Galway Bay (67 page)

“You’re in love with Patrick Kelly.”

“Máire, I’m not.”

“Spare me, Honora. I’d say he’s a grá for you, too, though he’s careful not to let on. I bet he has a woman somewhere.”

“He does not.”

“Why wouldn’t he? A fine-looking man, especially now he’s tamed himself. And why are you so upset with me suggesting it?” She got the jug and poured whiskey into each of our crystal glasses. “Tell me,” Máire said. “A bit of whiskey might help. Medicinal.”

I took a long drink. The words poured out of me—how guilty I felt when I realized I did have feelings for Patrick, such a betrayal of Michael, and a forbidden relationship anyway.

“Forbidden? Who says?”

“The Church. There’s an impediment to a widow marrying her husband’s brother. I mean, it’s possible to get a dispensation from the bishop, but still . . .”

“Dispensation? Impediment? And what are they when they’re at home? One more stick to beat us with. Whose Church is it, anyway? I’d say the women at the Holy Hour have as good a claim as any bishop. Ask any one of them about impediments—she’d say, ‘Patrick Kelly needs a wife and doesn’t have one, and you need a husband and don’t have one. Why not?’”

“I had a husband. The best man in the world.”

“Who’s been dead sixteen years,” Máire said. “Honora, you’ve made your heart into a shrine to Michael Kelly, but isn’t it yourself you’re lighting candles to? Honora, the good mother; Honora, the faithful widow; Honora, the righteous woman. Michael would be ashamed of you.”

“You don’t understand,” I said.

“I do understand. You think yourself into knots, torture yourself. Maybe Patrick’s a mearbhaill. . . . Take a closer look.”

“What’s the use, Máire? I’m forty-one years old. Patrick’s fifty-three.”

“And I’m forty-three and doing nicely,” said Máire. “You’ve years and years ahead of you.” She stopped. “Feck it, Honora. Hide. What do I care? I saved you once. Well, I’m not doing it again. You’re always saying we Irish rescued ourselves, saved each other. Well, save yourself. Rescue Patrick Kelly. At least tell him how you feel. There’s a lovely room at the Tremont House—”

“Máire! I could never sleep with a man I wasn’t married to.”

“And I never sleep with a man married to anybody else. You’re a coward, Honora. What about Maeve and the Brehon laws? Patrick Kelly’s going back to war. He could die or disappear back to Ireland. Gone and never knowing—”

“All right, all right. Maybe it’d be no harm to talk to him.”

“A nice long good-bye, and then who knows? I’ll send Patrick up to you when he gets back from McKenna’s.”

Midnight had passed and dawn was close when Jamesy, Stephen, and Michael came in, all of them singing “Ireland Boys Hurrah” and well jarred, but then so am I, arranging words in my head for hours. Patrick will be at the door any minute.

“Go to bed, boys. Get some sleep.”

But Jamesy dropped into Patrick’s chair.

“It’s late, Jamesy,” I said.

“We wanted to give Uncle Patrick a good send-off, Mam,” he said.

“Send-off?”

“He’s gone, Mam,” Jamesy said.

“Off with that James Stephens fellow,” Michael said.

“An early start,” Jamesy said. “Uncle Patrick’s taking Stephens to visit Fenian Circles in the army on his way south. Michael and I wanted to go along, but Uncle Patrick said we had plenty to do here . . . Mam, are you all right?”

I must have slumped forward. The boys were standing over me. Jamesy held my shoulders.

“Some water,” I said.

After all that, Patrick’s gone. I looked at the faces of my sons, concerned about
me
when it’s Jamesy going to the war, and the other two will follow if the fighting goes on much longer—in danger, all of them. Forgive me, Lord. I’d never flaunt the laws of the Church. Protect them, please, dear God. Keep them safe.

I stood up. “Come into the kitchen. I’ll cook you some eggs. And Jamesy, there’s extra socks on the bed, to take with you.”

“Thanks, Mam. Oh, I wanted to tell you—I’m leaving the pipes with Michael. He’s already got a good few tunes and, well, it’s hot weather in Georgia—not good for the wood.”

“I’ll take great care of them,” Michael said, sitting down at the table.

Afraid to risk the pipes with the battles that awaited them. I’ll be making my Stations. Máire can mind her own business. And no whiskey.

Nine candles to light every day—Paddy, Thomas, Jamesy, Daniel, James Mulloy, James Nugent, Colonel Mulligan, Patrick Kelly, and the final candle for Johnny Og. Eight of them in danger. One gone.

The flames ducked and dove, enclosed in the blue glass votive lights lined up before Our Lady’s altar, my troops standing watch through the night. Keep them safe.

But young Michael’s schoolmate was correct. The mathematics of battle prevailed. All eight could not survive. It was the Irish Brigade fell to the odds. Kernstown, July 23, 1864.

Only a few months before the battle, the whole regiment had come to Chicago on furlough. April 1864. Paddy’s three-year enlistment was done and dusted. He was home, courting Bridey Kelly from Roscommon. Safe. But then the call went out. Men were needed—even conscription couldn’t fill the ranks. Alderman Comiskey told me the secretary to the British consul was making nice money declaring men who were drafted British citizens and exempt. “Traitors,” Paddy had called them. But I couldn’t blame the fellows, not with the number of casualties listed in the paper every day.

“I have to go back,” Paddy had told me. “Plenty of the fellows haven’t served their three years. My friends will need me.”

“Thomas found a way to get out.”

“And none of us soldiers have much time for him because of it. He as much as deserted, going off with that photographer fellow O’Sullivan. He’s lucky Uncle Patrick fixed it when he brought James Stephens to meet Colonel Mulligan. Photography officer . . . How can he live with himself?”

Paddy had handed me a broadside. It invited men to reenlist in “Mulligan’s Brigade.” A bounty of four hundred and two dollars would be paid to veterans.

“I want to marry Bridey,” Paddy said. “Reenlisting’s the only way I can get the money we’ll need.”

“If Slattery would advance you some—”

“I can’t go back to work for Slattery,” he said.

“There are jobs galore, Paddy—the railroad and . . .” I stopped.

“The packinghouse? I tried it, don’t you remember? Though now I’m well used to blood and muck all over me and the smell of death. I can’t take orders anymore, Mam. I’ve had enough. I want to be my own boss. I’d like to buy the forge from Slattery. He wants to retire. Michael and I can run it, but I need money. See how veterans can get a four-hundred-and-two-dollar bonus if they reenlist? That’s more than I can make in a year. Added to that is a month’s pay. So, five hundred dollars, Mam, and my monthly pay until the war’s over. I can save seven or eight hundred dollars. Bridey and I will get married while I’m home now, and then if I die, she’ll get the money.”

“Alanna,” I said.

He let me hug him, my sturdy lad, but stayed straight and stiff in my arms.

“Aren’t you afraid at all?”

“Mam, I was afraid when I stole the bishop’s egg, but I did it. I still remember the jaws of that old slobbering hound.”

“It was a lovely egg, Paddy, still the best I’ve ever tasted.”

“Because we were starving. And that’s why life for me and Bridey will be so good, because I know now what luck it is to be alive.”

“It is, Paddy. A miracle.”

“And to have children,” he said.

“Yes.”

“My firstborn will be a son,” he said. “Michael Joseph Kelly.”

“You’ve so much to live for, Paddy. Take care of yourself. Promise me that after the war’s over you’ll stay home, no matter what your uncle Patrick—”

“I won’t be joining the Fenians, Mam,” Paddy said. “I don’t know how any fellows who’ve been in one war would want to be in another. No one wants peace more than a soldier who’s been in combat—that’s what my friend Marty Berndt in the Pennsylvania Volunteers says. And it’s true, Mam. But
this
is
my
war. I have to finish it. But then, no more.”

Colonel Mulligan and Marion came to Paddy and Bridey’s wedding, and James Nugent and Bridget managed a dance and a walk along the river that spring evening.

“He’s asked me to marry him,” Bridget whispered to me later, “and I said yes, I would. Yes.”

Eyes shining. So happy. A reward for all her years of goodness, helping me raise her brothers.

“A lot of weddings when the war is over and they march back,” Máire had said when the Brigade left in July.

As we stood on the platform waving good-bye, the train moved slowly from the station. “Don’t cry, Mam,” they’d told us. And we didn’t. Smiling, all of us, and the men the same. Colonel Mulligan gave a little salute as he passed us. James Nugent held his hand on the glass of the window. Paddy nodded. And Marion Mulligan held her three-year-old up to us. She and her babies were going with the Brigade. She’d stay near headquarters in Virginia—“James wants us to be there for the victory.” Then Kernstown. A good omen to stop the Confederates’ last thrust there, because General Shields defeated a Confederate force at that very place at the start of the war.

But Colonel Mulligan, who had been named general that very day, wasn’t allowed to follow Shields’s battle plan. Disaster.

Colonel Mulligan was hit and badly wounded. James Nugent had been one of those carrying him to safety when the colonel saw the Brigade’s flag fall onto the battlefield. “Lay me down,” he’d told James. “Save the flag!” But when James Nugent picked up the banner, he too was shot. Enemy soldiers attacked the group and captured the colonel. He died two days later. Marion reached him two hours after his death. He was thirty-four. General Mulligan, but never Senator Mulligan or President Mulligan. James Nugent was missing, presumed dead, his body never found. Paddy had survived—just—knocked unconscious, he said, but able to escape with a number of the Brigade, more determined than ever to fight.

Bridget often stayed with Marion Mulligan now, helping her with the babies and trying to console Mrs. Nugent, who was determined to find her son’s grave. The Confederates had recruited townspeople to bury the bodies left on the battlefield, and there was a chance someone in the area might remember James Nugent. A thousand broadsides were posted around Kernstown and the vicinity with this description: “Lt. Nugent was 18 years and six months old; six feet in height; rather slender; fair coloring, blue eyes, golden hair, regular features, white even teeth, smooth-shaved face, was dressed in dark blue jacket, with first lieutenant shoulder straps, black pants. Had on a plain gold ring with his own and other initials on the inside. Any person or persons knowing anything about his burial or grave, would be doing a great act of kindness to his mother and sisters by giving information.”

It was her initials, Bridget told me, with James Nugent’s, engraved inside that ring—J.H.N. and B.K. “A pledge to me,” she said. “That’s why he pressed his hand against the window—to show me his ring finger.”

No one came forward. We waited. Would the war never end?

With a big
whoosh
, the huge bonfire blazed up against the night sky. The South had surrendered! Palm Sunday, April 9, 1865. Michael and the Hickory Gang threw packing cases onto the tower they’d built as soon as word came. Peace. The neighbors came out. Such singing and dancing and hugging. Molly and Lizzie, James McKenna and Barney McGurk—the tavern emptied. All of Bridgeport celebrated together.

Stephen stood to the side with the firemen—keeping an eye on the flames. Máire and Gracie clapped along with John Joe’s fiddle, but Bridget and I stood quiet. Peace had not come soon enough.

Now the victory bonfire illuminated Bridget’s face. Peace never comes soon enough. The
Tribune
had estimated that six hundred thousand men had died in four years, the combined total for both armies. Some perished immediately on the battlefield, some from their wounds later, many from disease. Only a guess. Hard to know for sure. So many.

Bridget, Máire, Gracie, and I left the celebration and slipped into St. Bridget’s. Quiet, lit only by the tabernacle lamp and the votive candles. One by one, the Holy Hour women came in—Lizzie, Molly, and the others—and we thanked God and His Blessed Mother that the killing was over. But it wasn’t.

President Lincoln was assassinated April 14, 1865, Good Friday. Not even a week since we celebrated around the bonfire, and now Bridgeport stood together, watching the flag-draped caisson bear his body from the train station to the courthouse. Lines of girls in white dresses led the procession, followed by soldiers—companies, brigades, divisions. Yet these were the fellows who had left the fighting before the war was over. The rest were still making their own way home. Máire and Bridget and I watched the sad parade.

“Any information?” I asked Bridget.

“None,” Bridget said. “Marion paid for more broadsides to be posted. Next month we’re going down to Virginia. Maybe if we’re there, we can find James, or his grave.”

Find James? Was Bridget pretending to herself that somewhere in Virginia James Nugent was alive? Imagining that he’d lost his memory but would see the poster, read, “Six feet tall, slender, golden hair, gold ring,” and say, “Why, that’s me! I’m him, I’m James Nugent!”

For years after Johnny Leahy drowned, Máire had wondered if maybe he’d been saved at sea and was strolling the streets of New York—not sure of who he was, but whole and alive. Hard for me to believe Michael was dead, even though I’d seen his spirit leave his body. But when there is no body . . . Would Bridget wait and wait, nursing this hopeless love, keeping an image in her mind that had no reality?

The cortege passed us. A grand funeral, a solemn tribute. See how we revered our great president? We’ve done our best for him in these grand ceremonies. Now he can come back. But the dead don’t return. Not to this world. James Nugent would not read his poster.

It was June 1865 before all the boys were finally home. Paddy and the Irish Brigade had returned the first of May. And now Irish families from all over Chicago assembled in front of St. Patrick’s Church to welcome back the Irish Legion. Nine hundred had left three years ago. Only three hundred returned. Jamesy and Daniel, safe. Only Thomas missed the grand family reunion, off somewhere in the West with Timothy O’Sullivan, taking photographs, sending us a line or two now and then. And no Patrick Kelly.