Of Irish Blood Read Online Free PDF

World’s Fair and the Irish Village. Four years old, Ag was, and thought she somehow saw Galway Bay from above. “No Ag,” I told her, the two of us sitting at the kitchen table, her watching me do my homework, a year or so after the Fair. “We went up in the air in the Ferris wheel and looked down on the thatched cottages of the Irish Village on Lake Michigan. That is what you remember.”
    “But I can close my eyes right now and see Ireland,” she said. “The green grass, the hills, the white cottages, the blue water rushing in to break on the stones.”
    “Well, Ag,” I told her, “I see that too, in my imagination. I suppose all of us whose parents or grandparents came from Ireland have pictures in our heads that come from their songs and stories.” And then I sang to her, “‘When the fields are fresh and green, I will take you to your home, Kathleen.’”
    My great-aunt Máire, walking through the kitchen, heard us. “I’m one who doesn’t want to go home,” she said. “The songs don’t talk about people starving to death and bodies laying in the street and the landlord stepping over them. Be glad you are in Amerikay, girls. I am.”
    I knew Máire’s children had a landlord for their father. It was her son, my cousin Thomas, told me that day at the Fair when we were all having our dinner at Mrs. Hart’s Donegal Castle. The menu said, “Ye Olde Medieval Fare,” but it was corned beef and cabbage.
    Thomas had settled in San Francisco and must have been about fifty then, never married, and a dour kind of fellow, not laughing and chatting away like the rest of us. A drinker, nipping from the silver pocket flask he offered to no one. He leaned over to me and said, “I own a real castle in Ireland, my father’s, and I’m his oldest son.”
    I saw Aunt Máire watching us and later as we walked along the midway she took me aside.
    “Thomas blathering away to you about his lost inheritance?” she asked me.
    “A bit,” I said.
    “Poor Thomas,” she said, “made up a story in his head and I haven’t the heart to tell him his grandfather Pyke was a monster and the son, his father, not much better.”
    She pointed ahead to where my great-uncle Patrick—my grandda Michael’s brother—and Granny Honora walked together. Married to each other now. Something to get your head around. “Your uncle Patrick told my sons Thomas and Daniel that their father, Robert Pyke, had died a soldier’s death in India. Knew it would please them. Though why anyone would be glad to see the English taking some other poor country by the throat I don’t know.”
    When I was small I thought Uncle Patrick was my grandda. But Uncle Patrick said I’d had the best grandfather in the world, his brother Michael Kelly. “A better man than I am.”
    “But he’s dead,” I said. I was about ten. I liked to help him dig potatoes from the patch he cultivated in a clear space not far from the riverbank where he told me the last Potawatomi family in Bridgeport had camped. Lots of good stories from Uncle Patrick.
    “And what does how long a fellow lives have to do with his greatness?” he asked me.
    “But isn’t living better than dying?” I said.
    “Not always,” he said.
    And I wonder if that wasn’t the day I started turning away from the stories Granny and the black-shawled chorus of women who gathered at our fire told. Such sad tales—lovers separated, soldiers dead, ships going down. In Chicago, Irish people lived happily ever after. Danced to McNamara’s band, the finest in the land, got better jobs, bigger houses, sent their sons to Notre Dame, and cheered the “Fighting Irish” to victory after victory. We lost in Auld Ireland but we are winning in Chicago. Look at me: head of design for Ladies’ Fashion at Montgomery Ward. “Hurrah for me!”
    Except Henrietta’s saying, “Montgomery Ward must be soft in the head. No one’s going to buy some silly dress that you’ve concocted, Nonie. Something else is