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Every once in a while a letter from America would come, and Douglas would read it aloud in a flat, even voice. Ann would smile faintly, as if listening to a fairy story, to hear of the trees and fresh air, the simple living and the easy prosperity. Hamish had taken to running a general store with genial ease, and Ruth had a good head for business. Hamish urged Douglas to join them ‘when he could’. Douglas didn’t read those parts; Ellen only found them after, when she smoothed the crumpled paper and studied the words as if they held the key t
o something still.
She had a burning desire to leave the cloying air and damp walls of the sickroom, and the narrow, grimy streets of Springburn beyond. To hope, even when it felt as if there was nothing left to hope for.
Then Ellen’s mother died. It had been a long time coming, and when Ann Copley finally breathed her last, Ellen could only feel a weary sorrow, coupled with the guilty stirrings of relief. She wished she’d felt more, and maybe she would have once, but time and care had taken too much from her. Her mother’s suffering was finally over; the last few months Ann had been racked by coughing and insensible with pain; even the costly elixirs Douglas bought at the druggist’s didn’t help any longer.
The flat seemed empty without her mother’s presence, and although Douglas once suggested Ellen return to school, it didn’t seem practical. Who would scrub and cook and wash? Who would go to market, darn her father’s socks?
Besides, Ellen admitted quietly to herself, she wouldn’t fit in with the other children who hadn’t yet left the schoolroom for the reality of work, although they would soon enough. She felt years older, yet she wasn’t yet thirteen.
Two months after her mother died, Douglas Copley brought home the timetable of the RMS Carpathia. He handed it to Ellen silently, and she gazed at it for a moment before looking up at him.
“She leaves in three weeks,” he said. “I haven’t saved quite enough for two tickets yet...”
“You’ve been saving?” Ellen said in surprise. Her father had not put money in the tin in years.
Douglas smiled and shrugged. “On the quiet. I didn’t want to get your hopes up.”
Without a word Ellen slid from her chair and went to the shelf above the range. She could reach it without a chair now, easily, and she took down the old flour tin and handed it to her father. He looked inside, his mouth dropping open in surprise. “How...”
Ellen smiled; it felt like her first real smile in years. “I’ve been saving too.”
His eyes glinted with emotion as he looked up. “You’re a good lass,” he said, his voice hoarse. “A good lass.” He rested one work-roughened hand on her hair, briefly, and Ellen wished she could put her arms around him. A few years ago she would have, and he would have given her one of his old bear hugs, yet with the cares and worries that had weighed heavily on both of their shoulders, that easy affection had slipped away. She didn’t know how to get it back, or if she even had it in her anymore.
With their pooled savings, they were able to buy two third class tickets on the RMS Carpathia, departing Glasgow on the third of July, 1904 and arriving at Pier 54 in New York City on the tenth.
And now they were here, their new lives, their real lives, about to begin. Ellen lifted her face to the air, letting the salty sea breeze cool her cheeks, and felt her soul buoy with a hope she’d been afraid she’d lost forever.
The blank, staring face of the Statue of Liberty gazed across the harbor as the ship passed, and Ellen found something chilling about that impersonal face with its patrician features, a face that had coolly watched thousands—hundreds of thousands—of hopeful immigrants pass this way.
Shrugging aside such thoughts, she closed her eyes and pictured her room in Vermont as she imagined and hoped it to be, a patchwork quilt on the bed, a window looking out to fields of flowers. She could almost feel the crisp pages of new books, hear the shared laughter of new friends. She hadn’t had any friends in Springburn after she’d left school, unless she counted the harried chats with Mrs. MacDougall over the washing line.
As for girls her own age... there had been no time, and she’d felt so different from the children who could still go to school, dirty their knees and pull each other’s plaits. Most of them would stay in school until fourteen, if their families were fortunate. And while they were playing games in the schoolyard, she was bartering over a vegetable barrow, or counting her pennies to make the coal last.
Yet surely in Vermont, when she was in school, that would change. There would be no bartering, no counting pennies. Ellen didn’t want to be a child again; that was impossible. But she wanted to feel hope, and maybe even happiness.
The steamer was cutting quickly through the harbor to its destination for third class passengers, the immigrant station at Ellis Island. First and second class passengers could walk straight down the gangplank as free as you please. Steerage would be subject to physical examinations and more, sometimes taking a day or longer. Ellen had heard whispers of the immigration station on the ship, heard the tales of flinty-eyed customs officers who barked questions, turning back anyone whose accent was funny, whose English was too broken, who simply didn’t look or sound right.
And then there were the doctors, who poked and prodded and even lifted your eyelids with button hooks, all to make sure you were fit enough to enter this fabled land of dreams.
“And if you aren’t?” Ellen asked once, and a woman with a nursing baby had regarded her with both fear and pity.
“Pray you are,” she said grimly. “Pray you are.”
Ellen didn’t answer. She hadn’t prayed much since her mother’s illness. When her mother had been well they’d gone to kirk every Sunday, same as everyone else. Ellen had sat in the pew between her parents and listened to the sonorous organ, let the words of the hymns wash over her. She’d liked Praise My Soul The King of Heaven—would sing the pretty words, praise Him for His grace and favor, to His people in distress—but when her mother fell so ill and her bed had to be moved into the kitchen next to the stove Ellen didn’t like that hymn or kirk anymore. She didn’t see much grace and favor then, just the distress. And her father had never been much of one for kirk, so they stopped going, except when Mrs. MacDougall insisted she come along because no Christian child should be raised like a heathen. Her father would always shrug sheepishly and tell Ellen to go on, then. Just the once.
Now, standing on board the RMS Carpathia and knowing her whole future lay in an unknown officer’s hands, she wondered if she ought to try praying again. Despite the years of her mother’s sorry health and the bitterness that had taken root in Ellen’s soul, she thought she’d prefer her fate to be in God’s hands than those of an immigrant officer on Ellis Island.
Ellen’s father dismissed anyone’s concerns over ‘the Hall of Tears’ with a jaunty laugh. “That’s not for us, Ellen. We’re both fit and strong, and we’ve family waiting for us. That’s not for us.”
Ellen wanted to believe him, but at almost thirteen she well understood that her father wasn’t always the most sensible man. He held onto dreams, even impractical ones, for far too long. He’d always assured her the latest tonic or elixir would set her mam to rights. Ann Copley would smile weakly and take her dose for her husband’s sake, although privately, in a thready voice, she told Ellen she didn’t think they helped.
“Your father needs to believe in something,” she’d once said, her face gray and haggard with pain. “I only wish it were God.” Even in her most agonizing moments, when the coughing racked her mother’s thin frame and blood spattered the old blanket, she believed. She’d asked Ellen to fetch her old Bible and slept with it clasped between her bony hands. Her last words, with Ellen sitting by her side with a cup of beef tea, had been about God.
“He’s been good to me, Ellen. Don’t doubt it.”
Ellen did. When her mother had slipped from this life, her poor, thin body barely making a lump under the blanket and Ellen sat alone in the sudden, eerie silence of the flat, the rattling rasp of her mother’s labored breaths forever silent, she doubted it very much indeed.
