Haunted Nights by Lisa Morton

Author:Lisa Morton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

All Through the Night

Elise Forier Edie

WHEN THEY SHOWED Maggie her husband’s body, it was Granny O’Neill she mourned, not him. To be sure, she had loved Aiden once. But New York had hardened her heart into cobblestone, and the sight of his snapped neck, and poor dirty drawers, only twisted her mouth in disgust. Every finger in his right hand was broken. He had died in the streets like a dog.

She said to the men who had probably killed him, “See that he’s properly buried.” In autumn, they sent her some money. Maggie set it aside. By then she knew she was pregnant, and her troubles were only just beginning.

But first, she thought of Granny O’Neill, and the rain-washed fields of Kerry. How, even when they were both starving, light and fragile inside as spiderwebs, Granny’s bewhiskered face had been smiling.

“See how hunger makes the world like a veil,” she had said. “How another Place hides behind it.”

And wee Maggie, just a child then, with her bony side pressed to Granny’s, had seen: how the grass hid a greener field beyond, how the hedges were full of slim doors and slit windows, how the fields glittered with a thousand faceted eyes. She looked and never forgot the World-Behind-the-World, the one you could see only if your belly was empty.

But if such a World-Behind existed in Five Points, Maggie imagined it a wretched place. For New York pressed in on all sides, and instead of clean, green hills and bog ponies, there were crowds of people, cramming like hogs at feeding time. Their first few days in America, Maggie white-knuckled Aiden’s sleeves like a child, and when he laughed and tried to peel her off, she whined and clutched him more. Everywhere they went, they banged into horrors. Pits of shit steaming behind tenement houses. Fireworks exploding over a river of fish corpses. A pack of ragged children cooking rats on a fire.

They shared a room with ten other immigrants, curled on a straw-strewn floor. She wept. “What if we die here?”

“Die?” he laughed. “But of course we will. And here. This is our home now. But don’t fret, my love. We’ll be on to something better.”

But weeks passed and she saw nothing better in the whole New World. Not mist-bathed fields, or warblers, or wych elms, not mushroom circles, or hills furred with green. Just sights so strange, she didn’t know what to make of them: A Syrian lad with a ragged pet monkey. A long braid snaking down a Chinaman’s back. A peddler holding a tray of tomatoes, the fruit’s smell and color so foreign and alarming, she almost yelled at the sight.

And poor Aiden breathed his last in the gutter, lips and blue eyes beaten to jelly. Maggie cursed herself thrice over. For it had been she who asked to come to this stone-cold country, an impossible ocean away from everything they’d ever known.

For a time, she felt safe at a grocery on Orange Street. She would linger there, after sewing pieces for a Jew down the road.

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