The Law of Dreams Read online

  “Come downstairs, Molly, get a bite of food. It’s warmer down there. We’ll feed you up.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bring you something, then.”

  “I don’t want it. Just go away.”

  “Well, I’ll put your gown by the fire —”

  “Go away.”

  “Molly —”

  “Go away! I need my thoughts.”

  EATING BLOODY beef with the German farmers, he decided that she was afraid of the sea. Of course she was. That was her trouble. It was only natural. She feared the crossing.

  Nothing human in the sea.

  The fear was in him too, but he had managed it by not thinking of it directly, not handling it in his mind. He looked around at the farmers and wives and children eating. Cheerful they seemed, blithe, despite the awful journey before them all.

  He remembered the old man on Ruth sobbing after they had lost sight of land. And that crossing had been one day at sea, not forty.

  WHEN HE brought her supper on a tray she was asleep, or pretending to sleep, facing the wall. Leaving the tray, he went back downstairs and spent an hour in front of the fire, mixing ashes with kitchen fat, rubbing the paste into their boots. Working coat after coat of grease into the pliant leather with his hands.

  He wished he might rub her with a healing wax, something to protect her, to keep her warm and safe.

  When he came back upstairs she hadn’t touched the tray. Germans were preparing for bed, rustling their heavy clothes, women undressing underneath cloaks, boots dropping on the floor. People sighing in the dark as they settled in bed.

  She didn’t move when he climbed in beside her but lay facing the wall, with her back to him, her little shoulders, frail white neck.

  The last candle was blown out. Soon he could hear the long, rolling breaths of the people asleep.

  Longing burns down fear, consumes hesitation, ignores danger. You would die for a passion, easy — for a scented, gluey cunt — but you want something more from a girl, and can’t name what it is.

  HE AWOKE in the middle of the night. She was asleep but her body was burning, her shift soaked with sweat.

  The air in the crowded room was moist with the breath of people unconscious.

  He thought of the ship waiting. How dark was the ocean, forty days out?

  It sounded brave, saying you would go for America.

  He didn’t feel so brave.

  After a while he climbed down carefully from the crib, making as little noise as possible, and picked a path through the clothes and luggage on the floor, taking care not to awaken the sleeping farmers and their families.

  THERE WERE no Germans in the corridors. In darkness he felt his way carefully, and came down the stairs. The only light in the house came from an oil lamp glowing in the little vestibule where Maguire’s night porter was snoring on his bench.

  Fergus went quietly to the boxroom and tried the door. It was locked. Going back to the vestibule, he lifted the key from its hook without disturbing the porter’s snores, then returned to the storeroom and unlocked the door. After lubricating the iron hinges with spit, he eased the door ajar.

  The storeroom racks were crowded with canvas sacks, bundles of tools, sea chests, casks, wooden crates the size of coffins. The crates were nailed shut and the chests fastened with locks and iron straps or bound with knotted rope. Canvas sacks, lumpy and heavy with the goods inside, were sewn shut.

  He found their sea chest, opened it, and took out the steel knife. Groping at the canvas sacks, he tried guessing what might be inside. Slitting one open, he began pulling out woolen shirts and woolen stockings. The soft German clothing smelled clean. Some of it was wrapped around books. Laying the books aside, he began stuffing the woolens into their sea chest.

  Slitting open another sack, he found a set of embroidered blankets wrapped around jars of pickled onions. He packed the blankets and the onions into their chest, then slit open another sack and found a great yellow wheel of cheese wrapped in yards of fine cloth. He added the cheese to their chest and began rearranging the sacks so the room would appear undisturbed. Locking the door, he replaced the key without awakening the porter and went upstairs quietly.

  Climbing in beside her, he felt new and strange. He put his arm around her, his hand on her little round belly, pushing his leg between her warm thighs.

  PART V

  A Ship I Am

  IRISH SEA AND NORTH ATLANTIC, APRIL – MAY 1847

  A Ship I Am

  IT WAS STILL DARK when Maguire summoned them. Pulling on their boots and coats, they went downstairs quietly in the dark. The Germans were asleep.

  In the kitchen the landlord gave them slices of bread smeared with butter and honey. The night porter was still asleep when Maguire took the key from its hook and unlocked the box room. Fergus slung the canvas grip over his shoulder, and he and Molly each took one handle of the chest.

  Maguire held open the front door, saying “God be with you,” then shutting it firmly the moment they were outside.

  It was cold. They struggled along the glistening street, lugging the chest between them.

  “It seems so very heavy. We ought to hire a runner, Fergus.”

  “Waste of money. We can do it ourselves.”

  “No, it’s too heavy, I’m going to bust my arm.”

  As soon as she saw a runner lurking in a doorway she hired him to bring their baggage to Princes Dock. Hurling the chest and the grip into his barrow, the fellow set off at top speed and they hurried after, afraid to lose sight of him. The white mist was crammed in the alleys, and Fergus tasted the salt of the sea.

  WAITING IN the pack of emigrants on the quay at Princes Dock, he told himself that no matter what hand reached out for the rest of them, he and Molly would survive. Their boots were greased, their clothes stuffed with felt, extra woolens in the sea chest, excellent stores; he and Molly would preserve themselves. They could live in the coldest thoughts, in the dark bottom of themselves. Whatever was necessary. Stone partners they were, tough and hard. They would survive.

  THEY STOOD all morning on the quay, guarding their baggage and watching dockers humping sacks and barrels aboard Laramie. The dock basin was surrounded by warehouses, “built of iron, with no lumber in their works, not a twig, so they never will burn down,” the Cattarackwee boy informed them. “Full of treasure. Packed.”

  “What sort of treasure?” Molly wanted to know.

  “Everything. Cotton, sugar, black men, gold — but here we are, here’s the push!” The boy eagerly picked up his satchel. An officer was paying off dockers who were quitting the ship. As the last man came off, the crowd surged for the gangway and a fight broke out. The crowd kept pressing from behind. They were getting squeezed, and Fergus could hear small children caught in the crush moaning like cattle.

  A few people began heaving their baggage over the ship’s rail and clambering aboard. An officer in a black suit and an old man observed from the afterdeck without trying to stop them.

  “Come on, no use waiting like sheep,” Molly said.

  Dozens of passengers were now scrambling over the sides, passing baggage and hoisting children across.

  Dragging their chest to the edge of the quay, they hoisted it onto the ship’s rail, then scrambled over themselves and lifted it down. They were aboard.

  The deck was a tangle of ropes, hatches, spars, and boats. Passengers anxious to get below were shoving and fighting at the head of a hatchway while sailors perched in the rigging laughed at them.

  “Come on, Fergus, we must claim a berth, and we’ll only get what we fight for.”

  They joined the crowd at the hatchway fighting to get onto the steep ladder that led to the ’tween deck hold. A chest had been dropped and was smashed open at the foot of the ladder where the owners were frantically trying to salvage their goods, which were being trampled and crushed by the passengers pouring down. Molly raced forward to claim a berth while he dragged their chest over the woode
n floor. The ’tween deck stank of mildew, and iron rust, and was fitted with berths, three tiers on each side. It was dark except for the daylight that fell down the hatch.

  He found her lying in a slatted berth, hands clasped under her head, pipe jabbed in her mouth. When she saw him, she drummed her heels violently on the slats, taking the unlit pipe from her lips. “America!” she whispered.

  He smiled and sat down, then stretched himself out beside her. Strange to think they were afloat. The ship felt amazingly solid, without any sway or roll.

  “Does it suit you, Moll?”

  Their hips were touching.

  “Man, this is it,” she said warmly. “Waited for this all my fucking days.”

  “Is he a ribbonman, Father?”

  Fergus looked out at a little girl who had stopped at the berth and was staring at them.

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Her father was dragging a sea chest across the deck.

  “Are you a ribbonman?”

  Fergus shook his head. There was a boy, the same size as the girl, and their mother. “Deirdre, be still,” the woman said.

  “They are very curious on ribbonmen,” the man said. “Every unhappiness in our part of the world is laid to ribbonmen, never the landlord —”

  “Stop it, Martin,” the woman said sharply. She wore the red cloak of a country woman.

  The man wore town clothes — a hairy brown suit, more or less clean. “Coole is my name, Martin Coole. We’ll take the lease above, if you haven’t any objection.”

  “We haven’t.”

  Tall and stooped, he reminded Fergus of a riverine bird, an egret or heron. His wife was already lifting blankets from her chest. The man gave Fergus his hand, then Molly. “There’s something I’m wondering. Perhaps you know the answer. How is it that Irish beasts are shipped for England, while Irish people starve?”

  “Martin, don’t!” the woman said. She was spreading blankets on the two upper berths.

  “It’s a crime somewhere.” The deck was too low for him; Coole had to slouch awkwardly, neck bent. “These are close arrangements, very close indeed. How do they propose to feed two hundred souls? Yellow meal has to be cooked soft. Kill you otherwise with bloody flux. Where are the stoves for two hundred people? What about water? I counted but sixty-one casks taken aboard and I’m sure —”

  “Martin, don’t start. Calm yourself.”

  “Have you seen any arrangements in the way of cooking?” Coole turned to Fergus. “Stoves, grates? Seen any kettles big enough for two hundred?”

  “I have not.”

  “I really can’t think —”

  “Get ahold of yourself, Martin! Think of your children.”

  “Yes, yes, yes. The children.” Extending both arms, Coole flapped them in a strange, nervous gesture, again resembling a stalky, riverine bird.

  “Think of Carlo and Deirdre. Get ahold of yourself for their sakes, and don’t go to pieces now.”

  Coole twitched his arms, shook out his wrists and big hands, raised each foot and shook out each leg — then shook his entire body, from his neck to heels, with extraordinary vigor, like a wet dog.

  Suddenly there was shouting from the main deck, and feet rushing overhead.

  “Sinking!” Coole gasped.

  “No, mister,” Molly said. “I reckon they are throwing off. Leaving, it is. Come on, man!” She elbowed Fergus. “Let’s go up and see.”

  THE BREEZE tasted sharp after the rottenness below. Girls with trays slung around their necks strolled about the deck selling oranges, nuts, and pocket mirrors.

  Fergus watched as the gangway was hauled aboard. Sailors dragged in the dripping lines unleashed from bollards on the quay, coiling with frantic neatness and singing weirdly as they worked.

  He studied the men up on the afterdeck. A man in a cowhide jacket — the river pilot, he overheard a passenger say — was giving orders to a sailor manning the wheel. A man in a black coat clutched a brass tube in his hand. Next to him an old man wearing a shaggy fur coat stood with his hands clasped behind his back.

  A dozen sailors were singing as they worked a machine, winding a thick, wet cable that was warping Laramie off the quay. The taut cable drew her sluggishly across the basin toward the water gate, where a footbridge had been raised so she could slip out into the river.

  Passengers arriving too late for boarding had raced for the water gate, hoping to leap aboard as she slid through, but it was a terrifying jump. As the ship passed through the gate, he saw the old woman from the Goree in the cluster of anxious faces. A few men and boys made the leap, caught the rail, and were dragged aboard, but others were hesitating, too apprehensive to try.

  “Come across, mother!” Molly screamed to the old woman. “Country of the waves! Come across!”

  Without hesitating further, the old woman pitched her bundle then leapt across. They caught her by the arms, dragging her in over the rail as Laramie nosed into the river and began swinging about when the current caught her bow.

  Wheezing and coughing, the old woman pounded her chest and spat voraciously.

  “You’re all right are you?” Molly asked. “That was a fair jump.”

  “I’m old but I’m fleet.” The old woman pulled out a clay pipe she carried in her hair. “Spare me a pinch of backer, daughter? Never dreamed I could fly.”

  A STEAM tug was towing Laramie out through the busy traffic of steamers, ships, and barges.

  Sailors armed with pikes went below, hunting stowaways, while the emigrants were herded up a pair of ladders and squeezed into ship’s narrow foredeck. Sailors stood guard at the ladders and a clerk from Crawford’s shop began calling out names, checking them off against a passenger list.

  They were packed so tightly on the peak that people were lifting children up onto the rails.

  “Oh man, this is awful business, I don’t like this at all,” Molly gasped.

  Never would he have pressed cattle so close. To distract himself from the grasping panic he could feel rising in his throat he stared up through masts, spars, and rigging to the white sky.

  Can you control the song of fear in your head? It never really goes away. You’re wound with it, like a French ticker.

  After hearing their names and displaying their tickets, they were allowed to climb back down to the main deck, where they stood along the crowded rail. Tugs were buzzing up and down the river. Paddle wheels flashing, iron muzzles smoking. Laramie’s bow sliced across the Mersey ferry’s wake, a track of yellow fizz. The ferry was packed with red cattle and tramps, some heading for the railway works, probably; some for Murdoch’s cutting.

  The sailors who’d gone below hunting stowaways returned empty-handed. The river was opening, wide and green, marled with whitecaps. Their bow began to rise and fall, and some people were seasick on the deck or over the side. Looking up, he saw sailors walking out the yards, high above the deck, bare feet on footropes. The sails were still bundled in long white canvas rolls. Seabirds floated over the ship, crying bitterly.

  The breeze smelled of salt and kelp.

  The ship ahead of Laramie dropped her towline and filled her sails, clouds of pale canvas blooming as she started to roll.

  Im long mé méasaim, he thought. A ship I am.

  A little boat was maneuvering alongside. One of the boatmen tossed a line that was caught by a sailor and the orange-seller girls began going over the side on a rope ladder, dropping neatly into the boat. He watched Crawford’s clerk swinging down to take his place. The little boat fell off, raising a red triangle of sail and making for the Birkenhead shore.

  “Good-bye, old England, you fucker,” Molly said. “Good-bye, iron men, hard roads, bad sleeps, sickness.”

  He looked at her profile, small nose, strong chin. She was gall, she was bold. Her warm skin he loved, her scent, her clear, tough directness of thought. She was passion for staying alive.

  “Good-bye, old Kelly,” he heard her say. “Good-bye, you heartless fucking Muldoon.”


  Laramie’s yards were braced, the sails filled with a cracking sound, and the ship began to surge. The towline was cast away and passengers began cheering wildly as the tug fell off. Laramie began to roll and the cheering turned to terrified screaming as the world dipped. He heard Molly whoop for joy.

  Cutting loose the old, the everything. The country of the waves now, green and wild.

  The Poison Cook

  THE WIND WAS COLD. Molly soon went below but he remained on deck, fascinated by flocks of ships coming in under sail, eagerly crowding for the mouth of the Mersey.

  When he finally went below he found her sitting on their berth while the old woman placed drops of tincture on her tongue, using a straw. Mrs. Coole, hands on hips, stood watching. The contents of the old woman’s bundle — bunches of dried herbs, little jars and bottles — were spread out on the berth.

  “What is it? What are you feeding her?”

  “A healing potion. Medicine for women.”

  Molly’s face puckered from the taste. The old woman touched her forehead. “Now let the dose find her way in.”

  Molly opened her eyes. “Tastes rough, mother.”

  “It stings. Yes it does.”

  “Here.” Molly handed her a pinch of tobacco for payment, then lay back, and the old woman began gathering up her goods.

  “In my own country of Faha, I am well known,” she boasted. “I am Brighid of Faha, you ask them in my country. Cailleach feasa they say.”

  Wise woman. He sat down on the berth. “Are you ill?” he asked Molly.

  “I am,” she whispered. “I have the grumps. But improving.”

  “It’s the ship rocking, perhaps. You’ll get used to it.”

  “Perhaps — oh mother!” Molly suddenly groaned, clutching her belly.

  “Let the potion do its work,” Brighid of Faha said, taking her hand. “We must dose you every few hours. If you wish to help her, man,” she told Fergus, “rub her feet and ankles. Keep her warm down there; heat brings down the blood.”

  The ship was tossing and swaying and he could hear passengers being violently sick, the stench starting to bite the air.