Hm, I am the fairy man.
The human spirit is my business. Their madness, their passion, the wonderful and monstrous ways they burn out their brief candle.
I regret to tell you that very many American lives in love.
What's heard to shut from the car, he's dead. Whether he rebird to president.
Or four hours, people must get up and google identification.
I am here in the in between, to collect their spirits and carry them to what comes next. This road is not on any map. It spans the thresholds between their most forbidden desires and their greatest fear. All I ask for in payment is a tale and accounting of their lives and the great temporary that is the land of the living. These are their stories. This is the passage north brother Island. I visited this place often over the years. This tiny little stone beside a hellgate, the
strait that's sunk a thousand ships. I've fished out many a sailor from its depths, just as I have plucked souls by the handful from this parcel of land. Just up on the hill here sits Riverside Hospital, the place of the very last resort for the plague ridden castaways from the great Island of Manhattan, amidst the small pox and consumption that spout a little bright, pinned prick, a soul burning hotter than most eves. Picked up there at
the entrance to the hospital. She has risen from her sick bed and has moved down the stairs and into the pale November sunlight. Mary Mallin, But the world will come to know her by a different name. Born so far from here, in a land so much greener, she made her first passage decades ago across the cold North Atlantic into New York City, at a time when the Irish were viewed as no better than the body lies they picked up in steerage. She was fifteen and alone
in the hard, scrabble filth of New York City. Many did not survive those first hard years, but she did. She fought and scraped, and when she was told that she carried Salmonella typhe which had killed so many before her, she forged ahead anyway, taking the disease with her from house to house, and finally earned the name Typhoid Mary.
Hello, Jesus Mary, and Joseph You Mary, Ah, I sensed you before I even closed my eyes.
I knew You're a common far me, and somehow you surprise me.
That is never my intention. And yet and yet it is time walking me to the shore.
Ef I must.
It's not cold.
I always expected the cold.
None of that here.
Do you have a name?
You can call me the Ferryman if you wish.
Nah, sure, Ferryman. Feels like the whole of my life has been packed to the gills with fairy man of one sort or another. Whether I wanted to go with him or not, I went. I don't suppose I have a choice in this matter either.
Everyone must go eventually.
Sure, just another wheel turning. Eh, the great wheel of life carries it to the great wheel of death, and still it turns. What's next on the other shore?
That will all depend.
On what my accents in life, my morrows or your morals. Who's fucking marls? Am I beholding to the churches? They can all drain in now rever as far as I'm concerned. Nay, I'll not be accepting their ATTARTI anymore. Jesus Christ himself can get an air for from me on that account.
Yeah, the church has very little to do with the afterlife.
Ah, God's a comforted least where I'll be. It's an actual boat.
Well you surprised. I'm a I'm a ferryman.
I thought it'd be more of a what's this metaphor? But here I am getting an honest to God bite to carry me on. Oh you know, I didn't want to make that first voyage. I loved my home, I'd loved my mother, even my father drunkard. He was was a good man. He just couldn't ever quite get it right. Every opportunity dead in his hands. But that was almost everyone in the Old Country in those days, struggle and toile and come up short. There wasn't enough work, and
the work when it came didn't pay enough. So men drank, women drank. Everyone drank. A shadow over everything, a shadow that I would come to recognize. I was sent away because my mother taught i'd follow in his path if I stayed, And who knows, Sometimes I think I'd have made a spectacular drunkard. I've the temperament for it, to be sure. So they sent me to my aunt and uncle, who made a go of it in New York. I remember saying goodbye to my mother. She wept. She said
that one day she'd join me. Last I saw of her, she was standing on the docks as me ship pulled off. She didn't wave, she just stood there. Han Coultie's held hip over her mind, as if she were trying to stafle a scream. Ah. That was the last time I saw her. The voyage was long and difficult, the carter's stank up, shetting, vomiting, the sour stench of fear that grew all the more potent when the seeds were rough, which they were often, every face grain, everybody carrying a
shadow above it. I would often spend days walking the decks, flirting with the sailors, just to avoid the animal felt below, which permeated everything. Despite the conditions, though in every eye there was hope, even in the oldest, the most din trodden, there's perfoos clearly marked for death. That hope it trumped through the storms and stench, beat out even the heart sickness that comes with leaving home forever. Even I fell prey to what, young and terrified as I was, it
is the vilest thing. Hope it survives until the better end and is passed on to strangle the next generation. Hell I carry it with me, even I, although I think I know what waits for me on the other shore. It was in the belly of that ship, on the Great Voyage, that I first saw hem and illness had passed through steerage, a fever, people emptying their guts into
the latrine's buckets, whatever was at hand. I had secured a bunk in the corner, and there I lay, young and a line sucker than i'd ever been believe in that you were coming far me, And I thought, ferry Man, that it was you, yourself, elf, that I saw standing amidst the sick and dying on the voyage one night, with hollow eyes gazing at me across the wedd of the room. My eyes too blurred with exhaustion to see clearly. But it wasn't, was it. It was a different specter
with different purposes. I blent to clear my vision and he was gone, And after a few days Daonus left me. We made it across, I remember saying it for the first time, The skyline so vast, oh, so great. I was terrified, the star of the rest of my life. My aunt and uncle were kind, dacent people, but they couldn't afford to keep me on their meager wages, and so I was sent to work immediately in the immense
filth of New York City. It was the laundry first, so many park girls boiling the flesh on their arms, so many growing tain and frail, with too much labor and too little food. It was hot, wet, miserable. We worked in the closest of quarters. When the last girl was in each morning, they locked the doors from the outside to make sure we didn't walk out before the
day's labor was done. At the time, I was concerned mostly with the state in my hands, which were chopped and sore, hot water and harsh soap, and the state of my back, which protested even when I lay down at night. I was concerned with the little rest I got on the small cot in my aunt's catching. And I was concerned with the shadow that I caught following me all the way from the boat, who I caught occasionally in the corner of my eyes, but you eluded
me when I turned to look him straight on. Somewhere in my bones, I had a sense of what he was, but I was young. I did not know its name, but I saw him head on soon enough. It was seven months and to my work at the laundry late end of the afternoon. It was July, and we opened the windows. There was no relief from the swelter and hate that consumed us. In that sort of heat. It wasn't unusual for a girl at you to drop to need to be fanned and giving water and a sharp
rest before returning to the soup. I myself felt the tail tale flutter behind my eyes, the tunnel vision that came from the heat exhaustion. I was stepping back from the hot water to catch a bread when Sally Mile went headlong into her top. The girls working beside her stood for a moment, blinking stupidly, trying to make sense of sally face dying and the scalding water. I had to push one of them either away and break into the water to pull eye, shouted the others to make room,
tried to get her to cough up the water. Her face looked a fright, be red from the hot water, snot and tears mingled with his sons. I slapped her cross the face to waker, but you wouldn't entirely come to. By this time our farm and mister Moses had come out of his office and seen the hole mess. He shouted at us all to get back to work, and grabbed Hi man off the street to help him cart
her Sally home. I watched him go, and it was then that I finally saw the shadow head on, hanging quietly in the vestibule by the door to the alley where to carry the port drowned girl eyed hungry eyes that watched Sally go and then turn back to the rest of us, staring windows eyes. I blinked and he was gone. Sally never came back. We heard through her sister that she came down with pneumonia from the water in her lungs, and days later she passed. I was lucky,
you know. Though I toiled as hard as the next girl, I had prospects. My aunt was a cook for a well off family, and she promised that after a little training, she'd helped me find similar work. And so during the days I returned to that horrible hot warehouse to was hotel sheets under the watchful eye of mister Moses. And at night my aunt took the time to teach me how to cook, using ingredients pilfered from wealthier kitchens. Though
I tirled, I felt that dreadful hope. After a few months more, I was introduced to a young man in finance who had just married and bought a home, and he was in aid of a cook. And so I took leave of my aunt and uncle's home, of that laundry with that tin horrible shadow, with the hungry eyes, and I moved up tying into the servant quarters of the home of mister Bryant. Gars were long still, but I had a room in the cellar that I shared
with the housekeeper, Miss Evans. There was a fine job that ended all too soon when the family fell ill. Miss Nevans started influenza. But I knew different, you see, I saw him and the kitchen one morning, the tin shadow, just a flecker on a too early morning, when my bones ched from the wingswork as I ate stale head with my morning tea while the oven fire caught he was just looking at me with those hungry eyes. My blood run cold as I stood to confront him, but
he was gone as quickly as he'd appeared. The next morning, the family was ill, a terrible waste and sort of illness, each of them with a terrible rash on their necks. None of them able to keep dying, even the water day scept drop by drop. I saw missus Bryant one morning. The maid was ill herself, so it was up to me to bring the mistress her hot beef brought and so the crackers that was to be her sore nourishment.
She was a sturdy woman by all accounts, but she lay there on the bed, skeletal, as if her guts had been pulled from her body. She didn't thank me when I dropped the tray, just looked at me with uncomprehending eyes. I'd seen it before in the boat. I'd felt it the none inside. It was horrible. I couldn't bear to look at it from the outside. I was so shaken that I walked out of the house that day and did not return. And so it was back to my aunt's hee. Far better or worse, there's no
lack of jobs in New York City. Miss Nevin's a coin soul, referred me to another family. I made the move again, and again, almost as quickly as it had begun, I saw the shadow man in the corner of the kitchen, and another family fell ill.
I was cursed.
This shadow had followed me from my father's home, and across the ocean into the guts of New York City. But what was I did you? I found a family in Long Island looking for a cook. I moved in. They fell ill. I left, and another family on the north shore the same Again and again. I prayed, I plead in winter shadow, whenever I caught a glimpse conjole and bargained leave me.
I peg.
And this way did the years pass. I'd gone through a dozen wealthy families, all of them fell ill, few of whom ever spoke to me except to give instructions anyway, or sometimes for a husband or the butler to make advances to carnerie in the kitchen, while the rest of the high staff was about their business, was at any different than the laundry where mister Moses got handsy with the girls, or from the factories, the farms, anywhere a
girl could find gainful employment. And what choice was I given but to bear it, such as the state of the wire. It was in a Park Avenue mansion that Master Soper Or find me. He had been hired by a family in Oyster Bay to discover why he'd fallen ill, and his trail led him from heis to heis until he find me. He was not unkind, He explained the situation. It's typhoid fever. We don't know why it hasn't made you ill, but it's getting past to the families you
cook for. He asked me to go with him as he tired to argue, and so he brought me to knart Brother Island for the first time, never been to a sanitarium. There was no work to do, nothing to fill all the empty hours except talk to the sick, which was nearly everyone there. At first, that was refreshing. I had worked my entire life, and here was a sort of endless holiday. In the spring, I would go and sit by the water and feel the wind cut through me. In the summer, I would even swim a little.
But at night I'd see my shadow watching, and I'd wait to see if his hungry eyes would mean do you oh? Sure the sick would die. But it was whatever they brought in with him that did him in. It had nothing to do with me. He watched over all of us par and infirm. He seemed to me no harm, So I grew accustomed to my shody man. He became start of a companion with his sad, hungry eyes. I was there on the island for three years the
first time. For all their prodden the doctors couldn't figure out what to make of me, and so they decided to set me loose with one terrible condition. I was never to cook again. And so there I was, a middle aged woman with no prospects. Now family left. My aunt and uncle had long since passed. I went back to the laundry. It was the samest when I had left it. For the most part. Master Moses had given way to another overseer, mister Roberts, who was younger, crueler.
The girls struggled terribly under hess yoke, and hey took advantage. It's see it when a girl was cowled up to his office and didn't return for a while, to look in her eyes when she came back to the soup. And one day it was me getting called to the office. Oh, the young overseer had nigh interest in may. Of course, I was just another gray worker to him. But I sat dining in his office with its steamy windows and pearl light, and he began to ask questions of me
about the girls. If the westper dings to each other to me. He wished to cut out any roamors, to rip them out by the roots, to let go into the wild world. Any girl dead would spake against them. It was day finally that I saw a truthful At first, he felt a trick of the light. I thought I'd seen my poor impoverished shot him on there, looking into the dark corner, there was something different. The darkness felt more slippery in that room. In it I saw a
sort of rising slathering. The cool shot of cast by mister Robert's body revailed to me for the first time, the great behamuth of greed, his massive roots drain in the land, his great hungry mouth, yawn and open his eyes, sharp and feral. It was he who wanted mated, mister Roberts, He who had animated the Sterlings, and the Joneses, and mister Moses before the them that serpenty, none of the
rich and powerful. It was not my own lesser shido poverty, with his dull sad eyes and broken grimace, He who had forced me and be strong, who made my tendencetnd I shut my neck and sculpted the ropy muscles in my arms and back. He had been an unwelcome companion, to be sure, but he was not my enemy. None are the messeries I endured that any of the girls endured, the misery that stopped my parents, and the peasants that
crossed the Atlantic with me. None of it was necess sorry for the world to continue on like there was enough food in the setty to feed us all, and have heizened to shelter all of us. Why we produced enough to make all the world comfortable, but to keep the likes of the mister Moses and the brilliance and Roberts of this world to feed them by hay in the shadows, creedy on fire Day needed us, They needed our bats broken to suck tomorrow from them.
I would not.
I would not anymore. I stood from my chair, never taken my eyes off the hideous shadows, sucking at the edges of the light. My true enemy, and march oight of mister Robert's office marched into the street. And that very day I find myself answering an ad for a cook. I would no longer be tormented by my lot. If I couldn't improve it, I would become an avenging angel. And so I returned to the kitchen. There I find myself over dinner preparations.
Far they're wealthy again, And with every meal I would cough empty my hand, and with that hat I would cook.
I'd caress every roast, dag my fingers into the touch, every care and potato on the plate. If anyone in the kitchens had any objection, they did not speak it, instead watching my every move. They knew. They all knew what I was, even though they may not have the language to speak my name. And it was not their duty to stop the great work, to pull the roots of the great greedy demon that ran all of our lives, one by one, to sicken its mouth till they waste
to its agents, one by one, family by family. As long as I lived with the sickness in my body, if not by lead by bread, do I wish it were otherwise? Of course? I wish I'd been able to stay back home with my ma, and if we were comfortable, and that I could live a comfortable life. I wish i'd come to a marror gun could be swept up my feet by a handsome young lad. I wish I'd been paid fairly enough to forge my own way into filthy land. Of opportunity. But this land isn't built for
one such as I to succeed in. Those who have will continue to have, and their children will have more. And after they've had all, they can eat simply hard the rest of the food and dole it out in little bites to the rest of us. Make us fight over it, then use us to grind at the wheels of their industry until we are dust. I've seen their true face. I've watched its leather in the darkness, and with my hands I did what I could to destroy it.
I don't regret doing what I did. What here already I could see beyond the dock to the land the Fogusto tek, Are we.
At our destination?
Oh? Is it having our hell?
That is for you to find out alone?
Oh?
Beautiful? And what if I don't go.
Well, you can stay on the dock if you wish, But uh, nothing'll happen. You just wait and wait until you make the decision to continue.
Sorry, I've got at least not much control of the situation.
Maybe half an hour in heaven before the devil knows you're late.
Ah. Oh, I don't know who will be there to hear me when I walk right, so I'll say it to you. If it's hell I'm walking into, I'll walk into it with my head held high, with my shadow Man proudly on my elbow. And woe unto them who believe that Mary Mallin will ever be under their control. Very well, fairy Man, I pray you carry a million mile like me in your time. The boar need their vengeance.
She made the great voyage, like so many before her, like so many who came after, all of whom were sold the bill of fare, America, the Bountiful, the land of opportunity, where the streets are paved with gold, and where anyone can succeed. She was met with the same hard reality as anyone else, toil hunger. Though she suffered, she did not suffer alone. Instead, Yeah, she made herself the legend. And so she marches on to whatever lies I had, secure in her knowledge that she did not
sacrifice herself entirely to the benemoth. I wish her well on her passage.
The Passage stars Dan Fogler as the Faeryman. This episode features Teresa McLaughlin as Typhoid Mary. Written by Nicholas Tuakowski, our executive producers are Nicholas Dakoski, Matthew Frederick, and Alexander Williams. First assistant director, script supervisor and production coordinator Sarah Klein. Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez. Casting
by Sunday Bowling, Kennedy and Meg Mormon. Editing and sound designed by Dan Bush, Dialogue editing and sound mixing by Juan Campos.
Additional sound editing.
By Racket Sound. Our supervising producer is Josh Thane. Created by Dan Bush and Nicholas Dakoski. Produced by Dan Bush. The Passage is a production of iHeartRadio and Cycopia Pictures.
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