Galway Bay (68 page)

“Uncle Patrick’s fine, Mam,” Jamesy was telling us. We were all gathered in our parlor the afternoon of the welcome home celebration. “He was with us at the end, General Sweeny’s scout,” Jamesy said. “He’s a colonel now, colonel brevet—commissioned in the field. While the rest of the boys in the Legion were hanging around waiting to be sent home, Uncle Patrick got General Sweeny to issue orders for us”—Jamesy put on a military tone—“to be assigned to Colonel Kelly’s staff for the purpose of accompanying him to New Orleans.” Patrick was meeting with the Irish Fenians there, he said.

“You went back to New Orleans,” Máire said. “Wonderful.”

“Here’s the best news. I found Lorenzo and Christophe!”

“Jamesy, how did you ever find them? I can’t believe it!” I said.

“Believe it! You see, there was this big parade down Rampart Street, and here came the Corps d’Afrique, a colored unit in the Union army made up of free people from New Orleans and emancipated slaves. The soldiers had a brass band. Lorenzo was playing the trumpet!”

“Is M’am Jacques alive?” Máire asked.

“She is. Lorenzo and Christophe took us to see her. She lives in the convent with Sister Henriette’s order, the Sisters of the Holy Family. Sister Henriette herself died ten years ago, but there’s quite a number of sisters now. They have a big house on Royal Street.”

“Ah, New Orleans,” said Máire. “What a future I could have had there.”

Daniel looked at her. “What do you mean, Mam?”

“I’ll tell you when you grow up,” she said.

“Grow up, Mam? I’m a soldier. I fought a war, and I’m about to fight another!”

“What do you mean?” Máire asked him.

I knew. Canada. “Jamesy,” I started.

But Jamesy continued talking about New Orleans, with Maggie Nolan—the first girl he’d invited to our parlor—taking in every word. A match there, I hope. Paddy was very quiet. I saw Bridey lean over and whisper to him. He smiled.

Paddy had told no stories. The time I’d asked him about Kernstown, his own injury, the colonel’s death, he only said, “Mam, I’m not talking about the war, no more than I would talk about the Great Starvation. Jamesy and Daniel might want to go back to Ireland, but not me. Bad memories.”

“But what about the before times, Paddy?”

“I can’t let myself remember even the good things, or the nightmares come back.”

“Still, Paddy?” I’d asked him.

When we first came to Bridgeport, he’d cry out in his sleep. I’d find him covered in sweat. “A great rat’s chewing on my hand, Mam, and I can’t move because I’m dead.”

I’d hold him and say, “You’re not dead, a stór. You’re alive.”

“Not the old nightmares, Mam. New ones.”

“Oh, Paddy . . .”

“But Bridey wakes me and tells me, ‘You’re alive, Paddy.’ As you did, Mam.”

Now, Máire put an arm around Daniel. “You’re going nowhere, Daniel O’Connell Leahy.”

Summer came, but no lineup of weddings at St. Bridget’s as Máire and I’d expected. Why wouldn’t Jamesy marry Maggie, or Daniel his girl, Sadie Healy? All the other veterans in Bridgeport were making a mad rush to marry and have children.

Bridey was pregnant and Paddy over the moon—and me up there with him. Máire gave them her apartment, and she and Gracie moved up with us. “You’ve generous heart, Máire,” I’d told her, but she’d said, “Why not?”

Daniel kept his room, and Jamesy moved down with him. Paddy insisted and Bridey agreed. “They’ll be off on their own soon enough, and you’d be very crowded upstairs,” Bridey said.

“Daniel and Jamesy are tired of us nagging them,” Máire said.

“Nagging? They’re twenty-three and twenty-two. The war took many years from them. Time to get a job, marry those girls.”

But instead they’d disappear for days at a time. “Traveling,” they’d say. When they were home, they’d stay out until all hours and sleep the day through. “Fenian business, Mam,” Jamesy would say.

Máire didn’t take much notice. She was working long hours at the Shop. Peace brought a boom in business. But I was worried.

One late summer’s day, I’d found Jamesy sitting behind the house, looking out toward where the prairie had been, playing his pipes.

“Your father would pipe to himself like that, Jamesy,” I’d said.

“I’ve been thinking a lot of Da lately,” he’d said, “trying to remember his voice. I can see his face and picture the games—playing we were Irish warriors, swinging the chestnuts. But I can’t hear him singing.”

“Your brother Michael sounds a bit like him,” I’d said.

“You know, Mam, we talk a lot about Ireland at the Brotherhood meetings, but so many of the fellows born here ask me if the countryside could really be as beautiful, as green, as their people tell them.”

“And what do you say, Jamesy?”

“I say yes, but my memories are all jumbled. Ah well, I’ll know soon enough,” he’d said, and he’d gone back to his music.

Jamesy and Daniel had always been close to their sisters, and I’d thought the girls could talk to them, but Bridget and Gracie spent much of their time over at Marion Mulligan’s, which worried me. “You’ve made your heart a shrine to Michael Kelly,” Máire’d said to me. But Michael was my husband, my children’s father, my fated love. For Bridget to spend her life mourning James Nugent . . . But when I said something like that to Bridget, in the gentlest way, she only looked surprised. “
You
must understand, Mam. You could never care for another man, nor could I.” At least she’d be teaching in the fall. Twenty years old now, she had graduated with honors in May. Her additional two years of study had earned her a teaching certificate from the Sisters of Mercy and the offer of a job on the faculty of St. Xavier’s. As Bridget received her diploma, Máire had whispered to me, “Miss Lynch should see us now.”

Michael hadn’t gone back to school. “Time for me to start earning a wage, and Paddy needs me.” They were doing well now, at Kelly Brothers’ Blacksmiths.

At eighteen, Stephen was the youngest fireman in Chicago, saving half of his wages, planning his future with Nelly Lang.

If only Jamesy . . .

One evening, Jamesy and Daniel had sat down Máire and me at the kitchen table. They laid out the last of their army pay, a good lump of money. “Take it,” they’d said.

“Take it yourselves,” I’d said. “Use it like Paddy did, set up a business, you and Daniel.”

“You need real money to open a business,” Jamesy had said.

Daniel had stood up and started pacing. “Oh, the capitalists will let us start little businesses in our own neighborhoods,” he’d said, “grocery stores or forges like Paddy’s and, of course, taverns. But they want Irishmen as laborers, full stop, not owners. Though they’ll be getting a few surprises from the boys who saved the Union for them, who fought as substitutes for rich men’s sons who bought their way out of serving! We’re not going to work twelve hours for insulting wages. No more ‘lie down, croppies, lie down.’”

“Jesus Christ, Daniel, are you a Fenian or a radical?” Máire’d said.

“A man can be both, Mam,” Daniel had said. “Look at the Molly Maguires. They’re Irish patriots who fight for justice for working men.”

“And get bashed in the head by Pinkertons,” I’d said.

“And then hanged,” Máire had added.

“Be careful, Daniel,” I’d said. “A man’s tongue can get his nose broken. Start talking about justice at McCormick’s factory, or out where Pullman’s building railcars, or at the stockyards, you’ll both be in jail.”

Later, Jamesy had reassured me that Daniel wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize the Fenian mission and that both of them were only waiting for the word to come—to move on Ireland or Canada.

“Jamesy, no,” I’d said.

“But don’t you want me to free Ireland? Plant the banner of freedom on the shores of Galway Bay?”

“Not if you get killed in the process!” I’d said.

But Máire’d told me to calm myself. “Nothing will come of it. According to Daniel, there’s a lot of disagreement between the top fellows. Watch—they’ll argue themselves out of the whole shebang. My Danny O will fall to Sadie Healy soon enough, and then we’ll hear no more of all this.”

“I hope you’re right.”

As we came up to our first peacetime Christmas, nothing had happened. Good.

Chapter 34

Y
OU’RE NOT MARRYING
James Mulloy now, and that’s the end of it.” Máire, angrier than I’d ever seen her, pounded her fist on the kitchen table.

But Gracie, sitting across from her, did not flinch. She leaned toward her mother, thumped the table herself, and said, “I am, too—if I have to run away to do it.”

I looked at Bridget, who shrugged, as surprised as I was at Gracie’s revolt.

Máire was flummoxed. “And we were having such a nice Christmas,” she said.

We were indeed. It was St. Stephen’s Day night, and we were still celebrating full out, the boys and Patrick gone to McKenna’s.

An almost frantic joy had been running through our boys from the moment Patrick and James Mulloy had arrived on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Such backslapping and laughing from Jamesy and Daniel, Stephen and Michael. Paddy’d been more reserved. I’d heard Jamesy and Daniel and Patrick whispering on the stairs as they carried Patrick’s things down to Paddy’s, where he was staying. Bridey was very good to make a fuss over “the famous Uncle Patrick”—and her eight months along.

On Christmas morning, Patrick Kelly had led us all into St. Patrick’s for Mass. He’d gone right up to the front and set St. Grellan’s crozier on the side altar.

After Mass, I understood why Patrick had insisted we go to St. Patrick’s. Men from different parishes, but all veterans of the Irish Legion and the Irish Brigade, came to the side altar to touch St. Grellan’s crozier and shake hands with Patrick. Solemn, not a word said. The Fenian Brotherhood, keeping faith.

Afterward, the men had stood on the church steps, speaking to Patrick in low voices, Jamesy and Daniel next to him.

“Disturbing,” I’d said to Máire.

But she’d said, “The more they talk, the less they do. What harm?”

She’d been more interested in her conversation with Joe and Margaret McCauley—St. Bridget parishioners, and the very couple whose request to marry had revealed the impediment to me. “Husband and wife, Honora. Dispensed,” she’d told me. “Father Dunne’s the vicar general now and can act for the bishop when he’s away or sick, so when Bishop Duggan was in Rome, Father Dunne fixed them up. He dispensed them and married them. Only a minor impediment anyway, Margaret McCauley told me. Father Dunne would get you and Patrick Kelly dispensed in the snap of his fingers,” she’d said, snapping her own. “We could have the wedding in Saint Bridget’s before the Christmas flowers die, or maybe better, right here at Saint Patrick’s.”

“Enough, Máire,” I said.

“The poor fellow, coming Christmas after Christmas. Home from the war now and—”

“Máire, please. I’ve myself sorted. And besides, Patrick Kelly’s hatching plans. He’ll not be here long.”

Patrick Kelly would never consider a regular happy life to be worth living, I’d thought on Christmas night during our annual visit to the Langs. I only hope Patrick doesn’t set Jamesy and Daniel on his path.

As I sat watching the dancing, Patrick walked over and sat on the chair next to me. “I don’t waltz, Honora,” he said.

“I know that, Patrick,” I answered.

A nice Christmas, as Máire said, but now here we were on St. Stephen’s Day night with Máire and Gracie railing at each other. “I forbid you to marry James Mulloy,” Máire said for what must have been the tenth time.

“Máire, you know Gracie fell in love with James Mulloy years ago. Why shouldn’t they marry?” I said.

“Love? Please, how long will love last when she’s shoveling shite on some godforsaken hill farm in Tennessee?”

“Not godforsaken! We’ll breed champion racehorses,” Gracie said.

“That was Owen and Michael’s dream at Knocnacuradh—a line of great horses,” I said to Máire.

“Mad,” Máire said. “Gracie, you’ve no notion of the work, and what money do you have? You’re staying here, finishing school, marrying a gentleman, living on Michigan Avenue like the ladies who come into the Shop!”

“But, Máire,” I said, “if that’s not what Gracie wants—”

“She doesn’t know what she wants. She’s eighteen.”

“The same age you were when you got married,” I said.

Gracie had grown into a beautiful woman, with the Keeley height and Máire’s curves. Máire certainly understood what attracted men. She probably could manage Gracie into a wealthy marriage. Máire’d introduce Gracie to the clerk she’d worked with all these years who now owned the Shop, Marshall Field. Or she might find a husband for Gracie among the sons of the Board of Trade fellows she knew.

“I want Gracie to have an easier life than we had. I want her near me, and my grandchildren rich and respected, not . . .”

“Bastards like we are, Mam?” said Gracie. “Whose fault is that?”

Máire’s mouth opened, but no words came.

“Gracie,” I said, “you don’t understand. She went with your father to save me.”

We’d never told the girls the whole story, but I did now—Johnny Leahy’s death, Father Gilley’s refusal to let Máire wed, the Pykes appearing at my wedding, the
droit du seigneur
.

“That’s horrible,” Bridget said.

“It is, but that’s the past,” I said. “The Pykes weren’t the
only
Irish landlords claiming the bride’s first night. Plenty of children in America now were born because of . . . Well, let’s thank God that
here
the mothers can start again. You’re called Leahy. In Chicago it doesn’t matter who your real father was. Or what country you come from or—”

“Don’t you believe that, Honora,” Máire said. “Now that the war is over and they don’t need the Irish to fight for them anymore, it’s back to twelve-hour days at the packinghouse for the paddys. . . . Grab a shovel or a miner’s pick, or waste yourself on a mucky piece of land. I don’t want that for Gracie.” She started crying.

Gracie moved toward her, but I was there first. I put my arm around her. “It’s not like Gracie’s crossing the ocean,” I started, but Máire shook free of my arm.

“With Thomas gone and Daniel up to who knows what, I want Gracie near me,” she said.