Brian’s cousin was good to his word. Mike moved to Florida, got married to a local girl and was managing an Irish bar in Tampa. He and his wife were expecting a baby. He and Brian talk on the phone a few times a year and Mike seemed very happy, with no regrets about leaving the city. Brian took a week off after his dad passed. Everyone put it down to grief, which it was, and trauma. He kept hugging his wife and son and telling them how much he loved them. After a while, he got back into the old routines and things settled down for what he hoped would be the last time. He got a lot of nightmares at first. He would jump up in bed suddenly and shake for a time. He didn’t know why he got nightmares this time more than the first time; who knows with these things. Anyway, he put it down to the effects of sleep apnea, the thing where you stop breathing for a few seconds. As it turned out, he had that too and the effects were very similar. He started to sleep in another room so his wife could get some rest, and over time the dreams become less frequent. He concentrated on trying to be a good husband, father, brother, person. Although he knew it would never be enough. He saw the way Jesus looked at him when they went to Mass and no, he had not been to Confession. He was sad about what happened, but there is a difference between being sad and being sorry and he didn’t want to add being a hypocrite to his other sins.
Years later, when his son was about twelve, Brian was sitting in the study reading and his son was doing his homework. His son had grown up a real ginger, a poster child for Ireland. His dad would have got such a kick out of him. Anyway, he was just dozing off when his son says,
“Dad, why don’t you ever talk about when you lived in New York? Why don’t we ever go to visit there?”
He was a bit surprised, Liam had never mentioned anything like this before. He knew that his son was in touch ‘online’ with some of his cousins and he began to wonder.
Brian raised an eyebrow and in order to buy some time he replied,
“What do you mean, what are you talking about?”
“Well, cousin Gavin says that we had real gangsters in the family and that you and Cousin Mike can’t go back to the city because of trouble with the Mob.”
Good Lord, here was this little ginger boy from the pleasant leafy suburbs of Charlotte asking him about Mob troubles. That little brat Gavin and his big yap, what the hell was his father thinking? No, not him, it must have been his wife, she never liked him or his family.
“Well, son, first off, I can assure you that Gavin does not know what he is talking about. Secondly, trips to New York are expensive, your mom and I have been there. We don’t get much vacation and we both work hard so we like to go places where we would all have a good time.”
“So, you are saying that Gavin is a big fat liar and that he is making all this stuff up?”
“I never said your cousin Gavin was big and fat, you just said, that not me.” Brian tried to get him off topic one last time, but he wasn’t giving up.
“But, Dad?”
“Tell you what, someday when you are lot older maybe we will go up to New York together, okay? In the meantime, since you are so interested in history, hand me that history book and let’s see how ready you are for the test.”
Brian smiled again as he thought of his father. He wasn’t sure about the trip to New York. He was certain that all that had happened was best left in the past. He didn’t want his son to have any part of it. He would be the last of the black Irish indeed. Maybe someday though, he would write it all down for himself. It might be, what do they call it, cathartic? Then he heard his Village voice laughing, ‘cathartic, bullshit’ and he went back to quizzing his son. You can take the boy out of the village, but the village never really leaves the boy, am I right? One thing he knew for sure was that as long as he had breath in his body, he would care for his son and encourage his growth and development. He would do his best to raise him in a safe and loving environment. That should take care of the nurture side of things. As to nature, his DNA, it seemed too soon to tell and maybe it was not important anyway, he thought. Maybe his son would be like his mother’s people, although Noreen always said that the boy was like his father. God help us all.