The Light of Evening Read Online Free PDF Page B

way of saying goodbye. “In your letters, better not mention politics,” he said. He had a secret life from us, he was a Croppy Boy,
    so many young men were, but dared not speak of it for fear of informers.
    In the mail car I kept touching my belongings, feeling for the two coins: the sovereign and a florin that my mother had stitched in the hemline of my coat, wrapped and rewrapped in cloth so as not to look like money. People waved from gateways and walls, knowing that the mail car was bringing people bound for America.
    A bumpy ride over the wintry roads and where bridges had collapsed we got out and walked, then back on again and the coachman belting the two horses with all his might, because we had to catch the train to get us to Queenstown in time for the ship.
    I thought of our dog Prince and he knowing for certain that I was leaving and of my mother crying into the black lace mantilla that had come from Salamanca. I thought too of the secret places where my brother hid his weapons, his revolver and shotgun wrapped in straw, like the figures in a manger.

    Little Bones

    for nearly two weeks a world of water, pounding and sloshing, great waves full of ice crashing against the portholes and a horizon that could have been anywhere, home or Canada, or Timbuktu, or anywhere.
    Down below where we were incarcerated the fumes were terrible, fumes of cooking and cooking fat and oil from the paraffin lamps that had to be lit all day. A hole. People bickering and fighting and brokenhearted. Some had brought their own provisions and would elbow each other for a place at the one stove, the contrary cook hitting out with her tongue or a ladle or whatever instrument she had to hand. It was her stove, her domain. The staple diet for most was dry biscuits and salt fish. I nearly died of thirst. The thirst was the worst of all. I kept thinking of wells at home, imagined putting the bucket down and drawing up the clean water that had come from the mountain and drinking it, drinking a mug of it there and then. The water casks had run out after the third day and we had to use salt water for our tea and for all else. Stewards came twice a day from up above, cursing and shouting, telling us to clean our slops, to clean our messes and the contents of chamber pots, slop buckets and cooking pots were tossed over the railings, the water a sheet of gray, mile after mile of it, the waves mouthing away, like the mouths of the millions of fishes that the sea harbored.
    In the evenings the sound of the orchestra drifted down as the
    first-class passengers danced and sat down to their five-course dinners.
    Earlier we were allowed up on deck to do our own dancing and a fiddler from Galway played with a gusto. Mary Angela surpassed herself, knowing all the steps, and was tossed from one young man to the next like she was a feather. Only Sheila suspected that all was not right because of the big skirt Mary Angela wore and the loose apron that she never took off. She said her stomach was swollen because of the salt water and the gruel. At night she sat with the men, drinking grog with them in the dark, lewd laughter and sounds, the tiptoeing to different berths, men vying for her.
    I had not taken my coat off in all that time nor ventured under the blanket in the berth my parents believed they had paid for. It turned out to be a quarter of a berth, the remaining three quarters occupied by a family that turned it into a pigsty and never stirred from there. The son had frog spawn in a jar and there were frogs scurrying about before we docked.
    Mary Angela was the one that struck fear and foreboding into us all.
    It was the night of the storm. Wind and rain battering the hatches, the ropes creaking, the timbers of the ship groaning as if they might snap apart, a crew half delirious, shouting orders to one another up above, as the ship pitched and rolled, delved down into the depths then vaulted up, water cascading in and we thrown in heaps on the floor,