John Casey - Spartina

Dick thought, This is more like Mary. More like having a beer with her while she took the paint off someone at the bar.

But this was Elsie’s house. Elsie looked unhappy and fragile curled in her corner of the sofa, her hair wet, her eyes squinting into the light from the standing lamp behind Mary. Dick got up and turned the shade away. His attention went back to Mary. He felt he should do something more for Elsie, but he couldn’t.

Mary took off her hat, and said, “I haven’t been to mass for years. Except for funerals. Maybe it’s my middle age, but I’m beginning to like it again. We all went to mass again this morning.”

She laughed. “One thing the old man said … I guess it was a couple of days before he died. My mother got this priest to come see him, a young priest, just a kid. But my father disapproved of deathbed confessions. Too easy. So the old man says he’s not going to confess. But the priest hangs around, tells a few stories, and gets the old man talking. The old man tells a few stories himself. The priest says, ‘Well, Mr. Scanlon, you’ve had a pretty good life.’ The old man says, ‘I have.’ And the priest says, ‘But there’re probably a couple of things you feel sorry for.’ The old man says, ‘There are.’ So the priest tries to finish it off, he slips in, ‘Because they offended God?’ The old man lifts his head up and says, ‘No. Because they offended me !’ ” Mary laughed and looked at Elsie, who looked terrified. “Oh Christ,” Mary said, “maybe you had to be there.”

Dick laughed. Mary looked at Dick, her gray eyes growing wider and brighter. He could see why she’d scared Elsie.

Mary said, “Or maybe you have to be Catholic.” She laughed again. “One time my father was working in an office, when he was a salesman for the lace company. There used to be a lace mill here in South County, made lace as fine as any in the world, won a gold medal at the Brussels fair. Anyway, my father used to do this Gallagher and Sheen routine with another salesman standing around the water cooler.

“ ‘Say, Mr. Gallagher?’

“ ‘Yes, Mr. Sheen?’

“ ‘I hear the new Pope’s got all the cardinals on their toes.’

“ ‘Now, how’d he do that, Mr. Sheen?’

“ ‘He raised all the urinals in the Vatican.’ Ba-da-da-dom. No, wait. So they all laughed, all except this one young secretary. My father turns to her and says, ‘I’m sorry, dear. Didn’t you think that was funny?’ And she says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Scanlon, I don’t know what a urinal is — you see, I’m not Catholic.’ ”

This time both Elsie and Dick laughed. Mary sighed. She said, “It got to be a family joke. If someone was being dumb, the old man would say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not Catholic,’ and we’d all break up.”

“How old was your father?” Dick said.

“Eighty-four. My grandfather got to be ninety-eight. My grandfather came over in time to fight in the Civil War. My father was drafted in World War I and got shipped all the way back across the Atlantic to France. So I suppose I’m lucky I got here at all, what with a famine and two wars. I had a cousin who got killed in World War II, but by then I was safe on first.

“My father was the tail end of his family, and I’m the tail end of mine. My brothers all have white hair, for God’s sakes. The oldest one just retired from the Navy. And I remember my grandfather from when I was little, and he was in the Civil War. My father remembered twenty-dollar gold pieces, when that was a whole payday.” Mary laughed. “At mass one day — just over here in Wakefield — they passed the collection plate and my grandfather reached into his pocket and tossed his penny in, you gave a penny in those days. Just as the plate reached the end of the row, he realized he’d put in his twenty-dollar gold piece. He started to reach for it, but my grandmother pulled his arm back. He whispered to her what he’d done, and then she started pushing him to get up and get it back, but by then the collection plate was going up the aisle like a bride to the altar. My grandfather said out loud, ‘No, Mary. I gave it to God — and to hell with it!’ ”

Mary laughed and looked at Elsie. Elsie laughed. Mary poured Dick and herself another shot. Mary said, “One thing that was nice about this last year was the way the old man’s childhood came back to him. He’d always talked about his life as a young man — being in the Army, working for the lace company, the mills closing, having to start all over, having to move to Pawtucket. Hard-times stuff. But this last year it was all the stuff when he was a little boy. He remembered these hills here when they were pastures, filled with sheep.

“When he was a little boy he had a crush on the prettiest girl at the mill. Mabel O’Brien worked a treadle — pumping away all day, her skirt hiked up to her knees, her calf muscles swelling under her white stockings. She had three bastards by three different men. We think of that time as repressed and intolerant, as though sex got invented in 1960, but there’s Mabel O’Brien, and she went to mass every Sunday with her three boys. The old man remembered her at the Saturday-night parties. It was lovely how clear the old man saw Mabel O’Brien’s legs. Working the treadle or prancing around the O’Briens’ big kitchen on Saturday night. I’d go to the hospital and sit while he and his roommate would watch the Red Sox game. The old man would take a little nap and then wake up from a dream — almost all his dreams were of his childhood here. He saw Mabel O’Brien’s legs, of course, but everything else clear as day too. When he was eight he used to collect the men’s hot lunches from all the wives — the Irish workers lived at the top of the hill in company houses — and he’d load all the lunch pails in a barrel he’d nailed to his sled, and just as the noon whistle blew he’d shoot down the hill, his legs wrapped around the barrel, his face freezing in the wind where he peeped around. He’d coast up to the door of the mill, and the men picked out their lunch pails and let him come inside to get warm, and they’d all talk a blue streak. There was no talking allowed during work, so they were all busting. He heard their voices in his dreams — most of them still had brogues in those days. And he remembers them not being able to stand still after being stuck at the machines. They’d arm-wrestle and dance and challenge each other to walk on their hands. My father’s father was famous for being able to jump over a dye vat from a standing start. My father saw him do it. He’d crouch down and disappear behind the vat and suddenly there he was flying through the air. I’d always thought the mills must have been hell, but when my father was dying it all seemed paradise to him. The way he talked, it was as though he’d never known anything since. He’d wake up from his nap and tell me about his sled shooting down the hill. Near the end he only felt hot or cold in his dream memory. And even taste. He dreamed of the first time he tasted maple syrup. None of them had ever tasted it. Someone gave them a bottle. They’d never seen it. His mother gave it to him as cough medicine until someone showed her how to make pancakes.

“And Mabel O’Brien, he adored her. They used to have parties in the O’Briens’ kitchen, just up the hill from the house he lived in. After the dancing and singing they’d tell stories. It was mostly ghost stories, you know, a man out alone at night and he hears a banshee. Terrified the old man, he was only six or seven at the time. One night he stayed later than anyone in his family, and he was scared to go home alone. Mabel opened the back door for him and the light from the oil lamps shot out along the snow right down to his own back door. So he started running down the beam of light from the open door and he could hear Mabel’s father shouting, ‘For God’s sakes, shut the door, Mabel!’ But she kept it open. ‘Shut the door, Mabel, we’re perishing!’ But Mabel held on till he got safe inside his own house.” Mary leaned back and put her hands over her eyes. “You know, it’s not so hard that the old man died at eighty-four, though I’m sad enough for that. But it’s him as a little boy I see. It’s Tommy Scanlon, running down the path alone, little Tommy Scanlon, scared of the dark.”