Free Man in the Shadows by Gordon Henderson

was dangerously close to the walls and Thomas hung a frightening number of inflammable objects near it. A wooden plank balanced over two barrels created a table; two old mattresses on the floor served as their beds. It was a place to leave, not call home.
    Thomas was now standing, looking down on his son. “I’ll tell you what Canada did for your mother,” he began slowly. “It was 1847, the start of the famine in Ireland. Millions of us were starving.” He paused and looked Conor directly in the eye. “Not hungry, boyo, but starving.”
    Conor ignored being called “boyo.” He didn’t want to quell the new life in his father’s voice. Thomas pulled up a rickety chair and sat down. Conor could tell that his father’s back was aching even more than usual.
    “The British landlords didn’t care about us. Year after year, the potato crop was in ruin, but all they worried about were their prices, their precious investment. We weren’t people; we were just Irishmen.”
    Conor knew the story of the famine. Thomas rarely spoke about it—and certainly never to his son—but other Irishmen spoke of little else. He was about to say something, but stopped himself and let his father continue. “The English had the means to help us, but they just sat back and watched us suffer. Finally, when the landlords’ profits really started to decline, they took some action. They evicted us.” Thomas kept his eyes focused on the mud floor. “Then we started to die. By the thousands, good farmers, good people …” His words drifted off, but only for a few seconds. “They wouldn’t give us freedom. They wouldn’t allow us our own government, but their bloody government didn’t give a damn.” Thomas swallowed hard; he was breathing deeply, almost gasping. “Oh yes, they sent commissions over—not to help us or feed us, but to count the dead. And they sent journalists over to watch us slowly waste away. I guess we were quite a story: Irish peasants in tattered rags, dying in ditches; children eating gravel while their parents lay dead beside them; typhus killing those who didn’t starve; undertakers building coffins with trap doors so that dozens of bodies could be buried from the same wooden box. We were a great story.”
    Then, strangely, Thomas’s expression changed, as if a dim memory had come to light. He rubbed his weary eyes. “It’s hard to fathom, but amidst the horror, your mother and I were so much in love that we could almost ignore our hunger and the despair all around us.”
    Conor was about to tell his father about Meg, the stirring within him, but again he stopped himself.
    “You were just a baby,” his father continued. “And dear Lord, how we loved you. You were good, very good. We barely had enough food to feed you, but you seemed to understand. You cooed and giggled from the day you were born, and made everything so … so …” Again his words drifted off, but his distant smile faded as he stareddeeply into the past. “But we couldn’t bring you up in that poverty. And anyway, they evicted us, too. Your mother and I had to leave a land that could have been—should have been—heaven on earth to come to a strange new place we knew almost nothing about.”
    Thomas gingerly stood up and carefully paced across the tiny room. “Your grandparents scraped together every bit of money they could find. And so did we. We wanted a future for our family—for you—in the New World.” He walked the length of the small room twice, pressing on the small of his back. “They held a wake for us before we left. Not a going-away party, but a wake. Our leaving meant we would never see any of our family or friends again. Margaret and I danced the steps of the living dead—the expelled.”
    Just hours before, Conor had been dancing with Meg with carefree joy. How long had it been since his father was carefree?
    Thomas stretched his back and sat down. “We left Galway Bay in the spring, boarding the ship almost in