The Brother

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 brokenhearted, 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.