Finding Home: Aughkiltubred, 1969 (2004)

September, 1930. Age sixteen, my mother, Kathleen Sloyan, the second of eight children, leaves her home in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo. She will marry, raise three children, and die in Brooklyn, New York, at age fifty-three, without ever returning home. We have no photos of her as a child. With my first wages as a paperboy, I bought her a 78-rpm record that had "Mayo" in the title. Her hug was a full world. Her eyes filled, and for years I bought her anything that had Mayo in the title. I still love the sound of the word Mayo. March, 1924. Age twenty, my father, Patrick Joseph Murphy, the fifth of thirteen children, leaves his home in Cloone, County Leitrim. He will return forty-five years later, a year after the death of my mother, many years after the deaths of his own mother and father. We have no photos of him as a child. This is the story of his journey home. I went with him and met myself. * * * In the Brooklyn world of my childhood, Ireland was always there on my mental horizon—in the rhythms of speech and turns of phrase of Irish people about the house; in the ballads about the old country and a moonlight in Mayo that could bring my mother to tears; in the Friday night card games in which a priest visiting from Ireland might occasionally loosen his collar and mutter a sort of curse when the Lord failed to fill his inside straight. Ours was a world of aunts, uncles, cousins; the calendar had its comforting rhythm of gatherings for holidays, baptisms, communions, graduations. And the funerals. Always uncles, John, Michael, Frank, each death strange in its own way, each one driving my father deeper into himself. I was eight when Uncle John fell over the banister on his way up to his apartment, dropped three stories, and broke his neck. I didn't really know him, but I can still see him falling. [End Page 12] Then, I was nine when Uncle Michael fell under the wheels of an IRT subway car. The family said it was the heart that gave way, dead before he hit the tracks, others whispered that he had jumped. My Dad said his brothers had bad luck. Mikey must have had the old heart attack. John, another story, let him be, no point in going on about it, let it be, drop it. Then, my godfather, Uncle Frank the bachelor, a large man with gruff manners whose hand swallowed mine when he shook it, his breath spoke of cigarettes, whiskey, and anger. I felt bonded to him as my godfather and a bit afraid of him at the same time. He drank himself to death. I was thirteen when he died; my father was fifty and was burying his third brother in America. Years later, I would begin to understand his loss and the pain that he kept inside as the funerals kept coming. But then, I was young and my father's losses were distant. I went to my uncles' wakes and funerals and then came home, tired after a day of play with all the cousins. I remember a deeper sense of loss about Uncle Frank's death than about John or Michael. Perhaps because I was older, the idea of death had begun to have meaning, but I also think that, despite my youth, I sensed Uncle Frank was a lonely and unhappy man, moving in a world too far removed from our Christmas dinners for me to understand. He remains very much with me, since he is in my parents' wedding picture, the best man. The picture is on a table in our bedroom, so I see it at some level of my consciousness every day. A lovely picture, taken in New York in a studio, light years way from Leitrim and Mayo. The whole picture speaks of Ireland, of emigration, and of change, especially the poses of the...