Chapter 1

“Joey, Joey? O God! Joey?” his mother cried out of her extremity and pain.

“I’m here, Mum,” said Joseph, holding her thin small hand tighter. “I won’t leave you, Mum.” She stared at him in the dimness, her eyes bright and distended and sparkling with terror. Joseph bent over her, the stool on which he sat rocking with the heavy laboring of the anchored ship. Her fingers squeezed his hand until they were like tight iron on his flesh. He felt the cold sharp tips. “Oh, Mum,” he murmured. “You’ll be well, Mum.” His crisp russet hair fell over his forehead and his ears and he shook it back. He was thirteen years old.

“I’m dying, Joey,” she said, and her weary young voice was hardly audible. “There’s Sean, Joey, and the little colleen. You’ll take care of them, Joey, for himself? You’ll mind them?”

“You’re not dying, Mum,” said Joseph. The eyes of his mother did not leave his face. Her gray lips had fallen open and they showed her delicate white teeth. Her little nose was thin and pinched and the nostrils blew in and out with her hurrying breath, and she panted. Her eyes asked him a desperate question, and they started from under her glossy black brows.

“Sure, and I’ll mind them, Mum,” he said. “Dad will meet us. You’ll be well then.”

The most pathetic smile appeared on her mouth. “Good Joey,” she whispered. “You were always a good boyeen. You’re a man, Joey.”

“Yes, Mum,” he said. The fingers that clutched his hand had become icy, and not only the tips. His mother’s thick black hair, as glossy as her brows, was strewn over the dirty pillows, and faintly shone in the light of the stinking and swaying lantern which hung from the wooden ceiling. That ceiling and the wet wooden walls sweated with an evil and oily moisture and the big masted ship creaked all about them. The coarse jute curtain at the end of the passage moved backwards and forwards with the slow lurching of the vessel. It was still light outside the four small portholes but little light entered here in the rancid steerage where fifty women and infants and little children slept on noxious bunks under thin and dingy blankets. The broken floor was soiled with the urine of children and scattered with sawdust thrown there for sanitary purposes. It was very cold. The portholes were blurred with spray and the little heat and breath of the bodies of the wretched creatures within. The ship was a four-master which had left Queenstown, Ireland, over six weeks ago. By standing on tiptoe the tallest could see the shoreline and wharfs of New York, the wandering yellow lights, the faint gloomy illumination of lamps, and flittering shadows. Some of the steerage passengers had been rejected twenty-four hours ago in Boston. They were Irish.

The majority of women and children on the hard bunks was sick with cholera, Famine Fever and other illnesses caused by rotten food and moldy bread, and tuberculosis and pneumonia. There was a constant frail wailing in the air, as if disembodied. Older girl children slept in the upper bunks; the very sick slept in the lower, clutched against the sides of their starved mothers. The light darkened swiftly, for it was winter, and the cold increased. Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh felt and saw nothing but his dying mother, who was hardly thirty years old. He heard bitter crying near him and he knew it was his little brother, Sean, who was scarcely six. Sean was crying because he was perpetually hungry and cold and frightened. He had had his supper ten minutes before, a bowl of thin oatmeal and a slice of coarse dry bread which smelled of mice.

Joseph did not turn to Sean. He did not hear the wailing of children and the weeping of the sick women in the steerage, nor did he look at the bunks which lined both sides of the narrow tilting deck. His mind and his passionate determination were fixed only on his mother. He willed her to live with a quiet cold will which no hunger, no destitution, no pain nor chill nor hatred could break. Joseph had eaten no supper at all, and had pushed aside the bowl which Sister Mary Bridget had entreated him to take. If he thought of anything extraneous but his mother now she would die. If he took his hand from hers and his eyes from her face, she would die. “They” would have killed her at last, Moira Armagh, who laughed when there was no occasion to laugh and valiantly prayed when there was no God to hear her.

But Joseph dared not remember that there was no God, and he was afraid of mortal sin, and only a God could help Moira now—and the will of her son. The new baby had been born at midnight, and the Sisters had taken her, and the old priest in the steerage—among the men beyond the swinging burlap curtain—had baptised the child and had named her, on Moira’s whispered word, Mary Regina, which had been her dead mother’s name. The child lay soundless in a cocoon of dirty blankets on the bunk of young Sister Bernardo who had given her a “sugar tit” to suck—a tied square of cotton in which some sugar had been placed—for there was no milk for such as those who traveled in the steerage. The child was too weak to cry; the young nun sat on the bunk near her and said her beads, then stood up as Father William O’Leary pushed aside the curtain and entered the quarters of the women and young children. The long passage became silent; even the sick children stopped crying. Mothers reached from the narrow bunks to touch his frayed black cassock. He had been summoned by a Sister aboard, Sister Teresa, and he carried, very carefully, a worn and ancient leather bag in his hand.

Old Sister Mary Bridget patted Joseph’s emaciated shoulder timidly. “Father is here, Joey,” she said. But Joseph’s head moved in strong negation. “No,” he replied, for he knew why the priest had come. He bent over his mother again. “Mum, you’ll be well,” he said. But she was looking over his shoulder at the priest and the fevered brightness of her eyes increased with fear. Sister Mary Bridget stroked the young woman’s arm. Joseph brushed her aside with ferocity, his own deep-set blue eyes shining with rage in the light of the malodorous lanterns. “No!” he exclaimed. “Go away! No!” He caught his breath with a choked sound. He wanted to hit the holy old woman, in her patched black garments. Her white coif, which had miraculously remained clean and stiff during these weeks, glimmered in the semidarkness, and beneath it her wrinkled face worked in pity and there were tears on her cheeks. Joey gestured at the waiting priest, but did not look at him. “You will kill her!” he cried. “Go away.” A spot of blackish oil fell from the ceiling above him and struck his cheek and left a smear as of old blood on its gauntness. It was the face of a grimly resolute man that looked at the old nun and not a boy of thirteen.

One of the six nuns in the steerage had produced a small splintered table and this she set near Moira Armagh’s head. “Come,” said Sister Mary Bridget, and though she was old she was sinewy and strong, having been a farm girl in her youth. The hands that had held the reins of a horse, and the handles of a plow, and had dug and turned soil, were not to be denied, and Joseph was pushed, in spite of his resistance and his firm seat on the stool, a foot or so along the side of the bunk. But he clutched his mother’s cold hand as tightly as ever, and now he averted his head so that he would not even see her face and especially not the face of the priest, whom he now hated with cold and determined anger.

“Joey,” said Sister Mary Bridget in his ear, for he had seemed deaf these past hours, “you won’t deny your own mother Extreme Unction, will you, and deprive her of the comforting?”

Joseph’s voice, as hard and ruthless as his nature, rose on a great cry. He lifted his head now and stared at the ancient nun with passion.

“And what has she to confess, my Mum?” he almost screamed. “What has she done in her life to make God hate her? How has she ever sinned? It is God who should confess!”

A nun who had been spreading the table with an anonymous square of white cloth drew in her breath at this blasphemy, and blessed herself. The other nuns did also, but Sister Mary Bridget looked at Joseph with compassion and she folded her arms in her veil. The priest waited. He saw Joseph’s face, so appallingly thin and white, the broad full forehead, the deep flashing eyes, the strong curved nose, the broad cheekbones on which ginger freckles were sprinkled lavishly, the long Irish lip and the wide narrow mouth. He saw the thick crest of the ruddy hair, its roughness, and the boy’s thin tall neck, frail shoulders and slender, clever hands. He saw his frantic dishevelment, the poor white shirt and rude pantaloons and broken shoes. The priest’s mouth shook; he waited. Grief, revolt, and hopeless fury were not new to him; he had seen them on too many calamitous occasions among his people. It was rare, however, to see them in one so young.

Vermin ran up and down the curved wooden walls of the deck. There was a splashing sound outside in the quickening dusk. The children began to wail again. Fetid air blew through the curtain at the end of the deck and now some man on a bunk beyond the curtain began to play on a mouth organ, a dolorous Irish ballad, and a few hoarse voices hummed the chorus. The kneeling nuns began to murmur: “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death—”

“No, no, no!” shouted Joseph, and he beat the side of his mother’s bunk with one clenched fist. But he did not release his other hand from hers. His eyes were blue fire. They could hear his disordered breathing above the mouth organ and the singing voices of the men. His face was pulled into a terrible distortion in his agony. He half-crouched over his mother as if to protect her from mortal enemies, and he glared at the priest and the nuns with the utmost and most intense defiance and rage. But Moira Armagh lay in mute exhaustion.

The priest silently opened his case and his ancient hands trembled with age and sorrow and reverence. Joseph’s eyes now fastened on him and his pale lips lifted from his big teeth in a soundless snarl.

“Joey,” said Moira in the faintest of dying voices.

“Go away,” Joseph said to the priest. “If she receives she will die.”

“Joey,” said Moira and her hand stirred in his. Joseph’s eyes closed on a spasm, and then he slipped to his knees, not in piety but only in weak surrender. He put his head down near his mother’s shoulder, near the young breast which had once nourished him, and her hand touched his hair with the gentle brushing of a wing, then fell. He held her other hand as if to withhold her from the darkness and the endless silence which he believed lay beyond life. He had seen many die, as young and innocent and as starving and brutalized as his mother, and helpless infants crying for food and old women gnawing their hands for hunger. He could not forgive God. He could no longer believe. He had only hate and despair to sustain him now, to give him courage.

A heavy mist was rising from the cold sea and melancholy horns began to moan in the harbor. The ship rocked. “I’ll take ye to your home again,” sang the men beyond the curtain, “to where the grass is fresh and green!” They sang of the land they had loved and left, because there was no bread there any longer to satisfy the body, and only rotting and blackened potatoes in the wet and ravished fields, and they sang with deep melancholy and sadness, and one man sobbed, and another groaned. Women’s heads lifted from rank pillows to watch the priest solemnly, the hands raised to bless meager breasts, and there was a muffled blurt of weeping.

A murmurous sound rose, the Litany for the Dying, and the kneeling nuns and the priest formed a small half-circle about Moira Armagh’s narrow bed. Beyond the half-circle little children raced and squalled and stopped briefly to stare at the black bent bodies, and then continued to pound up and down the wooden and reeking floor, scattering clouds of rank sawdust. From the deck below some cattle lowed. A night wind was rising and the vessel rocked uneasily and the foghorns moaned like a hell of the possessed. The priest had placed a candle upon the little table and had lighted it, and near it stood a worn wooden crucifix with a yellow ivory Corpus. There was the bottle of holy water, a saucer of oil, and a small dish in which the priest washed his tremulous hands, and a nun reached up to give him a clean and ragged towel. The old man leaned over Moira and looked into her eyes, on which a film was rapidly gathering. She gazed at him in a mute plea, and her mouth stood open with her panting. He said in the gentlest voice, “Peace be to this house—You shall sprinkle me with hyssop, O Lord, and I shall be clean. You shall wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow—”

“No, no,” whispered Joseph, and his head nestled deeper against his mother’s breast and he frenziedly clutched her hand even tighter. The Litany for the Dying rose clearer and stronger as Moira sank into darkness, and now she could not see but only hear. Some woman, not as sick as the others, had drawn little Sean to her bunk on the opposite side of the deck, and she held him there as she knelt, and he clutched her arm and whimpered in bewilderment, “Mum, Mum?”

Joseph held his mother, praying and blaspheming in his boy’s heart, and believed that he could bar the way into death by the strength of his young body and his silent inner cries. All became a murky and anguished confusion. A fainting sickness came to him. He, from the corner of his half-shut eyes, saw the flickering of the candle, and it greatly enlarged so that it became a monstrous and moving yellow blur at once nauseating and dizzying. The lanterns swayed and threw down their shifting pallid light and the stench of offal flowed through the deck from the two wooden latrines that stood between the men’s and women’s quarters. Timber groaned. Joseph drifted into a hazy dream of pain and despair.

The priest administered the Sacrament of Extreme Unction and Viaticum to the dying woman, whose white lips barely moved in her extremity. Then the priest said, “Go forth from this world, O Christian soul—”

Joseph did not hear this. He was saying to his father, Daniel, who was to meet his little family in New York, “I brought her to you, Dad, and Sean and the little colleen, and now you and I will take care of them, in the house you provided, and we’ll be free and never hungry or homeless again. No one will hate us and drive us from our land and tell us to starve—Dad, we’ve come home to you.”

It was real to him, for he had dreamt that scene a thousand times on this sorrowful voyage. His father, his young fair father with the singing voice and the strong thin arms and the gay laughter, would meet his family on the dock and enfold them all, and then he would take them to the “flat” in the Bowery where he lived with his brother, Jack, and it would be warm and there would be soft beds and a hot stove and joy and the fragrance of boiling potatoes and turnips and beef or lamb and Moira’s light songs and, above all, safety and comfort and peace and hope. Had they not received letters from him, and money, and had he not told them of this? He had a good job as janitor in a small hotel. He ate to repletion for the first time in years. He worked hard, and received money for his labor. He would provide for his family, and no more would they be hunted like vermin and despised and execrated for their Faith, and thrown from their land to die on the highways of exposure and hunger. “Ah, and it is a land for free men,” Daniel had written in his careful hand. “The lads will go to school, and the little one will be born in America, and we will be Americans together, and never part again.”

The dying woman suddenly moved so convulsively that Joseph’s dream abruptly ended, and he lifted his head. His mother’s eyes, no longer filmed and dull, were gazing over his shoulder with an expression of profound joy and surprise, and her gray face flashed with life and rapture. “Danny, Danny!” she cried. “Oh, Danny, you’ve come for us!” She lifted her arms, wrenching her hand from Joseph, and they were the arms of a bride, rejoicing. She murmured something deep in her throat, confiding, half-laughing, as though she were being embraced by a dearly beloved. Then the light faded from her eyes and her face, and she died between one breath and another, though the smile remained, triumphant and fulfilled. Her eyes still stared over Joseph’s shoulder. Her glossy black hair was like a shawl about her face and shoulders.

Joseph knelt beside her, no longer conscious of any pain or grief or rebellion or despair. All was ended, and he was emptied and there was nothing else. He watched old Sister Mary Bridget close those staring eyes and fold those rough and little hands across the quiet breast. The nun reached under the blankets and composed the long legs. She was one of the company of the Sisters of Charity in this steerage, but even she winced as the back of her hands and her fingers encountered the blood-soaked and vermin-infested straw mattress. So, much blood from so young and fragile a body—but at last the girl was at peace, safe in the arms of Our Lord who had come for His lamb. The nun gently drew the blanket over the smiling face and it seemed to her that it still glowed with joy. Sister Mary Bridget, who had seen so much death and so much torment and so much hopelessness, wept a little in spite of her stoicism.

The priest and the nuns were muttering half-heard prayers, but Joseph stood up. He tottered for a moment like an old man, then straightened stiffly. His face was as gray as the face of his dead mother. At the end—and as usual—God had betrayed the innocent and had left them comfortless. Joseph knew only one desire now—vengeance on God and on life. He crossed the aisle between the teeming bunks and without a word he took the dirty hand of his young brother and led him from the steerage section of the women and young children. He pushed aside the ragged cloth that hid one of the latrines—a mere wooden affair like a country privy, and stinking beyond endurance—and he signed to Sean to use the hole. He helped the child let down his pantaloons—which were belted with rope—and assisted him onto the narrow shelf, and he was not aware of the stench but only stared at the wooden walls and saw nothing. “Mum, Mum?” Sean whispered. Joseph put his hand on the child’s shoulder, not in comfort but in restraint, and Sean looked up at him blankly. He followed Joseph into the men’s quarters, and the men were silent and no longer sang, but gazed at the two boys in speechless pity. Joseph did not see their pallid and emaciated faces, both young and old. He had gone beyond them. They hoped, but he had no hope. He was as removed from them as a stone image is removed from life. It seemed to him that he was filled with echoes, and he had only endurance left and one absolute resolution: To deliver the family to his father.

He removed Sean’s pantaloons and shirt and shoes, leaving him dressed only in ragged underdrawers and darned long black stockings. He pushed the child down on the dark and smelly blanket and the stained striped pillow. Sean’s large blue eyes questioned him in silence. Joseph had always been a formidable older brother who knew all things and must be obeyed, but was ever ready with a kind brief word and encouragement. Joseph had taken care of the family since his father had left for America nearly eight months before. Even more than the father had Joseph been the head of the house, his mother’s guardian, the protector of a brother. Sean trusted Joseph as he trusted no one else, and leaned on that indomitable strength. The child did not know this new Joseph, so fixed and implacable of feature, so frighteningly silent. The lantern light swam over that austere face and then retreated as it swung, and Sean was afraid and whimpered again.

“Hush,” said Joseph.

Unlike Joseph, Sean was a delicately made child, with thin bones and long, and translucent flesh, easily flushed, easily warmed, easily expressing radiance of mind and body. He resembled his young father, Daniel Padraic Armagh, who awaited his family in New York. Daniel’s fairness had incited the suspicion in Ireland that he had some Sassenagh blood in him, and he had had to fight with fury to disprove this evil and insulting canard. He, with English blood! May God forgive the sinners who said this, though he would not! Sean had inherited his aristocracy of flesh, his fine golden hair, his patrician features, his hesitant, charming smile with lips that were softly colored, his dimpled left cheek, his air of gaiety and trust and joyful abandon, his impertinently tilted nose, his thick fair brows and milky skin, his quickness and eagerness, and his pale large blue eyes. Father and son possessed a graceful elegance which the tall but sturdier Joseph did not. Even patched pantaloons and ragged shirts acquired a smooth charm when they assumed them, while Joseph’s clothes were merely utilitarian over an impatient body hurrying to accomplish something or to set things to rights. Daniel and little Sean spoke softly and beguilingly, in the way of enchanters, but Joseph spoke abruptly for he was, instinctively, always pressed for time. Daniel, and Sean, believed that life was to be enjoyed. Joseph believed it was to be used. He loved and honored his father, but had never been unaware of the happy faults Daniel possessed, the procrastination, the belief that men were better than they obviously were, the optimism in the face of the most appalling and cruel disaster. It was Joseph who had said to his father, eight months ago when he had still been only twelve years old. “Go to Uncle Jack, in that New York, Dada, for we will die here, I am thinking, and there is no future on this land.”

Even the Famine had not stirred Daniel overmuch. Tomorrow would be infinitely better. God would perform a miracle and the black and soaking fields would flourish again with white fat potatoes and the corn would rise and the hearths would be red with peat fires, and there would be lamb stew in the pot and a bit of bacon for breakfast, with rich eggs and oat cakes, and there would be new thick blankets and the languishing fruit trees would be heavy with apples and pears and cherries—in short, there would be a blessed tomorrow.

“We can’t wait,” Joseph had said. “We are starving.”

“Ye have no faith,” said Daniel. “Ye are a hard boyo.”

“There is no bread and no potatoes and no meat,” said Joseph.

“God will provide,” said Daniel kindly, and with a large paternal gesture.

“He has not provided, and Ireland is dying of hunger,” said young Joseph. “Uncle Jack has sent you the money, may the saints bless him, and you must go to America.”

Daniel had shaken his head with loving admonition at his older son. “Joey, you are a hard man, and I say this though you are still a lad.” He looked at Joseph who had stared back at him with his relentless and darker blue eyes. Within two weeks Daniel was weepingly on the way to Queenstown to the ship for America. He embraced his beautiful Moira and his son, Sean, but had avoided looking directly at Joseph. At the last Joseph stiffly extended his hand to his father and the tender-hearted Daniel had taken it, and with a little sudden fear. “May the wind be always at your back, Dad,” said Joseph, and Daniel, suddenly feeling far younger than his son, replied, “Thank ye, Joey.” He had then stood tall and fair and beautiful, like a knight, his eyes fixed on a glorious future.

“It is said that in America the streets are paved with gold!” he exclaimed, and had smiled his radiant happy smile. “And some of it will be mine, I am praying!”

He had been imbued, then, with magnificent hope and animation, and Joseph had gazed at him with the reluctant pity such as an adult bestows on a buoyant child who knows nothing of life and nothing at all of terror. Daniel saw mansions and black horses and phaetons and curved green lawns and clinking gold pieces, and Joseph saw a rich Irish stew of potatoes and lamb and turnips and parsnips and a warm shelter free from alarms in the night and street-murder and starving hordes of men and women and children on the muddy highways of a desolate Ireland. Daniel saw ease and fawn-colored pantaloons and a shining tall hat and a cravat with a pin of pearl and diamonds, and a walking stick of gold and a swagger, and Joseph saw nights without the brutal fist at the door and desecrated churches and the hiding in the bogs with a priest who had a terrified face. Daniel saw big warm rooms glinting with candlelight and Joseph saw chapels where the Host was not stamped upon and a man could walk free to the worship he desired. In short, Daniel saw joy, and Joseph saw liberty, and only Joseph suspected that they were one and the same.

At the final moment before parting Daniel had smiled warmly but with unease, at his older son, “I pray you are not a Covenanter, Joey.”

Joseph’s pale lips had contracted at this insult. “Dada,” he had replied, “I do not believe in dreams. I believe in what a man can do—”

“With the Grace of God,” said Daniel, dutifully blessing himself. Joseph smiled grimly. The blessing was automatic and graceful, and therefore meant nothing. It was the gesture of a pagan. “With the grace of will,” said young Joseph.

Moira had watched this encounter with anxious eyes, then she had embraced Daniel and her tears came. “Joey will be the man whilst you are working for us, Danny,” she said.

“It’s afraid, I am, that he was always the man,” said Daniel and his gaiety left his face and he looked earnestly at his older son, and with a curious sad respect mixed with self-reproach. He knew that Joseph had considered him at least partly at fault for being unable to retain Moira’s inheritance of some thirty acres of land, five head of cattle, two horses, a flock of chickens and rich soil which could bear good potatoes and other vegetables and grain, and a small, tight thatched cottage in the midst of it all, with sound outbuildings. The Famine had not struck here too harshly in the first years and the village nearby had not been too stricken then.

Daniel had been an optimistic farmer. When the potatoes and other vegetables rotted in the black and sodden fields and the rain never ceased, the sun would be warm in a few days and new crops could be sowed. When the cows ceased to give milk, sure and they would soon be freshened. When the trees bore little fruit, the next year their boughs would be bending with the harvest. When the Sassenagh taxgatherers became brutally insistent Daniel talked with them in shining friendship in the pub, and paid for their poteen and smiled into their scowling faces. Next spring he would have more than enough for two years’ of taxes! A little time, gentlemen, he would say with that large eloquent wave of his arm and a conciliatory twinkle on his handsome face. Daniel was also a millwright. When the Sassenaghs suggested that he go to Limerick and seek employment he smiled at them with incredulous indulgence.

“I am a farmer, sirs!” he exclaimed, and waited for them to smile in return, but their scowls deepened.

“A bad farmer, Armagh,” one answered. “You paid but a portion of your taxes two years ago, and a year ago you paid none, and you have no money this year either. Like all the Irish you are improvident, careless, roistering, and sanguine. We know of the Famine. Who does not? The Irish wail about it without ceasing. But—what do you do?”

Daniel’s face darkened and became somber and very changed, and his family would not have recognized it, nor would he, for suddenly he faced reality.

“Now, you must tell me, sirs,” he said and his melodious voice was rough. “The whole land has been cursed by an evil, and what can we do? We can only wait for it to pass, like all evils. We cannot hurry time, gentlemen. What would you have us do? You have said I must go to Limerick and work at my trade. Matters, I have heard, are very bad in Limerick, and there is starvation there.”

“There is work at your trade, in England,” said another of the taxgatherers.

A white shadow struck Daniel’s mouth and his pale blue eyes narrowed. He said with the utmost quiet, “Had ye asked me to go to hell to work, gentlemen, you could have said nothing more insulting.” He had thrown down his last shillings on the table and had risen with dignity and had left. As he had walked home in the dark and teeming twilight his optimism returned, and he chuckled. He had had the Sassenaghs there! He would forget them at once, for they were not worth remembering. He had begun to whistle, his hands in his pockets, his head tilted, his woolen cap at an angle. Moira would laugh when he told her. And tomorrow, surely, this miserable day would be in the past and the future would open again, beaming, and the fields would dry and the Famine be over.

Joseph remembered the telling that evening, and he remembered his mother’s wide and alarmed eyes and the way she bit her lip. But Daniel was endearing, and she went into his arms and kissed him and agreed with him that he had been a fine boyo and that he had crushed the Sassenagh with his haughty words, and see, was not that the moon between that rack of black clouds, an omen for the morning’s sun?

Joseph, in the chimney corner with Sean, whom he was teaching his letters, had watched his parents and his young lip had lifted with mingled scorn and dread. He knew that his mother knew all about her husband. He would not add to her dejection with the sharp and blunt questions he wished to throw at his father, who was jauntily munching on a piece of dark bread and basking in the admiration of his beautiful young wife, and shaking his wet frayed coat in the small warmth of the peat fire on the hearth. The white plastered walls were stained with damp; there were cracks in the ceiling and on the walls. Daniel never saw these things; it never occurred to him to repair them. He constantly spoke of the larger stone house he would build—“soon”—and the slate roof. The money? It would come. The next harvest would be more than bountiful. There was a good piece of lamb boiling in the pot tonight, though unaccompanied by potatoes, and the turnip cooking with it was plentiful, still, and before the last four turnips were consumed God, in His goodness and providence, would provide.

The brick floor was cold and damp, as always, and the rush chairs needed repairing, though covered with the gay little cushions Moira had made from a last bolt of cloth, and the table was carefully spread with the colorful plates and cups she had inherited, and there was tea simmering in the brown earthenware pot on the hob. The feather-beds were still intact, and there were blankets, and Daniel saw: no farther than these, for he believed that fate was kind and one had only to endure in patience.

Had Daniel been a fool Joseph could have forgiven him. Had he been illiterate, as were so many of his neighbors, there would have been an excuse for his hopeful folly. Fools and illiterates looked no farther than the moment’s comfort. But Daniel was not a fool. There was poetry in his heart and on his tongue, and he had had the advantage of attending a Sisters’ school in his original home in Limerick for eight or more years. He had a little store of cherished books which some priest had given him, books of history and literature. He had read them over and over, especially the books on the history and glory of Old Ireland. He could quote passages at will, and with passion and fervor and pride. So, there was no excuse for his refusal to face reality and his confidence in some happy tomorrow.

Daniel also had faith in God. It was not the faith Moira had, devout, a little fearful of sin, and possessed of an enduring steadfastness. Rather, it was a gay faith, as lavish and as expansive as himself. He could readily conceive of mercy, but not of justice and retribution. God was a benevolent Father, and in particular He loved the Irish, so what harm could come to their dear land and this dear people so trusting of Him? One, Daniel had said earnestly to Joseph—in whom even he suspected cynicism—had only to lie in the arms of Our Lord, like lambs, and He would care for His little ones.

Joseph had said, “And the ‘little ones’ who are dying, we are hearing, of the Famine on the roads, and the priests who are hunted like mad dogs, and the hangings we are knowing, and the desecration of the churches, and the beating of women and the little colleens in the cities when they cry of hunger and beg in the streets?”

Daniel had shaken his head gravely. “We hear, but have we seen? Sure, we know it is very bad, but men will make big tales of little matters. The Faith is attacked by the Sassenagh, who, poor soul, believes that if it is killed we shall be more humble and willing to serve in the Sassenagh’s army and work in his mines and his fields and manufactories, and receive little for our labor. But God is stronger than the Sassenagh and his Queen in London Town, and He will not desert us.”

Then some of the starving, what was left of them, had come to the village of Carney, and a number had lain in Daniel’s rotting fields and had sought shelter in his barns and had begged him for bread—which he no longer had. They had lifted their limp infants to him, and the babes had sucked their hands greedily, and they were all eyes in small sunken faces, and the old men and women were too weak to walk any longer. Among them were two or three priests, as starveling as themselves, and they spoke of terror in the other counties and in the towns and cities, and the scaffolds and bloody murder in the streets, and the proscription of the Faith. Those who had taken refuge on Daniel’s farm were ragged, and though it was winter they had no coats or shawls or gloves, and their boots were broken and their flesh frost-bitten, and their bodies and faces were those of skeletons. And he had nothing to give them but the cold shelter of his barns, and they stayed there and they died, one by one.

Before they died, these destitute and homeless, Moira and Daniel and Joseph had gone to neighbors imploring any help at all, but the neighbors had their own famine-stricken in their empty barns and could only weep with the Armaghs. The village was starving also. The shopkeepers had little to sell, even if there had been, pounds and shillings and pence. The land was not producing; it was black and wet and dead, and the Sassenagh would not send his wheat and meat to save the survivors in the land he hated. His sovereign, Queen Victoria, regretting that the Irish Rising had not materialized after all, had written to King Leopold of Belgium to the effect that if the Rising had occurred, the trouble-making Irish would then have been destroyed once and for all, “to teach them a lesson.” (Her own Prime Minister had hoped for such a fatal insurrection so that the Celt would finally perish, and a new Plantation, settled by the English, would flourish in Ireland. He had not looked kindly on the foreign ships, even from India, which had brought some food to the dying land, and he had spoken to ambassadors with contemptuous hauteur.) The desperate Irish leaders had been publicly hanged in Dublin and Limerick, after a farce of a trial. Priests fled and hid in hedgerows and in ditches for their very lives. Nuns were driven in derision through the towns, yoked together like oxen. Many were violated by soldiers and thrown from their convents and their schools, to die and starve with their people on the highways. It was a fearsome thing and Daniel Armagh faced reality for one of the few times in his life and he knew a brief despair. However, the mood did not last too long in spite of all the evidences of disaster. But Joseph heard and his young soul had hardened and quickened.

Daniel’s brother, Jack Armagh, had gone to America five years ago and worked on the steamcars in the State of New York and he, in solicitude, though poor himself, had Sent Daniel some dollars in gold and Daniel had exclaimed with joy and had cried, “Sure, and I never lost hope and here is the Mercy in our hands, and all will be well!” He had then gone to Limerick on the coach and had returned with a basket of bread and some eggs and a little lamb and bacon and a few gnarled vegetables, and he was as ebullient as ever though the dead lay buried at the bottom of his garden, unshriven and as dry as juiceless twigs, mother with babe in her withered arms, old husbands and wives pressed together. Daniel remembered them at Mass each morning, but it was as if they had never truly lived and had died in his barren barns.