The Death of an Irish Lass by Bartholomew Gill Read Free Book Online

the rules with these people. He didn’t think of the money as compensation, but it might help them over the months of sadness, when, he supposed, neither of them would feel much like working.
    With quaking hands and fingers that seemed too numb or rough to separate them, Quirk tried to fan the bills. “I don’t understand. No amount of money will ever bring her back.”
    “And we don’t want it, neither,” said an old woman from a doorway that led to a hall and bedrooms beyond. “That’s dirty Fenian money it is, and what’s responsible for my poor baby’s death.” Her hand groped for the jamb.
    O’Malley stood to help her.
    She fended him off and walked unsteadily toward the divan. Her legs were like thin sticks and red from sitting too close to an electric fire. She was wearing an old, flower-print dress—green holly sprigs with red berries—and a wool cardigan worn through at the elbows. Her hair was thin and very white. Her face had once been handsome, but, like her husband’s, far toothin. Her cheekbones were prominent knobs and her false teeth seemed to be a bad fit. McGarr imagined that the Quirks, like many older people out here in the West, cooked only when they had company. Otherwise it was tea and cake, potatoes once in a while, and an odd rasher in the pot. Much of the produce in the garden out back had been left past prime.
    When she had eased herself into the cushions of the divan, O’Malley asked, “What makes you say it’s Fenian money, Aggie?”
    There were red circles around both her eyes. Otherwise her face seemed bloodless. “Didn’t she have a shooter in her handbag?”
    Her husband was surprised.
    “I saw it myself when she kept digging for them scented cigarettes of hers what smelled like a cabbage patch under the torch. Big as a gangster’s it was. How else can you explain that?”
    She didn’t wait for a reply. “Oh, I know how it is. I’ve read about it in the papers. Our poor innocent kids get over there to New York and after a few years they think they know it all. And then they meet up with a cutie, some little good-for-nothing chancer from hunger who’s got a nose for the fast buck and an easy mark. He gets ahold of a pretty young thing like May and asks her how Irish she is. And to prove it, over there where everybody’s pretty much of everything and nothing much of what’s good, she starts collecting money—handouts, mind you, just like plain begging it is—from other misguided country people. They think it’s going to the patriots and rebels, you know, the ones what freed the country from the British. But it’s not. It’s going straight into the pockets of the dirty little dodgers like that one in New York, or them in Derryand the Bogside, the ones what would rather kill than work, the ones what are blowing people out of the seats in London restaurants. Or the one what did whatever he did to May.” She made a fist with her right hand and pushed it into her forehead. “The craven coward, may he die a thousand hideous deaths!” She began sobbing.
    McGarr waited until she had quieted. “What man in New York?”
    “Sugrue, his name is.” She stood and started out of the parlor toward the hall. “Wrote her just last week, he did. A little runt of a man. And without an occupation, either. She told me he was a fund raiser. Now then,” she paused in the doorway, “wouldn’t you call that tripe? A fund raiser! Isn’t that what we all are in one way or another?”
    When she returned from the bedroom she had a letter in one hand, a photograph in the other. “Look at him. A half-pint. Doesn’t hardly come up to her shoulder.”
    McGarr didn’t stand to take the photo from her. He didn’t think he’d come up to the old woman’s shoulder either. She was at least six feet tall.
    And May Quirk was too. She and a man were pictured standing outside a bar named Mickey Finn’s in what McGarr assumed was New York, since all the cars parked at the curb looked like