Orphan Train

awake: Dominick and James, six-year-old twins, huddled together for warmth
     on a pallet on the floor.
    Sitting on the cot with my back against the wall, I held Maisie the way Mam had shown
     me, cupped over my shoulder. I tried everything I could think of to comfort her, all
     the things that had worked before: stroking her back, running two fingers down the
     bridge of her nose, humming our father’s favorite song, “My Singing Bird,” softly
     in her ear: I have heard the blackbird pipe his note, the thrush and the linnet too / But there’s
     none of them can sing so sweet, my singing bird, as you . But she only shrieked louder, her body convulsing in spasms.
    Maisie was eighteen months old, but her weight was like a bundle of rags. Only a few
     weeks after she was born, Mam came down with a fever and could no longer feed her,
     so we made do with warm sweetened water, slow-cooked crushed oats, milk when we could
     afford it. All of us were thin. Food was scarce; days went by when we had little more
     than rubbery potatoes in weak broth. Mam wasn’t much of a cook even in the best of
     health, and some days she didn’t bother to try. More than once, until I learned to
     cook, we ate potatoes raw from the bin.
    It had been two years since we left our home on the west coast of Ireland. Life was
     hard there, too; our da held and lost a string of jobs, none of which were enough
     to support us. We lived in a tiny unheated house made of stone in a small village
     in County Galway called Kinvara. People all around us were fleeing to America: we
     heard tales of oranges the size of baking potatoes; fields of grain waving under sunny
     skies; clean, dry timber houses with indoor plumbing and electricity. Jobs as plentiful
     as the fruit on the trees. As one final act of kindness toward us—or perhaps to rid
     themselves of the nuisance of constant worry—Da’s parents and sisters scraped together
     the money for ocean passage for our family of five, and on a warm spring day we boarded
     the Agnes Pauline, bound for Ellis Island. The only link we had to our future was a name scrawled on
     a piece of paper my father tucked in his shirt pocket as we boarded the ship: a man
     who had emigrated ten years earlier and now, according to his Kinvara relatives, owned
     a respectable dining establishment in New York City.
    Despite having lived all our lives in a seaside village, none of us had ever been
     on a boat, much less a ship in the middle of the ocean. Except for my brother Dom,
     fortified with the constitution of a bull, we were ill for much of the voyage. It
     was worse for Mam, who discovered on the boat she was again with child and could hardly
     keep any food down. But even with all of this, as I stood on the lower deck outside
     our dark, cramped rooms in steerage, watching the oily water churn beneath the Agnes Pauline, I felt my spirits lift. Surely, I thought, we would find a place for ourselves in
     America.
    The morning that we arrived in New York harbor was so foggy and overcast that though
     my brothers and I stood at the railing, squinting into the drizzle, we could barely
     make out the ghostly form of the Statue of Liberty a short distance from the docks.
     We were herded into long lines to be inspected, interrogated, stamped, and then set
     loose among hundreds of other immigrants, speaking languages that sounded to my ears
     like the braying of farm animals.
    There were no waving fields of grain that I could see, no oversized oranges. We took
     a ferry to the island of Manhattan and walked the streets, Mam and I staggering under
     the weight of our possessions, the twins clamoring to be held, Da with a suitcase
     under each arm, clutching a map in one hand and the tattered paper with Mark Flannery, The Irish Rose, Delancey Street, written in his mother’s crabbed cursive, in the other. After losing our way several
     times, Da gave up on the map and began asking people on the street for directions.
     More often than not they turned away without answering; one man spit on the ground,
     his face twisted with loathing. But finally we found the place—an Irish pub, as seedy
     as the roughest ones on the backstreets of Galway.
    Mam and the boys and I waited on the sidewalk while Da went inside. The rain had stopped;
     steam rose from the wet street into the humid air. We stood in our damp clothing,
     stiffened from sweat and ground-in dirt, scratching our scabbed heads (from lice on
     the ship, as