athenry, just east of galway city, ireland, the 1840s
“Mary,” he hisses and she turns to see his head sticking out of the brambles. “Mary!”
She giggles and goes over to him, touching his browned face. “Michael, what are you like?”
“In love,” he says without shame, taking her hand and pulling himself out. He wraps his arms round her thin waist and she giggles again, then catches the happy but not playful expression on his face.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, pressing her hands against the rough cloth of his waistcoat.
He took a deep breath. “I… I know I don’t have a lot, but Trevelyan’s letting a little plot of land, and there’s a cottage...”
She looks down, pulling at his lapels, then met her dark eyes with her own blue ones. “Go on,” she prompts him.
“Mary, will you marry me?” he asks.
“Yes. You know I will,” she says and kisses him.
They stand side by side, black against the dying sun as a flock of geese fly overhead.
“Sure,” she says with mischief. “What would I do without you?”
*
The girl can’t be more than eighteen or nineteen, but there are premature worry lines already formed in her face. Her red hair whips against them as she presses her hands and body against the rough stone. “Michael?”
There is a scrabbling at the other side and a tanned face fills the high barred window.
“Oh, Michael, Joseph told me, I didn’t really think, oh, Michael.” Her sky coloured eyes fill up with tears.
“It was for Sarah, Mary, you know that. If she died…”
“What if you die?” she says, her voice breaking into sobs, and only snatches of sentences escape. “Christ, Michael, what will we do? I can’t get a job now, Sarah’s sicker than ever… all over some bloody corn… how can they be so cruel, so… just corn…” She wails. The sound echoes in the velvety darkness of an autumn evening.
“Sh, sh,” he says, pushing his work hardened fingers out the window and down the wall, finding her hand. “Listen, Mary. They’re sending me to Australia.”
She gasps and freezes. “No, Michael, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave-”
A guard, upon discovery of the man standing by the window, lets out a roar on the other side of the wall. “Get down from there!“
He squeezes her thin, calloused fingers in his own. “Nothing matters when you’re free, Mary. Nothing at all. You have to look after Sarah, tell her what I was like. Promise me.”
She can’t reply, stuffing her free hand in her mouth.
“Promise.”
She nods. He lets go of her hand and his face disappears. But three words floated up through the window towards and wrapped around her like an extra layer. She whispers her reply.
“I love you too.”
*
With the child, sickly and crying, on her hip, she watches the ship leave the bay. Australia. It’s a long way away, across the world, far further than anywhere she could imagine. Her ideas of faraway places are Cork, Dublin, London at the most. Botany Bay…
He’s gone.
She watches the last star fall.
*
Sarah doesn’t recover, despite her trying. She takes her to her own mother, to the priest, to the unofficial witch woman. But they all reply that what she needs is food, but none can give her any.
She goes to beg at the Big House, but the man who opens the door scoffs. “After your husband stole from us? Not likely.”
She misses him with all her heart. She sits with Sarah in her arms, watching the door, imagining him coming in, flicking his light hair away from his eyes and giving her the sunny grin she knows and loves. She sees him coming over and kissing her and telling her how much he loves her. She sees them going out to the fields and watching the birds as they used to, tucking her head into his shoulder and kissing his bristly cheek.
She sits in an empty house with a dying child and tears on her face.
*
That night, she sees Sarah buried in the churchyard next to her great grandparents. There’s no headstone, just two pieces of wood tied together by a cousin. She sees herself standing by the graveside, weeping more and more, and opposite her, he stands with grave eyes. “You promised.” The words carry on the wind right back to her sleeping self, whispered and disappointed. She wakes. Beside her, Sarah is shivering, but not crying.
She bathes her child in kisses. “Live,” she commands. “Live.” Then goes and draws water and gets a cloth and stays up the whole night, with more determination than she has ever had in her life.
“Did I ever tell you about your father?” she asks. “He’s a great man…”
*
Sarah’s fever is gone a few days later when Joseph, a lifelong friend, comes to the door. “I heard you were in trouble,” he says, and puts down a sack of oats. “And I just got made chief servant at the Big House.”
He goes to the garden and pulls up the weeds she’s let take over in her husband’s absence. He asks her about the rent.
With a shock, she replies, “I’ll have to sell the goat. She’s been dry for weeks now.”
Joseph tells her not to. He says he can tide her over this time. He tells her to go to the Quakers, they sell seeds for new crops (not potatoes, never potatoes again). He tells her to feed the goat up, start feeding Sarah on its milk and porridge from the oats, and set some aside to sell. He says once Sarah is better he’ll see about getting them some chickens.
That night, when she dreams, she sees her husband happy in the company of other convicts, not murderers or rapists, men like him who were desperate to help their families. She sees herself, her hair tied up in a scarf, feeding chickens, with Sarah and two other children by her feet.
She smiles in her sleep.
*
The goat puts on weight, Sarah says her first word. It’s ‘Papa,’ and she shouts it as her mother and Joseph laugh as they try to catch the chicken he’s just brought her which is running around the little yard as if it has lost its head.
They both stop short, letting the chicken to her own devices, and stare at her. She grins and runs to hug her child. Tears spring to her eyes. “That’s right, Sarah. Your Papa. He was a great man. Is a great man. And you’re going to grow up and be as brave and creative and wonderful as him.”
Joseph puts a hand on her shoulder and says nothing.
*
“Look at the birds,” he says to her as they lie in the field.
“You’re forever going on about birds,” she replies, seeing the V of geese.
“You’re like a bird,” he says, rolling onto his side and looking at her. “I bet you were a bird.”
“What?” she asks, shocked and nearly laughing.
“That’s what they say out far east. They say you used to be a different creature, and when you die you’ll be a different creature.”
She shakes her head. “Your head’s full of stuffing,” she tells him.
“But do you love me despite that?” he asks, winking at her.
She meets his gaze and looks away again. “Of course I do.”
*
It’s half a year later when she sees him fall onto the hard-boiled Australian earth in her dream.
He doesn’t get back up.
When she wakes up, she finds there aren’t any tears left in her. She’s a widow, she feels it in her heart, but she knows she’s been a widow for months now.
Joseph comes that day and tells her how many eggs she should set aside to pay the rent that month. She takes off her ring and puts it on the table instead. He looks up at her with shocked green eyes.
“I don’t think I need it anymore,” she says. “Michael isn’t coming back.”
*
She still dreams about him every night. His laugh, the look on his face when he tried to add up numbers (he could never do it, she can, but she’s glad of Joseph’s help all the same), the smell of his sweat, the withered black lumps sitting in his big hands the day the blight came, the way he danced jigs, his soft, nervous voice singing lullabies to her and Sarah. At night, it’s just the two of them, and they go to watch the birds fly overhead.
But during the day, Sarah takes her first shaky steps and Joseph brings her another chick to tend to. She buys oats and tea and begins looking into how to make cheese. Joseph brings her a sheet of instructions he copied from a book in the Big House and gently corrects her when her tongue stumbles over the written words. After she left school she hasn’t needed to read again, she reminds him.
The next day he visits, he brings her a book. “Now you need to read,” he says with a smile- his smiles draw more to the left than the right, she notices.
When her mother comes, she shakes her head at the book on the table. “That boy’s doting on you, no mistake. And you a widow!”
She says nothing, but she can’t sleep that night. She’s never thought of it before. When slumber finally takes her, it’s dreamless.
*
A few weeks later, she can’t remember whether his scar from his first time cutting firewood was on his left or his right arm, but she knows that Joseph has a long white line on his wrist from tripping in the kitchen and catching it on his mother’s knife when he was very little.
Sarah says “Joe” and then “Papa.” Joseph looks at her and bites his lip. She picks the child up and hugs her, but doesn’t say a word.
*
Joseph and her take Sarah for a walk in the fields. Sarah goes exploring by herself- she’s inquisitive and adventurous these days and they’re left by themselves.
She looks up out of habit, and there’s two swallows swooping overhead. She laughs to herself.
“What?” Joseph asks, looking at her.
“Just the birds,” she replies. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
*
One day when Joseph comes, he brings a map of the world. She stares at it, spans her hands over faraway places. “Maybe I’ll go to China. Or Brazil.” She doesn’t mention Australia.
“Is Athenry not good enough for you?” Joseph asks, his eyes twinkling.
She shakes her head and smiles. “No. It is. I’ll never get to any of those places anyway.” She rolls the map back up.
“You can always dream.”
She sees the birds, sees Michael’s hand in hers, sees them talking and looks at Joseph. “The only dreaming I do is when I’m asleep. All I’ve ever done.”
*
“We’ll travel the world, see all there is to see,” he promises her.
“You know we won’t. We’ll never get further than Galway,” she says.
“You should dream more, Mary. You’re far too practical.”
“You dream enough for both of us, so I’ll never need to,” she says.
He takes both her hands in his. “What if I’m gone?”
“You won’t be,” she assures him and kisses him.
*
About a year after the ship left, Joseph plants a kiss on her lips. It’s nervous and very unsure, but it’s definitely a kiss.
She’s forgotten the tune Michael always used to whistle, what birds were flying overhead when he asked her to marry him. But she knows the names of all Joseph’s cousins, and knows his ambition to open a shop in the city.
She kisses him back.
*
Three months later, her wedding dress is altered and she wears it with spring flowers in her hair. Sarah wears her first proper green frock as she walks down the aisle in front of her mother and grandfather. They keep the little cottage, and the goat and chickens.
*
“Look at the birds,” he tells her, pointing up to where a host of sparrows gather above them. She squeezes his hand.
“They’re magnificent,” she tells him, and they lie back together in the long grass for the last time.
“Aren’t they just?” he murmurs and they watch the birds flying as the sun sets over Athenry.
AN: If you don't follow Irish rugby or support Celtic FC, you may not be aware of the song The Fields of Athenry, but every self-respecting Irish person has sung it at least once, but if you don't know it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLZRWNdG ... re=related -that's the Dubliners.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10agPj0Vzu4 -Dropkick Murphys.
So yeah... I just wanted to explore what happened afterwards... it was fun!But needs work... thanks for reading... Stella x
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