Ellis Island Read Free Page A

the others hated me: they were jealous of my looks, and the fact that my family was better off than theirs. It hurt, not being invited to play with the others, but I pretended not to mind. In any case, I didn’t like the way they carried on, bragging about their devotion to the Blessed Virgin and gossiping about the neighbors like old women. My mother didn’t gossip, so I never had any news. And I had always been taught that it was unseemly to talk about one’s private prayers and devotions. I had voiced this opinion once and imagined that was another reason for their rejection of me.
    Nobody liked Kathleen because her glasses made her eyeballs swim around her face like big, frightening fish, but she was just the same as them—always trying to get in with the others—talking nonstop about this one and that one, telling me that if the communion wafer touched your teeth, you’d be sucked down into the ground by Satan when you were sleeping. One day, when I refused to act out a tableau where she was the Blessed Virgin and I was a Sinning Advocate prostrate at her feet, she finally told me the real reason nobody liked me. “Your grandpa killed baby children when their mas came looking for food and he wouldn’t give them any, and your father loves the bastard British.”
    I didn’t cry. I just told her she looked a fright—which she knew anyway—and pretended she hadn’t said anything, but my stomach was turned inside out on itself all afternoon.
    I was quiet on the way home and John asked if there was something wrong. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” he said.
    “Kathleen Condon was awful to me because I wouldn’t play her stupid game.” I didn’t tell him what she had said. I didn’t want him despising me as well because of my family. “I hate her and I’m never going to play with her again.”
    John stopped to break off a long stalk of blackberries, pulling his sleeves over his hands and freeing the bramble from the mangled hysteria of the hedgerow with a ferocious twist. He served me the ripe berries as we walked on, passing them to me in soppy handfuls, his stained palm a platter. “Don’t do that, Ellie,” he said. “Poor Kathleen has nobody, only you.”
    My mother’s aunt was still ailing in the spring. By now, I had a comfortable routine: John always walked me home after school, but, three days out of the five, I would carry on with him to the Hogans’ and spend the afternoon there. They would feed me, then allow me to follow John around the farm as he did his chores. I was scant help to him. Mesmerized the first, second, third time I saw him milk a cow, after that it was my mission to distract him. I’d call and challenge him from some hiding place, clamber up a tree and squeal for his help; one time, I lay down under his favorite cow and urged him to squirt the milk directly into my open mouth. He failed and I got soaked in milk and muck. It wasn’t hard for me to untether John from his duties. It seemed that all that mattered was our happiness. I discovered freedom and joy, and I grabbed it with both my small hands and didn’t let it go until I got back to my parents’ house.
    For all the freedom she gave us, Maidy was a tidy woman and hated to send me home to my mother with muck on my uniform.
    “Pssht, child. Your mother will think I have no respect for her if I send you home in that state!”
    Tired of nagging and scrubbing stains off my skirt, one day she put me into a pair of John’s working trousers—the ones he changed into after school to keep his shorts clean and his legs protected from all the cow muck and dirt on the farm. They looked comical on me, but Maidy insisted on rolling them up to my knees and leaving on only my woollen undershirt, which she then covered with one of her aprons, binding me up in its voluminous, flowery print until I looked like a package.
    I ran and ran that afternoon. With my legs protected, I fled down a hill of nettles and