Strength & Luck
There’s
no food in Ireland for Patrick Kennedy. He slogs with the other starving over
the wintry road to Kingston port, hands the man his bit of coin earned working
with the lordship’s horses. And up the gangway to ride the groaning bucking
ship across the Irish Sea. Near to frozen in the open air he hears screams from
the freezing below decks. A rotten beam has cracked, shattered, broken the back
of a mother. The damn ship docks in Liverpool’s crazed harbor with sloppy,
exhausted triumph.
So
Patrick’s in amid the shoving, bellowing, crying mass of countrymen lost in the
dirty alleys snaking from wharf to dark city. A churchwoman offers bread and
weak ale, saving him, he supposes—he’s that hungry. To sleep then, in a heap
where he stumbles. The night brings him a dream of his father, still lively and
digging up stones. Morning and an English pulls him by the arm back to the
docks, signs him on and so he’s a stevedore—him, a boy whose life had been
stallions, mares, and colts. Liverpool smothers in coal ash and fear’s roiling
anger.
When
Patrick’s had enough of the place and the place has had enough of him, he
scrimps the fare (gone low it has for the thousands and for the shipping lines
wanting to carry them) and boards a steamship bound for New York City. At least
that’s what they tell him—he can’t read the paper ticket, but he’s paid for it
and takes his chances.
The crossing is hell plain and simple, the
only good being the end of it— a hundred or so poor souls with typhus ferried
to hospital on Ward’s Island. His luck with him or so he thinks, he’s in the
mass of them crowding down the gangplank. A cursing bastard in uniform grabs
him by the neck, pushes him onto a cart. By sunrise he’s in uniform himself. Patrick’s a private in the Union Army.
Whatever the hell it is, whatever the hell the fight is about, he holds a rifle
and boots too big for him are on his feet—he is in it now.
Because
Patrick Kennedy survived the potato famine, the refugee frenzy in Liverpool,
the rats aboard the City of Manchester, and the American Civil War to raise a
family with Catherine, née McCarthy, I am here to write these things down about
my great-great grandfather, born in Dunganstown, Wexford County, Ireland, 1836,
dead in Richmond County, Staten Island, New York, 1888.
