Eliot School was not sorry to see the back of Patrick O’Malley. Nor he of the school when, two years later, in 1858, he passed through its portals for the last time. He had concentrated hard on his studies, remembering at least, his mother’s advice that if they were to ‘up themselves’ in America, then education was the only route. However, if Patrick had learned one lesson from his time at Eliot School it was that, no matter how long he was in this country, he would never be ‘American’.
The Nativist blue-bloods descended from old-line Puritan stock, and the Scots-Irish would never accept Paddy Catholic as equal. No matter how much education, no matter what laws were passed – and they were the ones passing most of them!
The Nativists had a fear of the ‘niggers-turned-inside-out’, as they dubbed the Irish, of getting any social or political grip on Boston life. To this fear was added a bilesome loathing.
It wasn’t just in Boston either, but in New York and other major cities of the North, like Philadelphia.
‘Brotherly love, me arse … Oxy!’ Patrick pronounced to his friend. ‘Those northern Nativists would bite the bollocks off you for dumpling stew!’
The other youth, born in County Roscommon, Ireland, and known since birth as ‘Oxy’, agreed.
That Oxy Moran and Patrick O’Malley were as unlikely a pairing for close friendship, as one could imagine, was conceded by both. ‘Polar opposites’ was how Oxy described it. ‘You are on Jupiter, I on Mars.’
But they were both Irish and both Catholic, thrown together in an antagonistic land. That apart, they had few similarities of character: Patrick was ebullient, defiant, ready to take on the world; Oxy was the antithesis of this – quiet, intellectual, witty, his dark curling hair framing a delicate forehead and thoughtful eyes.
‘You should be a writer –’ Patrick teased ‘– you have the look.’
‘Oh, but I am,’ Oxy had replied, ‘… in my head … I just don’t write it down.’
‘How can you be a writer then?’ Patrick started, ready for argument.
Oxy had given him one of those dreamy half-smiles and replied, ‘Oh, Patrick, my friend, being a writer is purely a state of mind – like love or unhappiness.’
‘That’s how my sister Mary would answer,’ Patrick observed, ‘and there is no arguing with her. Even if she’s wrong, she’s right …’
‘Because she’s sure,’ Oxy added in.
‘Yes, that’s it, I think,’ Patrick answered. ‘She is clear on things, even if it is not so patently clear to others. You’re like that.’
‘I must have learned it from my sisters,’ Oxy smiled. ‘I was one against many “Marys” in our household. Six sisters – and all older – how unfortunate could one boy be?’
‘And none of them ever followed you to America?’ Patrick asked.
‘No,’ his friend answered. ‘My father’s view was that America was a man’s calling – and that daughters should stick by the home place, “not be going before themselves out foreign to America”. He was keen for me to see the world … and prove myself in it.’
‘Strange then, how it was your female aunt who took you in here, in Boston?’ Patrick said teasingly.
‘Yes, my father’s sister – but he didn’t see the conflict in that. He could sometimes be blinkered, my father.’ Oxy stopped for a moment. ‘But a good man, who worked hard and reared us right … a brilliant man pinched in by Roscommon. If he’d come to America himself, he would have been a millionaire … or a politician.’
‘Or both,’ Patrick inserted. ‘They seem to go together over here.’
Patrick had often wondered about his friend’s name – Oxy? It was a strange name in a land riddled with the names of saints – Patrick, Mary, Joseph, Brigid.
Oxy explained. ‘My father had his differences with the Catholic Church. When my eldest sister Aurora was born, the local priest refused her baptism, because she had not been given the name of a saint. Thereafter, my father refused to darken the door of the local church, declaring God to be found more in the fields and hedgerows than in the hearts of the peddlers of power, the name he called the clergy. He made up his own rules and when I was born he christened me Oxy … said it fitted me well … me being a Moran … me being a boy after six girls – a bit of a contradiction – an oxymoron. He had his humour, my father. A great man …’ Oxy paused, his mind far away. ‘I always wanted to be what he wanted … to be like him.’
‘And are you like him?’ Patrick asked.
‘Yes, I am, as it happens. People should live by their own rules. Not those of others. There are too many rules for everything. Power for the few and prisons for the many … that’s what rules are.’
And Oxy had defied the rules, stood staunchly by his friend throughout all that Eliot School business, quietly stating the inequality of it all. Patrick had admired him greatly then. Others of the Boston Catholic-Irish had not stood up to be counted but Oxy Moran had.
The year after leaving Eliot School, despite the school’s reputation for scholarship, had been fruitless for Patrick and Oxy. Choices were limited in Boston’s strongly Puritan and anti-Catholic businesses. Especially for those Irish who had stood up against the Lord’s Prayer.
Patrick had for a while secured a position as a grocer’s assistant, but he craved more excitement than shining apples with the cuff of his coat. Adventuring was what fired him, whether war or travel, he cared not. Setting out stalls around which the dandering ladies of Boston could gossip was not to be a lasting post for Patrick O’Malley. It did, however, provide him with a modest store of funds when, disillusioned with life in New England, the following year, 1859, the two had resolved to go ‘adventurin’ to America’s South.
‘They don’t like the Northern Yankees, no more than us’ seemed to Patrick as good a reason as any. ‘They want their own republic down there – just like the Irish,’ Oxy reflected, in his quiet way. ‘But the cotton kings of Boston still want to crack the whip on the South, keep a tight grip on the reins of production.’
‘You’d think the Yankees having once been colonised by the British, wouldn’t want to do the same to their own people?’ Patrick wondered.
‘Well they are … but they aren’t … their own people,’ Oxy reasoned. ‘The southerners are French, and worse, in Yankee eyes … they’re Catholic – and Acadians from Canada – and then they’re the whole lot mixed up together – Creole.’
Oxy thought Creole had a wonderful sound to it – ‘like the wind through cypress trees – sinuous, musical, exotic. Cree … ole, chroí-ól,’ he repeated. ‘The Irish words for heart and drink. What could be better?’
‘Maybe you’ll land yourself a pretty young Creole, Oxy?’ Patrick laughed.
‘Maybe I will …’ his friend answered. ‘They say that, at twelve or thirteen years, the young Creole girls suffer a rib to be taken from them to make their waists more slight … more desirable.’
‘Less of a handful!’ Patrick interrupted.
‘Beauty out of pain cometh!’ Oxy smiled, in that strangely attractive way Patrick noticed he sometimes did.
The thought of it fascinated Oxy. That one would suffer such surgical de-boning for a more graceful female form.
Regarding his mother, Patrick had these days all but banished her from his mind.
Let Lavelle continue his futile search for her – go west along the railroads. He was for going South and fighting these Boston Yankees … if war started up and it came to that.
South – and the Creole girls.