by Martin Sheen
He met my mother, Mary Ann Phelan, in Dayton, Ohio, a few years later. An Irishwoman from County Tipperary, she’d arrived at Ellis Island in 1921 at the age of eighteen. Her family owned a pub back in Borrisokane and had deep roots in the IRA, including her brother Michael, an Irish volunteer in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. She spoke English and Gaelic, which was a tipoff to her family’s Republican politics, and it’s possible that she was used to run messages and goods in the IRA underground; British officers would not body search girls younger than fifteen. For sure her family sent her to live with cousins in Dayton because they knew civil war was coming in Ireland. She had every intention of returning home as soon as the fighting ended.
But in citizenship class in Dayton, she became intrigued by the handsome Spaniard with the glasses and the gentle smile who spoke hardly any English. He was quiet and shy, unlike her raucous, gregarious clan back home, and where she was feisty and stubborn he was steadfastly determined and reserved. They didn’t share a common language but they were both devoutly Catholic and both had been shaped by the solid community ties of rural village life. Together they understood the daily challenges and small triumphs of being a foreigner in a new land. They began to study together for their citizenship exams, she taught him to speak English, and over time they fell in love. They married in 1927, when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-nine.
“The Spannerd,” she would call him affectionately. “Go an’ tell the Spannerd I need ’im.”
Those two truly threw their lot in together. They’d left everything they knew behind. What hope they must have shared at first. But my mother lost her first pregnancy, and then my father’s fluent Spanish landed him a job as a repairman with National Cash Register Company in Bogotá, Colombia. Living in the tropics was difficult for my mother’s Irish blood, and she lost a second child in Colombia. When she became pregnant a third time she decided to return to Ireland to care for her ailing mother and deliver the child there.
My brother Manuel was born in Ireland in 1929. One year later, my father secured a transfer to Hamilton, Bermuda. The family reunited there and five more sons arrived in quick succession. The outbreak of World War II prompted the family’s move back to Dayton, where my father took a job as a drill-press operator at NCR. I was born in 1940, the seventh son and the first child to survive birth in America. My sister Carmen and my brothers John and Joe followed, making our family an even dozen. As the oldest of the four American-born kids I was considered the leader of the Yanks in our family, a responsibility that has stuck with me to this day.
Growing up, I loved my name, Ramon, but my father was the only one who used it. To everyone else I was Raymond, or Ray, which was easier for Americans and especially my teachers to pronounce. “Rrramon,” my father would call me, with the endless rolled R’s of Galicia. I couldn’t hear it enough.
I can’t remember the sound of my mother saying my name, but I can recall her with great clarity. She was a large woman with the kind of enormous confidence that could have easily been mistaken for arrogance. We lived in precarious circumstances, in a very poor neighborhood, and yet she was so proud of who we were. Her whole presence conveyed an attitude of “And what is wrong with that?” She had a sense of dignity that even a child could recognize and admire, and she was terrifically proud of being Irish, particularly an Irish Republican. She was a real character, my mother. Often in the summer she would sit on our front porch on Brown Street and loudly sing the old IRA fight songs while she fanned herself and whacked at flies with the swatter she wielded in her right hand.
She also had great love, devotion, and faith. Every night after supper, wherever she happened to be sitting she’d pull out the beads and start reciting the family rosary. Whoever was home would gather around her and join in.
With ten children in the house, time alone with either of my parents was rare, especially rare with my father. There were so many of us, it was always a chore to get his attention for anything beyond the necessities. When I was about eight I was diagnosed with astigmatism in my left eye and had to wear glasses. The brothers would tease me and call me Four Eyes and I would immediately have to defend my honor. To keep me from taking swings at the other boys, my father took me hunting with him a handful of times early Saturday morning on the outskirts of town. Two sisters he knew from work lived on a farm where they would let him hunt their land for rabbits and birds. To get there we had to take the bus to the end of the line and then walk a few miles more. For me, these were precious and coveted days.
Memory is such an odd companion. Within its grip, we live simultaneously in the energy of the present and the deep emotional places of the past. A smell, a look, a feeling from long ago—sometimes one will come at you at the most peculiar time and a whole past world will awaken to you in the present. Of all my childhood memories, why does a single day of hunting with my father come back to me in such vivid detail now? Dramatic events are more likely to stick fast over the years—like the memory of my mother’s funeral, where Alfonso and I served as altar boys—but when I conjure up my father, small, quiet scenes full of sensory images come to mind. Just simple, shared moments like this one:
We’re waiting for the bus to the city limits. It’s a cold fall Saturday morning before dawn. I’m eight years old. At home my mother and siblings are noisily coming down the stairs for breakfast. At the bus stop, my father and I share a comfortable silence. He rarely speaks outside the house. Shy by nature, he’s uncomfortable with how he sounds when he speaks English. His accent is so thick you have to listen closely to understand what he says. When my father talks to strangers or even to people he knows at church or the grocery store, it’s always, “Yes, ma’am” or “No, sir.” Though he can talk up a blue streak at home, his public persona is that of a man of carefully selected words.
As we wait for the bus he puffs slowly on his cigar. Sweet pipe and cigar smoke cling to all his clothing. To me it’s always been a comforting smell. We board the bus and take our seats. The cigar is still positioned between his index and middle fingers. Even at eight, I know this isn’t allowed. Rules are rules and he always insists I follow them.
“Pop,” I say. “There’s no smoking on the bus.”
Silence. I can’t tell if he’s heard me or not.
“Pop, you can’t smoke on the bus.”
More silence.
“Pop.”
My father looks at me for a long, quiet moment and then holds up the cigar stub so I can see its doused-out tip.
“I’m notta smoking,” he says with a small, sheepish smile. He’s so frugal, he won’t discard a mostly smoked cigar but saves the remainder for later.
He lights up as soon as we get off the bus and smokes as we walk to the farm, him toting his double-barrel shotgun in a case in one hand and his cigar in the other, me shuffling along beside him. Inside the farmhouse I’m in for a surprise. The sisters have a television, a luxury we can’t afford at home. Theirs is a polished wooden box with a tiny screen on which grainy black-and-white Ohio State Buckeyes run from side to side. I badly want to watch the football game but the sisters have packed us a lunch and, after some small talk, my father is ready to leave. I don’t dare not go with him, and I don’t dare ask to stay behind. Many years later, I’ll remember those simultaneous feelings of longing and frustration, that inner conflict of wanting two things so badly and so equally and not having the ability to choose.
In the field, my father strolls through the grass with purpose. I follow him as quickly as my short legs allow. It looks like an ordinary Ohio field to me—grass, trees, sun, the distant squeaks and calls of high-perched birds.
Suddenly, my father freezes in place.
“Rrramon,” he whispers loudly. “Donna move!”
“What?” I say. Did something important just happen that I missed?
“Donna move!” Slowly, he raises the gun to his line of vision and . . . kaboom!
An earthquake erupts on the spo
t. The ground shakes. The air cracks. A loud scream escapes from my own mouth. In front of the bushes ahead, a rabbit appears out of nowhere and flails around on the ground.
“Shoot it again, Pop! It’s still alive! Shoot it again!” I shout.
My father tips back his head and laughs. His great basso profundo voice echoes across the field. He picks the rabbit up by the ears and tosses it into a bag. A few more join it later in the day.
I’ve never been a fan of hunting, but I loved being out in that Ohio field with that man. He was such a mystery to me, my father, and I hold on to these small details—an extinguished cigar, a double-barrel shotgun, a laugh that came from deep inside—for clues to who he was.
Sons absorb messages about manhood at their father’s sides, much of it through osmosis, and I observed my father closely whenever I could. All of us lads did. There was such joy in just being with him. At night we would crowd into the house’s single bathroom to watch him shave. He would talk to us and sing in Spanish as he sharpened his straight razor blade on a leather strop. As he sang he’d get a little rhythm going with the blade against the leather. I would sit on the edge of the tub and listen and watch. He was very tender in those moments. You’d ask him a question and he rarely gave a straight answer—I’d later come to recognize this as classically Galician—but he would lead you along in light and playful conversation the whole time.
“So, Pop,” you’d say. “What about this?”
“Well, you know, Rrramon, that’s the way itta is in here.” He scraped the blade against the foam on his cheek as he talked. “I don’t know-a ’bout thatta in there. But you know . . .”
It was a delicious kind of exchange and you knew it was going to last for the whole shave. I don’t think my father ever realized how closely we watched him, what a powerful influence he was on us, or how much we adored him. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he knew it all along.
Spain and Ireland were the twin enchantments of an Estevez childhood, distant lands that maintained an emotional pull on both my parents. My father had brothers in Cuba and Argentina by now and my siblings and I romanticized those countries, too—but Spain was our Golden Land. In European history class the Spanish Armada figured so prominently we felt a ripple of pride to be half Spanish ourselves. And again in U.S. history class, when we learned about the influence Spain had not just on the American southwest but also on Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida. We fancied ourselves descended from the great Spanish kings and queens. Of course, we were unaware of the horrible damage the conquistadors had done to native populations. We were taught to view Spain only as a glorious empire of the past.
As a result we had no great fondness for England, which had destroyed the Armada and, according to my mother, done a bad number on Ireland, too. “The wretched Brits,” she called them. Ireland itself, the place that had birthed her and defined her in so many ways, was a great unknown to us. After she died we heard little about or from her family there, except for an occasional air mail letter that arrived with a black border, alerting us to news of a family member’s death, sometimes months after the fact.
It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that my father began to open up about his early years in Spain. My brother Carlos, three years ahead of me in school, won a medal for speaking and interpreting Spanish in a state-sponsored test. My father could not have been more proud. He and Carlos began speaking Spanish at home, and it was as if the language unlocked a store of memories that had been remote and inaccessible to him until then. He told us stories from his childhood in Parderrubias and dug out photos of himself with his brothers. It makes me realize, even in a house filled with children, how lonely it must have been for him to be cut off from the words and nuances of his culture and how difficult it may have been for him to share his feelings in a language he could never claim as his own.
I was already in high school by that point—at Chaminade High School, Catholic and all boys—and working as a golf caddy from early spring to late summer. Caddying at the exclusive Dayton Country Club was as much an expected part of an Estevez boy’s heritage as serving as an altar boy and going to Catholic school. All my brothers before me had done it. I started at age nine. We would earn $4.25 for carrying two bags eighteen holes and get paid $5 or $6, which meant either a 75¢ or $1.75 tip, depending on the generosity of the golfer. At the end of a long work day, I’d head to the bus stop for the four-mile ride home with ten dollars in my pocket, twelve if I was lucky. Sometimes to save on bus fare, I’d walk.
The family needed the money we earned from caddying to pay for our school tuitions and books, that was true, but we never felt poor growing up. Or if we did, it didn’t matter, because everyone in the neighborhood lived in circumstances similar to ours. Everybody was working class, everybody was struggling. Instead of begrudging those more fortunate or dwelling on what we didn’t have, we innately realized how lucky we were to be part of a big family with such a great deal of love and fun. The brothers fought a lot but underneath it we were all like a bunch of clowns sitting around together on hot summer nights, laughing and smoking cigarettes, drinking three-two Bürger beer from long-necked brown bottles, and playing poker at the kitchen table. In the winter, we spent long hours at the Boys Club after school, boxing, wrestling, playing basketball, and shooting pool.
More than anything, we knew we had a place where we all belonged. The cardinal, unspoken rules in our house on Brown Street were (1) you’re not disposable and (2) we can’t get along without you. There was no excuse for anyone ever having to stand outside. You would only have to open the door to be welcome. You didn’t even have to knock. That was the kind of environment my father fostered and the kind of atmosphere that shaped us all.
On Sunday nights in the summer we would trickle home one by one from the country club after a long day’s work in the sun. Sunday was the only night of the week that we didn’t sit down for dinner together. In the kitchen, an elbow-deep pot of chili con carne would be warming on the stove and we’d each fill up a bowl. In the summer you could always count on a big pot of chili and in the winter a big pot of Spanish chicken and rice, my father’s version of paella. He loved to feed people. He would make everyone who came into the house sit down and eat. That was his form of hospitality, no matter who you were.
“Come sitta down in here. You wanna somethin’ to eat.”
It was a statement, not a question. Even if you weren’t hungry, protesting was useless. He would stand up and fill you a bowl. “You wanna somethin’ to eat. I’d like-a to fix you somethin’. Sitta over there, Rrramon.”
Sunday mornings, of course, meant Mass, and there was no excuse for missing it. Not if you were an altar boy. Not if you were my father’s son. If you were an altar boy and my father’s son, forget it. No excuses whatsoever.
When Alfonso and I were in high school, we served the 7:00 a.m. mass at Holy Trinity Church every fourth or fifth week. That meant waking extra early every morning of that week. We’d see our names in the church weekly bulletin and think, Oy. Again? But to my father it was a responsibility we could not shirk.
After my mother died, the tradition of the family rosary went with her, but my father still attended Mass every Sunday. He would put an envelope in the collection basket for each of my brothers in the military, with their names written on the front. MANUEL. MIKE. CARLOS. FRANK. Even if he could only put a quarter or a dime in each envelope, he would.
The weeks that Alfonso and I had to serve weekday Mass, my father woke us both up before dawn. He made sure we were never late. His clock in the house was always set a half hour earlier than necessary because he couldn’t tolerate being late himself.
“Alfonso! Rrramon! Come down here!” he would call to roust us out of bed.
I would roll over and glance at the window. Still dark. And in the winter, cold. Snow often blanketed the ground.
Alfonso and I never understood the point of us both getting up and walking the twelve blocks to the church in winter. The Mass didn’t
need two servers. If you tried to argue this with my father, he’d point to the parish bulletin defiantly. “Issa that your name inna there, Alfonso? Issa that your name, Rrramon? Then you must to going.” Over time we learned how to take turns and cover for each other, but we both had to get out of bed anyway and go through the motions of breakfast to honor the ruse.
Downstairs, my father already would have made the coffee and sliced the thick Vienna bread from the local market. Our heads were foggy from waking so early when we slid into our chairs. In winter it was so cold it made your eyelids ache. My father sat across from us at the table and stared into the distance as he poured milk and sugar into his coffee. Then he began to stir.
Anyone who spent time with my father would quickly learn two things about him. First, he was a pacer. He paced from room to room whenever he needed to work through a problem in his mind. And second, his coffee stirring was endless. He swirled the spoon for so long and with such vigor it clinked loudly and rapidly against the side of his cup. This would drive Alfonso and me nuts first thing in the morning.
“You needa the money for the supper?” my father asked.
Clink, clink, clink.
“Yeah, it’s my turn to cook, Pop,” Alfonso said.
Clink, clink, clink.
“You buy-a the bread and the fish,” my father instructed. He handed a few bills to Alfonso.
We sat for a while in silence. This early in the morning, you didn’t dare say anything more. My father stared off into space, dipping a slice of bread into his coffee cup and lifting each bite to his mouth. Then he picked up his spoon and started stirring again.
Clink, clink, clink.
