Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Ringing in the New
The nineteenth century yielded to its successor at midnight last night. Under a canopy of deep blue onyx skies, unadorned with even the barest wisps of clouds, the three-quarter moon gave a candlelight glow to the heavens above as the twentieth century was born.
The serenity of the moment immediately fell victim to the sounds of revelry as factory sirens, church bells and train horns marked the changing of the chronological guard. Locals had found their way to parties, public celebrations and “watch night” church services, joining with their fellow citizens in Jersey City. These scenes were repeated around Hudson County, across the water in New York City and all around the country.
I gazed up into that midnight sky from a porch rocker on Wayne Street. My companion, wrapped in a well-worn and loved wool shawl, head covered with an equally practical scarf, sat alongside, rocking almost imperceptibly in rhythm with puffs taken on a bog oak pipe, hand-carved in her Irish homeland longer ago than her memory could recall. Mary Margaret Flannelly, better known as Mamie, had recently had her 101st birthday. Born in 1799 in a thatched hovel in the wilds of the west of Ireland to dirt poor Irish Catholic parents, could she ever have dreamed her lifetime would touch three centuries and two continents? No need to ask that question. The answer was obvious – no way in hell.
I stepped inside the house and uncorked the bottle of champagne I had brought for us to toast the new century, pouring it into two old crystal glasses I found in the cupboard. Chipped but still delicately etched and graceful, like their owner, they had survived. Mamie put down her pipe, picked up a glass, eyed the contents and took a good gulp.
“Blessed Virgin, Jorden,” she gasped. “What are you about giving me, a physick?
“It’s champagne, Mamie.”
“Champagne? Fizzy piss, I say, and worse than me faither’s potcheen back in Sligo. Thar’s some whiskey in the sideboard. We’ll be havin’ a dram of that to rinse the taste of that swill out of our mouths.”
I had first met Mamie when she was ninety-one. A reporter for the Hudson Inquisitor, I was sent to interview her about how she had taken on a burglar who broke into her home one night. Believing she had some old gold coins (perhaps the clever genius thought she had the mythical leprechaun’s pot of gold under her bed), the young thief no doubt thought stealing them from an old lady would be easy pickings. He got something quite different than what he bargained for. While Mamie has a beloved mangy old cat, Boru, who is her constant companion, she has another favorite old cohort: a sturdy shillelagh carved of blackthorn wood. Villain met victim and soon after shillelagh met skull and the young thief went down in a heap on the floor of Mamie’s bedchamber. He survived, and speedy justice soon sent him to Snake Hill Penitentiary.
I remember sitting with my reporter’s journal in hand, scribbling down notes as Mamie told me about the break-in in her rough Irish brogue. Before long, I was no longer a reporter. I was a child sitting cross-legged on the floor in rapt attention listening to a storyteller weaving an amazing tale. I still have vivid recollection of her describing, to eyebrow-raising effect, the very particular sound resulting from the impact of shillelagh on cranium and the look of surprise on the face of the thief just before he spiraled to the floor unconscious.
When the Inquisitor ran my story a few days later, I stopped by Mamie’s to drop off a copy of paper so she would be sure to see it. Well, that’s what I told myself anyway. Honesty now compels me to say that I wanted to see Mamie again and the appearance of the article about her heroics gave me a means of doing that. It would be the first of countless visits I would make over the following ten years and the beginning of a fateful acquaintance and much-treasured friendship.
Over those years and often over cups of tea or shots of whiskey, I learned that Mamie was a spinster, never married and without children. Matter of fact, when she arrived in the United States in 1847, fleeing the worst year of the Irish potato famine, she was 48 years old and, statistically speaking, would have been considered in the waning years of her hard life. (Wouldn’t those statisticians be surprised?) She had reluctantly abandoned her homeland after nursing her dying mother and brother as they were consumed by hunger and dysentery. Her father had died years earlier, languishing in a filthy jail cell as a suspected member of the local anti-British resistance. Without family or means of surviving, she, like hundreds of thousands of other Irish, traded known risks for the unknown, boarding crowded ships bound for America.
I know what it is like to be alone. Perhaps that’s what drew me to Mamie at first. Who was this ancient warrior wielding a big stick and defending herself against someone a third her age? In my initial interview with her, she made no mention of relatives, nearby or not, and I saw no signs of “family” in her neat little parlor, save a simple makeshift altar with two stubs of candles flanking an image of St. Patrick. She lived alone, but for Boru it seemed, and they managed just fine by all appearances.
Mamie was not inclined to talk about the past and neither was I, another thing that likely led to the bond that formed between us. There is an inherent bias that infiltrates and colors the retelling of tales of the “good old days,” giving a pretty rosy tint of wistfulness to things better draped in black or best forgotten. Mamie and I both knew that very well. From such seeds grew our close connection, a very exclusive club of two souls with guarded hearts.
Chapter Two
Death Does Not Take a Holiday
January 1st, 1901, New Year’s Day and the first day of the twentieth century found me lolling over a cup of steaming tea, trying to recollect how many of those pallet-cleansing whiskey shots I had in the early hours at Mamie’s house. The answer? Enough to neatly substitute a nasty headache in place of the aftertaste of pissy champagne. Before I could ponder on about that, I heard a rap on my door, followed by my name being called out in decibels that made my teeth hurt . . . more.
I wrenched open the door and clapped bloodshot eyes on Owen, a newsboy and general gopher for the Inquisitor. In a tumble of excited iterations and gesticulations, Owen told me I must “hurry” as I was “wanted without delay” at the newspaper’s office where “police were waiting” to speak with me about the “mysterious death” of a woman the prior evening. I parted my lips in preparation for asking some of the questions that had popped into my head only to be greeted by the back of Owen’s head (and the rest of him) as he scurried off without so much as a “good day.” Nothing for it but to catch a car and find out what was going on.
(to be continued – subscribe now)
