Galway Bay (55 page)

On and on. Patrick didn’t waver. He believed in the principles of Young Ireland. Barney McGurk hinted to me that Patrick Kelly had a hand in helping the condemned leaders of the 1848 uprising— Mitchel, Meagher, and MacManus—to escape from Australia. Patrick told me himself he’d met those fellows in America and had gone with them on their speaking tours of the country. He’d brought John Mitchel to Chicago and taken the whole bunch of us down to hear him speak at the new St. Patrick’s Parish Hall. Mitchel called for armed rebellion in Ireland and got great cheers from a crowd of men who’d be safe in their beds within the hour. Nice to see Patrick Kelly that added time, however.

Máire, though in no way interested in “the wild man” for herself, was still curious about his women. “Surely there are some,” she’d said to me. And when she’d said to him, “I know you’ve an Indian princess devoted to you up there in the North Woods,” he’d answered, “And why should an Indian woman accept a neglectful husband?”

I’d said to Máire that Roisin Dubh, the Dark Rosaleen—Ireland—was the only woman had captured Patrick Kelly. But then she’d said that surely a fellow so, so male got a bit of “this and that” somewhere, if I took her meaning. Everyone needed “this and that,” except maybe “Saint Honora,” she’d told me.

And I’d said that I’d had plenty of “this and that” with Michael, thank you very much, and would treasure those memories forever. She’d said she herself preferred present realities to distant memories. If a gentleman buyer, visiting from out of town, wanted to take her to dinner a time or two and then invited her to his room in the Tremont House, well . . .

“All right, Máire, enough,” I’d said.

“Oh, never the married ones,” she’d told me, “but young men often appreciate an older woman,” trying to shock me, but I’d set her back on her heels all right.

The look on Máire’s face when I said to her, “Really, all you’re doing is following the Brehon laws of ancient Ireland. That code set out ten lawful relationships between a man and woman for the purpose of ‘this and that.’ The union of an older woman and a younger man was one of those—no dowry exchanged, nothing long-lasting expected—an education for the fellow and some fun for the woman.” That had stopped her. She’d looked so surprised, I started laughing. “I’m not Saint Honora or a nun, either. Michael was the love of my life and now I’m happy to raise our children,” I’d told her.

Máire wasn’t the only one curious about Patrick Kelly and women. Over the years, any number of widows and single girls intercepted him after Christmas Mass at St. Patrick’s—talking away to him, smiling up into his eyes—very forward altogether.

“Rude,” I’d said to Máire last Christmas as we’d watched Katie McGee going on to Patrick on the church steps, touching his arm. “Embarrassing for Patrick.” But Máire had said that he seemed to enjoy Katie, and maybe he would marry a young woman, have children—after all, a man’s never past it.

“Patrick’s fifty-one,” I’d said. “Very fit and good-looking, I’ll give him that,” Máire’d said. “Ah well, maybe he is wed to Ireland, as you say.”

“He is,” I’d said.

I remembered how Patrick had moved away from Katie and stood, watching people make visits to the side altar where Father Dunne had set Grellan’s crozier, another Christmas tradition. Families knelt together at the rail. Fathers pointed at the golden staff, whispering to their children. Then, heads bowed, they’d pray, “God save Ireland. Grant her freedom.”

Máire had teased Patrick at that Christmas dinner about Katie’s attentions. Other Irish revolutionaries had wives, she’d said. Hadn’t Meagher married the daughter of a very rich New York Yankee family? The woman was maybe a little long in the tooth, but now money was no problem for him. If Patrick got a fine suit of clothes and started orating, maybe an heiress would fall for him and then we’d all be on the pig’s back.

He’d laughed then, but later that night he’d told me how the wives of the Young Ireland men had suffered when their husbands were in jail. Many of the women had no proper home, little money. Even now, the men were always gone, in danger from British agents even in America. Mrs. Mitchel and her children moved from pillar to post—Paris, then New York, Tennessee, Virginia. And there were the struggles within the revolutionary groups—not a life you’d wish on a wife. Patrick had gone quiet then.

That was last Christmas.

“Honora! Honora!” Máire called to me from the parlor doorway.

“Máire, what is it?”

“I’ve been standing here watching you stare down at the letter, not writing a word. Gone astray. Off with the fairies.”

“Sorry, Máire.”

“And me late for the Shop. Still, Mr. Potter Palmer mightn’t even notice. All the fellows do now is ask each other, ‘Will there be war?’ On and on. Mr. Palmer’s wife’s a southerner, though he’s all for Abe Lincoln. I’d better hurry, though Marshall will make up an excuse for me if anyone asks.”

Since that first Christmas when Patrick had arranged for Máire’s job, she’d made herself an essential part of the grand emporium she called the Shop.

She walked over to the window. “We need new curtains. You can see the wear on these in the spring sunshine. How old are they?”

“Let’s see,” I said. “We bought them the Christmas Patrick came from the gold fields. Remember? He brought all the boys jackknives, even the little ones, and rag dolls for Gracie and Bridget. Bridget wasn’t in school yet, so 1850.”

“You have to go through all that? Can’t you say we’ve had them ten years? You sound like the old ones at home, counting backward and forward from the summer the donkey kicked a hole in the shed. And not even knowing their own true age because they can’t name the year they were born.”

“I know our ages all right, Máire. I’m thirty-eight and you’re forty.”

“And both of us sticking it well,” she said, pulling me over to the large looking glass she’d purchased from the Shop at half its usual price. Máire pinched her cheeks, then brushed her upper lashes with her finger. “A tiny bit of bacon grease makes them darker. You should try it. And rub some of that cream I bought into your skin. Helps with wrinkles, though we’ve not too many.”

Her face was smooth—only a few tiny lines around her blue eyes. So like Mam.

Máire threw back her shoulders. “Bosoms still standing up straight, thank God.” She looked over at my image. “You’ve some curves now, Honora, but a girl’s figure still, and those high cheekbones and greeny gold eyes—lovely. Only for that stick-straight hair . . . Ah well. I’ve a strand or two of gray, but my curls hide it.” She smiled at herself and at me. “Molly says that new boarder thought I was Johnny Og’s sister, not his mother.”

“You could be,” I said.

“The widows,” she said, and laughed. “Not that we couldn’t have married again. But, of course, you’re so—”

“Don’t start, Máire,” I said. “Don’t start.”

She liked to tease me about Barney McGurk. He’d only proposed to me out of politeness because he spent so much time in our kitchen. Too afraid to ask Máire. And there had been fellows who’d come to me for the letter writing and would start to ramble on about needing a good wife and not minding about the children. Easy enough to discourage them. I loved Michael and always would. There’d never be another man for me. Máire knew that.

“Why don’t
you
find a husband? Still time,” I said.

Which was true enough. Women in their thirties and even early forties in Bridgeport still gave birth, often to the babies of second marriages. Fellows died young. What was a woman to do? And a man who lost a wife needed a mother for his children.

Máire settled a feathered hat on her head. “A woman’s worth more than a dowry,” she said. “Jesus, see the time on my new wind-up wall clock? I’ll miss the Archer Road horsecar.” And she was off to downtown Chicago.

Quiet in the house with all of them gone. I went back to the letter.

This fellow’d sent news about the war, too. He’d wanted me to assure his mother there wouldn’t be one, and if there was, he wouldn’t be fighting. Didn’t bear thinking about.

Bridgeport had supported Stephen Douglas for president. We were Democrats, after all, and hoped he’d find a way to keep North and South from fighting. But the southern members of the party had opposed Douglas and put up their own candidate against him.

President Lincoln was elected. The southern states left the Union. Bad times coming.

Slavery. What had Sister Henriette called it, “the great sin” of America? I thought of M’am Jacques. She’d been sold away from her own mother as a child, she told me. A terrible evil, no question. I agree with the abolitionists. I only wish they weren’t so hateful about Catholics. Patrick Kelly said Abraham Lincoln would use force if necessary to keep the South. “Divide America in two and England will march in and take over the whole place. That’s why we need Canada to rebel against the Crown and join us,” Patrick had told me.

Patrick said that the southern slave owners were like landlords in Ireland. Both groups made worlds of their own on big estates and really believed there were people put on this earth to serve them. Their property, not people.

The woman receiving the letter would have only one concern: Let my son be safe. Every mother’s prayer.

I wonder, does Patrick Kelly understand how much I want ordinary happiness for my boys—to marry, have children, do decent work, be healthy? During the Great Starvation, such a life seemed unattainable. Now it was within our grasp. But Patrick didn’t value the ordinary. His life had a different purpose. One Christmas evening—ten years ago?—he’d tried to explain himself to me.

“I was spared so I could serve the Cause,” he’d said. “I should be dead.”

Then he’d told me the story. He began with his voyage to America. Martin O’Malley had arranged passage for Patrick soon after he’d left Michael and me on Grace O’Malley’s island in Ballynahinch Lake. But the vessel was a coffin ship, Patrick told me, an old slaver, and the captain and crew were former Blackbirders. Nasty fellows. One of the sailors tried to attack a young Irish girl and Patrick fought the fellow—killed him. Self-defense, Patrick said, but he was put in irons and sent to jail when the ship docked in Quebec. Some of the passengers testified for Patrick at the trial, said he saved the girl’s honor. The British judge had laughed at that. Honor? Most of the prostitutes in Montreal were Irish, the judge had said. Maybe the girl had been looking for business, and Patrick was only jealous. Condemned to death, and they didn’t even know he was wanted in Ireland.

“Missed a trick there,” Patrick’d said, “though I suppose they couldn’t hang me twice.”

He’d escaped. One of the prison guards was from Kerry. The father of the girl he’d saved gave him a horse, “along with some food and Grellan’s crozier—they’d gotten it off the ship,” Patrick had said.

Irish farmers in the Canadian wilderness aided him, but he was a wanted man. Posters out with a sketch of him on them, rewards offered. Patrick had to keep moving. He traded the horse for food and went on foot, trying to get across the border to the United States. Winter caught him alone in a wild forest without food or shelter. He’d come to the end of his strength and was sick with fever when the Ojibwa found him.

There was an Irishman called Martin Lynch with the tribe. They’d been trapping in Canada and now were headed south to Wisconsin for the winter—1847. Black ’47, and him cut off from any news of Ireland and dying to boot. “Only for Martin Lynch asking the chief to hold a medewien healing service for me, I would be dead,” he’d told me.

“Medewien?” I’d asked him.

“Whites call the priests ‘medicine men,’ but no one outside the tribes really understands who they are. These men form a secret society. They learn rituals and herbal cures,” Patrick had said. He’d explained to me that the priests memorized the lore, laws, and stories of their people.

“As the Irish poets of ancient times did,” I’d said.

“That’s right,” Patrick had said. “Those at the highest levels of initiation led the ceremonies to honor the Manitou.”

“What is the Manitou?” I’d asked.

“That’s their word for God, but he’s not like the Christian God. Doesn’t hand out rewards and punishments. The Ojibwa believe God’s in everyone and everything—animals and trees, flowers and rocks, the sky, the wind—a very spiritual people altogether.”

The ceremony that had cured him took seven days, he’d told me. The priests had shot at him with magic seashells.

“Shot at you?” I’d asked.

“To kill me, symboliclike. Then I came back to life, cured,” Patrick had said.

But he’d been weak enough all through that first winter at the village he called Waaswaaganing, which meant, he’d said, “the place you fish with torches.” He’d been very eloquent, describing the lakes and pine forests and the clever ways the Ojibwa knew to live off the land, but the strange part of the tale, Patrick had said, concerned the Ojibwa’s attitude toward Grellan’s crozier. It seems the chief medewien priest, a fellow called Bald Eagle, Migizi, was quite fascinated with the spirals and zigzags incised in the gold. Patrick told him the staff had belonged to a great medicine man and that Patrick’s clan, the Kellys, had carried it into battle. Patrick had even explained its truth- compelling properties.

This Bald Eagle insisted Patrick go with him on a kind of sacred journey. Patrick had said they’d traveled east for days, portaging between rivers and then walking through dense forest—the start of spring, buds on the trees. They’d come to a clearing in the woods and a huge cave. Patrick had said a dolmen was guarding the entrance.

“You’ve lost me there,” I’d said. “A dolmen? You mean like the giant stone structures at home?”

“Not ‘like’—identical,” he’d answered. “A huge boulder, many tons, balanced on slender pillars. Dolmen. I know it sounds impossible, but I saw it.”

“Well, maybe in ancient times the Indians had similar—”

“I told you—not similar, the
same
, and next to the dolmen there was an ogham stone.”

“You mean something like an ogham stone?”

“Not like, not similar,
the same
. Carved with Celtic crosses and zigzag lines—the exact symbols that are on Grellan’s crozier! That’s what Migizi wanted me to see.”