Chasing the Sunset(30)

“I forgot my waistcoat,” Ned said quietly. “Blasted thing always gets too tight after I eat. I was going to see if you needed any help with the cleaning up, Maggie. I will be going to my bed now. Goodnight.”

He turned and left, leaving Maggie and Nick staring after him, still wordless.





SEVEN



Maggie bit her lip as she hurried toward the stables. She had not realized that this was going to be so hard. It took every ounce of courage she had to go to the stables and see Ned. She had to try to explain, for she could not stand it if he thought badly of her. He was the only family that she had left, and she had not realized until last night how much his good opinion meant to her. How important it was to her.

Until it was gone, she thought gloomily. She would never, for the rest of her days, forget the look of shock in Ned’s eyes when he stood in that doorway and caught her in Nick’s illicit embrace. She was deeply ashamed. She should have known better. Nick had warned her how it would be, and she had not listened to him, she had just gone on and done what she wanted without a thought to the consequences. She had thrown herself at the man every chance she got, and she had no right . . . she was not free to love him, and she knew it.

Last night, after Ned had left them standing there, the look on Nick’s face had killed her tender heart. He was tormented by guilt and she could see the shame in his eyes. He had turned and left then, too, without speaking a word. Maggie had watched him go with all the frustrated love in her heart. She had spent the next four hours weeping into her pillow, only dropping off to sleep when exhaustion claimed her body.

Now, she called softly for Ned. She peeped into the tack room, and squeaked in alarm when she ran right into her uncle’s chest. He put two hands out to steady her, and frowned. Maggie felt a scalding blush rise up her face. She lowered her eyes, unable to meet the knowledge in his.

“Here now, what is this?” he said gruffly. “Something wrong, Maggie girl?”

Maggie felt the tears well up from some place deep inside her, some hidden crevasse inside her wounded soul. She tried to keep them at bay, but they came on anyway, an unstoppable flood. Ned pulled her forward against his chest, and cradled the back of her head with his hand.

“There, there, poppet. Do not cry, sweetheart,” he soothed. He patted her back as if she were a small child in need of comfort, and that made Maggie cry all the harder. She remembered when she was small and Ned would come to visit, how he had always brought her a gift, how he held her on his lap and kissed away her hurts. She felt like a child again as he tried to console her.

Ned led her to a bale of hay in a nearby empty stall and sat her down, gave her a handkerchief from his pocket, and waited out the storm of tears. When the flood had abated to a trickle, and she sniffled and blew her nose, he spoke.

“Has this something to do with the scene that I walked in on last night?”

Maggie nodded miserably, wiping her eyes.

“I . . . I do not want you to think badly of me,” she whispered. “I cannot bear it, Uncle Ned.”

His wrinkled old face gentled and he sank down beside her, patting her knee.

“I do not think badly of you, Maggie girl. I was just surprised, that is all. You are a grown woman, and the good Lord knows you are entitled to some pleasure in your life, and Nick is, too. I will not stick my shanty Irish nose in where it does not belong, if that is what is worryin’ you.” His arm crept around her shoulders and gave a gentle squeeze. “Just you be careful, Maggie. Do not get a babe if you do not want one.” His face reddened and he cleared his throat nervously. He twitched a little on the bale of hay, and his eyes had a hard time looking at her. “There is ways to prevent ‘em, you know. I will probably set the barn on fire with my face bein’ so hot, but I will tell you if you need to know.”

Maggie stared at him, and he squirmed a little at her direct gaze. “Uncle Ned,” she said in a faint voice, shocked all the way down to her toes. “You never behave as I think you will. Just when I have made up my mind about what you might do or say, you utter something outrageous. I think you do it just to confuse me.”

He smiled, showing slightly crooked teeth. “You must grab your joys where you can in this life, Maggie, m’dear. There is tears a plenty, that is for sure, so you needs grab happiness with both hands and wring every last drop out of it.” He picked up her hand and studied it, perusing the delicate bone structure, the trimmed nails and work-worn texture of the skin there as if some secret resided in the slender digits.

“Did your father e’er tell you about immigrating to this country, lass?" When Maggie shook her head, he smiled. "Ah, your father was ever one to ignore terrible events. He liked to discard the bad parts and keep only the good in his life. Well, never mind that. Let me tell you about it." He squeezed her hand affectionately and began again.

"We came here in the year of An Gorta Mor all together, Maggie, me and your father and all of our family. That was the year of The Great Hunger. It was the year of the potato blight. It started just as a little white spot on our tatties, and we thought nothing of it until we went to pick them and realized that it was fungus, and it had rotted through every potato in our field. And not just our fields, lass, it was through every field in Ireland. And people were starving to death before our eyes. We were lucky. Our Ma’s grandfather had been a wealthy man, and he still had jewelry that had been in his family for generations, and he left it to her when he died. Our Ma had hidden it, thinking that one day we might need it. And she was right, Maggie, for without the money she got for the jewels we would have all died. Our Ma brought our entire family here, my Da, me and your father, my aunt and uncle and their two little ones. She bullied them into comin’, and they all did as she said, e’en the ones who disliked the idea of moving so far away from our home. She forced us all to leave, in the early days of the famine, and thank the good Lord for that, for the famine lasted five long years. She got us out of Ireland, and gave us all a chance at a decent life, because there was no such chance in Ireland. For in Ireland, you see, the beauteous Irish countryside with its green pastures and wonderful farmland had long ago been taken away from the Irish and given to the English. They took it from its true owners and made the land into English plantations. Land-owning Irishmen, one of whom was my great-grandfather, who had worked for themselves for centuries, became English tenants overnight. The only money that changed hands for the transfer of the lands, of course, was the rent that was now paid to the new landlords. And that was not all, Maggie. All of Ireland had to contend with laws that were designed to break the backs of the Irishmen and make us ignorant. We were forbidden the exercise of our religion, or to receive an education, and to enter a profession. We could not hold public office, or engage in trade or commerce. We were forbidden to own a horse of greater value than five pounds, to vote, or even to purchase land. Laws like that were a disaster-in-the-making for the Irishman, and so you see, the potato crop was all that we had. We had to pay the rent with the proceeds of the potato crop, or we would be kicked off of the very land that we had owned for hundreds of years. And my Ma knew, deep in her bones, that bad times were there to stay, and so she made us all leave Ireland. We settled in St. Louis, a grand, wild place." Uncle Ned smiled, and squeezed her hand. "I wish you could have known my Ma, and my aunt and uncle and all of their children, but they died in a cholera epidemic when you were only a wee little girl."

"Mother did a portrait of them once," Maggie said softly. "From memory. It hung in our house for a long time, but I do not know what happened to it after my parents died. They all looked so happy together."

“Did I ever tell you about my wife, Maggie love?”

Maggie shook her head and stared wide-eyed at his words. She had not known that Uncle Ned had ever been married.

"She was as rough a woman as you e’er want to meet.” He smiled, staring off into the depths of the stable, his eyes seeming to see some distant picture that pleased him. “I met her when I was but a lad of sixteen, and she was three years my senior, and they were a hard three years, too, darlin’. Her mother was a dockside whore, as pitiful a slattern as you would ever want to meet, and her father was a useless, lying drunk who had just as soon cut your throat for a penny as look at you. She was a maid in a fine house, and she near worked hersel’ to death six days out of the week, trying to feed hersel’ and all the little ones in her family.”

He looked at Maggie, and she was astounded to see the sheen of tears in his rheumy eyes. He wiped them away unashamedly with his sleeve and gave Maggie a crooked little smile.

“Her name was Siobhan. She was short and stocky; the top of her head barely reached to my shoulder and you know that I am not a large man. She was bowlegged, to boot. Her hair was a tangle of wild red curls and she had a mouth on her that would put the roughest sailor to shame and cause him to blush. I was down on the east side of St. Louis, visiting with my aunt and uncle who lived down there, and I had decided to walk along the pier, not knowing how dangerous it was down to the docks. All of a sudden a man comes howling out of one of the shacks that were all along there, and this screaming virago follows him out, yelling curses I had never heard the like of. It was Siobhan, down visitin’ her younger brothers and sisters on her half day off. I stood and gaped, and when she turned around, and our eyes met, I gaped for another reason.” His voice dropped to a low murmur, and he closed his eyes momentarily, the better to see his memories... “Och, she was lovely to me, Maggie. Maybe she would not have been to anyone else, but to me she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I to her. I looked down deep inside her from the moment of our meeting, down past the worn clothes and terrible upbringing, past the anger, past all the terrible, terrible things she’d had to do just to survive, past all the surface of her . . . and I looked inside her heart. We knew each other, Siobhan and I, from that moment and nothing else mattered.”