Galway Bay (60 page)

“He’d come for money, but not for lives? Not for Johnny Og?”

“Plenty of Johnny Ogs, Honora.”

Night was falling, shrouding the prairie.

“At least Paddy’s done his ninety days and he’s finished,” I said.

“His time will be extended. Soldiers will be kept as long as they’re needed.”

“But the parole. The Brigade can’t fight again!”

Patrick kicked at the ground. “As soon as Mulligan is released, he’ll go straight to Washington and have the Brigade reinstated.”

“But he can’t! That was part of the parole! Here, look.”

I carried Paddy’s parole, folded up and tucked inside my blouse. A talisman—he was out of the war. In it, Corporal Paddy Kelly pledged his word of honor not to take up arms against the Confederate states or give aid or comfort to the government of the United States or any of its armies.

“Given at Lexington, September twenty-fifth, 1861,” I read. So,” I said, “he can’t fight. None of the lads can—see? Pledges his word of honor.”

“Look again, Honora. It says ‘until he shall have been exchanged or otherwise released.’ They parole our troops and we parole theirs. Everyone goes home and joins up again. Eventually there will be prisoner-of-war camps, enemies captured can be removed from the field and—”

“Removed from the field? You make it sound like a hurling match.”

“Too bad it’s not,” he said. “The Ojibwa settle their quarrels by playing lacrosse.”

“And the old Irish sent one champion to fight another. Single combat.”

He nodded. “Listen, Honora, I have to leave now and I’ll . . .”

“I won’t let Paddy go back to war, and the others aren’t enlisting,” I said, interrupting him.

“Honora, I told you before, you won’t be able to stop them. They’re pledging themselves up there, swearing on Johnny Og’s coffin.”

“Do you think Máire would let Thomas and Daniel . . . ? Please keep your guns and drums away from us.”

“You’ll see,” Patrick said. “Máire will want Johnny Og’s death to have some meaning, as the boys of the Brigade do.”

“But death isn’t real to them.”

“We all die, Honora. These boys have warrior blood in them. Victory here and freedom for Ireland—they’ll change history.”

“History? Now they’re dying for history? September twentieth, 1861—Johnny Og Leahy is wounded. October twelfth—he dies, at age twenty-one. Write it down. That’s history. I’m sick of history.”

“You can’t escape history,” said Patrick. “You’re Irish.”

“Mam!” Michael ran up to me, with Charlie Comiskey following. “It’s too dark to see the ball—we’re going in.”

“I’m coming with you, Michael.”

“Good. Come on, Uncle Patrick,” he said, taking his hand. “I have a good plan for getting those Rebs who killed Johnny Og.”

I picked up Charlie Comiskey, and I pulled Michael to me. “Uncle Patrick has to go, Michael. He’s going on a long trip and we won’t be seeing him.”

“Till Christmas?” said Michael. “That’s not too long.”

“I may not be able to come for Christmas,” Patrick said.

Just as well, I thought.

“He’s trying to make the war shorter,” I said.

“Not too short, Uncle Patrick,” Michael said. “I’ll be thirteen next year and I could—”

“Michael!”

“Your mother’s cold, Michael. Go in with her. Honora, I’ve spoken to John Comiskey. He’s a job for you, sorting out the Brigade’s correspondence when Colonel Mulligan returns. The Union army’s captured some high-ranking Confederates. They’ll be exchanged for Mulligan soon. The office is downtown. You’ll need the money, Honora. Prices will rise. War does that. And I don’t know where I’ll be.”

“Thank you. Good-bye, Patrick,” I said. “I’ll be praying for you.”

“Do that, Honora.”

Chapter 30

C
OLONEL MULLIGAN
returned to Chicago on November 1, Samhain, and I received a note from him. He had meetings in Springfield and Washington but expected to be back in two weeks. My job as his secretary would start then. It couldn’t come soon enough. The cost of food went up every day.

Máire had not gone back to the Shop. After being so brave through Johnny Og’s funeral, she’d collapsed, sleeping most of the day, sitting up with a jug of whiskey into the night. In the three weeks since we’d buried Johnny Og, she’d left the house only on Sundays to visit his grave at Calvary Cemetery, up north beyond the city limits on Lake Michigan.

A long, cold, bleak trip it was. A train took us to Howard Street, then we hired one of the waiting hacks that provided transport for funerals during the week and visitors on Sunday.

Full winter now, the sky low and leaden over the gray lake, a chilly wind blowing.

We’d stand at the mound over Johnny Og, Máire wrapped in a black shawl. The Snowy-Breasted Pearl had become a grieving mother. “At least I’ve tucked his body into a snug grave,” she’d said to me last Sunday.

I’d put my arm around her. “Why not come to the Holy Hour, Máire?”

She’d looked surprised. “I’m done with all that, Honora.”

“What?”

“I’m ignoring God. Otherwise I’ll start hating Him. This way’s better. Let’s go home now.”

Later, I’d settled Máire by the fire and drunk a whiskey with her.

“Go home, Honora. I’m fine.”

I’d stirred the fire and left. She’d wanted me gone so she could drain the jug and maybe sleep. “Every night the same, Auntie Honey,” Gracie had told me. “She’ll only eat a potato or two.”

Gracie and Thomas and Daniel had their dinner upstairs with us now. Máire wouldn’t come. “I’m not hungry.”

“Leave her alone,” Molly Flanigan had told me, and Lizzie said the same. “Give her time, and if she finds comfort in the whiskey, what harm?”

Johnny Og’s army wages paid Máire’s rent for two months. But money was running out, and she wouldn’t, couldn’t, return to the Shop.

Paddy was drinking heavy, too. In McKenna’s every night until the early hours. He hadn’t gone back to Slattery’s.

“Why?” he had said. “I’ll be reenlisting, and then there’ll be the bounty, Mam.”

Twenty-five dollars bounty was paid on enlistment. Most families in Bridgeport were struggling. Good jobs were getting scarce. The big companies that got army contracts for meat and beans and flour and boots drove the smaller places out of business. Hough’s was gone, Thomas out of a job. The new packinghouses paid low wages— fellows hired by the day, fired for no reason. The bosses didn’t want Irish workers. They preferred the new people coming in from all over Europe, who couldn’t speak English and had a harder time standing up for themselves. Even Daniel’s barrel factory suffered, their prices undercut by new factories.

A bonus of twenty-five dollars right away and regular army pay would support a family, no problem. At the Holy Hour, mothers who hadn’t spent Sunday afternoons at Calvary Cemetery thanked God their sons had reenlisted, and prayed for a swift victory.

Paddy was only waiting for Colonel Mulligan to give the word. Jamesy, Thomas, and Daniel planned to join him. And Máire and I could not stop them.

Bridget and Gracie had wanted to give up school to work and bring in money.

“Work and do what?” I’d said. “Be a maid in the house of one of your classmates from Saint Xavier’s? Graduate. Then you can become teachers.”

I couldn’t charge mothers to write letters to their soldier sons or ask Father Kelly to pay me. He’d stopped construction on the church. Every collection went into a fund for widows and orphans. So I was very relieved on the day in mid-November when Paddy escorted me to the Brigade’s office downtown, and glad too that he was beside me in the chaos. Chicago was gorging on the business brought by war. Buildings burst out of the mud. Trains arrived from every direction. Crowds and more crowds.

“These are the offices of the lawyers and traders and insurance brokers. They’re the ones grease the wheels of Chicago,” Paddy said as we climbed the stairs of the brick building on Lake Street.

He knocked on a door on the third floor. Gold letters spelled out lines of names on frosted glass: first, Arrington, Fitch & Mulligan, Attorneys-at-Law; then,
Western Tablet
, William Onahan, Publisher, James Mulligan, Editor; and then on the bottom line, John Comiskey, Alderman 10th Ward, Treasurer, Shields Guards/Irish Brigade.

“Come in,” a voice called.

The three men, sitting together at a long wooden table, stood immediately, putting their cigars on a dish in the center of the table.

Paddy saluted. “Corporal Kelly reporting, Colonel, sir.” He clicked his heels.

“At ease. At ease, please,” Colonel James Mulligan said. I noticed again his dark, intense eyes, that disciplined mustache. A very serious man.

Paddy clasped his hands behind him, stood with his feet apart.

Colonel Mulligan spoke very kindly to me, beautiful manners altogether, saying how proud I must be of Corporal Kelly and asking me to express his sympathy to Corporal Leahy’s mother. Then he asked if I’d had any news from Patrick Kelly, which led Mr. Onahan and Alderman Comiskey to praise Patrick’s efforts as what Colonel Mulligan called “our builder of morale.” I thanked Mr. Onahan and the alderman for coming to Johnny Og’s wake and funeral.

“We must honor the fallen,” Colonel Mulligan said. Then he explained my first assignment: Letters of condolence must be sent to the families of all one hundred Irish Brigade members killed or wounded at Lexington. Colonel Mulligan would write a sample letter, which I would then copy onto the Brigade’s stationery. He handed me a sheet of heavy white paper with “The Irish Brigade” engraved in Gaelic-style letters at the top. On the left, shamrocks surrounded a harp set above a banner that read, “Erin Go Bragh” and “Remember Lexington and Fontenoy.”

Colonel Mulligan said the bodies of many of the Brigade soldiers were buried in Missouri. Unmarked graves, I thought. He wanted the letters to be a kind of memorial for the families, something they could treasure. Father Kelly had confirmed what Patrick Kelly had told them, that I wrote a lovely hand. How quickly could I do one hundred letters? I asked the colonel if I could work at home and bring the letters to him to be signed. He said yes and that I should take them to his house.

“I’ll have them for you tomorrow afternoon,” I said, thinking Bridget and Gracie could help me. Alderman Comiskey wondered if ten dollars would be acceptable. Very acceptable, I said. Colonel Mulligan then said that he couldn’t ask me to write my sister’s letter. He’d do it, and I could use it as the model for the others.

He sat down at the table, took a sheet of stationery, and began to write—stopping and starting, tapping his finger on the desk.

As he worked on the letter, I looked over the list he’d given me:

Company A: Patrick Carey, John W. Smith, J. J. Armstrong, John Kelly, John Foley.

Company B: Michael Grenahan, Frank Curran, William Mulligan, F. Cummings, Patrick Fitzgerald, Edward Conlee, McCarthy, no first name, John Delaney, John Gallagher.

All dead.

Patrick Mooney, Edward Hanlon, David Shea, Anthony McBreagh, John McLaughlin, Thomas O’Meara, John McCloy, James Roche, Patrick McMann . . . Dead.

I noted the different spellings—Kelley with an “e” and without. Conry and Conroy, Conlee, and Connelly—they’d put English on their names to accommodate America.

I looked at Paddy, whole and healthy, and thought of Johnny Og and Máire.

“Máire, here, I’ve something for you. Let me in, please.” An age until she opened her front door. She took the letter and walked into the kitchen to read it. I followed her.

Cold in here. That fire’s burnt down to ashes. Máire’s hair looks greasy—unkempt. She had a black shawl wrapped around her. I wonder where her red silk is.

Máire set the letter on the table, pushed it one way, then another. She finally opened it. Máire read the letter twice. Then she ran her fingers over the paper, rubbing the heading. The harp—Erin Go Bragh—Remember Lexington.

“Would you like to hear it?” she asked me.

“I would.”

She read:

Dear Mrs. Leahy,

Your son died for a glorious cause and I know you do not begrudge him his destiny. I pray that in return for your sacrifice, Our Lord will bless you with the grace to carry this cross. He asked the same courage of His own mother. As she saw the resurrection, so too will you see John live again in our victory, here and in our beloved Ireland. John Leahy’s name is added to the roll of the brave. He will be remembered.

Your obedient servant,

James A. Mulligan, Colonel of the Irish Brigade,

23rd Illinois Volunteers.

“Added to the roll of the brave,” Máire repeated. “He will be remembered. My son. My Johnny Og. More than his father got.” She smiled at me. The first smile in a month.

“More, surely,” I said.

“And that tidy grave. We must put up a headstone—green marble with ‘Irish Brigade’ on it and the shamrocks and harp for all to see.”

“We will,” I said.

“Do you believe what Father Kelly said? Is my Johnny Og safe at home?”

I looked at her and took her hand. “He is, Máire. Johnny Og’s meeting his father at long last.”

She nodded and squeezed my hand. “Johnny would be proud to have a son who struck a blow for freedom. Do you think he knows?”

“He does, Máire. Michael is with them, too.”

“In heaven,” she said. “With Mam and Da and Granny. A great gathering. I suppose if I’m going to believe in heaven, I’ve got to let God back in. I have missed going to Mass. Couldn’t trust you to bring me back the news from the church steps.” Máire stood up and looked around the kitchen. “Best start a meal for the boys. Look at the state of that fire. Have you some wood I could borrow, Honora?”

“I have, Máire.”

“Though why I say borrow . . . You’ll not be getting it back.”

“No bother.”

“Remember Christmas Eve, when we were going to burn Molly’s chairs and then Patrick Kelly came?”

“I remember,” I said.

“A good fellow, Patrick Kelly. Bringing Johnny Og home. Johnny Og had such an old head on him, and now he’ll not live to comb gray hairs,” she said. “I thought we’d escaped death.”

“I know.”