Shanty Irish (8 page)

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had an early breakfast. The woman packed a lunch for us.

She put us on the train bound for St. Marys.

My sister borrowed five dollars and sent it to her. The woman returned the money.

Virginia then sent her enough red calico to make a dress.

The best friend I found in St. Marys, with the exception of Virginia, was my grandfather Tully.

He looms larger as the years pass. I was driven from one relative to another too young to work and too inexperienced to beg. The old man made of me a companion.

“Your dad'll be here in two weeks. It's glad I'll be to see him. I ain't had a decent dhrink in a month,” he said when I greeted him.

He had a home with his daughter. By some ingenuity he was always well supplied with liquor. He would shake his immense well-chiseled head, narrow his eyes, and bite two words often… “Kape dhrunk.”

It was the pastime in the wretched town for yokels to tease old Hughie Tully. So long as they bought drinks for the reveller everything was all right. If drinks were not forthcoming he would wander to another saloon.

I spent hours with him at the different bars.

Still a child, I learned quickly to drink and to observe, and to remember.

I developed early a capacity for remembered sorrow. It is possible that I have remembered too much.

“I like ye me boy,” the old man told me after the first week. He could not realize my great sense of freedom after the orphanage.

I was soon to know all the saloon ruffians in the town. A shrewd judge of my character, my grandfather told me something of each of them.

Outspoken and diplomatic, there was in him a quality which often pierced the heart of things.

He had at least one great quality—detachment. He did not live to please others.

“I'm jist plain Shanty Irish an' I'll go to hell when I die—so thire's no use to worry.”

He had been fond of my mother. He had no illusions about my father.

A few days before his son came to town he said to me—“There's somethin' wrong with your dad—whin the Lord made him He forgot to take the shovel out of his brain—he's niver bin the man he mighta bin—but oh well—it wasn't yere mither's fault—she came to a sad ind—as wimmin do—.”

He pulled me toward him with a touch of blunt affection.

“But take not to heart what I say,”—his voice lowered, “she married yere father—a brave woman and a sad. Ye are like yere mither, me boy—yere worth the whole damn kit an' caboodle of 'em.” Wiping the beaded alcohol from his stubble of beard, “An' yere like me too—the quick timper yere mither had—an' the heavy heart. She worried too much—an' for what—for nary the good it did her.” He paused, “She's in the Glynwood graveyard now watchin' the frozen worms crawl in the winter time, and lookin' at the roots of daisies in the spring.” He rubbed the bottom of the whisky glass over the wet bar. “To hell wit' it all, me boy… to hell wit' it all.”

He filled his glass to the brim. The bartender asked, “Have you seen the new glasses Hughie—they got sideboards on 'em.”

The old man frowned.

“Shut yere damn mouth and spake whin yere spoken to—the glasses are little enough as 'tis—” was the irate answer.

Then aside to me, “Niver let yere infariors give ye any sass, me boy. If he were any good he wouldn't be servin' poison to the likes o' me.” He laid a worn dime on the bar.

Old Hughie Tully was short and wide, with the strength of a bull.

My grandmother married him after she had inherited twenty acres of Irish ground.

With no money to buy horse and plow, they tilled the land with spades. For five years they bent their backs and starved.

The adjoining land was owned by an English lord. They watched sleek horses furrow his acres with shining plows.

They sold the land to their aristocratic neighbor and came to America during the middle of the last century.

My grandfather was a peddler of Irish linens and laces in the South for three years.

His wandering had given him knowledge and contempt for people. In the South he often sent another Irishman to visit the town ahead of him. It was that man's duty to select a beautiful girl, and dress her in excellent laces and linens. In all her glory the maiden would go to mass on Sunday. All the other women would be curious to know where she purchased such fine raiment. The girl would tell them that she had met a peddler in a town nearby. Hughie, the adroit, would make his entrance in a few days and do a thriving business. His confederate would be in a town beyond making further arrangements.

“Wimmin are not all vain, indade not,” his voice would raise, “some are dumb too.”

My childhood was unusual in that it contained no soldier heroes. My grandfather had two distinct prejudices—he liked neither the Irish nor the negroes. His dislike of the former was based on general principles—and of the latter, because he believed that they were the souls of Methodists come back to earth—singed by hell-fire.

Believing this, he had no desire to fight for the freedom of scorched souls. The Civil War was deprived of his services.

I asked him why he had not been a soldier.

A man of nearly eighty then, his body still powerful, his sharp steel-blue eyes looking out from beneath shaggy eyebrows that had faded from red to yellowish gray, he snapped:

“If ye are in a strange nayborhood ye don't take sides—Ireland is me country—an' by the help of God may I niver see it agin!”

There was an old Irish shrew who did not like grandfather because he drank overmuch at times. She was haggard and worn. Her tongue was sharper than her features.

“The old hag, she said to me yisterday, ‘Indade and if ye were me husband I'd give ye poison.'

“‘Indade and if I were, I'd take it,' I said right back.”

Grandmother Tully was said to have been of better blood than he. The daughter of a country squire, she wrote verses.

Grandfather, who was never without his bottle, would often take a swig and exclaim:

“Sich blarney—makin' words jingle—indade—ye'd better be washin' the daishes.”

When I told him I wanted to be a writer, he threw up his hands.

“Oh—me God, me God—git yereself a shovel like yere father—let yere grandmither do sich things—it's not for the likes of a brawny boy like ye.”

When the rheumatism had forced grandfather to retire from a laborer's life to live on the sparse bounty of his children, he evolved a method that would keep an active mind from getting into a rut.

He would leave the house each morning at seven o'clock.

It was the hour the saloons opened.

There were twenty-six of them in St. Marys. Grandfather was the most charming of the village drunkards. He knew all the saloon keepers and bartenders in the place.

Many of them were Germans. Auglaize County was settled by Irish and German peasants. They were always at war.

Grandfather was the ambassador of love. Not for such a man were the squabbles of peasants.

He would lean his two hundred pound five-foot four body on the bar and pour soothing oil on the troubled waters of Irish and German—for a glass of liquor.

He was never really a cadger. He traded wit for drink. If wit were not needed, he gave consolation and advice. He had worn out several peddler's packs and many shovels. Thus equipped, he knew how to run the country, a neighbor's farm, and all affairs with women.

He was really a social appendage.

Every week he trimmed his black and white beard and mustache within a half-inch of his face.

He had never been to a dentist—had never lost a tooth. They were large and even.

He had retired at seventy.

“Indade—if a man works till three score and tin—an' rheumatiz taps at his heart an' no one kapes him—he'd better starve till they do.”

His nose was large, his jaws heavy. He bit his words—between smiles.

There was only one negro in the town of St. Marys. In spite of his avowed prejudice, my grandfather was his bosom friend. The negro spent his money freely at the bar, which grandfather appreciated.

“Indade an' indade,” grandfather often said to him, “a colored gintleman is better than the Irish—I know—for I'm one o' thim.”

Often on the negro's day off, the two could be seen walking arm in arm from one saloon to the other.

My grandfather had a song which would make the darky laugh. He would pound the bar and stamp his feet to keep time, so he thought, with his words. All would listen.

Grandfather was one of the first men in Ohio to allow his wife complete expression. He would not bother her for days at a time. Unless, of course, liquor had made him slightly ill. He would then sit in his large chair and hit the table with his bottle.

“Kath-u-rin—Kath-u-rin,” he would shout.

Grandmother, aged, stooped and vital, with wrinkles in her face deep enough to bury matches, would draw near him holding a corncob pipe in her hand.

“Indade, Kath-u-rin—you know what it is—it's that damned licker Coffee sells—it'd eat a hole in a pipe.”

“Well, it's good for ye—a man yere age—a-lettin' the licker soak yere fine brains out—what'll iver become o' ye?”

“Be still, woman, be still—be still! It's more licker I want an' not advice—indade a woman o' ould Ireland should be ashamed to talk so to her lord an' master.”

“Indade an' ye'll git no more licker this day!” was the defiant rejoinder.

At this insult grandfather would hurry from the house.

But grandfather was unlike most men. Once in the saloon, no one ever heard of his troubles at home. He was a born man about town.

The saloon was his refuge from the crassness of a peasant world into which he had been accidentally born.

Grandfather loved the machinations of politics. As a peddler he had learned to be a great teller of tales. He could adapt himself to any company. He could be droll or sentimental by turns, according to his audience. He seemed to read on faces the kind of story wanted. To everyone in the town he was “Old Hughie.” But he was more than that—a traveling raconteur on the muddy road of life. He drank vile and good liquor, and tried every means possible to keep still-born the hopes that lay close to his heart and brain.

At times, when alone with him, I could see a pained expression on his face. And once, when his immense shoulders ached when he lifted the glass, he rested his hand on the bar…

“Niver work hard wit' hands me boy—look at me—I'm bint like an ould tree in the wind—and for what—a bed that's niver made up—an' shotgun whisky for a nickel a glass—an' the damned rheumatiz on cold nights that cuts at me flesh like Dick Hurm's razors. The praest'll tell ye that work is noble—it may be—for a mule—for he does none of it himself—I mane the praest—.

“Now whin I was a pidler—” he sighed deeply, and into his faded eyes came the pain of happy memory, “ah thim were the days—even the waeds along the road had blooms to thim thin—

“Well—whin I was a pidler in Asheville—it was a pimple on the world's nose thin—but oh how purty—there was the swaytest little yellow girls—with forms—” he curved his big hands inward— “Ah me God—they were lovely as sin—me wife was in Ireland thin—an' would to Almighty God she had stayed there—I could sing an' drink all night for a trainket outta me pack—I always carried a trainket wit' me—” He winked at the bartender—He rubbed a left thumb and forefinger down a heavy well shaped nose. His voice crooned—“There was a little girl there—her dad had been Irish—and he missed mass one Sunday an' sinned wit' her mother—an' later on—he left the holy church—her eyes were as a flower on a plate—an' her skin was brown an' soft like a berry in the sun—I've niver known anything like her—I give her four pieces of lace one time—her father was an old pidler who lived in mortal sin—he opened a store in Nashville—and I says to him I says—‘Ah the purty little maid in Ashville—and ye know she's yours'—and he says—‘Which one, Hughie—I'm an old man—'tis hard to remimber—'

“I'd attinded his dear wife's funeral that day—he rode so sad to the graveyard—it was all I could do to take the bottle out of his hands—there was little left for me to drown of the agony of death—an' on the way home from the dear woman's grave he stopped an' picked up the purtiest woman ye iver see—an' he married her right off an' took her to his house—an' he met Moses the Jew who ran a store in the nixt block nixt to him…

“An' Moses said, ‘Who is she?'

“‘An' who would she be'—says he—‘I'm an honorable man an' I obey the laws of me country an' me God—she's me wife ye fool—I'm a better trader than ye—I've traded a dead one for a live one…'