Afterword

The Irish as a people have little written history, so I have relied extensively on oral history and family memorabilia gleaned from my grandmother, Grace Sweeney Tannehill, my late uncle, Robert E. Sweeney, my father, Gerald F. Sweeney, and other family members and extensive family research as I wrote this fictional version of my great-grandmother Mary Agnes’s story.

Mary Anne Agnes Coyne Cleveland was born in Dawrosmore, County Galway, Ireland on November 18, 1872, and died in Chicago, Illinois on September 11, 1957. As a young girl she lived with her grandparents, Festus and Mary (who I call Grace in the novel) Laffey, at the end of the Dawros peninsula in northwest County Galway outside of Letterfrack in Connemara.

Mary Agnes traveled to America either alone (according to my grandmother) or with a Laffey cousin and his wife and child (according to other family members) in the mid-1880s to rejoin her parents who left her in Ireland as an infant. While in Chicago, she lived with Laffey relatives and worked in domestic service. She met and married Thomas Halligan of Peoria, Illinois, who, soon in the years afterward, developed tuberculosis. After traveling to Colorado Springs with him to chase “the cure,” Tom Halligan died in El Paso, Texas. After Tom’s death, and before Mary Agnes returned to Chicago to stay for the rest of her life, she worked as a cook on a chuckwagon somewhere along the cattle trail from El Paso to Denver.

I’ve chosen to play with family history here to serve the story (including moving up the date that St. Mel’s Catholic Church opened in Chicago by several years).

My father’s recollection of his gram, who went by Mary Agnes, and who raised him in the early 1930s in Chicago, is that she was feisty and fair and frugal, possessed a sizeable sense of humor, and had a great love of all things Western. My father remembers she had a large set of Zane Grey novels on her bedroom dresser and always talked fondly of El Paso. He clearly remembers sitting with her as she listened to Westerns on the radio. Mary Agnes ruled with a firm hand, a tight purse, and a great smile—and always served more than enough to eat. That would be fitting.

I have always thought of myself as a proud Irish American (now, more than thirty-six million people of Irish descent live in the United States, nearly nine times the population of Ireland, with large pockets of Irish still in Boston, Chicago, and New York). It’s no secret that those of us of Irish descent are prone to story and exaggeration. These are gifts. I hope I’ve used them well here as I’ve spun Mary Agnes’s story.

I hope I’m forgiven by Mary Agnes and other family members for taking liberties with her story. This is where creative license comes in. Much like Mary Agnes repairing nets, I am repairing her life and giving her an alternative ending, for reasons of my own. It’s fiction, after all.