All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  My mother continued to play the Irish accordion for money at the local barrooms. The welfare office of course didn’t know this, and if they ever found out we’d be in worse shape than we’d ever been in before. We’d be out on the streets. But the welfare check certainly couldn’t support all of us, and so Ma made some money for the kids doing what she loved to do: entertaining people. She’d get about thirty dollars for groceries at the end of a night. We’d go to McBride’s down past the projects at the bottom of our hill, or else to the Galway House on Centre Street. Kevin would show he wasn’t such a runt by carrying her antique accordion, which she’d played since she was sixteen, and which was now held together with glue and electrical tape. It never lost its tuning or its booming volume, though, and she preferred it to any newer accordion. Then she started bringing her guitar to do country-western songs, songs like “Your Cheating Heart” by Hank Williams and “My D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette. These songs were often dedicated with a cackle of laughter to her “ex-husband, Dave MacDonald,” or “Mac,” as we’d all started to call him now that he was a thing of the past.

  I’d listen to my mother from a barstool, along with all the old drinkers who were slouched over mouthing the lyrics between long cigarette drags. I’d wait until one of them would notice me and offer to buy me some chips or a pickled egg from the big jar I was staring at. Meanwhile, Kevin would be off scheming about how to get in on a little of the drinking money placed carefully under the noses of all these drunk people. Sometimes he’d put on a sad pauper’s face and pass a hat for our mother, as if she weren’t already getting paid by the bar. Kevin often got sympathy, being as bony as he was. The drinkers said he looked half starved and would give him a dollar sometimes. But Kevin wasn’t collecting for my mother at all. By the age of seven, he was already finding ways to “get over.” And since he always shared his spoils with me, I kept my mouth shut. A few times Ma found out and made him hand over the money to her. She was thrilled to get more than the thirty bucks the bar paid. In the end, Kevin didn’t mind because it would all be spent to stock our refrigerator anyway, and he was proud to show off that he was “a born provider.” Keeping the money from my mother was really just a game to see if he could play the player. Ma always told him that he should’ve lived during the Depression, that he would’ve been able to support a whole family back then.

  Like my mother, Kevin was outgoing and would use his way with people to make more money. He played the spoons by taping two kitchen spoons together and banging them up and down his legs, arms, and back. He had great rhythm and could keep double-time. He was acrobatic, and could walk on his two hands, his skinny body straight upside-down. The teachers had called Kevin hyperactive, and he bragged about that to friends and strangers alike, as if he’d been given a title of importance. When he wasn’t entertaining for money, he was out shining shoes at the bars. He saved up for a shoe-shining box and took special care of it, hiding it in a safe spot every night before he went to bed. He had a sweet look about his face, and people were drawn to him. I spent a lot of time tagging along on Kevin’s exploits up and down Centre Street, the main drag in Jamaica Plain. As long as I could keep up with his speedy pace through the store aisles, I’d make out pretty well, getting my fill of candy or toys from Woolworth’s. Kevin was generous. Whenever I’d hear the expression “He’d give you the shirt off his back,” I’d picture Kevin. I always thought that the expression was made for him alone. He’d literally give you the shirt off his back, and had done so more than once. It might be a shirt swiped from the back of a truck, but that was beside the point.

  Every spring we looked forward to the Irish Field Day, way out in the country, in Dedham. It was a day of Irish entertainment, games, rides, and food to raise money for the African Missions, which worked for some starving children far away in Africa—those children we always heard about when we weren’t hearing about the poor hungry children of Ireland who would walk miles to school with no shoes at all on their callused feet. It’s because of those kids so far away that we were never allowed to complain about our lot, and would get down on our knees to thank Christ for America and those orange blocks of government cheese from the welfare office. The Irish community came from all over Boston to support the African Missions. All our relatives would be there: my aunts, cousins, Nana and Grandpa. Our family usually piled into one of the souped-up cars my brother Joe was working on, with doors, hoods, and a roof that were all different colors. Joe was always fixing up big old cars that he could drive around while proudly smoking a cigar and checking out girls. Joe said he looked like a pimp, but my brother Davey called him Jethro and said that we looked more like the Beverly Hillbillies.

  One year we barely made it, breaking down on the dirt roads twice. The backfiring and clouds of exhaust let everyone know that we’d arrived. And we made a scene climbing out of the car windows too, since as usual Joe’s doors didn’t open. Ma hurried through the crowds to the side of the stage, and hollered up to the emcee, pointing to the accordion over her shoulder to let him know she’d be next to entertain. My grandparents had to run and hide for the shame, but the crowds loved Ma. She made everyone feel they were at a real party back home. Some even dropped their American middle-class airs, to toss each other around, doing set dances on the dirt in front of the stage.

  In the meantime, Kevin scouted out the scene for ways to leave with more than he’d come with, and I followed looking for my share. He played a game of darts with his only quarter, and in no time he’d won all kinds of stuffed animals. There was a dart table where you had to aim for the stars scattered across the backboard. What they didn’t realize was that Kevin had gone to Woolworth’s early that morning to snatch a whole box of those same stars to put on the ends of his darts.

  Before long Kevin ended up getting a job at one of the game stands. They were probably sick of him winning and figured it would be cheaper to pay him a day’s wages. He ran the games with energy and wit that drew customers from all corners of the field, all the while pocketing quarters when no one was looking. The more customers he drew, the better he made out, and the less likely that anyone would notice a shortage of profits. I watched my brother wheel and deal as I heard my mother’s voice from across the field belting out “The Wild Colonial Boy.”

  “Look, that’s Ma!” Kevin was proud of Ma and bragged to everyone around us that our mother was on stage. I was a little worried about it, though. I thought all the Irish would talk badly about Ma, as my grandparents said she was a shame to us all with her accordion, and her long hair and short skirts. “And that was how they captured him, the wild colonial boy.” Ma proudly stomped her foot through the last line of the song, and finished like she always did, with a loud “wo-ho!” Then Ma took another musician’s guitar away from him and finished up with her all-time favorite by Janis Joplin, putting on her country accent and really belting out “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and nothin’ ain’t nothin’ honey if it ain’t free.”

  Soon enough Kevin’s pockets were full and so were mine. We had plenty of quarters to play more games, as well as prizes and Irish flags to wave all the way home out the windows of Joe’s shitbox. Before leaving Kevin led Kathy and Frankie into the woods where he’d hid his spoils and gave them their equal share. When we came back into the field, Kevin saw that there was one table he hadn’t gotten to yet: the one that sold raffle tickets for the gallons of booze hidden underneath, behind a tablecloth. He had gifts for everyone and didn’t want to forget Ma’s cousin Nellie. Nellie had come from Ireland when she was sixteen to live with Nana and Grandpa. All our relatives thought she was too wild, but Ma considered her a sister. We called her our aunt. Kevin knew she loved the drink and that she had no money, raising five kids on her own with no father. Besides, she’d be sure to keep us all laughing on the way home with a few drinks in her. Kevin made us watch the rest of the goods while he slipped under the table when no one was looking. He waited for a signal from Frankie and s
lipped back out again with a whole case of Irish whiskey. And didn’t Nellie go home legless that day from the drink, doing her wild imitations of our relatives and keeping us all in stitches the whole ride home! Kevin once again had provided for everyone, an eight-year-old genius of scams.

  Jamaica Street was my only experience living with families who had a father going off to work every day. We were probably the only family on welfare. Looking back I realize our Irish neighbors had some American middle-class pretensions that were at odds with the ways of my mother and us kids. And if we ever did anything considered lower class—like go to the corner store barefoot—in front of someone from Ireland, they might call us “fookin’ tinkers.” This was the worst you could be, according to Irish immigrants, especially once you’d already made it to the Promised Land.

  While we were happy not to be living in the project for once, my family still spent a lot of time visiting the one nearby and hanging out with the other families on welfare. It was a pretty equally mixed project racially, and as a result the tensions weren’t as bad as in Columbia Point. This all changed when the Jamaica Plain development shifted toward a black majority and poor whites started to flee. That’s when the fights broke out. That’s when the chanting started:

  Beep beep beep beep,

  Walkin’ down the street,

  Ten times a week.

  Ungawa ungawa,

  This is black power,

  White boy destroyed.

  I said it, I meant it,

  I really represent it.

  Takes a cool cool whitey from a cool cool town,

  It takes a cool cool whitey to knock me down.

  Don’t shake my apples, don’t shake my tree,

  I’m a J.P. nigga, don’t mess with me.

  The white kids started to say the same chant, switching “whitey” and “nigga.” But for a while, my older brothers and sisters hung out with mixed groups. Especially Mary, who by the mid-seventies had adopted a style that my grandfather criticized in a thick Irish brogue as an “African hairdo.” She was dressing too in platform shoes and doing the dances that only the black girls knew. She could do “the robot” like the dancers on “Soul Train.” Later, when Mary had two children “out of wedlock” in her late teens before finally marrying the father, my grandfather traced her alleged downfall back to the African hairdo.

  There was never much traffic, so we were able to take over Jamaica Street with games of tag, dodgeball, and red rover. All the kids from the other Irish families would join in. Then they’d disappear, called in to dinner. But we stayed outside because we could eat whenever we wanted to. They’d come out again after dinner, but a couple of hours later we were again on our own, as all the other kids on the street had strict curfews, usually before dark.

  The kids from the projects could stay out late too, so it was better to hang out with them. Sometimes we’d stay out really late telling ghost stories on the porch. Stories like the one about the hatchet lady, who carried a shopping bag full of little boys’ heads. As her bag was very heavy and she was very old, a polite youngster would offer to carry it for her. Before he got to her door with the heavy bag, he’d get curious and ask what was in it. The hatchet lady would let him look into the bag, and while he was bent over, she’d cut his head off with a hatchet, adding another head to her collection. I believed every word of these stories and was horrified when I saw Frankie or Kevin helping an older woman with groceries to her door. But they always got a quarter for their courtesy and still had their heads.

  Kids from all over Jamaica Plain started to hang out with us, because they liked our house and could do what they wanted there. My older brothers and sisters set up a clubhouse in the basement, inviting friends over to smoke cigarettes and play spin the bottle. Friends would stay overnight in the cellar, especially when they weren’t getting along with their parents, or were running away from home. Most of them started calling my mother “Ma.”

  On hot summer nights, we’d all sleep on mattresses on the front porch. The house was stifling and we didn’t have the air conditioners that others on the street had. Most families in the neighborhood seemed perplexed by our ways. Mrs. Schultz, an older woman from Germany who lived upstairs from us, used to wake us all up to send us inside the house. She was bothered by the idea of having to climb over loads of kids in their underwear, all wrapped in sheets like mummies. She seemed mean, speaking in German and shooing us into the house before we’d had a good night’s sleep. Our makeshift way of living seemed normal to us, but it opened us to harsh judgment, like gypsies.

  Any time any programs about gypsies were on, Ma would call us all to the TV to watch. She had a great fascination with gypsies, and especially with the tinkers in Ireland. When she’d traveled to Ireland as a teenager, she’d run away from her relatives and hung out with caravans of tinkers, playing the accordion for them. Her aunts wrote back to my grandparents telling them that she was shaming them all over Ireland by joining up with “the tribes.” I grew up with a romantic picture of the tinkers from my mother’s stories, and always wondered if we had tinker blood in us, blood that my grandparents would never mention.

  Looking back, it seems that early on I took over the job of trying to keep things looking whatever way they were supposed to look. I worried both about keeping up with the other families and their ways and about making sure that we looked poor enough for surprise visits by the social workers from welfare.

  Ma would get an unexpected call early in the morning saying that the social worker was on her way. She’d wake us all up in a panic about the state of the house. The problem wasn’t that the house was a mess, but rather that it looked like we owned too many modern conveniences for our own good. Poor people weren’t supposed to have a color TV. We’d all have to get up right away on those days to pull a fast one. I actually loved devising strategies for outwitting the inspectors. In no time flat, we’d be running in all directions, getting rid of anything of any value. Out went the toaster. It didn’t work without using a steak knife to pull the bread out, at the risk of electrocution. But a toaster might mean that there’s a man living in the house, giving gifts or money to my mother. Welfare wouldn’t allow for that; God knows a woman with eight kids shouldn’t have a man living in the house! But who needs a man in the home, I always thought, when you have the welfare office? A man would only be abusive, tear at Ma’s self worth, and limit her mobility in life. Welfare could do all that and pay for the groceries. No man ever did that in our home. But our interrogators seemed to be obsessed with the notion of some phantom man sneaking in during the night and buying us appliances. So out went the blender too. Really poor people have no time for exotic milkshakes. We thought it would be enough to put things in the cabinets under the sink, but the social workers got keen to that hiding place. They were shameless about going through cabinets and drawers. We had to resort to the crawl space under the front porch.

  But the new color TV was too big to hide. It was one of those huge wooden-cased televisions with fancy-looking cabinets on either side. So we pulled down a heavy green velvet drape from one of the windows and threw it over the television, turning it into a lovely table to serve the social worker a cup of tea on. We had to look as if we had some television-watching in a house with so many kids, so we pulled out the contraption we’d been using before we finally entered the modern age of Technicolor. It was two sets actually, one sitting on top of the other. One had only sound, and the other had a black-and-white picture that would get scrambled from time to time. You’d have to get someone to hold a butter knife to the place where the antenna used to be, in order to keep the picture straight. Usually that someone was me; everyone raved that I had some kind of magic power to set that TV straight. Ma said that I was the seventh son, and therefore had special powers that the others didn’t have. I was so proud of myself that I would sit for hours holding the butter knife to the back of the TV, forming a human antenna while my family watched its shows: cartoons, “Soul Train,
” or stories about gypsies and gangsters. For a while this was all we had, and I often felt helpless when “The Brady Bunch” would proudly advertise “in color” at the beginning of the show, knowing there was no way that that butter knife would help on that score.

  By the time the social worker arrived, everyone would’ve left for school except me, as I wasn’t yet school age. I got to walk through the house with her and my mother, proud that we looked like we owned nothing at all. Just a few mattresses and an awkward-looking table with an ugly green velvet tablecloth that reached well beyond the floor. And of course while the social worker had her tea on top of our well-draped color television, I sat holding the butter knife to the back of the other TV contraption, reaching my head around to the front to watch morning cartoons. I used to guess at what colors the characters on the set would be if I were watching the TV that the social worker was sitting at. And I couldn’t wait for her to leave so I could find out if I was right.

  The interrogation lasted about an hour, and it usually focused on men. The social worker would take time out to ask if we had heard from “the father.” Ma always said she had no idea where he was. Of course she knew exactly where Mac lived, but didn’t want to let on, reminded as she was of the days of abuse with no groceries at all.

  There had been times when “the father” had tried to come back. I’d always heard the story of the time he came over drunk, smashed the front door window, and started beating on my mother once he got inside. I was less than two years old, standing in a crib. Ma had stored her accordion on a shelf near the crib, and she always loved telling me how I picked it up and smashed it over Mac’s head. She said he was knocked for a loop, and quieted down after that. Of course I don’t remember any of it, but I was proud of the way Ma told the story of me putting up a fight.