It was then I caught sight of the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin. It was in this city that my first venture into the adult world had begun in June 1944. When I had arrived at Union Station on that hot summer day, I didn’t know what direction my life would take. Now, I was returning to my home country a different person but still unsure of my future. That had to change. I couldn’t continue with such uncertainty. Like Michael had said, it was time to make a decision.
Chapter 42
St. Patrick’s Day may be the occasion most Americans associate with the Irish, but it is the wake that comes closest to capturing the emotional complexity of that long-suffering race. Living in isolated homesteads in Ireland, many saw their neighbors only when they had received word that someone had died. Fueled by poteen, a potent home-brewed liquor, the wake took on the celebratory nature of a reunion. If the deceased wasn’t one of your loved ones, an Irish wake could provide some of the best entertainment in town, and it certainly was well attended.
As soon as I arrived in Minooka, I immediately went to see my aunt. Although she was in the last days of her life, Aunt Marie greeted me with a feisty, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Now I know I’m dying, if they sent for you.” Taking hold of my hand, she said, “Don’t look so worried. I’ve had the last rites twice before, but I’m still alive, and Father Kelly’s dead and buried.”
It was obvious Aunt Marie wasn’t going to leave this world without a fight, but it was a fight she was going to lose. The air in coal towns is hard on everyone’s lungs, but most especially on those of miners and ladies from another era, who passed their evenings rocking on front porches while smoking their pipes.
In the last week of her life, my aunt drifted in and out of consciousness. In her lucid moments, she spoke of her childhood on the beautiful shores of Loch Corrib in the west of Ireland, as well as some of the more memorable of the hundreds of her students, including my parents, who had passed through her classroom from the time she had begun teaching in Minooka in 1887. She insisted that her only regret was not returning to Galway, but there was no way that she would have left Minooka with her sister and brother up on the hill in the church cemetery.
The Egan Funeral Home did a nice job with Aunt Marie, and I’m sure she would have been pleased at how good she looked, with curled hair and wearing her best dress, a pale blue A-line, with matching pumps, and a faux diamond brooch given to her at the time of her retirement.
Aunt Marie had died two days earlier, and her open casket was in our parlor for what was to be the first of two days of viewing for family and friends. Three members of the Sodality of Mary, dressed from head to toe in black, had arrived to lead the mourners in the rosary, and Sally Bluegoose, who had once run a hole-in-the-wall, selling whiskey to the miners, started keening. “Wora, wora, wora!” A banshee crying from the hills of Connemara could not have done a better job.
My father, who did not get along with Aunt Marie, nevertheless was busy toasting her memory. While Dad put away another one, my mother was setting out more food for the mourners, all the while trying not to cry because there was just too much to do.
Most of the men were gathered in the parlor, talking politics or telling stories about their days as slate pickers at the breaker or as mule drivers before reaching an age where they were old enough to go underground and work “down in the hole.” The women were either helping in the kitchen or were gathered in a circle around the coffin gossiping, but in quiet voices, so as not “to wake the dead.”
Along the back wall were the ancient ones, those who still spoke Irish and who punctuated their speech with their clay pipes while enjoying “a drop of the creature.” Grandpa Joyce was among the few abstaining because thirty years earlier, at the request of his pastor, he had taken an oath of abstinence. It was too bad Father Loughran hadn’t asked him to be nicer to his family.
Through the kitchen window, I could see the perpetual glow from a fire on Downes Mountain fueled by an inexhaustible supply of coal from below. There was nothing that better served as a reminder that I was back in Minooka than the pervasive smell of sulfur that was the signature of every town in the hardcoal country of eastern Pennsylvania.
Patrick had picked me up at the Lackawanna Station, and his first words to me were, “Where’s your cowboy? I don’t see a ring, and you know what they say, ‘It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that ring.’”
“How’s your love life, Pat?” I asked, knowing that most mothers wouldn’t allow him to darken their doors. Even with a stellar service record in the Navy, including a commendation for bravery when his ship had been torpedoed near Cuba, mothers had long memories when it came to their daughters.
“I don’t have one. No one in particular, that is,” he said, smiling like the Cheshire cat. “I like to share the wealth.”
“In other words, no one will go out with you.”
Patrick started to say something when I asked him to stop. “For God’s sake, we haven’t made it to the city line, and we’re already fighting. Can you just give it a rest?” After taking a deep breath, I asked him how Aunt Marie was.
“She’s dying.”
“Really, Patrick? Thanks for the news bulletin.”
“Mom thinks it’s only a matter of days.”
“How’s J.J.?”
John Joseph Mulkerin had come to Minooka from Ireland in the 1870s as a ten-year-old orphan. He had been delivered by an emigrating adult from his village to his father’s cousin, Mary Coyne, who “didn’t have a pot to pee in.” But J.J. was so engaging that the whole town had adopted him. After he got a job as a mailman, he became a hot item because he was employed and he wasn’t a miner. But J.J. had eyes only for my Aunt Marie. What on earth would he do without her?
“Aunt Marie’s never alone,” Patrick continued. “Mom or Aunt Agatha fix her meals every day, and the neighbors are taking turns checking up on her. She wouldn’t let J.J. spend the night because it would be ‘indacent,’” he said, mimicking Aunt Marie’s brogue that had survived her sixty years in America. “At 8:00, he pretends he’s leaving, and she pretends he’s not in the next room.” According to the little man with the big heart, they had been dating for forty years, and he proposed to her every year on her birthday.
“Grandpa’s looking forward to seeing you again,” Patrick said, smiling. “He just found out where you’ve been living. He thought you were still in Germany.”
When we pulled into the alley behind the house, I was overwhelmed by a flood of memories, especially of my grandmother. All summer long, Grandma would be in the garden checking on her tomatoes and other vegetables to make sure they had ripened to perfection. While Grandma was out in the garden, my mother would be in the kitchen, peeling, slicing, or boiling potatoes, which was what she was doing when I came through the door. I had not seen her since August 1946.
Mom looked much older. Added to the daily stress of living with a husband who drank too much and a father-in-law who raised meanness to an art was the strain of caring for my Aunt Marie. But Mom had an inner strength whose source was her unshakeable faith in her church and her belief that everything happened for a reason, according to God’s plan. We had been having a good cry when my Grandpa, sitting in his usual place by the coal stove, woke up.
“I thought you be dead,” he said.
In order to keep peace in the house, I needed to come up with a reason why I had been in England, the home of his enemy, for more than a year. But I thought it best to keep it simple. “The U.S. Government gave a lot of money to the British during the war, and there had to be some accountability on how the money had been spent.” That was the truth. It just didn’t have anything to do with me.
After a long silence, Grandpa finally said, “That be a good thing. Those teeving bastards need watching.” And he went back to sleep.