Free Of Irish Blood by Mary Pat Kelly Page A

and then told me the rest of the story. How the Scoundrel Pyke, their landlord, really wanted to take Granny Honora on her wedding day and … Granny couldn’t say the word.
    “Rape you?” I said.
    She nodded.
    “Your aunt Máire stepped in. Her, a young widow already expecting her dead husband’s child. She took my place, and if she hadn’t, Honora, you might not be standing here for your grandfather was a young man and too brave for his own good and might very well have gone for the landlord’s son who was a soldier and allowed to shoot dead anyone who attacked him.”
    When Sister Henrietta, the colored nun who helped them in New Orleans, heard that story she gave Aunt Máire the red shawl as a badge of honor and protection, Granny told me. “Your namesake,” I said to Henrietta after I repeated Granny’s story to her. “Shut up,” she replied. Dead now—Granny Honora, Aunt Máire. Would I be carrying on with Tim if they were living?
    Sometimes after I come home from my few hours with Tim, I slip into the bedroom and settle the smooth silk over my shoulders and pray to Aunt Máire. What am I doing? Can I believe all his talk about his change of heart and us getting married? And did I even want to marry him? Tim was a crook, pure and simple, doping his horses and gambling and I didn’t want to know what else. Being a fallen woman when no one knew was one thing, but Mrs. Tim McShane? Was a baby worth that?
    As much as I miss Agnella I’m glad she’s gone to the convent. Hard to lie to her. Sometimes I want to confess to Rose but she is deep in sorrow, three miscarriages already, and one born two months early, a boy who lived for an hour. I went with Rose to arrange a funeral Mass for the poor little guy but Father Sullivan said no funeral because the child hadn’t been baptized. I told him that the baby’s own father poured water over his head and said the words while Rose held him, and that any child of Rose McCabe Larney would be welcomed into heaven by every angel in the place. Still he’d refused us. Priests! What if he knew. I was at the communion rail every Sunday while “having carnal knowledge with a man not my husband”?
    That’s what the priest at St. Michael’s German church on North Avenue called it when I stopped by there that Saturday afternoon a few weeks after I turned thirty-one. Here’s the place to get right with God, I thought. And then … marry Tim? Find another fellow? Maybe if my soul were clean I’d know what to do.
    Any luck and the German priest won’t understand a word I say, I thought. But wouldn’t you know the fellow had a brogue. And very impatient. A warm day in May and I could smell the sweat off him. He told me to speak up and get to the point. So I said this man and I were acting like we were husband and wife and we weren’t. He said, “Carnal knowledge with a man not your husband is a mortal sin,” and asked me if he the man was married.
    “No,” I said.
    “Haven’t you a father or brother who’d make the man marry you?” he said.
    “I’m not sure I want…” I started.
    “So you like sinning? You enjoy being a fallen woman?”
    I almost said, “At times I do, and that’s the problem.”
    He went on and on, and after he wrestled a firm promise of amendment from me he mumbled “Absolvo te” in Latin and gave me ten rosaries as a penance.
    I stepped out of the box into the gilt and glory of St. Michael’s Church, so different from the Irish plainness of St. Bridget’s. The archangel himself, dressed in shiny armor, held pride of place over the altar. This had been Aunt Nelly and Aunt Kate’s church as girls, and it reminded me of the Christmas cakes their German father taught their Irish mother to make. Ten layers stacked up and held together by different kinds of jams and jellies—apricot, strawberry—and drenched with whipped cream. “Schlag” they called it, and marzipan fruit sunk into the top and pushed into the sides, covering every