Shanty Irish (7 page)

The rays of the kerosene lamp turned the pouring rain into silver. For a second the figure of John Lawler could be seen moving swiftly in a lane of light.

The Lawlers stood in the doorway and watched the released jailbird climb into a buggy. A horse's hoofs were soon heard sloshing on the muddy road.

John Lawler sat, with liquor roaring in his head, and rain running down his hard face. The horse turned onto the St. Marys pike and hurried westward.

Neither man in the buggy spoke for several miles.

The rain ceased. The sun rose. A train stopped at a small station.

John Lawler had gone from Ohio forever.

His parents died within a month.

Grandmother Lawler, her defiant spirit unbroken to the last, went first.

My grandfather followed her within a week.

His heart stopped one morning as he lifted his fork at the breakfast table. Made methodical by sixty years of economic slavery, he laid the fork down before dying.

He sat alone, breakfast untasted, stiffening hands on the table, massive chin on his breast. Gnarled, defeated, dead.

He was buried in consecrated ground.

A
ND
all things danced upon the morning of the day Christ was said to have risen. According to mother, it was the sun shining on the tears of angels that made the April rainbows of Ohio.

A week before she died I trudged down the road with her to watch the sun come up.

I had never seen her quite so cheerful. Her mood enraptured me.

She stopped along the road to gather some “Johnny-jump-ups.” I scrambled to help her. Each carrying a bouquet of the little flowers, we went on down the road.

Her hair, the passion of my childhood, was never more lovely.

I would often hold a braid of hair in each of my hands as though they were lines. Mother would then “play horse” with me.

But this morning, she was too busy to play. For mother and all her children must attend mass on Easter Sunday.

As the sun came up, her spirits seemed to go down.

She sobbed and held me close as though the mystery were too great for her.

My mood changed with my mother's.

We did not talk on our return to the house.

Mother poured water in an empty jelly glass and placed the flowers in it.

She died on a rainy April night.

She had been ill for several days.

The little baby, as if in a hurry to leave the dreary Ohio country, died too.

My uncle Tom awoke me. The kerosene lamp threw weird shadows over my attic bed. The rain rattled on the roof.

My uncle tapped my shoulder and said, very slowly,

“Jimmy—your mother's dead.”

He held a large red kerchief in his hand. A tempestuous, sentimental, bitter, kindly and fanatic man, he stood above me now, silent as the moon.

Stunned for a moment, I held his heavy hand. He said again, as if to himself… “Yes—Biddy's dead.”

I could hear footsteps down stairs.

My two brothers were awakened.

No other words were said between us. We put on our few rags and followed Uncle Tom.

Into my childish mind a terrible thought came. I had killed my mother. The doctor had forbidden her to have water. The day before she had lain in bed, her throat parched. No one brought water but me. My sister Virginia had begged me not to listen to mother if she pleaded for water.

“It will kill her,” she said softly, “the doctor says so.”

Mother had a passion for keeping young.

She had the fear of death and old age which belongs to all great lovers of life. She often said to me, “I'm not so old—I'm just your oldest sister, Biddy.”

I sat on her bed while she petted me.

“You'll get your Biddy a drink, won't you, dear? The doctor is just mad at me—and I'm so thirsty. You can run to the pump quickly—no one will know—and I'll never tell.”

I found a large dipper in the kitchen and ran to the pump. I brought it brimming full to her. I took the dipper to the kitchen. Mother crooned to me when I returned.

She never told on me.

She begged her God not to take her. She told him the ages of her children in the hope that He would allow her to stay.

She died in the early thirties. Her last contribution to life's eternal merry-go-round, lay dead beside her.

Many people were in the room of death. They made way for Biddy's children. I advanced slowly—and stopped.

She did not seem dead to me. The lights from the lamps turned her hair into gold. Her eyes were half open.

Little more than a baby, I can see every scene, every gesture, as if it were yesterday.

A rosary was twined around her hands. Her fingernails were still pink.

Virginia put her arms about me. I touched my mother.

There had never been much love between the relatives of my father and mother. Both were in the wrong. Death had waved a flag of truce. They mingled sadly now.

Grandfather Tully stood in one corner of the room, alone. I hurried toward him.

My father joined us. Neither man spoke for some time.

“It will go hard on the boy here,” said my grandfather.

“Yes—” my father returned slowly.

“Too much for Biddy it was—her mither an' father goin' in a month—an' John Lawler comin' back—an' Dinnis leavin' the way he did.” My grandfather talked as if to himself.

My father said, “Yes, as slowly as before.

Our destitution was worse than usual. My clothing was not fit, in the eyes of my relatives, to allow me to attend my mother's funeral.

I stood in the road and cried until the hearse had passed from view.

A terrible brooding came over the log house. I would escape from it each day and wander with Virginia over the countryside.

It was soon decided to send me to an orphanage. I cannot recall that period of imprisonment without a feeling of overwhelming sadness.

I read a great deal. I knew Fox's “Book of Martyrs.” I was certain that Martin Luther had hanged himself to a bedpost, and that St. Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland.

The routine of the days was precisely the same.

We children built all plans of the future upon the words, “when I go away.” Leaving the orphanage became a mania with each child.

Three of my uncles came to the orphanage once in six years. My father did not come near.

I became a burden to the institution the last year. Those in charge were tired of seeing me.

During the final months of my stay at the place I was worried greatly for fear that I would be sent to that penitentiary for juveniles—the Reform School. Two dozen boys lived under this threat. Our crime was—remaining too long at a place which we hated. Those who did run away were captured and returned. Each morning in school, we sang lustily—

Never did criminal put in six more terrible years of torture. And often I felt that I too was a convict.

I had given my mother water to drink.

O
NE
Sunday I received word that I had friends to see me. I could hardly believe the news. It was the third time in six years.

I hurried to the reception room.

Virginia and my older brother awaited me.

Little more than children, it was the first time in their lives they had ever been ten miles from St. Marys.

They had the expressions of people who face unknown terrors.

We were too overwhelmed to talk for some time.

My sister cried a great deal. Her arms would tremble as she held me. The touch of woman was a new experience. Dazed, it seemed as if I had been born into a world of which I had never dreamed.

I wore the little suit in which I had received Holy Communion a few weeks before. I had to change to older clothes with which to face the world. The trousers were gray and patched at the knees. The blouse was faded and worn. The hat, the first I had worn in six years, was redder than my hair. But clothes did not matter.

The emotion of leaving overshadowed everything else.

There were some children whom long years of loneliness had taught me to love. They cried as they saw me leave. I thought not of them that day.

A letter was sent from the superintendent of the orphanage to one of my uncles. It threatened me with the Reform School. He did not respond. His wife told Virginia.

She was earning a dollar and a half a week as a servant girl.

My brother earned ten dollars a month on a farm. Together they decided to come and get me.

The Grand Central Station in Cincinnati made me speechless with bewilderment. My sister held me by the hand—the blind leading the blind.

It was an excursion train upon which the fare had been reduced.

A crowd of glassblowers had travelled from a town near St. Marys. We all boarded the same car. Neither brother nor sister had the money to pay my way.

The glassblowers solved the problem to everyone's advantage except my own. They placed me under the seat each time the conductor came through the car. To them it was a joyous pastime. To me it was a long misery. The rolling landscape fascinated me. I could not enjoy the view from the window.

The men were all drunk.

We reached St. Marys at midnight. My brother walked to the farm. I stayed with my sister.

The next morning she borrowed five dollars with which to take me to my father. He was said to be forty miles away.

Whether or not we would find our gypsy father was uncertain. We talked but little. I looked at the St. Marys Reservoir as we rode toward Celina and thought I had never seen anything so magnificent.

An old man left us at Ohio City. He was to take another road to Chicago. His body was twisted. His teeth were nearly gone. He cackled more than he laughed. A Civil War veteran, he had visited a brother at the Soldiers' Home in Dayton. His eyes were red as blood.

We became warm under his twisted smile.

“You'll get along my boy. You'll find your father. And some day you'll be a big grown man.”

I watched him board the waiting train.

He had given me an apple.

After the old man had gone, Virginia hugged me and cried.

Worn from varied adventures, I slept with my sister's arm about me.

She wakened me at Haviland, a small station on the Cincinnati Northern Railway. Opposite was a two story hotel built out of rough pine boards. A tall grain elevator was a few hundred feet away.

We went to the hotel.

An immense woman met us. She wore a Mother Hubbard red and white calico dress. A blue and white checked gingham apron was tied about her. Her eyes were little and black. Her skin was swarthy. Her hair was sparse, coal black, and plastered to her head, which was shaped like a canal boat. A long black mustache was on her upper lip.

Virginia asked if Mr. Tully, the ditcher was at the hotel.

The woman, impassive, rubbed her mustache.

“He's been gone three weeks,” she said, almost defiantly, pointing eastward. “Said he was goin' to Grover Hill—I ain't heard of him since.”

My sister tried to be cheerful.

“Is it far?” she asked.

“Ten miles.”

“Can we hire a livery rig?”

“Yes—” was the answer, “I kin have my man take you over—three dollars—you kin find him over there—it's a big ditchin' job—they say.” Looking at us with more interest, “Is he your pa?”

“Yes—” Virginia answered.

The woman called her husband.

Heavy and morose, he took us to Grover Hill.

“So you're Jim Tully's gal—an' the young ‘un—”

“My brother.”

A laugh stopped half way in his throat.

“Gosh—diden' think Jim ever stayed long ‘nough anywhere's to have any kids.” He slapped the horse with the lines.

“Your ma livin'?”

“No—” Virginia answered slowly. “I'm takin' my brother to our father—he's been in an orphans' home.”

“Huh—too bad.”

Our father had gone from Grover Hill some days before. No one knew where.

It was late afternoon when we returned to Haviland.

Virginia paid the three dollars and took me by the hand. The woman's eyes followed us.

We walked across the road to the depot, and seated ourselves on a curved wooden bench, empty of words and forlorn, we looked down the railroad track. Two tiny streaks of gray, it seemed to stretch into the far-off sky.

The telegraph instrument clicked loudly. A wagon rumbled by on its way to the grain elevator. A farmer boy dangled his feet from the rear as I had done so long before.

Hungry and silent, we looked at a map which was tacked to the wall. It advertised a resort in Michigan. By one of those pathetic twists of memory, the map is still vivid in my brain.

“Don't you wish you was rich, Jimmy—we could go there.”

I nodded, “Yes.”

Virginia, like my mother, was almost beautiful. Her eyes had the same tragic sadness—the eyes of a hurt animal which must be hurt again. Still in her teens, she played with a long braid of hair and smiled whimsically.

I sobbed.

She put a finger to her lips—“Shhhsh, they'll put us out.”

A terrible loneliness enveloped me. I longed for the children of the orphanage.

The ticket window opened.

“No more trains to-day,” said a voice. The window went down with a crash.

We looked at the map on the wall.

The woman entered. Her frozen indifference had melted.

“What you children goin' to do?” she asked.

I looked at Virginia. She did not answer for a moment.

“We don't know.” The words came at last.

The woman twisted her blue and white checked apron into a rope in her hands.

“Well, supper's ready, I didn't know. I hate to broach into people's business that hain't mine.”

She led us to the hotel, talking volubly.

“You'd a thunk the cat had your tongue—you mustn't be like that—how'll you ever get along in the world. I didn't know your ma was dead till my man told me. The Lord never sent me no babies—it hain't because I didn't want 'em.” She caressed me. “You know I could thresh your father—did he know you were comin'?”

“No—we wanted to surprise him,” returned Virginia proudly.

The woman seated us at a large table covered with red oil cloth.

It was the first real meal since mother's death.

There was chicken and gravy and biscuit.

The woman took a delight in serving me.

“When folks don't eat I think they're mad,” she said to me several times. “I believe in lots of good food.”

No meal has ever been so memorable.

The woman and her husband started eating after we had about finished. My sister bashfully pleaded with them to eat. They would not listen until we were satisfied.

After the meal we were taken to the private “parlor.”

The woman raised the curtains weakly. The dying day came into the room. It showed heavy red chairs and a red lounge upon which was a red quilt. “I guess I'm gypsy. I like lots o' color,” she said to Virginia, “it makes me feel warm.”

“So do I,” assented my sister.

The woman's nails were broken, her hands red and puffed. She twisted her apron again and chattered on, as if to relieve a pressure on her brain. “So you hain't seen your father in a long time.” She looked kindly at me. “He's the strange man, he is—he works till his back's half broke—and then he gives it all to the saloons.”

She picked up a pink sea shell. “Ain't it purty—put it against your ear and hear the ocean roar. I ain't never seen any water—except Blue Creek and one time Maumee River. Many's the night I've sit and listened to it. I've always wanted to see the ocean.” She laid it down with care. “I got it in Van Wert at the Fair—your Pa went with us—but he never got to the Fair Grounds—he got so drunk—when I scolded him he said—‘Oh it's ivery man his own poison and the divil take us all.'” She chuckled and twisted her apron until the ends of her fingers turned white. “He was here with me three months—and he never mentioned a child he had in the world. Ah—but Jim Tully is the funny one—there was never anything in his room but empty bottles—he'd give you the world when he had it—but he never had it long.”

“He was always good to us children,” Virginia said defensively.

“But he should keep his own together—you didn't ask to come into the world.”

Virginia smiled. “No—I never would ask that—”

“Why how you talk,” the woman's words came quickly.

The girl smiled again.

“I hope you don't mean it,” declared the woman, “you're too young and purty for such thoughts.”

I slept that night in the room my father had occupied.

I wondered if the years had changed him—if he would know me. I could hear the noise of frogs and crickets and a horse's hoofs on the road.

Gazing into the darkness, my mind limped over the six years at the orphanage.

A feeling of bitterness toward my father came over me. I thought of my brother Tom, and tried to brush it aside.

“Dad had his troubles,” Tom used to say. “Besides—we've learned to read and write. And maybe we wouldn't of done that if he hadn't sent us to the orphanage.”