...and on and on. Here's the next bit. I'll go on like this until
I've serialized the whole thing, à la Dickens.
Maybe some kind editor will spot it and ask to publish it. (All right, all
right, you can stop laughing now.) Intermittently, I'll be posting pieces on
other subjects than myself, which will be a pleasant change.
2. In the 1870s a
mysterious crisis that led directly to my being born an American occurred in
the Boylan house of hogs in Clones. Whether the casus belli was religion, or money, or somebody else’s wife (or,
more likely, hog), or the goggle-eyed way your man had of staring when he’d
drink taken, or a bungled bit of pocket picking or horse thieving, we’ll never
know; but feelings ran high, heated words were exchanged, gunshots were fired,
and the result of the whole business was Ned Boylan, my great-grandfather—a
lovely man to look at, judging from the sole photograph I ever saw of him: wide
shoulders and big white mustache and eyes blue as the speedwell flower or the
occasional Irish sky—hitting the road southward to Dublin with his wife Mary
and sons Ned Junior (my Granda) and Bobby in tow, along with attendant bags and
suitcases, most of them portaged by Mary in the fine old Mediterranean
tradition of rural Ireland. Watching them go from beneath the Palladian
fanlight of the doorway of their tumbledown Queen Anne manor house was Ned’s
big brother Eomer, jeering “Sod off ya wankers,” or “Get out of it ya shites”
or touching words of farewell of that nature. In the background a flute keened,
a bodhran throbbed, kiddies sobbed. (Or am I thinking of that John Ford movie?)
Ned, I’m sure, never looked back, but made his way stiff-necked down the
winding road, attempting a manly swagger, and no doubt (I can see it from here)
turning to distribute redundant cuffs about the head to his two lads, as a
means of asserting such meager authority as he yet had. The lads, frustrated,
turned on each other, and continued doing so until their own Great Rupture
thirty-odd years later, history unknown being condemned to repeat itself, as we
know (or not)…but I anticipate.
My
great-grandad was, in truth, terrified of what he was doing, as who wouldn’t
be? But to give the old lad his due, after lengthy sojourns in the hostelries
of Balbriggan, Skerries, Dublin, and Liverpool, he succeeded in getting everybody
across the water safely. They came to Philadelphia, pot o’ gold at the end of
the trans-Atlantic rainbow. Irish were everywhere, but they coalesced into
exclusive groups by county or clan of origin, and spilled across the Delaware
into New Jersey, and southwards into Delaware and Maryland. Legions of paddies
headed west to work on the California and Utah railroads, or north for work on
the Erie-Lackawanna line or the Great Lakes. As for Ned Boylan, he stayed put
and made a living at first by applying tar to guy-ropes down on the Philly
docks; then, when that palled (after, I would imagine, about ten minutes), he
stitched soles on shoes for a German shoemaker named Willy Brandt. (His real
name; the Willy you're thinking of was named Herbert Frahm, in reality.) Great-gran,
the poor wretch, in common with so many other poor immigrant female wretches,
took in washing and scrubbed floors and kept the kids clean—yet the woman in
the end was a success, unlike her husband. Ned was a good man but a dreamer,
and he withered away in the garish and ramshackle new world without the
reassurance of rutted boreens and Connemara ponies and the sound and scent of
pipes and overflowing pewter pints down at the local. But Herr Brandt, his
benefactor, who’d come down to the docks holding up a sign reading “Shues:
Helfer Needed,” was an all-too-understanding man, a widower and immigrant
himself from the Rhineland, a manic depressive just like Ned, and consequently
no slouch when it came to emptying bottles, in his case slim ones of hock. The
two became drinking buddies and let the shoemaking business go to hell,
traducing two families. Kindly Willy keeled over of an aneurysm one day while
halfheartedly tooling his leather, leaving nothing to his children but debts
and unsold shoes; and Ned Boylan, by then in his early fifties and not in the
best of health, was forced to find work on the railroad, pumping a railcar on
the new Reading-Pottstown line. It was a bad career move for a hard-drinking
asthmatic, and one morning, around a scenic bit of hillside track in the
Alleghenies, his heart up and quit on him. He slowly toppled over the side of
the railcar and tumbled into a bed of sun-warmed pine needles, where he lay
face down as the unmanned car, gathering speed, rattled downhill and finally
hurtled off the next trestle and came to rest, wheels spinning, in the burbling
nascent Schuylkill.
