one of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays, but rather a simple
s’lahng
that’d be uttered along the Lane back home … the kind that carried with it the understanding of seein’ each other again. And soon.

Numbers are cold and impersonal things, efficient, absolute. So it was no wonder then that they’d become Ethan’s near-perfect refuge after Aislinn’s death, what with the way he’d count everything he could to keep from thinkin’ about her, about The Hunger, about everything else that was beyond his control. By the time he and Mam and Aunt Em’d left for Newry, Ethan already knew that the distance from the Brodericks’ stables to Mr. Hanratty’s cottage was about fifteen hundred of his normal steps, though he’d once made it in one thousand three hundred eleven, taking the longest strides he could. It took about two hundred strokes to properly groom each horse, three hundred seventy-seven horseshoe nails to fill the wooden bucket at the stables, and two hundred forty-seven dry oats were as many as he could hold in one hand.

So as he followed the Quigleys down into the cargo bay accommodations of the
Lord Sussex
, with people pushing and shoving and even fightin’ each other as if staking out a claim to their own small bit of land, it made perfect sense for Ethan to turn to numbers once again. He counted the support rails set up every six feet or so, the ones that held up the long rows of planking that ran practically the whole length of the bay, two of them on each side with about four feet of space between them. There were fourteen support rails per side, and as the passengers scrambled for spaces by the bow where there was a trickle of light comin’ down the stairway, Ethan walked slowly to the stern alongside
the Quigleys, defeated just like they were, and counting, so as not to think of how he’d have to live here without enough light to read.

By the time they reached the fourteenth beam, they were at the dark stern at the end of the bunks and next to eight makeshift latrines. Eight latrines meant eight big wooden buckets set on the floor about two feet above three planks, with the hole cut into each one of them for doin’ the necessary. They looked clean, but it was hard not to wonder what they’d be like when all these people were doin’ their necessary in there all day long. It was a sad place, and Ethan wanted to go back above deck, to leave the ship altogether and go find his Mam and Aunt Em to work with them in the mills until they could all go to America together. But then Mr. Quigley told him the sliver of space up on the top level of planking would be his, and as Ethan climbed up, the old man stood there with a content smile on his face like he’d done his manly duty. All he’d really done, Ethan thought, was surrender straight off and consign them to the darkest corner of the whole ship, and Ethan placed his satchel down along the front edge and buried his head on top of it. Within an hour they were on their way, and there’d be no turning back, no findin’ his Mam and Aunt Em or workin’ in the mills. Just a dark corner of space next to the latrines that was to be the greater part of his world for the duration of the voyage.

It turned out life aboard the
Lord Sussex
was
all
about numbers, even if you weren’t purposely tryin’ to find them. For starters there was the number sixteen, as in sixteen ounces of food per passenger, per day. Might be some stale bread or uncooked rice or potatoes, or even a bit of fish, but whatever it was, it was always sixteen ounces and never a fraction more. And though they’d never weighed their food back home, it was easy to see that the ship’s ration was less than what they’d had in Aunt Em’s cottage, even durin’ The Hunger, even when it was four of them instead of three. On the third day, when they were fully out to sea, the bouncing ship turned Ethan’s stomach in knots. He walked to one of the latrines and didn’t even have time to close the door before his stomach started heaving and his mouth opened wide on instinct. But nothin’ came out. Behind him was the old man Donnegan from across the aisle. And Donnegan let out a bitter laugh and said to Ethan
sixteen ounces ain’t wort’ de effort of throwin’ back up
.

Then there was the number six, as in six pints of water per person, per day, or six paired with two, to make six feet by two feet of bunk space for each person. Of course, one of the crewmen informed them right off that the water was
for drinkin’, washin’, and cookin’, not in that order, haha
, and that ration’d be cut unless they saw some rain on the trip. But the more rain they saw meant
the food stores’ll rot faster, so there ya go, haha
. As for the bunk space, it was more like six and twenty, as in six feet by twenty inches per person, because two hundred didn’t stand for the number of passengers aboard the
Lord Sussex
the way it was supposed to. Donnegan said the crewman counted out two hundred and fourteen rations of water each day for the passengers, which explained the tight fit in the bunks.

Donnegan took to callin’ the
Lord Sussex
a Coffin Ship after what that same crewman told him was the common reference to these converted cargo vessels carrying desperate emigrants across the sea. The crewman said it was pretty common that such a ship sailing from Liverpool, Dublin, or Cork wouldn’t arrive
wit’ all its cargo intact
, and it took Ethan a minute to realize that
they
were the cargo.

More important to Ethan than sixteen or six or two, or any other number set rigidly in place, was the number that was constantly movin’, constantly shrinking toward its ultimate, beautiful destination. It was the countdown of time until noon each day when sixty, as in sixty minutes above deck, became his favorite number. When noon arrived, Mrs. Quigley gathered their rations together to cook in one of the communal pots, and when it was done, she poured out a little of the used water for Ethan to wash his face and hands. The washin’ and the eating took only ten minutes right in the middle of the hour, and the remainin’ fifty minutes were Ethan’s to wander about, exploring the ship and takin’ in the spectacle of the infinite ocean landscape. It was his time to read, from
The Odyssey
mostly, thinking about Odysseus driftin’ over the sea for twenty years, and comforted by the thought that their voyage would only be about five weeks.

Ethan kept the daily count waitin’ for the hour above deck, and then there was an even more important count he kept, broken down into the hours and minutes ’til ten o’clock Sunday mornin’ and the start of seven continuous,
glorious
hours above. By the second Sunday,
nine days out to sea, the smell of the cargo bay was so foul that it lingered even after the latrine buckets were emptied each evening, and the thought of seven hours in the fresh ocean air made the anticipation all the greater.

Services in ten minutes! Ten minutes! was the call they’d all been waitin’ to hear.

Then came a rush for the stairs, and within a few minutes most of the passengers and crew were assembled for services in front of a makeshift altar made from the same table used to distribute rations every day. The Father they had onboard was no Father Laughton, what with how his sermons ate up so much of their precious time above deck, but finally the Mass was done and Ethan was free for the nearly six hours that remained. Mrs. Quigley set up with the other women around the buckets full of brown water that’d been used to wash the decks. They pulled out torn clothes from satchels and dropped them in, hoping to take some of the smell out of them before hanging them over the sides of the ship to dry. But Ethan cared little about any of that, walkin’ up to the bow and settling himself in his new favorite spot behind a pile of thick mooring rope.