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their wings furious as they strove to fend each other off, to get down there, fathoms deep, down to where our minds could not go, so hideous was it.
    Two of the crew arrived with sticks and began beating the crowd back to make way for Captain DeVere. He was a big rough man who struck fear into us just by standing there. He wore a leather jerkin and leather breeches and had a mustache that curved halfway round his cheeks. Through a monocle he looked at her, her demeanor.
    “Little Irish hussy,” he said.
    “Your honor,” she said, but she was trembling.
    “Where’s your porker?” he asked.
    “Fintan … the creature … he died … the milk gave out on
    me.
    “You mean you got shot of it,” he said, and then she threw herself at his mercy and begged not to be sent back down to the hole as the men would crucify her, and looking from her to them he simply said, “Yonder.” We watched her go, watched her slim back, beholden, as she trotted after him.
    “Its little bones, its little bones,” Sheila kept saying, as if by delivering it she had some claim on it and leaning over the railings she stared and spoke down into the curdling water, into the deep, as if she could fish it out, the ship slewing and bouncing on its way, the birds maddened with hunger.
    A preacher came that night to read aloud to us and possibly to quell any unrest. He read from a leather-bound book in a very somber voice.
    The basin of the Atlantic Ocean is a long trough, separating the old world from the new. This ocean furrow was probably scored into the solid crust of our planet by the almighty hand — that there be waters which he calls seas might be gathered together so as to let dry land appear. Could the waters of the North Atlantic be drawn off so as to expose to view this great sea gash, which separates continents and extends from the Arctic to the Antarctic, it would present a scene most rugged, grand, and imposing, the very ribs of the solid earth with the foundations of the sea would be brought to light and we should have at one view in the empty cradle of the ocean, a thousand fearful wrecks, with that fearful army of dead men’s skulls, great anchors, heaps of pearls, and inestimable stores, which in the poet’s eye lay scattered at the bottom of the sea, making it hideous with the sights of ugly death.

    Ellis Island

    in the big hall under a roof that leaked, we were herded into different groups, our names and our numbers tagged onto our chests, the inspectors like hawks, looking for every sickness, every flaw, every deformity, brutes at sending people back.
    I had never known, never thought, that God had created so many different races — different attires, different hairstyles and headgears, men with ringlets and small skullcaps, women the size of tubs because of the clothes, the bundles they had wrapped around themselves, and their children roped to them in case they got lost. When children cried parents gave them their dolls and demanded medicines for them, which they fed them off spoons as if they were little gods. Suspicion in all eyes. Exiled from where we came and exiled now from each other, the waiting as dreadful as the journey on the ship.
    To have caught sight of New York, the tops of the tall buildings pink in the dawn haze, was to wish more than ever to be set down in it. It seemed so idyllic, barges and boats moored in the harbor, the water calm and glassy, and the birds not at all like the venomous ones that had gone down after the little corpse.
    On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation, our tongues pressed, our eyelids lifted with a buttonhook, our hearts listened to, our hair examined for lice, then our bodies hosed down by foreign ladies who had not a shred of modesty.
    Then came the test for our reading and writing skills. People stammering and hesitating as they stumbled over the words of the Psalms:
    This our bread we took hot for our provisions out of our
    houses on the day we