Free Ellis Island by Kate Kerrigan Page B

the church, and he didn’t sound like himself, but a triumphant yet embittered stranger.
    I’d had enough. I wanted my day back, my John back. I tugged at his arm and said, “Come on, you silly man, and take me into Bewley’s for our wedding breakfast.” Defiant in the face of his war reverence, I added, “Or am I not enough of a lady for you?” I held his eye firmly and did not waver. Not for one moment did I betray my fear—that I had pushed him into marriage, and so God was going to punish me by sending him back to war. I stood and cocked my head to one side, expectantly, until I drew a smile out of him. The smile that made him belong to me again.
    “You are too much of a lady, Ellie Hogan,” he said, grabbing my face and kissing me firmly on the lips in front of his hated, disintegrated Nelson. “That’s the problem.”

Chapter Thirteen
    We telegrammed our parents from Dublin, and went home to Maidy and Paud’s house to take the softest blow first. We passed Paud in the field on our way in. He shook John’s hand, but did not follow us up to the house. Maidy did not greet us properly at the door. She was tight-lipped and continued about her housework, deliberately ignoring us. I was distraught. I had never seen Maidy like this before. John was not worried. “She’ll forget soon enough,” he said, when she left the room.
    “Indeed and I will not!” she shouted back. Then, unable to hold on to her anger, she came back in and pleaded, “Why did you do it, John?”
    Would he tell her I had put pressure on him? “We’re well beyond the age of consent, both of us. We waited until Ellie was finished school . . .”
    “You did not ,” she retorted. “Ellie was to join the convent then and teach. Arrangements had already been made, John.”
    “Ellie is eighteen, a woman. She can make up her own mind.”
    I realized that Maidy must have been speaking with my father. “What did my father say?”
    “He said . . .” She paused, as if she did not want to tell me, and instead looked over toward the fireplace. I followed her eyes. Poking out of a grain sack slumped beside the hearth was the blue feather pillow from my bed at home. Maidy found a flint of anger—her lips tightened and she burst it out of her: “He said to tell you he has already paid out your dowry—to the nuns.” Then her face collapsed with regret and her voice softened to the mild Maidy I loved. “He left your belongings. I didn’t open them out, but the bag was damp, so I just kept them by the fire.”
    A sob rose in my throat. My dowry. I had not thought consciously about it till that moment, but now I realized I had been depending on it. I knew I could live without my parents’ love, but in that moment I did not know if I could live without their money. I ran over to the bag and emptied it out across the floor. My blanket, my pillow and all of my clothes. But not my Jesus and Mary uniform, or my valuable rosary beads, or the precious prayer book. “Damn those pigs!” Anger and despair came howling out of me. I grabbed at the shabby pile and began to tear into everything, ripping the fabric, shredding everything I owned into rags.
    John came over, gently pulled me back and put his arms around me. “They’ll come round, Ellie,” he said, adding, “I’m your family now.”
    We stayed with Maidy and Paud for a few days. I slept on the settle in their kitchen and John on the floor. We met in the fields during the day to make love—and for those first few weeks our new marriage was just an extension of the friendship it had always been. John went into town and made contacts in the pub—Maidy disapproved, but reluctantly conceded that John needed to keep “in” with the men of the town if he was to get work. I helped Maisie a bit with the farm, cleaning out the henhouse and trying to milk the cows, but I was not born to farming and she found it easier to wait on me than instruct me. I was comfortable with the old couple looking