Galway Bay (52 page)

Patrick Kelly was gone.

I went to the kitchen window. Pink light brushed the snow as the sun rose out of the Lake. Many, many inches buried Bridgeport—no heaps of rubbish, just hills and valleys now—beautiful. The wind threw sprays of snow into the light—diamond sparks lifted above the frozen surface. Christmas morning.

Has Patrick Kelly helped us only to disappear as he’d done so many times in Ireland? I wondered. But then I saw him, seeming to walk on top of the snow, almost at the door. I wrapped the pelt around me and hurried down the stairs.

When I opened the door he was bent over, removing something from his feet.

“Snowshoes,” he said, holding up a round wooden frame with a handle, crisscrossed with a kind of netting. “Indian invention. How’s the baby?” he asked.

“Better.”

“An Ojibwa cure.”

“Ojibwa?”

“The Indian tribe I’ve been trapping with up north. You’re dressed in one of our prizes—a bear skin.”

“Very warm,” I said. “Come in. They’re all asleep upstairs.” I walked in the door and up a few steps, Patrick following.

“Wait,” he said. “Sit down a moment.”

Drawing the pelt around me, I eased myself onto a step. He sat down two steps below me and set a full sack on the step between us.

“What’s this?”

“Eggs. Rashers. A jug of milk.”

“Thank you, Patrick. And thank you for the wood.”

He shrugged off his fur jacket and leaned his shoulder against the step. He’d been working hard somewhere—muscles under the buckskin shirt he wore, some heft on that lean frame of his. Outlandish clothing, though, not only tight leggings of yellow leather with fringe along the sides but soft shoes beaded in different colors and designs. He saw me looking at his feet.

“Moccasins,” he said, lifting one foot. He pointed to the flower designs on his shirt. “Porcupine quills, dyed,” he said.

“You’d get some queer old looks in Galway,” I said.

“You would, too,” he said, “wrapped in the skin of a she-bear.”

“No bears in Ireland now,” I said, “though there must have been once, or where did the MacMahons get their name?”

“Son of the Bear,” he said.

I nodded.

“So hard to believe Michael’s dead. I can’t take it in, Honora,” he said. “I thought all of you were safe in Ireland and that the money I sent would see you through.”

“If we’d left as soon as we got the money from you, Michael would be alive. But you made him part of the uprising—your man in Galway. He wouldn’t go.”

“And it’s my fault you stayed?” he said.

“Well . . .”

He pushed himself up to my step, sat next to me. “You blame
me
for Michael’s death,” he said.

I put my hand over my eyes.

“Answer me, Honora.” He took my hand away, made me look at him.

“All right. I do. Maybe I’m wrong, but I do. You should have sent money earlier. . . .”

“How? I was on the run, Honora. Hiding all that first year. I didn’t even know the pratties had failed until—”

“Why didn’t you? Everybody else in Amerikay knew. If we’d gotten that money right away, it would have made all the difference. He looked to you, Patrick! And then when we could leave, you had to enlist him in your revolution. He worked so hard, Patrick, so hard—walking ten miles barefoot through the snow and ice to break stones for twelve, fourteen hours—no real food to eat, getting thinner and thinner. And I couldn’t help him. I couldn’t do anything. Even the good things—the harvest, blacksmithing—turned wrong. If he hadn’t had to work at the forge in Galway City where the fever was, maybe he’d be alive now. I had to watch him die. Alone in that shed. I couldn’t save him, Patrick. And you, you were gone. Gone.”

He still had my hand. “Honora, is it yourself you blame?”

I pulled my hand away.

“You said you couldn’t save him.”

“We’d survived so much—Black ’47, baby Grellan’s death and Granny’s, my brothers gone, Jackson . . . But in the end, in the end . . .”

“Don’t blame yourself, Honora. Or me. You know who murdered Michael and a million more. They’ve been trying to destroy us for centuries and will go on killing Irish people until we take our country back. Michael has not died in vain, Honora. I promise you that. We will avenge his death and all the others.”

“Too late, Patrick. The Sassenach have won. The Irish are dead or gone from the land forever.”

“That’s wrong, Honora. The battle’s only begun. We’re gathering our strength here in America. They didn’t take America into account.”

I sagged down. “Oh, but Patrick, it takes so much to survive in Amerikay. What’s left over for Ireland? Seems most of the Irish have to forget Ireland in order to make their way here.”

“You’re wrong there, Honora. You’ll see.”

“Jesus Christ,” Máire called down. “What are you two doing there? Come up.”

I put my hands down on the steps to push myself up. Patrick took my arm and helped. I wrapped the bear skin tight around me.

“You look like some prehistoric queen of Ireland,” he said. “Banba or Eriu, or the great Maeve herself.”

I nodded. A truce. “Nollaig Mhaith Chugat . . . a good Christmas to you, Patrick. I’m glad you’re here. I’m sure it was Michael sent you to us. Maybe there’s truth in not being able to believe he’s dead. I feel Michael’s with us, somehow. I am carrying his child. A son, Patrick, I’m sure. We’ll name him Michael Kelly. A comfort for us both.”

He nodded but said nothing, then followed me up the stairs.

The kitchen was warm. Sun was coming through the window. Máire and I cooked the eggs and rashers while the children sat at Molly’s table staring at Patrick, not saying a word.

Thomas spoke first. “We had this breakfast every day at my father’s house,” he said to Patrick as I put the food on his plate.

“So did we,” Paddy said.

“You did not. You were poor,” Thomas said.

Máire turned from the stove. “Poor? I’ll give you poor. Sure we were all poor, and take that sneer out of your voice, Thomas, or I’ll shake it out of you.”

Stephen clapped his hands. He always got a great laugh from Máire’s scoldings. He’s well.

“We won’t be poor anymore now that you’re here, Uncle Patrick, will we?” said Paddy.

“You won’t be poor, Paddy, because you have a strong back and a good pair of hands. How do you find Hough’s?”

“It’s all right,” Paddy said.

“He hates it,” said Jamesy. “Hates the blood and the shit and watching the men beat the cows to death.”

“But I go, Uncle Patrick, I go every morning, and Johnny Og goes with me. We didn’t whinge and whine to get out of the hard work like Thomas did so he could run around the city like a monkey on a string,” Paddy said.

“Where did you get such an expression?” I asked him.

“Barney McGurk says it.”

“Teacher showed us a picture of a monkey in school, Uncle Patrick,” Jamesy said. “Brought Daniel to the front of the class to show how his face was like a monkey’s.”

“You never told me that,” I started.

“For Jesus’ sake!” Máire said, and banged the skillet on the top of the stove. “What happened, Daniel?”

“Teacher took a ruler and put it up against me and said I had a monkey face because I was Irish.”

That set the other children laughing. “Monkey face!” they repeated. “Monkey face!”

“Stop it, stop it!” I said. “This is nothing to laugh at.”

But the big boys chanted, “Monkey face, monkey face!”

“Stop it!”

But they wouldn’t.

Patrick brought his fist down hard on the table. The plates rattled. Silence.

“You listen when your mother speaks. And you always do what she tells you. And as for that teacher, he’s an ignorant guilpín. There are no apes or gorillas or monkeys in this house. Only some bad-mannered children.”

The children gaped at him. I looked over at Máire. Should Patrick really speak so harshly to the boys?

“Honora?” Patrick said.

All the children turned to me.

“Your uncle Patrick’s right,” I said.

“Boys can get out of hand,” Patrick Kelly said to Máire and me as we sat in the kitchen after our young fellows, wrapped in furs, had run out to join the Bridgeport children rampaging in the snow. Father Donohue hadn’t been able to get through the snow. No Christmas Mass at McKenna’s.

The small Christmas tree was on the floor now, with Bridget, Gracie, and Stephen on their stomachs under it, looking up into the branches.

“This is where the bird that sang to baby Jesus lives,” we heard Bridget tell them.

“
Curoo, curoo
,” they sang.

“A good imagination, that one,” I said to Patrick as the three sang.

He smiled. Almost pleasant when he smiles.

Máire brought out the doneen pipes and sweet Tip-Top tobacco she’d bought as our gifts. One drag started me coughing.

“Don’t waste it,” Máire said, and passed the pipe to Patrick. “Her condition,” she said.

“He knows,” I said.

“You’ve done well enough for yourselves to get here,” Patrick said. “Two women, eight children.”

“True enough,” Máire said. “Did you tell him, Honora, how Jackson burned the cottages over our heads in Bearna?”

“I didn’t.”

“We escaped in Da’s púcán,” she said. “Sailed through the night down Galway Bay to Ard near Carna in Connemara, Granny’s home place.”

“Your parents?”

“They stayed, Patrick,” I said. “We’ve heard nothing.”

“Ard near Carna. I’ll look into it,” he said. “Go on.”

Máire told him how we’d rowed the curragh out to the
Superior
and were taken aboard.

“Brave in a boat, Honora,” he said to me.

Máire went on with her story of our voyage, the time in New Orleans, the journey up the Mississippi, our arrival here—the disappointment. “I could have stayed in New Orleans. Opportunities there. But Honora insisted on Chicago. And Patrick Kelly.”

“I promised Michael,” I said to Patrick. “His dying words: ‘Take the children to Patrick in Chicago.’”

Patrick shook his head, drew on the pipe, and breathed out the smoke. “Good on you both,” he said. “Now. First, I’ll get Johnny Og and Paddy out of Hough’s,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Phil Slattery, the blacksmith. He can take Paddy on as a helper at the forge.”

“What about my Johnny Og?” Máire said.

“Michael Gibson has a boatworks,” Patrick said. “Johnny Og’s father was a fisherman, wasn’t he? Michael’s a good fellow.”

“All right,” said Máire. “No need to worry about Thomas. He’s set, and my job is—” She stopped. “I liked it until . . .”

“Her boss cheated her,” I said. “Croaker.”

“One of those men from back east. A Yankee. Can’t expect to be treated fairly by them,” Patrick said.

“How was I to know?” Máire said. “I sold to the
best
people in Chicago—Cyrus McCormick himself.”

“McCormick’s a thief and a bigot. Lectures his workers on the evils of Catholicism, brags about how his ancestors fought with King Billy in the North of Ireland to destroy the papists. Typical of the
best
people in Chicago.”

“Oh,” Máire said.

“Now, the school,” Patrick said. “Can’t pull them out. No place else to send them yet, though the bishop plans for every parish to have its own school.”

“The bishop, is it?” Máire said to Patrick. “Listen to him, Honora. As if the bishop would sit sipping tea with such a savage-looking fellow!”

“Bishop Quarter and I prefer whiskey,” Patrick said.

I laughed at that.

Máire flared up. “You think he’s funny?,” she said to me. “Who is he to come in and lay down the law to us? Took him long enough to get here.”

“Don’t attack Patrick, Máire. I already have,” I said. And then to Patrick, “We do need our own schools. To think of that teacher ridiculing Daniel in front of the whole class—the Irish ape-man? I thought we’d left that behind us.”

“There’s plenty who insult us in America. The difference is, we fight back. I’ll have a word with the teacher,” Patrick said. “He’ll not bother Jamesy and Daniel again. Now, about dinner—”

“Excuse me, Patrick,” Máire said. “Your questions have been asked and answered. Your orders received. I have some questions for you, like where have you been? What have you been doing? Have you a wife, family?”

Patrick stood up. “I’ll call the children in. As I was trying to say, we’re invited to the neighbors for dinner.”

“Which neighbors?”

“The Potawatomis—friends of mine.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Máire.

Patrick walked to the door and turned. “Honora will tell you what my work is, and no, I haven’t a wife and never will. Wouldn’t be fair to the woman.” He left to collect the children.

We wrapped ourselves in the furs. Patrick sat us all on a long sled—a toboggan. Another Indian invention, he said. He’d borrowed this one from the Potawatomis. He pulled us over the snow and through Bridgeport; his snowshoes kept him on top of the drifts.

“This is fun, Mam,” Jamesy said as we glided over the canal and crossed Healey’s Slough, frozen solid now. In no time at all, we reached a large round structure covered in birch bark with three smaller domed huts around it.

“Wigwams,” Patrick said.

“Like the beehive huts the Irish monks built in ancient times,” I said to him.

“Warmer,” he said.

A man, two women, and a group of children waited at the entrance, all smiling, gesturing us in.

“I’d introduce you, but I don’t know the name of the older wife,” Patrick said.

“The older wife?” I asked.

“I think she’s from the Kankakee tribe. The younger wife is Catherine Chevalier, and she’s Potawatomi.”

“Two wives?”

“Both good Catholics,” Patrick said.

A fire burned at the center of the big round room. The ground was covered in furs. Our host was Chief Alexander Robinson, a spare man, older than Patrick. Che-Che-Pin-Quaw—“Blinking Eyes”—was his Indian name, the man said. His father was a Scotsman, his mother a member of the Green Bay Ottawa tribe, he told us. Though he had long hair, Chief Robinson dressed in the trousers and jacket of any Chicago businessman. But the women—with their shiny black hair and dark eyes, wearing white tunics, embroidered like Patrick’s shirt, over leggings—had an unfamiliar beauty. Amerikay in the before times.