A chill, damp and heavy, such as their mother had never known in Cuba, went to their very bones.
That morning, they brought more wood in from the porch and built a great fire; they had covered their two horses, Hercules and Tinto, with extra blankets in their stalls in the barn, their poor ears cocking against the wind. And their mother stood by the window, pregnant for the thirteenth time in her young life—it was 1918 and she was not yet thirty-five—watching the road for the approach of their father. The previous afternoon, he had driven the Model T to Philadelphia to pick up tin canisters of film from a distributor, and she wondered just where along his route he might be—Ward, Unionville, Kirkwood? And as her mother waited by the window watching the snow falling in fierce swirls, carried by winds that twisted the house’s timbers, which creaked like a wooden ship, there came over her an expression of pallid fear—it was as if anxiety had pulled back the skin of her lovely face, so that one could make out the outlines of her skull. But they all felt a tightening in their limbs, for after such storms the papers listed who had been found in a field, in an underheated house, in a pond, “overcome by the elements.” What could they do but attend to those duties which most pleasantly produced more heat—a stew of vegetables and beef under way in the kitchen, candles and kerosene lamps lit to help warm the parlor, where they had gathered on the couches, covered in blankets, yawning and asking, “Where is he?” A few hours passed and still no motion on the road—no sleigh carriages or milk truck or automobile, or animals grazing in the fields or birds in flight; just old cocoons and desolate birds’ nests and snow, while in the barn, in the upper rafters, the mute gray pouchy-looking creatures called murciélagos in Cuba (bats) hung upside down, asleep. Time slowed to a tedium of worry. Then at two o’clock in the afternoon they saw him, their Poppy, Nelson O’Brien, a great shadowy mass struggling against the winds up the incline some twenty yards from the road toward the house, flushed with exhaustion and pulled along by Margarita and Isabel, who had gone out to fetch him.
His clothing drenched, he warmed himself by the fire, rubbing and blowing warm breath into his hands and calling out for a cup of whiskey—justifiably so—and their mother, her arms wrapped tenderly around him, saying to him in Spanish, as was her habit in moments of emotional agitation: “I thank God that you’re here, my husband, but, my God, where was your common sense?”
“Oh, my dear wife,” he said in English, pulling her close, “I couldn’t get past the drifts by Tucker’s Pond and I thought it best that I leave the Model T, so please calm yourself, woman, and pass out some of the candies I’ve brought along—over there in my pocket, caramels and hardballs. And don’t be angry with me.”
Warmed by the fire, he sat there with two of the littlest ones in his arms, holding them proudly, while his wife mopped up the floor. He had stretched and yawned, feeling the dampness through his thick flannel union suit; he had pulled off his stockings, which lay in crumpled balls, sending up steam by the fire. Margarita had knelt down before him, rubbing his frozen feet with a cloth dipped in kettle-warmed water. And then she brought him a bowl of stew.
“¿Quieres algo más?” she had asked.
“No, no,” he’d told her.
Then, watching and listening to the storm as it continued, he announced, “My God, but I think it’s time for a nap.”
When he got to his feet, the fatigue of his trek through the snow made his knees quake. Yawning again, he made his way up the stairs to their bedroom, where he managed to put on some dry clothing, and then he collapsed on their canopied bed, sleeping until the following afternoon. Late the next day, the family still snowbound, he sat fortified by whiskey and his nightly tonic before the fire.
He was worried, he’d told his daughters, about getting out to the automobile with a shovel so that he might retrieve for his business’s sake the films he had brought back from Philadelphia, and hoped that it would stop snowing soon, as he was very much concerned that the tins he’d left behind, and the silver-nitrate films they contained, might freeze to brittleness and crumble if the storm’s cold persisted.
And yet it was that afternoon, and on into the night, that her Poppy spoke to his daughters about his past. Margarita listened and years later she imagined. Later in life, she would wrap that minor incident around the circumstances that first brought him to Cuba in 1898—seeing him as a man battling the storm of his own powerful emotions.
THEIR POPPY AND THE STORY OF HOW HE CAME TO AMERICA
— A Mist-ridden Place —
She’d imagine that the Ireland of her father’s youth was a sad, mist-ridden place where it was always four o’clock on a late January afternoon in 1895. An endless drizzle fell, with stronger winds in wavery sheets like sea gales over the green countryside, and the chimneys of houses hundreds of years old sent up puffs of peat smoke. Men would appear on the horizon, guiding their carts and horses out of the muddy bogs and through the fields of clover, breath steaming from their lips, their bones rheumatic from the dampness, cheeks flushed from drink or the wind.
He might have lived in Drogheda, Dundalk, Glandore, Glengarriff, Youghal, Kinsale, Wexford, for all the sisters knew, for their father never mentioned the name of the town where he was born and he burned all his letters. Perhaps it had been a magical place with fairy mounds where the spirits of old poets—Ollam fili, they were called—and of Celtic warriors awaiting entry into the Mag Mell, the Plain of Pleasures, went roving about in clouds of mist over hills and creeks, water draining into the river that their father called the River of Sorrows.
Like a snare drum tapped by a child’s fingers, the rainwater leaking from the ceiling of the inn where the O’Briens operated a pub and dry-goods store, and settling into a porcelain bowl placed on the floor to catch it. Elsewhere in the room, on the wall behind the bar, the dripping water had buckled the matted picture of Germanus of Auxerre handing the bishop’s scepter to the young St. Patrick, bathed in the light and glory of God, a picture which his dead mother, a woman who had come from Belfast, had put up for the Catholics of that town—and they were mainly that, Catholics. There was an oak counter, and behind its whiskey-stained surface were kegs of ale in a row and Nelson O’Brien, not yet eighteen years old, schooled by priests and good with numbers, working over a black ledger, taking inventory of the sundry provisions that his father and uncle would sell to the people of the town. It was a hard job, because his uncle was always pilfering goods, selling whiskey and ale on the side, and slipping money out of the till, so that at the week’s end Nelson, head lowered close to the columns in the ledger, and trying to protect his uncle by rigging the numbers, trembled.
The inn’s business a “tethered weight” on his shoulders, Nelson’s father would take it out on him, beating him with a strap, until his son’s arms and legs were covered with welts. That’s when he’d daydream about leaving that town for a place filled with light and peace.
Or perhaps he simply had a young man’s craving for adventure: all he knew was that he wanted to go away.
In those days, he and his older sister, Kate, would make their way along the meadows and picnic under the leafy boughs of a great spreading tree. Kate was eighteen then, in 1895, and quite beautiful, a buxom and comely woman with a head of red hair, a widow’s peak, and soft blue eyes like his own. But, like his mother, she was not always in the best of health. On one of those afternoons, when they had napped under the tree, she had sat up and said to her brother, waking him, “I was just thinking that it would be a most pleasant thing to have a farm, away from the troubles that people make. Do you think so, Nelson?”
“Yes, I can see that. But how?”
She shrugged and said, “I don’t know, but it’s a thought I relish.”
On those strolls, he’d carry a satchel with him filled with books—a photography manual, the gift of a fellow named MacPhearson, for whom he sometimes worked, and penny novels that caught his fancy, about cowboys and Indians and the likes of Wild Bill Hickock and Jesse James, w
hich, with their diverting tales, helped to lift him out of himself.
“Now, Kate, listen to this,” he would say, flipping the pages of the book and coming to a chapter called “The day that Jesse James got his Revenge”: “As Jesse, sorely wounded, hid, lying low behind a horse trough and still bleedin’, he watched the bushwhackers riding sinisterly into town. Although they outnumbered him eight to one, they was eight varmints against one real man: drunk on their mounts, and reeling about in circles, they fired their pistols into the air. That’s when Jesse saw his chance. Springing up with both his six-guns loaded, he took aim and one by one brought them down off their horses; five he hit squarely in the head, got two right through the heart, and the last he clipped in the knees so that he crawled on his belly like a snake. Jesse, blowing smoke out of the barrels, stood over the fallen craven cur, grinning coolly….”
“Ah,” he said to his sister, “isn’t that a rousing tale?”
And she laughed, remembering this younger brother’s flights of fancy, and sadly, too, thinking of how, when things weren’t good in the household, he would sometimes sink down in the corner of a barely lit storage room to read his little books by the faint window light. He would turn over a bucket and sit on it, pulling his jacket closed and holding its lapels together in one shivering hand, while lifting the book up toward the glow, his posture, as he tried to fold his limbs into himself, intended to diminish his presence in the world and therefore, as happens with little creatures, his potential to be harmed.
“A good tale,” she said to her brother. “My, but you love those troublesome folk.”
Nelson O’Brien nodded. For a moment, the meadow before them filled with whooping Indians and desperadoes and buffalo herds, and he imagined himself and Kate on one of the American Great Plains, he positioned behind a tripod-and-bellows camera, the kind that MacPhearson owned, his hand ready to press the pneumatic bulb, the camera and the promise of adventure one of the daydreams of his young life.
To that end, since the time he was about twelve years old, he would try to escape his duties at the inn and, often getting into trouble, spend two hours walking along the roads to the town where MacPhearson ran a photography studio and pass the day there working for the man—firing off chemical flashes and preparing, according to MacPhearson’s instruction, silver-nitrate plates, and offering whatever assistance he might need. (Nelson setting off the chemical flash, and in the parlor of MacPhearson’s studio bursting with light; the subjects, a fashionably dressed newlywed couple, who had likely dropped down from heaven, posing proudly against the backdrop of a mythological scene—golden Arcadia, perhaps. Her hair, blond and curly, rises above her ears; she is wearing a great beribboned bonnet and a high-busted, hip-padded velvet dress with puff sleeves that trails to the floor, and a five-foot-long ostrich-feather boa. She purses her lips like a Gibson Girl, while her husband, more simply attired, in a topcoat and vest and button-fastened pinstripe trousers, sits posed with his top hat on his lap and a silver-tipped cane in hand. MacPhearson, lost under a black cloth, mutters to her father, “Now then, lad, on the count of three!”) Liking that work—the modernity of the photographic art—and always touched by the way MacPhearson treated him, with generous pay, reassurances, and talks about life such as he never heard in his household, he did not care that his father—jealous, possessive—sought to punish him on his return.
That afternoon, as on many other afternoons, feeling as if he would never escape from their household to enjoy the pleasures of this life, Nelson lost his vision of cowboys and Indians, and suddenly, as if carried in the wind that traveled over the glens, a great sadness overcame him. Looking out over the fields, he saw in the distant mists a conglomeration of colors welling up on themselves: the hazel trees, the thready cloud-ridden sky, the rushing hues, squirrelly and liquid, flowing toward him, like a piling of stones, shimmering in the darkness, and rising still higher. The mid-afternoon light of day darkened—and when he looked about, he saw that a high, unclimbable wall, as one would imagine God might make, had shot up around him.
“Come, let’s go back,” Kate would say. “Let’s go see if the swans are on the river and give them bread.”
But he could not move.
“Nelson, what’s troubling you, let’s come along, won’t you? We’ll get back and I’ll go into the kitchen and make you something nice to eat! Come on!”
Then she pulled him up, and this goddess of love, losing her temper, said to him, “Oh, come along now,” straightening his jacket and tugging on his sleeves. “Don’t know why you’re like that at all.”
Sometimes, in those moods, he would be barely aware of the world around him and go walking about with his hands dug deep in his pockets, between his lips a sprig of rosemary or thyme that he’d chew on with his slightly uneven, crooked teeth, a good lad with a cap pulled low on his brow, and yet with a tormented posture. Perhaps he resembled those earnest Cockney boys from the Rank Organization film versions of Dickens’s novels. He was a handsome youth and may have been alluring to the young ladies of their town, as he seemed industrious (though troubled), working in the inn and for the photographer MacPhearson—putting his wages carefully away, a shilling here, a pound there; and he was careful in his habits, ever courteous and capable of cheer with certain of these females, but at the same time a little removed. And while he’d tip his hat and always smiled in greeting, a certain gloominess registered on his features when they were at rest and he was not playing the good-hearted Irish lad.
While making his way along the road behind the sheepherds with his friend, the gregarious and good-natured Jim O’Nolan, whom he’d known since boyhood, he’d listen to Jim boast about his carnal dalliances at the local brothel, and nod. But he could not understand why the sight of a woman with a nice bosom hidden under layers of dress and coat would make Jim whistle and blush, or why he was rambunctious in pursuit of a pretty girl whom he fancied, picking flowers for her and doffing his hat and bowing in a sweeping gesture when she passed by; or, for that matter, why he would eventually marry her and seem the happiest man in the world.
Even back then, Nelson supposed that he might have felt differently if he’d been closer to his mother while growing up. Her name was Margaret, and she was a woman from the Protestant North. He remembered that her life could not have been very happy, for people were not kind to her. He could barely visualize her, because she had been called from this world when he was but five—something about the redness of her hands and the stringiness of her hair, the smell of coal and grease about her, and sometimes of heavy lager; and eyes clear and blue-gray like his own, catching the light, pupils expanding as she’d smile, and then those eyes getting red and her hands shaking a little at a certain time of day when she would gasp for air and clutch at her breast; and when she pinched his cheeks and called him “my little Nelson,” the pinch was a bit too hard, as if her fingers were made of wood; and when she called out to him, crying, “Now, give your mum a hug,” he’d press close to a body warm under a spotted dress, but also almost wooden. One day he had been sitting in the corner of their kitchen watching her chopping an apple, and the next he was moving through a crowd of strangers, and his father, who went crazy when she died, took him by the hand into a room thick with candle wax and incense that smelled like an altar, and led him to his mother, dressed in a dark dress better than she had ever owned and asleep in a box of dark wood, saying, “Now you pay your respects, son,” and he knelt and pressed his hands tight around hers and later threw up and cried, and when it was all over, his father sat before a stove in the chill of an Irish winter without moving.
Thinking about his mother’s death, Nelson O’Brien would feel a deflation of the heart, a miasmic ebbing in that part of his soul that had to do with love, a slothfulness of character, a sapping of ambition, a “life fatigue” which he always had to fight and which seemed to come over him at the sight of certain everyday objects. He would feel afflicted by hand mirrors, of Celtic or French design,
with seashell- or gemstone-topped finials, ovular in their shapeliness; by broken morning rolls, soft silken purses, or “pursies,” as he sometimes called them in his sleep, when he’d snore deeply and mumble conversations with the citizens of his past; by goldfish and slithery minnows, spiders descending through their empires of web on the porch, curling leaves in a puddle, orange and fiery-red leaves blowing through the street in the fall; by gnarled-hair brushes, soap dishes, tureens, beetles, broken eggs, walnuts and chestnuts, fur hats and muffs, ocarinas, bells, clarinets, flutes, trumpets and kettledrums, the endocarp of apples, grapes and pears, serving spoons and ladles and butter tubs; hammocks swaying in the breeze, washbasins, urinals, drains, sewers: these bothered him.
This queasiness, having to do with women, accompanied him everywhere: to work in his father’s failing dry-goods store; in and out of the classroom of the good Christian Brothers’ school; to the pubs at night; to the stone-floor church where, neither believing nor disbelieving, he knelt before a statue of the Virgin, whose gaze spoke of unbounded kindness and compassion, lighting candles for the soul of his long-departed mother so that she might sooner escape the fires of Purgatory. It followed him to the gate house of the cemetery, and there, amid many wind-toppled, soot-black stones, he would stand before the grave of his mother.
His emotions would get the best of him, a rush of feelings. The Celtic crosses, marking the passage of the dead, mocked him. He would listen carefully—ghosts in the ground, breathing ever so softly, a rattle of bones. Because he’d once heard, told by the fire in the inn one night, the undertaker’s description of certain phenomena, he became convinced that his mother’s hair and fingernails were still growing, imagined that her hair had turned white and was a dense coil against the coffin lid, trying to ease its way out; and he believed that indeed the fingers twitched and the lips sometimes trembled. And just like that, he’d blink his eyes, and though years had passed, he’d have the sensation that she was nearby—invisible, to be sure—making her way, in the agony and solitude of the dead, toward the Land of Promise.
The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien Page 11