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ut at the heavy gray sky, the sound of the engine yards a constant clamor in the distance, the coal dust as thick and black as ever on the window sill no matter how she or Mam dusted, and then in careful silence she put all the money back in the tin and replaced it on the shelf. She never said a word to anyone.
Ellen remembered going with her father to the docks to see the other Copleys off. Hamish, Ruth, and Rose were no more than blurred faces in her memory, figures standing at the railing of the ship as her father waved with determined cheer and Ellen felt the sting of bitter disappointment like an acrid taste in her mouth, worse than coal dust. She wanted to be on that ship, sailing into her future, and she clung to her father’s hearty words as they turned away, the ship no more than a speck on the horizon.
“It’ll be us soon, lass. When there’s a better fare. Another month or two. When the weather’s warm and your mam can catch her breath.”
Ellen nodded, wanting to believe, yet even at that young age doubts struck at her heart. She lay awake in the night, listening to her mother’s desperate wheezing before she finally erupted into hacking coughs that tore as much at Ellen’s soul as they did Ann Copley’s chest. She saw the clutter of patent medicine bottles on the table next to Mam’s bed—Colden’s Liquid Beef Tonic and Leonard’s Blood Elixir—and knew why there wasn’t more money in the tin.
The weather warmed, the pallid sunshine streaking through the windows of the flat, bathing Springburn’s engine yards in gold, and her mother never did catch her breath.
The spring slipped into a damp, chilly summer, and then autumn again, and all the while her once-robust mother seemed to shrink and fade. Her times away from bed, cooking and cleaning and taking care of her family and flat were farther and farther in between, and the careworn look on her face told Ellen that her mother could no longer pretend that they would be heading westward when the weather turned... again.
Douglas still pretended, though. Ellen knew he needed to; he clung to that thin thread of hope as if it could pull him all the way across the ocean. In a place like Springburn, where men lived and died without the coal dust ever leaving their lungs, it was sometimes all they had. In the evenings he brought the ships’ timetables to their flat, poring over them by the light of the oil lamp. Sometimes Ellen would sit on his knee and watch as he traced the ship’s passage on a map with a work-grimed finger.
“Across all that ocean, see Greenland there... a cold place, that. All the way to New York City... a city of islands, Ellen, covered in buildings, some touching the sky. They call them skyscrapers, they do. Imagine that.”
The journey, however, did not stop in New York. A year after their departure Hamish and Ruth sent a letter saying they had settled in Vermont, opening a general store in the small town of Seaton. Rose had married an Irishman and gone right up to Canada with him. The letters from her relatives were infrequent but treasured. Ellen loved to hear her father talk about Vermont, an armchair expert.
“Vermont’s the place to be. Plenty of trees, and fields as far as the eye can see. And the rivers! The fish fair jump into your hand.” He spoke with such certainty that Ellen half-believed he’d been there and seen it for himself. She loved to hear about the farmhouse he’d build, with her own bedroom with a window looking out on a chestnut tree. They’d have kittens, of course, and a cow or two, and perhaps some sheep.
“And a dog, Ellen,” her father would say seriously. “A man has to have a dog.”
“May I name the kittens?” Ellen asked. “And may they be gray ones?”
Her father nodded thoughtfully, drawing on his pipe. “I reckon so.”
Sometimes while her father pored over his maps and timetables Ellen would take a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper—the edges of the newspaper or inside of some flour sacking—and draw pictures. She liked to draw what she imagined America looked like, with the sun and trees and even the two little kittens. Sometimes her father would look at her drawing and nod approvingly while Ellen half-shielded it with her hand in embarrassment.
“That’s quite good,” he’d say, as though surprised.
Her mother liked her drawings too; when Ellen sat by her sickbed she would sometimes while away the hours as her mother slept by drawing whatever took her fancy. Once her mother woke up and watched her without speaking.
Ellen finally felt her mother’s troubled gaze upon her and started in her chair. “Do you need some tea—or another spoonful of medicine—the blood elixir seems to help—”
Her mother shook her head and beckoned to the scrap of paper with one thin hand. Uncertainly Ellen handed it to her and watched as her mother studied the little sketch of their view of the street, a few raggedy children playing among the weeds, a fat storekeeper watching them speculatively, hands planted on his aproned hips.
“You have a gift, Ellen,” Mam said softly. “A gift from God. Use it well.”
Since her mam was always talking about God, Ellen only nodded. She was glad her mother seemed to like the drawings, at any rate.
Sometimes Ellen’s father took her to the Glasgow docks, to watch the ships set sail. “We’ll be waving from the deck one of these days,” he’d say cheerfully, his arm around Ellen’s shoulders, the dream firmly in place despite the fact that Ann Copley spent most of her days in bed, and at ten years old Ellen had taken over nearly all of the housework and cooking.
Then the doubt that had gnawed at Ellen’s heart began its treacherous work on Douglas’. Ellen couldn’t remember when they stopped going to the docks. She wasn’t sure when her father stopped bringing the timetables back to the flat. She did remember the day her father asked her to leave school to stay home and nurse her mother.
He drew her onto his knee, as if she were a child, even though she had turned eleven last month. “I’d do it myself, lass, if I could. But I need to be at the sheds, you know that.”
Ellen nodded in understanding, for without her father’s job as an engine repairman they would likely be out on the street. Yet she could not suppress the sharp stab of disappointment at the thought of leaving school, those neat rows of desks and the pleasing squeak of chalk on slates, the respite she’d had from the small, stuffy flat and the stale smell of sickness.
“It won’t be long,” her father said, and his voice trembled slightly. “God help us all, it won’t be long.”
Ellen slipped off her father’s knee. At that moment, she felt as grown-up as Mrs. MacDougall upstairs with her six children and a husband who had addled his brain in an engine accident. She didn’t belong on her father’s knee anymore, like a child asking for sweets.
“Don’t you worry, Da,” she said. “I can manage.”
Ellen took on the full responsibilities of their small household with grim determination. She haggled in the market and hung out the washing in the courtyard in the back, beat the rugs against the front stoop and made soups with what vegetables were left in the basket, pursing her lips and rolling up her sleeves just like any other housewife in Springburn, whose man made his living in the rail yards, where a quarter of the world’s trains were made, or so people said.
She watched with cool detachment when other children lined up by the railway-owned steamboat for a school trip to Broughty Ferry before turning away, her shopping basket on her arm. And if she thought of another, bigger ship, she told no one.
She also put away her pencil and scraps of paper and stopped drawing. There was no time for such childish pursuits anymore, and there was nothing she wished to draw.
