The Ethnography of Everyday Life
The center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life at the University of Michigan invited me to present at their recent conference, “Doing Documentary Work: Life, Letters and the Field.”
Where I come from, upstream on the Huron from smart Ann Arbor, we rarely offload words like ethnography unless we are appearing before the zoning board of appeals or possibly trying to avoid jury duty. All the same, I thanked the organizers and said I would be happy, etc., honored, of course, and marked the dates and times in my diary.
To be on the safe side, I looked it up—ethnography—and it says, “The branch of anthropology that deals with the description of various racial and cultural groups of people.” And anthropology—I looked that up too—is “the study of the origin, the behavior, and the physical, social and cultural development of human beings.”
Anthology—“a gathering of literary pieces, a miscellany, an assortment or catalogue”—is on the same page as anthropology. It comes from the Greek, as students are told, for “gathering flowers.” As the man in that movie about the big fat wedding says, everything comes from the Greek for something else.
Dictionaries are like that—you go in for a quick hit of ethnography and come out with flowers by the bunch. Two pages east and you’ve got Antigone, “the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta, in Greek mythology, who performed funeral rites over her brother’s body in defiance of the king” at Thebes. That ancient city’s on the same page as theater and theatre, which have several definitions all derived from the Greek “to watch.” Think of “the milieu of actors and playwrights.” Think Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Think Sophocles.
At the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, just last week, a new version of Antigone called The Burial at Thebes opened to great reviews in the Irish papers. One commentator claimed that Creon the king was like President George W. Bush, caught in a conflict he’d a hand in making. How’s that for ethnography and everyday? How’s that for life, letters, and the field?
I avoided the quagmire of milieu, suspect as we are lately of anything French, but looked up human and human beings and got what you’d guess, but came across humic, which sent me to humus, which has to do with “a layer of soil that comes from the decay of leaves and other vegetation and which contains valuable plant food.” It is a twin of the Latin word—because everything in our house came from Latin, except for the Kyrie—for soil, earth.
Which put me in mind of a book I’d been reading by Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead, in which he speaks about our “humic density”—we human beings, shaped out of earth, fashioned out of dirt, because we are primally bound to the ground our shelters and buildings and monuments rise out of and our dead are buried in. Everything—architecture, history, religion—“rooted” in the humus of the home place and to the stories and corpses that are buried there.
Thus was I shown, in my first days in West Clare years ago, the house and haggard, hay barn and turf-shed, cow cabins and out-offices, gateposts, stone walls, fields and wells and ditches, forts and gaps, church and grave vault, names and dates in stone—all the works and days of hands that belonged to the people that belonged to me, all dead now, dead and gone back to the ground out of which arose these emblements of humic density.
The awareness of death that defines human nature is inseparable from—indeed it rises from—our awareness that we are not self-authored, that we follow in the footsteps of the dead. Everywhere one looks across the spectrum of human cultures one finds the foundational authority of the predecessor. . . . Whether we are conscious of it or not we do the will of the ancestors: our commandments come to us from their realm; their precedents are our law; we submit to their dictates, even when we rebel against them. Our diligence, hardihood, rectitude, and heroism, but also our folly, spite, rancor, and pathologies, are so many signatures of the dead on the contracts that seal our identities. We inherit their obsessions; assume their burdens; carry on their causes; promote their mentalities, ideologies, and very often their superstitions; and very often we die trying to vindicate their humiliations. —The Dominion of the Dead, pages ix–x, Robert Pogue Harrison
Isn’t that just like people? Ethnographically speaking? Or anthropologically? To think of the place where their ancients lived and worked, fought, believed, and are buried as sacred, central to their own identity.
So we’re back to burials again—Antigone and Thebes. Creon and Bush. Do you suppose that humus is good for flowers?
Such is the trouble with the everyday—one thing leads to another. You start out with ethnography and end up with flowers, like the paperwhite narcissus my true love grows every Christmas from bulbs she buries in a kitchen pot, or the crocuses that press through the litter of old leaves, pine needles, melting snow, and warming soil every year in April up here at the lake. The everyday, predictable, measurable truth assumes a routine that we think we can study: how the seasons change, the moon runs through its phases, the sun rises earlier every day. “April showers,” we say, “red sky at morning.” Monday begets Tuesday, which in turn begets . . . well, you get it. We make our plans upon such reliable sciences. “Home by Friday, with the help of God,” I tell my darling on the way out the door.
MAYBE YOU WANT to know what I said at the conference?
I said it looked like “a paradigm shift.” (They were paying me a handsome honorarium.) I said it looked like a paradigm shift, from a sense of holy ground and grounding, to a kind of rootlessness—spiritually, ethnographically, anthropologically speaking, humanity-wise. At which point in the proceedings I removed from my bag and placed upon the table by the lectern from which I was holding forth, a golf-bag cremation urn. Molded, no doubt, out of some new-age resin or high-grade polymer, it stands about fourteen inches high and looks like everyone’s idea of the big nut-brown leather bag with plump pockets and a plush towel and precious memories in which “Dad” or “Grandpa” or “Good Old [insert most recently deceased golf-buddy’s nickname]” would have kept his good old golf clubs. The bottom of the golf-bag urn is fashioned to look like the greensward of a well-maintained fairway. So the whole thing looks like a slice of golf heaven. There is even a golf ball resting beside the base of the bag, waiting for the erstwhile golfer to chip it up for an easy putt. The thing is hollow, the better to accommodate the two hundred-some cubic centimeters, give or take, most cremated human beings will amount to.
I confess that the idea of the urn only came to me at the last moment, because I wanted to see the looks on their faces. It’s a character flaw, based upon my own lack of scholastic pedigree. Except for an honorary doctorate in humanities from the university I never managed to graduate from—though the Dear knows I paid for many classes—I hold no degree. I’m not bachelor, master, or doctor of anything, and though I was “certified” in mortuary science by a regionally respected university, a battery of state and national board exams, and the completion of a requisite apprenticeship, I’m self-conscious about standing before a room full of serious students and scholars. It is this fear—surely every human has it—of being exposed as a fraud that makes one eager to supply a diversion. Thus the urn: if I could not earn their respect, I’d . . . well, never mind.
Still, I wanted to see the looks on their faces when I presented, as an article of documentary consequence, as an anthropological artifact, as a postmodern relic of a species that had accomplished pyramids, the Taj Mahal, and Newgrange, the ethnographically denatured and, by the way, chemically inert, plastic golf-bag-shaped cremation urn. It’s one of a kind. It came from a catalogue. There’s also one that looks like a pair of cowboy boots—a “companion” urn for “pardners”—and one that looks like a duck decoy for hunters or possibly naturalists: variations on the theme of molded plastics. So I wanted to tell them about the paradigm shift that it signified.
I came up burying Presbyterians and Catholics, devout and lapsed, born-again and backslidden Baptists, Orthodox Christians, an occasional Zen Buddhist, and variously observant Jews. For each of these sets, there were infinite subsets. We had right old Calvinists who only drank single malts and were all good Masons and were mad for the bagpipes, just as we had former Methodists who worked their way up the Reformation ladder after they married into money or made a little killing in the market. We had Polish Catholics and Italian ones, Irish and Hispanic and Byzantine, and Jews who were Jews in the way some Lutherans are Lutheran—for births and deaths and first marriages.
My late father, himself a funeral director, schooled me in the local orthodoxies and their protocols as I have schooled my sons and daughter who work with me. There was a kind of comfort, I suppose, in knowing exactly what would be done with you, one’s ethnic and religious identities having established long ago the fashions and the fundamentals for one’s leave-taking. And while the fashions might change, the fundamental ingredients for a funeral were the same—someone who has quit breathing forever, some others to whom it apparently matters, and someone else who stands between the quick and dead and says something like, “Behold, I show you a mystery.”
“An act of sacred community theatre,” Dr. Thomas Long, writer, thinker, and theologian, calls this “transporting” of the dead from this life to the next. “We move them to a further shore. Everyone has a part in this drama.” The dead get to the grave or fire or tomb whilst the living get to the edge of a life they must learn to live without them. Ours is a species that deals with death (the idea of the thing) by dealing with our dead (the thing itself).
Late in the twentieth century, there was some trending toward the more homegrown doxologies. Everyone was into the available “choices.” We started doing more cremations—it made good sense. Folks seemed less “grounded” than their grandparents, more “portable,” “divisible,” more “scattered” somehow. We got into balloon releases and homing pigeons done up as doves to signify the flight of the dead fellow’s soul toward heaven. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” replaced “How Great Thou Art.” And if Paul’s Letter to the Romans or the Book of Job was replaced by Omar Khayyam or Emily Dickinson, what harm? “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” rings as true as any sacred text. A death in the family is, as Miss Emily describes it: “First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go.”
Amidst all the high fashions and fashion blunders, the ritual wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead still got us where we needed to go. It made room for the good laugh, the good cry, and the power of faith brought to bear on the mystery of mortality. The dead were “processed” to their final dispositions with a pause sufficient to say that their lives and their deaths truly mattered to us. The broken circle within the community of folks who shared blood or geography or belief with the dead was closed again through this “acting out our parts,” as Reverend Long calls it. Someone brought the casseroles, someone brought the prayers, someone brought a shovel or lit the fire, everyone was consoled by everyone else. The wheel that worked the space between the living and the dead ran smoothly.
Lately I’ve been thinking that the wheel is broken or gone a long way off the track or must be reinvented every day. The paradigm is shifting. What with distanced communities of faith and family, the script has changed from the essentially sacred to the essentially silly. We mistake the ridiculous for the sublime.
Take Batesville Casket Company, for example. They make caskets and urns and wholesale them to funeral homes all over the globe. Their latest catalogue, called “Accessories,” includes suggested “visitation vignettes”—the stage arranged not around Cross or Crescent or Star of David but around one of Batesville’s “life-symbols” caskets featuring interchangeable corner hardware. One “life-symbol” looks like a rainbow trout jumping from the corners of the hardwood casket, and for dearly departed gardeners, there is one with little plastic potted mums. There is the “sports dad” vignette done up like a garage with beer logos, team pennants, hoops, and hockey skates and, of course, a casket that looks a little like a jock locker gone horizontal. There’s one for motorcyclists and the much-publicized “Big Mama’s Kitchen,” with its faux stove, kitchen table, and apple pie for the mourners to share with those who call. Instead of Methodists or Muslims, we are golfers now; gardeners, bikers, and dead bowlers. The bereaved are not so much family and friends or coreligionists as fellow hobbyists and enthusiasts. And I have become less the funeral director and more the memorial caddy of sorts, getting the dead out of the way and the living assembled within a theatre that is neither sacred nor secular but increasingly absurd—a triumph of accessories over essentials, of stuff over substance, gimmicks over the genuine. The dead are downsized or disappeared or turned into knickknacks in a kind of funereal karaoke.
Consider the case of Peter Payne, dead at forty-four of brain cancer. His wife arranged for his body to be cremated without witness or rubric, his ashes placed in the golf-bag urn, the urn to be placed on a table in one of our parlors with his “real life”—which is to say, “life-size” golf bag standing beside it for their son and daughter and circle of friends to come by for a look. And if nobody said, “Doesn’t he look natural?” several commented on how much he looked like, well, his golf bag. The following day, the ensemble was taken to the church, where the minister, apparently willing to play along, had some things to say about “life being like a par-three hole with plenty of sand traps and water hazards”—to wit, all too short and full of trouble. And heaven was something like a “19th Hole,” where, after “finishing the course,” those who “played by the rules” and “kept an honest score” were given their “trophies.” Then those in attendance were invited to join the family at the clubhouse of Mystic Creek Golf Course for lunch and a little commemorative boozing. There is already talk of a Peter Payne Memorial Golf Tournament next year. A scholarship fund has been established to send young golfers to PGA training camp. Some of his ashes will be scattered in the sand trap of the par-five hole on the back nine with the kidney-shaped green and the dogleg right. The rest will remain, forever and ever, perpetual filler for the golf-bag urn.
Whether this is indeed a paradigm shift, the end of an era, or, as Robert Pogue Harrison suggests, an “all too human failure to meet the challenges of modernity,” is anyone’s guess. But we are nonetheless required, as he insists, to choose “an allegiance—either to the posthuman, the virtual, and the synthetic, or to the earth, the real and the dead in their humic densities.”
“So, which will it be?” I posed rhetorically to the audience (which seemed oddly fixed upon the objet de mort). “The golf bag urn?” (read posthuman, virtual, and synthetic) “or some humus—the ground and graveyard, village, nation, place or faith—the nitty-gritty real earth in which human roots link the present to the past and future?”
They looked a little blankly at me, as if I’d held up five fingers and asked them what the square root of Thursday was. There was some shifting in seats, some clearing of throats. I thought I might have numbed them with the genius of it or damaged them in some nonspecific way.
I thought about wrapping up with a little joke about a widow who brings her cheapskate husband’s ashes home, pours them out on the kitchen table, and begins to upbraid him for all those things she asked for but he never gave her—the mink coat, the convertible, etc.—but thought better of it and closed instead with an invitation to engage in a little Q & A on these and any other themes they might like to pursue. A man in the second row, whose eyes had widened when I produced the urn and who had not blinked or closed his mouth since the thing appeared, raised his hand to ask, “Is there anyone in there?”
“Why, no, no, of course not, no,” I assured him.
There was a collective sigh, a sudden flash of not-quite-knowing smiles, and then the roar of uneasy silence, like a rush of air returned to the room.
The director of the Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life hurriedly rose to thank me for “a thought-provoking presentation,” led the assembled in polite applause, and announced that the buffet luncheon was ready and waiting in a room across the hall. Except for a man who wanted to discuss his yet-to-be-patented “water-reduction method” of body disposition, there was no further intercourse between the assembly and me.
It’s only now, months later, the conference come and gone, the kindly stipend paid and spent, that it occurs to me what I should have said.
What I should have said is that ethnography seems so perilous just now, no less the everyday; that “life and letters and the field” seem littered more than ever with the wounded and the dead, the raging and the sad. That ethnicity, formerly a cause for celebration, now seems an occasion for increasing caution. That ethnic identity—those ties by which we are bound to others of our kind by tribe and race, language and belief, geography and history, costume and custom and a hundred other measures—seems lately less a treasure, more a scourge.
WHEN I BEGAN this book, I had in mind something that would help my family reconnect to our little history as Irish Americans, something that would resonate with other hyphenated types who’ve come from every parish in the world. I wanted the names and the records kept—a text my grandchildren, not yet born, might dip into someday for their own reasons. Something like Roots for the freckled and redheaded set, the riverdancing and flash-tempered descendants of immigrants—the seven million “willing” Irish men and women who have crossed the Atlantic in the last four hundred years, seeking a future in this New World that had been denied to them in the Old. From the first Scots-Irish, tired of the tithes and rents in Ulster in the seventeenth century—Davy Crockett’s people, westward pressing, sturdy and curious—to the hundreds of thousands of oppressed Catholics in the eighteenth century who would fight in our revolution and help to shape our nation, like the man with my name, from South Carolina, who signed the Declaration of Independence; to the million Famine Irish, sick with hunger, fever, and want in the nineteenth century, one of whom, my great-great-grandfather, came and returned, and another, my great-grandfather, came to stay; to the rising and falling tides of Irish who washed ashore here in the twentieth century, building our roads, working our Main Streets, filling our senates and legislatures, rectories, schools, and universities; to the sons and daughters of friends in Moveen who left home in the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s—Anne Murray and her sister Kay, a couple of the Carmodys, Downses and O’Sheas. They are still going out to America, although now they come and go as they please on 747s that every day fly over Moveen on their way to and from the airport at Shannon. Ultimatum has become an option. American Wakes have become bon-voyage parties as the young in West Clare become, like the young in Michigan, working tourists in a smaller world full of portable opportunities and multiple possibilities.
By the time Alex Haley’s Roots was published in 1976, I’d been back and forth to Ireland three times. Haley’s hunger for knowing and reconstructing and reconnecting with the past was one I’d got a whiff of in my early travels. When the TV series the book inspired was aired in January 1977, I watched with a hundred thirty million other Americans who, thanks to Haley’s gifts, saw, in the struggles of his family, something related to their own. For white Americans, it humanized blacks in a way that federal laws, however just and long overdue, had failed to do. For African Americans, it ennobled their struggle in a hostile world by connecting them to a formerly untold past.
When the African held his infant son, Kunta Kinte, up to the firmament and spoke his name into the dark face of creation, I understood the power of naming and keeping track of things, why all holy books begin with a litany of “begats,” and how much each of our personal stories owes to the stories of our families and clans, our kind and kin. Second only to the forced migration of the African slave trade, the tide of Famine and post-Famine Irish marked the largest single wave of immigration in U.S. history.
SO, I WANTED a book that honored those who stayed and those who went, to bridge some of the distance that always swells between people who “choose” a different path, or find some footing in a life with few choices. I wanted to understand the man who left, the better to understand the man who returned to Moveen, to understand the ones who went between and who would follow after.
I wanted something chatty and jaunty like a good night’s talk. Something that would find its market among even a fraction of the forty-some-million Americans alive today who trace their place back to the thirty-two thousand-square-mile island in the sea at the westernmost edge of Europe.
My agent and publishers oughtn’t to be faulted for thinking of a kind of travel memoir, something with a little something for everyone, something that would earn back its advance and then some. Something that would offset the losses on poetry. Truth told, it’s what I was hoping for, too.
The brother (about whom more anon), ever the raconteur, suggested at the outset a regimen of weekly audiences with himself and tendered Wednesdays with Patrick as a working title. “Or maybe Paddy—you know, for the folksy crowd—like that Paddy whiskey, easy sipping with a little bite. And maybe Thursdays, Tom. Yes, Thursdays with Paddy. That’s just the t’ing.” And the truth is I’d have no problem with that. He’s a great man in all ways with a skeptic’s temperament, a heart of gold, and a “fierce big brainbox,” as Martin Roche once said about J. J. McMahon, our neighbor in West Clare.
I wanted it all to be a gift, in thanksgiving for the gift that had been given me, of Ireland and the Irish, the sense of connection, and the family I found there and the house they all came from that was left to me.
SEPTEMBER 11 CHANGED all of that. The book I first imagined was no longer possible. Just as our sense of safety here, protected by oceans and the globe’s largest arsenal of weapons and resources, was forever shaken, irreparably damaged by the horrors of that day, so too was the sense that ethnicity is always and only quaint and benign.
Lost too was the luxury of isolation and purposeful ignorance of the larger world of woes, a taste for which I’d acquired in my protected suburban youth and overindulged throughout my adulthood—fattening, as Americans especially do, on our certainty that it will all be taken care of by whoever’s in charge.
I remember telling prospective tourists, fearful of what they’d heard about the “Troubles” in Ireland—the last century’s longest-running war in Western Europe—not to worry about a thing. Belfast and Derry were distant concerns, small towns in a tiny province—“little more,” I’d assure them, “than a bar fight in Escanaba or Munising.” I’d acquired the Irish gift for strategic understatement, too.
The day that terrorists bombed embassies in Africa, was it?—killing dozens or hundreds, I couldn’t say—I was shopping in Kilrush for kitchen things at Brews and Gleeson’s, certain that the troubles really didn’t concern me and that out by Dunlicky the mackerel would be plentiful and the walk to the sea would do me good, and nothing could be better than fresh fish and tea.
So maybe what I should have said is that ethnography, which formerly seemed a parlor game, seems more a dangerous science now, especially “the ethnography of everyday life,” because life, everyday life, here in the opening decade of the new millennium, constantly obscures, daily nullifies, and relentlessly confounds the needful work of such inquiry. The subgroup we were about to study is suddenly removed or written off by the first drafts of a history that our all-day-everyday news cycle proclaims.
“A Decade After Massacres, Rwanda Outlaws Ethnicity,” proclaims the headline in the New York Times on April 8, 2004. Marc Lacey reports from the capital, Kigali:
This country, where ethnic tensions were whipped up into a frenzy of killing, is now trying to make ethnicity a thing of the past. There are no Hutu in the new Rwanda. There are no Tutsi either. The government, dominated by the minority Tutsi, has wiped out the distinction by decree.
Ethnicity has already been ripped out of schoolbooks and rubbed off government identity cards. Government documents no longer mention Hutu or Tutsi, and the country’s newspapers and radio stations, tightly controlled by the government, steer clear of the labels as well.
It is not just considered bad form to discuss ethnicity in the new Rwanda. It can land one in jail. Added to the penal code is a crime of “divisionism,” a nebulous offense that includes speaking too provocatively about ethnicity.
As elsewhere, there are the politically incorrect.
A Tutsi woman, who was raped in 1994 by so many Hutu militiamen in the village of Taba that she lost count, said she has difficulty interacting comfortably with Hutu.
“I don’t trust them,” said the woman, who, identified only as J. J., testified about her ordeal before the international tribunal in Rwanda.
Tutsi and Hutu—such neighborly words—equal in syllables and vowel sounds, trochees and pleasantly fricative “t’s”: who’d ever guess that they accounted for eight hundred thousand deaths in a hundred days a decade ago, most by machete, that the rest of the world largely ignored.
While marking another anniversary of the Rwandan genocide this year, we are avoiding naming what is happening in Sudan’s Darfur region as “genocide.” That particular noun requires verbs—by international convention, something remedial would have to be done—whereas atrocity or ethnic cleansing leaves us options. The systematic rape, pillage, and slaughter of tribal Africans by Arab Janjaweed militia, armed by the Sudanese government, are, like the atrocities of the twentieth century—Armenians in Turkey, Jews of the Holocaust, Cambodians, Kurds, Bosnians, Nigerians, Bengalis—all lamentable mostly after the fact.
Asked whether the recent run of genocides might finally get it to “stick in people’s minds” that we’ve responsibilities, Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell, replies, “I think we tell ourselves, though, that that was the product of peculiar circumstances. ‘Oh, that’s Africa, you know, the tribes, they do that.’ ‘It’s the Balkans, this stuff happens in the Balkans.’ There’s a way that we otherize [my italics] circumstances that challenge our universal premises.” (Atlantic Unbound Interviews, March 14, 2003)
How do we otherize our fellow humans? How do we mistake them for something other than our kind? In what ways has our ethnicity poisoned the well of our humanity? Why must our religions so miscalculate our gods? If there is only one God, as all Muslims, Christians, and Jews believe, then isn’t the One we believe in one and the same? If there is no God, aren’t we only off by one? And if there are many, aren’t there plenty to go around? In the wake of that godawful September, after bombing the bejaysus out of Afghanistan, after bombing, invading, and occupying Iraq, a book about the forty shades of green I’d encountered driving around the Ring of Kerry seemed a little like a golf-bag urn—plastic, silly, curious, but idiotic. All I saw was forty shades of gray, and in each of them still forty more.
FROM THE POST-FAMINE cottage of my great-great-grandfather, to the Moveen my great-grandfather left in 1890, to the West Clare that Dorothea Lang photographed in the mid-1950s, to the Ireland I found in 1970, the greatest change in a hundred years was light—electric light. So says my neighbor J. J. McMahon, a scholarly and insightful man. It illuminated the dark hours, lengthened the evenings, shortened the winter’s terrible hold. Folks read later, talked later, went out in the night, certain their lamps would see them home. Still, life remained circumscribed by the limited range of transportation and communication. The immediate universe for most small farmers extended no farther than town, church, and marketplace, distances managed by ass and cart, or horse and trap, on Raleigh bike, or on foot—shank’s mare, as it was locally called. Communication was by gossip and bush telegraph, from kitchen to kitchen, with the postman up the road, with the men to and from the creamery, with the priest or teacher on their daily rounds, with women returning from market stalls. Talk was almost entirely parochial. The “wireless”—electric light’s chatty cousin—brought news of the larger world in thrice-daily doses whilst newspapers were read aloud, entirely. Still, these were one-sided communiqués. There was no escape, no geographical cures, no way to get out of the local into the world. Folks had to live with one another. This made them more likely to bear fellow feelings, to understand, to empathize. However much familiarity bred contempt—and it bred its share—the neighbors shared a common life experience, the same perils, the same hopes for their children, the same borders and limitations. They formed, if only by default, a community.
In the kitchens, shops, and snugs of those remote parishes, the visitor or stranger or traveler was, much like the bards of old, a bearer of tidings unheard before, like correspondence from a distant country, or a missionary or a circus come to town. The new voice at the fire relieved the tedium of the everyday, the usual suspects in the house, the same dull redundancy of the Tuesday that followed Monday, which in its turn followed Sunday, where the priest gave the same sermon he had last year at about the same time.
I was such a Playboy of the Western World, in the months of my first visit to West Clare. Deposed for hours on a variety of topics (music, money, presidential politics), and my opinion sought on all manner of things (the war in Vietnam, who shot Kennedy, the future of Ireland), I thought I must be a very interesting specimen indeed. It was years before I understood that, during those blustery winter evenings in Moveen, I provided only some little relief from habit and routine, what Samuel Beckett had identified years before as “the cancer of time.” I was not so interesting as I was something, anything, other than the known thing.
But today, the easier communications become, the easier it becomes not to communicate. The more rapidly we travel to the ends of the earth, the more readily we avoid our nearest neighbors. The more communing we do, the more elusive a sense of community seems. We are each encouraged to make individual choices, to seek personal saviors, singular experiences, our own particular truth. We make enemies of strangers and strangers of friends and wonder why we feel alone in the world.
Americans seem terribly perplexed at all the hatred of us in the world. Where, we wonder, are all those happy Iraqis who were supposed to greet us with smiles and flowers after we had liberated them? Where have all the flowers gone? Anthology? Antigone?
In his unstintingly titled How the Irish Saved Civilization, historian Thomas Cahill comments on page 6 on the tendency of one “civilization” to miss the point of an “other”:
To an educated Englishman of the last century, for instance, the Irish were by their very nature incapable of civilization. “The Irish,” proclaimed Benjamin Disraeli, Queen Victoria’s beloved prime minister, “hate our order, our civilization, our enterprising industry, our pure religion [Disraeli’s father had abandoned Judaism for the Church of England]. This wild, reckless, indolent, uncertain and superstitious race have no sympathy with the English character. Their ideal of human felicity is an alternation of clannish broils and coarse idolatry [i.e. Catholicism]. Their history describes an unbroken circle of bigotry [!] and blood.” The venomous racism and knuckle-headed prejudice of this characterization may be evident to us, but in the days of “dear old Dizzy,” as the queen called the man who had presented her with India, it simply passed for indisputable truth.
If this sounds a little like the conventional wisdom of the day, the policy and approved text on our “enemies in the war on terror,” then perhaps we should be on the lookout for “venomous racism and knuckleheaded prejudice” of our own.
Cahill goes on to make his case of how Irish monks and scribes kept the candles burning and the texts illumined through the Dark Ages and recivilized and re-Christianized Europe from west to east in what he calls a “hinge” of history. Cahill’s “hinges of history”—he has since done for the Jews and the Greeks what he did for the Irish—sound more than a little like what the German existentialist Karl Jaspers called the “Axial Age,” from 800 to 200 BC, when most of religious thought was formed, an age marked by violence and upheaval.
Maybe it is time we looked to Ireland again for some clues to the nature of our ethnic imbroglios, our jihads and holy wars, and to how we might learn to live peaceably in the world with our “others.” Surely the Shiite and Sunni of Iraq have something to learn from the Catholics and Protestants of Belfast and from the citizens of the Republic of Ireland. For here is a nation with a history of invasion, occupation, oppression, tribal warfare, religious fervor, ethnic cleansing, sectarian violence, and the tyrannies of churchmen, statesmen, thugs, and hoodlums. And yet it thrives on a shaky peace, religious convictions, rich cultural resources, and the hope of its citizens. It is a kind of miracle of civilization—where the better angels of the species have bested the bad. Such things could be contagious.
ON AUGUST 28, 1931, W. B. Yeats wrote “Remorse for Intemperate Speech,” a line from which this book borrows for one of its chapters and organizing principles. “Out of Ireland have we come./Great hatred, little room,/Maimed us at the start.” Yeats had witnessed and worked at the birth of a new Irish nation, had served as a Free State senator, and, after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, was at sixty-five the country’s public man of letters. An Anglo-Irishman who had ditched his people’s High Church Christianity in favor of swamis and Theosophists and his wife’s dabbling in the occult, he was likewise deeply immersed in the fledgling nation’s Celtic twilight, and torn between the right-wing politics of between-wars Europe and the romantic, mystic past of Ireland. His poem confesses and laments that reason and breeding, imagination and good intention are trumped by what he called “a fanatic heart.” The remorse is real. Surely the age in which we live requires such self-examination. In a world made smaller by its benign and malevolent technologies, out of whatever country we have come, great hatred, little room, maims us at the start. Regardless of our heritage, we carry from our mothers’ wombs our own fanatic hearts.
IF THE BOOK I first had in mind was made more difficult by the ethnography of everyday life hereabouts, something Yeats wrote in a letter to Maud Gonne affords a kind of guidance. “Today I have one settled conviction ‘Create, draw a firm strong line & hate nothing whatever not even (the devil) if he be your most cherished belief—Satan himself’. I hate many things but I do my best, & once some fifteen years ago, for I think one whole hour, I was free from hate. Like Faust I said ‘stay moment’ but in vain. I think it was the only happiness I have ever known.”
The bookish habits of Michel de Montaigne ought likewise to be imitated. (Already I’ve become more tolerant!) The essai, as the sixteenth-century Frenchman named it, is less a certainty and more a search, an attempt at sense-making, a setting forth, as if in a boat of words, to see if language will keep the thought afloat; a testing of the air for what rings true, an effort at illuminating grays.
We are told he retired to his library at a certain age and made his way among its books, endeavoring to understand his species by examining himself. “Each man bears the whole of man’s estate,” he wrote, and figured humanity could be understood by the scrutiny of a single human. As it was easiest, he chose himself and began to look. He was among the first ethnographers of the everyday. Whereas Augustine gave us his Confessions, in Montaigne we get, as his present-day disciple Phillip Lopate says gorgeously, “more of the cat examining its fur.” We get his table fare and toilet habits, his favorite poets and his favorite books, what he thought about the sexes, his take on the weather. From the tiniest of details, he essays the real, the human, and the true.
THIS BOOK WAS begun in my home in Moveen, in the easy early months of 2001. It was shaped between funerals and family duties over the next two years in Milford and was finished over the late winter and early spring of 2004 in northern Michigan, at a home we have on Mullett Lake, a half-hour south of the Straits of Mackinac. In each location, the “cancer of time,” the duties and routine of the everyday follow something like Montaigne’s regimen. I wake early, make the coffee, read the e-mail and the New York Times online, check the Irish Times and Clare FM, cook up some Odlums Pinhead Oatmeal. “Aptly named,” my loved ones sometimes say. At 7:30, I listen to The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor on the radio, a kind of writerly morning office or book of days during which he says what happened on the date, lists the birthdays, reads a poem.
Our calendars, once full of feasts of virgins, martyrs, and confessors, now are crowded with unholy days. The day they struck our shining cities; the day we leveled theirs; the day they killed our innocents; the day we did the same to theirs. So to have a poem and some better news, every day, is no bad thing.
Yesterday was the day they put Galileo on trial for claiming that the earth revolved around the sun. “You can think it,” the pope told him, “just don’t say so out loud.” “E pur si muove . . . ,” the astronomer whispered, alas to no one in earshot.
And today is the birthday of Thomas Jefferson, born in 1743 in Virginia, we are told, and “though he had grown up with slaves, and later kept them himself, his first legislative act was a failed attempt to emancipate the slaves under his jurisdiction. He later said, ‘The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise . . . in tyranny. . . . The man must be a prodigy who can retain his . . . morals undepraved by such circumstances.’ ”
And it’s the birthday of Samuel Beckett, your “cancer of time” man, born on Good Friday in 1906 in a suburb of Dublin, who said of his childhood, “I had little talent for happiness.” In 1928, he left for Paris to become James Joyce’s acolyte. In 1937, he was stabbed in the chest by a pimp named Prudent. He visited his assailant in prison and when he asked the man why he had attacked him, Prudent replied, “Je ne sais pas, monsieur.” “I do not know, sir,” became a prominent refrain in Waiting for Godot, his most famous play—in which, most famously, nothing happens.
We do not know. Such is the dilemma of the everyday. We rummage among books and newspapers, watch the fire go to ash, pace the room, walk out into the day that’s in it, watch the snow give way to humus. The loons return. The first insuppressible flowers bloom. We find in our theatres and times, like Vladimir and Estragon, that life is waiting, killing time, holding to the momentary hope that whatever’s supposed to happen next is scheduled to occur—wars end, the last thin shelf of ice melts, and the lake is clear and blue, like the ocean we are always dreaming of crossing, we get it right, we make it home—if not today, then possibly tomorrow.
TL
APRIL 13, 2004
MULLETT LAKE
MILFORD
MOVEEN WEST
Every so often the brother calls, ranting about having to get on a plane, fly over to Shannon, drive out to West Clare, and cut a finger off.
I blame myself for this.
“Not the finger again, Pat,” is what I say.
He says he wants to leave it in Moyarta—the graveyard on the Shannon estuary where our people are buried in the ancient parish of Carrigaholt. He wants to leave his severed finger there—a part of himself—against the loneliness: the low-grade, ever-present ache he feels, like a phantom limb, whenever he’s away from there too long. Will I come with him? He wants to know.
I blame myself for this. I know how it happens. I know it is only going to get worse. Lately he’s been saying maybe better a thumb.
“Better yet two thumbs, Tom! That’s it, both thumbs—one for the future and one for the past—there in Moyarta, that’s just the thing. One for all that was and all that yet will be. . . .” He’s waxing eloquent and breathing deeply.
“Never mind the thumbs, Pat,” I tell him, but he knows it makes a kind of sense to me.
There’s something about the impulse to prune and plant body parts on the westernmost peninsula of a distant county in a far country that goes a step beyond your standard tourist class. The brother is nothing if not a great man for the grim reaping and the grand gesture.
Maybe you’re thinking the devil of drink, but neither of us has had a drop in years.
Big Pat swore off it decades ago, as a youth at university. He’d been given a football scholarship to the University of Dayton. He was a tight end and a good one. At six foot five and sixteen stone, he was fit and fast and difficult to tackle. Between games and his studies he would drink in the local bars, where invariably some lesser specimen would drink enough local lager to feel the equal of him. Pat found himself the target of too many drunken Napoleons—little men determined to have a go at the Big so as to make themselves feel, well, enlarged. He had bottles bashed over his head, sucker punches thrown, aspersions cast from every corner by wee strangers looking for a fight. After breaking a man’s nose and spending a night in the lockup, Pat swore off the drink for the safety of all and everyone concerned. So he comes by his theory of thumbs quite soberly and knows that I know what he means to say.
IRELAND HAPPENED TO Big Pat in 1992 the way it happened to me in 1970, as a whole-body, blood-borne, core-experience; an echo thumping in the cardiovascular pulse of things, in every vessel of the being and the being’s parts, all the way down to the extremities, to the thumbs. The case he got, like mine, is chronic, acute, and likely terminal. The symptoms are occasionally contagious. He became not only acquainted with but utterly submerged in his Irish heritage—a legacy of Lynches and O’Haras, Graces and McBradys, Ryans and Currys, and the mighty people he married into—shanty and lace-curtain tributaries of a bloodline that all return to Ireland for their source.
Of course, there are more orderly ways to do it.
You can dress up one day a year in the shamrock tie and green socks, haul out the beer-stained jacket, get a little tipsy cursing the Brits and the black luck of the draw into the wee hours from which you’ll wake headachy and dry-mouthed the next morning and return to the ordinary American life—the annual mid-March Oiyrish.
Once, as luck would have it, I found myself in Manhattan for the St. Paddy’s Day Parade. I stepped out from my hotel into 44th Street near Fifth Avenue thinking it was a day like any other. It was not. Maureen O’Hara was the Grand Marshal. There were cops and crazies everywhere. Cardinal O’Connor, may he R.I.P., said Mass in St. Patrick’s, and I had to cancel a meeting with editors downtown. The sheer tidal force of Irishry, or of Irish impersonators—one hundred fifty thousand of them—all heading forty-some blocks uptown made perambulation against the grain of the parade impossible.
For most people, this Marchy excess is enough: the pipers and claddagh blather, the cartoon and caricature of what it means to be Irish and American. The next morning everyone returns to business as usual.
Or you might, after years of threatening to make the trip, get together with some other couples from the ushers’ club and take the standard ten-day tour, bouncing in the bus from the Lakes of Killarney to the Blarney Stone with a stop at the Waterford factory, a sing-along in Temple Bar; you’ll get some holy water and retail relics at the Knock Shrine and some oysters in Galway, where you’ll buy one of those caps all the farmers are wearing this year, and spend a couple hours in the duty-free, buying up smoked salmon and turf figurines, Jameson whiskey and Belleek before you fly home with the usual stories of seeing Bill Clinton or Bono in a bar in Wicklow or the man with the big mitts and droopy earlobes you met in a chipper in Clogheen who was the image of your dearly departed mother’s late uncle Seamus, or the festival you drove through in Miltown Malbay—fiddlers and pipers and tinwhistlers everywhere—the music, you will say, my God, the music!
Enough for most people is enough. Some photo-ops, some faith-and-begorras, maybe a stone from the home place, a sod of turf smuggled home in the suitcase, some perfect memories of broguey hospitalities and boozy light—something to say we are Irish in the way that others are Italian or Korean or former Yugoslavian: hyphenated, removed by generations or centuries, gone but not entirely forgotten, proud of your heritage—your Irish-Americanity.
Enough for most people is enough. But Pat was thrown into the deep end of the pool.
He landed in Shannon for the very first time on the Sunday morning of the 29th of March, 1992. A few hours later, instead of hoisting pints or singing along, or remarking on the forty shades of green, he was helping me lift the greeny, jaundiced, fairly withered body of Nora Lynch tenderly out of the bed she died in, out of the house she’d lived all her life in, out through the back door of her tiny cottage, into the coffin propped in the yard, on sawhorses assembled for this sad duty.
While most Americans spend their first fortnight tour rollicking through bars and countryside, searching none too intently for ruins or lost relations, Pat was driven straightaway to the home that our great-grandfather had come out of a century before, and taken into the room in which that ancient had been born. For Pat it was no banquet at Bunratty Castle, no bus ride to the Cliffs of Moher, no golf at the famous links at Lahinch, no saints or scholars or leprechauns. It was, rather, to the wake of Nora Lynch, late of Moveen West, Kilkee, County Clare—her tiny, tidy corpse laid out in a nunnish blue suit in a bed littered with Mass cards, candlesticks, and crucifix assembled on the bedside table, her bony hands wrapped in a rosary, her chin propped shut with a daily missal, folks from the townland making their visits; “sorry for your troubles,” “the poor cratur, Godhelpus,” “an honest woman the Lord’ve mercy on her,” “faith, she was, she was, sure faith”; the rooms buzzing with hushed talk and the clatter of tableware, the hum of a rosary being said in the room, the Lenten Sunday light pouring through the deep windows. Big Pat stood between an inkling of the long dead and the body of the lately dead and felt the press of family history, like the sea thrown finally against the shore, tidal and undulant and immediate. He sighed. He inhaled the air, sweet with damp-mold and early putrefaction, tinged with tobacco and turf smoke, hot grease and tea, and knew that though he’d never been in this place before, among these stones and puddles and local brogues, he was, in ways he could neither articulate nor deny, home.
He and his Mary, and me and mine, had booked our tickets two mornings before when the sadly anticipated word had come of Nora Lynch’s death at half-twelve in Moveen, half-past seven of that Friday morning in Michigan, March 27, 1992, four months into her ninetieth year, one month after she’d been taken to hospital in Ennis, six weeks after our father had died in the middle of the February of that awful year.
We had buried our father like the chieftain he was, then turned to the duties of the great man’s estate when word came from across the ocean that Nora had taken a turn for the worse. Two days of diagnostics had returned the sad truth of pancreatic cancer. The doctors were anxious to have her moved. In dozens of visits to Moveen since 1970, I had become Nora’s next of kin—a cousin twice removed, but still the first of her people ever to return to Ireland since her father’s brother, my great-grandfather, had left at the end of the nineteenth century. Neither her sisters nor her sisters’ children had ever returned. Her dead brothers had left no children. Nora Lynch was the last—the withered and spinsterly end of the line until, as she often said, I came. Two decades of letters and phone calls and transatlantic flights had tightened the ties that bind family connections between Michigan and Moveen. So when it looked like Nora was dying, they called me.
I LANDED IN Ireland on Ash Wednesday morning, March 4 that year, and drove from Shannon to the cathedral in Ennis, joining a handful of coreligionists for the tribal smudge and mumbled reminder that “you are dust and unto dust . . . ,” et cetera, et cetera. Then out the road to the County Hospital, a yellow stucco building trimmed in white, behind a wall on the north end of town at a corner on the Galway road. I remember the eight-bed ward of sickly men and women and Nora in the far corner looking jaundiced and tiny and suddenly old under crisp white linens. Four months before, we’d all celebrated her eighty-ninth birthday in Mary Hickie’s Bayview Hotel in Kilkee with cakes and tea and drinks all around. P. J. and Breda and Louise and Mary and me—there in Kilkee—all singing, “Happy Birthday,” and Nora not knowing what to do. She’d never had a birthday party before.
And here she was now, a season later, the mightiness gone out of her, wasting away in the corner of a county ward, dying, according to the doctors, of cancer. And I remember wanting to have the necessary conversation with her—to say out loud what we both knew but did not want to speak, that she was not going to be getting any better.
“The doctors tell me they think you’re dying.”
“We’re all dying, Tom. I just want to get home.”
“Home is where we’ll go then, Nora.”
I asked the doctors for a day or two to organize some care for her in Moveen. I spoke to Dr. Cox, who promised palliative care. I spoke to Catherine O’Callaghan, the county nurse, who promised to come by in the mornings. I spoke to Breda and P. J. Roche, her renters and defenders, who promised to oversee the household details, and I spoke with Anne Murray, a young unmarried neighbor, herself a farmer and forever my hero, who said she would stay the nights with Nora. I got a portable commode, a wheelchair, sheets and towels, fresh tea, bland foods, the Clare Champion. I called the priest to arrange a sacramental visit. I called home to see how the children were doing. I’d left my Mary with four teenagers in various stages of revolt. I promised to be home as soon as I could. “Do what you need to do,” she said.
Once Nora was home from the hospital, the borders around her days became more defined by familiarity, gratitude, cancer, and contentment. She moved between bedroom and kitchen, sitting hours by the fire, half-sleeping in bed, whilst neighbors and professionals made their visits. Old friends came by to trade remembrances, old grudges were forgiven or set aside, old grievances forgotten or reconciled. After a sustainable pattern of care had been established in the house, I said my goodbyes to Nora on March 13, my dead father’s birthday, and returned to my wife and children in Michigan to wait out the weeks or months it would be.
We deal with love by dealing with the ones we love, with sickness by dealing with the sick, and with death by dealing with the dead.
And after Nora died, it was the brother Pat who came to help me conduct her from one stone-walled incarnation to the next. We carried her out of her cottage to the coffin in the yard and processed down to the old church in Carrigaholt where Fr. Culligan, removed from his tea and paperwork, welcomed her with a decade of the rosary. The next morning Pat sang at Mass and followed us to Moyarta, where the Moveen lads had opened the old vault, built in 1889 by Nora’s grandfather, our great-great-grandfather, Patrick Lynch. In the century since, it has housed the family dead, their accumulating bones commingled there in an orange plastic fertilizer bag at the side of the grave. And after the piper and tinwhistler played, and after Fr. Culligan had prayed, and after we lowered her coffin into the ground, we replaced the bag of our ancestors’ bones, Nora Lynch’s people and our own, three generations of kinsmen and women, and rolled the great flagstone back into place. Our Marys repaired to the Long Dock Bar, where food and drink had been prepared. And we stood and looked—the brother Pat and me—from that high place—the graveyard at Moyarta—out past the castle at the end of the pier, out over the great mouth of the Shannon whence our great-grandfather had embarked a century before, and landed in Michigan and never returned, out past the narrowing townlands of the peninsula, Cross and Kilbaha and Kilcloher, out past Loop Head and the lighthouse at the western end where, as the locals say, the next parish is America.
IT WAS THEN I saw Pat’s thumbs begin to twitch, and the great mass of his shoulders begin to shake and wads of water commence to dropping from his eyeballs and the cheeks of him redden and a great heave of a sigh make forth from his gob and the hinge of his knees begin to buckle so that he dropped in a kind of damaged genuflection there at the foot of the family tomb into which poor Nora’s corpse had just been lowered.
“Oh God,” he half-sobbed through the shambles of his emotions, “to think of it, Tom, the truth and beauty of it.”
And I thought it a queer thing to say, but admirable that he should be so overtaken with the grief at the death of a distant cousin whom he’d only met on a couple of occasions over the past twenty years when she’d made her visits to America. What is more, I remarked to myself, given that the brother and I were both occupationally inclined to get through these solemnities while maintaining an undertakerly reserve, I thought his emotings rather strange. Might it be the distance or the jet lag or maybe the sea air? It was his first time in Ireland, after all. It might all have overwhelmed him.
Truth told I was a little worried that my own bereavement didn’t seem sufficiently keen compared to the way Pat had been leveled by his. All the same, I thought it my brotherly and accustomed duty to comfort the heart-sore with such condolence as I could bring to bear on such abject sadness.
“She’d a good life, a good death, and a great funeral, Pat. She’s at peace now and there is comfort in that. It really was very good of you and Mary to come. My Mary and I are forever grateful.”
He was still buckled, the thumbs twitching and the face of him fixed on the neighboring grave, and he was muttering something I made out to be about love and death because all he kept saying was, “In Love and in Death, together still.” He was making an effort to point the finger of his left hand at the stone that marked the grave next to Nora’s. I thought he might be quoting from the stone and examined the marker for “love” and “death.” It was clean white marble, lettered plain, the name of Callaghan chiseled on it and not much else that was legible.
And then it came to me—his wife Mary’s name is Callaghan.
“To think of it, Tom, here we are, four thousand miles from home, but home all the same at the grave of our great-great-grandparents; and the Lynches and Callaghans are buried together, right next to each other. In love and in death, they are together still. Who’d have ever imagined that?”
“Yes, yes, I see, of course. . . .”
“To think of it, Tom, all these years, all these miles. . . .”
“Yes, the years, the miles. . . .”
“Who’d have believed it, Tom?”
I helped him to his feet, brushed the mud from his trousers, and said nothing of substance for fear it might hobble the big man again. At the Long Dock he embraced his wife as a man does who has seen the ghosts.
PAT GOT SMITTEN at a funeral Mass one Saturday at Holy Name when Mary Callaghan, accompanied by her father on the organ, sang the “In Paradisum” as the sad entourage processed into church. First cross bearer and acolytes, then Fr. Harrington, then my father and Pat wheeling the casket in, the mourners rising to the entrance hymn. The brother stood at the foot of the altar holding the pall, transfixed by the voice of the angel come to earth in the comely figure of Mary Callaghan. When it came time to cover the casket with the pall as the priest read, “On the day of her baptism she put on Christ. In the day of Christ’s coming may she be clothed in glory,” Pat was elsewhere in his mind, imagining the paradise into which Miss Callaghan, what with her dark curls, blue eyes, and fetching attributes, might conduct him. My father thumped him ceremoniously on the shoulder to snap him back into the moment at hand. At the Offertory, she sang the “Ave Maria.” Pat swooned at the back of church at the Latin for Hail and Mary and the fruit of wombs. At communion, “Panis Angelicus”; and for the recessional she sang an Englished version of the “Ode to Joy.” It was all Pat could do to get the casket in the hearse, the family in the limousine, the cars flagged, and the procession on its way to Holy Sepulchre, so walloped was he by the music in her mouth and the beauty of her being.
When Fr. Harrington, riding shotgun in the hearse with Pat, wondered aloud, as he always did, had Pat met any fine young Catholic woman to settle down with yet—for a young man with a good job at the height of his sexual prowess untethered by the bonds of holy matrimony and indentured to nothing but his own pleasures is a peril second only to a young woman of similar station to any parish priest—Pat answered that he had indeed, and only within the hour. The priest looked puzzled.
When Pat explained further that he had only moments ago come to understand the trials of Job, the suffering of souls in purgatory, and meaning no blasphemy, the Passion itself—to behold such beauty and not to hold it, to have it, to take it home and wake to it, to be in earshot and eyeshot of such a rare specimen of womanly grace and gorgeousness and not be able to hold the hand of her, kiss the mouth of her, run a finger down the cheekbone of her—this was a suffering he had never had before. Fr. Harrington, blushing a little now, one supposes, had the brother exactly where he wanted him, on the brink of surrender to the will of God, ready to be delivered from the occasion of sin by the sacraments of the Church.
“Could you help me, Father?” Pat implored him.
“Leave it to me, boy. And say your prayers.”
So it was a priest who made Pat’s match with Mary Callaghan. Well, actually a bishop now. But back in that day it was Fr. Bernard Harrington, parish priest at Holy Name, who organized the courtship and consortium between the brother and the famous beauty.
Pat was twenty-three or twenty-four, recently finished with mortuary school, newly licensed and working funerals with our father and enjoying the life of the single man.
Mary was nineteen, an underclasswoman at Marygrove College studying theatre and voice under the tutelage of nuns. She was the fourteenth of the eighteen offspring of John F. Callaghan, a church organist, and Mary O’Brien Callaghan, whose once-promising operatic career was sacrificed to her marriage and motherhood duties. Of this prolific couple it was said that they had great music but never quite got rhythm.
It was the priest, later Bishop Harrington, who made discreet inquiries about the young woman’s plans and prospects; the priest who put it in the organist’s mind that a funeral director in the family would be no bad thing, the inevitabilities being, well, inevitable; and the priest who mentioned to the mother, “Queen” Mary, that a match between her namesake and heir to her vocal legacy and a tall and handsome Irish Catholic man, the son of famously honest people, would produce grandchildren of such moral, spiritual, intellectual, and physical pedigree as to ever be a credit to the tribe and race and species and, needless to say, to her own good self. It was the priest who advanced my brother’s cause with the girl in question, letting it slip, more or less in passing, that he owned, albeit subject to a modest mortgage, his own three-bedroom bungalow in a good neighborhood, stood to take over the family business, was possessed, it was said, of a grand if untrained tenor voice, and sang “Danny Boy” with such aplomb that many’s the young person and the old were set to weeping when he gave out with it.
It was the priest furthermore who blighted her other suitors, by novena or rosary or some other priestly medicine. One by one they all disappeared: the one in law school, the one with the family fortune, the one who later became a senator. Even Mary’s twin brother Joe’s best friend, a man of impeccable Irish-American stock who courted her with poems and roses and curried favor with the mother, even he was passed over. He went off to Ohio broken-hearted, married a Lithuanian woman, and was seldom heard from in these parts again. It was the priest who did it. And the priest who organized the first date, counseled them through the predictable quibbles, and after three years of courtship, pressed the brother to pop the question.
And standing before the dearly beloved and the church full of family assembled there—the Lynch and the Callaghan parents, like Celtic chieftains and their queens, the bride’s seventeen siblings with their spouses and children and significant others, the groom’s eight siblings with theirs as well, and the O’Brien and O’Hara cousins and uncles and aunts and host of friends all dressed to the nines for the nuptials—it was the priest who proclaimed it a great day for the Irish indeed.
INDEED, FOR THE IRISH and Irish Americans, the only spectacle more likely to bring out a crowd than a blushing couple at the brink of their marriage bed is a fresh corpse at the edge of its grave. Mighty at weddings, we are mightier still at wakes and funerals, to which we are drawn like moths to flame, where the full nature of our characters and character flaws are allowed to play out in a theatre that has deep and maybe pagan roots.
As Hely Dutton, an agriculturalist in the service of the Dublin Society opined in 1808 in the final chapter of his Statistical Survey of the County of Clare:
Wakes, quite different from what are so called in England, still continue to be the disgrace of the country. As it would be thought a great mark of disrespect not to attend at the house where the corpse lies, every person makes it a point, especially women, to shew themselves; and when they first enter the house, they set up the most hideous but dry-eyed yell, called the Irish cry; this, however, lasts but a short time. The night is usually spent in singing, not mournful dirges, but merry songs, and in amusing themselves with different small plays, dancing, drinking, and often fighting, &c.
When Pat’s Mary’s mother “Queen” Mary died, late last year at age eighty-five, we dispatched a hearse and driver to Pittsburgh to pick up a bespoke, carved-top mahogany casket for her. She’d have hated the expense but approved the bother. Mary O’Brien Callaghan was, like all the Irish dead, one of a kind. The much-doted-over only child of “Big Paul” O’Brien—a short man who made a respectable fortune as a lumber merchant—she passed her girlhood in Oswego, New York, with piano lessons, voice recitals, and the lace-curtain privilege of moneyed Irish. In high school she met her leading man, Jack Callaghan, when they played the love interests in HMS Pinafore. While attending Syracuse University on a voice scholarship, she married him and over the next twenty-two years gave birth to eight daughters and ten sons. He played the organ at daily Masses, directed choirs, and taught music at a women’s college and a Christian Brothers school. They kept body and soul and household together. On the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, an interviewer commented, “Mrs. Callaghan, you must really love children!” She replied, “Actually I just really love Mr. Callaghan.” That same love—selfless, faithful, fierce, and true—still shines in the eyes of her sixty grandchildren, forty-some great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
She had seen the generations grow up around her.
It was her grandson Paddy who helped his father wheel her casket into church, her granddaughter Caitlin whose soprano met the mourners at the door. It was her daughters who covered her with the pall and her sons who walked beside the hearse the few blocks to Greenwood Cemetery, then bore her body to the grave where another grandson piped the sad, slow air.
“Some say this is supposed to be a celebration of Mary’s life,” the priest said, “and we’ll get to that, but not right now. Right now it hurts too much. We must first mourn her death.” There was weeping and sighing, the breath of them whitening in the chill November air. Folks held hands and embraced one another.
The brother’s thumbs were twitching.
THE THUMBS ARE safe for another season. Because we cannot go to Moveen this March, because Pat got himself elected president of the Funeral Directors’ Association, because I’m finishing a book about the Irish and Irish Americans, because we are bound by duty and detail to the life in southeastern Lower Michigan, we head downtown to celebrate the high holy day in the standard fashion. A local radio station has a St. Patrick’s Day party they broadcast from the lobby of the Fisher Theatre on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. Then we make for Corktown and the annual Mass at Most Holy Trinity, where the blessed and elect, the great and small, will gather to give thanks for the day that’s in it.
There’s a crowd at the Fisher, and Paul W. Smith, the drive-time disc jockey, makes his way among the guests and celebrities and local business types who are keen for a little free air time to hawk their wares in their best put-on brogue.
Pat does “Danny Boy” and I recite a poem about a dream of going home, because here we are in a city of immigrants and their descendants from every parish on the globe and all of them wearing the green today, and hoisting Guinness and humming sweet ditties about the Irish. I see my mother’s cousin, Eddie Coyle, and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the self-described “first six-foot, six-inch Irish African American.” We laugh and glad-hand and then get on our way for Corktown on the southwest side of the city.
Corktown is the oldest neighborhood in Detroit. It was settled in the 1830s by Irish who came west on the Erie Canal from the eastern slums and the West of Ireland. Most Holy Trinity was the first English-speaking parish in the city that was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, still mostly French. The factory and railway and civil-service jobs that grew with the city attracted plenty of the Famine Irish and after the Irish, the Maltese came, and after the Maltese, mostly Mexicans. In a city that has been blighted by white flight, segregation, and racism, Corktown remains a little broken jewel of stable integration and diversity. There are blacks and whites and Hispanics sharing the row houses, family businesses, churches, schools, and community halls. New townhouses, vetted by the historical society for architectural correctness, fill in the old lots cleared for parking when the Detroit Tigers played at the stadium at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbell until 1999.
This morning it’s a mix of city people and suburbanites who fill Most Holy Trinity to celebrate the 170th anniversary of the church’s founding. Sister Marietta always saves a place for Big Pat down front with the politicos, heavy donors, and dignitaries. We are seated near the plaster statue of the saint Himself whose life and times in the fifth century still seems relevant for the new millennium. He was kidnapped in his teens by Irish marauders, taken to Antrim and kept as a slave, escaped to Gaul where he became a priest and returned to the country of his captors to convert them to Christianity. The snakes and shamrocks might have been added in by overly enthusiastic biographers.
The cardinal is here and his concelebrants, the governor and her smiling aides, the county executives and secretary of state, the president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the president of the “Ladies” AOH and a detail of knights from the Knights of Columbus. And the “Maid of Erin” and her pretty attendant court sponsored by the United Irish Societies, and all of them piped in by a corps of pipers and drummers in full regalia.
Everyone is wearing some paper shamrocks or a green carnation or a bright green scarf or tie or a badge that says something like, “Kiss Me I’m Irish” or “Erin Go Bragh.” And as the pipes and drums begin, we rise, all smiles, because it’s a great day for the Irish and Irish eyes are smiling and Oh Danny Boy things are good in Glocca Morra and God is in heaven and here, now, if only for a moment, all’s right with the world.
But of course it’s not. The litany of the world’s woes expands exponentially from the local to the regional to the global.
There’s famine in Africa, plagues in Asia; quiet little homicides and suicides and genocides go on around the globe while wars and rumors of war are everywhere, everywhere. The pitiful species remains its own worst enemy.
Fr. Russ Kohler, the pastor of Holy Trinity since 1991, steps to the lectern to welcome everyone. After the requisite niceties, he makes mention of the two young police officers from the neighborhood shot to death in the line of duty last month.
I personally knew 21-year-old Officer Matthew Bowens and instead of a marriage I officiated at his funeral. And I personally knew 26-year-old Officer Jennifer Fettig and officiated not at her wedding, but her funeral. Illegal drug distribution throughout Michigan renders our cities into virtual free fall. Inept political maneuvering demoralizes police departments. Using sworn officers for after-hours escorts to rave parties renders the whole city one big market for drug distribution and consumption.
The cardinal speaks about the War on Terror and the violence of euthanasia, abortion, the need for repentance, the hunger for justice, forgiveness, and peace in the world.
The governor is concerned about the loss of manufacturing jobs from Michigan to Mexico, where workers are paid much less. There’s an influx of illegal immigrants taking low-wage jobs around the state. She has brought a proclamation to honor the parish for one hundred seventy years of service to the immigrant and homeless, the helpless and those in need, many of whom are from, well, Mexico. The parish runs a free legal clinic, a free medical clinic, an outreach to sailors through the Port of Detroit.
The third-graders from the school sing, “I believe that children are our future.” Their faces are black and brown and white and every shade in between. They are from everywhere. Watching their performance, the Maid of Erin weeps, the governor is beaming and singing along, the cardinal is enraptured or possibly dozing in a post-communion reverie.
The Taoiseach (prime minister of Ireland) is in Washington, D.C., to give the president a bowl of shamrocks.
In Chicago they dye the river green.
There’s music and marching in Melbourne and Moscow and Montreal.
AND OUT ACROSS the world the roseate Irish everywhere are proclaiming what a good thing it is to be them, possessed as they are of this full register of free-range humanity: the warp-spasms and shape-changing of their ancient heroes, their feats and paroxysms and flights of fancy, their treacheries and deceits, sure faith and abiding doubts—chumps and champions, egomanias and inferiority complexes, given to fits of pride and fits of guilt, able to wound with a word or mend with one, to bless or curse in impeccable verse, prone to ornamental speech, long silences, fierce tirades, and tender talk. Maybe this is why the couple hundred million Americans who do not claim an Irish connection identify with the forty-five million who do—for the license it gives them, just for today, for a good laugh, a good cry, a dirge or a dance, to say the things most in need of saying, to ignore the world’s heartbreaks, the Lenten disciplines, their own grievous mediocrities, the winter’s last gasping hold on the soul, and to summon up visions of a home-place where the home fires are kept burning, where the light at the window is familiar, the face at the door a neighbor’s or friend’s, the sea not far beyond the next field over, the ghosts that populate our dreams all dear and welcome, their voices sweet with assurances, the soft day’s rain but temperate, the household safe for the time being from the murderous world’s worst perils; home among people at one with all immigrants, all pilgrims, all of the hungry and vanquished and evicted strangers in a strange place, at odds with the culture of triumphalists and blue bloods.
Who’s to know?
As for the brother, as for me, after making the rounds at the union hall in which all had assembled for corned beef and cabbage, we made for the road home before rush hour hit, singing the verses of “The Hills of Moveen,” counting our blessings as we had come to see them: that here we were, the sons of an undertaker who was the son of a parcel-post inspector who was the son of a janitor and prison guard who was the son of an ass and cart farmer from a small cottage on the edge of West Clare to which our own sons and daughters do often repair, for the sense that it gives them of who they are and where they’ve come from and where they might be going still.
Along the way were the cute fools puking out their excesses of spuds and green beer or leaning out of their car doors pissing their revelries into ditches, or being taken into custody by the police. We drove past them all, out beyond the old cityscape of slums and ruins and urban renewal, out past the western suburbs, with their strip malls and parking lots, bearing the day’s contentment like viaticum, singing the old songs, that “Wild Mountain Thyme” what with its purple heather, Pat tapping the time with his thumbs on the dashboard, out toward Milford where the sun was declining, where the traffic was sure to be thinning, and the last light of the day would be reddening and the false spring oozing from the earth might hold a whiff of turf smoke, a scent of the sea, and our Marys would have a plate of chicken and peas, a sup of tea, our place by the fire ready and warm for us to nod off in the wingback chairs, the brother and me, dreaming of the ancients and our beloveds and those yet to be—Nora and Tommy and Mrs. Callaghan and all the generations that shared our names; the priests and the old lads in the stories, our dear parents, gone with years, and our wives and daughters and sons, God bless them, and the ones coming after us we’ll never see, bound to the bunch of them by love and death.
It is mid-June, nearly solstice, and I am adding a room onto the house in West Clare. A small room only—12 by 12—enough for a bed and a bureau and a chair. P. J. Roche has put up the block walls and Des O’Shea is roofing it, after which the work inside might proceed apace—flagstones and plaster and decor. There’ll be a window to the east looking out on the haggard and a glass door to the south looking down the land, over the Shannon to Kerry rising, hilly on the other side.
It is an old house and changing it is never easy.
Near as I can figure it’s the fifth addition and will make the house nearly seven hundred square feet, adding this wee room to what is here now: an entrance hall, the kitchen, a bathroom and bedroom—my cottage in Moveen West—my inheritance.
I’m returning in a month’s time with my wife and her sister and her sister’s friend, Kitty, for a fortnight’s stay; and while the company of women is a thing to be wished for, sleeping on the sofa whilst they occupy the house’s one existing bedroom—my ancestral bedroom—is not a thing I am prepared to do.
Back in the century when this house was first built, we’d have all bedded down together maybe, for the sake of the collective body heat, along with the dog and the pig and the milch cow if we could manage it. But this is the twenty-first century and privacy is in its ascendancy.
So P. J. and I hatched this plan last year of adding a room at the east side of the house. He understands the business of stone and mortar, plaster and space, time and materials, people, place. He has reconfigured this interior before, nine years ago after Nora Lynch died.
We have settled on particulars. Gerry Lynch will help with the slates and Matty Ryan will wire things. Damien Carmody from across the road will paint. And Breda, P. J.’s wife, is the construction manager. She sorts the bills and keeps them at it. “There’s no fear, Tom,” she assures me. “It’ll all be there when you’re home in August.” There are boards and blocks and bundles of slates in the shed from Williams’s in Kilkee. We’ve been to Kilrush to order curtains and bedding from O’Halloran’s and buckets of paint from Brew’s. The place is a permanent work in progress.
MY GRANDFATHER’S GRANDFATHER, Patrick Lynch, was given this house as a wedding gift when he married Honora Curry in 1853. They were both twenty-six years old and were not among the more than a million who starved or the more than a million who left Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century in what today would be called a Holocaust or Diaspora but in their times was called the Famine.
On the westernmost peninsula of this poor county, in the bleakest decade of the worst of Irish centuries, Pat and Honora pledged their troth and set up house here against all odds. Starvation, eviction, and emigration—the three-headed scourge of English racism by which English landlords sought to consolidate smaller holdings into larger ones—had cut Ireland’s population by a quarter between 1841 and 1851. Tiny parcels of land and a subsistence diet of potatoes allowed eight Lynch households to survive in Moveen, according to the Tithe books of 1825. Of these eight, three were headed by Patricks, two by Daniels, and there was one each by Michael and Anthony and John. One of these men was my great-great-great-grandfather. One of the Patricks or maybe a Dan—there’s no way of knowing now for certain. Their holdings ranged from three acres to nearly thirty. Of the eleven hundred acres that make up Moveen West, they were tenants on about a tenth. They owned nothing and were “tenants at will”—which is to say, at the will of a gentrified landlord class who likely never got closer to Moveen than the seafront lodges of Kilkee three miles away, always a favorite of Limerick Protestants. Their labor—tillage and pasturage—was owned by the landlord. The Westropps owned most of these parts then—James and John and later Ralph. The peasants were allowed their potatoes and their cabins. Until, of course, the potato failed. Of the 164 persons made homeless by the bailiffs of John Westropp, Esq., in May of 1849, in Moveen, thirty were Lynches. All of Daniel Lynch’s family and all of his son John’s family were evicted. The widow Margaret Lynch was put out of her cabin and John Lynch the son of Martin was put off of his nine acres. Another John Lynch could not afford the seven pounds, ten shillings rent on his small plot. The roofs were torn from their houses, the walls knocked down, their few possessions put out in the road. The potato crop had been blighted for four out of the last five years. Some of the families were paid a pittance to assist with the demolition of their homes, which made their evictions, according to the landlord’s agents, “voluntary.” Along with the Lynches evicted that day were Gormans and McMahons, Mullanys and Downses—the poor cousins and sisters and brothers of those marginally better situated economically or geographically who were allowed to stay but were not allowed to take them in. It was, for the class of landlords who owned the land, a culling of the herd of laboring stock, to make the ones who were left more fit, more efficient laborers. For those evicted, it was akin to a death sentence. For those who stayed, it was an often-toxic mix of survivors’ pride, survivors’ guilt, survivors’ shame. Like all atrocities, it damns those who did and those who didn’t. Like every evil, its roots and reach are deep.
In proportion to its population, County Clare had the highest number of evictions in all of Ireland for the years 1849 through 1854. The dispossessed were sent into the overcrowded workhouse in Kilrush, or shipped out for Australia or America or died in a ditch of cholera or exposure. As John Killen writes in the introduction to The Famine Decade, “That a fertile country, the sister nation to the richest and most powerful country in the world, bound to that country by an Act of Union some forty-five years old, should suffer distress, starvation and death seems incomprehensible today. That foodstuffs were exported from Ireland to feed British colonies in India and the sub-continent, while great numbers of people in Ireland starved, beggars belief.”
But the words George Bernard Shaw puts into the mouths of his characters in Man and Superman get at the truth of it:
MALONE: My father died of starvation in Ireland in the Black ’47. Maybe you heard of it?
VIOLET: The famine?
MALONE (with smoldering passion): No, the starvation. When a country is full of food, and exporting it, there can be no famine.
The words of Captain Arthur Kennedy, the Poor Law inspector for the Kilrush Union who meticulously documented the particulars of the horror in West Clare, are compelling still:
The wretchedness, ignorance, and helplessness of the poor on the western coast of this Union prevent them seeking a shelter elsewhere; and to use their own phrase, they “don’t know where to face”; they linger about the localities for weeks or months, burrowing behind the ditches, under a few broken rafters of their former dwelling, refusing to enter the workhouse till the parents are broken down and the children half starved, when they come into the workhouse to swell the mortality, one by one. Those who obtain a temporary shelter in adjoining cabins are not more fortunate. Fever and dysentery shortly make their appearance when those affected are put out by the roadside, as carelessly and ruthlessly as if they were animals; when frequently, after days and nights of exposure, they are sent in by relieving officers when in a hopeless state. These inhuman acts are induced by the popular terror of fever. I have frequently reported cases of this sort. The misery attendant upon these wholesale and simultaneous evictions is frequently aggravated by hunting these ignorant, helpless creatures off the property, from which they may perhaps have never wandered five miles. It is not an unusual occurrence to see 40 or 50 houses leveled in one day, and orders given that no remaining tenant or occupier should give them even a night’s shelter.
The evicted crowd into the back lanes and wretched hovels of the towns and villages, scattering disease and dismay in all directions. The character of some of these hovels defies description. I, not long since, found a widow whose three children were in fever, occupying the piggery of their former cabin, which lay beside them in ruins; however incredible it may appear, this place where they had lived for weeks, measured 5 feet by 4 feet, and of corresponding height. There are considerable numbers in this Union at present houseless, or still worse, living in places unfit for human habitation where disease will be constantly generated.
The mid-nineteenth-century voice of Captain Kennedy, like mid-twentieth-century voices of military men proximate to atrocity, seems caught between the manifest evil he witnesses and the duty to follow orders he has been given.
I would not presume to meddle with the rights of property, nor yet to argue the expediency or necessity of these “monster” clearances, both one and the other no doubt frequently exist; this, however, renders the efficient and systematic administration of the Poor Law no less difficult and embarrassing. I think it incumbent on me to state these facts for the Commissioners’ information, that they may be aware of some of the difficulties I have to deal with. —Reports and Returns Relating to Evictions in the Kilrush Union: Captain Kennedy to the Commissioners, July 5, 1848
IT WAS A starvation, a failure of politics more than crops that cleared the land of the poor, killed off thousands in the westernmost parishes, and dispersed the young to wander the world in search of settlements that could support them.
Moveen, of course, was never the same.
By August of 1855, when Griffith’s Valuation was done, only three households of Lynches remained in Moveen—Daniel Lynch, the widowed Mary Lynch, and the lately married Patrick Lynch. It was Mary who gave Patrick and Honora their start, putting in a word for her son with the landlord and making what remained of the deserted cabin habitable.
My guess is Honora came from an adjacent townland, nearer the Shannon—Kilfearagh maybe, or Lisheen where her famous granduncle Eugene O’Curry, the Irish language scholar, came from; or north of here, toward Doonbeg, where the Currys were plentiful in those days. Maybe her people and Pat’s people were both from the ancient parish of Moyarta and it is likely they met at church in Carrigaholt or in one of the hedge schools.
Pat came out of the house above, on the hill where the land backs up to the sea, where James and Maureen Carmody live now with their daughter Rachel and their son, Niall. James would be descended from Pat’s brother, Tom; and, of course, from Mary, the widowed mother. We’d all be cousins many times removed.
The newlyweds leased twenty-six acres from Ralph Westropp, the English landlord. The house had, according to the records, “stone walls, a thatched roof, one room, one window and one door to the front.” In the famous illustration of “Moveen after the Evictions,” which appeared in the Illustrated London News on December 22, 1849, there are sixteen cottages of this kind, most of them roofless, their gables angled into the treeless hillocks of Moveen, their fires quenched, their people scattered to Liverpool and the Antipodes and the Americas. In 1855, the Griffith Valuation assigned the place a tax rate of ten shillings. The more windows and doors a house had, the more the tax. No doubt to accommodate their ten children, Pat added a bedroom to the south.
On October 3, 1889, Honora died. She was buried in the great vault at Moyarta, overlooking the Shannon and the estuarial village of Carrigaholt. Hers was a slow death from stomach cancer, giving time for her husband and his brother Tom to build the tomb, there near the road, with its cobblestone floor, tall gabled end, and huge flagstone cover that was inscribed with her particulars by Mick Troy, the stonecutter from Killballyowen, famous for his serifs and flourishes. The brother Tom lost an eye to the tomb’s construction when a chunk of stone flew off of Pat’s sad hammering. The work must have taken most of a month—to bring the round gray rocks up from the Shannon beach by the cartload for the floor, ledge rocks from the cliff’s edge to line the deep interior and build the gable he would plaster over, and finally the massive ledger stone that would serve as tomb roof and permanent record. Grave work, in anticipation of his grief—the larger muscles’ indenture to the heart—it was all he could do for the dying woman.
For months after his mother’s death, my great-grandfather, looking out the west window of this house at the mouth of the River Shannon and the sea beyond, must have considered the prospects for his future. As ever in rural Ireland there were no guarantees. The labor and poverty were crushing. Parnell and land reform were distant realities. Their lease on the land would support just one family. A sister Ellen had gone off to Australia. A brother Michael married in a hurry when he impregnated a neighbor girl and moved far away from the local gossip, first to Galway and then to a place in America named Jackson, Michigan. Another brother, Pat, passed the exam to become a teacher but the Kilkee School already had a teacher, so he was given an offer in The North. His mother, Honora, had forbidden his going there, fearful for his soul among Protestants, so Pat sailed off to Australia to find his sister Ellen in Sydney. He was said to be a wonderful singer. “But for Lynch, we’d all do,” is what was said about him after he’d regaled his fellow passengers on the long journey. He was, it turned out, good at seafaring too, keeping logs and reading the stars and charts. The captain of the ship offered him work as a first mate and it is rumored that after a fortnight’s visit with his sister in Sydney, he returned to the ship and spent the rest of his days at sea. No one in Moveen ever heard from him again. He famously never sent money home. Dan and John, two other brothers, had died young, which left Tom and Sinon and their sister Mary who was sickly and their widowed father still at home.
Tom Lynch booked passage for America. He was twenty-four. I’m guessing he sailed from Cappa Pier in Kilrush and went through Canada, working his way from Quebec to Montreal to Detroit and then by train out to Jackson. He settled in a boardinghouse near his brother Michael and the wife, Kate, there in Jackson—a place their father, Pat, had been to briefly years before—where a huge state prison and the fledgling auto shops promised work. Maybe it was in memory of his dead mother, or maybe because there was a space on the forms, or maybe just because it was the American style, he identified himself in his new life in the new world as Thomas Curry Lynch. Or else it was to distinguish himself from the better-known and long-established Thomas B. Lynch, proprietor, with Cornelius Mahoney, of Jackson Steam Granite Works, “Manufacturers of Foreign and Domestic Monuments,” situated on Greenwood Avenue, opposite the cemetery. Maybe to better his job prospects or his romantic ones, he shaved four years off his age in the same way. Among his new liberties was to identify himself as he saw fit. The stone in Jackson in St. John’s Cemetery maintains his version of it. Thomas C. Lynch, it reads, 1870–1930. Back at the Parish House in Carrigaholt, his baptism is recorded in 1866.
Before he was buried in Jackson, in consort with Ellen Ryan, the Canadian daughter of Irish parents, to whom he was married in 1897, Thomas Curry Lynch fathered a daughter, Gertrude, who became a teacher, and two sons: Thomas Patrick who would become the priest I’d be named for, and Edward Joseph who would become my grandfather.
According to the Jackson City Directory, Thomas Curry Lynch worked as a “fireman,” a “helper,” a “laborer,” a “painter,” a “foundry man,” and as a “janitor” at I. M. Dach Underwear Company. In September 1922, he was hired as a guard for the Michigan State Prison in Jackson. The picture on his employee pass shows a bald man with a long, square face in a three-piece double-breasted suit and white shirt, collar pin and tie. He is looking straight into the camera’s eye, neither smiling nor frowning; his closed mouth is a narrow level line between a good nose and a square chin—a sound man, as they say in Clare, able and airy and dressed to the nines. He bought a small frame house at 600 Cooper Street, a block south of St. John’s Church, outlived his wife by nine years, and died in September of 1930. He never lived to see his son receive his Holy Orders in 1934 or die of influenza in 1936. He is buried there in Jackson among the Morrisseys and Higginses and others from the western parishes of Clare, between Ellen and his youngest son. He rests in death, as in life, as Irish men have often done, between the comforts and vexations of priest and the missus, far from the homes they left as youths.
SINON, THE BROTHER Tom had left at home, stayed on and kept his widowed father. In 1895 he married Mary Cunningham from Killimer, east of Kilrush, and they raised sons and daughters, the youngest of whom, Tommy and Nora, born in 1901 and 1902, waited in the land and tended to their aging parents and kept this house.
The census of a hundred years ago records a house with stone walls, a thatched roof, two rooms, two windows, and a door to the front. Early in the twentieth century, another room was added to the north and divided by partition into two small rooms. So there was a room for the parents, a room for the girls, a room for the boys, and a room for them all where the table and the fire were. The farm, at long last, was a freehold, the first in the townland, bought from the landlord in 1903 under the provisions of the Land Purchase Act. Cow cabins and out-offices appeared, and a row of whitethorns that Pat Lynch had planted years before to shelter the east side of the house were now full grown. He bought them as saplings in Kilrush when he’d gone there for a cattle fair. He paid “two and six”: two shillings and sixpence, about thirty cents, and brought them home as a gift for Honora who had them set beside some native elder bushes. They still provide shelter and berries for birds.
This is how I found it when I first came here—sheltered by whitethorns and elders on the eastern side, stone walls, stone floors, thatched roof, an open hearth with the fire on the floor, a cast-iron crane and hooks and pots and pans and utensils. There were three windows and one door to the front, three windows and a door to the back, four lightbulbs, strung by wires, one in every room, the kitchen at the center, the bedroom to the south, and two smaller rooms, divided by a partition, to the north. There was a socket for the radio perched in the deep eastern window, a socket for the kettle and the hotplate, and a flickering votive light to the Sacred Heart. There were pictures of Kennedy and the pope, Jesus crowned with thorns, the Infant of Prague, St. Teresa, St. Martin de Porres, and a 1970 calendar from Nolan’s Victuallers. There was a holy-water font at the western door. The mantel was a collection of oddments—a wind-up clock, a bottle of Dispirin, some antiseptic soap, boxes of stick matches from Maguire & Patterson, plastic Madonnas and a bag of sugar, a box of chimney-soot remover called Chimmo, and cards and letters, including mine. There was a flashlight, and a tall bottle of salt and a bag of flour. Otherwise the house remained unencumbered by appliance or modernity—unplumbed, unphoned, dampish and underheated, unbothered by convenience, connection, or technology. It resembled, in its dimensions, the shape of a medieval coffin or an upturned boat, afloat in a townland on a strip of land between the mouth of the Shannon and the North Atlantic. It seemed to have as much in common with the sixteenth century as the twentieth. Perpendicular to the house on the south side was a cow cabin divided into three stalls, each of which could house half a dozen cows. On the north side of the house, also perpendicular, was a shed divided into two cabins. Hens laid eggs in the eastern one. In the western one was turf.
Last week for the first time in more than thirty years, I could see it all—as the Aer Lingus jet made its descent from the northwest, over the Arans to the Shannon Estuary, the cloud banks opened over the ocean, clear and blue from maybe 5,000 feet, and I could see the whole coastline of the peninsula, from the great horseshoe strand at Kilkee out the west to Loop Head. The DC-9 angled over Bishop’s Island, Murray’s Island, and Dunlicky, the cliffs and castle ruins, and the twin masts atop Knocknagaroon that the pilots aim for in the fog. I could see the quarry at Goleen and the Holy Well and James and Maureen Carmody’s house on the hill and Patrick and Nora Carmody’s, Jerry Keane’s and J. J. McMahon’s, and Sonny and Maura Carmody’s and the Walshes’ and Murrays’ and there, my own, this house and the haggard and the garden and outbuildings and the land and the National School and Carrigaholt Castle and banking eastward Scattery Island and the old workhouse in Kilrush and the ferry docks at Tarbert and then, in a matter of minutes, we landed.
I never saw it so clearly before. The first time I came here, it was just a patchwork of green emerging from the mist, the tall cliffs, ocean, river, houses, lands.
Nothing had prepared me for such beauty.
I was the first of my people to return.
My great-grandfather, Thomas Curry Lynch, never returned to this house he was born in nor ever saw his family here again. My grandfather, Edward, proud to be Irish, nonetheless inherited the tribal scars of hunger and want, hardship and shame, and was prouder still to be American. He never made the trip. He worked in parcel post at the Main Post Office in Detroit, wore a green tie on St. Patrick’s Day, frequented the bars on Fenkell Avenue until he swore off drink when my father went to war and spoke of Ireland as a poor old place that couldn’t feed its own. And though he never had the brogue his parents brought with them, and never knew this place except by name, he included in his prayers over Sunday dinners a blessing on his cousins who lived here then, “Tommy and Nora,” whom he had never met, “on the banks of the River Shannon,” which he had never seen, and always added, “Don’t forget.”
Bless us, O Lord
And these thy gifts
Which we are about to receive
From thy bounty
Through Christ Our Lord.
Amen.
And don’t forget your cousins
Tommy and Nora Lynch
On the banks of the River Shannon.
Don’t forget.
The powerful medicine of words remains, as Cavafy wrote in his poem “Voices”:
of those dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.
And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life—
like distant music that dies off in the night.
And this is how my grandfather’s voice returns to me now—here in my fifties, and him dead now “with” forty years (in Moveen life and time go “with” each other)—“like distant music that dies off in the night,” like “the first poetry of our life.”
Bless us, O Lord.
Tommy and Nora.
Banks of the Shannon.
Don’t forget. Don’t forget.
He is standing at the head of the dining-room table in the brown brick bungalow with the green canvas awning on the porch overlooking Montavista Street two blocks north of St. Francis de Sales on the corner of Fenkell Avenue in Detroit. It is any Sunday in the 1950s and my father and mother and brothers, Dan and Pat and Tim, are there and our baby sister, Mary Ellen, and Pop and Gramma Lynch and Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Mike and we’ve been to Mass that morning at St. Columban, where Fr. Kenny, a native of Galway, held forth in his flush-faced brogue, and we’ve had breakfast after Mass with the O’Haras—our mother’s people—Nana, and Uncle Pat and Aunt Pat and Aunt Sally Jean and Uncle Lou, and then we all piled in the car to drive from the suburbs into town to my father’s parents’ house for dinner. And my grandfather, Pop Lynch, is there at the head of the dining-room table, near enough the age that I am now, the windows behind him, the crystal chandelier, all of us posing as in a Rockwell print—with the table and turkey and family gathered round—and he is blessing us and the food and giving thanks and telling us finally, “Don’t forget” these people none of us has ever met, “Tommy and Nora Lynch on the banks of the River Shannon. Don’t forget.”
This was part of the first poetry of my life—the raised speech of blessing and remembrance, names of people and places far away about whom and which we knew nothing but the sounds of the names, the syllables. It was the repetition, the ritual almost liturgical tone of my grandfather’s prayer that made the utterance memorable. Was it something he learned at his father’s table—to pray for the family back in Ireland? It was his father, Thomas Lynch, who had left wherever the banks of the Shannon were and come to Jackson, Michigan, and painted new cellblocks in the prison there and striped Studebakers in an auto shop there. Was it that old bald man in the pictures with the grim missus in the high-necked blouse who first included in the grace before meals a remembrance of the people and the place he’d left behind and would never see again?
Bless us O Lord, Tommy and Nora. Banks of the Shannon.
Don’t forget.
When I arrived in 1970, I found the place as he had left it, eighty years earlier, and the cousins we’d been praying for all my life. Tommy was holding back the barking dog in the yard. Nora was making her way to the gate, smiling and waving, all focus and calculation. They seemed to me like figures out of a Brueghel print: weathered, plain-clothed, bright-eyed, beckoning. Words made flesh—the childhood grace incarnate: Tommy and Nora. Don’t forget. It was wintry and windy and gray, the first Tuesday morning of the first February of the 1970s. I was twenty-one.
“Go on, boy, that’s your people now,” the taxi man who’d brought me from Shannon said. I paid him and thanked him and grabbed my bag.
I’VE BEEN COMING and going here ever since.
The oval welcome in my first passport—that first purple stamp of permission—remains, in a drawer in a desk with later and likewise-expired versions. 3 February 1970. Permitted to land for 3 months.
The man at the customs desk considered me, overdressed in my black suit, a jet-lagged dandy with his grandfather’s pocket watch, red-eyed, wide-eyed, utterly agape. “Gobsmacked,” I would later learn to call this state.
“Anything to declare?” he asked, eyeing the suitcase and the satchel.
“Declare? Nothing.”
“Passport.” I handed it over.
“The name’s good,” he said, and made an “X” on my luggage with a piece of chalk. “You’re welcome home.”
I walked through customs into the Arrivals Hall of Shannon Airport. At the Bank of Ireland window I traded my bankroll of one hundred dollars for forty-one Irish punts and change—huge banknotes, like multicolored hankies folded into my pocket. I walked out into the air sufficiently uncertain of my whereabouts that when a taxi man asked me did I need a lift, I told him yes and showed him the address.
“Kilkee—no bother—all aboard.”
That first ride out to the west was a blur. I was a passenger on the wrong side of a car that was going way too fast on the wrong side of roads that were way too small through towns and countryside that were altogether foreign. Cattle and parts of ruined castles and vast tracts of green and towns with names I’d seen on maps: Sixmilebridge, Newmarket on Fergus, Clarecastle, then Ennis where the signpost said, KILKEE 35 MILES, then Kilrush, where another said, KILKEE 8.
“How long are you home for?” the driver asked. I’d never been so far from home before.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what “home” meant to the Irish then, or what it would come to mean to me. I’d paid two hundred and nineteen dollars for a one-way ticket from Detroit to New York to Shannon. I had my future, my passport, my three months, no plans.
The ride from Shannon took about an hour.
What a disappointment I must have been—deposited there in the road outside the gate, the Yank, three generations late, dressed as if for a family photo, fumbling with a strange currency for the five-pound note I owed for the ride, bringing not the riches of the New World to the Old, but thirty-six pounds now and a little change, some duty-free tobacco and spirits, and the letter that Nora Lynch had sent that said it was all right for me to come. Blue ink on light blue lined paper, folded in a square, posted with a yellow stamp that bore a likeness of “Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948” and a circular postmark: CILL CHADIOHE CO AN CHLAIR, which I later learned to English as “Kilkee, Co. Clare.” The handwriting was sturdy, angular, and stayed between the lines.
Moveen West
Kilkee
Jan 8. ’70
Dear Thomas
We received your letter before Xmas. Glad to know you are coming to Ireland. At the moment the weather is very cold. January is always bad. I hope it clears up before you land. Write and say when you expect to come so we’d get ready for you. I hope all your family are well.
With Best Regards to All the Lynch’s Nora & Tom
Of course she hadn’t a clue about us—“All the Lynch’s,” as she called us. Whatever illusions Americans have about the Irish—that they are permanently good-natured, all saints and scholars, tidy and essentially well-intentioned drunks, cheerful brawlers—all that faith-and-begorra blindness behind The Quiet Man and the Irish Spring commercials, what the Irish knew about Americans was no less illusory.
The taxi man told me a joke en route, about the “Paddy” he called him, from Kilmihil, who’d gone off to the States to seek his fortune, having heard that the money there grows on trees and the streets are “literally paved with it,” et cetera, and “he’s after stepping off the boat in Boston of a Sunday and making his way up the road when what does he see but a ten-dollar bill in the street, plain as day. And your man, you know, is gobsmacked by the sight of it, and saying to himself, ‘The boyos back home were right after all, this place is nothing but money, easy as you please,’ and he bends to pick up the tenner when the thought comes to him. He straightens up, kicks it aside, and says to himself, ‘Ah hell, it’s Sunday. I’ll start tomorrow.’ ”
Still Nora Lynch would have known I was one of her people. She would have sorted out that her grandfather was my grandfather’s grandfather. Old Pat Lynch, whose heart failed at eighty on the twelfth of June in 1907, would be our common man. His body buried with his wife’s, long dead, and Nora’s twin who had died in infancy of encephalitis, and Nora’s father who had died in 1924—all of them returning to dust in the gabled tomb by the road in Moyarta. We’d be cousins, so, twice removed. She could twist the relations back the eighty years, back to the decade before she was born when her father’s brother Tom left for America. Old Pat had gone to America himself years before, stayed for several months, and returned to Honora and the children. Maybe he was the one who discovered Jackson, Michigan, and the huge prison, opened in 1838, the largest in the world back then, and all the work it provided for guards and cooks and the building trades. And Nora’s brother Michael had gone to Jackson as a young man, following others from the west of Clare to “Mitch-e-gan.” The records at Ellis Island show him landing there in 1920, off the Adriatic from Southampton. He’d married there and when his wife died, he returned to Moveen, where he died of a broken heart one warm August day in 1951 while saving hay. Nora would have had word from him about the Jackson crowd—about their uncle, Thomas Curry Lynch, and his wife, “a Ryan woman, wasn’t she?” and about his boys, Eddie and Tommy, and their sister Gertrude, raised at 600 Cooper Street. Hadn’t he brought a picture of his first cousin the priest, Fr. Thomas Patrick Lynch, for whom I’d be named a dozen years after the young priest had died—my father’s uncle—there in the wide-angled photo of them all gathered out front of St. John’s Church on Cooper Street in Jackson, Michigan, in June of 1934 shortly after his ordination. My father, ten years old, wearing knickers and knee socks, is seated between his father and mother. And Nora’s brother Mikey, somewhere in that crowd, posed for the camera with his young wife who would be dead before long, the way they are all dead now. Nora and Tommy four thousand miles away, in the prime of their lives, will get word from one of them, about the new priest in the family.
And years later she will sort it all out: her Uncle Thomas married Ellen Ryan, “a great stiff of a woman,” she had heard, and their son, Edward, married Geraldine, “some shape of a Protestant, but she converted,” and their son Edward married Rosemary, and then this Yank, twentyish, out of his element, in the black suit standing in the rain at the gate, the dog barking, the cab disappearing down the road, all family, “all the Lynch’s,” all long since gone, and now returned.
“So, Tom that went,” she said, connecting eight decades of dates and details, “and Tom that would come back. You are welcome to this part of the country.”
After the dog, Sambo, was subdued, we went indoors. There was a fire on the floor at the end of the room, a wide streak of soot working up the wall where the chimney opened out to the sky. And the rich signature aroma of turf smoke I’d smelled since landing in Shannon. I was given a cigarette, whiskey, a chair by the fire, the household luxuries.
“Sit in there now, Tom. You’ll be perished with the journey,” Tommy said, adding black lumps to the fire. “Sure faith, it’s a long old road from America.” There were odd indecipherable syllables between and among the words I could make out.
Nora was busy frying an egg and sausage and what she called “black pudding” on the fire. She boiled water in a kettle, cut bread in wedges from a great round loaf, pulled the table away from the wall into the middle of the room, settled a teapot on some coals in front of the fire. She set out cups and plates and tableware. Tommy kept the fire and interrogated me. How long was the trip, how large the plane, were there many on it, did they feed us well? And my people would be “lonesome after” me. I nodded and smiled and tried to understand him. And there was this talk between them, constant, undulant, perfectly pitched, rising and falling as the current of words worked its way through the room, punctuated by bits of old tunes, old axioms, bromides, prayers, poems, incantations. “Please Gods” and “The Lord’ve mercies” and “The devil ye know’s better than the one ye don’t”—all given out in a brogue much thicker and idiomatically richer than I’d ever heard. They spoke in tongues entirely enamored of voice and acoustic and turn of phrase, enriched by metaphor and rhetoricals and cadence, as if every utterance might be memorable. “The same for some, said Jimmy Walsh long ’go, and the more with others.” “Have nothing to do with a well of water in the night.” “A great life if you do not weaken.” There was no effort to edit, or clip, or hasten or cut short the pleasure of the sound words made in their mouths and ears. There were “Sure faith’s” and “Dead losses” and “More’s the pities.” And a trope that made perfect sense to Nora, to wit: “The same but different”—which could be applied to a variety of contingencies.
“The same but different,” she said when she showed me the wallpaper she’d lately pasted to the freshly plastered walls of the room she had prepared for me. “The same as America, but different.” There was a narrow bed, a chair on which to put my suitcase, a crucifix, and the picture of the dead priest I’d been named for. The deep window ledge gave me room for my briefcase. There was a chamber pot on the floor and a lightbulb hung from the ceiling. The room was five feet wide and ten feet long, like a sleeper on a night train or a berth in steerage class, snug and monkish, the same but different.
After tea she took me down in the land. Out past the cow cabins and the tall hay barn, we stepped carefully along a path of stones through the muddy fields. Nora wore tall rubber boots she called Wellingtons and moved with a deliberate pace along the tall ditch banks that separated their land from the neighbors’. She carried a plastic bucket. She seemed immediately and especially curious about my interest in farming. I told her I didn’t know a thing about it. “There’s nothing to it,” she told me. “You’ll have it learned like a shot. A great block of a boy like you, it’ll be no bother for ye. You’d get a tractor, and a wife, and there’d be a good living in it.”
“What do you grow?” I asked her.
“Mostly cows.”
We made our slow way down the soggy land, dodging pools of standing water and thickening mud.
“Mind the fort, Tom,” Nora said, pointing to a tall, circular mound that occupied the corner of the next field over. “Never tamper with a fort.”
Then she knelt to an open well in the middle of the land, skimmed the surface with the bucket, then sank it deep and brought it up again with clear water spilling over the edges.
“Have a sup, Tom, it’s lovely water and cold and clean.”
We walked the half a mile uphill back to the house. I carried the bucket and was highly praised for doing so.
Back at the fire, Nora told me how she and Tommy had been the youngest of their family. How her father died young and all their siblings had left for America except for Nora’s twin brother who died in infancy. Two sisters had gone to Buffalo, New York, married well, and never returned. Mikey had gone to Jackson, “Mitch-e-gan,” and worked there in the factory and married but his wife died young and he came home to Moveen and died saving hay in the big meadow in 1951. He was fifty-three. So it fell to Tommy and Nora to keep the place going and care for their widowed mother who was always sickly and feeble. Neither married, though they had many chances, “you can be sure of that, Tom.” Both had stayed. Now, nearing seventy, they had their health, their home, and their routine. “Thanks be to God,” they wanted for nothing. God had been good to them. “All passing through life.” Sambo dozed in the corner. A cat curled on the window ledge. Another nursed her litter in the clothes press near the fire. There was a goose in the storage room waiting on an egg. There was rain at the windows, wind under the doors. The clock on the mantel was ticking. The day’s brief light was fading rapidly. The coals reddened in the fire on the floor.
Now I was nodding, with the long journey and the good feed and the warmth of the fire at my shins, and the chanting of cattle in the adjacent cabin and the story Nora was telling me of lives lived out on both sides of the ocean—an ocean I’d seen for the first time that day. I might’ve drifted off to sleep entirely, awash in bucolia, talk, and well-being, if all of a sudden Tommy didn’t rise, tilt his head to some distant noise, haul on his tall boots, and disappear out the door. Nora quickly filled a large pot with water and hung it from the crane over the fire. She brought lumps of coal from a bag in the storage room and added them to the turf. She rolled a piece of newspaper and fanned the coals to flames in the turf. She brought a bucket of meal from a tall bag in the same room. I wondered what all of the bustle was about.
Within moments, Tommy was back in the door holding in a slippery embrace a calf still drenched with its own birthing. It was the size of a large dog, and shaking and squirming in Tommy’s arms. Nora mixed meal in a large plastic bowl and filled it with boiling water—a loose oatmeal that she took out to the cow cabin. Tommy dried the new calf with straw and kept it close to the warm fire and tried to get it to suckle from a bucket of milk and meal. “Fine calf, a fine bullock God bless ’oo,” he kept repeating, “that’s it now, drink away for yourself.” Nora reappeared and disappeared again with another bucket of hot meal. All of this went on for most of an hour. The calf was standing now on its own spindly legs. Tommy took it out to suck from its mother. It was dark outside; the night was clear and cold. The cow cabin, though it stank of dung, was warm with the breath of large bodies. Tommy squirted the new calf from its mother’s teat and said, “Go on now, go on now, sup away for yourself, best to get the beastings right away, there’s great medicine in the first milk.” He got hay from the hay barn and spread it about and traded one of his Woodbines for my Old Gold. We stood and smoked and watched the new bullock suckle, its mother licking it with great swipes of her tongue.
“Haven’t they great intelligence after all?” said Tommy. “That’s it then, Tom, we’ll go inside.”
I was chilled and tired, tired to the bone. But Nora made fresh tea and put out soda bread and cookies and praised the good fortune of a healthy calf, God bless him, and Tommy who was a “pure St. Francis” with the animals. “None better. Ah, no boy. Of that you can be sure.” Then she filled an empty brown bottle with boiling water and put it in my bed to warm the sheets. She brought out blankets and aired them by the fire then returned them to the room I was given to sleep in. I crawled in and despite the cold and damp could feel my body’s heat beneath the heavy bed linens and was soon asleep.
Sometime in the middle of that first night I woke, went out the back door to piss the tea and water and whiskey in the dark, and looking up I saw a firmament more abundant than anything I’d ever seen in Michigan. It was, of course, the same sky the whole world sees—the same but different—as indeed I felt myself to be, after that first night on the edge of Ireland, in the townland of Moveen with the North Atlantic roaring behind the fields above, and the house full of its nativities, and the old bachelor and his spinster sister sleeping foot-to-foot in their twin beds and common room and myself out pissing under the stars asking the heavens how did I ever come to be here, in this place, at all?
IN THE LATE 1960s, my life was, like the lives of most American men my age, up for grabs. The war in Vietnam and the Selective Service draft made us eligible to be called up when between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six. For able-bodied suburban men, that meant going to college for the deferment. As the war grew increasingly unpopular, the draft was rightly seen as a class war being waged against the disadvantaged—mostly black or Hispanic or poor who were disproportionately sent into battle. In December 1969, Richard Nixon held the first draft lottery since World War II. The pressing need for more young men as fodder, the gathering storms of protest and public outrage, the inequities of the draft all coalesced into this theatre of the absurd. Three hundred sixty-six blue capsules with the dates of the year were drawn out of a fishbowl in Washington, D.C., on Monday evening, December 1. I was playing gin rummy in the student union of Oakland University. The first date drawn was September 14. Men born on that day were going to war. October 16, my birthday, wasn’t pulled until 254. The first hundred drawn were reckoned to be goners. They’d be suited up and enroute for Southeast Asia before spring of the coming year. The next hundred or so were figured to be relatively safe. The last third drawn were the jackpot winners. They would not be called up for Vietnam. They would not be given guns and sent off to an unwinnable war and told to shoot at strangers who were shooting at them. It was like a sentence commuted. I was free to go.
Up until then, I’d been going nowhere. I was twenty-one, a lackluster student in a state university studying nothing so much as the theory and practice of pursuing women, a variety of card games, the pleasures of poetry and fiction and drink. I had been biding time, doing little of substance, waiting to see what would become of my life. I was living in a sprawling rental house in the country not far from the university with seven other men and the women they could occasionally coax to stay with them. We each paid fifty dollars a month rent and a few bucks for light and heat. The place had five fireplaces, a stream out front, half a mile of woodlands to the main road, acres of scrub grass and ponds out back. We had our privacy. We’d play cards around the clock, listen to the music of the day, drink and drug and arrange great feasts. I was working part-time at my father’s funeral home to pay for the rent and the car and my habits but had steadfastly avoided making career choices yet. It was a life of quiet dissipation from which the number 10-16, the date of my birth, in concert with the number 254, delivered me. It seemed arbitrary, random, surreal. I could do the math—that 1016 was divisible by 254—but couldn’t make out the deeper meaning. As with many of life’s blessings, it was mixed. The certainty that I would not be going to war was attended by the certainty that I would have to do something else. As long as the draft loomed, I could do nothing. But I had escaped it. This was the good news and the bad news.
I considered the options. I had met a woman but was uncommitted. I had a job but no career. I was taking classes but had no focused course of study. I had a future but hadn’t a clue as to what to do with the moment before me.
My closest friend, then as now, was the poet Michael Heffernan, with whom I drank, read poems, and discussed the fierce beauties of women and the manifest genius of the Irish. He had regaled me with talk of his own travels in Ireland and read me what he’d written about the people and the places. At his instruction, I read Joyce and Yeats and Kavanaugh. I switched from vodka to whiskey—it seemed more Irish. I asked my widowed grandmother for an address. She still dutifully sent Christmas and Easter greetings to her dead husband’s distant old-country cousins.
Moveen West Kilkee County Clare Ireland
The syllables—eleven, prime, irregular—then as now belong to this place only: townland, town, county, country, place—a dot on an island in an ocean in a world afloat in the universe of creation to which I was writing a letter. No numbers, no street names, no postal box or code. Just names—people, places, postage—sent. Postmarked all those years ago now: December 10, 1969.
Tommy and Nora Lynch
Moveen West
Kilkee
Co. Clare
Ireland
Like a telescope opening or a lens focusing, each line of this addressing reduces the vastness of space by turns until we get to this place, this house, these people, who are by degrees subtracted from the vastness of humanity by the place they live in and the times they occupy and the names they have.
Since 1970, everything here has changed. Ireland has gone from being the priest-ridden poor cousin of Western Europe to the roaring, secularized Celtic Tiger of the European Union. For the first time in modern history, people are trying to get into rather than out of Ireland, and a country of emigrants has become a nation of commuters. Once isolated as an island nation at the edge of the Old World, the Irish are wired and connected and engaged with the world in ways they never would have imagined even a decade ago. There are more cars, more drugs, more TVs and muggings, more computers and murders, more of everything and less time in the day. Ireland has come, all swagger and braggadocio, into its own as a modern nation. Its poets and rock stars and fiddlers and dancers travel the wide world as citizens of the globe and unmistakably Irish.
Still, looking out the window my ancestors looked out of, west by southwest, over the ditch bank, past Sean Maloney’s derelict farm, upland to Newtown and Knocknagaroon, tracing the slope of the hill to the sea at Goleen and out to the river mouth beyond Rehy Hill, I think nothing in the world has changed at all. The same fields, the same families, the same weather and worries, the same cliffs and ditches define Moveen as defined Moveen a hundred years ago, and a hundred years before a hundred years ago. Haymaking has given way to silage, ass and cart to tractor and backhoe, bush telegraph to telecom and cell phones. But the darkness is as dense at night, the wind as fierce, the firmament as bright, the bright day every bit as welcome.
Everything is the same, but different.
Everything including me. In my fifties, I imagine the man in his twenties who never could have imagined me. I consider the changes in this house and its inhabitants—my people, me.
IS IT POSSIBLE to map one’s life and times like a country or topography or geography? To chart one’s age or place or moment? To say: I was young then, or happy, or certain, or alone? In love, afraid, or gone astray? To measure the distances between tributaries, wellsprings, roads and borders? Or draw the lines between connected lives? Can the bigger picture be seen in the small? Can we see the Western World in a western parish? Can we know the species by the specimen? Can we know the many by the few? Can we understand the way we are by looking closely at the way we’ve been? And will the language, if we set ourselves adrift in it, keep us afloat, support the search, the pilgrimage among facts and reveries and remembrances?
Is it possible to understand race and tribe, sect and religion, faith and family, sex and death, love and hate, nation and state, time and space and humankind by examining a townland of the species, a parish of people, a handful of humanity?
It was in Moveen I first got glimpses of recognition, moments of clarity when it all made sense—my mother’s certain faith, my father’s dark humor, the look he’d sometimes get that was so distant, preoccupied, unknowable. And my grandmothers’ love of contentious talk, the two grandfathers’ trouble with drink, the family inheritance of all of that. And the hunger and begrudgments and fierce family love that generation after generation of my people makes manifest. And I got the flickering of insights into our sense of “the other” and ourselves that has informed human relations down through time. Can it be figured out, found out, like pointing to a spot on a peninsula between now-familiar points and saying: It came from there, all of it—who we are, how we came to be this way, why we are the way we are—the same but different as the ones that came before us, and will come after us, and who came from other townlands, peninsulas, islands, nations, times—all of us, the same but different.
Those moments of clarity, flickering wisdoms, were gifts I got from folks who took me in because I had their name and address and could twist relations back to names they knew. When I stood at their gate that gray February morning, going thirty-five years ago, they could have had me in to tea, then sent me on my way. They could have kept me for the night, or weekend, or the week and then kindly suggested I tour the rest of the country. Instead they opened their home and lives to me, for keeps. It changed my life in ways I’m still trying to understand.
Tommy Lynch died in 1971. He was laid out in the room I sleep in now. After his funeral I rented a TV for Nora from Donnelan’s in Kilrush, thinking it would shorten the nights. Because she was an elderly woman living on her own, Nora got the first phone in Moveen in 1982. She added a roomlet out front to house the new fridge and the cooker. She closed in the open hearth for a small and more efficient firebox. In 1982, my friend Dualco De Dona and I ran a water line in from the road, through the thick wall, into a sink that sat on an old clothes press and gave her cold water on demand. “A miracle,” is what she called it, and praised our “composition” of it all. In 1986, she built a room on the back in which went a toilet and a shower and a sink.
Nora died here in 1992 in the bed I sleep in now. She left her home to me.
P. J. Roche pulled up the old flagstones and damp-coursed underneath them, then knocked out an inside wall to enlarge the kitchen, put in storage heaters, a back-boiler, radiators, and new windows. The place is dry and snug and full of appliances. The civilizers of the twentieth century—toilets and tap water, TV and a kind of central heat, the telephone and tractor and motor car—all came to this place in the past thirty years. Still, little in the landscape out of doors has changed. The fields green, the cattle graze on the topography that rises to the sea out one window and leans into the river out another. The peninsula narrows to its western end at Loop Head, where gulls rise in the wind drafts and scream into the sea that every night the sun falls into and on either side of which I keep a home. Folks love and grieve and breed and disappear. Life goes on. We are all blow-ins. We all have our roots. Tides come and go in the estuary where the river’s mouth yawns wide into the ocean—indifferent to the past and to whatever futures this old house might hold.
The plans for the new room include a sliding glass door out to the rear yard where the whitethorn trees my great-great-grandmother. Honora planted a century and a half ago still stand. According to their various seasons, they still berry and flower and rattle their prickly branches in the wind. It was her new husband Patrick who brought them home—mere saplings then—from a cattle mart in Kilrush where the old woman who sold them told him it was whitethorn that Christ’s crown was fashioned from.
There’s shelter in them and some privacy for those nights when, here in my fifties after too much tea, rather than the comforts of modern plumbing, I choose the liberties of the yard, the vast and impenetrable blackness of the sky, the pounding of the ocean that surround the dark and put me in mind of my first time here.
Those rare and excellent moments in my half-life since, when the clear eyes of ancients or lovers or babies have made me momentarily certain that this life is a gift, whether randomly given or by design; those times when I was filled with thanksgiving for the day that was in it, the minute only, for every tiny incarnate thing in creation—I’ve measured such moments against that first night in Moveen where staring into the firmament, pissing among the whitethorn trees, I had the first inkling that I was at once one and only and one of a kind, apart from my people yet among them still, the same as every other human being, but different; my own history afloat on all history, my name and the names of my kinsmen repeating themselves down generations, time bearing us all effortlessly, like the sea with its moon-driven, undulant possibilities: we Irish, we Americans, the faithfully departed, the stargazers at the sea’s edge of every island of every hemisphere of every planet, all of us the same but different.
My sister Brigid’s yellow Lab bitch Baxter was put to death last Monday. What can be said of such proceedings? That every dog has its day? The following from my sister’s partner, Kathy, tells the tale.
It is with a heavy heart that I write this e-mail to notify family of the death of Baxter Bailey (11 1/2 years old) on Monday, July 14th. Kidney failure. She was buried in a deserved spot, at Mullett Lake. She is survived by her sister, Bogey Bear (who is a little lost as to what has transpired) and her mother/best friend/companion—Brigid. A brief ceremony will be held the weekend of the 25th on Mullett Lake.
Whether you loved her, feared her or were entertained by her, she will never be forgotten. Long live her memory.
Kathy
In receipt of which I replied:
Dear Kathy and B,
Thanks for the sad and tidy news. I will not pretend to have admired the deceased. She was, however, a walking (more lately hobbled) example of the power of love. She was not bright, not lovely, less communicative than most mum plants, and drugged into a stupor for most of her life. But here is the mystery—the glorious mystery—that a woman as bright and lovely, articulate and sober as our B loved her, loved her unambiguously. For a man of my own limitations (and they are legion) the love B showed to Baxter was a reminder of the lovability of all God’s creatures—even me. In that sense she was a constant beacon of faith and hope and love. If this is what they call the Dog’s Life, I say more of it is the thing we need.
You and B will be in my prayers for a brief if deserved bereavement.
Love & Blessings,
T
PS: Pat and I will get the stone and willn’t stint.
It was a hasty but heartfelt sentiment, managed between the usual mélange of mortuary, literary, and family duties. I meant only comfort by it. And though we get the headstones at wholesale, the gesture was genuine.
PART OF THE comeuppance for calling our small chain of funeral homes Lynch & Sons is that the daughters—our sisters—control the purse. Three of my father’s six sons, I among them, went off to mortuary school and got licensed, years ago, to embalm the dead and guide the living through the funerary maze. Before our father died, we bought the enterprise from him. His three daughters—ever his favorites—went to university and business schools and were installed in various key positions. Mary is the bookkeeper and paymistress. Julie Ann is her factotum. Brigid handles trusts and insurance and pre-need finance and is the de facto comptroller at my brother Pat’s funeral home. We call them “The Three Furies,” and they travel between my establishment and Pat’s, bringing light and joy and accountability.
When I see them together—Mary, Julie, and Brigid—I often think of the headlands on the Dingle Peninsula called “The Three Sisters,” which rise in a triad of sweeping, greeny peaks to protect the Irish countryside from the ravages of the North Atlantic. Like those features in the West Kerry topography, they are strikingly beautiful, immovable, and possessed of powers we know nothing of. They are, it is well known, Irish in origin—the powers, the sisters. The source of all that is holy and hazardous about them is a matrilineage that finds its way back to a kitchen and cauldron in a boggy parish in the old country where only marginally post-Celtic mystics bedded with poor farmers who never knew what they were getting into. It is a lineage of women who emigrated on their own, in numbers equal to or greater than men, enduring steerage and indignity, years of indenture, to better themselves and their American children.
The sisters come by their powers honestly. They are their late mother’s daughters and have inherited that sainted woman’s charms and spells, blue eyes and Parian complexion, intellect and idolatries. They are, as she was, devotees of the votive and vigil, rosary and novena, perpetual adorations, lives of the saints, imitations of Christ, statues of the Blessed Virgin Mary and Sacred Heart, Stations of the Cross, relics, waters, ribbons and badges, prayerbooks and scapulars—all of which make them morally superior and spiritually dangerous. The arsenal of their godly wraths and blessed tempers would, in the best of circumstances, be turned on their spouses, to their betterments. But as each has partnered and consorted with the most amiable soulmate, they’ve only to train their tantrums upon their older brothers, whose puny potvaliances, collective and individual, are no match for The Furies. It makes them, I suppose, easier women to come home to.
Wednesdays Mary and Julie come to my funeral home in Milford for payroll and accounts—receivable and payable. Brigid remains at my brother’s office but calls to consult with her sisters three or four times on the day.
Last Wednesday, when Mary and Julie read my sympathy note, they rolled their eyes and smote me with their disapproval. “How could you say such an awful thing about Baxter to your grieving sister?”
“What awful thing?” I asked, “a beacon of faith and hope and love?”
“This bit about the mum plant and stupor. . . . Couldn’t you have just said something nice? Something about her loyalty?”
They did not see that stating the obvious about Baxter’s life and times was central to the art of condolence and, a fortiori, the construction of the note’s kindlier sentiment.
Truth told, the dog was a disaster, which had worn out her welcome by eleven years with everyone except, of course, my sister Brigid. A female assigned a fashionably suburban, chicly Anglo-Irish, but still oddly mannish name, “Baxter Bailey” never seemed to know whether she was coming or going, whether to hump or be humped, whether she ought to lift a leg or squat. When she had just achieved adult size and indoor continence, she bit my sister—quite literally the hand that was feeding her—thereby missing the only requisite point of Dog 101, to wit: Don’t bite the humans. B had her neutered. Later she growled and snapped at B’s infant and toddling nieces and nephews as they approached to pet her. On the strength of these misdemeanors and distempers, I once had B talked into putting her down, citing the liability presented by a dog that might attack neighbors or their pets or children, houseguests or passersby. I reminded her of the One-Bite Rule, with roots in the Book of Exodus, near where the ordinances on the seduction of virgins are recorded (alas, the emergent patriarchy!), which held that an owner would be called to account for the second infraction of a domestic animal. I’d gone so far as to set an appointment with the vet for the euthanasia and had Baxter leashed and loaded in the backseat and B agreeably disposed to the good sense of it all. But when she got there, she waffled in her resolve. She asked the vet, instead, for medication, something, she pleaded, “to calm her down”—Baxter, not Brigid. The cocktail of pharmaceuticals thus prescribed amounted to the nonsurgical equivalent of lobotomy. She was given phenobarbital to control her seizures, Lasix as a diuretic, something for her stomach disorders and insomnia, and a giant daily dose of canine Thorazine—enough I daresay to dull an orangutan—to quiet her demons, real and imagined. Baxter remained more or less on the edge of a coma for the rest of her life. Like some of those old lads you’d see in the pubs, the tooth gone out of them, supping up their daily sedation. She never snapped at anyone or anything again. She roamed about, bumping into the landscape and geography and furniture, like an outsize, spongy orb in a game of pinball or bumper-pool. At the lake, Mullett Lake—where we’ve recreated en famille for years and ruined the property values—she would sometimes walk into the water, as if some distant memory of her breed still flickered in her. Brigid would have to wade in and lead her ashore. People would toss Frisbees and tennis balls in her direction, hoping to engage her in the usual play. They would bounce off her snout and hindquarters, causing not so much as a flicker in Baxter’s glassy eyes. The customary commands—“Sit,” “Fetch,” “Heel,” “Come”—meant no more to Baxter than a recitation from the Tain or the Annals of the Four Masters. To the voice of her mistress or any human directive, Baxter was uniformly nonresponsive. The only trick she ever performed was, “Breathe, Baxter! Breathe.”
“Where there’s life there’s hope,” Brigid would say, ever the loyal human, as if the dog’s damage were reversible. It was a sad thing to witness, this zombified miscreant working her way through a decade and then some of meaningless days. Her end was a mercy to all and sundry.
But what my sisters Mary and Julie seemed to be saying was that no empathy or fellow feeling could be tendered that did not include the ruse that Baxter was Rin Tin Tin done up in drag, or Lassie or Old Yeller—a great dog to be greatly grieved and greatly missed—a loyal, loving, exceptional specimen of Man’s (read Woman’s too) Best Friend. When I protested that Baxter would not want to be placed on a pedestal, or to be loved for other than the amalgam of distress and misfortune that she was, that authentic feeling could not be based upon a vast denial of reality, they both rolled their eyes in counterclockwise turns and said, one to the other, “He just doesn’t get it.”
That I just don’t “get it” is the conventional wisdom and the conversation’s end with the several women in my life. Though I am the son of a good woman, now deceased and lamented, and sibling of three of them; though I am the father, friend, and spouse of females, like most of the men of my generation, and almost all of the men of my extraction, I just don’t get it and maybe never will. A library of literature currently exists on the whys and whatnots about Irish men—with the notable exceptions of Bono and Liam Neeson—which render them denser than other specimens when it comes to “getting it” so far as women are concerned. The Irish-American male is similarly disposed, unless there is a remedial dose of Italian, Mexican, or Russian in his genealogy, in which case not getting it gives way to not giving a rap.
FIVE MORNINGS OUT of every seven, the woman across the street in the gingerbready Queen Anne with the Martha Stewart garden emerges with her two snow-white toy poodles to attend to what Victorians called “the duties of their [the dogs’] toilet.” Each is the size of a bowling ball and their tiny feces like wee, green, cat-eyed marbles—about which more, alas, anon. These daft and dainty little sexless things are named for their mistress’s favorite libations, “Chardonnay” and “Champagne,” which are shortened in the diminutive to “Chardy” and “Champy,” as she is heard to call out when they go bouncing about the neighborhood in search of somewhere to take their tiny designer shits. Most mornings the entourage looks a little dazed, as if they all might’ve gotten into the vodka-and-tonic late. But who am I to say?
She doesn’t like me—the woman across the street. The list and variety of our quarrels and quibbles on civic, cultural, and neighborhood issues is a long and exhaustive one. I’m sure she thinks I just don’t get it. Truth told, I’m not that gone on her. Except for the occasional wave or sidelong glance and nod, we make no effort at neighborliness. We knew from the get-go we would not be friends. And though I admire her refusal to maintain any pretense or decorum, it is better to do so from afar. Maybe we remind each other of each other’s former spouses.
Still, I uphold her right to her ways as she upholds my right to mine. This is America, after all. Though we hold forth from opposite sides of the street, the name of the street is Liberty. So the insipid little dogs, the fellow she’s married to (who must on the weekends attend to Chardy and Champy’s morning office), the overgrowth of garden—these are situations I accept like variations on the theme of weather. It could be worse, is what I tell myself. In the same way, she tolerates me and mine: the overflow parking from the funeral home, the mysterious vans arriving at all hours, the bright Impatiens we plant every year among the uninspired juniper and yews and, the Dear knows, my manifest personal foibles. Like me, she has much to tolerate.
It’s only when she brings Chardy and Champy over to the funeral home to sniff about in search of a proper shitting ground that I take especial umbrage. To give her and her poodles their due, she always comes armed with a plastic bag and a rubber glove—the latter effecting the transfer of the turdlettes from my greensward into the former. She is, in keeping with local and regional custom, fastidious about the fecal matters. I think she uses them with her prized delphinium. But for some reason I cannot shake the sense that I and my real estate have been shat upon, and that there is a kind of message hidden in the act, that there is some intelligence she intends for me to “get” by the witness of it. Nor can I shake the temptation, so far resisted, to mosey on over and shit on hers. There’s liberty in it, and a kind of truth.
AFTER MY FIRST wife and I divorced, I was the custodial parent of a daughter and three sons from the time they were ten, nine, six, and four—until I was married again, some seven years later, to the Woman of My Dreams. It’s when I most wanted to be a feminist. The divisions of labor and money, power and parental duties—those good-for-the-goose-and-gander concerns of the third-wave feminism of the day—were themes I found the most intriguing. I read de Beauvoir and Friedan, Brownmiller and Millett, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem. I read Robin Morgan’s man-hating rhetoricals on “cock privilege” and castration and Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook and Andrea Dworkin’s sad and incomprehensible screed and wondered if there were miseries out of which such people could really never be put. I was a card-carrying, contributing member of NOW. I vetted my personal lexicon for sexist terms. Postman became mail carrier, chairman became chairperson, ladies became women. I never said “girl.” I made my sons wash dishes and my daughter take out the trash and filed for child support from my former spouse, in keeping with the equal-rights amends I was trying to make. I was encouraged by the caseworker from the Friend of the Court’s office—a fetching woman with green eyes and a by-the-bookish style—who said the children should get fifty percent of their noncustodial parent’s income. This, she assured, was a gender-indifferent directive. The state-prescribed formula called for twenty percent for the first child and ten percent for every one after that. “It’s what you’d be paying,” she said matter-of-factly, “if the shoe were on the other foot.” I figured I could save it for their higher educations.
The judge, however, overruled the caseworker’s recommendation. Her honor conceded that while in theory our sons and daughter deserved the benefits of both of their parents’ gainful labors, she could not bring herself to order a mother to pay child support, even one who saw her children but every other weekend. It was enough that the erstwhile missus was making her own way in a difficult world. Supplemental payments for the support of her children were more of an indenture than the judge was prepared to order. During the brief hearing, I was advised by her pinstriped counsel to leave well enough alone. I just didn’t get it after all.
In Ireland at the time, they had no ex-wives and more than once I thought, “How very civilized.” There was no shortage of domestic misery, of course, no shortage of abuse, just no divorce. It wasn’t allowed. So people moved apart and lived their lives as, more or less, ex-spousal equivalents. There was a Divorce Referendum in 1986, but the priests all preached against it in the country places. It failed by a convincing margin. Still men and women wanted civil disunions and lobbied for them until the measure passed just as convincingly in 1992. Now gay men and lesbians want to get married, and who could blame them, what with the bliss, for lobbying for the blessings and paperwork?
Back in those days, I kept a lovely cur, free of any registered pedigree or jittery habits. She had a small head, a large body, and an agreeable temperament. We called her Heidi. When she was a puppy, I walked her ’round our little city lot at the corner of Liberty and East Streets and the half-block next door occupied by the funeral home and its parking lot and told her that she could come and go as she pleased but that if she showed up at home, more nights than not, she’d be fed and petted and sheltered well; she’d be loved and cuddled, bathed and brushed. In short, if she would do her part, we’d do ours. Such was the nature of our covenant.
And though Heidi traveled widely, she never strayed. She would follow the mail carriers on their rounds, forfending them from more vicious dogs. She’d find her way to the corner butcher shop and beg for bones and to the bakery on Main Street to beg for day-old donuts. She was particularly fond of custard-filleds. She would stare balefully into the doorway of the delicatessen for hours until someone proffered some Polish ham or Havarti cheese or some other succulent or delicacy. Later in the day, she would make her way to the schoolyard to accompany my younger sons home from their day’s studies. Evenings she’d position her repose in the driveway of the funeral-home parking lot, acting the speed bump and sentinel whilst the children practiced their skateboarding or Frisbee or whiffle-ball. On weekends she’d be in Central Park, fishing with my oldest son or accompanying my daughter and her friends on their rounds through town, field-testing their ever-changing figures and fashions. She died old and fat and happy and was buried under the mock-orange bush where she used to shade herself against the summer heat. Near two decades since, she is still remembered with reverence; her exploits and loyalties are legendary.
Which is all I ever wanted out of love and husbanding, family and parenting—to be fondly regarded by the ones I loved; to be known for how I came home at night, minded the borders, kept an eye out for impending dangers, paid the piper, did my job, loved them all fiercely to the end. It was the dream I inherited from my mother and father for whom a division of labor did not mean a disproportion of power.
I WAS, IN those times, a casualty of the gender wars waged by the men and women of my generation over duties and identities. It was, I suppose, a necessary battle, which we did not choose and were powerless to avoid—damned if we did and if we didn’t fight. We all took too seriously the carping and dyspepsia of a generation for whom sexism was a sin only men could commit, and only and always against women. Power and money were zero-sum games. Sex and love were often trophies. Women of the day kept their litany of injustices—the glass ceilings, the hostile work environments, the sixty-three-cents-on-the-dollar deal, the who-does-the-most-work-in-the-house debate. The little tally of inconsistencies I maintained kept driving me crazier and crazier. That the courts gave reproductive options to women but not to men was a bother. There was no clinic to which men could repair to terminate their impending paternity. If “choice” were such a fine thing, it occurred to me, oughtn’t one and all, not one and half of the population have it? That my daughter might “choose” a career in the military but only my sons had to register for the draft struck me as odd. No less the victim-chic status of the feminist intelligentsia who were always ranting about “women and other minorities” while quietly ignoring the fact that women had been the majority for years. The planet was fifty-two percent female. That women not only out-numbered men, they outlived them—by years, not months, in every culture—seemed a thing that ought to be, at least, looked into. Never mind the incessant sloganeering, or the militia of women who blamed Ted Hughes for Sylvia Plath’s suicide or who blamed their husbands for the history of the world or who turned men into the tackling dummies for their chronic discontents. Maybe it was all that “every intercourse is an act of rape” hysteria, or “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” or the way they joked about the man who had his penis cut off by his angry wife. I used to wonder what late-night talk-show host would survive any less-than-reverential comment about a woman’s genitalia if the damage had been reversed.
Violence against women was quite rightly abhorred whilst violence against men was generally ignored. Nothing in the literature rang more true to me than something I had overheard in a conversation between pathologists who were autopsying a fatal domestic case: “A man will kill his wife, then kill himself,” one said grimly; “a woman kills her husband, then does her nails.” Whatever else I did not “get,” I got that one loud and clear: the higher ground of entitlement that victims, self-proclaimed, could occupy. I’m certain there were additional grievances, like so much else, I’ve forgotten now.
In ways that were not so for my parents’ generation and, please God, will not be so for my sons’ and daughter’s, the men and women of my generation suffered a kind of disconnect that left them each wary of the other’s intentions, each ignorant of the other’s changing, each speaking a dialect the other could not cipher, each wondering why the other just didn’t get it. Such are the accidents of history and hers—that we make aliens of our intimates, enemies of friends, strange bedfellows entirely that crave the common ground but rarely really find it.
So it is with nations and neighbors, parents and children, brothers and sisters, family and friends—the list we keep of grievances keeps us perpetually at odds with each other, alone in a world that is growing smaller, more distant from each other, more estranged.
The sisters, Godhelpus, are praying for peace and reconciliation and forgiveness. They are praying to be vessels of God’s love and mercy. They say it will take a miracle and that the world changes one heart at a time. They have unleashed the hounds of their Hibernian faith—the rubrics of which involve candles, moonlight, chrisms, icons, incense and every manner of mystic unguents, passions, immersions, aromatics, and possibly herbs, the recipes for which were no doubt published in the Gnostic Gospels, found in those jars.
I STILL DON’T get it. And I’ve quit trying to. Years of living with and among women have convinced me I’m as well off with no dog in that fight. My daughter, my sisters, my beloved wife (in the associative, not possessive sense), and no few women that I count as lifelong friends, the memory of my mother, aunts, and grandmothers—they’ve all been and remain powerful and courageous and selfless humans, gifted with a dignity and calm that has made me wish I knew them better and all the more wary of their mysterious medicines. Most days I recite a litany of gratitudes for the pleasures of their company, the beauty and beatitudes of their intellections. I’m resolved to say nice things about their dogs. It keeps me, so far, safe from the hounds.
Young neighbor couples and their designer dogs go walking with leashes now on weekend mornings. Their puppies and their babies are all pedigreed. Everyone is better trained and behaved. At every corner there are dangers and warnings; at every intersection, flashing lights and signs. The lesson, of course, is to mind the traffic. They learn to speak and heel and fetch and to return. The men, as is their custom, bark out wisdoms. They pose and sniff, they howl and growl and whine. Their wives and pets grow weary of listening. Some things only the dogs hear, some the women.
I ORDERED A mum plant for Baxter’s obsequies scheduled for later this month at Mullett Lake. I asked the florist to write, “Sorry,” on the card.
I hope they get it.