Nory Ryan's Song (12 page)

C
HAPTER
23

T
he next day I went down to the sea, hoping to find something that might have washed up on shore.

“Almost anything might be turned into a little food,” Anna said.

And there it was: enough kelp for a soup tumbled in on the surf.

I went back, happy to tell Anna she was right. And as we stood at the door, a man came along the cliff road. It surprised us because strangers never came this far anymore. He looked bent and worn as if every step was an effort.

He stopped when he saw us. “Ryan?” he called. “Nora Ryan?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering, looking at Anna. “Who …”

“Come in,” Anna said.

He didn’t answer. He went past us and sank down on the stool at the hearth.

He was a big man, dark, his face tanned, his beard ragged. He sat with his head down and his arms between his legs, looking as if all he wanted to do was sleep.

“Your father …,” he said.

I stood there, hardly breathing. “Alive?” I asked. “Is he alive?”

The answer seemed to take forever, but then he nodded. “I have a message from him. And tickets.”

I backed up against the wall, feeling my legs tremble.
Alive
.

“It was a long trip we took, a second trip. There was no way to let you know. He is still working, unloading the ship.”

Alive
.

The man nodded as if even that was an effort. He reached inside his coat for two small pieces of paper, tickets like the ones Sean Red had. “Your father says you are to take the road to Galway. Stay on it and you will come to the ships. He will be waiting.”

Da’s blue eyes, his hands, his face. The road is like a ball of yarn let loose. Da alive. Da waiting
.

The man pulled himself to his feet. “I must go.” And when I still didn’t move, didn’t take the tickets from him, he put them on the table.

Anna shook her head. “Stay,” she said. “Rest.”

“I must go to Gweedore,” he said, “and my family. I know I am needed.”

He started for the door, but I took his sleeve. “Did you see a cart along the road? A little boy …”

He shook his head. “I’ve been so tired. I’m sorry.”

“And at the docks. My sister. My grandfather.”

He raised his hands, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

I closed my eyes.

“It doesn’t mean …,” Anna began, and stopped.

The man went out the door, and I realized I hadn’t thanked him. I went after him to throw my arms around him. We stood there, rocking, and then he put his hand on my head. “I must go to my own children.”

I watched him trudge down the road and then went into the house to stare at the tickets with Anna. Bits of paper that would take someone across the sea to the country we loved without ever having seen it. America.

Something went through my mind and was gone.

What was it?

Two tickets.

One for me? One for Anna?

“No.” I said it aloud. “He would have meant one for me. One for Patch.”

Anna stared at me with her faded blue eyes, and we realized, both of us, at the same moment. I clutched at her. “He would have sent tickets for all of us, for Celia, for Granda.”

“Unless …,” Anna said.

“Unless they were there at the port. Unless he had seen them.”

“Yes,” Anna said.

“Alive,” I said, loving the feel of the word on my tongue, the sound of it. “All of them.” I looked down at her, the wisps of gray hair under the white cap. I touched the tickets. “There is one for you now, Anna.”

She smiled. “I will never leave my house, my hearth, Nory Ryan. And how could I leave the
madra?
I will stay here forever.”

I remembered my promise to her. I remembered all that I owed her. “I will never use my ticket either,” I said. They’d be waiting; when I didn’t come, they’d wonder what to do.

Anna shook her head. “There is something I want to show you. Something I have hidden from you.” She reached into the basket and pulled out a shawl. It was the
fuafar
shawl I had never finished. I had to look carefully to see where I had dropped the stitches.

“I have been working on it,” she said. “I always knew that someday you’d leave, and this is for you to wear on the road to Galway.”

I ran my hands over it, the creamy color, the soft warmth of it.

“You will reach the harbor and a ship. If you hurry, you may catch up with Patch. You will move faster than they can.”

A ship like the
Emma Pearl. “But the ticket,” I said.

She waved her hand. “You’ll find someone to use it in Galway. But next winter,” she said, “I will be here, warm at my hearth with Maeve. I will mix my cures”—she turned her head, looking out the door, up at the cliffs—“remembering the girl who sang like my son. A brave girl.”

I put my head up, my chin out. “We belong here together.”

She frowned, deep creases appearing on her forehead and around her mouth. “I belong here,” she said. “But you belong in America, Nory Ryan. And you’ll bring something with you. My cures. My medicine. A gift to that young free country.”

Ivy for burns, comfrey for fever, foxglove for heart pain, laurel leaves for ringworm, houseleek for the eyes, the web of a spider for bleeding
.

“Anna,” I said.

She clutched my arm so hard I knew it would leave marks. “You will do this for me.”

C
HAPTER
24

I
went to Devlin with the bottle under my shawl. “It may work and it may not,” I told him exactly as Anna had said. “Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Then for one last time I took the sharp little path up to Patrick’s Well. I thought of Cat Neely. We’d never know what had happened to her.

A soft spring rain had begun. There were wishes to make before I left. First to wish on Anna’s coin at last:
May she be warm in her house with the dog, and may the
sídhe
never cross her doorstep
.

And then on Cat Neely’s yarn:
Let the ship she sailed bring her to a happy place
.

Overhead was the tree with the tiny piece of Celia’s shift. Only a few colorless strings were left of it. I reached under my skirt to tear off a strip of my own petticoat and hung it next to hers.
Please let us stand in front of the house at Smith Street, every one of us, just the way Maggie drew it on the wood
.

I had to hurry now; it was getting dark. I went along the twisting path and climbed the stile that led to our field. Inside the house, I ran my hands over Maggie’s drawings on the walls. I would never see the house tumbled. It would always be this way in my mind.

Under the straw was Mam’s red wedding dress. I reached for it, knowing Celia and I would wear it someday. We’d eat Maggie’s brack and dance. I smoothed the dress with my hands as I knelt over the small fire that had glowed in the Ryans’ hearth for more than a hundred years. It took almost nothing to smother it, just a few small pats with the black potato pot. And then the house was dark.

I went back to Anna’s for the last night, to share a cup of hot water and to sleep for a few hours. And then it was time to leave. A thin mist rose over the sea. Above were the cliffs, and at the very top was Patrick’s Well, a dark shadow against the sky. It made me think of Sean Red.
We will be in Brooklyn together someday
.

I kissed Anna goodbye, holding her thin shoulders in my hands. “I love you, Anna Donnelly,” I said.

“And I you, Nory Ryan.” She wiped my face with the corner of her apron and pressed a bag of dried leaves into my hands. “I will think of you in Smith Street,” she said. “I will think of you singing. I will think of you happy, and without hunger.”

“The day will come,” I said, “when I have money. And I will send what I have to you.”

“And don’t I know that?” she said.

“I’ll make sure there will be nothing owing on the package.” We smiled at each other, and then at last it was my turn to go up the road, as the others had, to walk backward for as long as I could see Anna at her doorway, her hand resting on Maeve’s head.

“I will remember you,” I called to Anna.

I followed the path to the crossroads and stopped to scoop up two stones, one white and one blue, to take with me for Patch. Then I turned to the road that wound around the coast like a ball of yarn let loose.

416 Smith Street, Brooklyn
.

Milk in cans, no one hungry
.

A song
.

All of us together. Free
.

America
.

Dear Reader,

   
An Gorta Mór
is an Irish term that stands for the Great Hunger of 1845–1852. It reminds us that many of us are Americans because of that time: the potatoes turning black in the fields, the indifferent English government, enough food to feed double the population going out from the land and across the sea; a desperate people. The numbers are terrible. More than a million of the eight million people in Ireland died of starvation and illness. Another three million managed to get out of the country during the next fifteen years, but a hundred thousand of them died on the way.

Six of my eight great-grandparents lived through the famine. When they came to America, they must have been ashamed—as if it had been their fault that they’d had no food, no schooling, that the clothes they wore were torn and filthy. One of my great-aunts shook her head. “I’m a Yankee,” she said. “Whoever told you I was Irish?”

My uncle held up his hand when I asked. “You don’t want to know,” he said.

And so the family stories that might have been handed down from one generation to the next were never told. But I did want to know. I longed to know. I told myself that my beautiful Irish grandmother Jennie would have told me what she had heard from her mother. But she died before I was born, and all I have of her is a picture that hangs in my dining room and a soft pink shawl.

Year after year I traveled to Ireland, to that lovely green country. “Tell me,” I asked distant relatives. “Do you know anything about it?”

I asked people I met: “Please, tell me anything.”

I collected in my mind every single shred of what they told me. One man waved his hand across the fields, saying, “If only we’d had a little help from the British government, we’d have all survived.” He smiled at me. “You’d have been an Irish girl living in Drumlish, instead of a girl from New York.”

I saw huge walls that had been built around the estates so that no Irishman could climb and take food for his children.

I saw mounds of earth where those who had died were buried without markers.

I listened to a wonderful Irish professor with the same name as mine tell me what she knew, and I saw the memorials in Roscommon and Cobh.…

And then in my mind I saw an old woman named Anna who wouldn’t leave me. I saw a girl named Nora who looked like the picture I have of Jennie, with her dark hair and freckles. I saw the chances those Irish women of the 1800s must have taken to survive, their strength and their luck.

At last, I ran my hands over the rough walls of my great-grandmother’s house, the house that was there during the famine, and I walked up the road and tied a piece of my jacket sleeve to the tree over Patrick’s Well. I tucked a manuscript page between the rocks and made my wish. “Let me tell it the way it must have been. I want my children and grandchildren to know. I want everyone to know.”

I went home then to write under Jennie’s picture, with her shawl around my shoulders.

Patricia Reilly Giff
January 2000

A
BOUT THE
A
UTHOR

PATRICIA REILLY GIFF
is the author of many beloved books for children, including the Kids of the Polk Street School books, the Friends and Amigos books, and the Polka Dot Private Eye books. Her novels for middle-grade readers include
The Gift of the Pirate Queen
and
Lily’s Crossing
. Her most recent book for Delacorte Press,
Lily’s Crossing
, was chosen as a Newbery Honor Book and a
Boston Globe–Horn Book
Honor Book.

Patricia Reilly Giff lives in Weston, Connecticut.