The Element of Fire. Brendan Graham

      She was no longer one of the potato Irish; nor would her children be singled out as such. What harm if in Boston’s public schools her son had to recite the Protestant Ten Commandments and the Protestant Our Father? Or read the King James Bible that he was made to bring home for the ‘edification of your family’, as the Headmaster of Eliot School had so delicately put it. It was all much of a muchness to her. ‘Bishop John’, as the Catholic prelate of Boston was familiarly called, could rant and rail against Anti-Popery all he liked. In the end it didn’t make one ‘Amen’ of difference. She had always maintained it was ‘how you came into the world and how you went out of it’ that mattered. Even to be born hard and bred hard, if, in the end, you died easy – in the grace of God – wasn’t that it? And it was the same, she thought, for black, as for white, for heathen, as for Christian, for Sassenach, as for Jew. The main thing was to see that her children got a good education, Catholic or Protestant. To ready them for this life – and the next.

      One evening while reading, waiting for Lavelle to come in from one of his Repeal meetings, she heard a noise outside. Thinking it was him, she looked up. There, darkly framed in the window, were the head and shoulders of a woman. Gaunt, sunken-eyed, a rag of a headscarf about her, the woman scratched at the windowpane, her withered finger bent against the glass. The sight of her startled Ellen. But when she opened the door the old woman was gone.

      The woman was so frail of limb, that she reminded Ellen of those poor souls ravaged by Famine that she had once seen along the Doolough Pass Road between Westport and Delphi. That day the wind had whipped up along the Pass, swirling the wafer-thin phantoms to a watery grave in the Black Lake. The memory sent a shiver over her and she crossed herself. ‘No use thinking of all that now, is there?’ she said to herself, before closing the door and running upstairs to the children. Probably just some poor old beggarwoman looking for a crust of bread. Then, maybe got frightened and took off.

      ‘Too much reading, agitating the mind,’ Lavelle had brushed it off with when he had come in later.