Chapter 8 #8
Oceans are not blue, Enda discovers. They are not the azure of the bays and inlets of the peninsula, where yellow-shelled creatures cling to rocks and frail scarlet seaweed waltzes in the clear, froth-fringed waves.
Neither are they the mild cerulean of her father’s maps.
This ocean, the one she is crossing, yard by yard, day by day, week by week—and to call it a singular “ocean” rather than “oceans” seems an error because its vastness, its boundlessness, its terrifyingly endless expanse implies plurality, how can something this large be one ocean alone?
—is shifting and various, impossible to pin down.
On dry and windless days, when the sails above them hang limp in the air, the waters are flat and dull as a sheet of metal.
If the winds start to rise, the waves become puckered and troubled.
And there have been times when gales scream and rip through the masts, and the seas boil up into great dark peaks striated with sinister white lace, and the ship is pitched down one incline then up another, a small vessel toiling across an aqueous mountain range, and the sailors lock down the hatches and no one is allowed out on deck, and the cramped quarters of steerage become a slithering purgatory of upturned waste buckets, belongings, water, wailing and terrified children, knots of people on their knees desperately reciting the Mysteries.
Enda has been assigned a bunk with five others: two men, their wives, and a boy of around six.
She wedges herself between the child and the partition: she doesn’t want to put herself, even dressed in Liam’s clothing, next to either of the men, and she worries that if she were by the women one of them might discover her secret.
She sleeps, fitfully, her arms locked around her fiddle, a scrap of blanket over her head; her money she has sewn into the lining of her jacket.
Liam’s jacket.
And she dreams of nothing but water: streams, pumps, wells, gutters, springs.
She is wading into the inlet at home, a creel for dulse and mussels on her back.
She is dousing a barrel of washing in suds.
She is swimming down a river, and the current is warm and cradling, and she knows Rose and Liam and Eugene are behind her, and then, without warning, there is a weir, the river rushing down its drop, and Enda is falling.
When she wakes, with a flinching start, she feels the keel and haul of the ship, hears the squealing of its boards and joists, and the slumberous sighs and snores of her bunkmates, the pukings and mewlings, the squabbles over space, and it comes back to her where she is, what she has done, that she cannot go back, she can only go forward, and even the familiar hollow lightness of the instrument in her arms cannot stop her sobbing into her sleeve.
What has she done? Why did she leave? Enda staggers around the dark and oppressive hold, pushing her way through the crowds, the press of unwashed bodies, cursing herself: impulsiveness has always been her downfall; she never thinks before she acts; will she ever learn?
The people around her are in family groups of four or five or more.
There are grandparents holding fast to the coats of small grandchildren; there are brothers and sisters and cousins, who all huddle together; there are couples with unwieldy broods of children.
They will arrive in the New World insulated and consoled by each other, perhaps to be greeted by more family.
Enda, however, will be alone, will need to find her own way, and she has no idea, no plan, as to how she will achieve this.
She is, she thinks, the only passenger who has no one, and this is nobody’s fault but her own.
Rose is expecting Tomás back soon; any day now he’ll walk up the boreen with his mapping bag on his shoulder, come in through the door and hang his cap on the peg.
She has been planning in her head, all these long weeks, how she will give him dinner before she tells him about Enda.
She’ll get him sitting down, put some boxty or some salted fish in his stomach to ease the shock of it, the deception and lies of it, Enda’s cruelty at not even saying goodbye.
For Enda to scheme like that, to steal Liam’s papers, and run away across the sea: it takes Rose’s breath away.
She has, she knows, been waiting for her father’s return so she may vent her fury and hurt, and receive the balm of his.
Now, instead, as she lifts her head from milking the cow, she finds not Tomás but two soldiers coming around the gable wall, carrying between them what at first sight appears to be a heavy sack.
Rose blinks. Why would soldiers be bringing her a sack, and one wrapped in cloth at that?
She blinks again. The sack is the body of her father, Tomás.
Rose staggers upright, startling the cow and upsetting the milking pail, and cries, What is this?
, rushing forward, and she is certain that Tomás is dead, the soldiers have killed him, and why would they do such a thing?
Then she sees the rise and fall of his chest: he is alive but deeply asleep.
Kneeling beside him, she demands: What happened?
But the redcoat lads have to lean with their hands on their knees, catching their breath, gasping and complaining about the climb up the hill, the weight of the man.
When they are able to answer, they talk over each other, rambling and confused, something about an accident, a cart, a spell in hospital, nearly died, lost his hand, medicine.
The way they speak is so jerky and tight-mouthed that she has to ask them to say it all again, which they do, ending with the fact that they had orders to lash him to the back of a horse and deliver him home, so here he is.
They are, by this time, taking off their hats, winking at her, offering her tobacco, saying they would have come sooner if they’d known she was such a looker; they’d have urged the horse up to a canter.
Rose steps past them, taking the proffered medicine bottle, and calls for Eugene to come and help her.
He won’t, however, come out of the byre until the redcoats leave, so she waits beside the insensible Tomás until she hears their boots departing.
Eugene and Rose put their father to bed, then stand there, taking in the state of him, bit by dreadful bit: face gaunt, body wasted and thin, the ominous bandage, the sling that holds the half-arm to the chest. How can this have happened, and after everything else?
It is too much: her mother, Liam, Enda, and now this.
She finds it hard not to believe this family is under some kind of curse.
With hands made slow by shock she takes from her apron pocket the brown-glass bottle given to her by the soldiers and administers the strange liquid with the dropper.
She and Eugene wait, gazing down at their subdued and motionless father, slumbering like a giant in a folktale.
Eugene hovers his fingers over the bandaged stump, over Tomás’s flickering eyelids.
He bends down, as if he might whisper something in his ear.
With the aid of the bottle, Tomás remains unconscious for three days.
Rose and Eugene tiptoe around, unwilling to rouse him.
Neighbours come, to tut and pray over him: the widow, the bonesetting sisters, the younger fisherman (who is in fact well over fifty by now).
The liquid in the bottle runs low; Rose gives him the final drops late one night. She wonders what will happen next.
In the thin, milky half-light of dawn, Tomás wakes with a roar.
It is a hoarse, atavistic sound, ripped from deep inside him, full of sorrow and ire. It is the lament of an injured animal, the grief of a fallen warrior at the close of a battle. It wakes Rose and Eugene up in the loft. It sets Bran instantly barking and leaping at the door.
Before Rose can make it down the ladder, Tomás has thrashed his way out of bed, yelling, stumbling about, upturning fire-irons and pots.
Eugene has his fists pressed over his ears, his face flushed and fearful.
Rose scrambles down the ladder, seizes Bran by the collar, and tries to get a hold on her father, who is on his knees, plucking at the sling, trying to pull himself free.
“Da,” she cries, as he slips from her grasp, crawling towards the window, where he pulls himself up to stare wildly out as if he, like Bran, believes that enemies are breaching their defences. “Da, you’re at home, with us. Your arm—”
Tomás gasps. Rose sees that he is looking down, for the first time, at his loose and empty shirt sleeve. He lifts his left hand and touches the absence there, his fingers groping for what is no more.
“You were in hospital,” Rose says, trying for a reassuring tone. “The soldiers brought you back. You nearly died of the infection. Do you remember—”
Tomás lets out a shaky, uneven breath, pulling himself up so that he is leaning against the wall.
He fumbles at the buttons of his shirt with his left hand, trying to push them through the cloth.
He manages one, but he can’t seem to get a grip on the second, his fingers slipping, a muffled sob escaping his lips.