Whose opinion is it that the US is a unique country with an essential and positive role to play?

Fiona Gorry-Hines

H-Block

At dawn I hear my father’s footsteps. He’s trying to be quiet, I know, but still the ancient floorboards squeak in protest under the weight of his heavy galoshes. I pull myself upright, and place a hand against cool, wet window. Through the misty rain and fog I see my father drag his shovel and hoe behind them. His silhouette is angular and hunched over, as if the tools were weighing his increasingly fragile body down. My brother Patrick draws himself up beside me and we watch my father get smaller and smaller, engulfed in the morning mist.

            Patrick breaks the silence. “Do you want to see the boat leave today?”

            I frown and let myself collapse on the bed again. “What for?”

            “Billy and his parents are leaving.”

            “Them and the rest of Ireland,” I mutter.

            I’ve heard the bright-eyed men, clutching letters from correspondents in America, tell stories of life through the “Golden Door”. They paint pictures of abundant land and plentiful labor. I can see that sparkle in my brother’s eye, carefully placed with the brush of a dreamer.

Hours pass before we hear my father’s galoshes again and the door creaks shut. Patrick scurries to the doorframe and I follow him. Patrick halts as we watch my father enter the kitchen like a dead man walking. He hangs his head and drags his feet. Patrick reaches for my hand. I let him take it, but don’t squeeze back because I can’t move. I’m frozen as my father melts into my mother’s arms. He looks into her eyes and shakes his head. I’ve never seen him cry and I don’t like to. Mum covers her mouth with a flour caked hand and leans into his shoulder.

“Blight,” he sobs, announcing what we already know. “Every last one of ‘em.”

In the hanging silence Patrick and I approach him warily and he pulls us in to his defeated embrace. I feel the rise and fall of his concave belly and his ribs against my face. We cry until I can’t tell which warm tears are my own. We could have stood there for minutes. We could have stood there for hours. But in days, we were gone.

            It’s raining when we stumble off the boat into a new life. The sky is grey, the streets are grey, the smoke is grey. The pavement under the worn soles of my shoes felt cold. We are swallowed up by a sea of Americans with black eyes and greedy hands. They shout at us, push us, grab us, and give us sinister, toothy smiles. The four of us hold onto each other as if for our lives, although we are in no such danger. A large, balding, man approaches us with his thin lips pressed into a toad-like smile. He clasps my dad’s shoulder and shakes his bony hand. The thunder and the roar of the crowd struggle to dominate the atmosphere, but all I can hear is rain.

            Over the years I watched my father leave each morning, hunched over with a fragile strength. His pick-ax and hammer seemed to carry him rather than the other way around.  I watched my father turn grey. The color was drained from his face and his once bright green eyes sunk back into his hollow frame. I watched him come home late at night, covered in dirt and soot. My mother clasped his chapped, blistered hands. She held ice to a black eye or a bloody nose, or wrapped a bandage around a wound. The blood and the flour exchanged between their tired hands fell in a red powder upon the dirt floor.

            Each day, more tracks were laid out, forming circles and loops. They took the black-eyed, greedy men nowhere and back again. I heard them say, “under every mile of railroad track is a dead Irishman”. I never heard anyone say that at home.

            On the streets, people glared at me with hateful eyes that told me to go home. I swallowed back tears, willing them to know that I would if I could. I would beg my slipping father to go back, terrified of the changes coming over him. We were better off here, he said, but I couldn’t see that through all of the smoke.

            Still there were hopeless harvests and crying fathers and boys at their windows who dreamed of lands of plenty. Still there were men who scowled at the newspapers, quick to criticize themselves, but quicker to criticize others. The tracks were planted and the potatoes uprooted, and through the mist and over the sea, it seemed like I was the only one who could see that it rained on both sides of the world.