Starving for the Big Red Barn

The big red barn was America. Rose was absolutely sure of that. It had been in all the paintings, with the amber waves of grain, and the eagle soaring overhead, and always full of cows and crops. She held the image of the barn in her mind as the ship pitched and rolled beneath her. Rose’s people had been tenant farmers for longer than anyone could remember but the barns of Ireland weren’t red, they were stone. And they were empty.

She had felt their emptiness like a wind in her bones as more cows went to market and fewer and fewer came back to replace them. She had watched as long rains and rising rents had dragged the land out from under her father acre by acre. What her grandfather had saved from The Great Hunger, her father couldn’t rescue from the greed of men and the loss of each parcel had been like a physical blow to the family.

Rose could still remember the great big pots of beef stew from her childhood. Her days were spent running after the newborn calves and their lowing heifers with her little brother, Michael, clinging to her hand. Her mother’s fresh baked bread, slathered with homemade butter, waited for them in the wattle and daub cottage that had sheltered her family for generations. Her brother had been all rolls and curls and happy sticky smiles, and he had worshiped her. But slowly there had been less beef in the pot, fewer slices of bread, and the butter all had to go for sale.

By the time Michael got sick, there was only cabbage in the pot. His beautiful rolls had worn to hard angles that gave a terrible frailty to his six year old frame and Rose still woke in the night, thinking she could hear his cough. The memory of the relief she felt when the coughing had stopped twisted in her gut. That was when her father had stopped talking about the tenant farm and started talking about the place with the big red barn.

America. It was a word that meant hope to the Irish. When her father had taken her on the long ride from Spanish Point to Ennis to sell the last of the cows, he had shown her the paintings in the shop windows. Mountains, prairies, and lands filled with big red barns, waiting to be claimed by the willing farmer. No more tenancies. No more rents and land lords. Just good Earth, waiting for her father’s strong, Irish hands. He didn’t talk about what else America meant; the bitter combination of surviving and giving up.

It was an ugly thought and Rose pushed it down and stepped to the ship’s railing. They had called land ho almost an hour ago, but she still couldn’t see her new home through the fog. She knew they had to go to the island first, to be processed like the last of her cows. She wondered idly if it would be like the market, where they checked the teeth and eyes and feet. She knew what would happen if they failed the inspection. They would be sent back to the empty barn, on empty land to die with green stained lips at the side of the road, like so many had in the Great Hunger.

Rose had never seen the green lipped corpses that had haunted her grandfather’s dreams, but often she felt she could feel their fingers dragging at her skirt as she walked the lush green paths of home. And when the heavy rains had come, and the blight had woken up and stretched out it’s hand for the west of Ireland, she’d heard their warnings on the wind. They had urged her to go even as her father fought to stay, and she could hear their cries in the lullaby lament that had been Micheal's favorite song. The night before they left, she had sung it to his bones.

The noise of the other passengers pulled Rose from her memories and she gasped as she looked up. America emerged from the mist in a jagged grey line, stretching across the horizon. It looked nothing like the craggy shores of home, with their stark cliffs and rolling green hills beyond. Nothing like the green of home. And where was the barn?

Mercifully, Rose barely remembered passing the inspection. A blur of sharp questions, untender hands, and crushing crowds. Her father claiming a cousin in the city. Proudly declaring that he had come to farm. The laughter of the clerks. The shame burning her mother’s cheeks. She stood like a statue, feeling the world move around her as her old world was stripped away and she found herself reaching for Michael's hand.

The cousin didn’t meet them at the dock. Her father had an address, a jumble of numbers, and they wandered the streets, trying to find their way. The city towered over them, filled with the noise and reek of people and Rose could feel her heart screaming out for home. Where were the fields? Where was the sky? Where was the big red barn? Rose strained her eyes, even as the light faded, seeking a hint of red, but saw nothing other than grey buildings. It was dark by the time they found the cousin’s home. Not a cottage but a reeking tenement building, filled with too many people and too little air.

She slept between her mother and father on the kitchen floor that night and tried to dream of the barn. She tried to call up fields and cows in her mind, but they were chased away by the unfamiliar noises of the street. Rose was bleary eyed the next morning when she sat at the table with her parents, her cousin, and her cousin’s children. Before her father had even started to talk, Rose could see that something was wrong. There were too many people packed into the little room. The pots were low, and there was no butter. The cousin listened to her father with his eyes trained on the ground and got up without looking at him. He faced the wall as he explained. There was an empty room in the tenement next door. There was work in the factories. But there were no fields. No farms. No big red barns to be had in New York City, and no way to get out. She watched as her father took each word like a stone on his back, bringing him lower, and lower.

Her cousin brought her to the factory the next morning. The foreman asked Rose what she was good at and all the other girls laughed when she said she could milk a cow and churn butter. The foreman was not an unkind man and showed her how to work the machines, how to keep her fingers quick and safe, and how to keep pace with the other girls. He promised her that if she kept to her work, she would never be hungry again.

But he was wrong. Rose was hungry, she was hungry all the time. She hungered for the green hills, she hungered for the lowing of the cows, for her brother’s hand. She hungers for the hope that had brought them from their fields to the factory. She hungered for the farm. She sat at her machine, and starved for the big red barn.