That We Shall Die

by Peter Hey

  Jane sat in silence, unsure if she should ask any more questions, whether she had heard enough.

  Her aunt stubbed out her cigarette and leant forward. The coldness left her voice.

  ‘Jane, sweetheart. He saw you. He was going to talk to you but he lost his nerve. My big, tough brother, who never backed away from anyone or anything in his life, was scared you’d reject him I guess. Like he deserved, like he rejected you. He said you were beautiful. You looked tall and strong and… upright. Not a lowlife scumbag like the rest of us. Like you would have been if he’d stayed around and dragged you down. I’ve never seen my brother cry – and he didn’t – but he was as near as I’ve ever seen him. He just kept saying, “She’s beautiful, Stace. She’s beautiful.”’

  Jane felt as if her own eyes should be heavy with tears, but her emotions refused to react. ‘Then he obviously didn’t get up close,’ she said.

  Jane walked back to her car across the playing field. Her flat shoes became caked in mud but she didn’t much care. She found her car unmolested, though there was a group of three teenagers on mountain bikes looking at it suspiciously from across the road. She ignored them and climbed in. She started the engine and then decided to lower the roof. It wasn’t the weather for open-top motoring, but she cranked up the heater and set off home.

  DNA

  Jane hadn’t dreamt of her father for some time. That night, her subconscious conjured him back to where he had always been in her childhood thoughts, saying goodbye on a windswept quayside beneath the arcing hull of that vast grey ship. It was a scene without substance, a memory that had been planted by her mother and grandparents, and nurtured by Jane herself until it put down deep roots. But now she was watching the drama from an unfamiliar viewpoint, high above, seeing the tearful little girl, the huge man and the ocean liner, which became ever more hazily transparent until it faded into nothingness. Jane was standing on a precipitous clifftop and could hear Dave’s voice calling her back from the edge. The earth beneath her feet was slowly cracking and falling away, and she started to drop. And then she was standing in the place of her younger self, but grown tall and staring straight into her father’s face. The black pirate’s patch that obscured his scarred right eye began to melt to a seeping, oozing red. He reached out for her, and she found herself turning and scrambling up the steep cliff face. But the surface was broken and loose. She kept slipping back, unable to get away and with hands torn and bloodied on the sharp rocks. She was jolted awake by frustration and terror, and her night’s sleep was over.

  Jane drank her first coffee of the day in a mood that alternated between relief and despair. Her father had come back into her life. Close enough to see her, to watch her, but without making contact. He was unlikely to come anywhere near her again. Jane’s rational side knew that could only be for the best. He had nothing to offer her but anguish and trouble. Nonetheless, the little girl within was hoping he would seek her out one more time. But that child spoke with two voices, one of loss and longing, the other of betrayal and anger. How would she react if he did turn up at her door? Would she fall into his arms or ring for the police?

  Jane needed to distract herself through work, and Alan’s DNA results were ready online, waiting to be analyzed. She sat at her dining table and opened her laptop. As she waited for it to come to life, she glanced through the French windows and realised the garden was still looking untidy. Did she need to bite the bullet and cut everything back, or could she put it off until next year? She was relieved of that concern when her computer chimed out to say it was ready. The new machine was much faster than the old one. That had been retired after it was hacked by the overzealous idiot who had been spying on her on behalf of her father. Perhaps she did have something to thank her daddy for.

  There were 163 people who shared enough DNA with Alan for the website to suggest they could be 4th cousins or closer. There would be thousands more distant relatives, but Jane was trying to find clues to Alan’s paternity and going through so many generations seemed unlikely to provide anything conclusive. 163 was still a large number, but many would be anonymously untraceable. Only a subset would have a useable family tree attached. The challenge was to find one or more on Alan’s father's side and exactly how they were related.

  There was the option of searching for births located in Cuba, but that drew a disappointing blank, so Jane decided to examine Alan’s ethnicity profile. In the past, there had been questions over the accuracy of these breakdowns, but the reference populations on which they were based were constantly being researched and refined. And in this case, understanding Alan’s ethnic makeup could be of particular value. She was looking for that Cuban connection, and whilst the island’s history made it a racial melting pot, there were clear themes.

  Columbus set foot on the island in 1492 during his first voyage of discovery. The explorer left for the last time over 400 years later, having travelled in death almost as much as in life. His remains were removed from Havana Cathedral when the Spanish were finally forced to relinquish the last major colony of their once-great Latin American empire. They had been humiliated in 1898’s brief war against the United States, a country which would grow to dominate the 20th-century world much as Spain had done in the 16th. The early conquistadors had greedily carried out the papal bull to overthrow ‘barbarous’ nations of the New World and bring pagan souls to the Catholic faith, and they had taken control of Cuba by 1514. After the native Taino population all but died out from imported European diseases, African slaves were brought in to provide labour on the farms and the plantations of sugar and tobacco. Over the centuries of rule from Madrid, there were also successive waves of immigration from Spain herself. Despite decades of revolts, slavery was not abolished until 1886. Over a third of Cubans now considered themselves black or ‘mulatto’, mixed race, but the majority identified as white. There had always been a good deal of intermingling, but Alan’s facial appearance suggested a predominantly European background. Jane was expecting there to be a high percentage of Spanish blood flowing through his veins, perhaps with traces of sub-Saharan African and Amerindian. That was not what she found.

  Nearly 40% of Alan’s DNA was shown as being from ‘England, Wales and Northwestern Europe’, reflecting his mother’s forebears who were from London, Portsmouth, Leeds and the surrounding regions. There was also 8% that came from the generations of Shaws who lived in County Down, Belfast and Dublin, though this was identified as Scottish rather than Irish. Jane recalled that the family had moved from Lowland Scotland in the early 1600s as part of the plantations to assert English-speaking, Protestant dominance over the Gaelic, Catholic Irish. The DNA was evidence that religious and cultural differences had precluded intermarriage between the communities. Jane was reminded, however, that nationality and ethnicity are different things. Alan’s great-grandfather, Thomas Shaw, had been born in a wintry barracks in Tynemouth and had died on another English coast down in Southsea, but whenever officialdom asked had always declared himself Irish.

  So, what of Alan’s ties to that other island, Cuba? There were large segments of his genetic code that could not be attributed to his mother, but they were almost exclusively Italian rather than Spanish. There was zero African or indigenous Cuban DNA reported.

  Jane sat back and wondered what someone with an Italian background might be doing in Cuba in the first years of Castro’s rule. But Alan’s mother was there, so why not another foreigner, drawn perhaps by the idealistic zeal of socialism? She immediately thought of Che, the Argentinian whose thirst for revolution later took him to the Congo and, finally, to a Bolivian death. Unfortunately, Wikipedia said the young doctor was himself of Spanish and, indeed, Irish descent, his full name sometimes being rendered as Ernesto Guevara Lynch.

  Then Jane remembered something she had read whilst researching Juan Manual Fangio. Sure enough, she soon confirmed that both of the great racing driver’s parents were born in Italy. But as Tommy had said, Fangio wasn’t in Cuba at the time o
f Alan’s conception. He had met Alan’s mother two years earlier, but his kidnapping had made him steer well clear of the island for over twenty years. But could a liaison have occurred outside of Cuba? How easy would it have been for Alan’s mother to get out, and back in, in those politically charged times?

  Jane realised she was getting fixated on famous names. The probable truth had always been that Alan’s father was someone who left only the faintest trace on history. But at least she now knew he was likely a man whose ancestors had herded their goats in the fields and mountains of Italy.

  Having gained a potentially critical insight, Jane turned her attention to the 163 people listed as Alan’s 4th cousins or closer.

  Jane’s hopes were raised when the very first name appeared to be Italian. Mario Russo was included as a potential 2nd cousin – tantalisingly close in DNA terms – but he had supplied no other information to indicate who or where he was. Jane quickly discovered that Russo was an unhelpfully common surname and there could be hundreds, if not thousands, of potential candidates all over the world. Fortunately, the technology provided a magic bullet. Jane was able to see which other profiles were a shared match for both Alan and Mario. One of those had considerately attached an extensive family tree, and the website even picked out the specific ancestor in common. This turned out to be one of the watermen who lived in the narrow streets of Old Portsmouth. Mario Russo was also related to that waterman; hence his genetic link was through Alan’s mother, not his father. It transpired Jessie Ostel’s youngest daughter had travelled the world as a dancer, before settling down in Rome with a doctor called Russo. Mario was presumably their son or grandson.

  Disappointed, Jane settled down to working through the remaining 162 names. Her plan was to focus on those who had at least some Italian DNA and no obvious maternal connections.

  One of the earliest candidates proudly and intriguingly identified herself as ‘IAmNavajo68’. The thumbnail photograph certainly looked the part, but it was far from clear how Alan might be linked to someone with Native American as well as Italian heritage. Again, the ability to see shared matches provided the key. IAmNavajo68 was also related to three of Alan’s more distant cousins, one of whom had provided a family tree, of sorts. It only went back two generations, and even then, nearly all the entries were still alive with their details automatically hidden. Jane was left with one identifiable person, a brother who died prematurely in his thirties but had been born in the New Mexican city of Albuquerque. Alton Francesco Fullelove had been blessed with a unique name if not long life, and Jane soon found him on another public tree, much wider in its extent and detail. It transpired that Alton’s Italian blood came through one of his grandfathers, Francesco Pecorelli. Jane spent some time working her way around Francesco’s family and cousins, and found a line where the surname abruptly changed from Pecorelli to Kelly. Giuseppe Pecorelli became Joseph Kelly sometime after emigrating from Naples in the early 1900s. One of his sons married a shopkeeper of Navajo extraction and lived well into his nineties. A younger brother, Frank, showed his loyalties ran deeper than just an Americanised name by giving his life for Uncle Sam on Anzio beach in 1944. It was the only time he ever set foot in his ancestral homeland. His wife, Giovanna, died just five years later, before reaching her 40th birthday. Their only child, Joe, had seemingly reacted to her loss by following in his father’s footsteps. Joe’s profile had a photo showing a young man in the unmistakable uniform of an American GI. Something about his face looked familiar, and Jane began to read his story with anticipation and interest. Joe was brought up in Texas but enlisted and fought in the Korean War, where he was awarded the Purple Heart medal. Upon leaving the army, Joe Kelly moved to Havana and – Jane’s eyes opened wide – worked in a casino in the same hotel as Alan’s mother. The only other information on his time in Cuba concerned his death in the Escambray Mountains in late 1960.

  His uncle was credited as the source and had composed the following enigmatic epitaph:

  ‘At the end, Joe showed who he really was, the man who his father and grandfather would have wanted him to be. For the second time in his short life, he took up a rifle to fight against the red tyranny of communism. He was captured by Castro’s goons and shot without trial. At that moment, any mistakes he might have made were purged from his record. God bless Joe Kelly, an American hero. We’re proud to have you as one of ours.’

  Jane sat back. This Texan of Italian background had been in Cuba, in that very hotel, and would have still been alive, just, when Alan was conceived. Jane looked again at the young soldier’s picture. She zoomed in and studied his features. Where had she seen them before? Was there a facial similarity to Alan? Perhaps, but there was something else. Then it came to her. She brought up the image of Alan’s mother meeting Che Guevara in Havana in January 1959. In the background were several smiling, joyful soldiers. One, his hair thinning at the temples but darkly Latin and bearded like the rest, now stood out from those around him. The eyes and nose gave him away. It was Joe Kelly.

  Phoenix

  Dear Jane

  Thank you for your email and your kind words about my research. One does try one’s best! But seriously, it’s my great passion and I’ve spent many happy hours – probably too many – trying to tell the story of people to whom I am in some way related. I know there’s a body of thought that you shouldn’t make your tree public, or that you should carefully restrict what you put out there, but I firmly believe I am doing my own little bit to keep alive those who are no longer with us. Someone said you die twice, once when you stop breathing and a second time when the last person speaks your name. You and I never met Joe Kelly, but we’re talking about him now, so we’re giving him his small share of immortality.

  I’ll stop preaching now, I promise! Can I tell you any more about Joe? A little. I spoke to his uncle, my late husband’s 2nd cousin once removed(!), some 20 years ago, when I had just started my family history journey. As you know, the first rule of this game is to interview all your older living relatives while you still can. Joe’s uncle was ancient by then, but his mind was sharp as a tack. I took lots of notes, though I recall he was cagey about elements of what he told me. After all this time, I can’t be sure that some of the nuances weren’t conjecture on my part – reading, or should that be writing, between the lines – but I do know that I, in turn, have been uncharacteristically careful about what I put online. There’s immortality, but there’s also defamation. We’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, after all. But – all things considered – I guess your client deserves to know the truth.

  This, then, is the full, unexpurgated story based on what, I think, I was told. (In reality, it’s nothing like full. It’s one man’s view based on a handful of memories and facts, tempered by the prejudices and preconceptions from which we all suffer.)

  Joe had a difficult upbringing. His mother, Giovanna, was a pretty girl, but troubled. The word his uncle used was “psycho”. I underlined it. I’m sure he just meant the poor woman had always suffered episodes of bad mental health. We Italian Americans can be emotional, but apparently she was really unstable and very, very volatile. After her husband was killed at Anzio, it pushed her over the edge and she was finally committed to an institution. I wasn’t explicit about how she died, but the fact is she took her own life. Not surprisingly perhaps, Joe was always getting in trouble as a kid, fights, run-ins with the police. He couldn’t settle in any of the jobs he tried so ended up in the army. He was sent to Korea in 1950 and received the Purple Heart, which is a medal awarded for being wounded in the face of the enemy. Joe took some shrapnel in the arm. He wasn’t hurt enough to be repatriated, but something happened over there a few months later that meant he was sent home before the rest of his unit. His uncle would only say Joe was very angry and resentful about it. He left the army under a cloud and, through a friend, got a job working in Havana. The Mob controlled all the gambling back then, and Joe was, I’m afraid, employed as some kind of heavy. Along com
es Castro, closes down the casinos, takes over everything, and all US citizens get the hell out. But not Joe. He’d actually gone off the radar the year before, and the family weren’t sure if he’d upset his bosses – and you wouldn’t want to upset the sort of people Joe worked for – or what had happened to him. Everyone feared the worst, but Joe finally got back in touch after the revolution and seemed to be very much in favour of the new regime, initially at least. I always had a suspicion that he might have fought on Castro’s side – your photo appears to confirm that – but his uncle was reluctant to admit it. The old man had been a big supporter of McCarthyism and was not exactly impressed that his nephew had become what he saw as a “Commie”. Anyway, there was hardly any contact after that. Then, a year or so later, the family heard from the US embassy in Havana just before it closed down. Joe had been killed, now fighting against Castro’s troops as part of the movement to depose him.

  So, basically, we’re not 100% sure what Joe Kelly was up to in Cuba in the final period of his life. It’s hard to understand his thinking and his motivations. His uncle believed he had at least picked the right side in the end.

  And it’s entirely possible he had a romantic liaison with your client's mother. He wouldn’t be the first soldier to get a girl pregnant far from home. And his uncle did say Joe’s last message home told them that he’d got married, though not who to, and I’ve never been able to find any record of it. You have your DNA evidence and, of course, that photograph. It certainly looks like Joe to me, too. It seems my family tree has got a little bit bigger.