Bridie's Fire Read Online Free PDF Page A

all three of the little wizened bodies in sacking and take them to the cemetery to be buried together. One day Bridie had seen Mrs O’Farrell sitting huddled on the doorstep of her home, and then a week later the door was blowing open.
    All along the laneways, houses lay empty, as if the people had gone out for an evening walk but then never returned. In some houses, the dresser stood with the crockery still upon it. Every day, a steady stream of people climbed over Mount Eagle or took the rugged road around the coast to Dingle.
    In the end Bridie had to walk halfway around the peninsula before someone would give her a few pennies for her dad’s things. Bridie went home to find Mam sitting close to the fire, rocking Paddy as he moaned in his sleep, with Brandon curled up near her feet. Paddy was starting to look like an O’Farrell child; his cheekbones were too big, his cheeks too sunken, and there was no softness to his little limbs. He didn’t want to play any more. Mostly he just slept in Mam’s arms.
    â€˜We’ll have to leave, Mam,’ said Bridie. ‘We’ll have to go like the others or we’ll starve, right here in our home.’
    â€˜There’s no cure for misfortune but to kill it with patience,’ said her mother, laying Paddy down on the bed that she’d once shared with their father.
    Bridie couldn’t stop the words and the fury spilling out. ‘The devil sweep your soul, you fool of a mamai , the hunger will kill us before patience can win!’ she shouted.
    â€˜Can we go to America?’ asked Brandon, sitting up. ‘If we go to America, we could find Uncle Liam.’
    Bridie looked at her brother and scowled. ‘And bad cess to him, it’s never a word we’ve heard from him since,’ she said. ‘No, we’ll go to Dingle, to Aunt Mairead’s house. We’d be cracked to stay here. I’ve heard there’s a soup kitchen in Ventry. We can go through there on our way.’
    â€˜That’s enough of your slack-jaw, girl,’ said her mother quietly. Though her words were stern, her whole body spoke of her exhaustion.
    â€˜Your dad always said, “No matter how hungry we get, we’ll never stoop to taking the soup”,’ said Mam, stroking the pale curls away from Paddy’s brow.
    â€˜But it’s the Quakers, Mam! They’re not asking anything of us. They’re not like the Church of Ireland. I wouldn’t go over to the Devil for a bowl of soup, but I’ll not watch my brothers die for want of it. I won’t be putting our boys in sacks like Kitty O’Farrell. We’ll be going to Dingle tomorrow,’ said Bridie firmly. ‘Blood knows blood, so Aunt Mairead will take us in – and the Quakers will feed us on the way.’
    Mam looked at Bridie as if she hardly knew the fierce girl who stood at the end of the bed. ‘God help us,’ she said, putting her face in her hands.
    Brandon wanted to go straight over the top of Mount Eagle, but Bridie said they had to take the coast road. Perhaps they’d be able to beg something from the folk along the way, and besides, none of them had the strength to carry the last of their possessions and Paddy over the high hill.
    The last time Bridie had travelled this road with her father, they had set out in the morning and reached Ventry by noon. But this time it took them a day and a half to walk the rutted track, stumbling behind the carts making their way around the peninsula. Bridie took a wooden bowl and begged a morsel at as many doors as would open to her, but most folk were as hungry as the O’Connors. At night she lay curled up against her mother and thought of the man she had tried to feed with nettle soup before he died. Her dreams were full of dark images.
    They reached Ventry late the following day to find the soup kitchen closed. A great mound of empty cockle and mussel shells lay piled beside the door. Brandon