All Souls

by Michael Patrick MacDonald

  Ma, I guess this is the end of the line for me. I am about to end my life in a few minutes. I miss Frankie so much. It hurts so much. That kid was everything to me we had so much fun together. I had a dream last night that me and him were riding around together picking up girls. He was so funny then I woke up and started crying and shaking just like I’m doing right now. I want to be with him and Okie. I love them both. Make sure Laura lets you see my wittle wittle moskito.

  Ma don’t go blaming yourself or nothing. Thinking you were a bad mother or some shit like that. You were the best mother anyone could have ever had you were so much fun. I never wanted to be a criminal it just came so easy and nothing else ever came my way. Tell Joey Earner he can have my clothes. Tell Mr and Mrs O’Conner that I will slap Okie for them when I see him.

  Ma I hope there’s no such a thing as hell, but all I know is if there is it cant be anything worse than what I’m feeling right now. Tell the kids not to cry. Love Kevin.

  But now in his Christmas card, Kevin was talking about coming to terms with Frankie’s death, and with his own life. Maybe there was hope. There was a rumor on the streets, though, passed around by Flabbo’s family, that Kevin was a snitch. People knew Kevin had been getting worked by detectives, and they figured he might talk, about everything, all the way up to Whitey’s organization. And everyone knew that Kevin knew a lot.

  So in spite of everything hopeful in that Christmas card, in March Kevin was found hanging from a bed sheet at Bridgewater. He was dead. The detectives who’d become friendly with Ma told her that the last person to visit Kevin, according to the sign-in book, was Detective Walter Kirby, known to be a good friend to the boys and to Whitey himself. They thought it was very unusual that anyone would be let in to visit at eleven-thirty at night. Kevin was found hanging in the bathroom outside his cell not long after midnight.

  I was staying with an artist friend in New York City when Kevin was found. I’d been trying to reach Ma, only to get a busy signal. The operator told me she couldn’t break through because the telephone was off the hook. I knew then that someone was dead. I had no doubts because I wasn’t panicking. I accepted the fact almost calmly. I walked all the way to 42nd Street to get on the bus back to Boston, and as I entered the Port Authority a homeless man stood in my path, shook his finger at me, and laughed, “ ’Til we meet again!” Those were the very words Ma had always put in gold letters on a bright green ribbon across the caskets of the children she’d seen lowered into the ground.

  When I got back to our apartment, it was three in the morning, and I burst through the door to find out who had died. All the lights were out and everyone was in bed. I was looking for sympathy cards in the dark room, and I saw the silhouette of a card standing upright on top of the TV. I turned on the lights and was pissed that someone had turned them off in the first place, letting the cockroaches take over. They were running in all directions now to get away from the light. I grabbed the card: “Happy St. Patrick’s Day.” But under it was the Boston Herald with a picture of Ma and Seamus with sad faces and the headline: “Mom Loses Third Son to Violent Death.”

  “Who’s dead? Who’s fucking dead!” I went screaming through the house and into Ma’s bedroom. “What are you talking about?” Ma said. “Go to bed, for Chrissake, you’re waking up the little kids.” Steven wasn’t in the Herald picture, so I thought it might be him. But because Ma was saying “the little kids,” I knew it wasn’t. “No one died; get some sleep for yourself.” Ma sounded almost believable, not as if she’d just lost a third son to a violent death. I told her I’d seen the Herald headline. Then she gave in and told me, “It’s Kevin,” and her voice broke when she added, “You better get a good night sleep—we have a lot of work to do in the morning.” She spoke from the darkness of her room, and her voice became a muffled cry as she buried her face into the mattress.

  I went to bed numb. I wasn’t going to feel this one. We’d buried Frankie only eight months earlier, and I never wanted to feel again. I chased away any memories of Kevin that popped up, of us taking baths together as toddlers, of him stealing prizes for me at the Irish Field Day, of him beating up anyone who ever messed with me, and of our walks through Southie on his first paper route. I stayed awake all night, and I remember wondering without feeling how many times tragedy could pound Ma’s already shattered heart.

  C H A P T E R 9

  E X I L E

  HEY MIKE, YOU GOT FIFTY CENTS SO I CAN GO TO the Irish Mafia store?” I heard Seamus’s voice from inside the dumpster I was about to toss the trash into. He popped his head up and laughed. Stevie was in there too, along with his best friend, Tommy Viens. They said they were playing cops and robbers and were hiding out from the bad guys. “And who are the … ? Never mind,” I said. We’d all talked about how the little kids had been able to “bounce back” from the tragedy they’d lived through. Seamus was nine and Stevie eight, and here they were, having the time of their lives, making their own fun in the same courtyards and dumpsters where I’d followed Kevin around as a kid. I gave Seamus and Stevie three dollars, one for Tommy, but I told them they couldn’t go to the Irish Mafia store, or to the Clam Shack, and then I knocked off a few other stores that I knew had connections to what I had started to identify as “the bad guys.” My list didn’t leave them many places to go, and in the end they just tramped off to Whitey’s headquarters anyway.

  We didn’t feel the same about our neighborhood now that the kids were dead. Ma said she wanted nothing more than to get the hell out. But there was nowhere to go. Ma was getting $250 a month from welfare, less than a month’s rent in apartments outside the projects. She was going to hairdressing school, hoping to get a job; but the people in the neighborhood who had jobs, usually at factories and plants that bordered the neighborhood, were losing them. This was while downtown cafes and wine bistros continued to pack in the crowds of yuppies who were taking over traditional working-class neighborhoods like Charlestown and the North End. With the rents outside the projects going up, we knew Southie was next.

  Ma worked hard just to keep herself busy after the kids were buried. She said she had no time to sit around feeling sorry for herself, thinking about them. She said they were in a better place, better off than the rest of us. Ma went to hairdressing school every morning, and spent the afternoons cutting hair at the local homeless shelter, even though she always found head lice walking on her scissors afterward. Ma loved being around the homeless. She said it kept her going, listening to all their stories and sending them off “looking like a million bucks.” She said when she got through with them they looked like Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, or one of her other favorite country stars. But when Ma started to hang out with the young gay men from hairdressing school, and going to gay clubs, she updated, and sent the homeless off looking more like Cindy Lauper. Then she started volunteering nights at AIDS wards, giving complete makeovers—hair, makeup, nails—and playing her accordion between stories that kept everyone in stitches—stories about her husbands, her boyfriends, and courtroom scenes with Nellie. Ma said she wanted to help the dying patients prepare to “cross over to the other side,” and she figured some makeup and a few laughs were as good as the Rosary any day.

  Ma was going mad with the makeovers, though. One time my Aunt Sally cried looking into the mirror after Ma got through with her head. She’d been given what Ma was calling “the windswept look,” and the helmet of orange hair plastered to Sally’s forehead and chubby cheeks looked like a cyclone frozen over. Ma told her she looked like Liza Minelli, and Sally said she wanted nothing to do with Liza Minelli. Ma had plucked off Sally’s bushy eyebrows with the tweezers, and her chin whiskers too, which was really why Sally was crying. “Oh, shut up!” Ma snapped at her younger sister. “Dan’ll be thanking me now that I got rid of your beard.”

  That night we heard a gunshot on Patterson Way and Sally made me walk her to the train station, saying anything was better than spending one more minute with Ma, and her cutting and p
lucking.

  Ma was just doing whatever she could to keep her mind off what she was feeling. But the hearses kept rolling down Dorchester Street, where in better days we’d watched the St. Paddy’s Day parade and the antibusing motorcades. And every time it was another Southie mother’s turn to see her child off at Jackie O’Brien’s, it brought Ma right back to reality. She started going to all the wakes, even if she didn’t know the family, and in about a year she counted that she’d been to thirty-two, all dead from suicide, drugs, or crime. Ma started hanging out with other women whose sons or daughters had died, and she started cutting some of their hair too—until they learned to make sure they went to the hairdresser’s on a regular basis so Ma wouldn’t have them walking down Broadway in one of those newfangled cosmopolitan hairdos she was bringing to Southie from the gay clubs.

  Then Ma got into the holy water, after Grandpa took her on a trip to Fatima where the Blessed Mother had appeared to the three children. Holy water and haircuts. Ma was on a mission. To give whatever she was able to give. She was always pulling something out of her pocketbook, whether a piece of toast for the guys on the wino wall, or a rock for someone who needed strength. Besides the scissors and jug of holy water, Ma’s pocketbook was full of rocks that she had brought back from Fatima. “Oh … thanks. What’s this for?” I asked Ma, trying to sound grateful as she handed me a three-pound rock. She told me that when Grandpa and the other pilgrims to Fatima had crawled on their knees to the next holy site, she’d run back to the well where the Blessed Mother had appeared and chiseled out a few stones. “Get down on your knees for Our Lady, you damn fool,” Grandpa told her when she returned. “Like hell I would,” Ma told me. “You should have seen the face on my father, like he was wearing the crown of thorns himself.” Ma was inspired by her own relationship with the Blessed Mother, saying she needed the rocks for some of the mothers burying their kids in Southie. Most people actually treasured their rocks, and some told me that they kept them in their pocketbooks always, to remind them of Helen and all her strength.

  I was worried about Ma in those days, with her running out to gay clubs and blessing the mothers of Old Colony with holy water, but everyone else saw her as an inspiration, just to have gotten up in the morning and put her spike heels on the right feet. The mothers who’d lost one kid didn’t know how she could do it, having lost four. And Ma was even smiling again, as much as she could make herself do. She said she had no other choice, except suicide, and she couldn’t do that, with Seamus and Stevie and all these other people to look after.

  Ma got me to go back to school. She said I was sleeping my life away, and I was. She started making calls, setting up appointments for me to get my GED, and then to take the SATs. She knew how to work the financial aid applications to get the most money for school, even with the cutbacks in education grants. I didn’t know the point of it all, but it felt good to score high on the SATs despite having dropped out of high school. And before long, I was getting up early mornings for the two-mile walk from our apartment to the University of Massachusetts. Being busy like Ma helped me to forget about the kids being dead, sometimes.

  Now Ma had only Seamus and Stevie to worry about. She didn’t want them bused across town, and she couldn’t afford to keep Stevie as well as Seamus at St. Augustine’s. Ma called the Boston School Department and tried to find out where Stevie would be assigned for first grade. It all depended on your address. “If I lived at 8 Patterson Way, would my son be able to go to the Perkins School across the street?” Ma said the woman on the phone understood what she was getting at. She said she was from Roxbury and wanted to send her own kid to school near home. The woman told Ma that if she did live at 8 Patterson Way, her son would be bused, but that if she happened to live at 9 Patterson Way, he could go to the Perkins. Ma hung up the phone and called back, saying she lived at 9 Patterson Way, even though there was no such address. Later that morning, Ma whispered to the mailman that she’d be getting mail sent to 9 Patterson, and to tell the other guys at the post office just to get it to her and to not ask any questions. The mailman was happy to help. “Hey, I gotta try that for my kid,” he said.

  “Just keep going, and hold your head high!” Ma told her new friend Theresa Dooley as they walked past the gossipers who’d left their stoops in the project to stroll down Broadway. Ma barged her way into Theresa’s life after she heard that her fifteen-year-old son had hung himself in his bedroom. “Two kids! That’s like a double murder, and these dirty bastard politicians keep saying there are no problems in Southie?” Ma knew that Tony Dooley’s suicide had everything to do with the murder of his big brother Tommy—who he’d idolized—in front of Kelly’s Cork and Bull. Ma went over to the Old Harbor Project on the feast day of the Mother of Sorrows and asked neighbors where Mrs. Dooley lived. She walked into her house, telling her to get dressed and to come for a walk up Broadway. Ma knew that people liked to whisper when the two of them walked by. Some would stare into their eyes looking for the grief. But Ma said she wouldn’t satisfy them. “If they want to talk, they should talk about what the hell is happening in this neighborhood before it’s their turn next!” One woman actually told Ma she didn’t want to get too close to her or Theresa, that the bad luck might rub off on her. Within a month the same woman nonetheless ended up burying her own son, dead from an overdose. That’s when she found out that in Southie it had little to do with luck.

  Ma was still trying to uncover details of Frankie’s and Kevin’s deaths, but no one seemed to have them. Theresa was still pursuing Tommy’s killers, but the homicide cops had long since given up on witnesses, and the Stokes family still laughed at her whenever she walked into the Irish Mafia store, before Whitey took it over from them. “The Devil has no conscience,” Ma said. They both had it in them to fight, two daughters of Irish immigrant workers who’d raised children on their own in tough housing projects, scraping up money to try to keep them in school and off the streets, against the plans of liberals who knew better and a drug lord who knew best. But there was even less mothers like them could do now, in the face of an extensive criminal drug ring reaching far into the offices of local politicians and the ranks of the police department. Theresa, always more of a churchgoer than Ma, had never imagined the corruption Ma was starting to talk about. She was dealt another blow when Ma told her that Tommy Dooley’s case probably wouldn’t have a shot, since his killer’s family was married into the family of Detective Lumsden. In later years, Lumsden would be investigated for allegedly receiving thousands of dollars to protect gambling rackets associated with Whitey.

  People in Southie didn’t trust the police, except for the ones they were related to, since the beatings and the cover-ups of those beatings we’d witnessed during busing. For many kids my age, hate for the cops was a good enough reason to be an outlaw. But Ma’s opinion of cops only solidified after her kids were dead and she decided to snitch about the drugs in town. “If you’re going to drop a dime,” her friend Snooka warned her, “you better do it from a phone booth, and whatever you do, don’t give a name!” Snooka knew what she was talking about. Her own son was a drug dealer in D Street Project, and one time when she tried to snitch on him, calling the drug unit of the police department, she got a knock on her door the next day from Whitey’s underlings, who gave her a warning. “Don’t you know who’s taking those calls at the drug unit?” she asked Ma, as if she was the only one who didn’t. “Patsy Magee, that’s who!”

  “Don’t you know who’s taking those calls at the drug unit?” Ma was asking me the same question as if now I was the idiot who should know more about what goes on in Southie’s underworld. “And who the fuck is Patsy Magee?” I asked her. I didn’t know much about Southie crime, and didn’t want to know either. I was just wishing I could sweep my whole family up and take them out of this death trap. Ma told me that Patsy Magee was a sister to Kevin Magee, one of Whitey’s top lieutenants. “He’s the fat guy Whitey has the liquor store with. Mother of Christ, he can hardly
walk with all the fat on him.… Good thing he carries a gun.” Ma said she didn’t know where to turn, who to trust in the neighborhood. “Let’s just get the fuck out,” I said. As if it was that easy.

  I stayed out of the neighborhood as much as I could, sleeping on friends’ couches around the city, and getting up in the morning to go to my classes. I went to New York quite a bit, catching rides there to see bands or go to clubs. But no matter how far I ran, Southie was always on my mind, and I called the house all the time to check up on my family. “Is everyone okay?” was the first thing I’d ask when Ma picked up the phone. “Oh, my aching Jesus,” Ma screamed into my ear, “you’re driving me up a wall! You’ll have to see a psychiatrist or something, with all the calls, day in and day out.” But I never believed Ma was telling the truth when she said everyone was okay, so I asked her if she was sure everyone was okay, before getting a loud click in my ear.

  One time I was in New York staying with friends, sleeping on the floor of an art gallery they owned in the Lower East Side. As grungy as the neighborhood was, I was as removed from the world of Old Colony as I could be, with paintings all around the room—heavenly scenes with angels and comic parodies of New York high society. One night there I had a dream that brought back the sick feeling I’d started to get whenever I walked over the Broadway Bridge, back into Whitey’s clean-cut neighborhood. I dreamt I was walking into Old Colony and was approached by some kid crying and begging that I listen to him. “Something terrible is about to happen,” he wept. “This shit’s gotta stop.” I spent the next morning trying to figure out who the kid was. At breakfast I drifted away while my friends were arguing about something artsy and useless to my troubled head. “Johnnie Baldwin!” I said. They all looked at me. “He’s just this kid who was in my dream last night. He and three other kids were drinking and driving and crashed into a bus and died four years ago.”