Nory Ryan's Song by Patricia Reilly Giff

us going. Maybe all of us. Your mother and Granny …”
    “Granny’s gone.” He raised one hand toward the cemetery.
    I shook my head. “But we didn’t pray over her.”
    No wake, no funeral. And then I thought about it. No money for the food and the poitín at the wake. And who was left to come? People were trying to get a ship to America, or they were sick lying in the streets of Ballilee, or just wandering out on the road as Devlin put them out of their houses.
    Sean looked as if he didn’t have the strength of Patch, but I couldn’t think of that now. “How are your hands, Sean Red?” I asked. “Are they strong enough to hold me on a line?”
    His head was down again, his hands dangling.
    “I am going out on the cliffs,” I said. “Like Tague. I’ll take the eggs of the wild birds if I can find them.”
    Still he didn’t answer. But wasn’t that like Sean, hating to open his mouth? I began again. “Do you think I like to talk to the top of your red head?” I tapped his shoulder. “It’s not your head I need, it’s your hands.”
    He put out his hands and showed me the palms: red and purple, bruised, cut, and blistered. He couldn’t even bend his fingers.
    I bit my lip so hard I could taste the blood. He’d never hold a rope; he couldn’t hold anything.
    “They wouldn’t let me work on the road anymore,” he said.
    I knew what that meant. The Mallons had no way of getting food.
    I grabbed his sleeve, feeling the long bones of his arm underneath. “We will find a way,” I said. “We’ll have food for you and your mother, for Anna, and Patch, and we’ll hold ourselves over until we plant again, or until my da comes back.”
    “And someday we will go to Brooklyn, New York, America,” Sean said.
    “Smith Street,” I whispered.
    In my head I saw the box with its bits of colored paper and the R that stood for Ryan .
    “You can’t go down on a rope,” he said. “Tague was killed that way. You know that.”
    “Do you think I’m going to die for want of food,” I asked, “when it’s there on the cliffs waiting for me?” But even as I said it I wondered if I could do it. I looked up across the fields. I could almost see Da there, and Celia and Granda, coming to save us.

C HAPTER
20

    “W e can’t,” Sean said again.
    “Will you say this all afternoon?” I asked him. “Until the sun falls away from us and the birds go back to their nests?”
    He made a sound, but I didn’t listen. “First we’ll get the ropes,” I said. “Then we’ll go up to the cliff.”
    “I will never hold you,” he said, putting his hands up to his face. “But you could hold me.”
    “And how would you carry the eggs without breaking them?” I tried to smile.
    He nodded. “We’ll tie the rope to my waist then and to the rocks. If we cover my hands with cloth, I will manage somehow, Nory.” He looked into my face. “I will never let you fall.”
    “I know that, Sean Red.”
    He looked back at the door of his house, a quiet house without the sound of his mother’s scolding. Was she lying in her bed, as sick as Anna?
    I looked across the field. A small shape tottered toward me. I stood up. “Patch.”
    “I’m coming, Nory,” he called. “Coming to find you.”
    My hand went to my mouth. What could I do with him?
    “We can’t take him,” Sean said.
    I shook my head. There was no time to go back to Anna’s. And there was only silence in Mallons’ house. “We can’t leave him.”
    “He’ll fall.”
    I ran my tongue over my dry lips. “We’ll lash him to a rock. We’ll make sure he doesn’t fall. Somehow we’ll do that.”
    He sighed. “Yes, all right.” He walked away from me then, going around the side of the house for his brothers’ fishing ropes, reaching for the cart to carry them, using his wrists rather than his hands.
    He leaned into the cart, pushing it with his body, and stopped at the end of the yard so I could find a place for Patch on top of the ropes, a place so