The Parting Glass (26 page)

Niccolo thought of Megan and her morning demands. He was ashamed of himself for the way he had reacted, but he wasn’t sure what he would do differently if he had another chance.

“What’s the problem this time?” Niccolo buttered a roll while Iggy considered.

“Well, it’s this talk of miracles,” Iggy said. “Although that’s not all of it, of course. He claims it’s the rumors. The Church has had too many public relations nightmares lately. He’d prefer we not look like a bunch of raving lunatics in the newspapers. That’s understandable.”

“I suppose if the image had appeared in a church or charitable organization, we might look saner,” Niccolo said. “But Mary finding her way to an old bootleggers’ tunnel is pretty far-fetched.”

“The rumors are one thing. The test of faith is another. An occurrence like this is a Rorschach for believers. Look at the wall and what do you see? The Virgin stretching out her arms, asking you to come into the Kingdom of God? Or a simple unattractive water stain?”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“I’m to do my best to quiet the rumors.”

Niccolo wasn’t surprised. Had he been the archbishop, he probably would have said the same. “And what did he suggest?”

“That I use my good sense.” Iggy reached for a roll, sighing with pleasure as he held it in his hand. “He’s much too good a man to tell me how to use it. Or even to make suggestions.”

“In other words, he doesn’t have a clue.”

Iggy smiled. “Not the way I would have said it, of course.”

“Have you given this some thought?” Niccolo didn’t know why he’d asked. Of course Iggy had thought about it. That was why Niccolo was having breakfast in the rectory.

“Have you ever tried to quiet a screaming infant?”

“I have nieces and nephews.”

“So do I. Grandnieces and grandnephews by the dozens, too. Not a one of them pays me the slightest bit of attention.”

“But from them you learned…?”

“Tell a baby not to scream, he screams harder. Put your hand over his mouth, he bites you.”

“You’ve never put your hand over a baby’s mouth. Not in your life.”

“But if I had, that would have been the result. It’s the same with people spreading rumors. Tell them not to, they’ll scream louder.”

“Censor or censure them, and they’ll bite your hand.”

“Exactly.” Iggy rolled his eyes in pleasure at his first, glorious bite. From experience, Niccolo knew he wouldn’t eat much more.

“Then what exactly do you propose to do?” Niccolo said.

“I think we need to discuss this openly and honestly. Bore them to death with the theological implications. If you discuss how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and discuss it long enough, you won’t see the gyrations. They disappear. Poof.”

“So who asked you to discuss this?” Niccolo had already started on his second roll, but he took a break to lean back and eye his friend. “Because that’s what this is about, correct?”

“Of course.”

“And?”

“Newschannel 5 at Noon. You’re invited, too. I told them yes for me. You can accept or not for yourself.”

Niccolo ticked off the positives and negatives in his head. If Iggy had accepted, then clearly the television channel wasn’t going to do a hatchet job. It was probably a local interest piece, and a great chance to discount some of the wildest rumors. Yesterday he’d been asked if the tunnel really smelled like roses, and if it was true that light from unseen candles illuminated the image.

“You think I should do it, don’t you?” he asked at last.

“Of course I do. We’ll answer questions about the tunnel, then you’ll turn the topic to Brick. This is your chance for good publicity. Maybe you’ll even get some new funding from it.”

“The accident clarified the need for more funding, that’s for sure. I don’t know how much longer we can go on the way we are. I don’t mind the work, but Megan does.” He wasn’t sure where that had come from and was sorry the moment he’d said it.

“Selfish to the bone, our Megan.” Iggy took another bite.

Niccolo felt properly rebuked. Megan was anything but selfish. She had given up most of her life for her family and had never mourned a bit of it. The fact that at last she might be asking for something for herself was a sign of good mental health.

And a sign that she loved him.

“I’ll do it,” Niccolo said. “I’ll call the station and set it up.”

Iggy reached in his pocket and handed Niccolo a slip of paper. “Number and name of my contact. They want us on Friday.”

“While I’m here, I have a favor to ask you.” Niccolo was still thinking of his wife. “For Megan.”

“Anything.”

Niccolo had told Iggy the story of Irene Tierney. Iggy knew Peggy was in Ireland living in Tierney Cottage, and that she had promised Irene to search out Liam Tierney’s years in Cleveland. Now he told him what Megan had learned so far.

“But she’s come to a halt,” Niccolo finished. “She doesn’t have the time to go through the microfiche spool by spool. That could take months. So I wondered if it was worth checking the church archives to see if there’s any mention of Tierney here.”

“You certainly had good luck last time you needed information.”

Niccolo knew what Iggy was referring to. Two years ago, in order to discover the details of a murder in the Donaghues’ past, Niccolo had read the journal of a former St. Brigid’s priest, Father Patrick McSweeney, which had contained the answers they sought.

“I don’t expect to be that lucky again,” Niccolo said. “Although it’s too bad McSweeney discontinued his journals. He might even have been at St. Brigid’s when Liam Tierney and his family were here, at least in some capacity.”

“There are no more journals, at least not that we’ve ever discovered. But we do have the letters his sister wrote to him in the 1920s.”

“
Her
letters?”

“Just hers, of course, because his went to Ireland.” Iggy smiled. “Never write to a priest. We collect and keep everything.”

“I’ll bet they’re interesting. Half a correspondence…”

“Is better than none? In this case, yes. Although there’s one problem. They’re in Irish.”

“Gaelic?”

“That’s right. Some English from time to time, so she was obviously bilingual. Apparently she wrote to him in Irish to help him stay fluent. She was quite a Nationalist. We’ve translated some of them, but not all. A pity, too. They’re a chronicle of the times. But Irish speakers are few and far between in these parts.”

“Megan knows a little Irish.”

Iggy’s eyes brightened. “You don’t say.”

“Not much, but enough that she might be able to help. She’s been going to college for years, taking a class here, another there, enough to assemble for a degree if she wanted one. She didn’t want to take French or German, but she took Irish for three summers under a special program, and she’s continued studying on her own. She doesn’t speak it well, that takes a lot of practice with native speakers, but she could probably translate the letters. At least well enough to give you the gist of them. And these days, she has more time than she knows what to do with.”

“Why don’t you copy the letters and take them home? See if she’s interested.”

“I will. And may I browse through the parish hall library and see if Liam Tierney turns up?”

“It’s all yours, and the archive storeroom besides.” Iggy got to his feet.

Niccolo was pleased right up until the moment Iggy left him inside the walls of the library, instructing him to lock the doors behind him when he left. St. Brigid’s needed a professional to catalogue and care for the plethora of information on its shelves. Some documents had gone to the Historical Society, but most had not. Iggy was always on the lookout for volunteers who would help with the process, but history was less important to most people than the other workings of the parish.

Niccolo browsed the shelves and knew how impossible his task was. Most of the information wasn’t even arranged by date, and he knew for a fact that more documents existed in trunks and boxes in the storeroom. He had hoped for proof that Liam and his wife had been members of St. Brigid’s, perhaps even an address or notation about rites of passage that had been performed for the family. But tentative forays into fading volumes turned up nothing helpful, and he already knew that the church’s computer system had not yet extended this far into the past. Volunteers were working on it, but they hadn’t yet keyed in data from before the seventies. And gathering it to input would be difficult.

He spent an hour paging through ledgers and volumes until the cramped, faded handwriting made his sight blur. He closed the last volume he’d tried and slipped it back on the shelf.

Before he abandoned Niccolo to the library, Iggy, who had an unerring sense of where papers resided in the chaos, had gathered together the letters of Maura McSweeney to her brother and taken them into the church office to be copied. Niccolo had the copies in a manilla folder ready to take home to Megan. The letters were in chronological order, and the ones on the top had already been translated.

Niccolo leafed through them now. He hoped Megan would find the letters interesting. At least he could tell her he’d tried to find some information and brought her a consolation prize instead. He might earn some approval points. Nothing else he’d done lately had.

He was leafing past the fourth letter when a name sprang out at him from the translation.

“Liam.” He could hardly believe he’d seen it. He took the copy closer to the nearest table lamp and squinted. The sum total he knew of the Irish had come from the Donaghue clan. He didn’t know a single Liam, but wasn’t this a common enough name? Liam Neeson was an actor he admired. He tried to think of others.

He read the sentence out loud. “You can be certain I share your concern for your flock, dearest Patrick. Yet what can be expected? A man does what he must to feed his family, and should he be faulted for breaking a foolish law he did not make? Your Liam has found a way to care for his own. Now you must find a way to care for him, despite his decision.”

Niccolo was intrigued, despite himself. He had looked into this for Megan, but the unfolding drama interested him. In the twenties, the laws most likely to be broken had to do with Prohibition. He certainly knew about bootlegging. The saloon tunnel attested to it.

He read the rest of the letter, but Maura had gone on to other topics, none of which seemed to relate to the mysterious Liam.

The next letter made no mention of him.

The first paragraph of the last one that had been translated didn’t mention the name he was searching for, but another familiar word leaped out at him.

“Shanmullin.” He knew this was the village where Peggy was living now, the ancestral home of the Donaghues—or rather, the Tierneys—in Ireland. And Lena Tierney Donaghue had come from there, as well. So must Liam have.

He backed up to the beginning of the letter to read with more care, reading aloud when he reached the important part. “A young man from Shanmullin would have little to hope for here in Ireland. Someday, perhaps, but your Liam would have found little to sustain his family.”

“Liam…” There was the name again. And the connection made it nearly certain this was Liam Tierney. Perhaps Maura McSweeney was using only first names to protect the St. Brigid’s parishioner if anyone else got hold of her letter. Perhaps her brother had done the same.

He skimmed and came to another paragraph that interested him. “I would agree that a law that makes life worse for so many is worse than no law at all. We Irish understand only too well about laws that benefit those who are already wealthy and powerful. The criminal class thrives on needs that can’t be met by legal means.”

Niccolo was certain now that Maura was talking about bootlegging and rumrunning. During Prohibition too many people had died from the trade in bootleg liquor and from the liquor itself. Too many shady characters had made millions while legitimate distillers went out of business. Had Liam Tierney gotten involved in the illegal trade?

He read on to the end. “Your life has always been a study in balances, brother. Balancing God’s word with the needs of man, balancing your own needs with those of the Church. Now it seems the balancing must continue. You have members of your flock on every side of this sad business. Your Tim, carving out his own piece of luck and threatening all who interfere. Your Glen, struggling to uphold a poor law that is law nonetheless. And now your Liam, trying to take care of those he loves. Life is far too often this way, isn’t it? And there are no easy answers.”

Niccolo wondered who all these people were. Tim? Glen? He felt the deepest sympathy for Father McSweeney, who must have hoped his retirement years would be a time of rest and contemplation but had found struggle instead.

He closed the folder. At least he had something to show Megan now. He hoped she would realize he had been thinking of her this morning.

1925

Castlebar, County Mayo

My dearest Patrick,

You write of the number of policemen in your parish and the way our young Irishmen are drawn to enforcing the law. Odd indeed, for those who had little power in their country and whose rural life hardly seemed to lend itself to the back alleys and vacant lots of large cities.

And yet we are a sociable people. I read tales of your American farms, of their vast expanses and distance from neighbors, and I understand well why my countrymen find them so unappealing. We saw our land yield terror and heartache during the famine, and we trust the land no more. Instead we settle naturally in America’s cities, where our strong backs and deft hands are wanted and our own people have come before us. Perhaps we are not appreciated for our courage and intelligence, but we are hailed for our willingness to do work no one else will abide, work that requires close allegiance to others, work that requires little education and pays poorly.

If we have learned nothing, dear brother, we have learned to stick together. We speak with one voice, organize and march together, and offer a helping hand to those who are like us. This is how we survived and will continue to do so.