Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Read online

  “Well.” Ray stepped out away from his family, extending his hand. “James Madigan. How’re you keeping?”

  The man lifted his head from his knees and looked up wild-eyed at Ray. They knew him well—he was a young enough fella, with a family of his own, but the way his scraggly hair stood out from his head put the weight of years on him. His knee breeches were worn soft, and patched. His coat was frayed about the cuffs and collar. He was unshaved, and he kneaded the knuckles of one hand with the other. Ray’s hand was just hovering there in the air, until finally James took it in his own.

  “Sorry, sorry there, Ray, I nearly didn’t see you there,” he said.

  Maire snapped a look at her mother, but said nothing.

  “Are you right there, James? You look awful shook,” Ray said to him.

  James’s eyes fled from Ray’s face to Ginny’s, and then, in turns, to the children. He opened his mouth, but made no reply. He rocked himself a small bit, turned then to look back over his shoulder, to his own decimated field. And then his hands were in against his scalp, pulling at his hair, and the tears stood in his eyes as plain as day. Ginny looked down at her feet, to give him a moment. Poppy was pawing at Maire’s skirt, and Maggie and Michael were inspecting a grasshopper who’d emerged from a gap in the wall.

  “It’s all gone.” James’s voice was a choked whisper.

  “Ah, here,” Ray said, but James was shaking his head, still kneading his knuckles with his fingers. His eyes were pink and rheumy.

  “No,” he said. “There’s nothing for it. When gale day comes, we’ll have nothing to give Packet. He’ll throw us out.”

  “Ah, James,” Ray said. “Surely there’s something, something you could sell? Or maybe Packet will give you credit until the spring rents?”

  “Ha!” James spat into the road. “You’d sooner get credit from the devil himself.”

  Ray drew up his hand and scratched his chin. “Things being what they are now, surely the landlords might compromise. They can’t drive the whole population into destitution. They have to see reason.”

  But despite these hopeful words, a look of desperate resignation passed between the two men. They knew the absentee landlords over in London didn’t care about the natives, so long as their plum Irish land continued to yield hearty profits, so long as the grains and cattle they extorted from Ireland continued to fetch their English fortunes.

  “He’ll take my house.” James Madigan’s miserable voice climbed in pitch while he talked. “That blaggard Packet will turn my family out into the roads. We will starve. My hand to God, my children will starve!”

  Maire drew in a sharp breath, and Ginny turned to her, steered her over toward Maggie and the grasshopper.

  “Never worry, love,” she said to her daughter.

  “Never worry?” Maire looked at her mother like she was mad. “We’re well past that, Mammy.” Maire lifted her chin, just enough to remind Ginny that there was no baby fat left there. She was slimming down in her jaw and her cheeks, and the lashes grew longer and softer over her pale blue eyes. Soon she would be a young lady.

  “All right, so.” Ginny nodded at her.

  “Look, Poppy,” Maire said then, crouching down to her little sisters. “See the way its back legs are bent, for jumping?”

  Raymond wasn’t long talking to their neighbor, the men’s heads bent toward each other, Ray with his hand on James’s shoulder, James with his arms folded gravely across his chest. Ginny talked loudly to the children, hoping they wouldn’t hear the notes of hysteria in the poor man’s voice. He slipped inside the stile and was staggering off through his bald field when Ray returned. They walked on to Westport town.

  “The poor man sowed no oats this year,” Ray said quietly when the children were out of earshot.

  Ginny could only gasp in response.

  “They’re in a bad way, Ginny. It’s the road, for them.” He shook his head. “God save them.”

  “You don’t think Packet will postpone the rent for them, just this once? Give them a pass until spring?”

  Ray didn’t even bother answering; he didn’t need to. He just looked at Ginny with one eyebrow arched.

  The road before them wound down through the fields, and then pitched itself steeply uphill again as it narrowed into the town. The children dropped back and gathered in around Ray and Ginny as they entered the streets. There was a bustle in Westport, people hurrying all around, some with a horse and trap, or a donkey, but mostly on foot. Poppy was tired from the walk, so Ginny lifted the child onto her hip, and carried her as they crossed over the Carrowbeg River onto Bridge Street.

  In town, the noise of the people was frantic, as if all their voices had been drawn out of the surrounding farms and fields with a thirsty dropper, and then unleashed like a wild thing into the clamoring streets. The urgent volume pressed in and gave Ginny a fright. She drew in against a shop wall to collect herself for a moment. People streamed past in frenzied clusters and her red petticoat flittered on the passing breeze. She grabbed Maggie by the hand. Raymond was talking, but in the din, Ginny couldn’t make him out.

  “What doesn’t look good, Daddy?” Maire answered him.

  “By God, Maire, would you ever stop with the bloody questions!” he snapped, loud enough for Ginny to hear over everything. “Just for once, and be quiet. Let me think.”

  Maire looked at her mother for comfort, but Ginny only shook her head.

  “Why don’t you take Michael and go look at the ducks,” she said to her daughter. “Go on. We’ll meet you on the mall, after.”

  “I want to go, too, Mammy!” Maggie squealed.

  “No, love, you stay with us.”

  “But, Mammy!”

  “You’re too small, mo chuisle.”

  “I love the ducks!”

  “We’ll see them after.”

  Maire and Michael had already slipped off into the crowd. Maggie sulked, so Ginny had to rightly drag her down the street toward the open market. Two-and-a-half-year-old Poppy had her warm body wrapped around Ginny, her legs clamped tight around her mother’s waist, and her mop of goldy curls tickling her mother’s chin. Ginny kissed the top of her head. She was a pretty child, with big, reverent brown eyes—her only reverent feature, perhaps. Her big sister tugged and leaned from Ginny’s arm.

  “Maggie, don’t pull on me,” Ginny said, and the child turned to scowl at her mother. For an instant, a certain twist of expression, Maggie looked exactly like Ginny: the black hair and vivid blue eyes, the arched brows and full lips. But it was something more than that. A trick of God’s magic, the way a mother can trace herself sometimes, beneath the skin of her children.

  All around them, animals bleated in their pens, and men’s voices competed over one another in their haggling. Ginny could smell the animals, the manure underfoot, the press of men’s bodies, the sweetness of burning tobacco, and then behind all that, out beyond the streets in every inch of soil surrounding Westport, that awful, sharp and curdling rot. On a crowded corner, an old fella sat playing the fiddle, and a small gathering of children stood quietly staring at him. Maggie tugged at Ginny’s arm and pointed.

  “Isn’t he lovely, Mammy? How does he do that?”

  There was another tug then, at her waistband, and it was Michael. Himself and Maire were back already.

  “I thought you were going to wait for us on the mall,” Ginny said.

  “Ducks are gone,” Michael announced.

  Maggie’s blue eyes grew wide.

  “That’s odd,” Ginny said quietly.

  “But the ducks are always there, Mammy,” Maggie said, with an edge of worry in her voice. “Where’ve they got to?”

  It was true that there were usually ducks in that walled stretch of the Carrowbeg—almost always. The children loved to quack and waddle after them.

  “I don’t know, love,”
Ginny said. “Maybe they’re off at a duck meeting, up at Westport House.”

  Michael grinned. “Like a quacker council?”

  Ginny laughed. “Yes, just like that.”

  Raymond wasn’t listening. He approached one of the merchants, John McCann, who was known for doing a stiff trade with the English ships. He always offered a fair price to the locals. There was a small crowd of men around him already, some talking, some only leaning in, listening. Ginny pulled in as close as she could, and strained to listen, too.

  “It’s no skin off my nose if you don’t want to sell the pig for that price, if you want to hang on a bit,” McCann was saying to a lean, whiskered man. “But I’d hide him fast if I was you, before your hungry neighbors find him.”

  The gathered men laughed, but the whiskered fella only waved an exasperated hand at McCann, and turned on his heel to go. The man pushed past Ginny through the crowd, and McCann called out after him. “You watch, that pig will go the way of the ducks!”

  • • •

  On the mall, there was a young fella, only a child really, no more than maybe fifteen years of age, sat on a bench reading out of the newspaper to a group of stern-faced listeners. Maggie and Poppy wheeled over to the canal wall to peer over at the missing ducks. Indeed, the gray and swift-flowing water beyond was empty of them. Michael stood between his sisters, pointing out the places where the ducks would usually be mucking about.

  “I told you,” he said. “They’re disappeared.”

  Maire stood beside Ray and crowded in among the others, who jostled to hear the young lad reading out of the paper in his unfaltering voice. He had it spread open across his knees like a blanket, and his voice rang out clear enough, despite the way he hunched over to squint at the words.

  “‘Serious food riots in Dungarvan led to the pillaging of a baker’s shop in the town center. The baker fled, and was uninjured. Authorities now fear that the nationwide devastation of the potato crop will be permanent and absolute, in all provinces of the country. Indeed, no corner of Ireland appears to have escaped the ravages of this year’s annihilation.’” The boy looked up from his paper and eyed the growing crowd nervously.

  “Go on, son!” someone encouraged him from the back.

  “Read it out, child!” an old woman added.

  Maire was staring at him, her eyes as wide as the sun. The young man rearranged his grip on the paper and cleared his throat.

  “Panic reigns in Ireland,” he called out, and then he closed it, folded it up on his knee.

  “What else does it say?” a man from the back of the crowd urged him.

  The boy shrugged, his eyes no longer flicking over the words on the page. “More of the same,” he answered quietly, standing up from the bench and glancing back down at the folded paper. “The Queen is sending men of science to analyze the extent of the destruction.”

  “God save the Queen!” a lone voice shouted, and this sentiment was met by a round of hissing and jeering.

  “Devil take the Queen!” someone else shouted, and then everyone cheered.

  “She’s not our Queen!”

  The crowd was growing rowdy.

  “God save us,” said an old woman beside Ginny.

  “Sure it was God Himself that did this,” said another old woman, her companion. Their arms were linked through each other’s at the elbow. Perhaps they were sisters. They were dressed like townies, no muck of the roads on their feet. They sighed heavily together, almost like one beast. “Divine Providence has finally seen fit to punish our wastefulness. ’Twas a sin, the way we’d that many praties in the good years, the farmers were using them to manure the fields.”

  The other old woman clicked her tongue. “We never took any heed when times were good.”

  They turned as one and tottered off down the mall, shaking their heads and tutting at each other. The lad with the paper started to push his way out through the crowd, but a young mother with an infant at her breast pressed her hand against his arm.

  “But what are we to do?” she asked. Her eyes were pleading all over the young lad’s face. “What good are these men of science? Will they help us?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, missus.”

  “But surely there must be something to be done.” Her voice was rising in pitch, and she tightened her grip on the boy’s arm. “A lad of good learning like yourself must know. There has to be an answer coming, please God.”

  The young lad bit a sharp breath into his lungs and wrenched his arm back from the desperate young mother. “I’m just like the rest of ye,” he insisted. “I don’t know anything!”

  The woman began to wail. “Winter is coming, God help us! Merciful God save us!”

  The boy slipped away as quick as he could through the scattering crowd. People were drawing away from the young mother, wary of her shot nerves and her swift panic. There was a contagion to that kind of madness that no one could afford. The cracked and hollow sound of her cries followed the Doyle family as they crossed back over the Carrowbeg River, and found their road home.

  Maire herded the other children in front of her as they walked, and only looked back at her parents now and again. Ginny carried Poppy, and she and Ray spoke to each other in fits and starts. He was mostly deep in thought.

  “We’ll slaughter the hog that’s left,” Ray said as they walked. “Never mind the rent, we’ll slaughter the hog.”

  “Never mind the rent, Ray, have you lost the plot?”

  He shook his head and his mouth made a small twitch, but he didn’t answer.

  “That hog is going to Packet,” Ginny said. “No question about it. I’ll not give him an excuse to throw us out into the roads. Anyway, we’ve the cabbage and turnips, and we still have the three hens, the eggs from them. We still have the cow.”

  In truth, the hog wasn’t in great shape—he was hungry, too. But regardless, he was owed to Packet; he was rent, and there was nothing to be done about that. Any other food was only supplemental, little things Ginny grew in the kitchen garden just for the odd bit of variation. It was a paltry inventory, and it would never be enough to survive on. How would they even feed those hens?

  Ginny and Ray reared up their children on potatoes, as everyone did—and those children were fit and pudgy off them. Look at them there in the road ahead: their strong, loose bodies, their glowing skin. Their free little hands like birds, flitting and soaring. Michael poking Maggie in the ribs, and she lunging back, like fencers at play. They were the picture of grace, those small, nourished people with their bright eyes. Even after a whole year of slim crop.

  The Doyles had never really been troubled before, even when times were bad; they’d managed to escape the worst of the blight until this. Ginny thought of their two scarce mounds of saved potatoes at home. They were catastrophic, those heaps. Maggie started to fall back from Michael and Maire, exhausted from the long walk, and Ray hoisted her onto his shoulders. She tucked her feet into his armpits.

  “How come you get so tired, missus?” Ray asked his little daughter.

  “Because I’m only five, Daddy, and my wee legs are only small,” she said.

  “Lazy, that’s what you are.”

  “I’m not, Daddy. I have to work twice as hard as you. Even harder. For every step of yours, I take three. Do you know what that means?”

  “What?”

  “I’ve walked ten times farther than you today. I walked all the way to Dublin.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yep.”

  “And did you see the castle?”

  “I did.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  Maggie stuck her fingers into Ray’s ears and wiggled them around.

  “I’VE GONE DEAF!” he yelled.

  Poppy giggled over at them. “You’re not, Daddy—it’s Maggie’s fingers!” she said.
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  Except for the solid knot of dread that had settled somewhere near the top of Ginny’s throat, things seemed almost normal.

  • • •

  After the children went to sleep, Raymond and Ginny left the lantern burning and went out into the dark night. There was a smattering of stars smeared across the blackened sky, and a cold wind rattled through the ruined fields. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and crossed it over itself, tucking it into her waistband in front. They turned their backs to the cottage and stepped out together among the crunching stalks. Ray kept his arm around her, and she floated her opened palm above the withered brown crop. He hadn’t said much all afternoon, and she wondered if his heart felt as tight as hers. It was a new moon, and well dark in the fields. Only the faintest glow in the western sky whispered the lamps and hearth fires of Westport town. She couldn’t see his face. They were quiet for a time, and she was the first one to speak.

  “It won’t be enough.” She said the words for both of them. “The eggs, the cabbage. It’s only September, Ray.”

  She heard him cracking some of the potato stalks next to her. He crinkled them in his palm and took a sniff, then dusted his hands off. Maybe he hoped, if he kept checking, he might find something different.

  “The next harvest is June at soonest,” he said, thinking out loud.

  She stopped walking and turned to look in his direction. He already knew, they both knew. There was a queer, silvery fog like a veil over the land, even in the dark, and that blanket of fog kept the stink of rot tamped down beneath it.

  “Please God, let the sun come tomorrow,” she said, “and burn all this dankness away.”

  “Amen to that,” Ray whispered. His hand found hers in the darkness, and they avoided it for another minute—the horrible thing they had to say to each other. She was the one, in the end.