Buried Troubles

by Marian McMahon Stanley

  “Yes,” Rosaria responded. “I can understand.”

  Theresa looked to the side at the curtained windows again, perhaps wishing she were outside standing by the river instead of in this small parlor talking about hard things. “He said he had to talk about it. I think my mother knew more than she let on, but she wouldn’t talk about it. Still won’t.” She turned her eyes to Rosaria. “I’m thinking now that my father must have told Patrick the story. Perhaps after he heard about Patrick’s special project. Maybe my father thought this was a way to bring the truth forward.”

  “Would that have still been dangerous? It’s an old story.”

  “It’s still sensitive to talk about secrets from the North. People think everything’s come out. I think there’s much more that we don’t know about. But my father was beyond thinking about danger or ramifications. He already knew he was going to die.” She looked down at her hands. “But perhaps he didn’t think about the danger to Patrick.”

  They both let that awful thought settle between them before Rosaria asked, “But how did your father find out about this in the first place, Theresa?”

  “The workman at the Home had a son who witnessed the murder, not really understanding who or what he was seeing. The boy used to wander up to the Home sometimes in the evening if his father was working, and just watch his father from behind a stone wall. Only for something to do and to see his dad, you know.”

  Rosaria nodded.

  “They boy had to tell someone what he’d seen, though his father had threatened him against it. Eventually, the boy told his teenaged cousin he was close to, my own father—much older than he was, but close, you know. They made a blood pact never to tell anyone else. As time went on, when they were older, and read the news and saw pictures in the paper, they understood who and what Liam had witnessed that night.”

  Rosaria almost stopped breathing. “Liam?”

  “Yes, that was my father’s cousin’s name. The workman’s boy was Liam Joyce.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Mossie had been walking Fergus up and down the Market Street while Rosaria made her visit to the Martins. The big man and the dog, who now sported a kerchief around his neck in the maroon and white colors of the Galway Tribesmen hurling club, were on the stone bridge over the Owenglin when she came outside. She joined Mossie in silence for a few moments—as they both looked over the bridge wall at the river rushing down to the salmon weir.

  “I’d like you to drive me down to the old Saint Mary of Egypt Mother and Baby Home.”

  Mossie frowned. “What would you be wanting to go there for? You know, when I first signed up for this job, I thought you’d be wanting to do things like go to the super for food or the hairdresser or even to Mass.” At this last he gave a derisive snort, since Rosaria didn’t go to Mass.

  She smiled back at him. “Maybe another time. Right now, it’s Saint Mary of Egypt.”

  He stared at her and said slowly, “Now, you know I like you, Rosaria, but you wouldn’t be one of those nosy reporters or writers now too, would you? Digging up half-cocked old tales about the Mother and Baby Home and dragging the place down?” He didn’t say it, but Rosaria could hear the unspoken end of the sentence “just to make a buck”. She recalled Declan Twomey asking her the same kind of question.

  “I’m not a reporter or a writer, Mossie, but I do need an answer to some questions about what happened back in Boston. It’s possible that answer may involve Saint Mary of Egypt. You know Patrick Keenan was murdered, and that I’m here to help the family.”

  The big man nodded.

  “Patrick was just twenty, Mossie.”

  “A terrible thing, a terrible thing.” He closed his eyes briefly. “But that was some guy in Boston that did that, am I right?”

  “Maybe, but the answer to why it happened may be over here.”

  Mossie cocked his head and looked at her skeptically. “At the old Mother and Baby Home? That’s hard to believe.”

  “Maybe. I can’t tell you more than that, but if you knew the story, you would want to help me find an answer.”

  A long silence as Mossie gazed at Rosaria from under his bushy black brows and thought about the situation. A heavy sigh followed. “Okay, you’re the boss, Miss O’Reilly. Saint Mary of Egypt it is.”

  He gave Fergus another head rub and started for the car. “Thanks, Mossie.”

  Mossie nodded. “We’ll go straight out from here to the Ballyconneely Road and Errislannan.”

  ◆◆◆

  While they rode on the winding road out of Clifden, Rosaria asked, “Mossie, did you ever know of a man named Joyce who worked at the Mother and Baby Home?

  “Joyce, is it?” Rosaria nodded.

  He rubbed his face with his hand. “Well, there was a man there by the name of Joyce. I think it may have been Brendan, who used to work at the home. Kept it going for the nuns for a long time—with all the work and upkeep around the place. Of course, that was years ago. He’s gone now.”

  “Do you remember if he had a son, Liam?”

  “Yes, I am thinking I’ve heard of him. Liam Joyce. Is he the one went to Boston and they call Saint Liam sometimes?”

  “Right. Quite likely they’re related,” Rosaria mused. “That’s interesting, if it’s true, father and son running charity homes, like a family tradition.”

  Mossie reflected on this for some time before speaking again. He laid a heavy forearm on the bottom of the car’s open window frame and stared out at the road ahead. “Well, maybe not all the family traditions.” Rosaria shifted in her seat to face him, but Mossie continued to stare ahead. “They say there was some other business that went on here.”

  “What do you mean other business?” Rosaria asked. “Do you mean something other than separating young mothers from their babies? All the illegal adoptions, trafficking in the babies—selling them to America?”

  Rosaria knew the sad history of the mother and baby homes. Pregnant, unwed young mothers sent to the nuns at the homes where they worked for their keep, only to have their babies swept away in adoptions, often to America, and often arranged by parish priests on both sides of the Atlantic. Aching holes in the hearts of the young mothers, most never healing even after they had families of their own. Aching holes in the hearts of the adopted children who may have tried to trace their birth mothers through the obstruction and stonewalling of Church bureaucracy.

  “Well, that was a dark business. But I’m talking about something else.”

  “Yes?” Rosaria asked. “What would that be, Mossie?”

  Mossie continued at a thoughtful pace as if Rosaria had not spoken. “You know, many people in the South, in the Republic, have always been sympathetic to the resistance in the North. Not active really, but sympathetic in many ways, if you know what I mean.”

  Rosaria nodded, thinking of the adoptive father she loved who was not only sympathetic, but apparently active.

  “Liam Joyce’s father, if it was him, would have been no different, but there were whispers that he was active.”

  That word again. “What does active look like?”

  “Oh, helping the Cause in different ways.” They both allowed a prolonged silence before Mossie continued. “You know that New York, Boston, Philly used to send money for Derry up north.”

  Rosaria nodded again.

  “But, they sent arms too. Weapons.”

  “Really?”

  Mossie looked at her as he would a child. “Yes, really, Rosaria. This was a war, you know. That’s what happens in a war.”

  Rosaria thought by then that she could be pretty sure where Mossie’s sympathies lay.

  “Sent over on ships in crates labeled something else—in one local case, they say maybe as fishing supplies. I think they used those big long rubber waders from some factory around Boston to hide the guns. No one would have looked at those. You know how big the salmon fishing is for visitors here. Anyway, guns and rounds of ammunition in the waders.”

  Mossie’s
comments settled like a stone in Rosaria’s stomach. She thought back on Declan Twomey’s sly comment when she’d visited him. A comment that had nagged her ever since her visit to the construction magnate. How useful her adoptive father, Jim O’Reilly, had been with his job in the rubber footwear factory. Of course, the factory made, among other things, fishing waders. Long, rubber fishing waders shipped in long crates.

  She remembered her father as a sentimental Irishman, nothing more. The workers in his department in the factory who were not Irish American suffered under endless corny Irish songs on the loudspeaker system. He might occasionally intersperse the Irish singer Carmel Quinn’s songs about Galway Bay, the Green Glens of Antrim and The Old Bog Road with Frank Sinatra or Perry Como songs about moons like big pizza pies in the sky—or maybe Julius LaRosa for the rest of the population—but mostly it was an endless procession of schmaltzy Irish tunes. She was not sure how the workers felt about this cruel and unusual punishment, but her father was well-loved and they seemed good-humored about it.

  Still—this sweet, sentimental man a gunrunner for the IRA? The thought took her breath away. How well do we know anybody? Even our parents. She felt her world shifting. She was in one of those time-out-of-time chapters of life. Anxious about what she might learn, perhaps even about her own father.

  Mossie hadn’t noticed her momentary freezing and continued. “They’d be picked up from the larger ship by a fishing boat, ferried to the shore here, hidden for a while, then collected and brought up north along back roads in farm trucks with false bottoms and the like.”

  Rosaria stared at him. “Where are you going with this, Mossie?”

  “They say that the grounds of the Home might have been used as a collection point. There’s a nice little old granite wharf there right in front of the Home. Never really used much. It was built during famine times as a work relief project.” Mossie took a deep breath. “Now, I’m not saying what the nuns really knew about all this. They trusted Joyce. As I say, he kept the place going for them. They relied on him.”

  Mossie took a glance at Rosaria. “Of course, the nuns were only human— though some weren’t so sure about that, the way they treated those young girls. But all the nuns were Irish and may have been sympathizers too. Jaysus.” He turned the steering wheel suddenly to avoid a large stone on the road.

  Rosaria thought for a moment they were sure to get lodged in one of the thick hedgerows, but—thank God—Mossie righted the car in a matter of seconds and they proceeded along the road. Not for the first time, she congratulated herself on hiring Mossie O’Toole as a driver.

  “How did the people in the South feel about the events up North?” she asked.

  “Oh, sympathetic. Not necessarily the government—I think they were afraid of the violence, the complications and maybe their own relationship with the UK—but the people, yes. Mostly armchair Republicans, as they say—not active, but supportive.” He nodded as if agreeing with himself. “I saw a clip about the big march in Dublin during the eighties in support of the IRA hunger strikers up in Her Majesty’s Maze prison in Belfast. You’d know about that, would you?”

  “Yes, terrible. How many? Ten?”

  “Right. Ten. They wanted to be held as political prisoners, not common criminals and to wear their own clothes, not prison uniforms—that kind of thing.”

  “Seems reasonable. But then, I don’t know that much about it.”

  Mossie laughed. “Would I be riding along here with an incipient sympathizer now—a fellow traveler, so to say, Ms. O’Reilly?”

  “Oh, perhaps,” she smiled. “It always helps to know a little bit more, though, before you sympathize, don’t you think? Anyway, they never got those demands met, did they?”

  “From that heartless Maggie Thatcher? Not a chance. No, they didn’t get those specific demands met, but in the long term it had a big effect.” He glanced over at her. “Have you never heard of the ‘King’s Threshold’ hunger strike tradition in Ireland?”

  “No—what’s that?”

  “Legend has it that in olden times—like really olden—maybe seventh century, a travelling bard was not paid after he’d entertained a king and his household for some time. Maybe the king didn’t like the bard’s verses or maybe he was just a cheap bastard. Anyway, the bard pleaded with the king for payment to no avail. Finally, the bard was so desperate that he made a decision to starve himself to death at the gate of the king’s castle—the King’s Threshold—for all to see.”

  “That’s a dramatic way to deal with it,” Rosaria commented.

  “Yes, indeed. Now, I’m not sure that the poor bard ever got paid, any more than the Belfast boys got their demands met, but the King’s Threshold hunger strike is an old tradition here. A way of bringing an injustice into the public eye. They used it during the fight for Irish independence.”

  “Sounds like it would have a big emotional impact.”

  “Oh yes, an effective tool—if you don’t mind giving your life for a cause. During the strike at the Maze prison, someone put up the name of Bobby Sands—the lead hunger striker who was dying in the Maze—for Parliament and he was soundly elected by the people. They say that is when the IRA realized how much power they could have at the ballot box.”

  “A turning point.”

  “Of a sort, I’d say. Then, when he died from starvation, a hundred thousand people attended his funeral. He often quoted the famous line of an Irish independence hunger striker who said, ‘It is not those who inflict the most, but those who suffer the most who will conquer.’”

  “Powerful.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  They were quiet for some time with only the sound of the car, the wind in the hedgerows and the grass and the occasional lowing of the cattle.

  “So, these nuns might have been sympathetic.”

  “Oh, I’d say they were. Putting on the black veil and rattling a rosary around your waist doesn’t always mean you leave your political passions behind.”

  Mossie stopped again, speaking even more slowly this time. “And then— practically speaking—they were always in need of funds to keep such a big place going. They got money from the government for the care of the young women and babies and, of course, from the adoption fees, but I imagine finances were strained. Joyce was very devoted and I expect would have found a way to take care of them. In his fashion, if you know what I mean.”

  It took some time for the meaning and the weight of these words to settle in Rosaria’s mind. It all felt so strangely foreign. So other. Her ancestors were sons and daughters of this place, but she was not part of this world. With its desperate, complicated history and long grievances, no more desperate and complicated than her own country’s, but unique. Her ancestry gave her no special insight. In fact, a journalist had commented that the chasm between Irish America and Ireland was as deep as the Atlantic. She felt that now. She didn’t understand it at all. Nuns and guns. It couldn’t be.

  “Of course, the house has been closed for years now, thank God. Terrible place. It’s all shut up, but still standing. I don’t know why they haven’t sold it. Maybe the history holds back a sale. I heard another developer is looking at the land now. He’ll tear it down, you know, for holiday cottages. It’s a beautiful spot.”

  Rosaria gazed at her hands thoughtfully. “What order of nuns would have run the place?”

  Mossie snorted. “The Sisters of the Compassionate Heart—as if they ever had one. They were known as the Compassionates.”

  “Irish order?”

  “Oh yes, based in Dublin, I think. I don’t know if they’re still around or if the order died out. I’d say the publicity about the mother and baby homes didn’t help with vocations, you think? Though as some say, no nuns broke into our homes to steal our daughters and their babies—we were the ones who drove them away. And we knew what that would mean for the mothers and the babies. But still people blamed the nuns and the Church.”

  ◆◆◆

  Beware of bul
l said the sign on the metal gate of one rocky pasture. Rosaria’s stomach was tight in anticipation of what she could soon learn at the sad place they were about to visit. Still, she had to smile thinking of the many corporate meetings she’d been part of in her life that could have used such a sign. Beware of bull.

  “There’s no real bull around here,” Mossie commented. “Farmers put those signs up all the time against the hikers, the trekkers.” He glanced at her as they turned a tight corner. “Hikers forget to close the gates and the sheep or the cows get out. Or they hike with those dogs who chase the animals. Better to keep them out in the first place.”

  Rosaria sat in the passenger seat of Mossie’s antiquated Renault van. It was a little too strange for her to sit in the rear seat while Mossie drove. Sitting in the front seat also softened her ride, as the old car’s well-worn shock system was clearly unequal to its present challenges. Still, Rosaria felt every bump and rock on the narrow road descending from the hills outside Clifden down to the shuttered Saint Mary of Egypt Mother and Baby Home near one of many small harbors on a jagged coastline.

  Outside, close by her window, the bramble and fuchsia hedges occasionally brushed her arm. Then, they’d suddenly make way to wide vistas of rough green fields—an endless mosaic filigreed by stone walls—rocks, hills and valleys, lakes and bogs, all the way to the Bens, the mountains in the hazy distance. Gentle white Connemara ponies—blessed creatures say the poets—and cattle watched the old Renault bump along the road with uncurious eyes. The occasional pre-famine cottage, nestled beside a modern farm house, held an assortment of farm equipment and garden tools or perhaps a cow or two. Ancient memories not quite crowded out by the beasts and workaday debris of a new generation.

  “Well, they certainly chose a remote location for Saint Mary’s,” commented Rosaria.

  “Oh, yes. Well, they couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth, could they?” Mossie replied. “Someone gifted the place to the order of nuns—shortly after our Civil War, maybe in the nineteen-twenties.” He swerved quickly to avoid a particularly impressive boulder in the road. “The place originally belonged to one of the old Anglo-Irish families.” Mossie paused to chuckle. “You can bet the road would have been better maintained in those days, what with summer guests coming from the train station in Clifden and all. Different times.”