“He wants to marry you, this Willie?”
She did not reply. Still beautiful she looked with her shawl over her shoulders and the wind catching her hair, still young enough to be loved.
“Bring him home, girl,” I said. “We will make him welcome.”
We walked on, leaping the brooks, taking the short cuts over the fields on the paths we knew so well. Years it seemed since we first came to Cae White. Willie O’Hara had come into her life at a time I feared for her sanity, and I was grateful to him, and relieved. For Morfydd was the one reason why I stayed on at Cae White. Much as I longed to get to America there seemed no chance with Morfydd around, and I knew that Mari would never leave her alone to fend for Richard.
“The trouble is you and Mari,” said Morfydd. “Hardly fair, is it, to walk out of the place with Willie and Richard and leave the pair of you alone – not fair on Iestyn, come to that.”
“No,” I answered.
“Queer old life, isn’t it?”
I nodded, taking her hand over a stream. Brilliant that early morning sunshine with the mist billowing down the river and the rooks screaming in the tops of the trees. Every detail of that last walk together to the pit is impressed on my mind, cut in deep grooves as with the knife of the woodcutter; every second of that morning I hear: the gurgling rush of water over stones, the coloured darts of the kingfishers I see, as if it was yesterday instead of through the mist of years.
“Mari and me will be all right,” I said.
“O, aye?”
“You go and make a home with Willie, do not study us.”
“No, Jethro,” she said. “Not till Iestyn comes back.”
“Three years,” I said, watching her, wondering. … But I knew she thought him still alive when I saw her smile.
“God, I know how Mari feels,” she said. “Three years more, that is all, and then I will see him.”
Less than three hours.
I knew of a ship at Saundersfoot; a three-masted barque that was lying at the quay; waiting for the flood of immigrants from the north – people coming down on foot, it was said. Two weeks or longer she had laid at Saundersfoot with her sails trimmed down and smoke drifting from her galleys, and her captain was taking the fares at the gangplank, five pounds a head steerage, fifteen pounds a head cabins. Bound for the port of Philadelphia: a leap from there to the town of Pittsburgh and the flaming ovens of the iron. White in the deck, black-tarred her hull, a leviathan of a ship of two hundred tons, stalwart, braced in the bows for ploughing Atlantics, with pigtailed Plymouth men manning her and her captain with the face of Neptune himself, bearded and sideboarded and a gold-buttoned tunic. God, how I longed for that fifteen pounds, for Mari, Jonathon and me. Saving every penny now in the black box under the bed. No more quarts in Black Boar tavern, skimping on this and that, coming the Welsh Jew, longing for the feel of the deck beneath me, with Mari one side of me and Jonathon on the other, turning my back on the labour I hated. Last fall I had ploughed and sown Cae White, doing it spare time after a full Ponty shift, and the corn was standing high now, begging for the reapers – full price and profit for corn now the gates were nearly down. Like a longing for Mari it grew within me, this yearning for the land of promise, to make a decent life. This very morning Rebecca was marching on Carmarthen city, but I was sick of fighting. Led by Rebecca John Harries of Talog Mill thousands of the daughters were marching on the city to burn the workhouse down, they said; burn it to the ground and succour the starving, and God help the man who stands in our path. Flannigan would be there, Toby and Justin, Matthew Luke John and even Tom the Faith – scores of others I knew, fighting for justice. For this was Rebecca triumphant, showing her strength now the gates were down; pitting her numbers against the sabres of the yeomanry, spitting on dragoons, constables and magistrates. Fighting, fighting – four years of it, me – and for what? Not for gates. Fighting for Mari and the ship that was lying at Saundersfoot Quay. I would hang in her rigging, unfurl her sails, tar her from bow to stern while she rode at sea, scrub her white, labour in the galleys, bow and scrape to the dining gentry – just to hear the song of her, feel the roll of her, the buck and toss of the swell beneath her and listen to the whine of the Atlantic gales that drove her west to Philadelphia. Fifteen pounds between me and freedom – saving it now at two shillings a week – take me three years at this rate. And in three years time Iestyn would come back – tiptoeing over the waves from Botany Bay, his fingers clutching for Mari, invading her life.
I had to get away.
Lying in the seam in Number Three now, coal-grimed, sweating in inches of water, with the pick reaching in to the two foot roof. Liam Muldooney beside me mouthing the Bible, intoning deep about Kabzeel; his grandpa; grumbling and grunting about lions in snow. Worse than ever was Liam these days, what brain the coal left him was deserting him fast now: stupefying his body with unending labour, and God knows for what for he didn’t need the money. The tram-towers and basketers were labouring behind us, coming in a queue from the ladders to the seams where fifty men or more lay side by side with us. I stopped for a breather and turned on my back, arms behind my head. Saw Morfydd next one up with a tram
