The Best American Mystery Stories 2012

by Otto Penzler

  Their eyes met for the first time, father and son, searching, like boxers in an opening round. No trust; animal suspicion. Myles noticed his father had the same deep blue eyes and dimpled cheeks as himself. Now those older eyes twinkled with mischief, as if Jack were about to tell a hilarious joke.

  He smiled at Myles conspiratorially, then reached in his pocket with crowd-pleasing deliberation, saying to no one in particular, “So this is my great big son. I brought you something I think you’re gonna like . . .” With great flourish, he pulled out a gorgeous silver watch, a fashionable Timex. It had a chain about a foot long, with a silver T-buckle on the end. He held it high for all to admire, then lowered it to Myles’s outstretched palm.

  Without a word, Myles took the watch, gazed at it for a long few seconds, then threw it with all the force he could muster straight at his father’s head, yelling, “I don’t want yer watch! I don’t want anythin’ from ya! I wish ya’d just stay away from us . . .”

  He didn’t wait to see where the watch landed—just tore down the laneway toward his refuge, the garden, vaguely registering over his shoulder the flurry of apologies from his mother. “He’s not like this at all. I don’t know what got into him. Oh, Jack, please don’t be upset. I’ll talk with him . . . He’ll apologize . . . I’m so sorry . . . I had no idea . . .”

  Myles had learned from watching Kitty over the years that the best balm for upset is hard work. Now he threw himself into weeding the lettuce ridges, head down, back to the house, where he could hear the subdued voices of his parents. Then he heard footsteps on the garden path. Kitty was coming to reprimand him, to order him to apologize. He didn’t turn around, just kept working, bracing for the verbal assault.

  It never came. To his surprise, it was his father’s voice that broke the silence: “This is a beautiful garden you’ve grown here, son. So clean. I used to plant lettuce and onions in this very same spot when I was your age. It’s the sunniest place in the whole orchard. Did you know we used to call this ‘the orchard’? The field over the house used to be filled with apple trees—people would come from all over to pick them. The trees would be in full bloom right about now, all shades of pink and white. We had such great yield, we just gave them away for free. The cattle and pigs ate the rest.”

  He kept up the monologue, squatting down in the row beside Myles in his polished shoes and white shirt, moving with him up the row. This went on for at least a half-hour, during which time Myles kept working but never looked at his father or said a word. The speaker might as well have been invisible. Finally Jack stood up, dusted off his pants, and mumbled something about needing to wash up for dinner before vanishing behind the orchard wall.

  Myles waited till he heard the wooden gate close behind him, then broke into tears of confused rage that watered the fledgling lettuce plants, lasting till he finished the row, exhausted and afraid of facing his mother.

  At last Kitty emerged, under the guise of picking scallions and lettuce for supper. To his surprised relief, she assured him that she was not upset, that she understood it would take time for him to get used “to having a man around the house.”

  It was the last thing he needed to hear. His anger returned, surprising both of them: “I’m never gonna get used to it. We were doin’ fine without ’im. And I’m not goin’ to call ’im Da either, an’ there’s no use trying ta make me.”

  “All right, a Cushla, I know this is hard for you. But I still expect you to show your manners and to be polite. There’s no excuse for rudeness. Promise me that you won’t let us down. Do this for me, please!”

  Myles dug at his tear-stained face with two muddy fists, promised her without conviction, and went in to wash up for dinner. He was used to being without a father, but now it was beginning to look like he was about to lose his mother, too—at least the one he’d known up to now. Fine, maybe he’d just run away to England; that would show her about a “man in the house.” He could find work on the buildings; four of his cousins had already gone to Sheffield and they were only three years older.

  Jack Hogan proved hard to resist; he had a magic about him that Myles felt drawn to. Even mundane tasks like shearing sheep or clipping the pony became occasions of performance and celebration. Everyone—men, women, and children, even the animals—seemed to vie for his attention. He was charming, entertaining, and loved to make people laugh.

  Myles knew his father had won several singing competitions, both in Ireland and in England, but he had no idea what that meant. Then, on his second night home, Myles came to understand why Jack Hogan was known as “The Voice.”

  With plenty of Guinness being passed around, conversations buzzing in the kitchen, the usual suspects had arrived to perform their party pieces. No one was paying much attention—everyone talking at once—until someone shouted, “Hush up! Jack is goin’ ta sing.”

  As if someone had hit a master switch, the house instantly falls silent. Jack stands up, steps confidently to the middle of the room, takes a deep breath, and launches.

  His selection is Thomas Moore’s classic, “She Is Far from the Land,” a song familiar to all.

  From the first line, all Myles’s resentments and plots for escape dissolve. His father’s voice is unlike anything he’s ever heard—sweet, enchanting, and almost like a musical instrument in its perfection. Like the rest of the audience, Myles finds himself swept up in the emotion of the moment, crushed by the grief, still embracing it with both ecstasy and anguish that he has never experienced with other singers. By the end of the first verse, several people, women and men, are openly weeping. Some are actually sobbing, shoulders heaving. Handkerchiefs are out, arms clasping shoulders in comfort, and Myles finds himself crying openly with the others, without self-consciousness.

  The words, poetry sung from the heart, etched themselves in Myles’s memory, words he would recite and sing in faraway places decades later:

  She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,

  And lovers are round her, sighing:

  But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,

  For her heart in his grave is lying!

  In full performance persona, Jack swings toward the kitchen audience he’d had his back to for the first verse. His hands form a moving circle in front of him as he sings, making deliberate and lingering eye contact with each person as he delivers the next lines:

  She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,

  Every note which he loved awaking;

  Ah! little they think who delight in her strains,

  How the heart of the Minstrel is breaking

  He had lived for his love, for his country he died,

  They were all that to life had entwined him,

  Nor soon shall the tears of his country be dried,

  Nor long will his love stay behind him.

  For the finale, he comes full circle, pauses for several seconds, then turns toward the finish. The silence is perfect as he hits the pièce de resistance.

  Oh! Make her a grave, where the sunbeams rest,

  When they promise a glorious morrow;

  They’ll shine o’er her sleep, like a smile from the West,

  From her own loved Island of sorrow!

  As Jack finishes on a caressing inflection of sorrow, his audience sits stock-still, mesmerized. Then come the tears, mingled with self-conscious giggles. The applause is long and loud, everyone on their feet, even Mick Murphy, who never rises unless to relieve himself or to go home. They are uniformly awestricken. Shouts of “No trouble taya, Jack! More! More! Give us ‘The Foggy Dew’” can be heard in the adjoining townsland.

  Jack obliges, without coaxing, leading off with “The Foggy Dew,” then “Dawning of the Day,” “If I Were a Blackbird,” closing with a nationalist favorite, “The Croppy Boy.” He delivers his medley of ballads with the same fluid energy, the beautiful voice, the engaging presence. Long before the final song, Myles has been captured by his father’s magnetic field, holding on to his
jacket, proud to claim him as his very own da.

  The ramblers notice the gesture and applaud that, too, long and loud. In the background Myles can see Kitty, beaming her approval as she busies herself with the tea.

  The spring and summer flew by in a blur of manly activity. Myles spent hours with his da, just the two of them, working on blocked drains, collapsed fences, and overgrown hedges. Sometimes they just wandered around the farm, like two pals, taking stock of the dilapidation, while Jack displayed the same comedic skills as their aging neighbor, Andy Murphy—mimicry, jokes, foibles, legends—all in a day’s work.

  Jack seemed to have lots of money, spent it freely, and was in no hurry to find work outside the farm or new ways to provide for the family. No one questioned the source of his largesse. Irishmen often came home from England feeling flush and spending lavishly, even if they couldn’t afford it. After all, Jack had been gone for over a decade and might have changed his ways. Rumor had it that he’d won the lottery in Birmingham. Another had it that he had a recording contract with Decca Records and had been given a big advance. Sure, wasn’t he “a finer tenor than John McCormick”?

  More remarkable still, he never touched a drop of drink all summer. Given the man’s reputation, that was nothing short of a miracle. Jack brushed it off with a simple comment that drink “doesn’t agree with me anymore” when pressed with “Sure one bottle of stout won’t kill ya.”

  Some days, instead of farm projects, they went hunting down in the lower meadows. At last Myles had his chance to do what he’d been dreaming about for years: show off Nell’s skills and his own knowledge of game and fox habitat to his da. In turn, Jack taught him how to shoot the ancient single-barreled shotgun that had hung unused in the upstairs rafters. Kitty had warned Myles against the dire consequences of even touching the gun, though he sometimes sneaked in and played war games, pretending he was an IRA marksman, killing scores of British soldiers as they came swarming across Sugarloaf Mountain.

  That was before Jack came home. Now he was allowed to take target practice openly in the orchard, using a thick wedge of oak nailed to an apple tree as a bull’s-eye. Once he got used to the violent kick of the butt against his jaw—which knocked him flat the first time he pulled the trigger—he showed a lightning speed and accuracy that drew praise from all quarters. Soon Myles was bagging pheasant and rabbits weekly, beating his father to the mark when the dogs flushed the game from the furze.

  It was on one of those hunting expeditions that Myles came to know another side of his father. He also learned a well-kept secret about his mother that cast her in whole new light. The conversation began after Myles had downed a pheasant with a brilliant shot and Jack, sensing his son morphing to a man, opened a delicate subject: his years in the IRA.

  “You know, son, the crack of a gun always reminds me of when I led the flying column down in Bunclody back in ’19. We’d been tracking the Black ’n’ Tans for a week after they burned out the whole village of Kiltealy. Well, we hit ’em at three in the mornin’ . . . blew up the barracks where they were billeted, out toward Vinegar Hill. Never knew what hit ’em. Bastard foreign riffraff . . . Criminal element turned loose from British prisons and armed on condition they come over an’ massacre us. Five of ’em escaped the first blast, but we blew their balls off as they came charging out of the back.”

  “What happened after that, Da?”

  “They caught us in Enniscorthy four months later, but not before we’d done several more jobs like that.”

  “How come they didn’t kill you like they did when they caught Padraig Pearse and the others in the Easter Rising?”

  “Did yer mother never tell ya the story? Sure I’m not surprised; it’s not like her to dwell on the past. Or to brag.”

  Myles was now listening to an entirely different man than he’d known before. Gone was the funny raconteur. In his place was a soldier, focused and gleaming at the memory of battle. This was the real IRA hero, the one he’d never believed existed. Yet here he was listening to the firsthand account, like a dream come to life. Myles sank down on the stone wall, ready to drink it all in, watching his father’s glistening blue eyes harden as he warmed to the story.

  “Well, see, we were arrested and taken to the local jail in Enniscorthy. The whole county knew what happened: someone had informed on us, one of our own. We were to face the Tan’s firing squad the following Wednesday. So here’s what happens. We were allowed one last visit from family and friends to say our goodbyes. No men, only women. I was dating your mother at the time, sort of—she was Kitty Cusack then, a gorgeous slip of a girl, but secretly a commander in the local Cumann na mBan.

  “I thought only the men could be commanders?”

  “Oh, no, son. The women were commissioned, too. Kitty had a reputation—well deserved, may I say—as a fierce Republican. Absolutely fearless. And deadly. She shows up on Tuesday night, acting the green, gawky country girl—‘Sorry to bother ya, sir’—with freshly baked brown bread, four packs of Sweet Afton fags, and guess what else?”

  “A hacksaw blade?”

  “Ha, you’ve been reading too many comics. No—a sawed-off shotgun, stowed under her big winter coat.”

  Jack smiled at the memory and lit his pipe, puffing to fill the silence. Myles felt his pulse race. His mother with a shotgun? Was this the same woman who forbade him to even handle the old shotgun gathering dust upstairs before his da came home? He watched Jack’s face for a few more seconds before asking, “So did she manage to hide the shotgun from the guards?”

  Jack laughed and rolled on. “No, that was not the plan. She had a different idea. The guard, a Tanner, never knew what hit ’im; she fired at point-blank range . . . right through the coat . . . blew a hole in him the size of yer fist.”

  Myles tried to swallow, but felt his mouth go dry and his chest tighten. Then he heard himself say in a faint voice that sounded high-pitched and distant, “You mean ta tell me that Mammie killed the guard . . . I mean, the Tanner?”

  Jack smiled indulgently at the boy’s amazement, continuing calmly, as though telling a bedtime story. He moved in closer to Myles, holding his gaze, warming to the subject, enjoying both the memory and the discomfiture of his audience.

  “Oh, absolutely. Dead as a doornail. He made one fatal mistake—didn’t think a country lass would have the nerve to pull the trigger. Stupid ejeet dared her: ‘Go ahead,’ he sez, ‘ya Feinian bitch. I dare ya. Ye don’t got the fucken nerve.’ Sure we all heard ’em yell it from up an’ down the cell block. We knew they’d be the last words the Tanner ever spoke. Didn’t know Kitty Cusack like the rest of us . . . That woman had nerves of steel; tougher than most of the lads in the movement. Kitty always took care of business. Always got the job done.”

  With that, Jack looked off in the distance and paused to relight the pipe. A long silence followed before Myles broke in, choking back tears.

  “I never knew any of that, Da. Mammie never told me . . . How could she? So how did you escape?”

  Another long pause, puffs on the pipe, and a resigned sigh. “Well, after Kitty sprung us—all twelve of us . . . Oh, listen, ’tis a long story, son. We split up. Packie Hayden, Denny Brennan, an’ me stayed together an’ got out to Canada; ended up in Montreal. We had contacts and a lot of help up the chain of command. But that’s why yer mother and I had to meet up in New York after it had all settled down years later.

  “I’ll tell ya the rest some other time. Sure Mick Collins and I were best buddies; started out as handpicked lieutenants in the IRB—Irish Republican Brotherhood—before De Valera and the treaty tore us all asunder. I can’t bear to even think about the betrayals and treachery; all those fine young men and women, tortured and martyred for . . . for what? Look what it got us.”

  The memory seemed to wilt him. Gone was the aloof storyteller, spinning a yarn. His soft tenor voice broke and tears welled up in the blue eyes, turning gray in anguish. Embarrassed, he turned away, trying to regain his composure. “I�
��m sorry, son. I shouldn’t have told you all this. Promise me ya won’t tell yer mother I told you about Enniscorthy. I shoulda let sleeping dogs lie . . .”

  “I promise, Da. I won’t say a word.”

  With that, Jack stood up, stuffed the pipe in his pocket, and started up the hill toward the red-tiled farmhouse. They walked the distance in silence, deep in their own thoughts, Myles a few steps behind his father. His mind raced with questions and the dawning realization that his world had just been turned upside down.

  Suddenly the mysteries of deference to his mother made sense.

  After each incident, Myles had assumed his mother, a naturally dominant personality, intimidated her targets with sheer force of will. Now he understood the pitiful pleading, the sudden show of compassion, the ready admission of guilt. They all had one thing in common: terror. They weren’t facing his mother; they were facing Kitty Cusack, legendary commander in the Cumann na mBan and secret enforcer for the IRA.

  But did they know the whole truth? That she’d shot a Black ’n’ Tan prison guard, and the only living witness was Jack Hogan? Maybe the whole truth was worse. Perhaps she’d shot others? If so, how many? And who besides Jack knew?

  Myles was left to ponder these questions alone. He would have to bide his time before he could even broach the subject with his da, and Kitty was completely off-limits; on that front, he was sworn to secrecy.

  After that one extraordinary tale of his jailbreak, Jack returned to his other persona: an endless fountain of hilarious mimicry, ancient wisdom, songs, and poetry. Myles, in turn, decided to focus on the bright side of this newly revealed heritage. He was the only son of Kitty Cusack and Jack Hogan, Cumann na mBan and IRA insurgents who’d trounced the Black ’n’ Tans, hooligans and murderers all. This was nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, he was proud of his pedigree. After all, Kitty and Jack had put it all on the line for Irish freedom when it mattered most. He didn’t know anyone else who could say that about both their parents.