A Song Across the Sea Read Free Page A

excitement. America! Even the word had a wondrous sound to it. She drifted toward sleep as if carried there by a tranquil current, humming to herself and dreaming of America.

Chapter Two
    S ummer’s spun-gold days slipped away. Autumn was fast upon them. Tara’s chores around the farm increased, but she didn’t mind. Joyfully she helped her father dig potatoes out of the earth, thin the turnips and cut the turf that would be burned in the stove and fireplace in the long months ahead.
    Padraig was often beside her. She’d give him a spade and laugh at his childish efforts to dig around the potatoes with it. He seemed to have forgotten his injury, but the back of his right hand still bore the memory: a vivid reddish patch of puckered skin.
    After a round of visits and tales that left the villagers breathless, Miss Brigid Connelly had taken her leave and gone back to America. Back, Tara imagined, to her mansion and servants, to fine dresses and food too exotic to even imagine. On the eve of her departure, Brigid gave her brother enough cash money for a new plough horse. Tara’s father reported this bit of news one evening at mealtime; he’d overheard the brother boasting about it in the village pub the night before.
    “I don’t think we’ll see the likes of her again,” he commented, while working his way through a plate of steaming cabbage. “Her Duchess Miss Connelly”—as he’d taken to calling her—”is too fine a lady for simple bog-pickers like ourselves.”
    Tara’s days were too full for her to give much thought to Brigid Connelly. She arose before dawn and had a quick cup of tea to quiet her stomach before milking the cows. The white-legged Molly was her favorite. Sitting on an ancient three-legged stool in the cow barn, a bucket propped between her knees, Tara sang snatches of song while she squeezed the cow’s teats and sent long streams of milk into the bucket. Occasionally her mind would wander, and a jet of milk would miss the bucket and hit the straw-covered stall floor instead. Molly sometimes turned her head and looked at her as she sang. Even a cow could be cheered by a little music, Tara thought, then laughed at her own silly ideas.
    Then the bucket of milk had to be carried over to the churn. She’d hoist the bucket up and pour the milk into the churn, through the muslin cloth used to strain the milk. The milk would be separated into cream and skim milk, and the cream put into the hand churn for the making of butter.
    After feeding the chickens and helping her father catch the horse for his day’s work, Tara sat down to her own breakfast. Days when she wasn’t out in the fields she spent helping her mother. There was bread to be baked, with flour ground from grain threshed from the wheat grown in their own fields. Eggs had to be collected from the hen house, bedding washed and hung outside to air, clothing made and repaired.
    Tara, under her mother’s watchful eye, was learning to rein in her natural exuberant energy for this last task. Sewing required patience and even stitches. She was, gradually, acquiring some skill at it. Her mother said Tara turned as fine a hem as she’d ever seen. On their last visit to the village, Tara’s mother had traded lace with a local shopkeeper for several yards of cotton, an apple-green fabric sprinkled with deep blue flowers that her mother said would bring out the color in her eyes. It was to be a dress for Tara. She insisted on making it all by herself.
    Now, as Tara painstakingly cut out the pieces on the long kitchen table, she heard her parents talking outside. She tried not to listen to the voices drifting in through the open window—something in their tone hinted that the conversation was not for her ears. Tara wielded the scissors carefully, frowning in concentration, and tried to imagine herself in the finished dress. She pictured herself wearing it at a dance, the skirts swinging around in a green-and-blue-whirl as she danced a jig, all