in her kitchen and the other half sat drunk in the pub, Norea wandered down to watch the seals popping their heads out of the waves. Her brothers were huddled like puppies in two big beds at home, but there wasn’t a thing she could do. She reached under her skirt, pulled out her mother’s boots and walked away. She walked as far as Dublin, pressing herself behind stone fences like a sheep during the day and feeling for the edge of the road with her feet at night. She talked to her mother-the-bird on her shoulder as she walked. She said hurried rosaries when she passed the roadside Mary shrines. When she arrived weary in the city, she saw tall buildings for the first time and couldn’t imagine why people liked to live in such high rooms. She was afraid of being found and taken back, so she cut her hair and stole some trousers, called herself Pippin and got onto a ship as a scullery boy. She carried her mother across the sea farther than she’d ever imagined, and after she was discovered she spent the rest of her journey in the fearsome stench-filled hold, starving and filthy and thirsty and heartsick. Finally after twenty-eight days they sailed into the mouth of a great river that cuts half a continent in two.
The sea tosses up our losses, the torn seine, the broken oar. Norea saw the smoke of the settlement when they were anchored off Millstone Nether and jumped ship without a coin in her pocket, too afraid of what might happen to her if she stayed aboard. There was work trenching potatoes and minding children for a girl with strong arms, and for a while Norea slept in others’ huts, under others’ stairs. Still, she had no desire to live indentured, little better than what she’d left behind. Before four seasons passed she managed to save enough to buy a horse and cart, and each morning before dawn she milked the cows at Meggie Dob’s farm and bought the milk, and to the satisfaction of those hard-working island women, she delivered milk and eggs and gossip through the half doors of the settlement, driving her milk wagon along and playing a little pennywhistle.
Is the milk fresh today? one teased.
If it were any fresher, it’d be grass, laughed Norea, handing over the clinking bottles.
Norea, called another, Finn said he had eggs cheaper than yours.
Watch out for that one, she flung back. He’ll steal the skin off your bones.
Old Mrs. Murphy observed the cheeky red-haired, hard-working milk-girl and one morning sent her son Rory out to fetch the milk. He stood holding the empty bottles, tossing stones against a tree. He watched her drive her horse and admired how she swung down off the seat of her wagon, tied the reins and carried the heavy milk bottles, singing,
The gardener’s son being standing by,
Three gifts he gave to me, me—
The pink, the rue, the violet blue,
And the red, red rosy tree,
The red, red rosy tree.
Come all you maids, where’er you be,
That flourish in your prime, prime.
Be wise, beware, keep free from care,
Let no man steal your thyme, thyme,
Let no man steal your thyme.
When he stepped in front of her she said, What’s a young man doing standing about on a morning when the boats are already gone?
He laughed. I’ve been sent, he said.
And are you compelled?
Well, I don’t know about that. How much for the milk?
Norea scoffed, What would you know about paying for milk? Your mother does all that. Then she handed him the full bottles, took the empty ones and drove her horse away.
Each morning Rory Murphy stood waiting for Norea.
Don’t you ever work? she said.
Only after you’ve gone, he said. I could get to work earlier if you married me.
And what do you do in the evenings?
I sing with my mother.
Is that a fact?
I have my own house and a good bawn and a dory.
With his charming smile he sang, For in my mind, of all mankind, I love but you alone, and as she drove off, the melody of “The Nutbrown Maid” got tangled into the clop of her horse’s hooves. All day and all night she thought and the next morning she agreed to marry Rory Murphy on the condition that she keep her own name and not give up her milk route. She hadn’t walked across Ireland at night eating nettles to hand herself over to the first tuneful boy who came along. They