“I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”
-- William Butler Yeats
“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”
He tore it to pieces and threw it away. My father destroyed the only picture ever taken of his grandfather, Patrick Callahan, Irish immigrant, shoemaker, father of eleven, a soldier who had fought for the 104th Infantry, New York, at Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, among the bloodiest battles of the American Civil War. Patrick was wounded at Chancellorsville, captured at the 2nd Battle of Weldon Railroad, Virginia, in August 1864, and paroled in December of that year. Surely a hero. Why would my father do such a thing?
Dad threw the picture away before I was born, before his marriage and his demons propelled him to drink. His own father had been only ten years old when Patrick, the Civil War hero and an inveterate alcoholic, deserted his wife and children. That little boy, my grandfather, quit school and started working to help his mother raise his brothers and sisters. That little boy grew to be a man who never tasted a drop of alcohol himself. As far as I was concerned, my great grandfather, Patrick, was just another Irish drunk who disappeared when family pressures became too hard to bear.
Was that why my dad threw Patrick’s photo away? True, Patrick had failed the family, stolen my grandfather’s childhood. I wonder now, however, if my dad sensed his own fate in that picture. Dad never left us, always loved us, and never missed a day of work, until the morning his best friend took a look at his jaundiced face, and said, in panic, “Tom, you’ve got to go to the hospital.” Dad entered the hospital that day and died three weeks later, still a relatively young man.
A snowball starts rolling down a hill in the nineteenth century and still hasn’t come to rest.
I forgave my father a long time ago. His was a sad life. I’ve begun to think that I should forgive my great grandfather, too, for his was, without question, a difficult journey.
Not until Vietnam did we consider the lasting psychic trauma of war. Any man who lived through the horrors of all those Civil War battles was likely scarred. Patrick, a stranger in a strange land, enlisted in his late twenties. He never ran from battle, but I’m sure the battles continued to rage within him all his life.
Post-war life was not much easier. To earn more money, Patrick drove rich men in a horse and carriage to and from the city’s country club at night. One freezing evening, as he sat waiting outside to drive the rich men home, a sympathetic club employee came out with a blanket. “For the horse,” said the employee.
That’s all I know about Patrick Callahan, that he was a Civil War survivor, that he was mistreated the way so many Irishmen were back in the those pretentious days, that he abandoned his family, and that he drank himself to death in a poor house. I know those circumstances, and the fact that he cast a looming shadow across his family for over a hundred years.
I think that’s why my father destroyed in the only way he could the fact that Patrick Callahan had ever lived.