August Gale by Barbara Walsh

the funny sheets,” she’d tell us. Saying good-bye brought back the memory of her mother’s death. She was four as she stood by her mother Bridget’s bed, silent and scared. “Goodbye,” her mother said with her last breath.
    After her mother passed, Patricia’s father married a feisty Irish woman from County Galway, a woman who was not afraid of standing up to her husband. The last of seven children born to Tom O’Connell’s first wife, Patricia often retreated to the porch steps as her stepmother and father bickered and hollered.
    â€œShe got nervous when they shouted,” Patricia’s sister Eleanor recalled. “She was a soft, soft individual. If you’d ask her for something a second time, she’d give it. If anything went wrong, you could always go to her.”
    It also was not Patricia’s nature to complain, and despite the sorrow Ambrose inflicted upon her, she never spoke a bad word about him. Yet a few months after she returned from San Francisco, she confided to Eleanor: “If there is such a place as hell, I hope he ends up there.”
    â€œHe’d probably talk his way out of it,” Eleanor quipped.
    The two sisters shared a laugh over Ambrose’s ability to talk at length about any given subject.
    More than fifty years later, laughter is not on my mind as I think of my grandfather and the pain he wrought on a woman who spent her life caring for others. My older sister’s words spoken hours earlier on this night return to me in the dark.
    He was a bastard.

CHAPTER 9
FATHER MCGETTIGAN’S TORMENT—MARYSTOWN, LATE AUGUST 1935
    L izzie Drake started at the slam of the kitchen door.
    The young woman kept her eyes focused on the potatoes in the sink as Father McGettigan pushed a chair from his path. Aye, he’s in a fine mood this evening , Lizzie muttered to herself. As the August days waned, she had noticed the priest’s demeanor growing increasingly sour. Just the other night, he’d kicked her bucket of suds over upon his return from counseling a family, parents who had lost their beloved baby to pneumonia. Lizzie had been kneeling there on the kitchen floor, scrubbing his own holy footprints, when he stormed in and upturned the water in front of her. Not a word he said to her then, nor now. Not that twenty-year-old Lizzie wanted the reverend to speak to her; she had little to say to the gruff priest. ’Tis better off there be few words among us , she thought. And with these desperate times, she knew she was lucky enough to have a bed in the parsonage attic and a bit of beef on her plate. The four dollars a month wage she received for her housekeeping and cooking duties was a bonus that she was grateful for.
    Still, the priest’s presence kept the maid jittery as a boiling teakettle. She wondered if the absence of McGettigan’s dog, Jocko, had anything to do with the reverend’s foul moods. If he regretted the dog’s passing, he was likely the only one in Marystown to harbor remorse. The creature, big and black, taller than Lizzie herself when it stood on its hind paws, was worse than the devil himself, terrifying everyone that walked past the parsonage. He had attacked the poor and rich alike; tearing the coat off a well-to-do missus from the north side—a coat that the priest later paid a pretty penny to repair. And then there was the unfortunate soul, the fisherman passing by the priest’s home on his horse and cart. Jocko charged the horse, so frightening the large animal that it tumbled in the dirt, tipping the cart and tossing his master to the ground. The fisherman never recovered from his head injuries, his sufferings severe enough to render him a cripple, no longer fit to earn his living by the sea. And the worst incident of all, to be sure, involved poor Tommy Flanagan. Cornered by Jocko as he ambled past the priest’s home, the simpleminded lad grabbed a broken piece of picket