“That would be a sin and a sacrilege!”
“It would be,” Patrick said, and walked out.
I followed him out into the cold night. He turned and gave me that hard stare of his.
“I thought you understood, Honora. I need it for the work. When I ride into a mining camp in Colorado or sit around the fire with the men who cut timber in the North Woods or meet with fellows digging for coal in Pennsylvania . . . After we talk about Ireland and what she needs and how they can help her, I pass the crozier from one to the next. Each one holds it and takes the oath. No informers or traitors would dare take the oath because the crozier would burn the flesh off their hands.”
“An oath to do what?”
“To fight back.” He held up one finger. “Sooner than you think, Honora. The soft underbelly of the British Empire is only a few days’ ride north of us.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Canada,” he said. “Mostly French and Irish and Indians up there, and all of them hate the Sassenach. There are Ojibwa tribes on both sides of the border ready to join us.”
Barney McGurk was walking toward us. “Patrick, I was looking for you at McKenna’s. You put Hough in his place today, reminded him that we Irishmen must be respected.” He turned to me. “Should have been there, Honora.”
“Ask Barney, Honora,” Patrick said. Then to him, “You fought to get Texas for America less than two years ago. And who led the troops? Irishmen like James Shields and Thomas Sweeny. Am I right, Barney?”
“True enough, Patrick. But we paid a price.”
“Always a price,” Patrick said as he turned away from us onto the dark street.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“Things to do,” Patrick said.
“Of course, Patrick,” said Barney. “Ná habair tada.”
“But you’re not leaving, are you?” I asked Patrick. “We’re grateful, and it’s good to have you here. You won’t just go?!”
“I’ll be back,” he said.
“But when?”
“I’ll be back,” he said, and was gone.
“That’s Patrick Kelly for you,” Barney said as we went up the stairs.
When Paddy asked me the next day, “Where is he?” I told him:
“He’ll be back.”
“Abrupt fellow,” Máire said.
Three days later, we moved.
“Sure it’s far from a parlor we were reared!” Máire said as we hung Granny’s penal cross over the fireplace.
The parlor windows faced two ways. One looked east toward Lake Michigan and the sunrise and the other west to the prairie, so the room was always sunny. Did you arrange the views, Michael, a stór? We bought a used horsehair sofa and a big easy chair and set them in front of the fireplace.
All the boys slept in one bedroom, but each had his own small bed. Bridget, Stephen, and I had a double bed in the other room, Gracie and Máire in the third. With all we bought, we were still able to pay three months’ rent and have twenty dollars. I was grateful.
Three months later on Easter morning, Father Donohue brought the first letter from Patrick to us. I opened it right away, not waiting until after Mass. News of our brothers, maybe, or Patrick telling us when he’d be back.
Instead, Patrick wrote that Mam and Da were dead. He’d met a fellow newly come from Ard/Carna. The fever got Mam and Da soon after Christmas, Patrick wrote us. He was very sorry for our troubles.
“What?” Máire whispered to me as Father Donohue started the entrance prayer. I handed her the letter. “No!” she said. I took her hand. Paddy looked over at us.
Mam. Da. We would never see them again.
Father Donohue was preaching now. Resurrection. Death defeated. Eternal life. Together in heaven. Please God.
In our new parlor, Máire and I keened for our parents.
“We’re all very sad, Mam. Stephen, too,” Jamesy told me.
But, I wondered, did they really remember? So much of home seemed to be fading from them.
Michael Joseph Kelly was born in May of that year, 1849. I clutched the Mary Bean, but the pains of childbirth lasted only a few hours as I pushed Michael into life. Lizzie held my shoulders and prayed away to St. Bridget. Michael was a fine heathy fellow—eight pounds. He gave one short cry and then smiled—truly, he smiled. He fastened onto my nipple. My breasts were full of milk for him. Michael Kelly. Our son, a stór, born in Amerikay.
Each dawn I nursed Michael in the parlor, sitting in my easy chair, a small fire taking the chill from a Chicago early summer morning. Baby Michael and I would watch the sun coming out of the Lake and into the window, and then I’d look out the back at the prairie to see the new grass and spring-gold willows, the froth of apple blossoms and one stand of furled maple buds stretching up to the warmth.
Catherine Robinson had shown me where wild blackberries grew and pointed out the old apple trees. She and the other Potawatomis had left in late April, their land taken for a glue factory. I missed her, and our ones missed the Indian children.
Spring would have turned the fields at home every shade of green. I thought of how our land at Knocnacuradh took the light first. I closed my eyes and escaped into the past, lulled by the soft, steady pull of Michael Joseph Kelly at my breast.
Baby Michael lost my nipple and started crying.
“Whist, whist,” I said, “there, now . . . grab on now, mo buachaill.” I sang Mam’s lullaby to him. “A long, long way from our home place, a rún,” I whispered to the baby. “I wish you could see Galway Bay, my American boy.” He never would. “We’ll go to Lake Michigan, and I’ll show you waves like the ones at home.”
A trumpet sounded—the first canal boat of the day arriving. Men hurried toward the dock, ready to unload the boat, to send those tons of wheat off to the grain elevators. The packinghouse closed at this time of year, so the men were glad to have work on the boats, in the brickyard, or the quarry. No slack season in Paddy’s blacksmith shop or at the boatyard, and Thomas still needed at Hough’s. Jamesy and Daniel were doing well at school. Patrick’s word with the teacher had certainly . . .
“Mam!” It was Jamesy. “Thomas is taking my socks!”
“I’m not, Aunt Honey! They’re mine!”
“They’re not!”
“Paddy hit me, Aunt Honey!”
“Daniel hit me, Mam!” Paddy said.
“Honora?” Máire’s voice. “Would you put the coffee on? Can’t be late at the Shop today—inventory.”
The Shop. Patrick had helped her get a job at a much bigger place than Croaker’s. Máire was full of ideas on how to make it better, conspiring with a young clerk named Marshall Field.
I put Michael on my hip and started toward the kitchen. You’d think Patrick would want to see the new baby. “I’ll be back.” When?
“Where do you think Uncle Patrick is?” Jamesy asked me at least once a week.
“He could be anywhere,” I told him.
“Uncle Patrick’s on a secret mission,” Paddy had told Máire and me.
“Your uncle’s a wild man,” Máire had said to him. “Let him stay where he is.”
“He’ll be back,” I’d say. “Patrick has a way of showing up when you least expect it.”
“Mam!” Bridget now. “These boys!”
“Yes, Bridget.”
The Wars 1861-1866
A
PRIL 12, 1861
. I looked at the date I’d written on the fair copy of the letter I’d done for one of Molly’s boarders. April 12—one month until Michael’s birthday. He’ll be twelve in May.
So.
We’d been in Chicago twelve and a half years. In any Irish village we’d still be blow-ins, but here we were considered one of the founding families of Bridgeport. “I remember when a Potawatomi family lived across Bubbly Creek, when we picked wild apples and blueberries, and the open prairie came right up to the canal,” I’d say to the newcomers flooding into Bridgeport. Hard for them to imagine there’d ever been empty space here, now that new rolling mills, packinghouses, and factories butted up against the quickly built wooden houses and flats that filled street after street. Never called Hardscrabble anymore.
“We’ll be incorporated into Chicago within the next two years. Guaranteed,” James McKenna said.
Plenty of work for everyone, and all our fellows doing well. Paddy, at only twenty, was a full partner in Slattery’s, the busiest forge in Bridgeport, and Johnny Og near ran Gibson’s Boat Works. Years ago, probably on the Christmas Jamesy was eleven, Patrick Kelly had gotten him taken on as an apprentice to the carpenter who built sets at McVicker’s, the theater that replaced Rice’s. And didn’t the musicians in the orchestra take to Jamesy after they heard him play his tin whistle? They taught him other instruments, and now, at eighteen, he plays flute and all manner of horns in the orchestra and couldn’t be happier. That same year, Patrick brought Daniel to Mr. Rosa, the barrel maker, and he’s still there. Good work, well paid, making more at seventeen than older men do in the packinghouses.
Patrick Kelly comes to see us for a week every Christmas. “The General,” Máire calls him, “here to inspect us and sort us out.”
“Doing his duty for Michael’s children,” I said to her. “A brother’s love.”
Because of the good-paying jobs Patrick arranged for the older boys, the younger children had been able to stay in school—students, and not at the Bridgeport School. All four went into downtown Chicago every day. Bridget, sixteen, and Gracie, thirteen, were St. Xavier’s girls.
One Christmas, Patrick had taken Máire and me to meet the principal, Mother Mary Francis de Sales. Surprising, how easy he was with this stern-looking woman. Patrick told us later that a botched dental operation had left her with that forbidding look. “Knew her in the early days when the Sisters of Mercy first came to Chicago,” he said. Mother told us she’d never forget how Patrick would leave a load of potatoes or cabbage at the convent door. Happy to give scholarships to his nieces, she said, and now both Bridget and Gracie were at the top of their class.
Father Dunne at St. Patrick’s had been glad to have Stephen and Michael in the parish school. “Pay what you can,” he’d said. Both boys were earning good grades, and young Michael had been chosen for the choir. He’d inherited his father’s singing voice as well as Michael’s blue eyes, height, and breadth. Stephen, just turned fourteen, was “Red” to his classmates. A gift for friendship, that fellow has. Hadn’t the men at the firehouse made him a kind of mascot, even taking him on the fire runs? I wondered, did Patrick Kelly have a word there, too? I know he rescued Thomas from bother over his gambling debts at Mike McDonald’s. Now Thomas only played poker backstage at McVicker’s with Jamesy and the actors. No credit issued there. Patrick told Thomas if he gave three-quarters of his pay as Hough’s clerk to Máire, he could wager the rest. Thomas called himself Pyke now. Máire’d shrugged. He was nineteen. Let him be who he pleased.
The way Patrick Kelly, in his fringed leggings and moccasins, managed to move the levers of Chicago amazed me. Lizzie McKenna said that Patrick was a throwback to Billy Caldwell, the Irish-Indian Chicago pioneer. “We are a frontier town, after all.”
“Patrick Kelly’s got clout,” James McKenna had explained to me—a Chicago word for a kind of power that didn’t depend on money or education or position in the world but was a measure of the force a man had inside him. “Patrick Kelly gets things done. Fellows listen to him,” he said. “He’s a good friend, a bad enemy, and that’s known.”
I knew that Patrick had a hand in organizing the big march on City Hall in the mid-fifties when the Know Nothings took over Chicago. An awful year. A group called Americans on Guard had elected this fellow Levi Boone as mayor. He wanted to get rid of the Irish, build a wall around Amerikay to keep all immigrants out. Chicago passed a law saying only the native-born could be policemen and that naturalized citizens couldn’t vote in city elections until they’d resided in Chicago for twenty-five years. Amerikay was turning on us. But when Boone and the others tried to close the saloons and beer halls, they went too far. That united Irish and German. Patrick raised up Grellan’s crozier, led the demonstrations, and negotiated the settlement, too. The businessmen in Chicago saw sense. The
Chicago Tribune
might call us degraded drunkards and insult our Catholic religion, but the merchants needed our money and the manufacturers our muscles, Patrick said. And right he was.
But what I appreciated most about Patrick was the way he made Michael live for my children. He gave them something of their father. Every Christmas evening—after we’d made our annual visit to Professor Lang and his family, eating the German cakes Sligo-born Ellen Lang baked and admiring their giant Christmas tree—we would gather around the fire in our own parlor. Patrick, Máire, and I sipped whiskey, and the children drank sweetened tea thick with milk while Patrick told us stories. Not old Irish tales, but his memories of their father as a boy.
“Uncle Patrick, tell us ‘Saving the Baby Da,’” Jamesy would say, or Paddy might ask for “Racing on the Course.” Bridget liked to hear “My Granny Kelly,” and Stephen wanted tales of the big blacksmith Murty Mor. The Christmas he was four, young Michael told Patrick that he remembered his da from when he was a big boy in Ireland. Patrick invented memories of Johnny Leahy for Johnny Og, and on Christmas night two years ago he’d told Thomas, Daniel, and Gracie that he’d discovered Robert Pyke had died in an accident in India, trying to rescue soldiers who’d fallen into a raging river. “Very convincing,” Máire said to him later, “though I don’t believe a word of it. Still, better a dead hero for a father than a living scoundrel. Thank you, Patrick.”
Then long after the others went to their beds, Patrick and I shared our own Christmas ritual: We talked politics, Irish politics, hurling history at each other until dawn.
Only physical force could liberate Ireland, Patrick maintained, while I argued for a mass movement and monster meetings, done peacefully, with support from the Irish in America.
“The British only understand violence. We need an army,” Patrick would say.
“You can’t ask people who’ve barely survived starvation to risk themselves, when even writing rebellion receives a death sentence,” I’d answer.