May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel by Peter Troy Read Free Book Online Page A

the communal pots, and when it was done, she poured out a little of the used water for Ethan to wash his face and hands. The washin’ and the eating took only ten minutes right in the middle of the hour, and the remainin’ fifty minutes were Ethan’s to wander about, exploring the ship and takin’ in the spectacle of the infinite ocean landscape. It was his time to read, from
The Odyssey
mostly, thinking about Odysseus driftin’ over the sea for twenty years, and comforted by the thought that their voyage would only be about five weeks.
    Ethan kept the daily count waitin’ for the hour above deck, and then there was an even more important count he kept, broken down into the hours and minutes ’til ten o’clock Sunday mornin’ and the start of seven continuous,
glorious
hours above. By the second Sunday,nine days out to sea, the smell of the cargo bay was so foul that it lingered even after the latrine buckets were emptied each evening, and the thought of seven hours in the fresh ocean air made the anticipation all the greater.
    Services in ten minutes! Ten minutes! was the call they’d all been waitin’ to hear.
    Then came a rush for the stairs, and within a few minutes most of the passengers and crew were assembled for services in front of a makeshift altar made from the same table used to distribute rations every day. The Father they had onboard was no Father Laughton, what with how his sermons ate up so much of their precious time above deck, but finally the Mass was done and Ethan was free for the nearly six hours that remained. Mrs. Quigley set up with the other women around the buckets full of brown water that’d been used to wash the decks. They pulled out torn clothes from satchels and dropped them in, hoping to take some of the smell out of them before hanging them over the sides of the ship to dry. But Ethan cared little about any of that, walkin’ up to the bow and settling himself in his new favorite spot behind a pile of thick mooring rope.
    The sun was almost directly overhead by now, its rays dancin’ off the crests of the waves in brilliant flecks and sparkles. And Ethan took in the sea air with deep breaths, imagining that this must’ve been somethin’ like what Mr. Hanratty described about the glorious spring of ’98, when an Irishman could know what it was like to experience true freedom. Opening his book, he began to read slowly, stoppin’ after every page or so to look up and take it all in again, reverently, thankfully. When five o’clock came, it was back down below and startin’ the count until noon the next day, nineteen hours … eleven hundred forty minutes … sixty-eight thousand four hundred seconds.
    BY THE THIRD SUNDAY OF the voyage, Ethan had a new number to count. Many of the people in the bow of the cargo bay got sick after drinkin’ water from a barrel that’d been used to store salted fish. One seven-year-old girl seemed to take the worst of it, and for four days her fragile body rejected everything she was fed, throwin’ it back up as soonas it hit her stomach. Then during the fourth night her chest heaved and she made strange noises as her mother woke everybody up with her screams. Before long it was just the sound of the mother’s screams, as the little girl lay still and lifeless across her Mam’s lap.
    The next mornin’ the Father said a few words about her before the Mass, but her Mam wouldn’t go above deck for it, sayin’ she didn’t feel
loike a god who’d take anudder choild from me deserves any more o’ me Sunday mahrnin’s
. And all the ladies blessed themselves and took a step away from her when she said it. Ethan spent much of the Father’s sermon thinking of the number one, as in one passenger who’d been tossed into the abyss of the ocean, one person who’d never get to see America
wit’ the gold nuggets in the streets and the stuffin’ yerself ’til ya can’t stand
. One … so far, he thought.
    He had
Paradise Lost
with him that