All I had to do was supply him with grilled cheese sandwiches and soup. The groceries were delivered by the Everett caretaker, who told me his name was Patrick—a member of the local Ojibwe tribe, he said, though I wondered at his gray-blue eyes and what seemed like a touch of red in his graying hair. He kept us supplied with wood and started a fire each evening. Cold up there still. I’d sit in the living room as Ed drank, then dragged himself to bed. The fire comforted me. So did John McCormack, singing to me from Ed’s fancy phonograph.
What I wouldn’t have given to have my love, Peter, sitting in the easy chair beside me, reading—a companion, as well as a lover. I tortured myself listening to “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms” over and over. How the Count’s voice soared on those words, “The heart that has truly loved never forgets, but has truly loved on to the end.” Yes, that was me, and there was no other man I could imagine in that chair. Better to have my memories and my independence. I thought of Agnella and the nuns, who had to conjure up their bridegroom from the get-go. At least I’d had some time with Peter. Enough, I’d say to myself. Go to bed.
I brought my camera and challenged myself to be up and out on the dock, ready to photograph the sun just as it rose. It was on the fifth morning that I heard footsteps coming down the path.
“Nonie, you out here?”
“Ed,” I said. “Be careful. The fog’s thick, and the pier is slippery.” All I needed was for him to fall into the lake.
But he said, “Sounds like a description of politics.”
He must be feeling better, I thought. I pushed one of the deck chairs over to him. “Better wipe it off,” I said, handing a towel to him.
“The foggy, foggy dew,” he said, and began to sing. “But the Angelus bell o’er the Liffey swell rang out in the foggy dew,” and smiled, for the first time since Ed Junior died. “Not quite John McCormack.”
A silver disk was floating up, out of the mist that covered the lake. I lifted my camera, pressed the shutter. “Got it!” I said. “Imagine … this happens every morning.”
“With no help from us,” he said.
The sun swept the fog away, and the pine trees began to appear. Black shapes turning green, and reflected in the water.
I raised my cup in a salute and took a sip. A blue, blue Northwoods sky emerged. “Enough blue to make a Dutchman a pair of pants, as Rose says,” I said to Ed. I could hear crows now and a loon’s dominating cry. I closed my eyes and felt a splash of warm sun on my face.
Poor Ed. He didn’t complain, but he must have had a terrible headache. “Beautiful spot,” I offered.
“Do you want to see the site Ed Junior and I picked for the house?” Ed asked.
“Very much,” I said.
He got up from the chair and started walking up the pier. “Did you ever notice that Ed Junior had his mother’s profile? The spit of Mary,” he said.
Oh no, I thought. That’s it. He’s going to head right back up to the cottage and the Jameson. But he kept walking. The fog burned off, and the mystery lifted. Just Catfish Lake now, Everett’s Resort, a lodge and a collection of cabins along the lake.
I followed Ed past the boathouse up the path into the dense woods and along a narrow peninsula that ran into the lake. We came to a giant tree. Pine of some kind.
“Most of the Northwoods was cut down in the last century,” Ed said. “Very few stretches of virgin forest. This is one.”
“Don’t you remember Uncle Patrick’s stories?” I asked him. “He talked about the logging camps up here and how he’d traveled from one to the other, enlisting the Irish fellows into the Fenian Brotherhood.”
“Vaguely,” Ed said.
“Of course, we were the ones Uncle Patrick and Granny Honora lived with,” I said. “I talked to him more than you did.”
“I do remember his stories about the Ojibwe tribe in this area,” Ed said.
“You should,” I said. “His Ojibwe ointment saved your father’s life as a child. You wouldn’t be here except for that.” Uncle Pat said that the Irish and the Indian should be allies, since both had their land stolen.
“My father talked about that often. One reason why I wanted a place up north. Of course, half of Chicago is here every summer. My land adjoins Mont Tennes’s place,” he said.
“Wilcox will love that. I can just see the headline, ‘City Official Vacations with Notorious Gambler.’”
Why had I mentioned Wilcox? That would start him drinking again, I thought. But Ed was staring up at the tree.
“A clever fellow, Mont. And really, by setting up wires to the race tracks, he gives the bettors a fair shake.”
“Mmmm,” is all I said.
“I just can’t get excited about gambling,” Ed said. “I’d like to see it made legal so the city could collect taxes. Though Mont claims he does pay a kind of unofficial tax by supplementing the pay of the cops.”
“Mmm,” I said again.
“They should raise policemen’s salaries. After all a man has to feed his family,” Ed said.
I sometimes wondered if the reason that Irish politicians didn’t worry too much about bribes was because we all had a bone-deep fear of starvation. We’d inherited it from our grandparents, who’d barely escaped death in Ireland when a million died after the potatoes failed.
Not a lot of talk about those days from Granny Honora and the old ones. But enough that we got the message. The English landlords tried to wipe us out once and for all, sending the healthy crops away to feed their own people, and leaving us with nothing but barnacles, unmilled corn meal, and nettles to eat.
If my kids were crying from hunger, and a fellow offered me a sawbuck to ignore a betting parlor, I’d take it too.
“The architect Ed Junior and I consulted wanted me to cut down this tree. It blocks the sun on the porch in the afternoon. I told him no. Something this majestic deserves to live.”
“Good morning,” we heard. Ed and I turned. Patrick from Everett’s stood right behind us. A very quiet walker that fellow.
“Do you know what this land is called?” Patrick asked.
“Indian Point,” Ed said.
“Yes,” Patrick said. “This tree holds the spirit of our ancestors. There’s an eagle’s nest up there. So few eagles left,” Patrick said. “The paper mills have poisoned the air and the water, and many farmers shoot them. Indian Point has always been their refuge. And now they have returned. Eagles are the totem of my clan. Tonight the full moon will rise at eight o’clock. I will come for you at seven.”
“Pardon me?” I asked. But Patrick had walked away.
And at seven, there he was. I’d been expecting Ed to start on the Jameson at five, as usual. He made it a point of honor to wait until cocktail time before he began to get skittered. But tonight he sat at the dining room table, studying the blueprints for the house, making notes and eating a ham and cheese sandwich as he worked.
Patrick came right in, followed by an older woman. He stopped, stepped back, and said very formally, “May I present my mother.”
Hard to guess her age. Not many wrinkles, but white hair in two long braids, and those same blue-gray eyes.
She smiled. “My name is,” she began, and paused.
I expected a difficult Ojibwe name, but she said “Bridget.”
“Bridget?” I repeated.
“Yes,” she nodded. “My father was your kinsman, Patrick Kelly.” Setting the words out one by one. “I am his daughter.”
“What the hell?” Ed said.
“You must have known that Patrick Kelly lived with the Ojibwe,” Bridget said.
“Yes,” I said. How many times had Granny Honora told us how the whole lot of them would have frozen to death if Uncle Patrick had not shown up with a load of furs he’d trapped in the Northwoods and saved them all, their first Christmas in Bridgeport. None of us Kellys, including Ed and me, would be alive today if Uncle Patrick hadn’t rescued our fathers. But had he left this woman behind as a baby in order
to save us?
“He never told us he had a child,” I said to Bridget.
“My father didn’t know about me,” she said. “My mother told me that soon after I was conceived she had a dream. Little children crying, two women lost. All calling, ‘Patrick, Patrick.’ The next morning, she told my father that his own family needed him. He argued with her. His family was far across the sea, but my mother insisted. She said they were where the river emptied into a lake near many buildings.”
“Chicago,” Ed said.
“Yes,” Bridget said.
“And that was it? He left?” I asked.
“The dream came to my mother after she’d taken the sacred medicine. We honor such messages,” she said. “So even though she suspected she might be pregnant, she sent my father away.”
“So she sacrificed herself and you?”
“My mother didn’t think like that. She followed the old ways. Even her time with my father came because she saw him in a vision—a man wounded within and without, who must be healed. He was very sick when he came to the tribe,” she said.
“We didn’t know that,” Ed said.
“Lost and alone in these woods during a blizzard. Two of our men found him. One was my grandfather. He brought him into his lodge, and my mother cared for him. She saved him and loved him. But…” Bridget stopped. “He was with the Ojibwe for a year. He wanted to marry my mother, but she would not. That caused my father pain.”
“But why did she refuse?” I asked. I thought of that strange short ceremony in the Irish College Chapel. My wedding—a few minutes while some fellow waited to take Peter into revolution and death.
“My mother said she always knew my father must return to his own people one day. And, indeed, he told her there was another woman he cared for but that she was married to his own brother and so they could never be together. My mother did not want to be bound to a man who could never give her his whole heart,” Bridget said.
“She didn’t want to be bound,” I repeated. “Usually it’s the man who wants no strings.”
I thought of Tim McShane, who’d convinced me I was a different kind of woman, who could take my pleasure like a man. No sniveling—his word—about marriage. No whining. Except when I did try to leave, he was the one refused to let me go. I could still feel his hands on my throat. Again I thanked God and Spike O’Donnell that Tim was dead.
“You see,” Bridget went on, “there was another man from the Two Rivers Band on Lake Superior who had come to Lac du Flambeau and met my mother years before. He was a holy man, a shaman, and had told my grandfather my mother was the woman meant to join him on his sacred journey. But my mother was only fifteen and was afraid of the path this man called her to. Three years later Patrick came. After he left, she sent a message to the shaman. She was ready.”
“But did she love this other man like she loved Uncle Patrick?” I asked.
“She respected him and understood the great honor it would be to serve our people at his side.”
“An impressive woman, your mother,” Ed said.
“Yes,” Bridget said. “And a very happy one.”
“But didn’t she ever wonder about Patrick?” I asked. And then, I remembered. “But wait. Patrick came back to the Northwoods years later with my granny Honora. Surely he tried to find your family.”
“My mother lived far away in Two Rivers. My grandparents died soon after she left. Her brothers scattered. I don’t think my father could have found my mother. And, besides, I had a new father. A kind and good man who taught me the secrets of healing, and how to become one with the sacred plants and animals.”
Bridget reached over for Ed’s hand and mine. “We are cousins, and now you will come with me. They are waiting for you, Ed,” she said.
Bridget made me promise never to reveal the details of the ceremony she performed at Indian Point that night, as the big orange moon rose out of the lake and shone on the water. I’m not sure I could. I remember the beginning. The fire of cedar logs, burning within a circle of stones. Bridget offered us what she called “the medicine.” First, special tobacco in a pipe we shared, and then sweetgrass, which she wound around our wrists. Then, sage—a big clump of it lit in the fire, making clouds of smoke that enveloped the four of us. Finally, a paste we chewed.
Then Bridget and Patrick began drumming, exchanging rhythms, and chanting. I looked over at Ed. I could only see a bit of his face, illuminated by the firelight and the moon coming through the trees. He lifted his hands and closed his eyes as his body began to sway.
“Mary,” I heard him say. “Mary,” and then “Ahh. Ed.” He smiled.
The fire seemed to dance, colors changing. Orange and red. Blue, green, purple. The drumming got louder and louder. I closed my eyes and saw the kitchen on Hillock. Mam and Granny Honora laughing. Surely Peter Keeley would appear to me. I waited. And then … I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly the drumming got louder. Bright bursts of sound that seemed to call forth the sun. And there it was—a red tip, pushing up from behind the pine trees.
“Look,” Patrick said and pointed. A pair of eagles was heading right toward us. They rode the air, then swooped down. The drummers went wild. Then the eagles wheeled in the air, shot straight up, and disappeared above the clouds.
“Some men are born to be eagles,” I heard Patrick say to Ed.
And that night changed Ed. I’m not saying he never drank another drop, but he was never drunk again.
* * *
“I want to start on the house so we can have it finished up by the end of the summer,” he said to us over dinner, Patrick and Bridget joining us for a real meal.
“You’re building it then?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Ed Junior wants me to. And Patrick told me anytime I sat under the tall pine tree, I would feel his presence.”
“Great,” I said. I didn’t understand what had happened to Ed, but he seemed full of purpose.
Bridget took a leather pouch out and gave it to Ed. “It’s to be your medicine pouch,” she said.
Ed opened it. I expected to see a bear claw, or eagle feather, or a muskie tooth. Instead, Ed pulled out a medal, an actual religious medal, bigger than usual, a dull copper color, and the size of a silver dollar, an image on each side. Mary as the sorrowful Mother on one and Jesus crowned with thorns on the other. Both faces seemed worn away a bit.
“My father, Patrick, your great-uncle,” Bridget explained, “left this with my mother as a sign of his gratitude and love. He told her his own mother had given it to him. My mother didn’t want to take the medal. ‘This should be kept in his family,’ she’d said. But he insisted, and gave it to her, along with many beaver pelts. But my mother told me that she resolved that if any of Patrick’s family ever came back to the Northwoods, she would return the medal to them.”
“But Patrick had no other children except you,” I said.
“I am the daughter of the Ojibwe,” she said. “And my son Patrick is a shaman. No, this medal is for you.”
I picked up the medal. “So this belonged to Patrick and Michael Kelly’s mother,” I said to Ed. “Our what? Great-grandmother?”
“Yes,” he said. “I didn’t think they brought anything from Ireland with them.”
“Grellan’s crozier,” I said, and Bridget laughed.
“Ah yes, Grellan’s crozier. Patrick caused much confusion among our people with that golden staff. You know its power?” she asked me.
“That it grows hot in the hand of someone who is lying?” I said.
“Dangerous in a small tribe of people to know too much truth,” she said.
“So it worked?” I asked.
“After the first experiment, Patrick took the staff back and never used it again here. Where is it?”
“Old St. Pat’s Church in Chicago.” I turned to Ed. “Might come in handy for you.”
“But,” Ed said. “This medal belongs to you too, Nonie, and all the cousins really.”
“You must take it,” Bridget said and pushed the medal across to Ed. “Yours is the most difficult path.”
“An eagle,” Patrick said to him.
10
Before we went back to Chicago, Ed asked Patrick to hire a construction crew. He wanted to start on the house immediately so it would be ready for August 1, always a day Granny Honora celebrated, though I can’t remember why.
On May 1, 1926, the twins arrived. Margaret was over the moon. She named them Patricia and Joseph. Maybe her own father was Joseph. It did have a kind of German ring, and they were gorgeous. Irish heritage there, I’d say. I wondered about their mother—the girl who’d asked the sisters from St. Vincent de Paul to find a home for her children. Was she anguished or relieved? And the father … had he refused to take responsibility? Judge not, Nonie, I thought to myself. Remember Agnella and Erigina. God is love. Providence. That’s the way Ed saw the twins.
“God’s gift, Nonie.” Ed was very serious. The two of us were in his office at the South Park headquarters, the old in-charge Ed back. Hard to believe that this was the same wreck of a man I’d driven up to Eagle River just weeks before. He reached into his pocket, took out the medal that Patrick had given him, and rubbed it.
“Margaret longed to be a mother her whole life, and now she is. I don’t want anything to distract her from the care of her babies. I want this summer to be the happiest she’s ever known. Can’t you imagine the little ones with their feet kicking in the lake? The clear air, those blue skies, no Big Bill Thompson or Reverend Wilcox. A place for all the family to come to for my mother and Aunt Kate.”
“Michael and his kids,” I said. “Rose and John.”
“We Kellys are country people after all,” Ed said. “Wasn’t our grandfather a farmer? And Granny Honora’s people fishermen? We need to connect to a simpler life.”
“You’re not exactly building a cabin in the woods, Ed,” I said. I pointed to the blueprints on his desk. “Eight bedrooms. Two thirty-square-foot rooms on the main floor.”
Irish Above All Page 11
