Blood & Bones

Water & Stone

Bridget Teresa Veronica Joyce Stennes left this reality December 10, 2024, in the early afternoon just shy of her 91st birthday. She was my first cousin once removed. My father and her were first cousins who never met. My grandmother and “Terry’s” father were siblings, Joyces, Grandma being the oldest child and Martin being the youngest. Their parents had nine children, eight of whom immigrated to America. Martin was the only one to remain. He lived with and took care of his parents before inheriting the farm where Terry, short for Teresa, was born. Like my Grandmother Delia (in so many ways) Terry was christened “Bridget” but was known by her second name. As teenagers (almost a half-century apart) they both chose to go to America and work as domestic help in Boston. Six of Terry’s aunts and uncles had settled in the Boston area. Only Delia and her brother Tommy had ventured further to Butte, Montana, where in 1917, less than a year after arriving, he died in the Speculator Mine disaster.

Terry found America exciting, and she fell in love. Unfortunately she decided to marry a Protestant (like her cousin, my father) much to the displeasure of her Catholic relatives. But Aunt Delia was the exception who said, “Tell them to mind their on damn business or go to Hell!” Terry and her Aunt Delia were a lot alike, both of them being headstrong Irish women.

I met Terry through her daughter, Debra, whom I met on “23 and Me” after our son gave us the DNA kits for an anniversary present. When I got my results, Debra was the closest relative I had at that time outside of my son. We are 2nd cousins. It was during the pandemic when we started communicating and sharing family pictures and ancestry. Then in 2021 I was named Poet Laureate of Montana, and I got busy with all that. Our connection got put on the back burner with all that was going on.

My sons suggested making “the trip to Ireland” that we’d talked about doing for the last 20 years sometime in 2022, and I suggested we wait till 2023 when my “Laureate gig” would end. So in 2023 I reconnected with Debra to see if she had some relative connections in Ireland I could contact. Once we began that conversation, Debra suggested I talk to her mother. She had told her mom about me and shared some of my writing with her. When Debra told Terry about my intention to travel to Ireland and the old Joyce place in Connemara, she told Debra she’d like to talk to me.

I knew Terry was in a nursing home and almost 90, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But Debra told me her mom had all her faculties and was excited to talk to me. She said Terry loved my poems that she’d shared with her, so I was looking forward to having a chat. I hoped to get some good information about the place she and my grandmother grew up in, maybe even give me some folks I could connect with over there.

It is difficult to describe my feelings, the overwhelming emotion that hit me when I first heard her voice—that Irish brogue of my grandmother triggered deep in my brain. She reminded me of her, too: that frankness, the humor, her absolute bullheadedness, and that fiery attitude, an even measure of feminine and masculine energies that played out in the stories she told and the musical lilt of her tongue. I fell in love with a woman I’d never met but seemed to have known all my life. She said she felt that way, too. She claimed it was an “Irish thing,” that the Irish culture and rebellious personality was embedded in us, in our blood and bones.

Maybe she felt like she knew me because of her connection with my grandma, but it probably had a lot to do with the fact that she read many of my poems filled with stories and ideas she identified with. For whatever reason we bonded (as strongly as people can bond over the telephone) having never laid eyes on one another. Yet these encounters touched me deeply and I believe she felt the same about me. I was probably projecting my grandmother onto her, and it was wonderful! She was so happy for me that I was going to Ireland, and that I could go with my family. I think my going to find her home made her feel closer to it, the place where she and my grandmother were born and raised.

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Blood & Bone
	for Bridget Teresa Joyce Stennes

Driving up the lane to the stone house,
a farm tractor blocked the road. A crew 
of men were putting up hay. They stopped 
for me, wondering what I needed. I walked 
toward the opened door of the house I knew
from photographs, where my grandmother 
was born. It served as a hay barn now 
and had for fifty years. The thatched roof 
replaced with tin decades back was rusted 
along the eaves, and the door and shutters 
once painted bright red were faded, chipped, 
ignored. Loose hay trailed the way inside.

An old man with a cane came rocking 
outside into the light donning a soiled work-
coat and beaten Donegal cap, the brim 
half-gone from taking it off and putting it on 
year after year. Squinting in the glare, one 
wandering eye, a dead-ringer for Peter 
Ustinov. He stopped and stared at me.
I asked, “Are you Patrick Joyce?”
                                                       I yam, 
he replied, that one eye bouncing on his 
deeply furrowed face weathered eighty-plus 
years. He silently sized me up, so I said. 
“My grandmother, Delia, was born here.”

Deelah? he frowned, scanning my face.

“Yes, she married Martin Gibbons. They left
for America in 1916, My dad was born in Butte.
Montana. That's where I'm from. This is my
first time in Ireland.”
                                  Jaysus! He grinned.
Montana, ye say? Deelah and Martin! 
He pointed south, Ol' Jimmy Gibbons 
lived right down dere.
                                     “Yeah, my cousin, 
Teresa Joyce, told me she remembered 
Jimmy walking up here to visit. Did you know
Teresa?”
                 Treesah?A huge smile filled his face. 
 Jaysus! Sure I know Treesah! My sister's age . . .  
and Deelah . . . , he nodded, pondered it all. 
Will ye be here long?
                                  “No, sadly our time is up, 
we've got to fly out of Dublin tomorrow. 
I stopped by a few days ago, but no one was 
around. Wish we had more time.”
			                   He nodded, 
but didn't say a word. “Anyway, I better get 
goin', let you get back to work. It took me 
70 years to make this trip. Hope I make it back 
sooner than that! Lucky I caught you today!”

Well, I'm glad ye did! His eyes lit up, then 
narrowed to the frown. We shook hands while
the hay crew waited, watched us, like my family 
down the road in rental cars. I started away, 
turned to wave goodbye. He'd already gone 
back inside. So I walked on toward my family.
A flush of emotion lifted me off the ground. 
To meet Patrick face to face still working the old 
Joyce place I knew it was why I'd come—
to find him, some blood relative, standing framed 
on the threshold of Grandma's stone house
digging up the bones above and below ground.

---

Terry loved the story I told her about meeting our cousin Patrick Joyce on the old Joyce home place. She laughed and told me her best friend and cousin, Mary, Patrick’s sister (who coincidentally is in hospice now, just days behind her dear friend’s exit) told her that “Patrick would rather spend time with the cows than with people.” We had a good laugh at that (and my estimation of Patrick grew immensely). She also mentioned that once their mother had to go to a nursing home in Clifden, Patrick, who didn’t drive, would often walk there to see his mother on weekends, 15 to 20 miles one way. If he was lucky he might catch a ride along the way and the weather would do him a favor, but regardless, he went. The Irish are a loyal bunch.

from left: Catherine Stennes, Terry Joyce Stennes, Martin Joyce, Delia Joyce Gibbons

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So, I raise my glass to Terry and our brief and unforgettable time (almost) together. A year and a half on the phone, probably six good conversation of an hour or more and another half dozen near misses due to the complications of our circumstances and the limitations of a phone call. I’m so thankful that we had the time together we did before she snuck out the door after nine decades on this side of the veil. When Debra informed me that her mother died on Tuesday afternoon, December 10th, I remembered that’s when I was in the kitchen getting lunch together, and I heard a tapping. I thought someone was at the door. Then I heard it again louder, closer, like tapping on the kitchen window, so I walked over to look, and there was a huge Stellar Jay pecking on the window. It was big, beautiful, and busy! I watch it for a minute or so, pecking and nosing around, looking at me standing just inches away on the other side of the glass. It pecked at the grout around the pane, so I poked the window to back it off and watched it jump to the fence and duck away into a tree. Such a bold and striking bird, I knew it was destined for a poem, so I wrote it that afternoon and the next day.

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Stellar

Outrageously flexed
Mohawk headdress 
Of feathers expresses

What beady-black 
Agate eyes cannot.
It hammer-pecks

The window glass,
Sill & frame, then
Hopping & bopping,

Cocking its head,
It stop-stares at me,
Looking stone-still  

Till I knuckle-rap
The glass & blast
Its blue barrel-

Chested backward-
Cast, flitting atop 
The gatepost to

Make its escape
Into the densely 
Shadowed Spruce

Branches—pausing 
Just long enough 
To wave a Royal

Blue-tailed goodbye
Before diving in
& away from me.

	for Terry, December 10, 2024

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The following night I received a message from Debra that Terry had passed away on Tuesday afternoon—not long after I was visited by the Stellar Jay, so I went back and reread the poem. My reaction was along the lines of “Jesus Fucking Christ!” I guess I wanted to believe Terry came to say goodbye to me. I sure as Hell couldn’t ignore it. That’s me. Maybe it’s the Irish in me. I know Terry would agree, and what sealed the deal was Debra’s response after I sent her the poem and told her the story. She said, “Mom was really into birds, like really into birds. She loved them!” And, yes, Debra is her mother’s daughter, and we all love those wildly bat-shit-Irish “coincidences,” believing the power of mythology can be a balm death, a kind of comfortable mystery providing a sort of “explanation” of what we hope is possible in a world we can’t fully understand. Yes, we love stories! And of course I want to distill everything into a good story! Regardless, the coincidences can’t be ignored—whatever they mean.

We’re always looking for a way to explain, to connect the dots, make sense of shit we can’t understand. One word for that is “magic.” I remember being in Ireland and filled with something I couldn’t explain, a powerful sense of connection, on a daily basis. Then when we came to the end of our Dingle Distillery tour and I was talking to a young woman, pierced and tattooed, who’d been serving us drinks, I gave her a book of my poems in thanks for their generous good will, and she looked up at me smiling ear to ear. She came up close in a confidential way and asked me, “Can you feel it?!” I smiled, “Can I feel what?” Then she leaned in closer, her eyes glittering, and asked more slyly and secretive-like, “The magic. Do you feel the magic?” Holy shit! That question hit me like a tidal wave of emotion filling my chest, and I barely got out, “I’m feeling it all the fucking time!” That was Ireland for me, and Terry was my guide. I believe she came to me before leaving this world, that she went out of her way in the best form she could conjure to remind me, “Hey! It’s all magic! Follow me.” Thank you, Terry, for reminding me: it’s all magic. Slainte!