Free Past Lives by Shana Chartier Page A

day, watching my poor father hold back her hair as he rubbed her back, her skeletal body draped over an already disgusting pot of puke. She couldn’t hold down the floured biscuits and nasty barrel water we had as provisions.
    Really it was ironic for her to die of starvation after we had already left The Emerald Isle. When my father finally found the will to tell a crew member, the three of us watched in horror as she was wrapped in some cloth and heaved into the ocean. It was the only time I had seen my stoic Irish father finally break down and sob openly. Kneeling on the deck, he began to bang his head on the wooden railing of the ship. Jack cast a sideways glance to me, wiping away his own childhood tears. I think that was the day we had given up on the idea of childhood for good anyway.
    “Papa, you must stop this…you are scaring J…” Jack pleaded, ever my protector and friend. If my father heard him, the only indication was that he stopped injuring his head on the railing and instead sat in silence, which he did not break until our feet touched the dirty, polluted ground of America. I remember watching the tarp that carried my once beautiful mother away further and further into the sea, and I hoped that the angels would take her and give her a big bowl of hearty soup. She would like that, I thought.
    By the time we reached America, the once proud landowning and well educated man that was my father stood hunched over, a husk whose soul was lost at sea with his wife. It was Jack who had to speak on our behalf as we waited at customs for hours, our sticklike legs burning from the energy it took to stand for hours at a time. It was Jack who found someone from county Claire who was willing to guide us to their group and help us find a place to live and perhaps a bit of food for the night. I placed my tiny hand in my father’s, his eyes clouded in mist as he mechanically went through the motions of allowing his small children to lead the way to a new and horrible life.
    There’s a funny thing about Boston in the 1850’s that you might not know if you’re reading this in the 21 st century. Bostonians hated the Irish. Like really. Hated them. Spit on them. Abused them. Tried to pass laws to prevent them for entering the country or working in America at all. Our family complexion and dirt-matted hair gave us away outright, and as we hurried through the crowd in our disheveled state we were met with nothing but glares and mumbled curses about more filthy Irish coming to destroy this great city. It was a blessing when we finally made our way to the waterfront, though it smelled like fish and human waste. Strings draped in clothing connected the little brick buildings to each other, and I wondered how they could possibly ever be clean in a place like that.
    We were introduced to a thin woman named Sally who took one look at my father and tsked before ushering us into a small kitchen.
    “We have nothing to offer you here,” she said, her eyes hard. Still, there was something about her I liked. I didn’t believe she would throw us out on the street.
    “Please ma’am,” my brother pleaded. I could tell he was near fainting with the exertion it took to get here without any food and little water. Still, he carried on, holding our father and me on his young shoulders. “Can you at least tell us where we can find some work, so as to feed ourselves?”
    “Yes, please,” I said in my smallest voice. I had learned that adults were most susceptible to small children. I had also been told that I was a particularly beautiful little girl, and I tried to make my eyes as big and pleading as I could. It was the only tool in my five-year-old arsenal, and it worked. The tenseness in the woman’s skeletal shoulders released, her face falling into a mask of hopeless sympathy. Sitting back in her hard, wooden chair, she sighed and rubbed a hand across her eyes, holding it there as though she could keep the world from reappearing when