This story is an extraction from a novel that I’m writing; I have adapted a portion of it into a short story, so a brief introduction is required.
The year is 1792 and the love of Lizzy’s life has been transported to a penal colony in Australia. Broken-hearted she embarks on a journey to find him. Unsuccessful, she’s now on her way to America with her friend Orla. Lizzy is telling her story.
There was a funny little man on board, although, I shouldn’t say “funny,” there was a definite sadness about him. He seemed to be lonely except for his dog which he would put on a strong rope whenever they were up on deck; he never let that dog out of his sight. It was obvious that they both loved each other.
The man never socialized with any of the other passengers nor made any attempt to befriend anyone. People were afraid of him as he had all the appearances of being a released convict. I had seen many of them upon their release and always remarked on how they stood out in society. Apart from the physical scars that they carried, their spirits were broken, they lacked the ability to make eye contact with you and many were unable to function as human beings preferring to work at menial jobs and congregating in communities of like-minded souls. It was as though they found security in one another’s company. On the other hand you would encounter the ones who had no trouble making the transition from convict to law abiding citizen and took advantage of the opportunities that a developing country had to offer.
It was understandable that not many were prepared to embark on a perilous journey back to their homeland, but it wasn’t all that unusual as many had been forced to leave wives and children behind.
My curiosity was aroused by this old man. Well, I called him old but it was hard to tell just how old he was. His hair was white, which may have made him look older than he actually was and it looked like he’d been blinded in one eye. In fact, at first impression he looked as though he’d been trampled on by wild horses, but we knew that these injuries had been inflicted by humans if you could call them that. His nose had been badly broken, maybe more than once and he had to support himself with a crutch, like his back had been broken at some stage and never mended properly. The poor man was frail and didn’t look like a fighter, and judging by his appearance he was in pain. I desperately wanted to befriend him but he would get embarrassed and walk away whenever we’d approach him. The journey to America was going to take several weeks so we said we’d give him his time. We respected his desire for privacy if that’s what you want to call it but he did look as though he could use a friend.
One day I observed him gazing out to sea. I saw him make the sign of the cross, like he’d been praying, he got embarrassed when he saw me looking at him and was about to walk away. “Are you a religious man?” I asked.
“Not really,” he replied, “But I have my beliefs.”
“I have my beliefs too,” I said, desperately trying to think of something to keep the conversation going. He looked at me for a moment as though he wanted to talk but didn’t know how to start, he just said, “Will you pray for me?” He started to walk away.
“It would help if I knew who I was praying for,” I said. He stopped and looked at me again, it was then that I could see the real sadness in his eyes. “I’m Lizzy,” I said, putting out my hand.
“They call me Snowball,” he said pointing to his white hair. I smiled but I was reluctant to address him as Snowball, it just didn’t seem fitting under the circumstances.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you sir.” He was taken aback at being called sir, but he smiled, placing his hand over his broken teeth. I ignored his humiliation.
“So, you’re Irish?” I said, “Going home?”
“Yes, “Yes, I want to see my old mother, I hope she’s still alive.” I was expecting him to become excited about the prospects of returning to Ireland but instead, his face took on a troubled look. He gazed out to sea again. “I have to go to America first.” he said without looking at me. “Great, that’s where we’re going too.” I said, I had a lot of questions for Snowball but I didn’t want to scare him off by asking too many on our first encounter, we had weeks of sea travel before getting to New York so I kept the conversation pleasant and friendly.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked. His eyes lit up and he looked down at him. “This is Teddy,” he said. Teddy looked up at him and he reached down to pet him. This dog was more than a travelling companion, there was an obvious powerful bond between these two and whatever pain or sadness that was bothering him, Teddy was a source of great comfort.
“You won’t get a more loyal friend, God’s greatest gift to mankind,” I said, “How long have you had him?”
“Not long, but we’ll be together forever now.” He said.
“Why did you ask me to pray for you?” I asked. He didn’t answer me straight away, just looked out to sea again.
“I’m going to hell when I die.” he said. I wasn’t prepared for that.
“Looks to me that you’ve been there already.”
“Yes,” was all he said. He kept his eyes on the sea, only now there were tears in his eyes.
“Well, I don’t think you’re going to hell, but I’ll pray for you anyway.” I said.
“Thank you Lizzy.”
“You were in a penal colony, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” he nodded.
“I’m so sorry, I know they’re evil places, not many survive them but you beat them and you’re free now, free to go home,” I said. He seemed to relax and reached into his pocket, he took out a folded piece of paper. “This is my release form Lizzy, I’ll carry it with me forever, I’m never going back there and if God sends me to hell when I die I’ll just tell him, I’ve already been there.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was fighting back the tears but now that I had him talking I wasn’t going to stop.
“I can’t imagine in my wildest nightmare what you’ve been through but God is not going to send you to hell, he knows you’ve been there, some people do their hell on earth, don’t you know that?” Snowball just nodded, he was still clutching the paper with ferocity as though his life depended on keeping it from blowing into the sea.
“What’s your real name?” I asked.
“Just call me Snowball, I don’t have a name or a number anymore and I think I sold my soul to the devil to get out of there.”
“No you didn’t, you sold your soul to God, you’ve done your time in hell, and the devil only wants the souls of the evil ones.”
“There’s no shortage of evil ones back there,” he said nodding his head back towards Australia. “I guess I’m one of the lucky ones,” he said and smiled… “I was christened Peter James but everyone called me PJ.”
“Well PJ it is,” I said and smiled. He smiled back, no one had called him that in a long time. He put his hand up to cover his smile again.
“I used to have a nice smile Lizzy.”
“A smile comes from the soul PJ and no one can take that away from you.”
“Ah.. You’re a good kid Lizzy, where are you going in America?” he said, changing the subject.
“We don’t know yet, how about you, why are you going to America first?” “Well, it’s cheaper this way, I have to get a job in New York and save up for the rest of the trip. I hope I don’t frighten my mother, I didn’t always look like this.” The tears were now closer than ever but I had to remain cheerful.
“A mother only sees her baby, and love… Nothing else PJ, Nothing else, she’ll be over the moon to see you.” But I was also thinking to myself, she’ll also be heartbroken to see what those callous monsters did to you…..
Poor PJ was broke and broken but in time he took to us and those defensive barriers crumbled, Orla and I took care of him , he dined with us, laughed and for the first time in years he realized that he had real friends. We talked for hours, and although we never asked him, we knew it would only be a matter of time before he would want to talk about the horror of those places.
“They hated us,” he said one day. “I’ve never known such evil, no man, no matter how evil can do those things to another human being unless he’s disturbed in his own head, I guess they were handpicked for that reason, yes we were there to be punished but not to be tortured for the pleasure of sick individuals. They would bring you to within an inch of your life with beatings, to the point where you welcome death just to end the pain. We languished in our own filth, misery and pain, hoping for death while these monsters looked at us as nothing more than wild animals. Most of these poor men weren’t evil, they hadn’t committed serious crimes, many may have simply stolen food to feed their starving families or worse still, sent out to that living hell on fabricated charges because some greedy bastard wanted their land or maybe his wife or cattle or whatever. Evil has no boundaries, you have no idea.”
Oh yes we did, we knew about evil but we weren’t about to deprive PJ of getting it off his mind.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said, “They took a particular pleasure in torturing Dermot Brennan, whatever it was about that poor man, I don’t know, but they singled him out for the most brutal and inhumane punishment. But he’d laugh, knowing that he only had a few months to go before he’d be freed. His plan was to get a job and send for his wife and children, but they finally beat him so bad that he died from his injuries only four days before his release date. He died begging for water as his skin blistered under the brutal Australian sun.
“Many went insane from the solitary confinement, they would put a black hood over your head for months at a time, I kept myself sane by humming and picturing my homeland and it’s beauty, it blocked out the screams of the others as they slowly went insane, maybe I went insane too and didn’t know it. They couldn’t break my spirit not even in the devil’s chamber, but as you can see, they broke my body.”
I asked him what the devil’s chamber was. He got choked up and just waved the question away with a brush of his hand. We didn’t pressure him, the very title was disturbing enough, and just looking at the poor man’s broken body was proof of man’s brutality towards his fellow human beings.
We looked at little PJ with a deep sadness. Yes, he had done some misdeed and maybe deserved some punishment, but you don’t beat a man to the extent that he’s deformed and in pain for the rest of his life. This was punishment taken to the extreme.
“Did you do something wicked and evil to be sent away?” Orla asked…
His face took on a strange look as he reminisced about his past misdeeds… We weren’t prepared for his answer.
“Yes I did, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it and I’ll regret it to the day I die, not because of what they did to me but because I’m sorry, truly sorry----” He looked at us and wiped his eyes that had suddenly welled up with tears.
“I’m not the nice man that you think I am, I deserved to be punished.” He paused while he thought about what he was going to say.
“As you may know, in Ireland we revere land, we worship it, almost like it was something sacred. We’re brought up to believe that you were nothing, without land. If you had a piece of land you worked it, you ‘owned’ it, you talked about it, you nourished it, you cultivated it, you measured it out to the inch before building a wall or planting a dividing hedge or building a fence. You protected it with your life. It was a statement, it got you respect, you could hold your head up as a land owner despite being piss poor and half starved but you passed it on to your children and they would own it too. People have died in disputes over land for years, even by their own family members. My God, I’ve even seen men beaten and bloodied because a poor donkey strayed onto another man’s property, and I’ve even seen the poor animal killed… For what? To protect a piece of land that’s been there since time began and will still be there when time ends, whole families have been ripped apart over land and there are good men buried six feet under because of it, and I put one of them there because I thought he had fenced off and stolen from me, and what harm would it have been if he had done so? I got twenty years of hard labour and I’d go back and do another twenty if I could take away the torment and the vision of that poor man as he looked at me with his last dying breath. I held him in my arms and begged him not to die, what could have been so important about a piece of land that I would club another human being to death over it? I held him close to me and prayed. My rage had turned to sadness and anguish in an instant, I cried bitterly, my agony deepening to an indescribable level as this grown man cradled in my arms called out for his mother to come and help him just like a child would. But the hours passed and the warmth went out of his body, he used his last ounce of strength to squeeze my hand as he ended the fight. I begged God for it to be a nightmare. Please let me wake up and find it was just a bad dream. But it wasn’t a bad dream and the nightmare was real. I had taken a man’s life. They found me in the morning clutching his dead body, I’ll never forget the look on my mother’s face. It was a combination of sadness, disappointment, revulsion and confusion all rolled into one, yet there was a look in her eyes that said I can’t hate you, you’re my son, my baby, I brought you into the world, I adored and loved you with every ounce of strength in my body. I wanted her to hate me as I hated myself but a mother is not capable of such hatred against her own child. If only I could take back those few minutes of anger and just walk away instead of flying into a rage and killing a man. My life, and that of others would have been totally different. This will be with me for as long as I live, maybe longer.”
He wiped his eyes again. “The torture that they put me through is nothing compared to the torture in my mind. Even when they were beating me mercilessly the only thing in my mind was, I deserve this, I took a good man’s life. This is justice.”
Orla and I had tears in our eyes. What could we say having heard such an intensely disturbing but heartbreaking story? We were deeply saddened but yet we couldn’t hate him. His actions had changed the lives of so many people in an instant of sheer madness and everyone was paying a high price for it. We felt so sorry for him.
“I’m a murderer, that’s what I am, now I have to face those people, but how can I ask them to forgive me when I can’t forgive myself? What can I say to them?”
I had no answer for him. Orla broke the silence. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through PJ but everyone makes mistakes and we all have to live with what we’ve done. There’s not a man or woman on the planet that wouldn’t like an opportunity to go back and do things differently. We’ve all done things in anger that we’re sorry for but we don’t have to dwell on it. The hardest thing in the world to say is, I’m sorry. We refuse to say it out of fear that those words will be thrown back in our faces, or simply because we can’t say those two words, I’m sorry…Whatever happens, just say you’re sorry…. And you know PJ, when they see what those animals did to you they’ll know that you paid a heavy price.”
PJ’s heart was breaking, we could see it in his face, he clutched the railings and broke down sobbing uncontrollably. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” We hugged him, this frail little man, broken in body and spirit had touched our hearts.
“We know you’re sorry PJ, You’re a good man, there are those out there that can kill with indifference and never give it a second thought and there are people like you who torment themselves for the rest of their lives for a moment of madness.
We let him cry, tomorrow PJ’s life would change for the better.
We arrived in New York and watched as PJ shuffle his way down the gangplank, his crooked back and frail body supported by his crutch only made him look more pitiful. His beloved dog Teddy never left his side.
We had asked him during the trip, “How long have you had Teddy?”
“That little dog belonged to one of the prison guards, we’d watch through the bars as the poor creature scalded in the hot Australian sun and many times burned his tongue on the dry water bowl as he tried desperately to quench his thirst. If we complained, which many of us did, we received a flogging. I knew the day I left that Teddy was coming with me. I was risking another ten years had they found me but I wasn’t leaving without him. He’d never want for food or drink again in his life, I’d go without myself first.”
We couldn’t help but think that PJ’s life would have been so different had he not snapped and killed his neighbour, he was a compassionate man, and any man that would risk ten years of torture for saving a dog was alright in our books.
PJ cried when he saw his reflection in the full length mirror in the tailor’s room in New York city. He looked so different clean shaven, hair cut and dressed in a tailor made suit, handmade shoes and a whole new attitude. He wiped away his tears as he stared at his reflection unable to take his eyes away. What is this poor man thinking? Here’s a man that has known nothing but hatred, torment and unbelievable cruelty at the hands of handpicked monsters. It had been a long time since anyone had shown him any compassion or affection and he couldn’t stop thanking us.
“Now PJ you’ll have no trouble finding a job,” I said and winked at Orla.
“I’ll never forget you girls, God bless ye, me poor auld mother won’t know me.” he said as he tried to hold himself erect. Orla and I were again fighting back the tears because we hadn’t told him yet that he wouldn’t be looking for a job in New York because he was going directly to Ireland with new clothes, shoes, money in his pockets and together with his beloved dog Teddy they were going first class at our expense.
Two days later we watched as the ship workers carried PJ’s bags up to his first class cabin. He was struggling to make it up the gangplank, his new found companion Teddy never letting him out of his sight, both of them embarking on a new life together. He waved back at us when he finally reached the top.
We were glad he was too far away from us to see our tears.
The year is 1792 and the love of Lizzy’s life has been transported to a penal colony in Australia. Broken-hearted she embarks on a journey to find him. Unsuccessful, she’s now on her way to America with her friend Orla. Lizzy is telling her story.
There was a funny little man on board, although, I shouldn’t say “funny,” there was a definite sadness about him. He seemed to be lonely except for his dog which he would put on a strong rope whenever they were up on deck; he never let that dog out of his sight. It was obvious that they both loved each other.
The man never socialized with any of the other passengers nor made any attempt to befriend anyone. People were afraid of him as he had all the appearances of being a released convict. I had seen many of them upon their release and always remarked on how they stood out in society. Apart from the physical scars that they carried, their spirits were broken, they lacked the ability to make eye contact with you and many were unable to function as human beings preferring to work at menial jobs and congregating in communities of like-minded souls. It was as though they found security in one another’s company. On the other hand you would encounter the ones who had no trouble making the transition from convict to law abiding citizen and took advantage of the opportunities that a developing country had to offer.
It was understandable that not many were prepared to embark on a perilous journey back to their homeland, but it wasn’t all that unusual as many had been forced to leave wives and children behind.
My curiosity was aroused by this old man. Well, I called him old but it was hard to tell just how old he was. His hair was white, which may have made him look older than he actually was and it looked like he’d been blinded in one eye. In fact, at first impression he looked as though he’d been trampled on by wild horses, but we knew that these injuries had been inflicted by humans if you could call them that. His nose had been badly broken, maybe more than once and he had to support himself with a crutch, like his back had been broken at some stage and never mended properly. The poor man was frail and didn’t look like a fighter, and judging by his appearance he was in pain. I desperately wanted to befriend him but he would get embarrassed and walk away whenever we’d approach him. The journey to America was going to take several weeks so we said we’d give him his time. We respected his desire for privacy if that’s what you want to call it but he did look as though he could use a friend.
One day I observed him gazing out to sea. I saw him make the sign of the cross, like he’d been praying, he got embarrassed when he saw me looking at him and was about to walk away. “Are you a religious man?” I asked.
“Not really,” he replied, “But I have my beliefs.”
“I have my beliefs too,” I said, desperately trying to think of something to keep the conversation going. He looked at me for a moment as though he wanted to talk but didn’t know how to start, he just said, “Will you pray for me?” He started to walk away.
“It would help if I knew who I was praying for,” I said. He stopped and looked at me again, it was then that I could see the real sadness in his eyes. “I’m Lizzy,” I said, putting out my hand.
“They call me Snowball,” he said pointing to his white hair. I smiled but I was reluctant to address him as Snowball, it just didn’t seem fitting under the circumstances.
“Well, it’s nice to meet you sir.” He was taken aback at being called sir, but he smiled, placing his hand over his broken teeth. I ignored his humiliation.
“So, you’re Irish?” I said, “Going home?”
“Yes, “Yes, I want to see my old mother, I hope she’s still alive.” I was expecting him to become excited about the prospects of returning to Ireland but instead, his face took on a troubled look. He gazed out to sea again. “I have to go to America first.” he said without looking at me. “Great, that’s where we’re going too.” I said, I had a lot of questions for Snowball but I didn’t want to scare him off by asking too many on our first encounter, we had weeks of sea travel before getting to New York so I kept the conversation pleasant and friendly.
“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked. His eyes lit up and he looked down at him. “This is Teddy,” he said. Teddy looked up at him and he reached down to pet him. This dog was more than a travelling companion, there was an obvious powerful bond between these two and whatever pain or sadness that was bothering him, Teddy was a source of great comfort.
“You won’t get a more loyal friend, God’s greatest gift to mankind,” I said, “How long have you had him?”
“Not long, but we’ll be together forever now.” He said.
“Why did you ask me to pray for you?” I asked. He didn’t answer me straight away, just looked out to sea again.
“I’m going to hell when I die.” he said. I wasn’t prepared for that.
“Looks to me that you’ve been there already.”
“Yes,” was all he said. He kept his eyes on the sea, only now there were tears in his eyes.
“Well, I don’t think you’re going to hell, but I’ll pray for you anyway.” I said.
“Thank you Lizzy.”
“You were in a penal colony, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” he nodded.
“I’m so sorry, I know they’re evil places, not many survive them but you beat them and you’re free now, free to go home,” I said. He seemed to relax and reached into his pocket, he took out a folded piece of paper. “This is my release form Lizzy, I’ll carry it with me forever, I’m never going back there and if God sends me to hell when I die I’ll just tell him, I’ve already been there.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. I was fighting back the tears but now that I had him talking I wasn’t going to stop.
“I can’t imagine in my wildest nightmare what you’ve been through but God is not going to send you to hell, he knows you’ve been there, some people do their hell on earth, don’t you know that?” Snowball just nodded, he was still clutching the paper with ferocity as though his life depended on keeping it from blowing into the sea.
“What’s your real name?” I asked.
“Just call me Snowball, I don’t have a name or a number anymore and I think I sold my soul to the devil to get out of there.”
“No you didn’t, you sold your soul to God, you’ve done your time in hell, and the devil only wants the souls of the evil ones.”
“There’s no shortage of evil ones back there,” he said nodding his head back towards Australia. “I guess I’m one of the lucky ones,” he said and smiled… “I was christened Peter James but everyone called me PJ.”
“Well PJ it is,” I said and smiled. He smiled back, no one had called him that in a long time. He put his hand up to cover his smile again.
“I used to have a nice smile Lizzy.”
“A smile comes from the soul PJ and no one can take that away from you.”
“Ah.. You’re a good kid Lizzy, where are you going in America?” he said, changing the subject.
“We don’t know yet, how about you, why are you going to America first?” “Well, it’s cheaper this way, I have to get a job in New York and save up for the rest of the trip. I hope I don’t frighten my mother, I didn’t always look like this.” The tears were now closer than ever but I had to remain cheerful.
“A mother only sees her baby, and love… Nothing else PJ, Nothing else, she’ll be over the moon to see you.” But I was also thinking to myself, she’ll also be heartbroken to see what those callous monsters did to you…..
Poor PJ was broke and broken but in time he took to us and those defensive barriers crumbled, Orla and I took care of him , he dined with us, laughed and for the first time in years he realized that he had real friends. We talked for hours, and although we never asked him, we knew it would only be a matter of time before he would want to talk about the horror of those places.
“They hated us,” he said one day. “I’ve never known such evil, no man, no matter how evil can do those things to another human being unless he’s disturbed in his own head, I guess they were handpicked for that reason, yes we were there to be punished but not to be tortured for the pleasure of sick individuals. They would bring you to within an inch of your life with beatings, to the point where you welcome death just to end the pain. We languished in our own filth, misery and pain, hoping for death while these monsters looked at us as nothing more than wild animals. Most of these poor men weren’t evil, they hadn’t committed serious crimes, many may have simply stolen food to feed their starving families or worse still, sent out to that living hell on fabricated charges because some greedy bastard wanted their land or maybe his wife or cattle or whatever. Evil has no boundaries, you have no idea.”
Oh yes we did, we knew about evil but we weren’t about to deprive PJ of getting it off his mind.
“I was one of the lucky ones,” he said, “They took a particular pleasure in torturing Dermot Brennan, whatever it was about that poor man, I don’t know, but they singled him out for the most brutal and inhumane punishment. But he’d laugh, knowing that he only had a few months to go before he’d be freed. His plan was to get a job and send for his wife and children, but they finally beat him so bad that he died from his injuries only four days before his release date. He died begging for water as his skin blistered under the brutal Australian sun.
“Many went insane from the solitary confinement, they would put a black hood over your head for months at a time, I kept myself sane by humming and picturing my homeland and it’s beauty, it blocked out the screams of the others as they slowly went insane, maybe I went insane too and didn’t know it. They couldn’t break my spirit not even in the devil’s chamber, but as you can see, they broke my body.”
I asked him what the devil’s chamber was. He got choked up and just waved the question away with a brush of his hand. We didn’t pressure him, the very title was disturbing enough, and just looking at the poor man’s broken body was proof of man’s brutality towards his fellow human beings.
We looked at little PJ with a deep sadness. Yes, he had done some misdeed and maybe deserved some punishment, but you don’t beat a man to the extent that he’s deformed and in pain for the rest of his life. This was punishment taken to the extreme.
“Did you do something wicked and evil to be sent away?” Orla asked…
His face took on a strange look as he reminisced about his past misdeeds… We weren’t prepared for his answer.
“Yes I did, and I’ve had plenty of time to think about it and I’ll regret it to the day I die, not because of what they did to me but because I’m sorry, truly sorry----” He looked at us and wiped his eyes that had suddenly welled up with tears.
“I’m not the nice man that you think I am, I deserved to be punished.” He paused while he thought about what he was going to say.
“As you may know, in Ireland we revere land, we worship it, almost like it was something sacred. We’re brought up to believe that you were nothing, without land. If you had a piece of land you worked it, you ‘owned’ it, you talked about it, you nourished it, you cultivated it, you measured it out to the inch before building a wall or planting a dividing hedge or building a fence. You protected it with your life. It was a statement, it got you respect, you could hold your head up as a land owner despite being piss poor and half starved but you passed it on to your children and they would own it too. People have died in disputes over land for years, even by their own family members. My God, I’ve even seen men beaten and bloodied because a poor donkey strayed onto another man’s property, and I’ve even seen the poor animal killed… For what? To protect a piece of land that’s been there since time began and will still be there when time ends, whole families have been ripped apart over land and there are good men buried six feet under because of it, and I put one of them there because I thought he had fenced off and stolen from me, and what harm would it have been if he had done so? I got twenty years of hard labour and I’d go back and do another twenty if I could take away the torment and the vision of that poor man as he looked at me with his last dying breath. I held him in my arms and begged him not to die, what could have been so important about a piece of land that I would club another human being to death over it? I held him close to me and prayed. My rage had turned to sadness and anguish in an instant, I cried bitterly, my agony deepening to an indescribable level as this grown man cradled in my arms called out for his mother to come and help him just like a child would. But the hours passed and the warmth went out of his body, he used his last ounce of strength to squeeze my hand as he ended the fight. I begged God for it to be a nightmare. Please let me wake up and find it was just a bad dream. But it wasn’t a bad dream and the nightmare was real. I had taken a man’s life. They found me in the morning clutching his dead body, I’ll never forget the look on my mother’s face. It was a combination of sadness, disappointment, revulsion and confusion all rolled into one, yet there was a look in her eyes that said I can’t hate you, you’re my son, my baby, I brought you into the world, I adored and loved you with every ounce of strength in my body. I wanted her to hate me as I hated myself but a mother is not capable of such hatred against her own child. If only I could take back those few minutes of anger and just walk away instead of flying into a rage and killing a man. My life, and that of others would have been totally different. This will be with me for as long as I live, maybe longer.”
He wiped his eyes again. “The torture that they put me through is nothing compared to the torture in my mind. Even when they were beating me mercilessly the only thing in my mind was, I deserve this, I took a good man’s life. This is justice.”
Orla and I had tears in our eyes. What could we say having heard such an intensely disturbing but heartbreaking story? We were deeply saddened but yet we couldn’t hate him. His actions had changed the lives of so many people in an instant of sheer madness and everyone was paying a high price for it. We felt so sorry for him.
“I’m a murderer, that’s what I am, now I have to face those people, but how can I ask them to forgive me when I can’t forgive myself? What can I say to them?”
I had no answer for him. Orla broke the silence. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through PJ but everyone makes mistakes and we all have to live with what we’ve done. There’s not a man or woman on the planet that wouldn’t like an opportunity to go back and do things differently. We’ve all done things in anger that we’re sorry for but we don’t have to dwell on it. The hardest thing in the world to say is, I’m sorry. We refuse to say it out of fear that those words will be thrown back in our faces, or simply because we can’t say those two words, I’m sorry…Whatever happens, just say you’re sorry…. And you know PJ, when they see what those animals did to you they’ll know that you paid a heavy price.”
PJ’s heart was breaking, we could see it in his face, he clutched the railings and broke down sobbing uncontrollably. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” We hugged him, this frail little man, broken in body and spirit had touched our hearts.
“We know you’re sorry PJ, You’re a good man, there are those out there that can kill with indifference and never give it a second thought and there are people like you who torment themselves for the rest of their lives for a moment of madness.
We let him cry, tomorrow PJ’s life would change for the better.
We arrived in New York and watched as PJ shuffle his way down the gangplank, his crooked back and frail body supported by his crutch only made him look more pitiful. His beloved dog Teddy never left his side.
We had asked him during the trip, “How long have you had Teddy?”
“That little dog belonged to one of the prison guards, we’d watch through the bars as the poor creature scalded in the hot Australian sun and many times burned his tongue on the dry water bowl as he tried desperately to quench his thirst. If we complained, which many of us did, we received a flogging. I knew the day I left that Teddy was coming with me. I was risking another ten years had they found me but I wasn’t leaving without him. He’d never want for food or drink again in his life, I’d go without myself first.”
We couldn’t help but think that PJ’s life would have been so different had he not snapped and killed his neighbour, he was a compassionate man, and any man that would risk ten years of torture for saving a dog was alright in our books.
PJ cried when he saw his reflection in the full length mirror in the tailor’s room in New York city. He looked so different clean shaven, hair cut and dressed in a tailor made suit, handmade shoes and a whole new attitude. He wiped away his tears as he stared at his reflection unable to take his eyes away. What is this poor man thinking? Here’s a man that has known nothing but hatred, torment and unbelievable cruelty at the hands of handpicked monsters. It had been a long time since anyone had shown him any compassion or affection and he couldn’t stop thanking us.
“Now PJ you’ll have no trouble finding a job,” I said and winked at Orla.
“I’ll never forget you girls, God bless ye, me poor auld mother won’t know me.” he said as he tried to hold himself erect. Orla and I were again fighting back the tears because we hadn’t told him yet that he wouldn’t be looking for a job in New York because he was going directly to Ireland with new clothes, shoes, money in his pockets and together with his beloved dog Teddy they were going first class at our expense.
Two days later we watched as the ship workers carried PJ’s bags up to his first class cabin. He was struggling to make it up the gangplank, his new found companion Teddy never letting him out of his sight, both of them embarking on a new life together. He waved back at us when he finally reached the top.
We were glad he was too far away from us to see our tears.
