Free May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel by Peter Troy

South Street Port and so on, Suah sharing a few details about the fever and landing on this side of the island and so forth. Ethan is quiet as he watches the men talk for maybe a minute, but then realizes that his life has just taken another leap into something new, this voyage, as always, filled with goodbyes, first Aislinn, then Mam and Aunt Em, the Quigleys … and now Suah. And the thought of it begins to bring the water to his eyes, just as his Da is gettin’ ready to take him home.
    T’anks fer lookin’ after me boy, his Da says to Suah, extending his hand toward him.
    Ethan wants to tell him that he’d done a whole lot more than that, that he’d saved his life and gave him food and even waited these hourswith him here on the pier. But the water’s pressin’ on his eyelids now, and he can’t say a thing, lest it escape down his cheeks and he go back to bein’ a boy instead of the man he’d just asserted himself as. Suah offers his hand to Ethan and places his other on Ethan’s shoulder.
    Goodbye Etan, he says.
    And Ethan can only respond meekly, Goodbye Suah, in kind, squinting to keep the water in his eyes from getting out.
    His Da and Suah shake hands again, and as Da begins to reach into his pocket Suah shakes his head and holds up the book.
    Your son give me dis book, he says, smiling broadly. I t’ink of you ev’ry time I read from it, Etan.
    And that’s the end for them, with just a final wave from the distance once Ethan and his Da have made their way back to the pier and are headed off into the vast wilderness of the city. When they’re far enough away, Da asks him about Suah, and Ethan starts to explain about Mrs. Quigley and the storage container and readin’ and such, and it all comes out so fast that it’s just a jumbled mess, and his father’s expression becomes more confused.
    You’ll see some colored folks around here too, lad, he says. We try t’keep t’ahr own the way this place is, but you come across a good man dere in yer friend. Sometimes you can tell that about a man, straight off … ahhhh lad, you’ll see how it is soon enough.
    New York is a collection of sights, sounds, and smells unlike anything he could’ve ever imagined. The buildings are four and five and six stories high with one of them right next to another. In Liverpool he’d seen his first buildings this tall, but there were only a few of them. Here there are hundreds. There’s a very tall church spire that stands out from all of them, Trinity Church, his Da tells him, and in the valleys between the great buildings is the strangest element of all, the people.
    It’s all a stunning, frightening, and oddly exhilarating assault on the senses. In the first few blocks they walk, he hears several languages, sees a few men who look like they could pass for nobility back in Ireland, and more than a few who resemble the battered masses by the docks in Liverpool. He sees women dressed in ways his mother would surely not approve of, and speakin’ to passersby in ways that make him blush. On another corner, near where the well-dressed men are gathered,there’s a preacher or politician of some sort standing on a wooden crate and shouting at them about the evils of slavery.
    Eventually they emerge from the tall buildings and are back at the water, and his excitement grows when he sees two dark-skinned men seated against a wooden gate by one of the ships. These two men, still at a distance from him, look like they’re wearin’ the same sort of clothes Suah did on the ship. And as he and his father approach them, Ethan begins to think that maybe they work on the ships too, that maybe they’ll know Suah and can invite him to come visit him in Brooklyn, the way he would’ve done before if the water hadn’t been in his eyes. But that hope is quickly forgotten as they approach the two men and he sees the chains connecting their wrists and ankles together. There’s a man standin’ right next to them with his hands