The Law of Dreams Read online

  Fog had swallowed the ship while they were talking, and when he looked up again he could see nothing of the rigging or the men. They had been cut off completely by the white pillow of mist. He could hear them shouting to one another, and the sails flapping. Laramie was beginning to wallow on her beam ends as her canvas softened and the hull gradually lost way.

  He went forward to the bow. Standing on a pile of anchor chain, he peered through the white fog, trying to catch a scent of America, the heavy aroma of ground, animals, people. But all he could smell was the chilly blankness of the ocean.

  AS SOON as his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the hold, he saw the curtain had been drawn shut on their berth.

  Brighid was shaking a potion bottle. “Come here, man, you must help me dose her.”

  She pushed the curtain aside. Molly writhing on the pallet, her linen shift rucked at her hips.

  “Sit her up so I can dose her.”

  He could smell the sweat glistening on her white legs and patch of sexual fur.

  “I’m going down, man!” she gasped as he put his arm around her.

  “I will bring you through, dear,” the old woman crooned. “Oh, you are lucky to have me. Only I wish I had a drop of lamb’s blood and the black cohosh. Here, angel” — holding out a spoonful of syrup — “you must take another dose.”

  “I know, I know — only I can’t.”

  “Darling, it will give you some heat.”

  “I don’t want any more . . . Can’t . . . no more. Please!” She was weeping.

  “Is it black fever?” he asked Brighid.

  “Hold her, man, she must take the potion, though it tastes bitter — it does, I know it does, sweet angel.” Slipping the spoon between Molly’s teeth, she pinched her lips together until she had swallowed. “Now let her down.”

  Fergus let her down gently until her head was on the pillow, one of the German blankets he’d rifled from Maguire’s storeroom.

  “Now this, baby.” The old woman shook drops from a little bottle onto Molly’s tongue.

  After a few moments she stopped thrashing and lay still. Her eyes were glassy. Drawing a blanket up to her chin, the old woman began stroking her cheek with the back of her hand.

  “I have all the juice — I always have,” she boasted. “I am famous in my country. ‘Go see Brighid of Faha,’ they say. ‘She will cure the cattle. Bring her wheat bread. She likes a cup of honey. The whiskey in the cool blue jar.’”

  “Is it black fever?” Mrs. Coole asked, when she came below and saw Molly. “Oh my poor children.”

  The old woman told Fergus he should sleep on deck; she herself would stay the night with Molly. “She’ll rest better if you’re not here. Go up on top, sleep clean under the stars, and wish for her.”

  She was trying to spare him, he knew. He had no wish to be spared, but suddenly felt too exhausted to resist. Struggling to empty his mind, to feel as little as possible, he took a German blanket from the sea chest and climbed up on deck.

  A Seat in a Canoe

  HE MADE A BED IN THE WINDLASS housing on the foredeck, but couldn’t sleep. The pressure of loneliness screeched and howled through the cracks and kept him awake.

  He tried to recall the tip horses, grazing softly along the Sunday roads. He’d been alone then and content. But he could not find sleep, and finally crawled out of the windlass housing and went aft to the galley. It was the hour when watches overlapped. The wind was blowing steady and the enormous sky was sprinkled with stars.

  The galley was packed with sailors drinking mugs of tea with rum. Handed a steaming mug by the black cook, gripping its warmth in his hands, he got a light for his pipe then went to stand at the rail, watching the black sea splashing white along the hull.

  Why should being alone be so hard to bear?

  “I’ve been playing cards with our captain.”

  Looking up at the voice, Fergus saw the old man leaning with his elbows on the afterdeck rail.

  “Won two pounds off the gentleman.” Ormsby swallowed the last drop of liquid in a tumbler, dropped the glass into a pocket. “Care for a cigar?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll trouble you for a light.”

  Ormsby swung down the ladder deftly, the unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. Fergus gave him a light and the old man puffed and blew until the tip was glowing red. “How are you tonight, Fergus?”

  “Well.”

  “And down below? How are they keeping?”

  “There’s some of them sick.”

  “Seasick or fever?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “So early on a passage, fever wouldn’t be a good sign.”

  They smoked in silence. He could see the red tip of Ormsby’s cigar glowing, hear the sputter, smell the smoke.

  Ormsby knew nothing of Molly, probably had never seen her.

  “What prospects, Fergus?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you have people? Friends in America? Do you have a trade?”

  “My people were murdered by the landlord. Carmichael his name.”

  Ormsby was looking at him, expressionless, his face a mask.

  Saying the word murder felt like setting up a kind of gravestone, hard and permanent, marking the truth of what had happened to them. It felt intensely satisfying to say it.

  Ormsby was still looking at him. A landlord himself.

  Finally Fergus broke the silence. “Cattle I know. Horses a little. Navvying. I drove the tips. I’d like to get some ground.”

  “Navvying’s no trade! Do you have any capital whatsoever? Any savings? Every Irish emigrant thinks he’ll have a farm in America, but farming takes capital.”

  He was hardly listening. He couldn’t really think of America. His head was full of her.

  “You’ll need to find a place. America is not for the poor. You could starve to death at Quebec or Boston and no one would know your name. It’s no different than anywhere else. In Canada they hire Irishmen for cutting timber, but winter is the season for work in the woods. In spring, the camps are all shutting down. Cotton mills down the Boston states pay a dollar a day for hands so I’m told. From Quebec you might walk to Lowell or Manchester in nine days.”

  He remembered them leaving the camp together aboard the blue horse. The memory caught in his throat and made him cough.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I am.”

  Ormsby tapped his cigar, and a trail of embers streamed off into the dark. “There may be a place with the spring brigade.”

  “A place?”

  “A seat in a canoe. I can promise nothing more. Seven weeks’ hard travel from Montreal to Rupert’s Land.”

  “A canoe, what is it — a púcán?”

  “More or less. Our freight canoes are birch bark on red cedar, seamed with pitch. If you make the trip with me, and present yourself to Company council — with a character from me — they’d offer you an apprenticeship.”

  “Why mister? You don’t know me.”

  “We travel hard, I warn you. A young Irishman with no capital but brains and nerve can make himself a place. Get rich in the trade.”

  “What do you want, mister?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you want of me?”

  The tip of the old man’s cigar glowed red as he drew on it, then breathed out a cloud of fragrant smoke. “Do you play cards?”

  Fergus shook his head.

  “You’ll have to learn. I like to play a hand, traveling up the country, it passes the time.

  “The spring brigade — think it over, Fergus. Perhaps it’s your fortune I’m offering you. Perhaps it’s death in the woods. Who can say? I’m going to bed. Good night.”

  HE RETURNED to the windlass housing and tried to sleep but the wind creaking through kept him awake. At first light, sniffing smoke from lit cabooses, he crawled out feeling stiff and groggy.

  Morning light the color of iron. Clouds bloomed low, and the ocean w
as greasy with calm.

  Was it death he felt in his bones, or just a wretched night? He felt sore all over.

  On the afterdeck, Mr. Blow was bellowing orders and sailors of both watches were scrambling in the rigging. There wasn’t much wind — he could hear the sails billowing and cracking. When the wind was soft, they made a great deal of pointless noise. When they hardened there was a vibrant, strumming sound, the sound of speed.

  He watched the sailors climbing the ratlines hand-over-hand. Men aloft were walking out the yards on footropes — horses — slung beneath. From out on the tips of the yards, there would be a clean fall to the sea.

  Only a few passengers were on deck, cooks-of-the-day starting the breakfast, or people using the heads in the bow. Though the air down below was awful most people disliked coming up on deck because the endless sea terrified them.

  When you were ashore the sea seemed to have a relationship to the land. Aboard ship, you knew the sea was nothing but itself.

  Ormsby appeared at his usual spot at the afterdeck rail. “Weather coming in,” he called down. “I hope you have found your sea legs. She’ll be rocking in a while. We’ll get some speed coming out the other end, perhaps. Anything to get us out these murks. Two weeks and we ain’t seen Cape Clear. Never had such a pallid ride.”

  This morning he wore a Scotch bonnet and velvet jacket. Without the bulk of his fur coat the old man looked small and wiry, a rugged little peck of a fellow sipping coffee from a noggin, the pungent, gorgeous scent steaming. He had a shock of white hair and pale blue eyes. His face was pink and freshly shaven.

  “You cook yourself a good ration this morning. Don’t suppose you’ll be allowed fire while the storm lasts. And our captain will nail down the hatches if there is any weather, so the people will have to ride it out in the hold. You tell them there’s no need to be frightened, though. The ship is sound. She’ll withstand. I suppose there’s few of them below have ever ridden out a storm at sea. The Irish have always kept their backs to the sea.”

  The sea looked placid enough, though darker than usual.

  He could see the sailors up high taking in sails, gathering and bunching canvas and bundling it in long fat rolls, which they were lashing to the yards with dozens of small ties.

  “Have you given any thought to what I said?”

  There was a smile on Ormsby’s lips, but his eyes were appraising.

  “Will you take a seat in a canoe, and see what the country brings you?”

  “I can’t go with you, mister, I am traveling with a girl.”

  Ormsby was silent for a moment. “Are you now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve not seen her.”

  “She’s keeping down below. She’s been ill.”

  Ormsby nodded and took a sip of coffee, looking out at the sea. “I’ll wish you luck then. I hope you both land on your feet.”

  Sensing the old man’s disappointment, Fergus was afraid he had wounded — even insulted — him by refusing. Pride hones disappointment into insult, and Ormsby was proud. Such a caustic old man would know how to cut.

  Ormsby hadn’t said so, but Fergus assumed that the son with the changeable names — Many Gray Horses, Daniel, the Constant Sky — was dead. If Ormsby was after a replacement for his son, he’d never find it.

  The living won’t stand in for the dead. The thought of it fills them with revulsion.

  Bonaparte’s Retreat

  THE OLD WOMAN and Mrs. Coole were rubbing Molly’s ankles and soaking her feet in warm brine. Her stupor reminded him of small animals he’d found alive in his traps — not yet dead, but ready to die; numb with the foretaste.

  “She’s in a violent purge,” Brighid told him. “All her sense is occupied.”

  When Molly began to writhe and moan, Fergus helped the two women hold her still, and Brighid placed two drops of tincture under her tongue.

  When he leaned over to kiss her lips, he could taste the acrid decoction. Her eyes were open, but she wasn’t seeing him.

  The ill are consumed by their illness, it swallows them.

  THE CATTARACKWEE boy, his face spangled with the red nick of fleabites, stood on the foredeck, fiddle tucked on his chin, playing a familiar tune, “The Bonaparte’s Retreat.” Passengers were dancing on the deck, determined to burn off the murk and gloom infesting the ship. They danced to warn off the sailors and impress the master with their noise and their power, and Fergus had joined in, trying to defeat the dread he could feel growing inside, slowly paralyzing him.

  Like all the dancers, he had taken off his boots. As he jigged and twirled on the slippery boards, he could sense Laramie changing course. All day she had been sloughing in a fat sea. Now the wind was picking up and the sky had darkened. Looking aloft, he saw the sails had tightened and filled. He heard the strumming noise of speed.

  The fiddle tune kept spinning faster, as though the fiddler was trying to dance them straight into the eye of whatever was coming.

  When Molly’s cry came, he heard it through the deck boards. It nipped at his bare feet and sent him crashing into a pair of dancers who ignored him and kept on dancing. Pushing his way out of the crowd, he grabbed his boots and raced for the hatchway. No one else seemed to have heard her.

  SHOVING OPEN the curtain, he looked down at Molly lying on bloody straw with a mound of bloody rags crammed between her legs. Brighid and Mrs. Coole were sitting on the berth, Mrs. Coole wiping Molly’s legs with a wet rag while the old woman chafed her ankles. They looked up at him.

  “Go away, man!” Brighid whispered. “Go away! You don’t belong here!”

  “Is it the fever? Is she dying?”

  “Go away! Come back when we’ve cleaned her up for you. You must go away!” The old woman gave him a push.

  “What are you doing with her?”

  “Cleaning her, can’t you see. She’ll be better if you go. It isn’t for a man. Go!”

  “Poison!” Mrs. Coole hissed.

  “Don’t say so,” said the old woman.

  “Look at the mess coming out of her! Poison!”

  “Go away,” the old woman retreated. She sighed, as if she knew he wouldn’t obey, and resumed rubbing Molly’s feet and ankles.

  “What do you mean, poison?”

  “This one has poisoned her,” said Mrs. Coole.

  “Ach.” Brighid’s face twisted in contempt.

  “She is, she is — an old poison cook, I told you so.”

  “Poison cook? Who brought your little boy back? You knew how far he was gone, didn’t you? And I called him back —”

  “What’s wrong? Why is she bleeding so — tell me.”

  “Go away, man. Go away, you don’t belong here, you’ll spoil her.” She glared at Mrs. Coole. “What are you saying, you bossy crag — you’ve a face like a hawk, missus. Cruel you are, vicious.”

  “I’m telling him the truth,” said Mrs. Coole.

  “The truth? The truth is your boy’s alive, ain’t he, thanks to me.”

  Both women were silent.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Will you tell me, please?”

  The women looked at each other.

  “Go on, tell him, you.” Brighid sighed. “You’ve ruined him now. Only tell him the truth.”

  Mrs. Coole looked at him. “She was carrying a child, she was, your child.”

  “What?”

  “She couldn’t keep it,” Brighid said, wearily. “She wasn’t ready. Thought it would kill her. What are you doing here, man? Go away.”

  “This one has been dosing her with syrup of pennyroyal.”

  “Pennyroyal? What is it?”

  “Poison, man.”

  “To draw down her blood,” Brighid said.

  “Draw down this man’s baby, you mean.”

  “No baby it was — she hadn’t quickened. Only a few days gone. There, there, daughter,” Brighid crooned at Molly. “Nothing to fear. Old me is here.”

  “Don’t say you didn’t know what you were doing,
” Mrs. Coole said.

  “It isn’t my baby — it’s Muck’s.”

  They both looked at him.

  “Muck Muldoon, the ganger. He was her man. Before me. It must be his she couldn’t carry. She didn’t say so on account of being afraid that I would cut her loose. Which I would not, Molly,” he whispered, picking up Molly’s limp hand. Hot tears filling his eyes, spilling down his cheeks. “I swear it.”

  Both women were watching him.

  Brighid shrugged then turned back to Molly, placing a hand on her brow. “Sometimes it comes down very easy but I warned her, I said it might be rough —”

  “You wicked, lurid creature, and to think you were doing your black art in the same berth with my babies —”

  “Don’t speak ill of me, missus. Black art indeed! You know nothing.” Brighid looked up at Fergus. “Forget what you’ve seen, man. Your girl will get better now. The poison is come out. I told you — she’ll come back to you. She’ll give you another, by and by.”

  Reaching up, she drew the curtain and shut him out. He could hear the women murmuring but didn’t want to listen to any more. He ran to the ladder and quickly climbed up on deck.

  POOR OLD Muck, you’re twice dead now.

  The sea had broken open, and the wind was aggressive. Waves were cracking over the bow, water sweeping the foredeck.

  The passengers were still dancing. The old man, Ormsby, had joined in and was cutting capers, hands on his hips, head thrown back, yipping like a rooster. A dance so crowing and sexual that even the young men and buxom girls were shying away, giving old Ormsby plenty of room — their quick, light stepping so demure next to his jagged leaps and spins.

  “Passengers below!” the master shouted through his trumpet. The weather was beating hard at the ship but the Cattarackwee boy kept fiddling and the passengers kept dancing, glad to disobey Mr. Blow.

  Two sailors ran up to the foredeck and attempted to seize the Cattarackwee boy. Dodging them, he ran around the deckhouse still with the fiddle on his neck, scraping out music, until the black cook stepping from the galley headed him with an iron pan. The boy crumpled on deck, and a sailor seized the fiddle and swung it against the foremast, smashing the instrument into splinters then dropping the wreckage over the side.