Free Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan

each other short, urgent letters. I told my friends the correspondence was with a maiden aunt who had grown attached to me during the summer. John told me little of his life, only that he missed me and loved me. He said he was cutting his apprenticeship short to come home. He was worried about Maidy and Paud; there were troubled times ahead and he wanted to be close to them, and to me. I wrote to him once and begged him to come and get me. I wanted to run away from school and get married. John would not entertain the idea. He wrote: “I need money to do well by you, Eileen. I’ll not marry you poor. Two years will be time enough to set things right.”
    John came home the following summer from Dublin. He moved in with Maidy and Paud, and we were inseparable. He didn’t talk about the war and I did not ask. It seemed to me as if it was over. I made myself believe the fighting was something that had happened in Dublin and could surely not touch the simple, quiet life we enjoyed in the country. In any case, that summer it was as if we were children again, walking the fields, laughing and talking, our friendship stronger than ever. Maidy and Paud were so happy to have their John back from Dublin that they would not hear of him helping on the farm for the first few weeks he was home, and my parents trusted me to spend the days as I pleased. The sun shone, the hedgerows were heavy with fruit and we were beyond happy. We experienced the freedom of touching each other and enjoyed long kisses hiding in the soft grass, but we always held ourselves back from what we really wanted.
    One day, toward the end of the summer, my father came into my bedroom. It was early evening and I was getting ready to go out. John had been in Ballymorris looking for work and I had spent the day helping my mother in the garden, cleaning out the henhouse and tearing back the weeds from the edges of her rhubarb patch. It had been a balmy day, and the room was filled with an orange light. I checked myself in the mirror and wished John was there to see me looking as warm and rosy as I did.
    “I’ve made preparations for us to travel to Galway to collect what you need for the convent. They have asked that you start back a week before school opens, so you can settle in before the new students arrive.”
    My stomach tumbled over on itself. I thought I was going to be sick, but I kept my voice steady and said, “Yes, Father.”
    Later that day, as we lay on a mattress of heather in his father’s bog, John kissed me harder than he had done before. I could feel the savage drive in him and instead of pulling back as I usually did, protecting us both from mortal sin, I pushed my hips toward him and ground myself into him. John pulled himself away, but I could feel his frustration.
    It was an opportunity and I took it. I reached over and stroked his face, down across his chin and neck, then reached down and moved his hand into a caress across my breast. “Will we marry now, John? Then we can do as we please.”
    He reached up with his free hand and firmly stopped me by the wrist, but I knew that I had won.
    The day before my father was due to take me back to the convent to start as a novice teacher, six weeks after my eighteenth birthday, John and I ran away and got married. He collected me at dawn and carried me on the back of his bicycle to Ballymorris, where we caught the morning train to Dublin. I was shivering with the cold and with the enormity of what we were doing. On the train, John tucked me inside his greatcoat and I clung to his chest. I didn’t speak in case I might say something that would make him change his mind. So I listened for the thud of his heart and felt the hardness of his bones, the warmth of his blood and told myself that he would look after me.
    We walked to St. Dominic’s on Dorset Street. It was a Franciscan church and John knew the friar. A small, chubby man, he shook John’s hand and greeted me so warmly that I felt we were doing