The few memories I have of my little sister are as delicate and thin as tissue. I was only four and a half when the sickness took Sophie from us. I remember her being a happy child, mischievous sometimes, and afraid of the dark—she would cuddle close to me in the bed we shared at night. I remember her sitting on my grandmother’s lap and my being jealous because I wanted Gram’s lap to be only mine. I remember her taking one of my shoes once and throwing it into the well just to hear it splash. I remember her golden brown curls and the yellow hair ribbons she liked to wear that at one time had been mine. I remember her lying in our bed burning with fever and how I had to sleep at Gram’s cottage while she was sick and I liked it. I remember Gram telling me between sobs that the angels had come for her and I remember the tiny coffin. I remember the sound of my mother’s wailing and my father carrying the coffin up the hill to the cemetery with other men from the village.
After Sophie’s death my parents seemed unable or unwilling to talk about her, and so her presence lifted and she became like a vapor to me, a dream. A dream of a sister whom I might have had but never did. As the years went on, my parents learned to laugh and smile again, and I know they loved again because I would hear them in their room next to mine. But there were never any more babies and I don’t think they grieved that. Losing Sophie had changed them, made them fearful of having more children who could also be taken from them.
My father brought out his word book again when I was eight or nine; I didn’t even know he had it, because he had put it away when Sophie died. But he was ready, I suppose, to continue to learn all that the world had to teach. I was the only one of the children interested in Da’s word book. My brothers weren’t curious and didn’t value schooling like my father did. None of them wanted to be learned men who taught at university or performed important work in an important office building dressed in an important-looking suit.
So it was me with whom Da shared his word book. The book kept us close even as I became a young woman and started to be more and more interested in Mason’s friends. My two older brothers, Niall and Ross, both married at age twenty, and since they were eight and ten years older than me, they were out of the house and creating families of their own well before I knew where babies even came from. Mason, only three years older than me, didn’t mind my company, especially after the older brothers moved out, and he let me follow him and his friends almost anywhere they went. He had a group of chums and most of them were unremarkable fellows.
Colm McGough was the exception. He was a year and half or so older than Mason and tall and handsome. He was the boy in the village all the young girls wanted to impress. He came from a family of fishermen by trade, the second-born of two sons, and the rumor was his father, Gerard, was an authoritative figure who showered little affection on his boys. His mother was a meek little creature who seemed to be afraid of Gerard McGough’s very shadow. I don’t think I ever heard that woman give an opinion of her own volition or contradict Mr. McGough. Still, Colm seemed a cheerful sort, easygoing, and he surely knew he had the eye of every young girl in the village. I would daydream of him, and I was content enough with that. I had no illusions that Colm McGough fancied me. I was Mason Whalen’s little sister; that’s all I was. That’s what I thought, anyway.
The day my father fell from the roof was an ordinary day. I was still going to classes at sixteen, although many of my schoolmates had stopped at fourteen and were working or learning a trade. I was walking home from school, the long way by the docks, and keeping my eye out for Colm’s fishing boat, when I heard someone calling my name. A neighbor was running toward me, holding her skirts up so that she wouldn’t trip. My father had fallen and hit his head, the doctor had been summoned to my house, and my mother needed me.
I ran home expecting my father to be sitting in his favorite chair with a chunk of ice to his head, laughing about his clumsiness. But when I came into the house I saw that my da was not in his chair. He was in his bed with a bandage around his head that was seeping blood, and his skin looked pale and slack. The doctor was there and he was telling my mother that it was quite possible Da would not awaken, that my father’s eyes were fixed when the doctor had shone his light in them and that was never a good sign.
The doctor told us he could do nothing for him. Prayer was the only thing that could save my da. So we prayed. For four days we prayed. But the doctor was right. Da did not awaken. My mother had been sitting up with Da at night for fear of missing the moment he opened his eyes, but she had fallen asleep holding his hand, and when she startled awake at dawn on the fifth day, the hand in hers was stiff and cold.
Up to that point what I knew of death was the loss of Sophie, which I could barely remember, and the loss of my gram, who had died three years previous. My grandmother had seemed old to me and it seemed natural when she passed. I didn’t like it one bit, but other people’s grandmothers had died. It didn’t seem odd, just sad. My father’s death, however, seemed wrong, as if a giant mistake had been made. I could not fathom that my da was gone.
I remember very little of his passing or his funeral or burying him next to my sister and my grandmother. I was in a fog of numbness that I didn’t want to emerge from. Mason had already been set to emigrate to America. A second cousin on my mother’s side had offered to sponsor him, and he already had his passage booked. He made it clear that he didn’t want to stay in Donaghadee; he wanted to make his own way in the world even more so now that our father was dead. He did not want to be a roofer, and that’s what his lot would’ve been had he stayed. My mother told him to go, even while I begged him to stay. My two older brothers who lived nearby—but not in Donaghadee—offered to help as best they could, but they had children of their own to provide for. It would have made sense if one of them had offered to take in Mam and me, but neither one did. I wonder to this day if Niall and Ross were jealous of the love Da had lavished on me.
At first the neighbors would bring us warm dishes of food or a freshly plucked chicken or jars of preserves. But as the months went on and everyone returned to their own lives, Mam and I began to feel the loss of my father’s income. There wasn’t enough to eat in the house, little coal for the fireplace, and no extra money for gifts or a cake for my seventeenth birthday four months after my father’s fall.
Colm began to show up on our doorstep from time to time with extra fish from his day’s catch. We had heard from Mason by this point and we knew he was safely in New York, had found work, and was going to be sending us some money as soon as he found a better job. I believe Mason had asked Colm to check on my mother and me in his absence, as his happiness with his new life in America was making him feel guilty. Colm had obliged.
The more Colm came over, the more he found solace at my house, I think. Mam was a good cook and a good conversationalist and his mother was neither. Colm could share his opinion about something, whether it be politics in the village or the world at large, and my mother would engage with him. At some point he began to see me no longer as just Mason’s little sister. I remember with utter clarity the day he told me I wasn’t a little girl anymore and that I was pretty.
“Stop your teasing,” I’d said to him with a laugh, because I was sure he was. “It’s not nice.”
“I’m not teasing,” he replied. “You’re the prettiest girl in the village. And the truest. You’re not like the other girls, all full of giggles and fancies and flirtations. I wouldn’t trust a one of them.”
It was a compliment of some kind, but even then I wasn’t sure what he meant by it. Trust those other girls with what? I thought.
“You’re the kind of girl every man wants for his own, you are,” he said.
I had never had a boy say anything like this to me before. And I had never dreamed Colm McGough would ever say such a thing to me.
He was good-looking, somehow didn’t smell of rotting fish, was congenial, laughed a lot, drank too much sometimes with his brother and friends, and sometimes told bawdy stories that made me blush.
Most of the time he came by the house to see me, but occasionally he’d take me down to the docks and I’d watch as he and his friends passed around a flask of whisky. The other girls in the village, none of whom I was close to—my closest friends had moved away for work—were jealous, I suppose, that Colm had chosen me and distanced themselves from me. After a while Colm seemed to be the only friend I had. A few months before my eighteenth birthday he asked me to marry him.
We were on his boat at the docks, and we were alone. We’d been kissing and Colm had his hands everywhere on me. I hadn’t let him have his way fully with me. I had made a promise to my da years before that I wouldn’t give my body to a man who hadn’t first given me his pledge in marriage. Once you’ve given a man your body, Da had told me, he doesn’t need anything else from you. I didn’t want to break my promise to my da. So I kept telling Colm no and he kept whispering things and caressing me, trying to get me to change my mind. I think he thought that he could; I think he had with other girls.
I pushed myself away from him and said, “I’ll not be giving you what isn’t yours! I’m not your wife, Colm.”
He smiled wide. He liked it that I hadn’t been with anyone else, and that I wouldn’t consider being with anyone I wasn’t married to. “Then, be my wife, Saoirse,” he said. “Marry me.”
I didn’t know if it was love I felt for Colm or just immense attraction, but I knew if I did marry Colm, I would always be able to look out for Mam and there would always be food for us both. The fishermen in the village weren’t rich, but they never starved. When I told her that Colm asked me to marry him, she as much said the same thing to me: that it would be a relief to her to know that I would always have food to eat and a warm bed and a strong man to protect me. She gave her permission and we were married a few weeks later.
I knew enough from what Colm and I had done when no one was watching to know there were pleasures to be had that I had yet to experience. The first time I lay with him was indeed magical even though painful, and I was happy, truly happy, for the first time since my father had died. This was a pleasure that seemed to have the power to mask every other kind of disappointment, even grief. Even if just for a little while.
The first time Colm struck me I lay on the kitchen floor with my hand on my cheek too stunned to move. We’d been married for only four months and we had just come back from a walk into the village from our little seaside home at the end of a long lane. A man whom we both knew well had tipped his hat to me in greeting and I had wished him a good day. This was the reason Colm had hit me when we returned to our cottage, though at first I didn’t understand why and I had to ask him. I could not grasp what the offense had been. Colm yelled that it was not that I had said hello to the man; it was how I had said it and how I had looked at the man, but I didn’t know what Colm meant. I hadn’t looked at the man in any particular kind of way.
It happened again a few weeks later, and then again a few weeks after that. I realized I could not return the greeting of any man in the village when Colm was nearby, as he mistook every cordial interaction as coquettishness on my part. I began to look forward to the times when he was out at sea because then I could relax and not worry about the grocer or the cobbler or the milkman talking to me.
Colm didn’t hit me when he was drunk. Strangely enough he was lazily cheerful when he had too much drink. It was when he was sober that he was the most dangerous, and I never knew when something I would do would set him off. Sometimes he’d get angry if I took too long making supper or if I had it ready before he was wanting to eat. Sometimes he would not come home at night, and if I asked him where he’d been, he would go into a rage, saying it was not my place to question him. He would usually apologize hours or days later, but he’d never say he’d try to change. I wanted to reach out to Mam to ask her how to have the kind of marriage she had with Da, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what Colm was truly like. My friends from my school days were living their own lives now in other villages, or they’d gone to Belfast to secretarial school or nursing school. I had no one to confide in.
A year passed and then I found myself pregnant. I foolishly believed that my being with child would make a better man of my husband and he would begin to see anew his role as loving provider. But Colm took the news strangely that we were to have a child, and in bed that night he was savage toward me, hurting me as he lay on top of me. It was as if he wanted to yank out the new life he had put in. But weeks later he was happy about it and he put his hand on my growing stomach and talked to the child, calling him a little boy and telling him what it would be like to teach him the ways of the sea.
I was six months along when Colm came home angry after a fight he’d had with his father. I had never seen him so livid. I could tell it was not safe for me to be in the house and I wanted to escape to my mother’s while he settled down. When I mentioned that I needed to take something up to Mam’s, he took great offense, yelling at me that he had just gotten home, and when I tried to move past him and go anyway, he yanked me by the hair, threw me to the floor, and began to kick.
I tried to protect my child. I tried to crawl away, and when I could not, I curled into a ball and put my arms around my stomach. But the kicks from his heavy boots kept coming and coming until he finally tired of it. He stood over me for few seconds, breathing heavily.
“You’re a useless slag,” he said, nearly spitting the words on me. Then he grabbed his coat off its peg. “And don’t even think of going to your mam’s.” A second later he was out the door and on his way to the pub.
As soon as he was gone, the childbearing pains began to come. I struggled to my feet and out of the cottage. I got as far as halfway to the neighbor’s house before collapsing in water and blood. My tiny blossom of a girl was born that night as blue as a summer moon. I held her dead body as my vision went cloudy and as the blood continued to pour from inside me, and then I knew no more.
When I awoke two days later I was in a hospital bed in Belfast. I was not a mother. I would never be a mother. Everything within me that could make and hold a new life had been torn out of me.
I was in hospital for ten days. Colm did not come to Belfast to visit me. My mother came every day to sit with me and cry with me. I told her what Colm had done even though I knew it would hurt her.
“You’ll not be going home to him,” Mam said. “You’ll not.”
But I did. It was Colm who came for me the day I was discharged. He told me he couldn’t bring himself to come visit, and he felt bad for what had happened. But he did not seem sad that he had killed our baby girl and nearly killed me. When we arrived home, my mother came to the cottage and Colm sent her away. I watched her at the window crying as she went back to the house I had been born in, too weak to run after her.
I had cried my eyes dry, and I now felt nothing except for a cold, hard rumbling that was lurking deep within me, like water just about to boil. I didn’t know what to make of it. It didn’t feel like hatred; it felt stronger than that. The first time that Colm reached for me in bed after I miscarried our child, I just let him have his way. I felt nothing except that cold boil at the core of me. It was as if there was another person inside me with a plan, but I didn’t know what it was other than I wanted Colm to pay for what he had done. He had killed our daughter.
I knew that if he were to strike me again, I would hit him back. I was looking forward to it. I started looking for things around the house that I could use to pummel him. I began practicing with the fireplace poker, but in the end I needn’t have practiced with anything at all.
Four months after our baby girl died I walked to the docks where his boat was tied up because he’d asked me to bring down his supper. He had too much repair work to do to come up to the cottage. He was in a foul mood and I could tell there was going to be trouble. He and his father had had another fight and I was going to be bearing the brunt of it if I didn’t leave.
So I said nothing, placed the covered iron skillet that held his dinner on an overturned crate, and turned to go. He grabbed my arm and twirled me back around and asked where the hell was I going. We were close to the railing and there were ropes and nets and pipes littering the deck and I started to slip on them. I tried to wrench my arm free to regain my balance, which made him begin to lose his. He raised his hand to hit me and I ducked and grabbed the skillet. I lifted it and then brought it around with all the strength I had. The pan connected with his head and he pitched backward and over the railing.
There was a splash as he hit the water. I looked over the side to see him under the surface holding his head, with ribbons of red swirling through his fingers. His eyes were scrunched shut, but as he realized where he was, he opened them wide and looked up at me. He shot one hand out of the water toward me—his fingers splayed like limbs on a sea star. I stood there and did nothing.
His eyes widened and he shot up the other hand, the one that had been holding his head. He surfaced for a second and tried to say my name, but he was struggling to tread water and his head was bleeding, turning the water red around him. And I stood and did nothing.
He began to drift downward, still looking at me, still reaching one hand toward me. He was losing consciousness, and I did nothing.
I did not save him.
I waited until I could not see him any longer. I wiped the skillet with the cover I had brought and replaced the sausages and potatoes that had fallen from it. Then I ran, yelling for help.
It came too late, of course. I told the other fishermen who came in answer to my cries that Colm had been drinking and had stumbled and fallen overboard. I had been coming to the boat with his dinner when I saw him fall, and I ran but I couldn’t get to him in time.
He was pulled from the water, dead. The gash on his forehead looked so small compared to the amount of blood that had flowed from it.
I wasn’t sad that he was dead.
I wasn’t ashamed of what I had done.
He had killed my little girl. He was slowly killing me.
And now I was free of him. Or so I thought.
His brother and father could not believe that Colm had not been able to swim to shore after he fell, even with a gash on his head. He was a good swimmer. They wondered why I hadn’t jumped in after him or thrown him a life vest. They wondered what he had hit his head on when he fell. They’d been with him only a short time before and he’d not been drinking then. How was it that he was drunk—as I had claimed he was—so soon after they’d left him? They began to talk with others after the funeral and after I’d returned to Mam’s house. It was just talk at the pub, but Mam heard of it and began to worry for me, because I had told her the truth of what had happened. She knew how Colm ended up in the water.
It was Mam’s idea for me to go to America to be with Mason, her idea to use Sophie’s birth certificate to get a passport in Dublin, far away from home. It was her idea for me to have a fresh beginning with a name she still loved so very much and which would ensure no authorities in Donaghadee or County Down would ever know where to find me. It would also give me what she felt I deserved and what she had been unable to give me—a new and happy life.
I went to Dublin with my dead sister’s birth certificate. I worked in a restaurant there for two months as Sophie Whalen, and then I got a passport and booked a passage to America. My letters to Mam I sent to my brother Niall in Bangor so that the postmaster in Donaghadee wouldn’t know an S. Whalen was writing to her from New York.
I wasn’t anxious to get out of Manhattan because the tenement I was living in was appalling. It was, but that is not the reason I answered Martin’s advertisement. The tenements were full of other Irish girls like me, and a young woman I knew and who knew me had arrived from the village next to Donaghadee. She was living on my block. If I had stayed, she would’ve recognized me. I couldn’t take the chance that she would write home and that word would get out where I was. So I left and became Sophie Hocking. I became her. That’s who I am now.
Sophie Hocking.
There is no Saoirse Whalen McGough.