So it was me with whom Da shared his word book. The book kept us close even as I became a young woman and started to be more and more interested in Mason’s friends. My two older brothers, Niall and Ross, both married at age twenty, and since they were eight and ten years older than me, they were out of the house and creating families of their own well before I knew where babies even came from. Mason, only three years older than me, didn’t mind my company, especially after the older brothers moved out, and he let me follow him and his friends almost anywhere they went. He had a group of chums and most of them were unremarkable fellows.
Colm McGough was the exception. He was a year and half orso older than Mason and tall and handsome. He was the boy in the village all the young girls wanted to impress. He came from a family of fishermen by trade, the second-born of two sons, and the rumor was his father, Gerard, was an authoritative figure who showered little affection on his boys. His mother was a meek little creature who seemed to be afraid of Gerard McGough’s very shadow. I don’t think I ever heard that woman give an opinion of her own volition or contradict Mr. McGough. Still, Colm seemed a cheerful sort, easygoing, and he surely knew he had the eye of every young girl in the village. I would daydream of him, and I was content enough with that. I had no illusions that Colm McGough fancied me. I was Mason Whalen’s little sister; that’s all I was. That’s what I thought, anyway.
The day my father fell from the roof was an ordinary day. I was still going to classes at sixteen, although many of my schoolmates had stopped at fourteen and were working or learning a trade. I was walking home from school, the long way by the docks, and keeping my eye out for Colm’s fishing boat, when I heard someone calling my name. A neighbor was running toward me, holding her skirts up so that she wouldn’t trip. My father had fallen and hit his head, the doctor had been summoned to my house, and my mother needed me.
I ran home expecting my father to be sitting in his favorite chair with a chunk of ice to his head, laughing about his clumsiness. But when I came into the house I saw that my da was not in his chair. He was in his bed with a bandage around his head that was seeping blood, and his skin looked pale and slack. The doctor was there and he was telling my mother that it was quite possible Da would not awaken, that my father’s eyes were fixed when the doctor had shone his light in them and that was never a good sign.
The doctor told us he could do nothing for him. Prayer was the only thing that could save my da. So we prayed. For four days we prayed. But the doctor was right. Da did not awaken. My mother had been sitting up with Da at night for fear of missing the moment he opened his eyes, but she had fallen asleep holding his hand, and when she startled awake at dawn on the fifth day, the hand in hers was stiff and cold.
Up to that point what I knew of death was the loss of Sophie, which I could barely remember, and the loss of my gram, who had died three years previous. My grandmother had seemed old to me and it seemed natural when she passed. I didn’t like it one bit, but other people’s grandmothers had died. It didn’t seem odd, just sad. My father’s death, however, seemed wrong, as if a giant mistake had been made. I could not fathom that my da was gone.
I remember very little of his passing or his funeral or burying him next to my sister and my grandmother. I was in a fog of numbness that I didn’t want to emerge from. Mason had already been set to emigrate to America. A second cousin on my mother’s side had offered to sponsor him, and he already had his passage booked. He made it clear that he didn’t want to stay in Donaghadee; he wanted to make his own way in the world even more so now that our father was dead. He did not want to be a roofer, and that’s what his lot would’ve been had he stayed. My mother told him to go, even while I begged him to stay. My two older brothers who lived nearby—but not in Donaghadee—offered to help as best they could, but they had children of their own to provide for. It would have made sense if one of them had offered to take in Mam and me, but neither one did. I wonder to this day if Niall and Ross were jealous of the love Da had lavished on me.
At first the neighbors would bring us warm dishes of food ora freshly plucked chicken or jars of preserves. But as the months went on and everyone returned to their own lives, Mam and I began to feel the loss of my father’s income. There wasn’t enough to eat in the house, little coal for the fireplace, and no extra money for gifts or a cake for my seventeenth birthday four months after my father’s fall.
Colm began to show up on our doorstep from time to time with extra fish from his day’s catch. We had heard from Mason by this point and we knew he was safely in New York, had found work, and was going to be sending us some money as soon as he found a better job. I believe Mason had asked Colm to check on my mother and me in his absence, as his happiness with his new life in America was making him feel guilty. Colm had obliged.
The more Colm came over, the more he found solace at my house, I think. Mam was a good cook and a good conversationalist and his mother was neither. Colm could share his opinion about something, whether it be politics in the village or the world at large, and my mother would engage with him. At some point he began to see me no longer as just Mason’s little sister. I remember with utter clarity the day he told me I wasn’t a little girl anymore and that I was pretty.
“Stop your teasing,” I’d said to him with a laugh, because I was sure he was. “It’s not nice.”
“I’m not teasing,” he replied. “You’re the prettiest girl in the village. And the truest. You’re not like the other girls, all full of giggles and fancies and flirtations. I wouldn’t trust a one of them.”
It was a compliment of some kind, but even then I wasn’t sure what he meant by it.Trust those other girls with what?I thought.
“You’re the kind of girl every man wants for his own, you are,” he said.
I had never had a boy say anything like this to me before. And I had never dreamed Colm McGough would ever say such a thing to me.
He was good-looking, somehow didn’t smell of rotting fish, was congenial, laughed a lot, drank too much sometimes with his brother and friends, and sometimes told bawdy stories that made me blush.
Most of the time he came by the house to see me, but occasionally he’d take me down to the docks and I’d watch as he and his friends passed around a flask of whisky. The other girls in the village, none of whom I was close to—my closest friends had moved away for work—were jealous, I suppose, that Colm had chosen me and distanced themselves from me. After a while Colm seemed to be the only friend I had. A few months before my eighteenth birthday he asked me to marry him.
We were on his boat at the docks, and we were alone. We’d been kissing and Colm had his hands everywhere on me. I hadn’t let him have his way fully with me. I had made a promise to my da years before that I wouldn’t give my body to a man who hadn’t first given me his pledge in marriage. Once you’ve given a man your body, Da had told me, he doesn’t need anything else from you. I didn’t want to break my promise to my da. So I kept telling Colm no and he kept whispering things and caressing me, trying to get me to change my mind. I think he thought that he could; I think he had with other girls.
I pushed myself away from him and said, “I’ll not be giving you what isn’t yours! I’m not your wife, Colm.”
He smiled wide. He liked it that I hadn’t been with anyone else, and that I wouldn’t consider being with anyone I wasn’t married to. “Then, be my wife, Saoirse,” he said. “Marry me.”
I didn’t know if it was love I felt for Colm or just immense attraction, but I knew if I did marry Colm, I would always be able to look out for Mam and there would always be food for us both. The fishermen in the village weren’t rich, but they never starved. When I told her that Colm asked me to marry him, she as much said the same thing to me: that it would be a relief to her to know that I would always have food to eat and a warm bed and a strong man to protect me. She gave her permission and we were married a few weeks later.
I knew enough from what Colm and I had done when no one was watching to know there were pleasures to be had that I had yet to experience. The first time I lay with him was indeed magical even though painful, and I was happy, truly happy, for the first time since my father had died. This was a pleasure that seemed to have the power to mask every other kind of disappointment, even grief. Even if just for a little while.
The first time Colm struck me I lay on the kitchen floor with my hand on my cheek too stunned to move. We’d been married for only four months and we had just come back from a walk into the village from our little seaside home at the end of a long lane. A man whom we both knew well had tipped his hat to me in greeting and I had wished him a good day. This was the reason Colm had hit me when we returned to our cottage, though at first I didn’t understand why and I had to ask him. I could not grasp what the offense had been. Colm yelled that it was not that I had said hello to the man; it was how I had said it and how I had looked at the man, but I didn’t know what Colm meant. I hadn’t looked at the man in any particular kind of way.
It happened again a few weeks later, and then again a few weeks after that. I realized I could not return the greeting of anyman in the village when Colm was nearby, as he mistook every cordial interaction as coquettishness on my part. I began to look forward to the times when he was out at sea because then I could relax and not worry about the grocer or the cobbler or the milkman talking to me.
Colm didn’t hit me when he was drunk. Strangely enough he was lazily cheerful when he had too much drink. It was when he was sober that he was the most dangerous, and I never knew when something I would do would set him off. Sometimes he’d get angry if I took too long making supper or if I had it ready before he was wanting to eat. Sometimes he would not come home at night, and if I asked him where he’d been, he would go into a rage, saying it was not my place to question him. He would usually apologize hours or days later, but he’d never say he’d try to change. I wanted to reach out to Mam to ask her how to have the kind of marriage she had with Da, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what Colm was truly like. My friends from my school days were living their own lives now in other villages, or they’d gone to Belfast to secretarial school or nursing school. I had no one to confide in.
A year passed and then I found myself pregnant. I foolishly believed that my being with child would make a better man of my husband and he would begin to see anew his role as loving provider. But Colm took the news strangely that we were to have a child, and in bed that night he was savage toward me, hurting me as he lay on top of me. It was as if he wanted to yank out the new life he had put in. But weeks later he was happy about it and he put his hand on my growing stomach and talked to the child, calling him a little boy and telling him what it would be like to teach him the ways of the sea.
I was six months along when Colm came home angry after a fight he’d had with his father. I had never seen him so livid. I could tell it was not safe for me to be in the house and I wanted to escape to my mother’s while he settled down. When I mentioned that I needed to take something up to Mam’s, he took great offense, yelling at me that he had just gotten home, and when I tried to move past him and go anyway, he yanked me by the hair, threw me to the floor, and began to kick.
I tried to protect my child. I tried to crawl away, and when I could not, I curled into a ball and put my arms around my stomach. But the kicks from his heavy boots kept coming and coming until he finally tired of it. He stood over me for few seconds, breathing heavily.
“You’re a useless slag,” he said, nearly spitting the words on me. Then he grabbed his coat off its peg. “And don’t even think of going to your mam’s.” A second later he was out the door and on his way to the pub.
As soon as he was gone, the childbearing pains began to come. I struggled to my feet and out of the cottage. I got as far as halfway to the neighbor’s house before collapsing in water and blood. My tiny blossom of a girl was born that night as blue as a summer moon. I held her dead body as my vision went cloudy and as the blood continued to pour from inside me, and then I knew no more.
