Desegregation of the Boston Public Schools takes effect on Thursday morning, September 12, 1974. The buses that transport black students to South Boston High School are accompanied by police escorts. The police wear riot gear. As the buses near the school, several hundred white protesters — adults and children — line the streets. Chants of “Niggers go home” give way to “Niggers suck” and “Hell, no, we won’t go.” Several protesters hold up pictures of monkeys. One brandishes a noose.
The bricks come from a construction site on West Broadway. Other people use rocks. But the bricks make the most noise and do the most damage when they hit the windows of the buses. The children on the buses discover the safest place during the pelting is under the seats, and the only reported injury is to a teenager who gets glass in her eye; she requires medical attention but doesn’t lose the eye.
Inside South Boston High, the black students are met with something they’ve known forever at their own schools but didn’t expect here — no white kids.
On the first day of school, not a single white student attends South Boston High School.
When word of this fact spreads through the demonstrators, their chant turns to “Vic-tor-y. Vic-tor-y.”
A few hours before, at four in the morning, Mary Pat Fennessy’s body is removed from the parade grounds of Fort Independence on Castle Island and transported to the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office.
Bobby, Vincent, and their hastily put-together squad of detectives and patrolmen arrive at Fort Independence about five minutes after Mary Pat’s death to find Marty Butler and his men gathering their spent shells and preparing to leave. They don’t put up any fight. The guns they used are legally registered. Mary Pat Fennessy fired at them after murdering Frank Toomey. Brian Shea was killed in what Marty calls “friendly fire.”
Bobby arrests them and confiscates the weapons and the tripod Marty rested his rifle on, but Bobby has little doubt that the crime scene investigation will reveal events played out exactly as Marty says they did; he’s acting too fucking smug for it to be otherwise. Bobby might — might — get the case into court, if only because Brian Shea died as a result of three citizens taking the law into their own hands. But the chances of that case making it to a jury are about as good as Brian Shea growing his face back.
At the medical examiner’s office, they pull five bullets out of Mary Pat Fennessy’s body. The kill shot was a 7.62-millimeter round to the center of her heart, but Drew Curran assures Bobby that another round from the same rifle which entered her body through the right armpit would have done her in within another ten minutes.
“It had to be a shot to the heart,” Bobby says to Carmen a few days later. “Anywhere else? She would have just kept coming.”
The day after Mary Pat’s death, Bobby gets a call from Calliope Williamson. They catch up on a few things, and Bobby apologizes for not being able to make it back to the house after Auggie’s funeral.
“That’s okay,” she says. “You’re a good man.”
Bobby thinks, I am?
“Is it true,” Calliope asks, “that she helped you get the kids who killed my son?”
“Mrs. Fennessy?”
“Yes.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Bobby says.
“Work. All the women used to be her friends are calling her a snitch, saying she betrayed her own.”
“I heard you had words with her,” Bobby says.
“I did, and I won’t apologize for any of them.”
“Not asking you to. Whatever they were, I’m sure she deserved them.”
“But she also helped you catch my son’s killers?”
“She did a lot more than that,” Bobby says.
“I don’t understand.”
“The man most responsible for what happened to your son won’t be able to do it to anyone else ever again.”
“Because of her?”
“Yes. I’m not saying her intention was to get justice for Auggie — I don’t think it was. But she got it just the same.”
Silence as she processes that information.
“Are you going to her funeral?” Calliope Williamson asks.
“Depends when they hold it. If I’m working, no. If I’m not, yes.”
Another long silence. Then:
“Maybe I’ll see you there.” She hangs up.
Big Peg McAuliffe spends the days after her sister’s death trying to track down family for the funeral. Donnie, down in Fall River, says he’ll attend and shares that he has a line on Bill, who’s no longer in New Mexico but might be in Hartford. Big Peg reaches a few cousins and an aunt who say they’ll try to make it.
It nags her that she can’t remember the last words she exchanged with her sister. She knows the last time she saw her and knows what they talked about — Jules being missing. She knows she walked her to the door, but she can’t remember their conversation. And it bugs her to no end; you should be able to remember the last words you ever said to someone.
Some of the people around Commonwealth shoot her strange looks, like whatever virus her sister caught in the last few weeks of her life might catch Big Peg too. It pisses Peg off, knowing what Mary Pat did to the family’s rep. It’s gonna take time, maybe a lot of it, to get their good name back.
She says to Donnie when he calls back, “I mean, yeah, they dealt with Jules harshly, but ya know, she played with fire and she got burnt.”
“She was a kid,” Donnie says.
That almost gets to Peg, but she swats it away.
“What’re you gonna do?” Peg says.
“I know,” Donnie says. “Can’t fight city hall.”
“It is what it is.”
“No argument.”
“And we all know how Mary Pat could get.”
Donnie laugh-snorts. “She got that look in her eyes? There was no reaching her.”
“None.”
“So, Billy says he’ll come.”
“Yeah?” Peg lights a cigarette, surprised how nice it feels to know she’ll see two of her brothers after all these years. “Be like a family reunion.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“So, all right, then,” Donnie says to wrap things up.
“All right, then,” Big Peg agrees.
They hang up.
Big Peg sits by her window for a bit, smoking and looking out at the projects. She spies a spot of pavement where she and Mary Pat used to play with jacks or do hopscotch or jump rope as kids. They were never the closest of sisters, but they had some good times. She can see the two of them out there; for just a second, she can hear their laughter and their small talk echoing off the project walls. A ferocious pang seizes her torso — heart, lungs, stomach. A bomb of desolation that explodes and ripples upward, eventually reaching her brain.
How did I lose my sister?
Where is Mary Pat’s soul now?
How did things get so far?
She focuses on a pigeon across the way. It pecks at a windowsill. She has no idea what it’s pecking at (some gum? another pigeon’s shit?) but it keeps its head down. It does its job.
The chest pang passes, the shock waves wear off.
How things got so far, Big Peg reminds herself, is because Mary Pat meant well, but, let’s face it, she was never much of a mother. Those kids ran the show in the house because Mary Pat spoiled them. Simple as that. Let them talk back to her, rarely beat them, gave them her last dime if they asked for it. When you spoil people, they don’t thank you. They’re not grateful. They grow entitled. They start demanding things they got no right to demand.
Like with the coloreds and the school.
Like with Noel and the drugs.
Like with Jules and another woman’s husband.
Peg can’t blame herself for Mary Pat’s failings, can’t go on a guilt trip because she walked the straight and narrow like a good citizen while Mary Pat wandered off the path and into the weeds and the swamp beyond.