Emilie Richards - The Parting Glass

Irene was trying to hide a smile. “Bridie, this was your idea, was it now?”

“He needs a place to hide, Granny ’rene. They were going to carry him out to the country!”

“So you did it before they could?” Irene couldn’t hold back the smile any longer. “Well, he can’t come inside, not ever. I put my foot down about that.”

“I’ll give him a bath,” Bridie promised. She had bought a bar of flea soap with her own pocket money when Peggy bought dog food. “Tomorrow after school. I promise. But he needs you. He really does.”

Irene looked at Peggy, and Peggy shrugged. “He’ll make a good watchdog,” Peggy said.

“And what will he watch for out here?”

“Crows? Butterflies?” Peggy couldn’t even add snakes to the list. St. Patrick had taken care of that.

“We’ll give him a try, poor old thing,” Irene said. “He can sleep in my shed if he likes.”

“I’ll make him a bed,” Bridie said.

Peggy heard a familiar wail from the direction of her bedroom. “Well, looks like my timing was good.”

Nora came to the door and stared down at Banjax. “I know that dog. As useless as a chocolate teapot, he is. He’ll eat and sleep and nothing more.”

That seemed to strike a chord with Irene, whose days consisted of much the same. “He can stay. We’ll see.”

Peggy and Bridie followed her inside. Bridie peeked in the direction of Peggy’s room. Peggy had told her about Kieran on the ride home. “May I play with him?”

Peggy tried to think of the best way of answering. Kieran didn’t play, not the way Bridie surely expected.

“I’m good with children,” Bridie said. “He’ll like me.”

She said it with such confidence that Peggy had to relent. “I bet you are. It’s just that Kieran’s not good with people he doesn’t know.” And even the people he did weren’t sure how to approach him.

“Oh, that’s okay. I’ll just watch at first.”

“Let me get him up. I’ll be right out. Why don’t you put some food out for Banjax?”

By the time she returned with a freshly changed Kieran, Nora had set a pot of tea on the table and a plate of freshly baked currant scones, and Bridie was digging in. She cooed over Kieran but was careful not to rush him. She continued to sit and watch him from the corner of her eye as she ate.

Kieran looked around the room with sleepy, suspicious eyes. As always, Peggy wondered what convoluted mixture of signals his tiny brain was sending. When he struggled to get down she set him on the floor, standing close by in case he wanted to be protected from yet another unfamiliar face. But Kieran was gazing at Bridie the way he gazed at light flickering on the wall. He toddled closer, peering at her, stopping, peering at her again. Peggy held her breath. Beside her, she knew Irene was doing the same.

“Hi, hi,” he said at last. He moved closer. “Hi!”

Bridie took it in stride. “Well, hi to you, too, boyo.” She went back to her scones, unaware of the small miracle that had just taken place right in front of her.

“Kieran was fascinated by Bridie,” Peggy said that evening, as she and Irene sat studying a smoldering fire. “I think it’s her hair. It’s so bright, and light fascinates him.”

“She’s a beautiful girl.” Irene leaned back in her comfortable armchair and rested her feet on a small padded stool. “Sheila was lovely, as well. Bridie resembles her, but her bones are finer. Sheila’s beauty wouldn’t have lasted past forty, but Bridie’s will.”

“She must miss her mother so much. A girl that age needs one.” Peggy had lost her own mother at a much earlier age, but she’d had sisters and her aunt Deirdre to make up for it. Still, there was a yearning for Kathleen Donaghue that never quite went away.

“I suspect she’ll be finding her way out to Tierney Cottage more often now that you’re here. She’s taken to you.”

“And to Banjax,” Peggy said. The dog had settled into the shed as if he’d lived there forever. Irene had made her way outside to supervise the placement of his bedding, even deigning to pat his bony head.

“A girl needs her father, too,” Irene said.

“Bridie says Finn was working in Louisburgh today?”

“Construction. He wants nothing to do with medicine. He won’t even work in a laboratory. He works so hard building houses, he sees little of his own daughter.”

Bridie’s plight was too familiar. Peggy had grown up without a father, too.

Irene pulled a knitted afghan over her lap, as if settling in for a very long time. “I needed my father and missed him every day I was growing up.”

Since Peggy’s arrival, they had hardly talked about Liam Tierney or his death in Cleveland. That had been the purpose of Irene’s first contact with the Donaghue sisters, and Peggy had offered so little information.

“I wish I’d had time to dig deeper into city records,” Peggy said. “Sometimes the amount of information that’s out there is a curse in itself.”

“I grew up wishing I knew more about him. The urge doesn’t seem to go away. And I worry I’ll die without that mystery being solved. It nags at me, although why it should, I don’t know.”

“Tell me what you do know,” Peggy said. “Megan and Casey have promised to continue to search. You and I have the whole evening, if you’re not too tired. Start from the beginning, and tell me everything. Maybe you’ll remember something that will make their job simpler.”

“I was very young.”

“Then tell me what your mother told you.”

Irene sighed contentedly. “A cup of tea would be nice, don’t you think? If I’m going to tell the story.”

Peggy rose. “I’ll make it. You gather your thoughts.”

“I’ll do that.” Irene closed her eyes. “It’s a happy story, at least at first. The telling of it won’t be so hard.”

1923

Castlebar, County Mayo

My dearest Patrick,

As always, I think of you, my only brother, so far removed from Ireland, and I mourn your leaving for Ohio as if it only happened yesterday instead of nearly a lifetime ago. Cleveland is more your home now than Ireland ever was, and St. Brigid’s still the center of your heart, even though you have now retired and serve as its priest only occasionally. But how sharp your mind has remained, and how astute your observations. We are lucky, you and I, that we still have our wits left, and that only an ocean separates us and not yet death.

How different our views on the plight of our people. Yours garnered at one end of our national tragedy and mine at the other. Yours when the immigrant steps off the ship or train and into a world of belching factories and hastily constructed shanty houses. Mine when the emigrant leaves his poor barren farm, prayers in his heart and hope glimmering in his eyes.

They say we live in a new Ireland. So far I’ve yet to see it. Last year assassins killed the Big Fellow at Beal na mBlath, a terrible loss to all men and women who believe our best fate lies in compromise. We Irish still fight among ourselves, as surely and naturally as we fought the British invaders. Men who survived the horror of Gallipoli fall in Dublin’s streets, and sabotage, execution and other atrocities have become as symbolic of our ancient and honorable culture as rainbows and church spires.

You tell stories in your letters of new Irish blood for Cleveland, of men with surnames such as Durkan and Doyle, Heneghan and Lavelle, names as familiar to me as my own. I mourn for these men, although I never knew them, for their need to depart the country of their birth, and for unwelcome surprises on arrival. I remember too well your letters about the place called Whiskey Island, dear Patrick, and the horrors of life there for men who had only known Ireland’s green splendors. Perhaps things are better now, but Cleveland will never be Ireland, will it?