Loyal beyond Death

It became clear to me one afternoon that I am not as clever or worldly minded as I once thought that I was. I had long thought that I, as a member of the many whose childhoods had been spent among the poor and impoverished masses, must have been an expert on many important topics. The most important of these topics was the subject of loyalty.

I, as a matter of course, had been schooled in the idea of loyalty from many different teachers. The greatest, and most influential, of these instructors was my father. It was from him that I gleaned my most lasting definition of the concept of loyalty. He had told me, the day I ratted out my sibling for stealing my father’s wallet even though it had been me who took it, “You’ve got no loyalty. All you’se care about is yourself. You tell on them so you’se won’t get in trouble. You gotta think about others, and put their feeling first. Then, and only then, will you have loyalty.”

He delivered those lines to me much as you’ve received, like the Irish street hood that he was. He had twisted my hand up in my shirt collar and jerked me off of my feet. My ten-year-old legs were dangling in the air. I was suspended between heaven and earth looking into the steel gray Irish eyes of his. He gave me a shake or two and then let me drop.

So there it is; the official Irish-American mobster’s definition of loyalty. This was a startling revelation to me. I drank it in and let it become a part of my soul. It was from him and it would be part of me.

It would not be long before this idyllic dream would be shattered. St. Louis was a different place when I grew up there. Most of the Irish, both the immigrants and those born to them were crammed in a section of St. Louis called the “Kerry Patch.” If there was ever a place that could be described as hell on earth, the “patch” was it.

It was one of the most neglected and dangerous Irish ghettos in the United States. As the number of Irish flooding into St. Louis grew, they overwhelmed the city's ability to house them. In 1850, 43 percent of the population of St. Louis was Irish. Many were living in the streets.

John Mullanphy, an Irish immigrant who had become wealthy in St. Louis, donated a large tract of land for the Irish to settle. It was located north of Carr Square and extended from N. 9th Street, west between Morgan and Franklin Avenues. The heart of Kerry Patch was considered N. 18th and O'Fallon Streets, but as the Irish population spread north and west, all of it was called "Kerry Patch".

There, the Irish built "clapboard" houses - small, frame homes that often were home to more than one family. The houses were built at or near the sidewalk line. During floods, many of the homes filled with mud from the streets. These were St. Louis' "Shanty Irish".

In the early 1900s, St. Louis was a thriving metropolis. It was the fourth largest city in the U.S. Politics, poverty and prohibition combined to create a very lethal atmosphere in the Patch. Many single shanties had been replaced with tenement style boarding houses. Irish families tended to live in compact single rooms located in boarding houses that carried the names of famous battles in Ireland as well as in the US Civil War.

Tenement houses were crowded places that housed hundreds of people. There were no sewers and public bath houses were patronized monthly. Some tenements were not even built facing a street, but faced each other forming a square in the middle.

The men worked long hours in any of the pre prohibition breweries that operated in the city. Of course, as one could expect, they also spent the majority of those wages in the many drinking establishments in the “patch”.

Violence and crime were a way of life for Irish of the “patch.” Many young men joined the gangs that controlled the city’s crime. Other cities may have Italian crime families, but St. Louis was dominated by the Irish.

My father was one of the many young toughs who found themselves caught in a precarious position. Unable to find a job after Prohibition closed the brewery he worked in, he was faced with the idea that his young wife and children needed to eat. He did the only thing that he could do. He joined a gang.

He had been in the gang before. When he was a teenager, my father was a courier for the “Eagan’s Rats.” He had made a little money, the first in his life, and enjoyed feeling important. The story had taken a turn, however, when he had met my mother. She was a small Irish lass with flaming red hair, glittery green eyes and a temper to make the earth quake. She was a prize that my father couldn’t let go of, so he gave up his life of crime and got a job in the brewery.

After the start of Prohibition many Irish, who had been skilled workers in the breweries, began to make and sell hooch out of their homes. These enterprises soon became the property of one of the many Irish gangs that rules the city. During Prohibition, the Largest of these gang’s was the “Eagan’s Rats.” They virtually controlled the city. They always needed strong enforcer’s and my father was welcomed back with open arms. My mother wept for days after, I am told.

By the time I was ten years old, my father had committed, I am sure, countless crimes. He had transitioned from a strong enforcer to a key manager. We enjoyed a life that was better than many of my schoolmates, but we still lived in the “Patch.”

One snowy winter day I was walking with my father. We had just left my father’s favorite drinking establishment. My father liked to take me with him as he went from place to place talking to the people. We turned a corner and began to make our way toward our home when a voice called out my father’s name.

As he turned, his eyes widened and he shoved me hard. I flew off my feet and fell down the steps to the basement of the building we had just come out of. The air exploded around me as my father was gunned down, presumably by a rival gang. As I hid behind a pile of rubbish, I caught a glimpse of a face. It was squat, sallow face that would haunt me forever.

My father’s murderers fled as the patrons of the drinking establishment flooded out to see what was going on. They, the patrons, found my father bleeding to death in the street, and me cowering behind that pile of rubbish like a coward. My father’s body was taken in doors and my mother was told. She was brought, along with my four sisters, to the shanty and ushered into a room where they had taken my father’s body.

As I sat in that tiny room, I could feel the shame of seeing my father’s death creep up on me. My mind raced back to what my father had told me about loyalty. He had shown me that type of loyalty when he had shoved me down the steps. He had shown that type of loyalty all along. He had put his life on the line, and had eventually lost it, for his family.

I sat there with tears running from my eyes. Someone came and stood in front of me. I looked up into the face of a man I knew well. His face was pale, and squat. He reached out his hand to touch me on my shoulder. I shrank back, and he smiled evilly. He lowered his head to whisper in my ear, “You’ll be doin yer mum a real disservice if ye don’t keep yer big mouth shut. I’d hate to see anything happen to either her or them gals, you know.”

I swallowed hard and nodded at him. He rose to his feet and put a sad face on as he went and paid his condolences to my mother. The sadness and shame that had filled me was being replaced by another emotion: rage. My hands shook. I gritted my teeth as my father’s murderer hugged my mother and promised her to try to find out who had done this to our family.

I lunged forward and ran from the room. My mother called after me, and I heard footsteps behind me but I outran them. I ran on and on in the snowy night. I ran to a place that only my father and I knew about. It was our secret cache. We kept things there that were for our eyes only.

I peeled back the wood board that covered the entrance to the cache. I lit a match and reached for the yellowed candle that my father had hidden just inside the entrance. It crackled as I stuck the old twisted wick into the flame of the of the match head. I raised the candle high in the air and let my eyes wander over my secret hoard. Though there were several interesting items here, I was looking for two specific items.

It did not take me long to find them. Lying near the back of the hoard was my father’s pistol. He had put it here and told me to come get it only in an emergency. Next to it was a bottle of fine Irish whiskey. My father’s father had brought it from Ireland, and my father had hid it here when my mother had told him to get the vile stuff out of her house. I picked up the pistol and spun the cylinder. All six shells were loaded. The gun felt heavy in my hand and I shook with the enormity of the thing that I was contemplating.

I reached down and picked up the bottle of whiskey. I had never before tasted strong drink. My mother had insisted that I was too young to drink whiskey. Like all Irish boys I had drunk ale and beer almost from my birth but my mother would hear no arguing when it came to whiskey. My father had always kept me from it, but he had told me that someday when I was a man we would share this bottle together. He was gone, and today I would be a man.

I pulled the cork from the bottle with my teeth as I had seen the men at the pubs do a hundred times. I spit the cork from my mouth and turned the bottle up into my mouth and took a good long pull on the whiskey. It burned my mouth and my belly was on fire. I couldn’t catch my breath and I thought for a second that I would die, either from the fire burning up my insides or from lack of oxygen. My legs felt like they would come out from under me. I swayed a little bit as I struggled to find the cork that I had spit out and replace it in the lip of the bottle.

I put the pistol in the pocket of my tattered coat and carefully stepped into the cold air outside the hiding place. I replaced the board that covered the entrance. I almost fell down in the process. The whiskey had affected me more than I thought it would.

The cold steel in my pocket was no comfort to me as I made my way into the night. Neither was the fire in my veins from the whiskey. The bottle was still in my hand and I pulled the cork from the bottle and took a small pull on the whiskey. It burned, but not as bad this time. My head was burning now.

The snow was falling heavily as I found my way back to the place where my father’s body lay. The man with the pale face was just coming out of the shanty as I approached. I slowed my walk and fell in behind him a few paces. I could tell from the way he swayed on his feet that he had partaken of the whiskey that the proprietor of the drinking room where my father’s body lay would have offered to the mourners.

The whiskey was making my head throb and the pistol in my pocket was getting heavier by the minute. The man that killed my father turned up an alley and I realized that my time was coming. I slid my hand into my coat pocket and gripped the handle of the pistol. It was ice cold in my palm, and my fingers throbbed as I held it.

I took one last pull on the bottle. The warm liquid was now the only comfort I would have on this night. The bottle was empty and so was my soul. I threw the bottle at the man I intended to kill. It hit him between his shoulder blades. He turned and looked at me in surprise. A smile began to cross his ugly face as I pulled the pistol from my pocket and pointed it at him.

He began to chuckle. “What’re you gonna do wi’ that, huh? Yer dad never killed no one, kid, and you ain’t gonna neither. Tell you what, youse put it away and I’ll only beat youse up a little.” He laughed at me and made a move toward me.

It was now or never. I closed my eyes and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in my hand, it twisted from my grip and fell into the snow. My eyes popped open and I half expected to see the evil man looming over me ready to kill me.

He was standing about four feet from me and was staring at me with a strange expression on his ugly, yellow face. Then I saw the red on his shirt. It began to spread. He coughed, and blood flew from his mouth and landed in the snow. He crumpled into a heap in the snow.

I stood looking down at him as his blood spread out over the snow. The snow was so white, and his blood was so red. The whiskey in my veins had suddenly gone all cold and I began to shiver. Tears ran from my eyes as I looked down on the man who had murdered my father.

Suddenly I came to myself. I had murdered a man. If I stood here too long I would be caught and I would be put in some rat-hole jail, or worse I would be killed by the members of my father’s own gang. I had to get away. I picked up my father’s gun and I ran away as quickly as I could. I ran toward the center of the “patch.” There was a large Church there.

I jumped the stone fence that surrounded the church yard. I ran quickly toward the well that the priests drew water from. I looked around and then pitched my father’s gun into the well. Then I jumped back over the fence and ran away into the snowy night.

I woke in my bed. Even if I had wanted it to be a horrid nightmare the pounding in my ears and my aching head told me that I had indeed killed a man. The sound of a soft cough startled me and I looked into the steel gray eyes of Father Murphy. He looked at me sadly. His voice was full of pity and love as he said to me, “Boy, ye look a bit better today than ye did last night when I carried you up here to yer bed.”

I began to shake and tears filled my eyes as he pulled a broken bottle of Irish whiskey out from his sack and showed it to me. It was my father’s and it was covered in dried blood. The man I had murdered must’ve fallen on it and smashed it. I opened my mouth to say something to Father Murphy, but he cut me off with a look.

“Yer father once told me that you’d not follow his path, but I can see that maybe he was wrong.” He stood up and turned his back to me. I was crying hard now. I didn’t know what he was going to do. He turned back to me and held the bottle out to me. As I took it he said some words to me that burned in me even hotter than the taste of the whiskey had the night before. “Ye have no loyalty, boy. All ye care about is yerself. You killed that man to kill yer own pain, but what of yer mother or the girls? Who would take care of them if ye’d have been caught or killed? Ye must think about others, and put their feeling first. Then, and only then, will ye have loyalty.”

I hung my head. I had thought that I was being loyal to my father, but instead I had dishonored him by putting my family in jeopardy. It would have hurt my father more to know that I had done this thing. His family was everything to him. Shame filled me.

The gang found the body the very next day. They never discovered who had killed him. To tell you the truth I don’t think they tried very hard. He wasn’t missed.

I went to work for Father Murphy at the church and in return he taught me to read and write better. It was not long until Prohibition was repealed and I went to work in the new, legally opened brewery. I worked there for several years; all through the depression and the pre-war years.

My mother died not too long after my father. Her Irish heart was true to him and it could not beat without his light to fill it. My sisters were all older than me and they soon were married to men from the “patch.” When the clay mines were opened in the thirties their husbands went to work there and my sisters moved out to the area of St. Louis now known as Dogtown.

When the war broke out in Europe, I joined the service and fought. I had no one left, but a burning definition of loyalty would not let me stay at home when men were dying. The words my father spoke, and that Father Murphy had echoed, burned in my mind and heart.

I returned to St. Louis after the war and the first thing I did was visit the cemetery where my father was buried. I stood in the winter chill and looked down at the simple headstone that sits near his head. A shiver ran up my spine as I looked down at it. There, carved in stone, was the heart beat of a man I loved but never knew.

“Loyal beyond death, he put his family first.”