“MY MOTHER WAS BLUNT WITH WOMEN WHO wanted to know her plans for the future. She always knew what they meant. You mean what am I going to do about finding another man? Well, I’ve been married enough.
She often reminded them that World War I had torn up the community to the extent that a search for an unmarried man her age with two arms, two hands, two legs, and half a brain intact would be thoroughly futile. But this wasn’t so. This is merely what she remarked in public.
And then I formed the idea that my mother and I should go away and live elsewhere. But she wouldn’t leave the community, even though I knew that if we moved somewhere bigger, one or the both of us would find a nice man and be married within a year. She told me this was impossible in regard to her. If I’m supposed to marry again, whoever wants me will have to come to Milk Farm Road and find me. This happening, by 1938, was the true impossibility.
I asked her, Why would anyone come?
There’s the nice little store and the nice people and the nice pace to daily living. It’s not Richmond, Virginia, but it’s not Bell County, Kentucky, either.
I then saw my mother looking back on her life and seeing how far she had come since she and her family clawed to hang onto the bottom rung. On Milk Farm Road she’d remade herself into the Queen Bee, more or less organizing life through knowing everything. Anywhere else she’d be one of the crowd. Her dresses wouldn’t have been as impressive and neither would her intellect. She’d taken her chance once and wouldn’t risk leaving her home another time.
I’ve already left my home and people I love one time. I’ll not do it again.
It seemed to me that she had enjoyed taking her turn, and now she expected me to do without mine, and of course this had to feel unfair. And then I began to see everything around me differently from her, which was a change very late in coming. So late, in fact, that I know my mother had given up on it, believing independence had peeked up once in my refusal to eat healthful foods but then vanished again. I teamed up with her against my father so much that she mistook my companionship for a lack of free will. And then once he was dead and I asked her for my liberty, finally, she simply couldn’t understand me.
I looked around at my home. The store, though nice, was still small. And the people, though nice, had aged by leaps during the Depression, and their children, the ones my age, were married and involved with their families. My mother and I soon started to fight, and we fought all summer. I was desperate to get out of our community before it locked up to crumble in on itself.
I asked Trudy what she’d do if she were me. She said I was smart and pretty and could talk and would thus fare well anywhere. She, in fact, had moved and lived all over, heading from place to place beating rent. One choice she suggested was New York, which I balked at as too outlandish. Trudy, however, had been there several times visiting Tommy’s people and reported liking everything about it except for the noise, the dirt, and the people. I continued to resist New York and said that with this one exception I could actually see the world as open to me.
But then there came another turn in the road! A chance fell upon my mother and me to leave the community though just for a while. She hoped this would satisfy my urge, but I couldn’t promise her it would or it wouldn’t.
The particular event was my grandmother Bridget O’Cadhain’s strong urge to die. She had woken up one morning in Bell County, Kentucky, yearning to return to Ireland and pass, all brought on by dreams of angels and muddy water and visions of coffins in candles. My mother’s sisters wrote her with news of Bridget’s desire and said the old woman, very old, had harassed them all and even threatened to throw their children in the well if someone didn’t step forth to take her back to Ireland.
They all knew that Bridget was not beneath telling false tales in this regard. They knew she hadn’t really seen her death. She had, however, craved Galway for fifty years and had hatched many dashed plans to go. This time she was determined, and she backed her ears and went at getting to Galway and promised no peace in the household until someone agreed to take her. She’d counted on Sheamus to take her in 1928 but was disappointed by his death that same year. My mother had received the dark news on a penny postcard that said:
Papa came in and had fresh shad for supper and said he felt fine but then late in the night he dropped dead. Sincerely Eileen.
This note impressed my mother as odd, and everytime we’d see the postcard in our album she would find her queer look and comment on how the strange note was so in keeping with her family.
The arrangements for the Irish trip were made behind our backs. One of the sisters fixed Bridget with the idea that my mother still owed her from 1918 and thus she should escort her. Understandably, the thought of accompanying the old woman appealed to no one. And then Bridget decided that this plan was fair and true and thus she put all her faith in my mother to come and carry her. All this broke my mother’s heart to the point that she talked to the bank, and off we went to Bell County. I was to stay in Kentucky while my mother and Bridget went away.
Of course Bridget couldn’t afford the trip. Mr. Hoover had been especially rough on Kentucky. But she accumulated more than enough money for her passage. She had gone to each of the children, there were ten, and humiliated them to the point that they sold animals and automobiles and whatever they could find to sell to give their mother money. One son sold half his timber land. She made them feel guilty over not having enough children, not looking after her in her old age, not speaking Gaelic.
The journey was beautiful and green. I remember I sat on the train by my mother and held a hatbox full of cape jasmines in my lap. She had them packed in wet cotton and covered them with a fabric. Her sisters loved cape jasmines and had been denied them by their weather so we promised to take them some, more or less as my mother’s peace offering. She was very eager to get home, although the coming questions about my father alarmed her, I could tell.
The O’Cadhain house was a sight, painted in a very spotty fashion, though certainly as large a home as I’d ever experienced. When children married they stayed and threw rooms onto the house as necessary and thus the whole place was continuously changing and growing, fairly in motion over the side of the hill. My first impression of my mother’s family was startling. These were the kind of people who crack nuts in the house and leave the hulls on the floor. At all turns, their social edge seemed to be lacking. As much as my mother had advised me to dress simply, I of course outdressed my aunts and cousins and nieces, all of whom twisted my sleeve, wanting to know when they could try my dress on. Eileen, I noticed right away, was wearing two dresses, as later I discovered she did every day, an old one on top to protect the better one underneath. This is the sort of oddity I faced even as I came through the door.
Bridget was exactly as in my mind’s eye, down to the nubby teeth, though by 1938 she had lost most of her teeth to pull taffy, as had most of her family. She walked through, not into, the room right after my mother and I arrived and pursed her lips at us and hobbled away. She was almost eighty then so thus her trademark of trotting had slowed considerably. My mother watched Bridget leave the room needless to say without hopping up to create a beautiful reunion. She looked more or less pained.
As soon as we were out of our traveling frocks, we were put to work sweeping and tending to babies and barely regarded as company. Four or five days were to pass before my mother and Bridget left for Ireland, and during this time we were both ignored as guests and treated as chambermaids, for truth. I frankly think that with so many people in the house, they simply lost count from time to time and forgot we were there. My discomfort reared up in a sweaty nightmare that I became trapped there, made to hang out diapers, and everytime I thought the basket was empty a thousand more baby diapers appeared, like the loaves and the fishes.
On the last night before my mother left with Bridget, one of her sisters asked in a very huffy manner exactly how my father had died. My mother had staved off this question, it seemed, for as long as she could, but the time had finally come to answer it.
She lost herself in her plate, to keep her eyes from glancing to me, and told a very moving account of how my father pulled a rover from in front of a train, thus sparing the hobo’s life and losing his own. She actually tuned up and whimpered and then recited a little tribute the rover made at my father’s service.
This was a very wonderful point in my life, even more so when my aunts shouted, Oh, we’ve judged him wrong! Oh, his blessed soul! However, as sorry as they felt for my mother and me, they still stuck us with a tubful of dishes while they all played whist.
Although Bridget wanted her family to believe they’d never see her again, she barely winced upon leaving. I’d made a bigger deal over leaving Trudy Woodlief. I was very reluctant to see my mother go, not to mention the fact that I’d be shut up in a house with more or less fifty strangers. We’d not been separated an evening. She looked very pretty and pulled together for the trip in spite of the fact that Bridget, once out of the door for the train station, walked along behind my mother, nipping at her in her black.
After they left I explored all around the area with the intention of finding my father’s roots. His family that had settled in Bell County had picked up eventually and roved to parts unknown in Tennessee, so when I finally asked and asked about in the little Quaker area, all I was directed to was a cemetery.
All my life I’d heard my father remark that his mother had been a very strong believer in salvation by grace and that she had led her community’s pacifist movement and suffered ridicule greatly during World War I. She sounded very progressive in her thinking, though still firm in her church. And I featured her with a calm nature and a gentle disposition and I many times wished I’d known her. My mother, however, told me that the woman was actually surly, that she had a dark outlook, never smiled, and couldn’t cook. That was as much as she ever said about my father’s family.
Once I found the woman’s stone, I stood and stood and tried to feel either joy that she had been my grandmother or sorrow that she was dead. But all I could do was read her stone and wonder how they afforded it, it was large and beautiful, and what possessed someone to write that they marvel in the finished work of the Lord. We marvel in the finished work of the Lord.
My mother, in the meantime, was involved in Bridget’s difficulties, riding sick and embarrassed all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Bridget drew notice everywhere. No doubt my mother was passing at acting as if she knew what she was doing, standing in this or that line, tipping correctly, as suggested by her reading. But the minute Bridget stuck my mother in the back with her cane and snapped at her in Gaelic, my mother’s ease was flung into the ocean.
Your grandmother made me miserable. I couldn’t understand her and I’d become nervous, which seemed to thrill her because she’d push at me stronger. But though I can’t say she would’ve cried had I fallen overboard, I also can’t say she was a bad woman. She’d hardened herself to live with my father, and this would’ve made the best of us mean-spirited. I have difficulty judging her, although she had no difficulty tormenting me trapped on the boat with her.
Once they arrived at Galway, Bridget insisted on being taxied from Cork to Galway simply because she’d never ridden in a taxicab. Then once they got to Galway and found the little thatched roof O’Donough house, Bridget entered without knocking and barked at the man of the house to go pay the driver.
My mother assumed her sisters had notified these relatives of the visit, but of course they hadn’t, thus more frustration. She apologized and apologized and set herself to organizing their arrangements, then Bridget started sending the children out into the neighborhood to collect women for the death watch.
The O’Donough woman said, A nice visit we can do, but none of this.
But in the end she lost her will to Bridget and the ladies came and were paid and arranged themselves in chairs in the wide hall by Bridget’s door. Not saying a word to anyone, Bridget went and crawled in the bed with her head towards the west. My mother was so humiliated by all this that she left the house.
I walked and walked in the night-cool and came to a pretty little inn type of place and went inside and ate the most of an entire loaf of soda bread. I sat with the baker, who made me guess the ingredients, which took My mind off my mother’s insanity. However, I had to return to the three women crying and the O’Donough couple shuffling around the house still very confused over our coming. I went in their bedroom, which my mother had assumed for her own, and saw her there sleeping, curled on the bed, snoring and drooling away, still in her dress.
Out of the house I carried myself, back to the soda bread inn. I took a room and stayed there all night. When I returned in the morning I walked towards an uproar in the kitchen, and there stood my mother screaming and waving her fists at the household, yelling how ill-mannered they were not to have a nice breakfast prepared for her. She jabbed her cane at them and said she was leaving to go stay with old Mrs. So-and-So, who would treat her better, but the cousins said this lady was dead. Bridget said, Fine, then I’ll go stay with another old So-and-So. And she was dead too. She named off five or six people and they were all long dead, and then she whirled around and blamed me for dragging her off to Ireland to visit a bunch of dead people.
So thus my grandmother had fallen asleep dying. But at least she had gone back to Ireland. On the way back to Kentucky my mother had quite a time continuously making up tales for ticket people concerning Bridget’s one-way accommodations, which had been so foolishly bought before. But they finally returned, and I was thrilled and relieved to see my mother, aged as she seemed though in the face.
Bridget O’Cadhain outlived most everybody she had ever known. At ninety-seven she tripped in the yard with a bucket, thus breaking bones that by nature would never knit. She was placed on a cot in the kitchen and ran the household from this corner. And from all reports, when she finally died, she very unwillingly went.