The Light of Evening Read Online Free PDF

saw the ship and waved to her.
    “Westwards … in  her  beautiful white  cloak,” he  said.  He
    was going to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a boat all by himself like Brendan the Navigator and be a hero and go down in the annals.
    Maybe I decided then or maybe not. There was always so much talk about America, every young person with the itch to go. Nothing for us in the rocky fields, only scrag and reeds and a few drills of potatoes.
    Little did I dream that one day I would be lemon-oiling the banisters of the stairs of Mr. and Mrs. P. J. McCormack in their mansion in Brooklyn and dusting the treasures on Mrs. McCor-mack’s dressing table, the tiny glass pots with their silver tops, the silver-backed brush and comb set, the silk pincushion skewered with her hatpins, Matilda, with corsages of violets and strawberries pinned to her bosom.
    Creena was making us all laugh with a dance that her aunt had taught her. Her aunt Josephine had been home from Boston, cut a dash every Sunday with a change of style for Mass, telling people that America was out of this world and that no sooner did a craze for one dance catch on than another dance took over, all crazes, all fads.
    My mother found the note I’d written and hidden under the mattress. It said, “I want to go to America where I can have nice clothes and a better life than I have here” and was signed Dilly. She beat me for it and ripped an old straw hat that I was decorating with gauze. She was furious. I would stick at my books and stay home and be useful, I was a good pupil, the way she was a good pupil before me. Again and again she would tell it how when she was in the school she prayed for rain, downpours, so that the teacher would let her spend the night in the school because it was too far to walk the four miles home barefoot. She would tell how she used what was left of daylight to keep studying. Why should America claim Ireland’s sons and daughters, Ireland needing them, so many that had died on the scaffold and many more to die including, though she did not
    know it then, her own son. Had I no nature to want to leave, to bolt? We were always at loggerheads, my mother and me, both being very stubborn and strong-willed.
    The night before I left home, there was the wake in our kitchen as was the custom for anyone going so far away. The kitchen was full of people, two men left their flash lamps lit during the dancing. Boys danced with me, said that they’d miss me, boys that had never thrown two words to me before, over a ditch. The older men sat on the settle bed with their bottles of porter and the one bottle of whiskey that they passed around and when they got up to dance they staggered and had to sit down again. The women were by the fire consoling my mother, consoling themselves, fearing that I would never come back. Some neighbors had helped with the passage money and I was sent around the kitchen to shake hands with them and swear that I would repay them. My things were packed, a black oilskin bag with twine around it, other clothes in a flour sack, and a long tin box with the name of a whiskey and the picture of a stream near where it was malted. My brother Michael sang “The Croppy Boy” and there were floods of tears over it, tears at my going and tears at the poor Croppy Boy who innocently went to do his Easter duty not knowing that the priest in the confessional was an English yeoman in disguise who would have him hanged for his insurgency.
    We left in the sidecar at dawn and as many as would fit got up with us, others walking behind, the young men haggard from the night’s enjoyment, slipping off at their own gates, cows waiting to be milked, a day’s work to be done. I’ll never forget my mother, Bridget, kneeling down on the dirt road to kiss my feet and saying, “Do not forget us, Dilly, do not ever forget your own people.” My brother came with me to wait for the mail car. He took off his brown scapulars and gave them to me, it being his