Ballycastle, Co. Mayo, 8 November 1847.
My dear Patrick,
It is six weeks and two days since the night of the wake, and I have counted every one of them, which is a foolish thing to be doing and I do it still. I am at Father Mullan's table this evening and he is putting down what I say, for you know well I have no letters of my own, and he is good enough not to make little of me for it.
I do not know is this reaching you or is it going out on the water after nothing. I say to myself that you are landed and in work and too busy to be writing, and that is the story I keep, and I would be glad of one line to put an end to the keeping of it.
We are stripped bare here but we are living. My father had the pit opened the second week of October and what came out of it would not fill a creel, and the smell of the rest of it is in the garden yet. He says we will do, for we have the two cows and he sold the young one at Ballina in September before the price went down out of the world. He is gone in to Ballina again on Thursday and I asked him to go down to the quay and see was there any list of ships come in from Liverpool, and he said he would, and then he said a girl would do better to mind the fire than the sea. He was not being hard. He is only afraid of the winter the same as the rest of us.
There is a great quiet on the village, Patrick. I never knew a street could go so quiet and still have people in it. Mrs. Heffernan was taken in to the workhouse at Ballina and there is no word of her since. Peg Ruddy stood at the chapel gate on Sunday and asked me was there word from America, and I had to tell her no, and she said she had none of her own Martin in two years, and then she took my two hands and said she would pray you got over safe. She has more courage in her than the whole parish. Old Kitty Loftus is very low and I sit with her Tuesdays. The Gaughans have a child coming before Christmas and it is the one thing anybody speaks of with any lift in them.
I was up at your mother's on Sunday after Mass. She had the hearth swept and the chair pulled out from the fire the way she always has it, and we sat and said very little, for there is only the one thing either of us wants to say. She is bearing up better than I am, and she has more cause to be down. Seán has the ridges cleared above and he does not speak much these days but he does the work of two men, and Michael is restless out of him and talks of the harvest in England, and your mother will not hear it named in the house. She gave me tea and would take nothing for it. At the door she said, Mary, we will hear, and she said it the way you would say a prayer, not the way you would say a thing you knew.
Father Mullan is reading this back to me and I will not let him leave out that I asked after your health first and got no answer, so I will ask it again. Are you fed. Are you dry at night. Have you anyone at all from home about you. Do not be sparing me, for I would sooner know a hard thing than sit inventing softer ones.
I am not asking you for anything and you are not to think I am. You said a thing to me at the gable of the house the night before you went and I have it kept and I am not going to write it down and have it read out over a table. It is enough that the two of us know what was said. Only write, Patrick. A line on a scrap would do me. There is no news out of America comes into this parish only what somebody's letter carries, and there are houses here that have had none in years, and I do not want to be one of them and I am afraid I am learning how.
This goes with my father to Ballina on Thursday and Father Mullan will see it away for the post. May God have kept you through the water and have you standing on dry ground this night, and may He put the price of the paper in your hand and the notion of writing into your head.
I am, dear Patrick, yours,
Mary Cafferky
P.S. I have put in the words of the song they sang for you the night of the wake. Nobody would sing it since.
This written down for her by me, and faithfully, as she said it. John Mullan, P.P.