Shanty Irish by Jim Tully

Virginia how it happened?”
    Tom, my nine year old brother, replied slowly—“Yes—”
    A farmer, hauling gravel from the Forty Acre Pond stopped his team.
    He was a shriveled, weather beaten man with a face the color of burnt brick. He put his hand on my shoulder.
    â€œLost your dog eh—oh well—don’t you cry—you kin git another one—there’s lots o’ dogs.”
    He helped us place Monk in the wagon.
    As it stopped in front of the house mother and sister Virginia came to the road.
    Monk’s mouth was grim in death. His front paws were crossed. They cried over the thoroughbred martyr for the peasant Irish. Red-eyed with weeping, mother looked at me.
    â€œWhat will you do?” she asked.
    Tom said, “Mother.”
    Holding both her hands to her ears, she said: “I know, I know .”
    Monk’s name was never mentioned to mother again.
    We buried him in a far corner of the woods. Three hard maple trees formed a triangle over his grave.
    We built a fire upon it, and chanted all we could remember of the Litany for the Dead.

CHAPTER VI
A BRAND SNATCHED FROM THE BURNING
    G RANDAD Lawler was the father of as passionate, unyielding and stubborn a group of men as ever turned over the ground for grub. More like robber barons than peasants, four of his five sons were as unrestrained as eagles.
    They were all devout Catholics during mass on Sundays. Roisterers, drunkards, braggarts, picturesque men and poor farmers, they made of their parents’ lives a long tornado.
    If not mad, they were at least not completely sane.
    They were physically brave. Their tempers were impetuous; their intelligence always superior to their environment. Open to every impression, they were extremely volatile. They lacked perseverance. They resented discipline. Boastful and quarrelsome, they were excessively vain.
    Their simplicity was often childlike. Their feelings were always austere and intense. They were violently active and lazy by turns. Their interests were as narrow as those of savages. They followed the four seasons without the pain of wonder. If a neighbor died, he went to heaven, hell or purgatory. His destination was not debated among them. They feared death—more as a cessation of violent living—than as an eternal quietus.
    They often wept over trifles, and were adamant over events that would have wrecked less primitive men. They could veer suddenly from tears to the crashing laughter of barbarians.
    No man among my mother’s brothers was less than six feet tall, and none weighed less than two hundred pounds. Well built, well muscled—they were neither gaunt nor fat. No Lawler ever died slowly. Each man went—sudden as a pistol shot.
    There was in all of them, a holdover from ancient days—a deep mystical strain.
    They believed in ghosts, in fairies and in witches. In their hearts, ready to germinate at any moment, were the wild seeds of fanaticism and bigotry.
    My mother was baptized Maria Bridget Lawler. It was shortened to Biddy. Maria, we were told as children, was the name of the mother of Jesus. St. Bridget was said to have been the foster mother of Christ. My mother was proud of the name.
    Her father first came to America from Ireland in 1850. It was said of him that he was “as good a man as ever lived.” His wife, ever a bitter woman, the apple of whose life had early turned sour at the core, followed him a few years later.
    Only once did he ever do anything in anger. That was when his daughter Moll Lawler had astonished the countryside by attempting to join the Walnut Grove Methodist Church.
    She had been working as a “hired girl” in the home of a farmer six miles away. Her brother Dennis, driving through the neighborhood, told the family that Moll was nightly at the Mourners’ Bench.
    The Lawlers were seated at the supper table.
    â€œIt’s a Methodist she’d be,” Dennis said to his father.
    â€œA