Free Past Lives by Shana Chartier

I.”

Part Two—U.S.A.

    The Civil War

Chapter Eight
    Luck of the Irish

    Whenever my father took to the bottle, I got to hear the story of how we came to live in Georgia. Since this happened a lot, I got to hear it all the time. It’s actually quite the harrowing tale.
    Once upon a time, my father was a wealthy Irish landowner in county Claire. He and my mother owned a two-story house, and inherited the farmland from generations past. Our family had a reputation for being kind and benevolent landlords, and my mother would often take her woven basket around the region and provide gifts on special holidays to the people who tilled our land. Even though we were Protestant in a Catholic country (which England was desperately trying to change, with their laws preventing Catholics from owning things or influencing the country in any way), our neighbors were always our friends.
    Then a cold wind blew, so cold that it pierced the earth and brought poison to the land. The fist of the English squeezed and squeezed, and the people of Ireland became a skeletal lot, too poor to even gain sustenance from the land. The only thing that kept them alive was the blessed potato, a vegetable with enough nutrients to sustain the rising population. And then one day God frowned upon the Irish, as he so constantly did, and the potatoes came out of the soil black and rotted to the core. The people of our country cried and cried to the heavens, wondering just what we had done wrong.
    With no crop to sustain us, my father took all the money we had left and bought passage for my small family for a ship to America—the land of dreams and promise. And then we got to Georgia…the end.
    I cut short because usually that’s the part he liked to talk about the least, and he drank enough to fall into a sound sleep by then. In actuality, I remember it quite differently, though by the time we left I was only five years old. I do remember Ireland as a lush and beautiful place…tragically so. The Cliffs of Moher towered over the sea, and I would often sit and watch the waves crash into the jagged rocks below, free to come and go as they pleased. I often wished I could do the same. By then the famine had crashed into our country, and I watched as my family grew thinner and thinner, my brother Jack often giving up half his nightly potato to me.
    I watched as people barely able to stand hobbled their way to the fields, only to soil their hands in the rank, black poison of rotten potatoes. I watched them die there, starved and alone. It was when my mother really began to take ill that my father got desperate and sold everything we had back to the English for much less than what it was worth. We waited for weeks at the docks to pass all their health tests before boarding a sailboat for Boston. The journey of 43 days might as well have lasted 43 years. We sat in our cots below deck, huddled and afraid.
    As I cried, Jack held me close, putting on his bravest 8-year-old face. We were both so quintessentially Irish, with our curly black hair, pale skin and bright blue eyes—eyes just like my mother. My father, who had some English in him, had sandy blonde hair, and I believe would have had a thick build had it not been starved out of him. The first hour on that boat was the only one that was bearable. After that, the vomiting started down below, and the stench of bile seeped past our patched clothing and right into our skin. I watched as men, women and children emptied their bellies over and over again into pots that weren’t cleaned. We lived in a world of vomit, feces and urine, the smell unbearable when the hot sun beat upon the deck of the boat and boiled us whole above crashing waves.
    My mother in particular got the worst of it. She had been well bred enough to have never suffered a day in her life until the blight set in and destroyed our lives. It was my belief later that she died of a broken heart rather than an empty stomach. I sat on my cot, day after