Connemara Moonshine The worn luggage of my Irish ancestors sits in the darkest chamber of my heart, stacked dusty, unhinged but never unpacked, and when I listen alone, holding my breath, I hear whispers calling from trunk to glen: uprisings, green as the Twelve Bens and cool as moonshine on Lake Connemara March evenings when no one knows. My grandfather said his daily prayers in Gaelic, away from the church. His fingers worked the rosary beads he hung above his bed, just over his head, blood lucky as an ocean of ale. Adrift in my shanty ship of fool dreams, blue drunk on a frozen sea, this legacy of liquid terror and pride is stuck between absolute zero and steam, tears cold in my burning veins. Insane messengers of impending doom, bottles of Bushmills, smooth as gasoline, comfort the combustible marriage between Jesus and the devil Himself in my mind. If the bottle’s half full, I’m only half empty but know my rage will go wrong. So I’ll drink till ice ignites the song burning hotter than the fires of Hell in my gut and cry, For the love of Jesus H. Sufferin’ Christ! What the fuck am I supposed to do? Just one more time I’ll try to hide like a leprechaun circus bear. (Do you suppose he’s happy behind the bars tipping bottles and dancing in clothes?) I must dry the blind Madonna’s eyes, pack my bags for Butte and go, decide to be my mother’s son and know my father’s moon will rise once more St. Patrick’s Day.
I am traveling to Ireland with my wife and sons. It’s a trip we’ve talked about for twenty years, and one I’ve dreamed about taking all my life. My father’s family came from Ireland to America in 1916, a pivotal year in Irish and world history, and my father was born in Butte, America, in 1917, a month after Uncle Tommy Joyce died in the Granite Mountain-Speculator Mining disaster. Needless to say, my dad’s family story, his Irish heritage, had a major influence on me and my family.
On my mother’s side, her mother was Irish, Scotch-Irish. The Mitchells and the Landers arrived in the American south in the 1800s. My mom’s father was born in Germany, so I always figured I was 3/4 Irish and 1/4 German. 23 and Me confirmed that and added another 10% to the Irish side. I guess they detected that a few Celts were still running around the mainland. My wife’s 23 and Me revealed that she was 50% Irish which she didn’t know. The Irish blood dominates her Heinz 57 ancestry, so our sons are mostly Irish.
We’ve all heard that everyone is Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, and in America there is a good chance that’s true. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were more Irish outside of Ireland than were in it. Why did they leave? The famine? British Rule? Opportunity? Take your pick: any and all. The majority of them wound up in America. My dad’s families, Gibbonses and Joyces, were farmers and sheep people in Connemara. My great grandfather, John Joyce, John Doctor, was an animal doctor and a fishing guide besides attending to his rocky farm. My other great grandfather, Michael Gibbons, was a farmer who died young, highly likely the result of being a child of the famine years. They were two of 18 households in Cloonacarten, Connemara. It was a hardscrabble existence, and one that only one child could inherit as a condition of law. The rest of the children had to fend for themselves, find work, or more likely move on to an urban area or get on a boat bound for another land, preferably an English speaking country. Most sailed to America.
It’s been just 100 years since that story transpired, and having just turned 69 myself, 100 doesn’t seem very long at all. Yet much has changed. Neither my grandparents, my parents, nor my siblings ever returned. A few good friends, Irish, who dreamed of going but never made the trip, dying before they had time or money, will be with me, too, in spirit. I’m taking a lot of folks with me. Two of my dad’s siblings made it back in the 1970s and 1990s, and one of my sons, was there a decade ago with his friends. I understand that it’s a trip to Ireland, where my family came from, but it’s a big fuckin’ deal to me. I feel like a ghost train hauling a century of stories of longing, empty cars heavier than they would be full. I’m in a very strange place emotionally, and I’m thinking my dislocation and dispossession over the last year has somehow oddly prepared me for this journey that seems to be located in other parts of my body than my head. Looking forward to being there, at the old Joyce homestead.
So much of my identity I attribute to this Irish family/culture history in America and in Ireland. That strong sense of self and tribe and survival, the brogue and the secret language, the reactions to injustice. the love of story and laughter and music, an elevated sense of integrity, loyalty, honesty, and that righteous anger always poised for a fight, a struggle, a siege. That intense sentiment, the swing from joy to melancholy, the quick hop from litany to laughter. The Irish are an attractive lot. Much like the Indians were to me. Native Americans I realized the (more I thought about it) were people who had undergone similar circumstances. They were tribal people living on lands that were invaded by European cultures who went about eradicating them, their languages and their cultures. Both peoples survived mass genocide. And they both employed humor as a way of dealing with the absurdity of an impossible situation. Life is absurd enough. Subjugation, violence, and injustice are intolerable states people are driven to escape. If there is no escape, your only outlets become humor, intoxication, and death. Martyrdom or suicide, both achieve the same end. “The Easter Rising and Bloody Sunday” are paired in my head like “Wounded Knee and Alcatraz.”
So all this shit, what I’ve been scribbling, is what I’m processing like turning a blender on puree. I’m hoping I will find a thread their to follow back home because I all kinds of fucked up right now. Just plan on getting there and letting it happen whatever happens. Till then I’ll keep on blinking off and on, waiting on the cusp of traveling there with my family to this place, the old country, what I’ve been pondering since I was a kid, the only destination on my bucket list. So I don’t have much of a tourist sensibility for this trip, yet. I hope this prevailing irrationality will abate once I get there. I feel like I’m riding a tsunami or on an active volcano. It’s in my body where it’s always been ebbing and flowing, me monitoring its surges, doing my damnedest to mitigate big quakes and eruptions. Knowing this early I was a serious child who worked at having fun and making others laugh. I was always trying to entertain. One never escapes oneself. I fell in love with ghosts who lived in my father turning him into a ghost himself. I lived with, absorbed, and inherited a black-assed melancholy I didn’t understand. And I still don’t, but educating myself has helped me gain perspective on him, my ancestry, and myself. The ghosts will be with me on this trip. My grandparents will be my guides. I’ll let you know what I find there.
Prospects my grandfather was Irish so he drank a wee bit sometimes most of the times he felt like it and he felt like it a lot a lot of the time my grandfather Martin was handy with his mitts a shovel a pick he was at home in the dirt following his nose his eyes alert to veins in the earth my grandfather was a rock hound who scanned the ground for gold & silver deposits of ore in stone whatever paid he assayed by lantern light in a one room shack the jeweler’s glass tucked into his eye socket my grandfather visited us for a week each year showed his stash of shiny rocks some heavy some colored some crystalline wonders he’d roll with his fingers so they’d glitter in the light my grandfather doodled Irish ditties tapped his feet nipped at a jug of whiskey in his valise his brogue a foreign song to my ears to some my grandfather was a joke a crazy dreamer & deadbeat mick a travesty in the mouths of those sanctimonious shit- heels who spoke behind his back about his wife & kids scrounging pennies for eggs & potatoes while he was off striking it rich but not it’s true my grandfather drank a lot of his paydays got in more than a few fights he couldn’t walk away from he hated bullies injustice the blind arrogance of comfort those silent generations of English who took their tea regularly as Irish died hungry my grandfather believed in this land of opportunity the freedom to roam to dig to stake a claim & break away from the bonds he’d known all his life the hopeless promise of poverty my grandfather was a blue eyed dreamer no black- Irish blues singer but he knew the rhythms of labor the arc of the pick his breath danced with hand tools to dig ditches & sewers graves & cesspools glory holes & stope muck my grandfather lived for the moments he could scratch & sift fractured rock through callused hands palm nuggets he’d carry home in a bag to be graded & tagged spread out across his table my grandfather wasn’t deterred by those who looked down their noses at his schemes he became a slag monk of sorts after my grandmother sent him packing back to Glen Montana where he found himself a mountain of iron ore my grandfather drank daily & wintered well under the tarp on his bed broke ice on the water bucket mornings in his shack to wash his face wipe the sleep from his eyes then toddle on down to Grogan’s Bar for breakfast my grandfather ordered two in the water & a boiled spud was proud of John Fitzgerald Kennedy & wasn’t surprised when they shot him dead he ordered a shot of house whiskey & butter for his tea it was as close to Ireland as he could get at 10 below zero in Beaverhead County waiting for the flow the luxury & ease of opportune dreams to wash over him & warm the day’s prospects
grandma rode the Greyhound from L.A. to Montana every year holding her rosary her water the bus tires to the road and watched the moon glow out her window the same moon she'd wished on in Connemara before she followed her husband from Galway to Butte and raised her children in Beaverhead County where she scrubbed floors and folded other people's clothes to buy eggs and potatoes she fed her kids the church her boys abandoned for the bottle their father embraced to escape his Hell of digging ditches celebrate a wee bit of Heaven early just in case the meek didn't make out so good so she lost them the way all mothers lose though she didn't give up she never let go always made the trip prayed for our everlasting souls in her thick Irish brogue that still echoes inside of me
Thank you, Holly! It was good to see you last week. Hey to Tim and Helen.
Thank you, Jude! Your name is on a Guinness, and if you have a preferred whiskey, we could arrange that, too. Slainte!