Read Nory Ryan's Song for Free Online Page A

gagging.
    Now Patch was at the edge of the field, coming toward us.
    I shook my head and turned over the earth. A potato, fist sized, enough for a child’s breakfast. I turned over another, but I could dig my thumb into its soft spots.
    We could cut out the spots, cook the rest. I put it aside. “There, Patcheen,” I said. What would happen to him? What would happen to all of us? “We’ll make a pile on top of the wall. We’ll cook the ones that look the best. And then we’ll dig a trench to keep the perfect ones.”
    I picked up the next small cluster; they turned to mush in my hands. I threw them away from me, wiping my fingers on my skirt, clamping my lips over my mouth, swallowing hard. My shawl slipped away from my face and I held my arm up across my nose and mouth and breathed in, kept breathing.
    I tried not to watch Granda pile up the soil, digging as fast as he could, his shirt soaked, his face filthy. How old he looked!
    Celia watched him too. When he saw us, he shook his head. “Let me help while I can,” he said.
    I wanted to put my arms around him. I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted to tell him to lie in his bed with the door closed against that terrible smell.
    He’d never do that.
    I stared down at the earth. What would we do if something happened to him?
    Patch looked at me, but I just handed him tiny potatoes to put along the wall.
    By the time we were finished, there was a small hill of them, enough to last for only a few days. At the other end of the field was the trench. Instead of neat piles to be covered with soft earth and dug up for food all winter, there was one thin row of tiny potatoes, maybe enough for a few weeks, not enough for a winter, not even enough for the fall, and surely not enough to save for planting in the spring.
    Granda leaned against the wall at the edge of the field, looking up at the cliffs. He had tears in his eyes, tears like Da’s the day he left us for the ship, and tears like Maggie’s when she set out. Da wouldn’t even know what had happened to us, and neither would Maggie.
    Patch was in front of me, his thin clothes caked with grime. “We’ll go to the stream,” I said. “It will be cool and wet and we’ll march ourselves in.”
    “And dry ourselves off in the sun.” Celia turned to Granda. “Will you come with us?”
    He shook his head slowly. He was bent against the wall, his hands spread out against the rocks.
    The stream gurgled as we went across the field, Patch’s hand in mine. “A little string of water, isn’t it,” I said, “that winds down from the cliffs.”
    “Cunningham’s stream,” Celia said.
    “We are too tired to go to the sea,” I said.
    She nodded.
    I began to sing, “… wee melodie man, the rumpty tumpty toddy man …”
    Patch looked up at me. “We don’t care about the potatoes, do we?”
    I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to think about potatoes, or being hungry, or the pain tapping in back of my eyes.
    But I tried to follow it through. No potatoes. No food. But Da would bring money back.
    Enough money for food and rent?
    I worried it around in my head, back and forth like a cat chasing a mouse in the field.
    Lord Cunningham’s house was above us. Still. Silent. I wondered what he thought about all this. Was he glad? Was he thinking of sheep grazing on empty land?
    I put one foot into the shallow water. It was icy cold. In a second my toes were numb. I drew in my breath, pulling my foot out.
    “That water is too cold for me,” Patch said.
    “Yes.” I dipped my petticoat into the stream, then raised it to his face, cleaning his mouth, his nose, seeing his freckles like Maggie’s and his blue eyes like Da’s.
    I leaned over and sang to him as I rocked him back and forth.

C HAPTER
10

    W e went to our beds early. If we had left the door open, we could have seen the sky, still bright, with the sun just beginning to slide away in back of the cliffs.
    We didn’t do that, though. We