Crooked Branch (9781101615072) Read online

  “Ask your mom to bring some of her famous brownies when she comes to visit,” he says. “Are you allowed to bring brownies on airplanes now?”

  “I’ll ask her.”

  “You need anything else before I get outta here?” he asks, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets.

  Get outta here? I begin to panic. I hadn’t thought about him leaving. I glance at the clock on the DVR. It’s only twelve minutes past five. Leo won’t be home for hours. I think of the two veal chops in the fridge. I think how much I like hot Brian, how he’s probably going home to order a pizza, how inappropriate it would be for me to invite him to stay for dinner. I bite my lip. I’m lots of things I don’t like now, but I’m not an idiot.

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  Chapter Four

  IRELAND, SEPTEMBER 1846

  Before Ray left, they harvested and threshed the oats, and sold enough to John McCann, along with the hog, to make rent. They sold him the cow as well, and used some of that money to buy Raymond’s ticket. So that left a decent stock of oats, cabbage, and turnips, a small sum of money, and the three hens, to last until the promise of Ray’s American dollars. Across Ireland, hunger was falling into famine, but the Doyles were managing better than most of their neighbors. Ginny and her family were getting off lucky.

  His last night, Raymond and Ginny stayed awake while the children slept. They didn’t speak. They hardly moved. It was more wrestling than lovemaking, really. That’s how tightly they clung to each other. They were like a hard knot, fixed at the eyes, his elbow locked round the nape of her neck, her thighs clenched round his hips. She gripped his hair, his shoulder blades, his knuckles. Her fingers would remember him, every inch of him. They stayed like that until the dread dawn. When he finally spoke, his voice was a promise.

  “I will never let you go.”

  They were all up early, and when Raymond was dressed and ready, he lingered by the cottage door. He had been insistent that there would be no American wake, that his neighbors would not gather to see him off, that his family would not mourn his going. So Ginny tried to honor his wishes by hiding the worst of her terror from him.

  “I’ll be back in the summer, sure, when the crop comes good,” Raymond said to his wife. He kissed her mouth, and then he held his nose against her neck. He breathed her in, the scent of her. Their children stood around them in silence. Husband and wife tipped their foreheads together for a moment, and when Ray leaned away, he only nodded at her, and she nodded back. She turned away quickly, before he could notice her tears.

  “You’ll be a good girl, Maire, you’ll help your mammy,” he said then, giving his eldest daughter a squeeze around the shoulders.

  “I will, Daddy, of course,” Maire said, and her eyes were shiny, but she never betrayed herself any further than that. She was solid.

  The two littler girls were blubbery and sad. They clung round their daddy’s neck, and begged him not to go, but he kissed their cheeks and landed them down on the floor with a thump and a tickle.

  “If you’re good, I’ll bring ye back something from America,” he said. “But not if there’s tears.”

  Poppy did her best to dry her face with the back of her hand. “Like sweeties?” she asked. “Or a doll?”

  “Something like that,” Ray said, but Maggie couldn’t be won over so easily. The big, sloppy tears were still rolling on her pink cheeks.

  “Go on,” Ray said, swatting her backside. Maggie scampered away to her mother.

  Michael was the worst. He was inconsolable.

  “Why can I not go with you?” he asked his father for the hundredth time. Ray was down on one knee, and Michael stood in close to his father. “I’m big enough to work.”

  “You’re big enough to work the farm, all right,” Ray answered him. “That’s why you have to stay, son. Your mother needs you here, to keep things ticking over until I can get back. We can’t leave the girls all on their own, right?”

  Michael shook his head. He was nearly ten now. He hadn’t cried in two years. He wanted to show his father how grown he was. He wanted Ray to be proud of him. But in this moment, it was all too much. He crumbled in against his father’s broad chest. He fell in like a rag doll, and when Ray put his arms around him, he felt tiny there, curled up on his father’s knee.

  “What time is the ship sailing?” Ginny asked, to cover the sound of Michael’s sniffles. “God forbid you should miss the boat.”

  Ray nodded again. He gave Michael one last squeeze, and then kissed the top of his head.

  “I’d better be off, all right,” he said.

  But Michael wouldn’t let go. Ginny had to peel her son off Raymond. It was a horrible scene altogether: Michael was wretched, writhing. Any thought of wanting to please his father was abolished entirely by grief.

  In the yard, Ginny held on to Michael so he wouldn’t chase his father down the road when he had to go. Her son was almost too strong for her, getting big as he was. But he wept like a little baby, and in truth, Ginny wept along with him. Their three daughters followed Ray to the top of the ridge in their front field, and there they stood, staring after him as he went, their eyes already stretching, trying to cover that growing distance. Poppy and Maggie cried over each other, holding hands, their little faces turning all puffy and red. And Ginny sat on the three-legged stool beneath the crooked branch of the blackthorn tree, with Michael wailing and thrashing about on her knee. She pinned his little arms into his sides.

  “Daddy’s gone, gone,” she said. They all needed to believe it, to accept it. “He’s gone.”

  And then a grief stole over her that was so pure it was nearly like the chaste agony of losing a child, a sickening feeling of horror and panic. Ginny had suffered that kind of anguish only once before in her life, when she lost a baby in between Michael and Maggie. That time had been bottomless in its despair, and it was hard to believe that Raymond’s departure could feel that brutal. Ginny hadn’t been prepared for the enormity of it. But there was something primal in the farewell; maybe it came from Michael, from the immediacy of his pain. But whatever it was, it inspired a feeling of near certainty that she would never see Raymond again, the sweet corners of his half-moon eyes. It caught her by surprise, rendered her senseless. She held on to Michael, and she cried until her head pounded, until Maire put her hand on her mother’s hair. She patted her mammy’s neck.

  “It’s all right,” Maire said. “Stop crying now, Mammy.”

  And Ginny felt like such an amadán then, that Maire could be brave when she wasn’t. So that was the thing that snapped her out of it, at least in her body. Ginny snuffled and heaved, and then after a moment, she shuddered quietly. She wiped her tears with the corner of her apron, kissed Michael on top of the head, and after a few minutes of rocking, he, too, stopped fighting and turned toward his mother. He buried his face against her, and cried just loosely and quietly until he slept. She laid him inside on her own bed to recover, his face like her own: all pink raw, and covered with snot and tears.

  Those first days without Raymond were like learning a new way of breathing for Ginny, like her lungs had been folded in half, and she had to discover how to get by without air. At nights, she shuddered and shivered under their blanket. She prayed for sleep that did not come. Her eyes yawned open in the dark, and she imagined Raymond stretched out on some bunk or berth, sleeping heavily in the steerage of that America-bound ship. She imagined him rocking gently on the waters, like a baby in its mother’s arms, and some nights, she cursed him for that imagined comfort. She wished to trade places with him, to be the one whose grief and terror might be allayed by adventure. If she was gone to America, all full of purpose and energy—to save her family—well, wouldn’t that be all right in the end? Better than staying here, waiting in fear and sorrow, all the joy gone out of life entirely, watching her children grow tough and skinny. America would be the greatest distraction. />
  What would the light be like there, among the tall ships in the harbor, the teeming city streets? In the letters they took to Father Brennan to read, Raymond’s brother, Kevin, said there were more languages on the streets of New York than he ever knew existed. Ginny wondered what they might sound like, those unknown tongues, fighting for space, cleaving their singsong through the air. And all the families from right round the world, all packed in tight, living in beside one another, cooking their foods, spicy foreign steam billowing from their New York City windows. She wondered at the girls and women inside those windows, sweating at their hearths and cauldrons, swiping loose hair from their sticky foreheads. She wondered if Raymond would meet a beautiful young thing who smelled of chutney or pepper.

  In those first days, she lived more in her mind, with Raymond, than she did in their cottage, with their too-quiet children. That was how the remainder of September passed, unspooling itself into October, when the cold punched in and stayed. Michael hadn’t spoken a word since the day Raymond left. His little voice had gone dry in his throat, so there were two fewer voices now, instead of just the absence of Ray’s. Maggie took to building a cairn in the yard for her father—each day that passed, she added a stone to her mounting pile. By mid-October, her little monument was no larger than an upturned pail, but it grew day by day, and its smallness was a comfort, somehow.

  The first week of November was gray. There was no break of blue, no crack of sunshine in the heavy, slate sky. It pressed down on them, damp and grave overhead. In the morning, Ginny threw two sods of turf on the fire and stoked it up. The smoke drew up to the thatching, some of it pulling out through the smoke hole, and the rest tucking in under the eaves to warm them. Michael was leaning back on the tick of straw where he slept, his bony knees sticking out from beneath the hem of his petticoat. He seemed not to notice the chill, though Ginny could see the blue veins in his ankles and feet. He had one piece of scraggly straw in his fingers, and he was twirling it, watching it spin.

  “Michael, love,” Ginny called out to him, but her words didn’t even bump against his face. “Michael,” she tried again. He stared at the spinning straw. “Go on out to the shed, love, and bring us in the eggs for breakfast.”

  He stayed there long enough that she nearly repeated herself, but finally, a heavy sigh rolled over his shoulders, and he pushed himself up to his feet, and went out silently into the yard. He was gone so quiet that even his footfall failed to thump against the packed earth. The door wouldn’t rattle beneath his hand. And when he returned a few minutes later, he spooked his mother, appearing beside her like a specter with empty hands.

  “Where are the eggs, love?”

  Michael shrugged as the door swung shut behind him, but Maire caught a sight in the door gap, and lunged to swing it open again. She staggered outside, and Poppy followed behind her.

  “Mammy!” Maggie called, tumbling to her feet, and chasing after her sisters. “It’s snowing!”

  The thick white flakes in Michael’s hair were turning clear and dropping into cold streaks that ran along his scalp. His eyes were as flat as the sky. He trudged back to the tick, and Ginny followed him, knelt down, and leaned over him. She ran her hand through his moppy brown hair, cold with the melted snow.

  “I know you miss him,” she said. “We all do. But you’ve to be the man of the house now, Michael. I need your help, mo chuisle.”

  He rolled over to face the wall. Ginny sighed and stood up.

  “Fine, I’ll get the eggs, but you get yourself scrubbed up. You know it’s gale day. We’ll head over after breakfast to pay the rents.”

  She went out the door, and passed Maire swinging Poppy round by the arms in the side yard. Poppy was squealing, as usual, and had her tongue stuck out, trying to catch snowflakes. Maggie was out in the field a small pace, and Ginny could tell by the seriousness on her daughter’s face that she was rock-hunting, looking for the perfect stone to add to her father’s cairn.

  In the shed, the hens seemed awful nervous. Two of them were out in the center of the shed, flapping and scratching about. The third one was missing, and the baskets where they ordinarily roosted were empty. No eggs. Ginny backed away and stared into the empty baskets, her fists planted firmly on her hips.

  “Where?” she whispered.

  She spun around to watch the two remaining hens behind her. They were stood in the doorway, where the faint light of the early winter’s morning was stretching their cold shadows across the floor.

  “Where’s your friend got to?” she asked them.

  Her presence seemed to have calmed them a small bit. They clucked and pecked, waiting for their feed. She usually fed the hens on the skins of potatoes, but the praties were all gone now, and Ginny was trying the hens instead on what oats and scraps they could spare. They were growing skinny, and she knew they’d have to be slaughtered soon, but she hadn’t expected them all to stop laying in the one night.

  She stepped toward the doorway, to go out and scour the yard for the missing fowl, but she stopped short when she heard a strangled screech coming from a dark corner of the shed, behind a bushel of oats. The petrified creature came flapping across the shed, screaming its head off. It landed nearly at Ginny’s feet, and recovered itself at once, as only a hen could. In a moment, it was like nothing had ever happened to it at all. Ginny bent down to look at the bird: her feathers were still puffed and startled, but apart from that, she seemed unharmed. She bobbed her head.

  “What the devil were you doing back there?” Ginny said to her, and then straightened herself up at once, fearing a fox. She grabbed the hayfork beside the door and called out to Maire. The girl came in at the doorway.

  “What’s the matter, Mammy?”

  “Take the hens inside the house for a minute, love, and your sisters, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know, I think we might have a fox.”

  “In the daytime?”

  “I don’t know, love.”

  “If it was a fox, wouldn’t the hens be gone already?”

  “Maire, for God’s sake, stop asking questions and get the hens in!”

  Maire stooped and swept the three of them up in the blink of an eye. She had two of them hanging by the feet in one hand, and the third in the other. She could talk for Ireland, but she had a lovely quick grace to her all the same. After a moment, Ginny heard her daughter’s voice calling out quietly to Poppy and Maggie, and then the cottage door clicked shut behind them. Ginny held the hayfork low to the ground, and stepped in behind the empty baskets. It would be no bad thing to catch a fox now.

  “How would you cook a fox? I wonder,” she said to herself out loud. She did a lot of talking to herself, with Ray gone. “A stew, I suppose.” She shuddered at the thought of eating fox meat, but she’d be glad of it all the same.

  She crept forward and drew her breath in. She didn’t want to startle the beast, exactly. She wanted it to know she was coming. She didn’t want it flying at her face. They were fierce animals when they were cornered.

  “I wish Ray was here,” she muttered.

  She drew the hayfork back then, and up to her shoulder. Her hands were trembling, but she tightened her grip and took a deep breath. She could sense a presence there, in behind the oat bushels—maybe she could hear it breathing, or smell the alien musk of its pelt. She crept forward. She wanted to catch it, and she didn’t want to catch it. She lifted the hayfork with both hands, and yelled as she stormed forward, plunging the fork down through the air.

  “Faith, don’t hurt me! Merciful God!”

  She twisted the fork up just in time, and its tines clattered against the wall. Her hand flew up to her heart, which was beating now like mad. She shook, from the legs up.

  “Mary Reilly, I nearly had you for supper!” Ginny gasped.

  Her neighbor was sitting crouched in behind the oat bushels th
ere, her ragged red petticoat draped over her knees, and her head cradled down in her two hands. Her fair brown hair was thin in its braids, and the knuckles stood out of her hands like an old woman’s. She was close to the same age as Ginny.

  “God forgive me,” the woman said. “I’m sorry, Ginny Doyle. I’m awful sorry. I never meant to startle you.”

  Ginny held the hayfork in one hand, and leaned back against the wall to try and catch breath into her lungs. Her heart was still lunging around in her breast.

  “But what are you doing here, Mary?” She looked at her neighbor crouched down there like a cowering animal. “I thought you were a fox. I nearly poked you full of holes.”

  Mary Reilly opened her mouth to speak, but her face contorted, and she drew the apron up from her knees to hide herself behind it.

  “Here, come here, Mary,” Ginny said, leaning down to her. “Come out of that corner, pet.”

  Ginny tried to pull the woman up by the arm, and was startled to feel how slight and loose the flesh was there, hanging away from her bones. She struggled to her feet, and Ginny pulled the apron away from her face. Ginny drew the poor woman out toward the middle of the shed and sat her down on the milking stool. The woman’s eyes stayed stuck to the earthen floor. Outside, the snow was falling harder, the little flakes eddying along the frozen dirt. Maggie’s cairn had a white veil over it. Ginny waited for Mary to recover herself. When she finally spoke, her voice was so strained, Ginny had to step forward to listen.

  “We’ve nothing left,” Mary whispered, and for the first time, she glanced up at Ginny, their clear blue eyes locking on to each other for just a moment. She was shaking her head. “I came here to thieve one of your hens.”

  The woman dropped her head into her hands again, and Ginny thought she would begin to wail, but she didn’t seem to have the strength. She only shuddered instead. After a moment, she looked up again.