The Harp Beneath The Crown-With The Irish “Acre” In Mind 

By Seth Garth 

 

A word. Bob Johnson didn’t know a shabeen from a shillelagh but he was as Irish, was as driven by Irish passions as anyone who had ever come out of the Shamrock-drenched Acre section, the working poor section, of Riverdale out about fifty miles west of Boston (the river part came a few hundred years ago from its proximity to the small branch of the Connecticut River that bordered the town). For a fact, for a blessed hard-earned fact, he was not subjected to like his best friend Tommy Riley, best friend since about third grade in Miss Jacobs’ class where they met on the first day of school, the whole nine yards of the Irish litany but he grabbed most of the aura as he learned later when it counted for something.

Learned the inevitable eight hundred years of John Bull’s tyranny to the poor Irish peasant forbears who took it on the chin, especially since Cromwell’s time when “they” with their foreign tongues and foreign ways came and upended the land, grabbed every blessed thing that was good and proper, later the famine ships that brought later forbears to Amerika, and the eternal struggle to be free not consummated until after the events of the glorious uprising of Easter 1916 of song and legend (that latter something of a misbegotten myth created after formal independence since the “shawlies” of  Dublin originally spit on the work of the boyos in 1916 worried more about their paid packets sent from sons enmeshed in the damn British Army then slogging in the trenches in France). The equally inevitable bowing down before the dictates (from the dictator Pope such a word if uttered then would have stirred cries of blasphemy and mortal sin) with the decree to multiply, to out-populate the bloody Protestant wherever an Irishman laid down his head. The decrees to keep holy the holies, the prayer book in hand and to avoid like the devil (remember Adam’s grievous sin, the sin that took humankind east of Eden, out of the Garden) tempting any young colleens who had their rosaries around their dainty hands and their Bibles between their knees. And naturally the covenant to not “air the family dirty linen, the why of why was sister sent away to see Aunt Bernice, the why of why was brother Jimmy doing a hard five for armed robbery, to name a few secrets, in public. In short all that distinguished the life of the shanty Irish from the shanty Protestants whose betters ran the town still and whose religion cast them to the gates of hell.             

Our Bob Johnson was “spared” all that, or so he thought later on when he did seek out his Irish heritage, did see in that seeking that he had been as branded by the verities of their existence as Tommy had been. See Bob was the product of a “mixed” marriage, the marriage of a daughter of Hibernia and one of those bloody Protestants. Worse not even a local bloody Protestant, a known quantity of Methodist or Episcopalian, but a bloody Primitive Baptist (the real name for that denomination to distinguish it from other branches of those heathen faiths) from down in Appalachia, down in coal country, down in Hazard, Kentucky a name to conjure with in story and song. The how of that liaison had been a simple accident, an accident called World War II to hear Grandmother Dolan tell the sordid details (her term). Prescott Johnson had been stationed at the Riverdale Naval Depot after having seen his fair share of battles with the Marines in the Pacific wars while waiting his discharge papers. One night he had met Delores Dolan at a USO dance in Worchester and the “shiek,” the name that his Marine buddies called him which had been culled from his attractive to the ladies from down in Appalachia all the way to Camp Pendleton enbarkment ports had attached himself to her (and she to him).

After Prescott’s discharge from the Marines he and Delores had been married in the rectory of the Sacred Heart Church, the Dolan family church and good girl Delores’ favorite spot growing up. That rectory business which caused no end of anguish to Grandmother Dolan among her Riverdale ‘shawlie” friends had been necessary since a “heathen” Protestant could not be married in the main church to a believer, no way, and maybe it was the same today although Bob now far from the religion of his birth had not kept up with the doing of the old bastard Church of late. The other stipulation was that any children of that woe begotten marriage would be raised in the faith. And so they were. And so also those Primitive Baptists proved to be as prolific at reproduction as the bloody Irishman and produced, begot is what Preston proudly called his actions in his old age like some Old Testament patriarch, five sons before giving up the game.                    

That five son brood was nothing but a mistake, a social mistake that would have consequences not only of making Bob, the youngest son, aware of his Irish heritage in some oddly moving ways, but that would cause more anguish and teeth-gnashing that would have seemed possible to those two love-birds who exchanged vows that day in that benighted rectory in front of the disbelieving priest. Prescott, as it turned out, something that he was proud of but which others in Riverdale put to laughter to, was the son of a coal miner, had been a coal miner himself before he jumped the pits when the “Nips” invaded Pearl Harbor and he ran double-time to the recruiting offices to sign up rather than take his chance in the mines. He had regretted many thing but not that decision to leave the worn-out mines around Hazard.  The laughter part was that there was not a blessed coal mine within three hundred miles of Riverdale.  

This “joke,” cruel as it turned out, was to cause more hellishness than that poor benighted man deserved. Whatever teenage desires and passions had stirred Delores Prescott’s way got tangled up with the hard fact that Prescott was an unskilled laborer and hence even in the “golden age” 1950s subject to the harsh last hired, first fired (or laid off meaning the same thing when you had five hungry close in age boys to feed) rule of the jungle. And so to shanty Irish the “Acre” did Delores and her brood descend from the lace curtain Irish of her young girlhood. It was not a pretty sight, not pretty at all and she never really adjusted to the downward swoop.        

But she did raise the boys in the faith of her maidenhood, did make sure that they went to church on Sunday and made their yearly obligations, did their repetitive confessions which only grew more frequent as they grew older. Did make sure they had their seemingly annual for a while first communions, got confirmed and a fistful of other non-pagan rituals which took each boy in turn a long time to break from, to do good or evil, mostly the latter among the older boys. Despite that, despite all her entreaties she could not keep the four older boys from the wrong road, could not keep them from the lure of the wise guys who hung around Sully’s Variety Store and later around Sully’s Tavern (owned by the variety store owner’s brother who was using the store as a front for his bookie operation which was out in plain sight and even the cops on the beat placed their bets with old Sully). Could not keep them from their in turn jail time for assorted misdemeanors and felonies.

But that was their stories and their mother’s too not Bob’s who as the youngest after the older four boys turned out “bad” got picked up as a favorite by Grandfather Dolan (and to a lesser extent Grandmother Dolan too although she was as swayed as any “shawlie” by the bad ends of the older boys who she practically disowned once they went on their thieving ways). And maybe that extra attention made a slight difference for the old man was an uncanny and unrepentant Irish nationalist of the old school, meaning he sided with likes of James Connolly, the Commandant of the Irish Citizens Army in Easter 1916 not so much for his socialist vision as for hip pluck in taking on the bloody occupying British Army while they were in the throes of a life and death struggle in the field of mud-strewn France (and hence the old saying once again proved true that Mother England’s misfortune was Ireland’s fortune). Had had a cousin, once removed, Seamus who had fought the good fight at the Post Office with the brave lads (and Bob was later to find out brave woman as well but Grandfather Dolan was old-fashioned in that way as well about the women) and had barely escaped the clutches of the British with his life. The old man would forever curse the British for burning down the town, burning down Dublin, until at a very old age he realized that it was not their town they were burning down so it might as well have been in deepest Africa for all they cared.    

 

Meant too that Bob whom he always called “Robert my boyo” had his ears filled from early on about the whole freaking eight hundred years of John Bull’s tyranny, spitting out of the bastard Cromwell’s name, and of the exploits of the Fenian Brotherhood and of course endless details about 1916 and the fights after independence.          

All of that did not sink in until “the troubles” began up in the North in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it was necessary to move from off the dime-to support the fight against the Protestant heathen who were down-pressing the Irish Catholic minority something like the ghost of his grandfather’s bull sessions came up and seized him in a fit of shamrock patriotism. He would raise serious money for the boyos and later never regretted like some did that the money bought guns and ammo. Thought back every time some frightened Irish politician would call on the diaspora to not supply the bravos with such “toys” to his grandfather’s words about the boys of 1916 taking guns from the Germans in their fight-in war the rules don’t mean a damn thing winning does and losing means the hang them high gallows. Yeah, so Tommy Riley, now the late Tommy Riley of blessed memory, was not the only one who got the drill who lived to see his green side blossom for all the world to see. And, hell, to this day Bob Dolan still does not know a shabeen from a shillelagh.