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everything wet, our blankets wet, our clothes wet, crockery and utensils and fletches of bacon falling about, a woman pleading with us to say the rosary because the ship and the unborn child and its cargo were in death’s grasp.
    Mary Angela roaring her guts out and Sheila, who was not a midwife, trying to tend to her. Word had been sent up for a bed in the infirmary, but an answer came back that there was no room, as several people had been struck down with the fe-
    ver and all the beds were taken. Sheila kept telling her to push, in Jesus’ name to push, and the one lamp that had not blown out in the storm swung above her on its metal chain, swinging crazily, back and forth, the bowels of that ship like some inferno. Some prayed, some shouted for the roaring to stop and at the very last minute, when the screaming rent through us, a nurse appeared in a white coat carrying instruments and a bucket and Sheila hung a blanket on the handles of two brooms to serve as a sort of screen. There came then that piercing sound, with life and despair in it, the sound of an infant coming into the world and those who had been praying stopped praying and those who had been cursing stopped cursing, all now ready to rejoice, believing that the birth boded good luck for them.
    “It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” the word went round and there being no priest on board either among us or in the state rooms, a very old woman in a shawl produced a bottle of holy water and a sponge and gave it a lay baptism, wetting the lips, the forehead, and the chest, repeating some Latin prayers.
    For two days mother and child did not show themselves. They lay in the curtained corner, a yellow sheepskin rug that smelled lay over them, hidden from all, the mother’s hand reaching occasionally to take a biscuit or a mug of tea, the sound of the infant sucking and burping as she rocked it to sleep.
    The day she reappeared she looked frail, her face chalk white but her eyes huge like lusters, the infant wrapped inside a blanket. What had she had called it? Fintan, she said. Fintan, they said. She was going up for air, going up to show off Fintan to the wild sea, to the roar of the waves, to the gulls and ravens that followed with their eerie cries. No one actually witnessed the happening so that afterward there was debate and bitter argument as to the truth of things. The young men who had been ogling her and who had danced with her were now boiling with hate, ready to lynch her, older men having to hold them back from throwing her in. The first news of it came as a shout, a series
    of shouts, a sign that something terrible had happened. It took only minutes for a crowd to gather up there, fear and molten hatred in some eyes. Others stood silent, bewildered, disbelieving. How could she. How could she. There were men scuffling her, women goading them on, the little slut, the little bitch, their faces smack up against hers telling her the black fate she was about to meet. She stood with a peculiar half smile, her blue-black eyes startled, insisting that it was dead, it had been dead for days. No one believed her. Why had she not gone to the purser and have it buried with weights in a sail cloth, the way they had buried an old man three days previous? She had done it to save her own skin. A mother with an infant but without a father was not welcomed in the new world.
    “You kilt it.”
    “She kilt it.”
    “I had no milk for it,” she answered back.
    “Even a pelican tears its own flesh to feed its young.”
    “I would have taken it … I would have reared it,” one woman said, throwing herself down in a swoon and others did likewise as they recited the litany: “Mother of Divine Grace, Mother most pure, Mother most chaste, Mother inviolate, Mother undefiled, Mother most amiable, Mother of good counsel, Mother of Our Creator, Mother of Our Savior.”
    Droves of birds had come, squalling and squealing, seagulls and other birds with scrawny necks, the beat of