Of Irish Blood (64 page)

“A Kelly,” Captain Pyke says. “When we were told only pure Americans would be part of this delegation. No Fenian sympathizers.” How much does he know, I wonder. So far he’s said nothing about Peter Keeley. I smooth down the skirt of my dress. A dignified retreat, I decide, and now.

“I’m an employee of the American Committee for Relief in Ireland. I have decided rather than have our important work delayed I won’t pursue any complaint against your sergeant.”

Captain Pyke nods.

“Very wise,” he says. “Your train is leaving at nine p.m. I suggest you all stay here in the hotel until then.”

“All right, Captain,” Mr. Jenson says. “Since Miss Kelly has declined to press charges.”

Captain Pyke touches the brim of his cap, smiles, and leaves.

Dangerous if he discovers my connection to Peter Keeley. Better to drop it. Move on.

*   *   *

“You did the right thing, Nora,” Maura says. “They’re bastards but they have all the power. Better to keep your head down and get them from behind.”

We are walking along the shore of Galway Bay. Maura’s found me a heavy shawl to wrap around my flapper dress, and a pair of rubber boots. I refused to sit in that library for four hours waiting for the train. I want to move fast, stomp my feet. We reach a stretch of beach. “The Silver Strand,” Maura says. She leads me along a path from the beach and under an archway of tangled vines into a small clearing carpeted by tiny white flowers.

“Snowdrops,” she says. “St. Bridget’s flowers. Her feast is February first. In the old Irish calendar it’s Imbolc, the first day of spring.”

“Spring? February’s often the coldest month in Chicago. The streets turn white and there’s ice floes in Lake Michigan,” I say. “Here I can smell the new growth.”

“And primroses,” Maura says, pointing to colored flowers. They should be growing at Pearse’s cottage, I think.

A stone ruin in the center of the clearing, a miniature tower about two feet tall, open at the top.

“St. Enda’s well,” Maura says. I walk over, look down into the water. A bit of sun comes through the trees that rim the clearing and bounces on the water. I lean over and see parts of my own face reflected on the surface.

“Very ancient, this place,” Maura says. “Dedicated to St. Enda, a monk and teacher. But the well’s older than Christianity. A holy place of the old Celtic religion. The druids believed you could enter the otherworld through a well, a lake, or a sudden insight,” she says.

She sits on the side of the well, pats the space next to her. I sit down.

“You see, Nora, in Celtic spirituality the material world’s only one part of reality. We’re surrounded by the world of the spirit. Powerful. Eternal. In some stories the other world is called Tír na nÓg, the Land of the Young, an island off our coast. But I believe this other world is really inside us. And so can be accessed through our own imagination. Am I making any sense to you at all?”

I pull the shawl around me and nod.

“The Scoundrel Pykes are empty inside, Nora, for all they seem invincible. Pyke’s grandmother died screaming for drugs. His father was shot by a tenant. And this one, Captain Pyke, has neither chick nor child. Barricades himself in that stone prison of a house knowing his days are numbered. The Sassenach took our land but could never capture the deep-down life that sustains us. And that drives them mad. You saw the Black and Tans. That kind of hate comes from frustration. Why won’t the croppies lie down? Why do we Irish insist on fighting back century after century, no matter what they do to us? Why won’t we become the obedient serfs they want?” she says.

“We wouldn’t die and that annoyed them,” I say. “My granny Honora told me that.”

“She had it right,” Maura says, “summed up in one sentence.”

“I wonder if my granny ever came to this well?” I say.

“I’m sure she performed the ritual. Walk around the well three times, dropping a stone in the water each time,” Maura says.

“But Father Kevin described a ceremony like that to me. Done in Donegal he said,” I tell her.

“Practiced all over Ireland,” Maura says. “Are you game?”

I find three smooth pebbles, one with a streak of green through the center.

Maura says, “The first stone represents the past—worries, bad memories, remorse. Understand?”

“I do,” I say.

“The second stone stands for the present. The third pebble is a wish for the future. Now follow me.”

I do, thinking of Father Kevin as I walk. I squeeze into the first pebble the anger I feel at the Black and Tans and at the British and all who make war on women and children. I also jam in my own regrets and guilt, then drop the stone into the water. I hear it hit the bottom.

I rub the second stone between my fingers and pray for Peter Keeley’s protection and the committee’s success. Then let go of the pebble. I see the splash.

I hold the last green-tinged pebble a long time. I wish Ireland free, Peter and me together. Peace. I drop the third pebble. Circles form on the water’s surface. “Circles and spirals,” Granny used to say. “Life is circles and spirals.”

Nearly dusk when we leave the well and start back along the shore. A woman is coming from Galway. I can see the red petticoat under her long blue skirt and the black shawl very like mine wrapped around her. A young woman, I think. She moves so easily over the stones on the shore. When she reaches us, I see her gray hair and lined face.

The woman says something in Irish to Maura.

“She’s greeting us. Wishing God’s blessing on you.”

“Thanks,” I say to the woman.

More Irish. Maura replies in the same language. The woman nods.

Maura turns to me.

“She asked me if you are a stranger, a Sassenach, English. I told her you are one of us, only from America.”

More questions from the woman.

“She wants to know where you’re from,” Maura says. “What county?”

“Well, Cook County,” I say, “Chicago.”

Maura laughs and speaks to the woman, who smiles.

“She’s asking which county in Ireland your people come from,” Maura says.

“Here,” I say, “Galway. Galway Bay.”

Maura translates. More questions from the woman.

“What are the family names?”

“Keeley and Kelly,” I say.

When Maura relays that, the woman lets go with a rush of the language.

“Which Kellys and Keeleys? There’s many.”

“My grandfather was Michael Kelly,” I say.

“So was mine,” Maura says. “Half the men in Galway are called Michael Kelly. That doesn’t help. What was his father’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

The older woman leans forward as if to take in my words.

“My grandmother was born Honora Keeley,” I say.

“And her father?” Maura asks.

“I don’t know.”

The old woman lets out a kind of snort then speaks to Maura.

“She can’t understand why you don’t know,” Maura says. More talk. “Were the Lynches their landlords?” Maura asks me.

“I’m not sure but I do remember talk of a Miss Lynch. She was Henrietta Lynch, my great-aunt Máire’s godmother. My sister’s named for her.”

When Maura translates that, the woman pulls back a little and says something under her breath. Maura laughs. “She asked me if you were a Protestant.”

“No, no. Wait, I remember now. My great-grandmother had worked for the Lynches and Miss Lynch liked her. She also taught little girls in the big house.” Maura translates this and the woman nods her head. A wave of Irish words.

Maura keeps nodding and then says to me, “She thinks she has you. Your great-grandmother was Mary Walsh who married John Keeley from Carna in Connemara. Nora, we were very close to Carna at Lough Inagh.”

Now the woman’s speech takes on a singsong rhythm. Maura repeats the words, imitating the cadence. “He was a fisherman and lived just beyond here in the townland of Freeport in Bearna.” The woman points, then takes me by the hand. She pulls me along the shore. I keep stumbling on the round pebbles that make up the beach but she holds me up, gripping the stones with her toes so we don’t slip. Maura comes along behind us.

“Where are we going?” I say. “Tell her we have to get back to Galway to catch a train.”

Maura translates but the woman cuts her off.

“She says there are more trains,” Maura says.

After about fifteen minutes of me staggering after her, we stop. She points to a swath of grass between the shore and the road. “Here,” she says in English. “Freeport.” And rattles off more Irish.

“This was the fishing hamlet where your Irish grandmother was born,” Maura tells me.

“But there’s nothing here,” I say.

“Look,” the woman says.

I can see that in intervals across the empty field stones are set one on top of another.

“Old walls?” I ask.

The woman understands. Nods. Explains to Maura.

“Those stones are what’s left of the cottages that were here,” Maura tells me.

Maura listens to a long stretch of Irish. Then she says, “There were rows and rows of cottages on this land, clustered together. Thirty families. The fishermen fished with the men of the Claddagh. It’s her grandmother who told her how the púcáns would go into the bay, red sails stretched with wind, to join the fleet from Galway and go out into the sea. They would bring home the catch to the women,” Maura says. “Still do. Her son has a boat. She sells fish under the Spanish Arch. Coming home now.”

“I was there,” I say. “And half remember my granny talking of it. But what happened to their village?”

The woman takes my two hands in hers and speaks very slowly in Irish as Maura translates.

“Everyone was evicted and their cottages burned to the ground. All on one night during the Great Starvation.” The woman touches my cheek. “She says she’s sorry for your troubles,” Maura tells me.

“And the Lynches did this?” I said.

But the woman shakes her head and talks to Maura.

“Not the Lynches but the Scoundrel Pykes,” Maura continues. “She says the Lynches sold to the Pykes, who wanted to build a seaside resort here. Imagine, Nora, to think of building a seaside resort at a time when bodies lay in the roads, dead from the Great Starvation.”

“Terrible,” the woman says in English, and then goes on in Irish.

Maura listens and then says, “The Scoundrel Pykes weren’t able to build the resort. No one would work for them,” and now Maura’s almost whispering. “And from that day to this, no one has been able to build on this land.” The woman gestures around her. “She says the spirits of the people who lived here are keeping it as…” Maura stops. “I don’t know the word in English.”

“A memorial?” I say.

“Yes, but more than that. A kind of evocation of the people’s presence, a way to honor those driven out. Keep these empty spaces and the ruins of these cottages sacred so their souls will return here.”

The woman drops my hand, bends over, and begins scrabbling in the grass. She lifts up two stones.

“From one of the hearths,” Maura says. “She wants you to take it to build your own cottage in your family’s home place.”

I see myself living here with Peter Keeley. The two of us standing together, looking out at Galway Bay. I take the stones. “Say you’ll be returning with your husband and family,” Maura tells me. I do.

The moon is rising. Some story of Granny’s about the moon shining on the waters of Galway Bay, helping the family escape. Granny rarely spoke of the past, but there were those nights when she and Mam and Aunt Máire would sit together in front of our fire. Granny would fill her white clay pipe with tobacco, light it up. She’d draw in the smoke and then blow smoke rings for us children to chase. But when I got older I found all the talk about the Ireland I’d never see boring. I was as Irish as I wanted to be right in Chicago. Nora Kelly embedded in the here-and-now, St. Xavier’s, Montgomery Ward’s, Tim McShane. No interest in the ghosts who’d gone before me.

But they were waiting for me here, I think, my ancestors. Patient. Sure I’d find my way back somehow. I heft the two rocks in my hand. Charred by thousands and thousands of fires in the hearth and then finally by the blaze that destroyed their cottages. My people’s homes.

“And they were all evicted?” I say to Maura.

“They were,” she says. “A death sentence. No place to go, no work, no way to earn money. I wonder how anyone survived in those days or got to Amerikay.”

“Someone went ahead,” I say. “For us, it was my uncle Patrick.”

Those stories I’d listen to—American tales of work and survival and success. But I hadn’t been able to imagine this place. Or the cruelty of the Scoundrel Pykes. And today I both meet one of them and stand on the piece of Irish earth that belongs to me.

Overwhelming, all of it. I half close my eyes, look out over the bay, and try to picture this ruin as a busy village. The fishing boats pulling up in front of the cottages, the children laughing, all of them speaking the language that I’ve heard from this woman. My true mother tongue.

Somehow the Irish had held on to themselves. I’m certain now England will not win. The Black and Tans will be vanquished. Ireland will be a nation once again.

A rosy glow penetrates my slitted eyes. I open them to see the red sun slip into Galway Bay surrounded by pink and purple clouds. Glorious. The old woman points to where the sun is going down. “The Blessed Isle,” she says. “Tír na nÓg.”

“Amerikay,” I say. “Where so many went.”

“But their spirits come back,” the woman says in English. “To make their heaven here.”

I want to stand in the water turned red by the sun. The old woman smiles as Maura and I remove our boots, pull off our stockings. My bare foot hits a sharp little stone.

“Ow!” I lift up my foot. The old woman laughs, holds up her own foot, tough on the bottom, protected by layers of calluses. She leads us through the waves.

Cold water laps against my ankles. Scarlet bubbles surround my feet as the waves ebb, leaving the beach speckled with foam and lit by the setting sun.

The old woman says something to Maura.

“I’m not sure what she’s saying.” Maura asks the woman a question. They go back and forth in Irish and then Maura says, “She’s using a local word I don’t understand. A fishermen’s term.
‘Mearbhall
.
’
There’s a similar word that translates as ‘astounding’ but that’s only part of what she means. She says that sometimes at night when the men are out fishing, a light comes up from below the sea, illuminates the fish.”