Ellis Island

Read an Excerpt

Ellis Island

A Novel

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By Kate Kerrigan

Harper Paperbacks

Copyright © 2011 Kate Kerrigan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780062071538

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Chapter One

The first time I fell in love with John, I was eight and he was
ten.
One day, Maidy Hogan called down to the house with a
basket of duck eggs and asked my mother if I could play with
her nephew. His parents had both died of TB and he was sad
and lonely, she said. But for his aunt coming to ask for me in
the way she did, my mother would never have let me out to play
with him. My mother didn't approve of boys, or playing, or of
very much at all outside of cleaning the house and protecting
our privacy. "We like to keep ourselves to ourselves," was what
she always said. She didn't like us to mix with the neighbors,
and yet she was concerned that our house was always spotless
for their benefit. Perhaps the fact that she made an exception for
John Hogan made him special to me from the first.
John called for me later that day. He was tall for his age, with
bright blue eyes and hair that curled around his ears. He didn't
look lonely to me. He seemed confident and looked me square
in the eye, smiling. We went off together, walking and not talking
at all, until we reached the oak tree behind Mutty Munnelly's
field. Before I could get the words out to challenge him,
John was a quarter of the way up the oak, sitting astride its
thick, outstretched arm. I was impressed, but angry that he had
left me standing there. I was about to turn and walk off when
he called, "Wait—look." He ducked suddenly as a fat blue tit
swooped past his face, then took a white cotton handkerchief
out of his trouser pocket and inserted his hand into a small hole
in the trunk. He carried the fledgling down to me, descending
the tree awkwardly with his one free hand. "It's hungry,"
he said, carefully parting the white cotton to reveal the frantic
baby blue tit. "We could feed it a louse—there should be some
under that stone."
I hated insects, but I wanted to feed the blue tit, and I wanted
to impress him. So I kicked back the rock, picked up a woodlouse
between my thumb and forefinger and carefully placed
it into the bird's open, hungry beak. As it swallowed back, I
touched the top of its little head with my finger and felt how
small and soft and precious it was. I looked at John and my
heart flooded through. It was the first time I remember sharing
love with somebody.
"I'll put her home," he said, and climbed back up the tree.
My parents were never loving—that is, not toward me.
My mother was from a shopkeeper's family who were largely
deceased. Her grandparents had survived the famine years
through holding on to what they had while their neighbors
starved. They were hated in the locality, and her father had lost
the business because of his own father's sins. My mother bore
the scars of her family history in her acute privacy and
unwillingness to mix with anybody, not even her own child.
My father at least loved the Church. He had failed the priesthood
and been sent home from Maynooth College. Nobody
ever knew why, but it was certainly not that he had disgraced
himself in any particular way. It seemed he was just not considered
devout enough. He had made the mistake of thinking that
God had been calling him, when in fact He hadn't. My father
was fond of saying that it was his decision. That he had chosen
a life in the civil service over life as a priest, yet he went to
Mass every day—twice on holy days of obligation—and took as
many meals in Father Mac's house discussing parish business as
he did in his own. Whenever he was asked, my father would say
that it had been a difficult decision to make, but that marriage
and children were his vocation. Yet he and my mother slept
separately and had only one child. My father's room was as austere
as a monk's, with a huge crucifix over the bed. My mother
and I shared a bed in another room, and yet I could never say
that I felt close to my mother or knew her especially well. We
slept with dignified respect for each other's privacy, arranging
ourselves back to back, silently, never touching.
Maidy and Paud Hogan were in their late sixties when John
came to live with them. They had never had any children of
their own and treated this young orphan as if he were their son.
Maidy was a generously built and warmhearted woman, well
known in our town land as she had delivered half of the children
in the area. Even though she wasn't trained, Doctor Bourke
recognized her as a midwife and nurse and consulted her on
matters of childbirth and nutrition. Paud Hogan was a quiet
man, a hardworking small farmer. He was not schooled, but he
knew by its Latin name every plant and flower you could point
out—facts learned from the Encyclopaedia of Nature, which
he kept high on the mantel over the fireplace. John's father had
been Paud's beloved younger brother Andrew. When Andrew
died and his wife, Niamh, was tragically taken six months later,
Paud closed up his brother's house and took John in straight-
away.
John knew how to do everything. The Hogans were old, and
they wanted to be certain he would be able to fend for himself
after they were gone. So they taught their charge how to
grow vegetables, cook a decent meal, and know one end of a cow
from the other. John was an easy child to love. Andrew and
Niamh Hogan had showered their only son with affection,
before turning him serious and dutiful with their early, tragic
deaths. I knew John's story before I met him. Everyone knew
everything about everyone in our town land. Aughnamallagh
numbered less than one hundred people scattered in houses
across miles and miles of identical fields bordered with scrappy
hedgerows. The monotony of our fl at landscape was broken in
places by shallow hills and lakes, which were little more than
large puddles.
My parents' house was on the edge of the village, just three
miles from the town of Kilmoy. My father was an important
man, a civil servant working for the British government. And we
should have been living in a grand stone house in the town itself,
where he would not have to walk for an hour each way and my
mother could get turf delivered directly to the back door, and
not have to muddy her boots walking to the stack herself.
However, the house they had given us was outside the town, and as
my father was apt to say on the rare occasions my mother questioned
him, "Who are we to argue with the Great British Government?
It is our duty as citizens to be governed by them as we
are by God." Even though my parents kept us deliberately apart
from our neighbors, news of one another was unavoidable. It
carried across the church grounds in hushed tones and sideways
glances after Mass, across the still air of the grocery shop, in the
sucking of teeth and clicking of tongues when someone's name
was mentioned. My mother's ear was sharply attuned to secondhand
scandal, for the very reason that she was too distant from
our neighbors to receive it firsthand. So I had heard my parents
talk about John as a pitiful orphan—although, as I got to know
him, John's life seemed anything but pitiful to me.
That first summer, my mother was taken up nursing an elderly
aunt in the village and so it suited her for me to spend my
days with the Hogans and their nephew. My mother told me I
had to be kind to John because the Lord had taken both his parents
from him. She saw that she was doing the Hogans a favor
by allowing me to keep their orphan nephew company.
John called for me each morning and we went exploring.
Through his eyes, the ordinary fields between our houses
became a wild, exciting playground. John turned grass into
Arabian Desert sand, and ordinary muddy ditches into raging
rivers we had to conquer.
"Slip at your peril," he would say, as my small feet walked
comfortably across a narrow fallen tree. "These waters are
infested with sharks!"
He knew every animal, noticed their presence in shaking
leaves. "Rabbit!" he called on our second or third day out
together and I chased after him into the boundary bushes. John
foraged around and pulled aside clumps of leaves to reveal the
smooth, dark burrow entrance. I sat firmly down on a large
stone and insisted that we wait there for a fluffy ball to come
out. "It won't come. It's afraid of us," said John, peering down
into the tunnel. "There are probably hundreds, thousands of
them down there—but they won't come out."
I imagined the ground beneath us alive with busy, burrowing
rabbits, frantically hopping over one another, panicking about
John and me. The idea of the two of us sitting quietly in the
still day with all this mad activity going on underground made
me laugh. It was as if there were two worlds—their world and
ours—and I liked that. "If it came out now, I'd only want to
kiss and cuddle it," I said.
John looked embarrassed; he picked up a stick and sliced the
air with it. "I'd chop its head off and skin it and cook it into
a stew." I started to cry. Once I started, I couldn't stop—not
because of the rabbit any more, but because I was embarrassed
to be crying in front of John and I was afraid that he wouldn't
like me; that I would ruin everything. "I'm joking," he said, "I
wouldn't ever do that to a rabbit, Ellie, sure I wouldn't, stop
crying now, Ellie, don't cry." I did stop, but I remember thinking
how boys were different from us, and that I should be more
careful how I carried on if I wanted us to stay friends.
When the sun was directly above us in the sky, we ran over to
his house, where Maidy had our dinner waiting for us.
I loved eating in that house. My own mother was frugal with
food, not for lack of money, but because she had no fondness for
it. My father ate in the presbytery in town in the middle of the
day and she felt there was no need to go to trouble for me alone.
Her meals were meager, modest portions organized in shallow
piles that never touched one another and made the plates look
huge. In contrast, Maidy Hogan shoveled piping hot, sloppy
stews onto our plates until thick, brown gravy spilled over the
edges of them onto the table. There was never any room left for
the potatoes, so they went straight onto the scrubbed wooden
tabletop where we piled them with butter, often still watery with
milk from the churn, then tore them apart and ate them with our
hands. Afterward we'd have apple tart, or soda cake with butter
and honey.
Maidy was as round as her cooking was good, and Paud was
wiry and still strong at sixty. He worked hard to provide food
for her, and she made sure that the meal she prepared with it
was worth the work. I ate like a savage at that long, wooden
table. I ate until I thought I would burst inside out, until I could
barely move and would have to sit teasing ants with a stick on
the front step, waiting for my stomach to settle. The first time
I ate with them, Maidy asked, "Does your mother not feed you
at all?" I stopped eating, blushing at my greed, my spoon still
poised. She patted my head as apology, encouraged me to con
continue and never said anything again.
John always cleared the table and cleaned up after dinner;
that was his job, wiping the grease and crumbs from the table
and sweeping the floor beneath it, then washing the four plates
in a bucket of water warmed on the fire and polishing them dry
before placing them carefully back in the cupboard. I was never
allowed to help. The Hogans made me a part of their family,
yet they treated me like a treasured guest always. They loved me
like a daughter, but they never overstepped the mark and made
me into one. They had a talent for knowing the right way to be
with people.
Late in the afternoon, John would bring me back to my own
house. Although I was still full of Maidy's food, I ate a silent meal
with my parents. In the gray twilight then we would kneel and say
the rosary. The coldness of my father's praying voice settled on me
as a vague fear. An ache for life burned in my stomach.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan Copyright © 2011 by Kate Kerrigan. Excerpted by permission of Harper Paperbacks. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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