The Ohana Read Online Free Page B

a ship made for ten passengers. Coffin ships they are. I hear most people don’t make it to America alive.”
    “It’s dying here or on a ship. We have little choice,” Patrick’s Da replied.
    The O’Malley’s stayed in Liverpool until they sold everything they couldn’t take aboard the ship. His mother cried when her marriage chest, fine linens, and family china were purchased. They wrapped the rest of their belongings in faded blue cloth.
    As they boarded the ship, his mother started coughing.
    The ship was packed. None of the adults could stretch out to sleep. Patrick worried about his mother. Her cough worsened in the dank air below deck. After four days at sea, her trembling and alarmingly hot body woke him up in the middle of the night. His father wept through his mother’s moans. Patrick sat up and saw her head in his father’s lap. After awhile her body stopped shaking and her skin turned gray. His father clutched her to his breast and wailed. Patrick heard the same sound all around the bottom of the ship.
    The next day some of the crew descended into the dank hole to gather the bodies of the people who had died during the night. His father grabbed his sister and shoved Patrick into the sea of people rushing onto the deck where the relatives of the dead screamed and wailed as the sailors tossed the rigid bodies overboard.
    Patrick’s last memory of his mother as she plunged into the foaming sea was the peculiar way her cheeks and eyes had caved into her face and the eerie pallor of her skin. He pressed against his father fearfully. She no longer looked like his mother in the merciless daylight.
    Tears streamed down his Da’s face. “Oh, it’s sorry I am, Mary. To die out here without a priest to say last rites and not even a coffin or shroud.” He wept openly for a long time.
    After that, a coffin ship appeared in every one of Patrick’s nightmares.
    By the time they arrived at Constitution Wharf in Boston, Patrick had passed his eleventh birthday and was big for his age. His sister Katy’s growth had been stunted by starvation and the famine had temporarily taken her voice.
    “All she needs is to eat normal and she’ll be fine,” their father pronounced as the ship neared its port. “She’ll get plenty of that in America. Thank God.”
    Patrick noticed gangs of young men waiting at the docks. When pretty young women disembarked, the men snatched them and disappeared. The fathers, brothers, and husbands of the young women chased the villains with a howl. But weakened by hunger and the inactivity aboard ship, the men were easily overpowered by the thugs who beat them and stole their possessions.
    “Dirty, rotten emigrant runners!” A man waiting at the docks shook his fists at the villains. He turned to Joseph, looked down at Katy, and nodded. “You be keeping an eye on that one. Those poor girls will never see their families again. The scoundrels be taking them to houses of prostitution. Most of the prostitutes in Boston and New York be innocent Irish girls taken by gangs of Irish boys gone bad. ‘Tis a disgrace, it is.” The man spat on the ground.
    Patrick saw his father’s grip tighten on Katy.
    The O’Malleys settled in the North End slums in a dilapidated rooming house. Their neighbor’s baby had died a year before and she happily cared for Katy, freeing Patrick and his father to look for work. They saw signs posted everywhere: “No Irish or Catholics Need Apply.” Below one of the signs someone had scrawled, “The man who wrote this wrote it well, for the same is written on the gates of hell.”
    Joseph shook his head. “Sure and I didn’t come over the sea for this.”
    Patrick and his father signed on as day laborers on reclamation projects around Boston. There he met Timmy, who was a year older. Timmy was a handsome lad, but he had a club foot and walked with a limp. He was also smart and tough. Being they were both from Ireland and close to the same age, they became