Westward ho

R52 from Holbrook to Parnell, across the Iowa River Valley, was called the Black Diamond, still is north of Old Man’s Creek. In 1832 the Black Hawk Treaty with the Sac and Fox Indians plowed the way for west-moving settlers following deep along creeks and riverbeds, keeping timber and water by their side. During the 40’s and 50’s, hungry Irish immigrants heeded the adverts to rich farmlands and named towns names that are no more: Armah, Hinkeltown, Green Valley, Lytle City.

There is vastness in the Greene Township, every ditch, every S curve in the road named and remembered. Folks talk about the south side of the field, turning north on route R and east on the Black Diamond. Mapped routes are gravel, and I knew full well a dozen pairs of eyes watched behind curtains as a dusty vehicle crawled up Naughton Street to Hatter Ave to St Joseph’s, quiet as the grave on Easter Sunday. Although the younger, Parnell’s lonely church is scheduled for demolition in June.

Squint, and see what brought so many from Wicklow and Meath and Dunmore to these low hills, highwater creeks, thousands of miles from their rotting homeland. Tucked into safe country, anchored, far far from any sea, with the accumulation of acres, the least liquid and most valuable of assets, their future. 120 acres to start, a marriage brings 80, a clever purchase another 100, and families lend the lot to the next generation as they borrowed from the last.

Surrounded by ghost towns, nearly one itself, Holbrook is a place of souls, living and dead. St Michael’s cemetery, where my grandmother’s people rest, shows a new wound in its side. Soon an old woman pauses her car, steps into a brutal wind, stares into the hole and crosses herself.

Men older than my father remember their old folks minding the march across the Black Diamond when records and regalia were taken from the old capitol in Iowa City – too remote – to a new home in Des Moines, shortly after statehood. Irish farmers stopped their digging, looked up from their new fields and saw the stately procession, ignominiously stuck upon the road that very first night, a load heavier than anticipated.

Irish Sighs

Now is the silly season in Boston. Except for mold, there isn’t enough green to upholster a pillow, but plenty of faux emerald on the endcaps in Stop and Shop. And nutty hats. Guinness is the maddest haberdasher, planting fixtures like fireplugs atop the suburban public which, it appears, has just discovered drink.

From famine era to current frivolity, the Irish have contributed mightily to our city: presidents, playwrights, mayors and mafia, a checkered achievement. And, once landed on these shores, wasted no time in beating the tar out of the next wave of newcomers, in good American fashion.

Yet, like the rest of our immigrant nation, they were once scared and hungry. The woman who saved us sailed three months to the new world. Her dowry, a featherbed coverlet tatted by the nuns, rests in my closet in an 1841 brick boarding house run by a succession of Irish dears giving succor and chowder to seamen, before demon drink and the harbor harlots robbed them blind.

I looked up on this when-will-it-stop late winter grey afternoon and saw that flag, big as a mainmast and thin as water, unfurled in the vault of the Boston Harbor Hotel, flapping in the cold Lenten wind, waving its tricolors out to sea, past the Graves Light, where immigrants from countless towns and countries passed the rocky ledge in horror, past the Harbor Islands that hid the Irish mob’s monkey business and gun running, out past Finn’s Ledge, which drowned the crew of the Mary E O’Hara, and no one could save them, a hundred miles past East Boston where, in 1860, 600 who smelled land were lifted off the sinking Connaught, two months out of Galway, past George’s Bank and deep waters where those who tried and failed or were turned back sleep in the cold dark sea.

From coffin boat to Irish cruises, immigrants to emigrants returning, McNamara to Mack, the full circle of migration plays a sweet and mournful song.