Chapter 1
Our apartment was located on Doughty Street in Brooklyn New York. Pa spent all afternoon talking to people after we got off the boat and finally found us a place to stay in the front rooms of an elderly womans house. She smelled of burnt hair and gasoline from her gas lit stove. She hustled us through the door, turning up her nose at us because we were filthy immigrants. She told us not to make a mess and then with a huff, turned her fat bottom tied up in an apron and nice blue cotton dress out the door and upstairs to her nicer apartment. The apartment was dark, the windows black with smoke, so what little light came in didn't light the two small rooms very well. One room was the kitchen, with one small window looking at a brick wall of another building. It was small and infested with cockroaches and other such pests. The other room was just big enough for all of us to sleep lying side by side, like a bunch of sardines. It was better than being on the filthy boat, with 14 people, including the other family staying with us, in a very small cabin where 4 would share a bed and the floor was home to the others. 11 people walked onto that boat and only 8 people came off it on the other side.
Pa and Aidan, my eldest brother by two years, went right away to find work. They both got factory jobs at a local meat packing factory. The money there wasn't the greatest, and they came home with hands deep burgundy with pig blood and stinking up the small apartment which already ranked from the 8 bodies living inside it. But it was money, and it paid the rent as my Mother always said, so it kept us kids happy.
Let me tell you a little about my family. Darcy and Patrick O'Reilly, our parents, were both born and raised in Dingle, Ireland. Pa's family was well off due to the success of his pub, and they managed to survive the potato famine in 1860. They met in the pub when Pa was in his late teens and working in the pub. Ma was the fairest lass in all of Dingle, and many boys were after her. Or so Pa says. They fell in love and got married when they were 20. Aidan was born in 1880, and I, Brenna O'Reilly followed 2 years after. Michael came two years after I, and Christopher just two years after him. Christopher was the favorite out of all my siblings, when I was young I used to love to take care of him as if he were my doll. This doll cooed and cried, and needed changing and washing and feeding. However, when he was two, he died from pneumonia, caught from being out in the rain too long on a cold fall evening. Jack followed quickly on the heels of Christopher's death, Cassandra coming a year afterward Jack's birth. I took to raising Cassie as if she were my own, without the help from my mother. She was mainly locked in her room with Jack while Aidan and I were forced to take the roll of mother to her new daughter who Mother obviously didn't want.
Yet Mother continued making babies, and sprung out twins when Cassie was a year old. We all thought she'd hole herself up and abandon these two babies to the caretaking of me. It was too much for me and I grew to hate her shortly after she got pregnant. However, a few mornings after they were born, Mother emerged from her bedroom into the kitchen where Michael and I were feeding Cassie. She held both twins in her arms, and Jack, at two, who she had used to kind of replace Christopher, clung closely at his mothers heels. It was the first we had really seen of Jack up till that point, and Michael took a severe disliking to him over the years, since he had been robbed of his playmate Christopher and his mother at such a young age.
I can still remember that morning. Everything stopped when Mother walked through the door, her hair a little tousled and a small smile on her face as she glanced at her abandoned babies sitting around the kitchen table. Cassie just looked at her like she was a stranger and Michael edged closer to me on the bench. But mother smiled and told us the babies' names were Siobhan and Maria.
"I guess you want me to take care of them too." I said bitterly, crossing my arms across my chest. Mother was hurt, of course, and shot me an evil glare.
"No I do not young lady. Don't you ever talk to your mother like that again." At the raise in pitch of her voice, Cassie began to cry, she had rarely ever cried before, but mother picked up those natural instincts of hers and rushed over to see if her 'baby' was all right. Scared Cassie even more and sent her into a wail that filled the house.
"What's wrong with her? Isn't she happy to see her own mother?" She asked confused, setting one of the twins that I figured was named Maria on the table to try to pick up Cassandra.
I shot her a glance, how could she have been so ignorant? "She doesn't know who you are Mama." Mother arm shot back, and she gave a look of horror.
"Not know who I am? I'm her mother, the first thing she saw when she was born!"
"No that would have been Pa's, you sent her out of the room as soon as she was delivered remember?" Mother was getting angry at my tone but I didn't really care. I was angry that she could just waltz out of her room like that and expect everything to be normal and the way it was before.
Mother sat in silence, rocking her newborn baby on her lap. "Jacky, darling, come and sit with Mama." After a pause she gave me a stern look. "She knows who I am Brenna Catherine. You just have been feeding her stories to make her forget about me." The anger kept boiling up inside me, I couldn't believe I was hearing this! After a year of not helping take care of Cassie and rejecting her as one of her own, she's going to tell me what Cassie knows.
"Mama?"
"Yes?" Mother answered at the sound of Cassie's small voice.
"Who's that lady?" Cassie with her large blue eyes asked me, pointing a small finger at Mother, who burst out crying. Not only did her child not know who she was, but she was also calling her eldest daughter 'mama.'
It's memories like that that flare up my temper at my mother, and at Jack who had had a childhood unlike any of the other children who had to raise the others and deal with the hardships in life. Siobhan and Maria proved to be an eye opener for mother and she eventually became part of her children's lives. However, Pa began to drink heavily, and gamble. If it wasn't one parent it was the other causing our family grief.
The twins were 2 years old when mother got pregnant again and Pa's gambling became a real problem. It first started out with some money missing from the barrel of grain in the back pantry. Then a cow disappeared and some sheep. Soon land was being gambled off in plots, my mother helpless. She locked him in the basement when she could but he would find ways to avoid her throughout the day so she couldn't throw him into a closet or the basement where she could lock him in for the whole night. Francis was born in this chaos and my mother hated my father for little Francis. She fought good and hard, crying every night to her baby who wouldn't have a good meal in him. To this day little Francis is, well, tiny.
Pa had gambled away most of the land by that time and we were poor. Dirt poor and Mother was getting desperate. She couldn't feed all the mouths, and the older children always got shorted out on food and clothing. At the height of Mother and Pa's fighting, Mother got pregnant again. When she found out she went in a rage and hurled most of the pottery in the cabinets at my father, each one smashing against the wall beside and above him. I guess he figured he better shape up and make some money if he was going to be able to support another mouth. The baby would surely starve if born into their position, with no money coming in for food or clothing. So he went to work as a handy man in town and had made enough money so by the time Jude was born, he could afford to get her food to fill her hungry mouth.
How'd we get money to travel the seas to get to America? Through unfortunate means I suppose. Grandpa Mickey died, leaving his fortunes, small as they were, to father, which were just enough for tickets for the boat and with the selling of his fathers house and the house of his own, he could afford an apartment and some new clothes for the children. And that's how we got here, by climbing aboard a boat to go to a world very different from our own. Time was quick, but it did its job in changing and hardening each and every one of our large family.