The Year We Sailed the Sun

by Theresa Nelson

  “I’ll give her your love,” said Sister Bridget, as she hauled my suitcase to the buggy.

  But when were halfway down Morgan Street, I turned around for one last look, and there she was running after us, just like the last time.

  “Stop! Oh, stop, Sister!” I cried, and she did it; she pulled Hyacinth up short right there in the middle of the street and Betty came trotting up, grinning her old lopsided grin and hiding something behind her back.

  “Oh, now Betty, what’s that you’ve got there?” said Sister Bridget. “Oh dear, it’s not one of your—”

  “L.B.!” I cried, as she thrust the kitten into my hands—not such a Little Bear now, but half grown and fatter than ever. “Oh, Betty, I can’t take your cat—not this one, not your favorite!” But she wouldn’t stop grinning and she wouldn’t take him back, so that was that; there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, though the ache was worse than ever now. “Well, all right,” I said, “but I’ll just keep him for you till you come see us, do you hear? Miss Downey—I mean, Aunt Cora”—we’d decided that’s what I’d call her, though I wasn’t used to it yet—“Aunt Cora says you can all come visit.”

  And then I had a thought. I got my moonstone out of my undershirt pocket, and gave her that.

  And she popped it right in her mouth.

  “Oh no! No, Betty!” I said—just in time, before she swallowed it—and she popped it right out again and laughed out loud (I think she’d known what it was all along). And then she put it in her own pocket, and stood there, waving and laughing, till we were out of sight.

  Oh Lord. The great gray station with the mile-high clock tower hove into sight before us, and Sister parked Hyacinth and the buggy right out front, and I gave the old boy a last rub behind the ears, and leaned into his patchy old neck, and whispered, “Thank you, sir.” And then a big man came to help us with my suitcase, and my heart was pounding so loud, I was sure he could hear it, but he only tipped his cap at us and smiled, and didn’t seem to notice. And I held on tight to L.B. and walked like a sleepwalker through the crowd—crowds everywhere; I couldn’t imagine where they were all going—and Sister Bridget kept up a comforting stream of patter-talk all the way:

  “That’s it, right through here, dear. . . . Great gobs, is the circus in town? Stay close, now. . . . Look, there—I think that’s the one. . . . Excuse me, young man,” she said to another tall feller in another cap, who was standing beside the track where the big black engine was hissing.

  “Could you tell us if this is the westbound train through Hannibal?”

  “Yes, Sister, this is the one,” said the young man, turning toward us—

  And it was Bill.

  It was Bill.

  And my heart—oh, my heart—

  “Bill!” I cried, and I went running, and then he had me, cat and all; he was lifting me right off my feet and twirling me around and around, and I could hardly breathe; I thought I’d die of happiness. “But how? How’d you get away? Are you all right? Is your arm all right? Are you coming with me? Are you coming to Montana? Oh, Bill!”

  “Easy there, J. . . . Everything’s all right; don’t cry! Ah, come on now, what are you crying for? I’m just fine! We’re all okay. . . . Look, here’s Mick and your old pal Jimmy, see there? Tell her, Jim; you tell it better than I do.”

  And there they were, sure enough, the pair of ’em, waiting off in the shadows a bit, keeping out of the way and looking half-shy for a change. Even Jimmy. And then Sister Bridget was hugging her cousin Mick and smiling from ear to ear, and everybody was talking all at once, but it was Jimmy talking the loudest and fastest now, of course, telling me all about their amazing adventures—well, the older boys’ amazing adventures, anyhow; he hadn’t exactly been there, he admitted. But they’d told him the whole story: how Mick had cut a hole in the fence at Boonville in the dead of night and found Bill and snuck him out of town in the boat he’d been saving up for, till it leaked like a sieve and sank like a stone, and the two of ’em had barely made it, swimming to shore—half a mile, at least, according to Jimmy. (“Maybe twenty yards,” said Bill.) They’d had to bum rides on farm wagons all the rest of the way. Another narrow escape from the icy waters, God help us, but I didn’t mind hearing about this one. I didn’t mind anything, now that Bill was here.

  “All aboard!” called the conductor.

  “Are you coming?” I asked. “You’re coming, ain’t you?”

  But Bill shook his head. He couldn’t, he said. He’d be coming later, why, sure he would; he’d always wanted to see Montana. But right now—well, he and Mick were reporting for duty next week, you see. . . .

  “Reporting for what?”

  “For duty,” he repeated. “We joined the Army.”

  “The Army? But you can’t! You’re only fifteen!”

  “But they don’t know that. And I’ll be sixteen next month; they’d take me in a year anyhow. . . . Now, J, don’t look like that. It’s the best way; I swear it is! It was Father Dunne’s idea. They worked it out with the judge—him and Mick’s dad. We’ll see a bit of the world, that’s all, and then I’ll come to Montana.”

  “Promise?” I said, still hanging on tight.

  He took my right hand and put it on his heart.

  “Promise,” said Bill Delaney.

  . . . And Then

  The train pulls out of the Union Station, and I sit by the window, with the cat in my lap, and I try not to think, because it hurts too much. Better just to sit and listen to the cat purring and the whistle wailing and the sound of the wheels on the rails below, clicking and clacking. . . .

  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye . . .

  And the train turns east, then north along the levee, and there it is—the mighty river itself shining in the late-day sun, and the Eads Bridge looming on my right now, and the Kerry Patch, on my left, and a little girl and her sister standing by the tracks there, waving at me. And I wave back, still not thinking.

  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye . . .

  Past the bridge now, and the graveyard, where Mama and the twins and Gran are buried, and stranger after stranger with ’em. All the bones are here, all the dusty old bones. . . .

  Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye . . .

  But I don’t think about it. I’m leaving it all behind now. I’m carrying my own bones far, far away, a thousand miles, and the cat in my lap is fast asleep, and the train rocks beneath us as it turns toward the sun, straight into the prairie sea. . . .

  Montana, Montana, Montana, Montana . . .

  And my eyelids won’t stay up and I’m sleeping now, too, I guess. I don’t know for how long. . . . The days and the hours are all melting into one another and there’s wind all around me, blowing in through the window; my lids are too heavy to lift, but I can see right through ’em—and there’s my hat blowing away! It flies off my head and out the window and now I’m flying, too, chasing after it, flying right out of the train itself, and I don’t know how, but it’s lovely, so lovely up here, riding the wind. And there’s a sound in it like music—like fiddle music—like the wind and the sun and the prairie grass are singing to me, above me and below me and all around. And I can hear it with both my ears for once in my life, so I guess I’m only dreaming; I must be dreaming, but I can see it all, anyhow, and look there! Oh, look there—I’m not alone, am I? I was never alone. A hundred others, a thousand others are dancing with me, reeling to the wind music, hand over hand—Papa and Mama and Mary and Bill and Gran and the twins and all the rest—look at you there, laughing, Betty! You were all there all along but now I can see you, see? And you all know the steps—we all know the steps—it’s a fine, fierce dance, though I don’t remember learning it. . . . I can’t remember learning. . . . No one ever taught us, did they?

  Or maybe they did. . . .

  Maybe they did. . . .

  It’s so hard to keep remembering. . . .

  I try so hard that I wake myself up. It’s a thousand miles later and I’m out of the
train for real now and riding the camel-colored waves in a flatbed wagon, when it bumps and stops, and the wagon driver cusses a little:

  “Confounded gophers! Just a minute here now, missy. I won’t be but a minute. We’re almost there. It’s up just ahead, do you see?”

  And I do. I see it off across the grass, with the clouds casting shadows like ships, sailing toward it: a little square house, just going up, still raw around the edges. And the cat sees it when I do, but he’s quicker than I am; he jumps out of the wagon and runs straight for it and I’m right behind him, I’m running, too, and it’s not a dream. This is no dream. I’m running and running, I’m fast as a fox. . . . And the wind bends the grass and blows all around me as I reach the house and the door—just a frame—where a bright face turns toward me, and two arms open wide. . . .

  And Aunt Cora says, “Oh, Julia . . . there you are!”

  Author’s Note

  This book is a work of fiction, with a true story at its heart.

  Not long after the turn of the last century, a little blue-eyed girl named Julia was born in St. Louis, Missouri, not far from the great Eads Bridge, in the rough-and-tumble, mostly Irish neighborhood known as the Kerry Patch. The youngest of five children (her brother Bill—later one of Father Dunne’s newsboys—was the eldest), Julia was orphaned at an early age, lived for a time with her grandmother, and was eventually taken in, along with her sister Mary, by the Sisters of Mercy, who operated an Industrial School and Girls’ Home in the twenty-one hundred block of what was then Morgan Street (now Delmar Boulevard). The Sisters, struggling to make ends meet, put Mary to work in their laundry and sometimes took little Julia with them on what she later called their “begging missions” to the well-to-do of the day.

  She hated the begging.

  More than fifty years later, when I first met Julia (I was about to marry her youngest son, Kevin), she didn’t like talking about that part of her life. She had an abiding love for the Sisters—most of them—and was forever grateful to them for coming to her aid when she and Mary were in desperate need of their help, but she would skip over that time when asked about it, and go straight to the happy miracle of meeting a “maiden lady piano teacher” by the name of Cora Downey—a farmer’s daughter from Parkersburg, Iowa—who was to become her guardian, and who would take young Julia with her when she decided to try her hand at homesteading in Montana. “That’s where God put his finger in my life,” Julia always said.

  I’ve wanted to tell their story ever since.

  I began doing research for it in 1983, when Julia’s daughter, Sheila Cooney Tybor, first sat down with me at our kitchen table one unforgettable afternoon, and kept me spellbound with bits and pieces of old memories her mother had passed along to her. By 1992, I had finally begun work on the first of many drafts of the manuscript. But the story kept eluding me until 2007, when I had the good fortune to come across Daniel Waugh’s Egan’s Rats, a fascinating work of nonfiction that had just been published by Cumberland House in Nashville, Tennessee, in the spring of that year. It was a treasure trove of information about the Kerry Patch, largely drawn from newspaper articles of the time, including accounts of a gang war that was raging in the fall and winter of 1911–1912 between the so-called “Rats” (bossed by Thomas Egan, an infamous tough guy and saloon keeper) and their enemies, in particular the Nixie Fighters, who were attempting to claim the dangerous southwest side of the Patch, known back then as the Bad Lands.

  Most chilling of all were the mentions of two gang-related murders, never officially solved: one at a party given by Thomas Egan for his men on Christmas Day 1911, at the O’Fallon Pleasure Club; the other in the Bad Lands on Halloween night of that year, “in an alley near Twenty-second and Morgan streets”—Julia’s Morgan Street—just spittin’ distance from the actual address where she and Mary had lived with the Sisters. And for the first time I began to see the House of Mercy as a kind of embattled island in a dangerous sea, with the nuns standing guard over their young charges, come hell or high water.

  The building itself isn’t there anymore. Kevin and I walked what was left of the neighborhood, looking for it, just before New Year’s Day 2005, and found no trace—only parking lots and warehouses—though we did find the old brick building at the corner of Washington Boulevard and Garrison Avenue that for many years was Father Dunne’s News Boys Home. It’s a Salvation Army Harbor Light Center now, still helping those in need, while Father Dunne’s successors are still going strong as well, having merged with others to become Good Shepherd Children & Family Services.

  Gone, too, is the old Sportsman’s Park, where the St. Louis Browns used to play (they later shared the stadium with the Cardinals), and where Julia’s real brother Bill used to go to games, sneaking out of the newsboys’ chapel services and hopping rides on the trolley. The game between the Browns and the Detroit Tigers really did take place, exactly as described in this book, on October 7, 1911.

  Father Peter Dunne and the Sisters of Mercy themselves were completely real, entirely human heroes of old St. Louis, whose work continues to this day. I didn’t know Father Dunne or the Sisters of that time, of course, and wouldn’t presume to pretend I did. The nuns in this book all have fictitious names, though I have the census page listing their real ones, tracked down for me years ago by my resourceful sisters-in-law, Sheila Cooney Tybor (again!) and Peggy Healy Cooney (who also told me the piercing story that Julia had told her years before, about the nuns having to peel her fingers off the lamp pole when they came to take her to the orphanage). But since I had no way of knowing which nuns were which, or what they were really like, I changed their names to keep from being unintentionally unfair to anybody . . . or possibly struck by lightning.

  Speaking of weather: The temperature in St. Louis really was fourteen degrees below zero on January 7, 1912, during one of the coldest winters on record in Missouri and throughout much of the United States. It was not uncommon for the Mississippi River to freeze over in those days. A record-breaking blizzard did indeed hit St. Louis on February 20–21. (Five people died in the storm.) And the combination of so much snow melting and the breaking of ice gorges in rivers all over the country made the spring of 1912 one of the worst seasons of flooding in American history.

  As for the Great Here-After, it was one of the most popular attractions on the Ten-Million-Dollar Pike at the 1904 World’s Fair.

  There truly is an Irish reel called “Julia Delaney,” though it never had words, till Papa sang them in my head. And there’s an old Irish song called “Fair Thomas Egan” (Tomás Bán Mac Aogáin), with lyrics very close to those he translates at the Fair—with just a bit of a twist.

  But the Thomas Egan of old St. Louis notoriety died of natural causes on April 20, 1919, at the age of forty-four, and was buried in Calvary Cemetery, just seven years after the day Julia would have passed that way on the train leaving town—far beyond the Bad Lands—traveling east out of Union Station first, then north along the Mississippi, all the way to Hannibal, Missouri, where she turned west for good and all.

  And as for that blue-eyed girl herself, once alone in this world, she lived to the age of eighty and was the beloved mother of six, grandmother of twenty-one, great-grandmother of forty-two, and great-great-grandmother of eight, at last count.

  One last true fact that Julia—who became a lifelong reader and lover of books—always smiled about: Though it isn’t told in this version of the story, it was actually Aunt Cora’s older sister, Mary Downey Pfeiffer, whose charity work in St. Louis first introduced Cora to the Sisters of Mercy Industrial School and Girls’ Home. Mrs. Pfeiffer was the mother of Pauline, who later married into quite an interesting family herself. Which made our Julia—eventually—Ernest Hemingway’s cousin-in-law.

  As her old friend Marcella might say, “Now, ain’t that rich?”

  . . . And Acknowledgments

  I owe so much to so many whose help and humor, wisdom and love, saw me through the writing of this book—more than I c
an ever begin to repay, in too many ways to count. But I thank you all; I love you all:

  David Andrew Doty

  Lucy Frank

  Virginia Walter

  Mrs. Ernie Nortap

  Carlin Glynn and Peter Masterson

  William Goldman and Susan Burden

  Linda Crew

  Anne Steinman Montalbano

  Catherine Kinsel Collins

  Amy Kellman

  The BWFFG

  Peter and Clare Fields Flood

  Charles and Chesley Krohn

  Will and Patsy Mackenzie

  Judie Angell and Phil Gaberman

  Cynthia Burke

  Richard Bradford and Millie Perkins

  Kerry Madden

  Ross McMahon

  William and Susan Shofner Hardy

  Mary Goetz Sculley

  Sam and Gretchen Havens

  Sheilah Wilson Serfaty

  Bob and Marietta Marich

  Becky Ann, Dylan, and Willa Baker

  Charles and Florence Bernstein

  The guys and dolls in the green room (Theatre Under The Stars, Houston, Texas, 2011)

  The good old UST think tank and peanut gallery: Mark and Elaine Stevens, Bill and Suzanne Greene, and Dr. Charles Zeis

  Karl Hofheinz and his sister Nancy, our kind guides to St. Louis

  My dear Cooney sisters- and brothers-in-law: Sheila and Art Tybor, David and Peggy Cooney, Joe Cooney and Karl Dutt, Bill and Geneva Cooney, Linda Langdon Cooney, Mary Cooney Domingue, Tommy and Dotty Domingue

  Anne Tybor Hoover, loving caretaker of Julia’s Gypsy Breynton books

  Julia Cooney Batdorf, true believer

  Mary Katherine Downey Breckel

  Cousin Bill Koch, who told me about Uncle Bill’s red hair

  Anne Mead, whose taped interview with Julia (at age seventy-eight) was a godsend

  Joe and Lynn Muscanere (the lady who loves horses)