The Harp
Beneath The Crown- With The Chieftains In Mind
By Sam Eaton
“I’m as
Irish as the next goddam bogger,” shouted Jack Callahan, “I just don’t like to
wear it on my sleeve. I don’t have to break out in song every time I think
about what my maternal grandfather, Daniel Patrick Riley and that should be
Irish enough for you, called the “old sod.” For him it was the old sod since
his own grandparents had come over on the “famine” ships in the 1840s after the
bloody Brits had starved them out of County Kerry with their wicked enclosure policies
so they could have grazing land for their sheep or something and they, the Brits
hoarding enough food for a full larder for everyone and the starved broken
bodied piling up on the roads after eating tree bark or something you wouldn’t
feed a pig. At least that was the way my grandfather told me his grandfather
told him.”
Jack’s whole
uproar over his heritage, over his bloody green flag, harp beneath the crown heritage
had been brought about innocently enough as he and Bradley Fox, a friend whom
he had known since his school days at Riverdale High, sat in The Plough and
Stars bar on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge when Bradley had mentioned that
the Chieftains would again be doing their yearly series of shows around Saint
Patrick’s at the Wang Center in downtown Boston and had assumed that Jack would
once again jump at the chance to show his green side.
And that outburst
was the way that Jack had answered him with some put-upon air of righteous
indignation that he had to prove himself and his Irish-ness. Prove it he added to
a half-breed like Bradley whose own father was descended from the bloody Brits,
had only with fire and determination on his mother’s part had he been brought
up in the true church rather than some heathen Protestant chapel with those
god-awful hail high Jehovah psalms beseeching an unjust god to forgive them
their bloody heathen sins, and who had only been saved by his mother’s
full-blooded Irish lineage (his mother’s great-great grandfather having come
over on the famine ships with Jack’s maternal great-great-great grandfather if
that was the right number of “greats”)from being totally ostracized in the
whole neighborhood by the old “shawlies” who commented on every little
deviation. So no this year he would not be going to the annual concert, maybe
would not even go to the Saint Patrick’s Parade over in South Boston which he
had been going to since he was a kid although less frequently over the previous
few years as he had lost patience with the drunks, the rowdies and the one-day-a-year
Irish. The Polish Irish they would call them when they were kids, the Poles
being the other big ethnic group in the town, the ones who worked on the watch
factories that had dotted the river in those days. They would come into school
on Saint Pat’s Day all in green calling themselves MacWalecki or something. That
was the way the two old friends left it that night, left like they did many a
blow-up argument with a semi-smile since half the time after a certain hour or
a certain number of whiskeys they would collapse in on their arguments. This
one had that same fate.
[What
Bradley did not know that night, did not know for several more weeks, was that
Chrissie (nee McNamara) Callahan, Jack’s wife of many more years than any of
them wanted to count and who had been the classic high school sweethearts was
giving signals that she wanted to leave Jack now that the kids were grown and
they were “empty-nesters.” Wanted to in her words “find herself” before it was
too late and that she had felt like a stranger in Jack’s presence. That fate
weighted heavily on Jack since Chrissie had been his rock through those many years
and he was not sure what he would do if she left him high and dry like that.
Tried to argue her out of her thoughts always going back to the usually tried
and true argument about how they had first gotten together and that night had
pledged their eternal love. Bradley had known that story since he had been at
Molly’s Diner the night it happened. Jack had had a crush on Chrissie since
sixth grade when she had invited him to her twelfth birthday party and as such
things went at “petting parties” she had given him a big kiss that he never
really forgot about. But being shy and self-conscious he never pursued the
matter. Time passed and as they entered high school it turned out that Jack was
a hell of a football player who led his team to the state division championship
senior year.
So Jack
could have had any girl he wanted from sophomore year on. But he still retained
his Chrissie thing and his shyness. Chrissie had been harboring some such
feelings as well although as more outgoing and a beautiful girl she did not
lack for dates and the evil intentions of guys. One Friday night in the later
fall of sophomore year though she had had enough and knowing that Jack and the
boys would be at Molly’s playing the latest rock hits on Molly’s jukebox while
having their burgers and fries she went into Molly’s front door, drew a
bee-line to Jack, and to Jack’s lap. The way Bradley always described it later was
that Chrissie had had such a look of determination on her face that it would
have taken the whole football team to get her off that lap. A look a Jack said
that it would take the whole football team and the junior varsity too to get
her off his lap. So that night their eternal love thing started. Jack had told
Bradley in confidence that he could have had anything Chrissie had to offer
that night when they left Molly’s for Jack to take her home. That would come
later, the next spring when on Saint Patrick’s’ Day night after the parade was
over and after they had both consumed too many illegal beers they went over to
nearby Carson Beach and Chrissie had given Jack all she had to offer. So those
mist of memories had been were driving Jack dyspeptic response to Bradley’s
question.]
Later that
night after Jack got back to Hingham where he had his business, his Toyota car
dealership (he was perennially Mr. Toyota in Eastern Massachusetts), and his
too big house, Chrissie asleep upstairs (in one of the kids’ bedrooms, so that
was the way things were just then) turned the light on and went into his den.
Sat down on his easy chair and turned the light off. He had just wanted to
think in the gentle dark about how he was going keep Chrissie with him but he
found that he started to drift back to the days in Riverdale when he was a kid
and being Irish meant a lot to him, felt he had to uphold the Easter, 1916 brotherhood,
had to buck the trend that his parents and their generation had bought into-becoming
vanilla Americans. Losing the old country identities that men like his grandfather
held too with granite determination in the flow of too many other trends
driving them away from what they had been, where they had come from in this great
big immigrant-driven country.
All the funny
little rites of passage. First of all listening to his grandfather’s stories
about the heroic men of 1916 (women too but they slipped through cracks in his telling
the womenfolk being held in the background in that generation), above all James
Connelly who had place of pride on his grandfather’s piazza wall. Then the
times once his grandfather was in his cups a bit the singing of all the old
songs, some he had never heard of then but which later he would find were ancient
songs going back to Cromwell’s bloody hellish times. Later when he and his
friends, usually not Bradley since his father was adamant that he not attend
some frivolous doings, would sneak out of school, walk to the bus which would
take them to the Redline subway station and over to South Boston and the Saint
Pat’s Parade. See that day, March 17th was a holiday in Boston and
Suffolk County, not Saint Pat’s Day but Evacuation Day, the day the colonial patriots
drove the bloody Brits out of Boston during the American Revolution. But
Riverdale in Middlesex County did not get a holiday hence the sneaking out of
school.
Of course of
all the Saint Pat’s Days the night he took all Chrissie had to offer stood well
above all others. He thought about how Chrissie, all prim and proper on the outside,
at first refused to skip school until he made a fuse over it that he wouldn’t
have any fun without her. That got to her, and so they went with Jimmy Jenkins,
Frankie Riley and a couple of other girls whose names he could not remember over
to South Boston. They ran into one of Jack’s older cousins who gave them some
beers. At first Chrissie balked at drinking the stuff but Jack said just take a
sip and if she didn’t like it that was that. Well she liked it well enough that
day (which was probably the last time she had beer since thereafter it was respectfully
Southern Comfort, mixed gin drinks, and later various types of wine). They drank
most of the afternoon, had somehow lost the rest of the crowd from Riverdale
and Jack saw his big play. He asked Chrissie if she wanted to go to the beach
to sit on the seawall and watch the ocean before going home. She didn’t resist
that idea. So they went to Carson Beach
as it was starting to get dark, went to a secluded area near the L Street
Bathhouse, and started to “make out.” Jack began to fondle her breasts and she
didn’t push him away, didn’t push him away as he put his hand between her thighs
either, actually held his hands there. And so they as they saying went after a
Howlin’ Wolf song they had heard on Molly’s jukebox did the “do the do” for first
time. He blushed as he thought about that first time and how they, foolish high
school kids, didn’t have any “protection,” didn’t even think about such an
idea. Later they got wise but then they were as naïve about sex and what to do,
or not do, about it as any two Irish kids could be.
Jack as he
sat there in dark then thought enough of this or he might head up those stairs,
kids’ room or not. But above all that night he thought about his sainted grandmother,
Anna, by his account, by all accounts, a saint if for no other reason than she had
put up with his grandfather and his awful habits but also because she was the
sweetest woman in the whole neighborhood and was not, it bears repeating, not
afraid of the “shawlies” and their vicious grapevine (which had even caught wind
of his and Chrissie’s trysts although they denied the whole thing every time
somebody mentioned it-they were after all as good virginal Catholics as anybody else in the neighborhood
so there). He then remembered how when he was young she would sing the songs from
the old country while she was doing the washing (the old-fashioned way with
scrub board and wringer, clothesline-dried), Brendan on the Moor, Kevin Barry, The Rising of the Moon, and many others.
He would always request The Coast of
Malabar, ask her to sing it twice when she was in the mood. Such a song of
being away from home. He always loved it when the Chieftains played the song as
a part of their show.
Jack had that
song on his mind the next morning when after Chrissie had come down for her
morning coffee he asked her, half expecting to be turned down, if she wanted to
go to the Chieftains concert in March. She brightened and said “yes, yes of course.”
Later that day he sheepishly called Bradley and told him to order three tickets
for the Chieftains concert. Bradley chuckled. Enough said.
