I am in the closet with my grandmother. I call her Gram. My mother and her brothers call her Ma. With no light in the closet we are alone among the coats. She was cooking when the thunder started--rubbing the skin of an eight pound turkey--so her hands are slick with butter. She's afraid of the lightning and spends most storms in the closet since, as a child in Ireland, she saw her brother struck down and killed. I know this from my mother because Gram never speaks of it.
The closet smells like leather, like the inside of a boot, and Gram and I are holding hands as if we are siblings, as if I'd been born in Ireland and not in some American town. And while I've seen death--my own father's--I've never seen someone die, or seen the smoke come off someone's skin. Because of this, I am calm, or at least I pretend to be.
In the woolen darkness we do not speak. She cannot put words to her terror, but I stay with her and squeeze her hands when the whole house shakes from the storm. We are in the closet for fifteen minutes or so before Vincent, her youngest, comes home. He knocks hard on the closet door and she doesn't like the sound. I want to take him by the throat, but he's a miner and much too strong. "Ma," he says, "you're safe in the house. Jesus would you come on out."
He complains about his dinner, about the turkey uncooked by the stove, and when my anger speeds my pulse, she tries in her way to calm me. I have distracted her with my temper, which seems to work for a moment. She knows, as do I, that it's better to let Vincent holler.
And then a strange thing happens. I start to hum "Danny Boy," one of two Irish songs I know, and instead of settling down, Gram begins to cry. At first it's just a sniffle, but then she trying not to sob. I ask her why this makes her cry, thinking only after I've started that her brother might have done the same (perhaps his name was Daniel), but she doesn't answer. Not at first. She drops her hands from mine and wipes her eyes with her apron. Then, still shaking, she finds my ear with her short-nailed thumb and begins a whisper in her thick Irish brogue.
She tells me that before she left the Old Country to come to the States, she had loved someone. It was a silly love, she says, the kind only young girls have, and the boy used to sing her a song whenever they were alone. Not "Danny Boy," but something no one sings anymore. "How I miss that place," she says. "My people are all buried there." She takes my hands again as the thunder crashes outside.
In ten minutes we will come out, both with buttered hands, and if my uncle even says one thing, if he looks at her like she's a child, then I will go for his throat and squeeze until I've cracked his windpipe. Then he will do the same, only much much worse, but the beating I'll take will be worth it.
