by Thomas Lynch
SINON, THE BROTHER Tom had left at home, stayed on and kept his widowed father. In 1895 he married Mary Cunningham from Killimer, east of Kilrush, and they raised sons and daughters, the youngest of whom, Tommy and Nora, born in 1901 and 1902, waited in the land and tended to their aging parents and kept this house.
The census of a hundred years ago records a house with stone walls, a thatched roof, two rooms, two windows, and a door to the front. Early in the twentieth century, another room was added to the north and divided by partition into two small rooms. So there was a room for the parents, a room for the girls, a room for the boys, and a room for them all where the table and the fire were. The farm, at long last, was a freehold, the first in the townland, bought from the landlord in 1903 under the provisions of the Land Purchase Act. Cow cabins and out-offices appeared, and a row of whitethorns that Pat Lynch had planted years before to shelter the east side of the house were now full grown. He bought them as saplings in Kilrush when he’d gone there for a cattle fair. He paid “two and six”: two shillings and sixpence, about thirty cents, and brought them home as a gift for Honora who had them set beside some native elder bushes. They still provide shelter and berries for birds.
This is how I found it when I first came here—sheltered by whitethorns and elders on the eastern side, stone walls, stone floors, thatched roof, an open hearth with the fire on the floor, a cast-iron crane and hooks and pots and pans and utensils. There were three windows and one door to the front, three windows and a door to the back, four lightbulbs, strung by wires, one in every room, the kitchen at the center, the bedroom to the south, and two smaller rooms, divided by a partition, to the north. There was a socket for the radio perched in the deep eastern window, a socket for the kettle and the hotplate, and a flickering votive light to the Sacred Heart. There were pictures of Kennedy and the pope, Jesus crowned with thorns, the Infant of Prague, St. Teresa, St. Martin de Porres, and a 1970 calendar from Nolan’s Victuallers. There was a holy-water font at the western door. The mantel was a collection of oddments—a wind-up clock, a bottle of Dispirin, some antiseptic soap, boxes of stick matches from Maguire & Patterson, plastic Madonnas and a bag of sugar, a box of chimney-soot remover called Chimmo, and cards and letters, including mine. There was a flashlight, and a tall bottle of salt and a bag of flour. Otherwise the house remained unencumbered by appliance or modernity—unplumbed, unphoned, dampish and underheated, unbothered by convenience, connection, or technology. It resembled, in its dimensions, the shape of a medieval coffin or an upturned boat, afloat in a townland on a strip of land between the mouth of the Shannon and the North Atlantic. It seemed to have as much in common with the sixteenth century as the twentieth. Perpendicular to the house on the south side was a cow cabin divided into three stalls, each of which could house half a dozen cows. On the north side of the house, also perpendicular, was a shed divided into two cabins. Hens laid eggs in the eastern one. In the western one was turf.
Last week for the first time in more than thirty years, I could see it all—as the Aer Lingus jet made its descent from the northwest, over the Arans to the Shannon Estuary, the cloud banks opened over the ocean, clear and blue from maybe 5,000 feet, and I could see the whole coastline of the peninsula, from the great horseshoe strand at Kilkee out the west to Loop Head. The DC-9 angled over Bishop’s Island, Murray’s Island, and Dunlicky, the cliffs and castle ruins, and the twin masts atop Knocknagaroon that the pilots aim for in the fog. I could see the quarry at Goleen and the Holy Well and James and Maureen Carmody’s house on the hill and Patrick and Nora Carmody’s, Jerry Keane’s and J. J. McMahon’s, and Sonny and Maura Carmody’s and the Walshes’ and Murrays’ and there, my own, this house and the haggard and the garden and outbuildings and the land and the National School and Carrigaholt Castle and banking eastward Scattery Island and the old workhouse in Kilrush and the ferry docks at Tarbert and then, in a matter of minutes, we landed.
I never saw it so clearly before. The first time I came here, it was just a patchwork of green emerging from the mist, the tall cliffs, ocean, river, houses, lands.
Nothing had prepared me for such beauty.
I was the first of my people to return.
My great-grandfather, Thomas Curry Lynch, never returned to this house he was born in nor ever saw his family here again. My grandfather, Edward, proud to be Irish, nonetheless inherited the tribal scars of hunger and want, hardship and shame, and was prouder still to be American. He never made the trip. He worked in parcel post at the Main Post Office in Detroit, wore a green tie on St. Patrick’s Day, frequented the bars on Fenkell Avenue until he swore off drink when my father went to war and spoke of Ireland as a poor old place that couldn’t feed its own. And though he never had the brogue his parents brought with them, and never knew this place except by name, he included in his prayers over Sunday dinners a blessing on his cousins who lived here then, “Tommy and Nora,” whom he had never met, “on the banks of the River Shannon,” which he had never seen, and always added, “Don’t forget.”
Bless us, O Lord
And these thy gifts
Which we are about to receive
From thy bounty
Through Christ Our Lord.
Amen.
And don’t forget your cousins
Tommy and Nora Lynch
On the banks of the River Shannon.
Don’t forget.
The powerful medicine of words remains, as Cavafy wrote in his poem “Voices”:
Ideal and beloved voices
of those dead, or of those
who are lost to us like the dead.
Sometimes they speak to us in our dreams;
sometimes in thought the mind hears them.
And with their sound for a moment return
other sounds from the first poetry of our life—
like distant music that dies off in the night.
And this is how my grandfather’s voice returns to me now—here in my fifties, and him dead now “with” forty years (in Moveen life and time go “with” each other)—“like distant music that dies off in the night,” like “the first poetry of our life.”
Bless us, O Lord.
Tommy and Nora.
Banks of the Shannon.
Don’t forget. Don’t forget.
He is standing at the head of the dining-room table in the brown brick bungalow with the green canvas awning on the porch overlooking Montavista Street two blocks north of St. Francis de Sales on the corner of Fenkell Avenue in Detroit. It is any Sunday in the 1950s and my father and mother and brothers, Dan and Pat and Tim, are there and our baby sister, Mary Ellen, and Pop and Gramma Lynch and Aunt Marilyn and Uncle Mike and we’ve been to Mass that morning at St. Columban, where Fr. Kenny, a native of Galway, held forth in his flush-faced brogue, and we’ve had breakfast after Mass with the O’Haras—our mother’s people—Nana, and Uncle Pat and Aunt Pat and Aunt Sally Jean and Uncle Lou, and then we all piled in the car to drive from the suburbs into town to my father’s parents’ house for dinner. And my grandfather, Pop Lynch, is there at the head of the dining-room table, near enough the age that I am now, the windows behind him, the crystal chandelier, all of us posing as in a Rockwell print—with the table and turkey and family gathered round—and he is blessing us and the food and giving thanks and telling us finally, “Don’t forget” these people none of us has ever met, “Tommy and Nora Lynch on the banks of the River Shannon. Don’t forget.”
This was part of the first poetry of my life—the raised speech of blessing and remembrance, names of people and places far away about whom and which we knew nothing but the sounds of the names, the syllables. It was the repetition, the ritual almost liturgical tone of my grandfather’s prayer that made the utterance memorable. Was it something he learned at his father’s table—to pray for the family back in Ireland? It was his father, Thomas Lynch, who had left wherever the banks of the Shannon were and come to Jackson, Michigan, and painted new cellblocks in the prison t
here and striped Studebakers in an auto shop there. Was it that old bald man in the pictures with the grim missus in the high-necked blouse who first included in the grace before meals a remembrance of the people and the place he’d left behind and would never see again?
Bless us O Lord, Tommy and Nora. Banks of the Shannon.
Don’t forget.
When I arrived in 1970, I found the place as he had left it, eighty years earlier, and the cousins we’d been praying for all my life. Tommy was holding back the barking dog in the yard. Nora was making her way to the gate, smiling and waving, all focus and calculation. They seemed to me like figures out of a Brueghel print: weathered, plain-clothed, bright-eyed, beckoning. Words made flesh—the childhood grace incarnate: Tommy and Nora. Don’t forget. It was wintry and windy and gray, the first Tuesday morning of the first February of the 1970s. I was twenty-one.
“Go on, boy, that’s your people now,” the taxi man who’d brought me from Shannon said. I paid him and thanked him and grabbed my bag.
I’VE BEEN COMING and going here ever since.
The oval welcome in my first passport—that first purple stamp of permission—remains, in a drawer in a desk with later and likewise-expired versions. 3 February 1970. Permitted to land for 3 months.
The man at the customs desk considered me, overdressed in my black suit, a jet-lagged dandy with his grandfather’s pocket watch, red-eyed, wide-eyed, utterly agape. “Gobsmacked,” I would later learn to call this state.
“Anything to declare?” he asked, eyeing the suitcase and the satchel.
“Declare? Nothing.”
“Passport.” I handed it over.
“The name’s good,” he said, and made an “X” on my luggage with a piece of chalk. “You’re welcome home.”
I walked through customs into the Arrivals Hall of Shannon Airport. At the Bank of Ireland window I traded my bankroll of one hundred dollars for forty-one Irish punts and change—huge banknotes, like multicolored hankies folded into my pocket. I walked out into the air sufficiently uncertain of my whereabouts that when a taxi man asked me did I need a lift, I told him yes and showed him the address.
“Kilkee—no bother—all aboard.”
That first ride out to the west was a blur. I was a passenger on the wrong side of a car that was going way too fast on the wrong side of roads that were way too small through towns and countryside that were altogether foreign. Cattle and parts of ruined castles and vast tracts of green and towns with names I’d seen on maps: Sixmilebridge, Newmarket on Fergus, Clarecastle, then Ennis where the signpost said, KILKEE 35 MILES, then Kilrush, where another said, KILKEE 8.
“How long are you home for?” the driver asked. I’d never been so far from home before.
“I don’t know,” I told him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what “home” meant to the Irish then, or what it would come to mean to me. I’d paid two hundred and nineteen dollars for a one-way ticket from Detroit to New York to Shannon. I had my future, my passport, my three months, no plans.
The ride from Shannon took about an hour.
What a disappointment I must have been—deposited there in the road outside the gate, the Yank, three generations late, dressed as if for a family photo, fumbling with a strange currency for the five-pound note I owed for the ride, bringing not the riches of the New World to the Old, but thirty-six pounds now and a little change, some duty-free tobacco and spirits, and the letter that Nora Lynch had sent that said it was all right for me to come. Blue ink on light blue lined paper, folded in a square, posted with a yellow stamp that bore a likeness of “Mahatma Gandhi 1869–1948” and a circular postmark: CILL CHADIOHE CO AN CHLAIR, which I later learned to English as “Kilkee, Co. Clare.” The handwriting was sturdy, angular, and stayed between the lines.
Moveen West
Kilkee
Jan 8. ’70
Dear Thomas
We received your letter before Xmas. Glad to know you are coming to Ireland. At the moment the weather is very cold. January is always bad. I hope it clears up before you land. Write and say when you expect to come so we’d get ready for you. I hope all your family are well.
With Best Regards to All the Lynch’s Nora & Tom
Of course she hadn’t a clue about us—“All the Lynch’s,” as she called us. Whatever illusions Americans have about the Irish—that they are permanently good-natured, all saints and scholars, tidy and essentially well-intentioned drunks, cheerful brawlers—all that faith-and-begorra blindness behind The Quiet Man and the Irish Spring commercials, what the Irish knew about Americans was no less illusory.
The taxi man told me a joke en route, about the “Paddy” he called him, from Kilmihil, who’d gone off to the States to seek his fortune, having heard that the money there grows on trees and the streets are “literally paved with it,” et cetera, and “he’s after stepping off the boat in Boston of a Sunday and making his way up the road when what does he see but a ten-dollar bill in the street, plain as day. And your man, you know, is gobsmacked by the sight of it, and saying to himself, ‘The boyos back home were right after all, this place is nothing but money, easy as you please,’ and he bends to pick up the tenner when the thought comes to him. He straightens up, kicks it aside, and says to himself, ‘Ah hell, it’s Sunday. I’ll start tomorrow.’ ”
Still Nora Lynch would have known I was one of her people. She would have sorted out that her grandfather was my grandfather’s grandfather. Old Pat Lynch, whose heart failed at eighty on the twelfth of June in 1907, would be our common man. His body buried with his wife’s, long dead, and Nora’s twin who had died in infancy of encephalitis, and Nora’s father who had died in 1924—all of them returning to dust in the gabled tomb by the road in Moyarta. We’d be cousins, so, twice removed. She could twist the relations back the eighty years, back to the decade before she was born when her father’s brother Tom left for America. Old Pat had gone to America himself years before, stayed for several months, and returned to Honora and the children. Maybe he was the one who discovered Jackson, Michigan, and the huge prison, opened in 1838, the largest in the world back then, and all the work it provided for guards and cooks and the building trades. And Nora’s brother Michael had gone to Jackson as a young man, following others from the west of Clare to “Mitch-e-gan.” The records at Ellis Island show him landing there in 1920, off the Adriatic from Southampton. He’d married there and when his wife died, he returned to Moveen, where he died of a broken heart one warm August day in 1951 while saving hay. Nora would have had word from him about the Jackson crowd—about their uncle, Thomas Curry Lynch, and his wife, “a Ryan woman, wasn’t she?” and about his boys, Eddie and Tommy, and their sister Gertrude, raised at 600 Cooper Street. Hadn’t he brought a picture of his first cousin the priest, Fr. Thomas Patrick Lynch, for whom I’d be named a dozen years after the young priest had died—my father’s uncle—there in the wide-angled photo of them all gathered out front of St. John’s Church on Cooper Street in Jackson, Michigan, in June of 1934 shortly after his ordination. My father, ten years old, wearing knickers and knee socks, is seated between his father and mother. And Nora’s brother Mikey, somewhere in that crowd, posed for the camera with his young wife who would be dead before long, the way they are all dead now. Nora and Tommy four thousand miles away, in the prime of their lives, will get word from one of them, about the new priest in the family.
And years later she will sort it all out: her Uncle Thomas married Ellen Ryan, “a great stiff of a woman,” she had heard, and their son, Edward, married Geraldine, “some shape of a Protestant, but she converted,” and their son Edward married Rosemary, and then this Yank, twentyish, out of his element, in the black suit standing in the rain at the gate, the dog barking, the cab disappearing down the road, all family, “all the Lynch’s,” all long since gone, and now returned.
“So, Tom that went,” she said, connecting eight decades of dates and details, “and Tom that would come back. You are welcome to this part of the c
ountry.”
After the dog, Sambo, was subdued, we went indoors. There was a fire on the floor at the end of the room, a wide streak of soot working up the wall where the chimney opened out to the sky. And the rich signature aroma of turf smoke I’d smelled since landing in Shannon. I was given a cigarette, whiskey, a chair by the fire, the household luxuries.
“Sit in there now, Tom. You’ll be perished with the journey,” Tommy said, adding black lumps to the fire. “Sure faith, it’s a long old road from America.” There were odd indecipherable syllables between and among the words I could make out.
Nora was busy frying an egg and sausage and what she called “black pudding” on the fire. She boiled water in a kettle, cut bread in wedges from a great round loaf, pulled the table away from the wall into the middle of the room, settled a teapot on some coals in front of the fire. She set out cups and plates and tableware. Tommy kept the fire and interrogated me. How long was the trip, how large the plane, were there many on it, did they feed us well? And my people would be “lonesome after” me. I nodded and smiled and tried to understand him. And there was this talk between them, constant, undulant, perfectly pitched, rising and falling as the current of words worked its way through the room, punctuated by bits of old tunes, old axioms, bromides, prayers, poems, incantations. “Please Gods” and “The Lord’ve mercies” and “The devil ye know’s better than the one ye don’t”—all given out in a brogue much thicker and idiomatically richer than I’d ever heard. They spoke in tongues entirely enamored of voice and acoustic and turn of phrase, enriched by metaphor and rhetoricals and cadence, as if every utterance might be memorable. “The same for some, said Jimmy Walsh long ’go, and the more with others.” “Have nothing to do with a well of water in the night.” “A great life if you do not weaken.” There was no effort to edit, or clip, or hasten or cut short the pleasure of the sound words made in their mouths and ears. There were “Sure faith’s” and “Dead losses” and “More’s the pities.” And a trope that made perfect sense to Nora, to wit: “The same but different”—which could be applied to a variety of contingencies.