Shanty Irish (4 page)

My grandfather hit the table with his glass. My father looked as one who had heard the tale before.

“It's licker I want,” said the rugged ex-peddler, “Jim—yere father's glass is empty.”

The bartender filled the glasses.

My grandfather gave me a knowing look.

“There was min in Ireland in thim days, me lad—better min niver lived—like dogs,” says he.

The glass went toward his mouth with the speed of a bullet. He threw his massive head backward.

“I'd never heard ye say that Granddad was at the burnin' of the car,” observed my father.

“The hell he wasn't,” the old man retorted sharply, “he'd have burned the Pope that mornin'.” He motioned for the bartender again.

“Ye see—they
was mad
.”

My father laughed.

With eyes of wonder I look at both.

“What became of Timothy Walsh?” I asked.

“Ah—that's the sad thing—that's why he's been dead to me so many years … indade it was fine the bolt of lightnin' hit me blissed father before he knew it.

“Ye see—there was some Scotch in him, an' he didn't know it. But they smuggled him here to America, an' he became converted—an' inded up a Prisbyterian minister.”

The old man looked at his empty glass dolefully.

“A man with a neck like that.”

S
O
poverty-stricken were my mother's parents that three children remained in Ireland long after the others had come to America.

My mother was a house servant at fifty cents a week before she was twelve years old. Within a year she obtained work with another family at one dollar a week.

My grandmother started a boarding house when my mother, Biddy Lawler, was fourteen. Mother and daughter took care of fifty laborers, cooked three meals a day, made the beds, cared for several small children, and did the washing besides.

In two years they saved fifteen hundred dollars. With this money my grandmother purchased what is still known as the Lawler farm.

Then Biddy Lawler married my father. She moved with him into a log shack in the woods. There they remained three years. Sick with the ague, the mumps, yellow jaundice, and malaria fever, they emerged poorer than on their wedding day.

A woman of imagination, my mother had all the moods of April. Married at sixteen, she was dead at thirty-two.

The mother of eight children in as many years, she had an unconscious sense of drama, and no humor. But even humor would not have saved her. She was one of those sad women who lived by ignorance and died by faith.

Her hair was auburn, beautiful, and very long. She wore it in heavy braids which reached to her knees. Her eyes were large, deep brown, and tragically sad.

Her mouth was puckered always in a childish pout. The lower portion of her face was too strong for the current conception of beauty.

Her younger sister, Moll, had dark hair and dark flashing eyes. She was wistful and stubborn.

They had attempted to join a Protestant church. All the other Lawlers gesticulated wildly over the episode. My mother received the news in rigid silence.

Her pink flesh turned white. I was with her in the yard when my father told of the event. She held my hand till it ached.

Only once, and not until months later did she ever make comment.

The following Christmas, her relatives, a dozen in all, drove over the snow in a bob-sled to spend the day with her.

Moll accompanied them.

With an unyielding sense of Irish drama my mother walked to the sled.

She called them all by name, beginning with her father and mother—saying in turn:

“Father, you can get out— Mother, you can get out—Tom, you can get out—” and so on until she came to Aunt Moll—

“But, Moll—
you
can't get out. You can never darken my door.”

She turned defiant, and walked into the house, the long auburn braids of her hair swinging like censors aflame.

A brother followed and pleaded with her. He might as well have talked to a stone on a grave.

He pleaded forgiveness on account of Christ's Birthday—it would make her children happy—

With mouth set tight, she shook her head.

“You may never see her again,” the brother said.

“I
never
will!” Her mouth went tight again.

My uncle returned to the sled.

He took his seat near Aunt Moll. She was not much over twenty years old. An Irish colleen type, her features were regular and beautiful. Her eyes were vivid blue.

Many writers describe the Irish as loquacious in anger or war.

Greater mistake was never made.

These twelve, with the wounded pride, sat silent, and stared down the snowy road.

The horses started. The bob-sled glided over the road. All were gone.

My mother talked no more that day.

Early the following spring my mother was bearing another child. She had a cow to milk, the housework to do, a husband, a father and six children to look after.

She found time to make a bed of pansies and surround them with violets. She watched them tenderly.

A late frost came and shriveled their many colored heads even with the stems.

She cried over them as though they were dead children.

A
WIFE
, six children, two cows, one hog, a blind mare and a sense of sad humor, were my father's possessions.

We lived in a log house, in and out the windows of which the crows of trouble flew.

My father was a gorilla-built man. His arms were long and crooked. The ends of a carrot-shaped mustache touched his shoulder blades. It gave his mouth an appearance of ferocity not in the heart. Squat, agile, and muscular, he weighed nearly one hundred and ninety pounds. His shoulders were early stooped, as from carrying the inherited burdens of a thousand dead Irish peasants.

A man of some imagination, he loved the tingle of warm liquor in his blood. He was for fifty years a ditch digger.

The house, built by himself, contained four rooms. In it six children and their parents lived.

Relatives visited us for days at a time. I early learned to sleep like a contortionist.

We reached our home by a muddy or dusty lane according to the Ohio season. It was in the center of a dense wood a half mile from the main road.

A deep ditch ran in front of the house. It had been dug by my father.

The section in which we lived was known as the Black Swamp. It was flat for many miles.

The artificial St. Marys Reservoir, ten miles long and seven wide, was not far away. It drained the muddy water of many counties and spawned a pestilence of mosquitoes.

A soggy muddy basin, it was an ideal section for a ditch digger. My father had all the poverty, children and work he could manage.

My father came from Ireland with his mother when a lad of ten. My grandfather had preceded them three years before. After seven weeks on the ocean, he was five days reaching Ohio from New York, a distance of eight hundred miles.

At heart my father was an agnostic without knowing it. His wife relied much on God. He did not interfere.

Aware of the trap in which life had caught him, he bowed to his peasant futility like a gentleman.

He treated his children like unavoidable evils, and deserted them early.

Violating all rules of health, he was never ill.

He would read by the hour. Whether it helped him mentally, I know not. With but one exception, he was a man who never made comment.

He was nearsighted. When reading, he never moved his eyes. A country newspaper, a frayed volume of Shakespeare, or a medical almanac, it moved backward and forward within two inches of his left eye.

He would give his last dollar away—and take another man's last dollar without compunction. He gave his money to the person nearest him at the time.

He was always in debt.

He was a man whom calamity followed.

Once, while ditching in a nearby field, he saw his house ablaze. The family was away.

He ran across the meadow and rushed up the stairs.

He saved a corn husk mattress. He jumped with it out of the window.

My mother arrived with neighbors soon after. She hastily took a small gilt clock from the mantel. It was all she had of beauty.

A farmer threw a large crock of eggs into the yard in order to save them.

Two cows and Blind Nell were in a small enclosure adjoining the house. The cattle broke through the rails and escaped. Blind Nell remained.

She was the delight and wonder of our childhood. A five-acre woods was her summer home.

Totally blind, she could walk through it without touching shrub or tree.

She would enter the forest by the same route and come out at the same place each time.

With tail ablaze, she now stood whimpering, still.

My father seized a revolver. I followed him. He crashed a bullet through her skull.

She went to her front knees, as if in prayer for the dying. Her hide was bare as a glove. She twitched once—and was still.

A most amazing Irishman was my father—one devoid of sentimentality. A man without tears, he often seemed one without pity.

He patted the forehead of the dead mare, while his house burned to the ground.

Much was said against him. He was called a child deserter, a whore-monger, and a drunkard.

A product of people too much given to the vice of slander, he never made an unkind comment on others.

After the fire we lived in an old schoolhouse for two weeks.

My father borrowed five dollars. A few neighbors helped us.

Farmers and relatives gathered later to help build our new home. They brought cast-off pieces of furniture for our use.

They felled trees and hewed them. Oxen dragged them from the woods.

Straight trees of smaller size were cut and fitted as rafters. The home was completed by night.

Then mother brought her flock home, and life went on as wretchedly as before.

Father had the oxen drag Blind Nell to a spot in the woods.

She was never buried.

Black buzzards circled the sky above her.

I pointed toward them.

My father could not see that far.

I told my mother about the buzzards.

She planted a seed in my childish mind that day. While baking cookies she kindled my imagination with a strange tale. It has grown with the years.

The buzzards had once been beautiful eagles. Their homes were on the high mountains. Once a year they accompanied a fairy train to the moon.

In the long ago when returning from the moon they had seen a slender man with a sad face. He carried a heavy cross on his shoulders. His eyes had the look of one who gazed down a road in eternity.

He knelt, with head down, under the weight of the cross. Rising, he stumbled once, and fell. He looked upward imploringly at the green and blue eagles.

Three little sparrows came out of the sky and looked in pity at the sad man with the cross. They called aloud to the far-off eagles to come and help him.

Immediately the sparrows were turned to golden-throated nightingales. Their voices filled the world with music. The eagles flew higher and higher, laughing at a man who carried a cross on a rough road to a little hill which overlooked a never-to-be-forgotten valley.

Out of a jagged hole in the sky came a giant's head. His eyes were bigger than the sun. Worlds could be seen burning in them.

He lifted an ocean in his hollow palm, and pressed it to his forehead to cool the heat from his eyes.

“I must speak without malice,” he thundered, “and punish without vengeance.”

The eagles hung in the air, like iron birds attached to invisible wires.

The giant scooped all the snow from the mountains of the world and held it over his heart.

“My heart must be cool—for my punishment is severe.”

The eagles trembled before him, their wings outspread.

“I am the King of the Thunder,” the giant said in a low whisper which shook the sky, “and I saw you refuse help to a child of the stars in the land of human Buzzards—who eat the hearts and souls of the loveliest and the purest birds we are forced to send among them. And so for this offense—you will become as one of them—forever and forever and forever.”

As the giant said the three
forevers
the earth opened.

He smiled at a fleece of cloud that trailed across his right eye.

“The man you refused to help has come back to us—with what earthly buzzards call a thief on each side of Him. They were crucified for taking that which they owned as much as the rest of their fellow buzzards.”

The giant sighed and wiped a tear from his left eye. The ocean with which he had mopped his forehead rolled downward.

“Too bad,” he smiled, “that may cause a deluge in the land of buzzards. Oh, well, if a million or two are drowned we can always hatch others out of the eggs of rattlesnakes.”

The eagles laughed.

“Silence!” thundered the King of Thunder. “Why do fools laugh at the misery of men they do not understand?”

He wiped his other eye … Another ocean fell to the earth.

“Too bad—too bad,” he sighed again—“Every time the earth cracks down there a great man dies—It has cracked twice now in ten million years. One was a carpenter—and the other an unknown fool.”

He looked sternly at the myriads of eagles before him.

“Get ye down to the earth—and as buzzards remain—flying always in circles like the minds of all the other buzzards down there.”

The Eagles' feathers went black. They flew earthward, their eyes on the alert for carrion.

The sky closed.

The Giant was gone.