Law and Order

by Uhnak, Dorothy

  No one moved to the west; the west was the barren place, its voids filled only with sorrows too bitter to mention. Clare and Galway and Mayo were the places of wild beauty from which people came and held only in memory, with the hard and cold and hungry days mellowed and gentled by time and distance.

  But the O’Malleys, father and mother and sons and daughters, came, thrust themselves upon the quiet wind-swept hills, moved into a deserted, half-destroyed hut, collected stones from odd places, filled the holes, turfed the roof, washed down the walls and set the peat to burning without anyone’s by-your-leave. There was no one really to send them packing, for the former tenant, gone so long none could recall his name or story, had no claim to the house. The actual owner, far from his property, had no informer or agent to set or collect rent from the dead ruins which had been so heartily resurrected by the O’Malley clan.

  The O’Malleys filled places in their lives that no one in Clifden had dreamed were empty. They brought an excitement which was more than just the rare intrusion of strangers. They brought with them a certain daring and determination and sense of life which the bleak, weary, drained and emptied villagers and countrymen around the tiny town watched with wariness at first, then with interest, then, gradually, with a reviving enthusiasm of their own toward life.

  The O’Malleys had no intention whatever of rotting or dying off in silence. They let it be known they were just biding time until they would be able to retrace their steps across the face of the land to the Irish Sea, to embarkation, to the New World. What had brought them, in obvious flight, to the west, was a mystery to which they never referred, nor permitted any in their hearing to refer, and it was a matter of much speculation.

  The O’Malleys let it be known that their plan was a migration: the whole lot of them, not just an eldest son, or daughter with a position waiting, but the whole bunch of them, part and parcel, from parents to oldest son, Peadar, to youngest girl, Maureen. They’d go when the time and cash came together, and if they’d be damned, well, then, they’d go and be damned and so be it.

  Kevin O’Malley, the father, was a large red-haired and red-faced man who announced himself in the town’s main pub to be a man of all trades and entertainments. He briskly listed his accomplishments to an unimpressed gathering: tradesman and craftsman; common laborer or skilled; a head for facts and figures; a teller of stories to hold the listener spellbound; a player of tunes and a singer of songs. To prove the last boast, he motioned to his oldest son, a tall, vague, reddish-haired shadow of the father, who provided a fiddle which Kevin fondled for a moment and then briskly played.

  He cajoled them all to join him in singing but they held back until his own voice, strong and clear, reached into them, surrounded them, embraced them, until they could feel the very tune reel inside their blood. One by one, the younger men first, uncertain and shy, glances cast at their elders, who finally moved their own lips, unloosed their own voices, joined in, unable to remain silent in the face of Kevin O’Malley’s singing.

  No one had any money to speak of, yet, carefully, eyes averted, as though they might be committing an offense, they placed the large copper pennies in the hat which rested, upturned, upon the bar.

  “Don’t be shy, lads,” Kevin O’Malley roared at them. “Jasus knows, there’s none to hear the dumb man and doesn’t it bring joy to your hearts to hear the gifted!”

  He traveled the countryside, his sons with him, his wife and girls awaiting him at home. He returned with his wagon filled with kindling or grain or a sheep or goat or two. Sometimes, he brought a rare bag of coins. Rarely did he return empty-handed, and when he did, he would embrace his wife and girls with rough heartiness and sit over mugs of tea and plan for future encounters with fate.

  They acquired, somehow, through shrewd trade or dumb luck, a lean and fragile greyhound with haunted eyes and trembling frame. They raced him and won; raced him and lost; purchased a mate for him; raised some pups; sold some; raced others. Won and lost, but won more than lost.

  Occasionally, Kevin and his sons disappeared for long periods of time and then returned home silent and thoughtful, reluctant to join the men in the pub or around the open fire in someone’s hut. There were rumors went about at those times: that the O’Malleys had been up to a bad day’s work to the north. But whatever the bad day’s work might be, no one would care to speculate out loud, and the rumors, dark and dour and curious, would hang over them for a while until Kevin appeared, all gloom cast off, with a generous offer of a sup and a swallow and all such talk would cease. Yet there was always that about them: an aura of unspoken deeds done in the black of night, mysterious, unknowable and vastly intriguing.

  Kevin brought into the town great surly brutes of men who hammered at each other’s bodies and heads with mallet fists to the amazed and excited shouts of the men of five neighboring communities who traveled upward of ten miles by foot and wagon and paid their bread money to watch the matches.

  Kevin sold and traded and acquired and dispensed: animals, goods, services, arrangements of all kinds. The O’Malleys seemed to live off the land or from up their sleeves for they were never known to spend hard coin. Cash was for the family’s migration to America and for nothing else in this world or the other.

  Kevin O’Malley’s last great spectacle was not intended by him to be his last; it was as his fate decreed without consulting himself.

  On his travels, he had come upon a huge beast of a man, nearer to seven feet tall than six, with shoulders wide enough for two men and legs as stout around as solid old trees and arms to match. He managed to convince the lad—he was a simple farm boy—to test his strength by lifting heavy things: stones and logs and man and animal. Kevin caught the basic flaw; while the lad had strength, he had no technique. He bent from his ample waist, so that when he lifted, all the exertion went to his back. Huge and strong though he was, he was no great weight lifter and Kevin took care not to teach him too much: just enough for Kevin’s purpose.

  His purpose was to match the boy against the strong men in various villages, to hold events and spectacles and have the wagering fall in such a way that Kevin O’Malley would, in a manner of speaking, emerge the strongest man of all of them. To convince the crowd that the great lad—his name was Aiden Doyle—could be beaten, for his mere size might discourage strong men to try him, Kevin, though a large man, no larger than those who might be reluctant, though tempted, would first oppose the lad. Because he knew the tricks and techniques of how to lift and shift and balance (for hadn’t he and his own brothers performed for crowds when he was just a lad himself?), Kevin could handle a surprisingly great weight. The lad’s strength alone, without technique, could either come close to or beat Kevin, but the difference in their performance was slight enough to encourage men, who now measured themselves by Kevin’s performance.

  Kevin held his matches and won his coins, as he’d expected. The big fellows of each village could not resist the challenge. Encouraged by their chums, they proved their manhood by breaking their backs and soothed their injured pride by cooling their losers’ thirsts in the local pub, whose owner, by arrangement and in appreciation, but mostly by arrangement, paid a certain fee to Kevin for each drink sold. For wasn’t his spectacle the reason for the heavy drink in the middle of the week?

  However, something happened that Kevin had not anticipated. Aiden Doyle, who worshiped Kevin completely, had taken to watching him carefully, emulating him, learning from him. Bending deeply at his knees, he taught himself to lift as skillfully as did Kevin O’Malley. In the process, he rendered himself unbeatable and no one wanted to match against him. Frantic to prove him beatable, for he was earning a nice coin from the events, Kevin offered himself against Aiden, but the word went around: “Sure, O’Malley, but he’d let you win to lure an unsuspecting opponent.”

  Livid at the accusation of dishonesty—which in this particular case was totally unwarranted—Kevin, on the spot, devised a test of strength which none could call dish
onest.

  He ordered his sons to release the horse from the wagon, and before anyone could believe what the man was doing, O’Malley was stretched face down under the wagon from where he declared he would lift the wagon six inches off the ground. “Then let’s see if the lad can do the same. I’ll warrant he can’t, for though he’s stronger than me on the surface, he’s no technique. To prove me good faith, I’ll take no bets on this event at all.”

  The crowd decided that no one at all, O’Malley or Doyle, could perform such a feat and they drew around astonished and impressed. If Kevin O’Malley could perform such a task, who among them couldn’t take on the farm lad?

  It wasn’t as difficult as it would appear on the surface of it. It was a trick he’d worked out many years ago, a stunt he and his brothers had devised. It had to do with balance and force and technical things which didn’t involve strength so much as skill, and Kevin knew young Aiden wouldn’t be able to budge the wagon, and that his great failure would be an attractive lure to the men to try again.

  Kevin O’Malley, aged forty-eight, positioned himself in the way he remembered from some thirty years past. He drew his breath in sharply, stiffened his body, pressed his hands flat into the face of the earth, dug the tips of his boots in and arched his body.

  For one incredible instant, the wagon rose from the hard soil, balanced unbelievably, six inches from the ground, on the back of Kevin O’Malley, whose face, purple and stunned, seemed to freeze, turned black and collapsed at the same moment his outraged heart burst within his chest, failing, in its outrage, his otherwise fine and healthy body.

  The newly widowed mother gathered her clan about her and bitterly informed them that their recently deceased father had been a damned and bloody fool but that didn’t mean the rest of them should be stuck for all time in this empty and dying land scrounging for their pennies. She snapped her fingers at her eldest son, Peadar, who carefully placed a familiar canvas bag on top of the table. The mother knew, to the exact penny, how much hard cash the bag contained. More importantly, she knew what it represented.

  “We leave at the end of this very week,” she told them and they did.

  There were a few unforeseen things prior to leaving, but they were cleared up to the widow’s satisfaction if no one else’s.

  Matthew, the quietest of her five sons and two daughters, sought her out and with great stammering and blushing mentioned that he’d like very much to marry young Anne Foley from down the glen, and she a wild slip of a girl with a very bad temper. Widow O’Malley considered carefully, chewed her lip and advised him to speak with the younger O’Brien girl, Ellen, who was placid enough and had large blue eyes and a gentle expression.

  Matthew did as he was advised, and though he was a great deal older than the girl, she thought him quite handsome and the idea of going to America seemed great fun. For his part, Matthew thought it probably would all work out pretty much the same in the end, and this way, his mother was pleased with him.

  The next thing was with her son Brian, and a different lad from his older brother, though him only nineteen, but a will of iron. He was much taken, though God alone knew why, with the next O’Brien girl, Margaret, not quite eighteen, yet seeming younger than her sixteen-year-old sister. The mother knew she could not put Brian off, so there was no point to deny him. In a way, it would be good for the lad to have a steady country girl for a wife, for he’d need the protection from the trollops and wild girls in America.

  Brian O’Malley’s shadow fell on her before she heard the sound of him and she grabbed a handful of thick wool to keep her hands from trembling. The beige-eyed lamb protested the unexpected indignity loudly with much bleating. She concentrated then on gelding it and tried not to look up into his handsome face, but it became impossible.

  “Well,” he said bluntly, “we’re off at last, now the dad’s been done. The whole damned pack of us, off to the New World.”

  “What will you do there?” she asked shyly.

  “Why, live, of course, and grow rich and powerful. My old mother’s a brother there, in America, in Bronx City, that’s in New York somehow. And he’s to get us all into the Police Department there for he’s a great many connections.” His hand reached idly into the animal’s coat, his fingers moved, caught hers and held. “Well then, Margaret. Your sister Ellen’s accepted Matthew and he’s nowhere near the catch that I am; here’s your chance. Are you comin’ with us or not?”

  That was his proposal and she accepted.

  They were married, two brides and two grooms, by Father McSweeney at the village church and he was secretly glad to be done with the whole mob of O’Malleys for he’d feared from the first they’d bring the wrath of the authorities on the whole village for their secret comings and goings through the years.

  The O’Briens, mother and father, brothers, sisters, pressed the girls briefly in final embrace: they’d never come home, nor see them again. Ellen stared straight ahead, but Margaret watched over her shoulder as the land fell back and far away as they jogged in the O’Malley wagon to the sea.

  The early years in New York City were a time of unrelenting terror for Margaret O’Brien O’Malley. They were a totally wild bunch, the O’Malleys, the girls as much as the boys, given to terrible bursts of temper and angry words which led directly to flying fists. They didn’t care what harm they did each other or themselves for that matter. In their fights they wrecked the few sticks of furniture which were jammed into the long, dark and heavy-smelling rooms up three flights of stairs from the cement-covered world of New York’s West Side. It was one of the things that bothered her terribly: that her feet never touched earth. But it didn’t bother any of them at all. Nothing bothered the O’Malleys: not their surroundings; not the curious neighbors who spoke in an assortment of strange tongues and didn’t like them any better than they were liked in return; not the reeking hallways which seemed just recently abandoned by pigs, for what other animals would foul their own living quarters. They walked through life with blackened eyes, bleeding noses, loosened teeth and declared with broad smiles that they’d given as good as they got in the long series of battles they encountered with life.

  Ellen and Matt moved out first, to a flat somewhere “uptown,” and Margaret had no idea how to get about the city to visit with her sister, who seemed content and perfectly satisfied. Margaret kept house for the others; Brian’s mother and his other brothers and sisters were all in the same building with them. The old woman took care of children for some rich lady on Riverside Drive, though where that could be Margaret could only wonder.

  The old one rushed off each morning, filled with her own importance, braving buses or subways without a thought. She returned home each night with an odd assortment of things which she distributed among them: a warm sweater the missus didn’t need no more; a fine scarf, if a bit threadbare; no need to mend it, Margaret. Ah, Christ, the girl’s so damn fussy and proud, you’d think her descended from the kings directly. Here, eat these damn things. They’re tomatoes, the lady in the market said, and delicious even if they are filled with vicious little seeds. Swallow them down or spit them out, suit yourself.

  The boys all went to work, but not in the Police Department, for they had to be citizens and it turned out the old woman’s brother couldn’t arrange things as easily as they’d expected, but in some mysterious manner, and in a short period of time, they each of them came marching in with heavy, fine printed documents which did indeed declare them now citizens of the United States and they began watching out for when various examinations could be taken to get them the jobs they wanted and in the meantime worked where they could for whoever would have them.

  The older sister, Ann, a deep-voiced, two-fisted girl with the flashing blue O’Malley eyes, found herself a fine young man named Daniel Reilly, already situated in the Police Department, and pleased for a girl from home, and they got married and settled into an apartment in Brooklyn.

  The younger sister, a holy terror named Maur
een, was more than a match for the Sisters in the local parochial school and even the public school threw her out, she was so much trouble, with her bad temper and fierce wish to make trouble for herself and anyone who crossed her path. Her mother could beat her head bloody and her brothers could strap her sore but the crazy girl said she was bound to become a singer on the stage. She had a fine voice, inherited from her father and his father before him, but they’d not allow her to even think of such a terrible life and they had their hands filled with the girl and her bad temper.

  But it all turned out in the end the way the O’Malleys said it would, knew it would all along.

  Brian and Eugene, the youngest boy, did get into the Police Department when they reached the age. Peadar and John, for reasons that Margaret could never fathom, were declared suitable for the Fire Department but not the police, but this seemed to please them just as well.

  Neither department would have Matt, for his eyesight was that bad and he had a very slight limp besides, but he’d found a position with a milk company that was to his liking.

  They all moved to the Bronx eventually and Margaret thought it was a fine place, with its great broad thoroughfare, tree-lined streets, quiet, peaceful parks. She and Brian found a fine apartment in the same building where Ellen and Matt lived, with Gene and his new wife taking an apartment in the very next house and the John O’Malleys eventually around the corner.

  There were many Jews on the block, but mostly they lived on one side of the street or inhabited one particular apartment house or the other and didn’t mingle much with any except their own. They seemed to Margaret a nice enough people, quiet and very fussy about their children.