little cottage, which was falling down and forlorn.
“The potatoes wouldn’t grow,” Thomas explained. “There was a sickness in the crop. People were used to feeding their families all year long with the potatoes they grew in their little gardens. When the potatoes wouldn’t grow, they didn’t have anything to eat instead. Most families had a pig, but without the potatoes, they couldn’t feed their pigs the slops. So the pigs died, or they were eaten before they got too thin. Then the families had nothing.
“Grain still grew in the fields of the English landowners, but that grain was sold and shipped out of Ireland. The families didn’t have money to buy the grain or enough land or even the means to grow sufficient grain of their own. There were cattle and sheep, but very few people owned either. The cows and the sheep got fat on the grain, and they too were shipped out of the country. The beef and mutton and wool were sold to other nations, while the poorest people—most of the people in Ireland—got hungrier and hungrier and more and more desperate.”
“Couldn’t the people steal it?” Eoin offered hesitantly. “I would steal food if Nana was hungry.”
“That’s because you love your grandmother, and you wouldn’t want to see her suffer. But stealing wasn’t the answer.”
“What was the answer?” I asked quietly, as if the question was a philosophical one, a challenge and not a true inquiry.
Thomas’s eyes were on me as he spoke, as though willing me to remember, to take up the cause that had once burned so brightly in Anne Gallagher.
“For centuries, the Irish have been scattered in the wind—Tasmania, the West Indies, America—bought and sold and bred and enslaved. The population of Ireland was cut in half by the indentured servitude. During the famine, another million people died on this island. Here in Leitrim, my mother’s family survived because the landlord took pity on his tenant farmers and suspended the rents through the worst of the blight. My grandmother worked for the landowner—a maid in his house—and she ate in the kitchen once a day and brought home the scraps to her brothers and sisters. Half of her family emigrated. Two million Irish emigrated during the famine. The British government didn’t care. England is only a stone’s throw away. It’s easy enough to send their own labor over when we leave or starve. We were truly—are truly—replaceable.” Thomas didn’t sound bitter. He sounded sad.
“How do we fight them?” Eoin asked, his face flushed by the seriousness of the story, the heartbreak of it all.
“We learn how to read. We think. We learn. We become better and stronger, and we stand together and say, ‘No more. You can’t treat us this way,’” Thomas said softly.
“That’s why I go to school,” Eoin said, serious.
“Yes. That’s why you go to school,” Thomas agreed.
Emotion clogged my throat and threatened to spill out of my eyes, and I fought it back.
“Your dad wanted to teach school, Eoin. Did you know that? He knew how important it was. But he couldn’t sit still. Neither could your mother,” Thomas added, his eyes finding mine.
I had no response; sitting still had always been easy for me. I could sit and dream, my mind taking me away until I was no longer inside myself but away on a journey. The differences between the other Anne and me were piling up every day.
“I want to be a doctor like you, Thomas.” Eoin tugged on Thomas’s hand, peering up earnestly, past the brim of his peaked hat.
“You will, Eoin. That is exactly what you will be,” I reassured him, finding my voice. “You will be one of the best doctors in the world. And people will love you because you are wise and kind, and you make their lives better.”
“Will I make Ireland better?” Eoin asked.
“You make Ireland better for me. Every single day,” I said, kneeling down so I could squeeze him before he entered the schoolyard. He threw his little arms around me and hugged me tightly, kissing my cheek before he repeated the action with Thomas. Then we watched as he ran to the cluster of boys in the yard, tossing his hat and his little satchel aside and forgetting us almost immediately.
“Why do you tell him things that might not come to pass?” Thomas asked.
“He will be a doctor. And he will be wise and kind. He grows up to be a wonderful man,” I said softly, my emotion rising again.