Patricia Reilly Giff - Nory Ryans Song

A LSO B Y P ATRICIA R EILLY G IFF

For middle-grade readers:

Lilys Crossing
The Gift of the Pirate Queen
The Casey, Tracy & Company books

For younger readers:

The Kids of the Polk Street School books
The Friends and Amigos books
The Polka Dot Private Eye books

A BOUT THE A UTHOR

PATRICIA REILLY GIFF is the author of many beloved books for children, including the Kids of the Polk Street School books, the Friends and Amigos books, and the Polka Dot Private Eye books. Her novels for middle-grade readers include The Gift of the Pirate Queen and Lilys Crossing. Her most recent book for Delacorte Press, Lilys Crossing, was chosen as a Newbery Honor Book and a Boston GlobeHorn Book Honor Book.

Patricia Reilly Giff lives in Weston, Connecticut.

Dear Reader,

An Gorta Mr is an Irish term that stands for the Great Hunger of 18451852. It reminds us that many of us are Americans because of that time: the potatoes turning black in the fields, the indifferent English government, enough food to feed double the population going out from the land and across the sea; a desperate people. The numbers are terrible. More than a million of the eight million people in Ireland died of starvation and illness. Another three million managed to get out of the country during the next fifteen years, but a hundred thousand of them died on the way.

Six of my eight great-grandparents lived through the famine. When they came to America, they must have been ashamedas if it had been their fault that theyd had no food, no schooling, that the clothes they wore were torn and filthy. One of my great-aunts shook her head. Im a Yankee, she said. Whoever told you I was Irish?

My uncle held up his hand when I asked. You dont want to know, he said.

And so the family stories that might have been handed down from one generation to the next were never told. But I did want to know. I longed to know. I told myself that my beautiful Irish grandmother Jennie would have told me what she had heard from her mother. But she died before I was born, and all I have of her is a picture that hangs in my dining room and a soft pink shawl.

Year after year I traveled to Ireland, to that lovely green country. Tell me, I asked distant relatives. Do you know anything about it?

I asked people I met: Please, tell me anything.

I collected in my mind every single shred of what they told me. One man waved his hand across the fields, saying, If only wed had a little help from the British government, wed have all survived. He smiled at me. Youd have been an Irish girl living in Drumlish, instead of a girl from New York.

I saw huge walls that had been built around the estates so that no Irishman could climb and take food for his children.

I saw mounds of earth where those who had died were buried without markers.

I listened to a wonderful Irish professor with the same name as mine tell me what she knew, and I saw the memorials in Roscommon and Cobh.

And then in my mind I saw an old woman named Anna who wouldnt leave me. I saw a girl named Nora who looked like the picture I have of Jennie, with her dark hair and freckles. I saw the chances those Irish women of the 1800s must have taken to survive, their strength and their luck.

At last, I ran my hands over the rough walls of my great-grandmothers house, the house that was there during the famine, and I walked up the road and tied a piece of my jacket sleeve to the tree over Patricks Well. I tucked a manuscript page between the rocks and made my wish. Let me tell it the way it must have been. I want my children and grandchildren to know. I want everyone to know.

I went home then to write under Jennies picture, with her shawl around my shoulders.

Patricia Reilly Giff
January 2000

S omeone was calling.

Nor-ry. Nor-ry Ry-an.

I was halfway along the cliff road. With the mist coming up from the sea, everything on the path below had disappeared.

Wait, Nory.

I stopped. Sean Red Mallon? I called back, hearing his footsteps now.

I have something for us, he said as he reached me. He pulled a crumpled bit of purple seaweed out of his pocket to dangle in front of my nose.

Dulse. I took a breath. The smell of the sea was in it, salty and sweet. I was so hungry I could almost feel the taste of it on my tongue.

Shall we eat it here? he asked, grinning, his red hair a mop on his forehead.

Itll be over and gone in no time, I said, and pointed up. Well go to Patricks Well.

We reached the top of the cliffs with the rain on our heads. I am Queen Maeve, I sang, twirling away from the edge. Queen of old Ireland.

I loved the sound of my voice in the fog, but then I loved anything that had to do with music: the Ballilee church bells tolling, the rain pattering on the stones, even the carra-crack of the gannets calling as they flew overhead.

I scrambled up to Marys Rock. As the wind tore the mist into shreds, I could see the sea, gray as a selkies coat, stretching itself from Ireland to Brooklyn, New York, America.

Sean came up in back of me. We will be there one day in Brooklyn.

I nodded, but I couldnt imagine it. Free in Brooklyn. Seans sister, Mary Mallon, was there right now. Someone had written a letter for her, and Father Harte had read it to us. Horses clopped down the road, she said, bringing milk in huge cans. And no one was ever hungry. Even the sound of it was wonderful. Brook-lyn.

The rain ran along the ends of my hair and into my neck. I shook my head to make the drops fly and thought of my da on a ship, the rain running down his long dark hair too. Da, who was far away, fishing to pay the rent. He had been gone for weeks, and it would be months before he came home again.

I swallowed, wishing for Da so hard I had to turn my head to hide my face from Sean. I blew a secret kiss across the waves; then we picked our way up the steep little path to Patricks Well.

We sat ourselves down on one of the flat stones around the well and leaned over to look into the water. People with money threw in coins for prayers. But the well was endlessly deep, wending its way down through the cliffs toward the sea, and it took ages for coins to sink to the bottom. Granda said that might be why it took so long for those prayers to be answered.

But not many people had coins to drop into the well. Instead there was the tree overhead. People tied their prayers to the branches: a piece of tattered skirt, the edge of a collar.

I see my mothers apron string. Sean pointed up as he tore a bit of dulse in two and handed me half.

I nodded, sucking on a curly edge. I looked up at the tree. A strip of my middle sister Celias shift was hanging there. Now, what did that one want? She had no shame. There it was, a piece of her underwear left to wag in the wind until it rotted away. Every creature who walked by would be gaping at it.

I stood up quickly, moving around to the other side of the well to look down at our glen. The potato fields were covered with purple blossoms now, and stone walls zigzagged up and down between.

And then, something else.

Sean, I said, whats happening down there?

Absently he tore the last bit of dulse in two. Men, he said slowly. Bailiffs with a battering ram. Someone is being put out of a house.

Someone. I knew who it was. A quick flash of the little beggar, Cat Neely, her curly hair covering most of her face. And Cats mother, who sat in their yard, teeth gone, cheeks sunken, with no money to pay the rent.