Irish Eyes Page 4

  She shivered. “I don’t think I want to see one of them storms. I’ll take your word about the Lake wanting respect.”

  “The bottom of the Lake is littered with wrecks,” I went on, falling back on half-remembered stories from my father, “mostly from April or November storms. It’s usually safe in the summer months and in the harbors. Sometimes the whole Lake is frozen for much of the winter, though some of the last ore boats were also icebreakers.”

  Nuala was suddenly very solemn. However, she did not look like one of her “spells” was coming on.

  “People died out there?”

  “Thousands I’m afraid. Most of the traffic was freight of one sort or another, grain, iron, gravel, lumber, beer, Christmas trees; but before the railroads there were a lot of passenger ships too. Chicago was the busiest port in the world in 1870 and the fourth busiest in 1900. In those days you could look out our window here and routinely see sailing craft and steamships, some with paddle wheels, just like we see cruisers now in the summer. All that’s left now are a handful of massive boats which bring iron down from Minnesota or carry gravel and sand around the various Lake ports. No passenger ships at all, though there’s talk of building a few luxury cruise ships. Dad says that it was quite a business before the war.”

  “I’d never get on one of them,” she said firmly.

  “They’d be as safe as any of the Atlantic or Caribbean cruise ships, though, like Dad says, the ports aren’t all that interesting.”

  “I’ll be afraid of sailing with you in the summer,” she said somberly.

  “No risk in the summer, Nuala Anne, especially if you keep your ear on the weather forecasts. I wouldn’t think of sailing out this time of the year, however. There were a couple of disastrous storms around the turn of the century right in the middle of Indian summer, a foot of snow in Chicago.”

  I admit I was piling it on. However, veteran of the hooker races in Galway Bay that she was, herself tended to think of Lake Michigan as nothing but a big pond.

  Before I could continue my lesson, she and Fiona both heard a signal that was too subtle for my male ear. They both dashed for the stairs. The redhead from outer space was awake. Since she wasn’t screaming, I figured there was no need for me to follow them. I finished the pancakes and the bacon and then ambled up to our temporary nursery.

  Nelliecoyne was awake and smiling, content spinning the toys strung across her crib. Mother and wolfhound watched her in mute adoration.

  She was, I had to admit, an absolute perfection of human offspring.

  “Have you changed her diaper?” I asked.

  “Give over, Dermot Michael Coyne,” the child’s mother protested. “You know her delicacy. If she was carrying a load of shite, wouldn’t she be screaming her head off.”

  “’Tis true,” I admitted.

  “Go along with you now and get your exercise. Won’t I feed her when she gets hungry?”

  “Do I have to?”

  “Yes,” Nuala said firmly, “I don’t want a fat husband.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I replied docilely.

  “You too, Fiona. I don’t want any fat wolfhound bitches around my house.”

  Fat husband, I complained silently. I don’t feel like running today. Why do I have to do everything the woman tells me to do?

  BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO PUT ON WEIGHT LIKE YOUR FRIENDS DO AFTER THEIR MARRIAGES, the Adversary informed me. WHEN YOU MARRIED HER YOU KNEW YOU WERE GOING TO HAVE TO ACT RIGHT FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. DON’T BLAME ME. I WARNED YOU.

  “Shut up,” I told him.

  It was, however, a splendid morning for a run on the beach. There was an astringent autumn smell in the air, decaying vegetation. Eliot was wrong. In Midwest America, October was the cruelest month of the year. The wolfhound and I raced each other and wrestled and played her game of rescuing sticks from the water. I absolutely refused to join her for a swim like my wife did. Then she brought me another piece of driftwood which she would not let me have.

  “Good doggie,” I said. “Now let me have the stick.”

  No way.

  “Fiona!” I demanded. “Let it go!”

  She wagged her huge tail but would not comply.

  “I won’t throw it back in … here, I’ll throw another stick.”

  The bitch considered the implications, dropped the driftwood at my feet, and chased her new prey.

  I picked up the piece of wood, perhaps nine inches long and three inches wide. Water and sand and time had bleached it almost white. However, at one end letters had been carved into it. I tried to read them in the bright sunlight: “bor.”

  As in “harbor”?

  As perhaps in “Benton Harbor”?

  4

  A SHOCKING surprise greeted me when I opened the door of the house—a typical eighty-year-old wooden summer home on which a score or so of additions had been built and as devoid of architectural style as it was filled with disordered but soothing warmth. “A house to live in,” me wife had said when she first entered it.

  “Would you ever look at your daughter, Dermot Michael Coyne!”

  Nuala was sitting on a white wicker rocking chair with a comfortable old red pillow. She pointed in dismay at Nelliecoyne, clad only in a diaper. The future basketball great was sitting up, grinning happily. I had made Fiona shake out the Lake water before we entered, and now she carefully picked her way over to the human child and sniffed delicately.

  “She’s sitting up,” I said cautiously.

  “She shouldn’t be sitting up, should she?”

  “Maybe Father George will hear her confession.”

  I knelt beside our redhead. She waved clumsily at Fiona, then at me. She must have known that she’d done something remarkable, but wasn’t all that sure what it was.

  Nuala slipped between us and drew Nelliecoyne into her arms, hugging her fiercely.

  “I won’t let them make you take drugs, sweetheart! Never!”

  Maybelline, having noted that as a neonate our daughter was active and curious, had warned us, “The doctors say that kids that are like that usually end up hyperactive. But don’t worry about it. They have drugs for it now.”

  “At least she won’t be a tub of lard, like your kids!” Nuala had fired back, her face taut with fury.

  Such ripostes had no effect at all on my sister-in-law. She seemed never to hear them, which is why the family had adopted the policy of ignoring her. “She’s almost always in error,” Cindy observed, “but never in doubt. Besides, she’s a good soul. She means well.”

  I was sick of those two excuses. Maybelline was, it was argued, a good wife and a good mother even if a trifle overweight. She was involved in every good cause imaginable, from Rwandan orphans to monarch butterflies, though about all her causes she seemed to acquire only misinformation. She certainly worked hard on them, however, and Jeff seemed happy. She never thought much of me, however. “Dermot is just a good-looking oaf,” she had commented when I was a teenager.

  Ma, as I called my maternal grandmother, broke the family rules. “He’s the smartest and best of all of them,” she exploded, unfairly to my siblings it seemed to me, “and I’ll not tolerate another word against him.”

  That had shut Maybelline up for a while. After Ma had followed Da home, she had started in on me again. Her most recent comment had been, “Face it, Dermot, your novel was just racy trash. No one with a taste for good literature could possibly approve of it.”

  “You’ve read it, have you now?” said the bahn si to whom I was married.

  “I never read trash.”

  “Then you should keep your fat mouth shut about it.”

  The family froze and Maybelline just laughed.

  “I called your mom,” Nuala continued to hug our Nellie with the green eyes, “and she said that the child wasn’t a changeling. She said some babies are just better coordinated than others.”

  She didn’t seemed convinced.

  “I think she is a changeling,” I said with notable lack of consideration for my wife’s worries. “A fairy queen from county Galway has taken her over.”

  “Och, Dermot, be serious,” she replied as she put the green-eyed witch back on the floor, facedown. “Doesn’t your mom say that she could be crawling in another couple of weeks and maybe walking in two months or so? How will we ever keep her out of trouble?”

  Before I could answer that question, our little heroine rolled over and promptly sat up again. Fiona barked in approval. Nelliecoyne gurgled.

  I realized I had better say something intelligent. And sensitive. So I put my arm around my wife.

  “Come on, Nuala Anne, aren’t we all proud of the little power forward? And herself already a great athlete like her ma? And don’t we have to trust God and the angels and that overgrown wolfhound?”

  Nuala laughed and said, “Isn’t she ever a wonder altogether?”

  Then she began to cry.

  Which meant I had said the right thing.

  LUCK, PURE BLIND DUMB LUCK, the Adversary remarked.

  “That terrible woman was on the phone again,” she said, sniffling.

  “Maybelline?”

  “Your man was on again last night she said.”

  That I knew. Cindy had called. Nick was talking about violation of the child labor laws and calling for a DCFS investigation of whether we were fit parents.

  “Will they do it?”

  “You can’t tell what those assholes over there might do. But I’ll have an injunction on them as quickly as I can walk into a courtroom. Then we’ll sue Farmer and his station. I’ll talk to their general counsel tomorrow and warn him.”

  “That’ll do the trick.”

  “You bet.”

  I hadn’t felt all that reassured.

  “And what advice did she offer?” I asked, waiting for the inevitable explosion.

  “Didn’t she say that Farmer had a good point. People would say we were exploiting the poor little tyke.”

  “And you said?”

  “I said.” Nuala hesitated. “Och, Dermot, wasn’t I awful?”

  “I’m sure your response was appropriate.”

  “I told her to keep her friggin’ fat face out of our friggin’ business or I’d scratch her eyes out.”

  “And she said?”

  “She said I was being terribly selfish and not being a good mother. And I told her she was a nine-fingered shite hawk and hung up … . Dermot Michael Coyne, put down that telephone! Bad enough that I lost my temper!”

  Reluctantly I hung up.

  Our child distracted us by falling back on the floor, an experience which seemed to amuse her. Then she kicked her legs and gurgled again.

  “Doesn’t she want to be fed again and then go to bed?” Nuala picked her up and pulled off her T-shirt. “You go upstairs, Dermot love, and change your clothes or you’ll catch your death of cold.”

  I knew from long experience that there was no point in arguing that (a) viruses cause colds, not chills, and (b) during Indian summer there were no chills to be had. Like any dutiful Irish male I did what I was told.

  Downstairs Nuala was singing as she nursed our future All-American. Before I went to our room, I peeked into my dad’s study and consulted the listing in his big book under “City of Benton Harbor.” It had been rammed at night in October while returning to Chicago with an excursion party of Irish immigrants and their children. The Charles C. Campbell which rammed it pulled away without stopping to pick up survivors. The Life Guards from Michigan City had saved some of them.

  Irish?

  Somehow it figured.

  Back in the parlor of the house, my wife, naked to the waist, was sitting on the couch and crooning softly to our sleeping sports star.

  “God and Mary will take care of her, won’t they, Dermot love?”

  “And Brigid and Patrick too,” I said fervently, “and Ma too.”

  “That’s what she says and Nellie being named after herself too.”

  I avoided all questions about Nuala Anne’s relationship with my late grandmother. I didn’t want to know about it. But I was pretty sure that in the World of Grace (as George the Priest called it) there was not a chance that Nell Pat Malone would not watch over her namesake.

  “They’re all so close to us, aren’t they, Dermot Michael?”

  Before Patrick and his crowd came, the Irish believed that the boundaries between the living and the dead were thin and permeable. The Catholic clergy never saw any good reason to disabuse them of that notion. On this particular Indian summer day at Grand Beach, I was hardly in a position to question the belief. Too damn close, I thought to myself.

  I AGREE COMPLETELY.

  “The very hairs of our heads are numbered,” I said, figuring it was always safe to fall back on Jesus.

  “I still have a little milk left, Dermot love, if yourself feels thirsty.”

  This was an invitation to an occasional intensely erotic sacrament.

  I sat next to my wife, who was holding the child on her lap.

  “Which faucet?”

  “Isn’t there some in both now?”

  She drew my head to her nipple and sighed as I touched it with my tongue. Her skin was soft and smooth. She smelled of milk and springtime. The precious fluid was warm and sweet. For a moment I was a little boy again. She was now crooning over me. A brief taste of heaven.

  “No wonder Nelliecoyne likes it,” I said, shifting to the other breast.

  “I love you, Dermot,” she said with a loud, West of Ireland sigh, and then murmured some magic words in Irish.

  I couldn’t say anything at all.

  “Well,” she said, reaching for her bra, “there’s tea in the kitchen and some soda bread I made last night. Don’t spoil your lunch.”

  5

  “JUST KIND of curious, Dad,” I said to my father, trying to sound casual. “I was telling herself some of your stories about Great Lakes shipping. I wondered if there are any wrecks around here.”

  “I didn’t think you listened to any of those stories,” he said with a laugh.

  “I remember some of them,” I said defensively.

  I was supposed to be working on my novel. Nelliecoyne was sound asleep, watched over by Fiona, who occasionally shuffled into the study to check on me, perhaps to find out if I was really working, which I wasn’t. Nuala was downstairs doing her voice exercises. Outside the window the Lake was serene under a light haze, a “curtain of gold to protect its privacy and ours,” I had been told.

  “You don’t remember the story about the two-master which was buried under Sky High Dune?”

  “I guess not.”

  I didn’t even remember Sky High Dune.

  “It was a really big dune about halfway to New Buffalo. Back in the days when I was a kid, long before the State of Michigan began to worry about the environment, a developer plowed away the top half of it and uncovered the remains of an old schooner called the Mary Suzanne which floundered off the beach back in the 1870s. A lot of us Grand Beach urchins walked on the deck. Most of the remnants were carted off to a museum somewhere.”

  “People on it?”

  “She was carrying a load of Michigan timber from Sheboygan to Milwaukee. That was at the time that the timber barons were cutting down all the trees in the state. She got caught in an early winter storm. The New Buffalo papers said that the Life Guards had removed the crew of eight on their surf boats. That was before the Life Guards were combined with the Revenue Cutter Service to form the Coast Guard. They were brave men.”

  “How did the schooner come ashore?”

  “The Lake plays games endlessly with the shore and the dunes. We try to stop it by building our sea walls but eventually it rips out our puny protections. Before the developers put up these summer homes, the dunes literally traveled as the winds and the water shaped them and reshaped them. The sandbars came in and out, the beach expanded and contracted. The wreckage probably washed in and then was covered almost immediately by the sand and forgotten.”

  “I never realized that. Is there much wreckage under the sand?”

  “If you consider the whole Lake, probably a lot. On our particular stretch of beach, hardly any. Still you never can tell.”

  “Our house might be over a shipwreck?”

  “Dermot,” he said with a laugh, “the West of Ireland influence is finally getting to you.”

  Dad did not know about Nuala’s psychic kinks. George the Priest was the only one that did and he had enough sense to keep his mouth shut—on that subject anyway.

  “They’re never at a loss for stories, that’s for sure.”

  “How is she and my red-haired granddaughter?”

  “Both flourishing. They even have a little time for me.”

  “To answer your question, which to tell the truth gives me a little shiver, I hardly think so. Yet our house was one of the first to be built up there. I gather from pictures from the old days, there was unspoiled dune all around. Too bad they didn’t preserve some of it, but they didn’t understand such things back at the turn of the century. I’m sure they leveled the dunes a bit to lay down the foundations. If they had found anything, we would have heard the legend, like the old—and false—one about U.S. 12 actually running along the lakeshore at one time.”

  I hadn’t heard that one. Outside, the golden curtain seemed to be a bit thicker.

  “So not very likely.”

  “But not impossible if you’re thinking of making up a story. I think it would be a pretty good one.”

  Right! The remains of Irish immigrants buried beneath our house!

  Suddenly I wanted to go home immediately.

  “You don’t mind if I call you and ask more questions?”

  “You know how much I like to talk about the Lake.”

  I promised to give his love to the mother and child.

  If there were remnants of the wreck anywhere around us, why hadn’t Nuala noticed them before? The fey stuff was odd, however. We had driven by the site of Camp Douglas at 31st and the Lake several times before she heard the screams of the Confederate prisoners who were dying there.

  When she heard them, however, it became essential that we solve the mystery of why she was hearing the cries. Nuala believed beyond doubt, beyond question, beyond discussion that when one of these incidents occurred she was supposed to discover why it was happening. It was her duty to put to rest the ghosts of the past.