Chapter 13
Cora turned off the highway onto a street marked with a DEAD END sign and slowed the car to avoid occasional broken pavement and potholes. What looked like an old farmhouse sat beside a huge new luxury home with an elaborate playhouse in its yard. Cora shook her head as she drove by, wondering how people with young children could pay for such homes, and why they thought they needed that much space. She and Cisco never could have afforded such grand housing when they were raising their children, and wouldn't have needed it after the boys moved out.
At the end of the road was an overgrown area of shrubs and grass which dropped sharply beyond the foliage to a two-lane road. Cora pulled into the driveway of a modest frame ranch home, noting fresh paint on the window frames and a burnt-orange door that accented pale blue clapboards. A shiny brass knocker and kick plate adorned the door, and an assortment of pots on both sides of the entry welcomed visitors. Yellow mums brightened flower borders, and the lawn was well tended. This was a surprise. Bridey must have a lot of energy for an eighty-plus-year-old widow.
Cora almost called off her meeting with Bridey to spend the morning researching spirits; however, Father McGrath hadn't brought the books he promised yet, and she had already changed a number of appointments and didn't want to reschedule Bridey again.
Procrastination was not always a bad thing, Cora believed, but could be a tool. By removing her focus from problems she could see them more objectively when she returned to them. Sometimes they solved themselves in the meantime, saving her any effort at all. Incubation, she called it. Cisco called it rationalizing.
Bridey Boyle, a tiny, energetic woman with surprising bright red hair in a wedge cut, answered the door.
No way that's natural-it's got to be dyed.
After exchanging greetings, Bridey led Cora to her living room and invited her to sit on the sofa. "Would you like a cup of tea?" she asked. "I'd like one myself, and I hate to drink alone," she said, with a chuckle at her little joke.
"I'd love a cup of tea," Cora said, with an answering smile.
Cora glanced around the room while Bridey was in the kitchen. Like everything else she had noticed about Bridey's home, it was neat. The furniture was old but well cared for, the typical heavy blond wood and simple lines of the 1950s. The plush carpet was new, and showed tracks of recent vacuuming. The upholstery was clean but somewhat faded. Fussy knickknacks made the room seem personal and comfortable. On a small round table, centered in front of a picture window, was a professional portrait in a simple wood frame, showing a smiling Bridey and a handsome man of a similar age. It appeared to be fairly recent. The large man had warm blue eyes, a round ruddy face, and a full head of white hair. The picture reminded Cora of her own Irish relatives.
"You have a lovely home," Cora said when Bridey returned. She accepted a cup of tea in a deep red and gold bone china cup and saucer. "Can I set this on the table? What pretty china!"
"Of course you can." Bridey settled herself into a straight-backed chair in front of the window, set her own beverage down on the table, and swept the room with an arm. "This old furniture is hard as nails. It's gotten by all these years, the only real furniture we ever owned, after the hand-me-downs we started off with, that is. Jack was real particular about everything we bought. He wasn't much for shopping, and only wanted to do it once. Everything we bought was intended to last a lifetime."
Cora sipped her tea, then set the cup and saucer down. "Jack sounds like a great husband. Is that the two of you in the picture?" She pointed to the photo. "He's very handsome."
"Yes, he was. We took that picture back in 2000, to celebrate the new century." Bridey's face beamed. "Jack was healthy then," she said. "He didn't get sick with the cancer until almost ten years later. He's been gone two years now."
"I'm so sorry. Two years. That's the same time I lost my mother."
"You still miss her, I bet, just like I miss Jack. Not a day goes by...," Bridey said sadly.
"Yes. I keep thinking she's still here. I want to show her something or talk to her, and then I remember and tear up." Cora could feel her cheeks warming and moisture in her eyes, and changed the subject.
"Thank you for agreeing to talk to me," she began, fussing with her fingers on her leg. "There are few people any more who lived in Sag Bridge before it became part of Lemont. I've been talking to people who remember it when it was a town of its own."
"Oh, I'm happy to talk to you. No one wants to listen to us old folks anymore. Young people these days aren't much interested in the past."
Lemont and Sag Bridge were once important and separate canal towns during the construction of all three waterways that were responsible for Chicago's prosperity. Similar towns only three miles apart, Cora wondered why Sag Bridge disappeared and why little written or photographic evidence of the town existed. Even the history of the name, Sag Bridge, remained a debated issue. When Cora brought it up, the historical society's president suggested she develop an archive on Sag Bridge.
Leaning forward a little, Cora asked, "Do you know why Sag Bridge isn't a town anymore?"
"Some time in the 1950s, I don't remember the exact year, the town thought it was too much trouble and expense to keep running itself, and voted to unincorporate-there weren't enough people here anymore. But the school stayed open until 1961, you know. It was the last one-room schoolhouse in Cook County. I went there all eight years, I did. Same teacher that whole time, and she taught good. No assistant either, like they have today," Bridey laughed, waving a finger in the air.
Cora smiled. "I read about the school. The historical society has photos of the building and some class pictures. What I wanted to know was what it was like to live here, you know, before the industry, trucking companies, and junk yards took over. When Sag Bridge was something other than a corner of Lemont." She leaned back and crossed her legs as she waited for Bridey to think it over.
Bridey considered, rubbing both chair arms while she thought. "Well, I'm not sure I can be of much help if that's what you're looking for. Most of the early folks pretty much moved on after the last canal, the Cal Sag, was done, and that was before my memory. They started building that one in 1912, the third canal, and I think it took 'em ten years. I was just a baby when they finished."
"I realize that. I thought maybe you might remember stories you heard, from your family, or from your husband's family. I'm more interested in the town than in the canals," Cora explained.
"Well, why don't you ask me some questions? Something might come to me. My memory isn't what it used to be. In fact, before you got here, there was something I was thinking I needed to show you, something you'd be especially interested in, but I'll be darned if I can remember now what it was." She scratched her head and gazed toward some bookshelves against the far wall.
Cora smiled. "I do that too, all too often. Okay. Why don't you tell me about your mother and father? Where did they live, and what did they do?" Cora reached into her purse and took out a note pad and pen.
"Máime was a simple housewife, like me." The word jumped out at Cora: Máime. "And Dadaí worked on the railroad, various jobs."
Apparently, Cora assumed, she called her father Dadaí, which she pronounced DAH-dee. Cora looked up. "Your mother and father? You said that a little different. Can you spell it for me?"
"Sure. It's m-a-i-m-e with one of those little marks over the 'a', and d-a-d-a-i, with a mark over the 'i'. Most Irish people don't call their mothers and fathers that much, but people in Sag Bridge used the old names for their parents."
That explains that!
"He was a brakeman when he retired, I think. We lived on the family farm in the old farmhouse, but didn't work the land. We rented out the land to a farmer down the road." Bridey turned slightly, and turned an unfocused gaze toward a corner of the window.
"So your parents didn't live 'in town' so to speak?" Cora looked up from her note pad and Bridey turned to meet her eye.
Before replying, Bridey sipped her tea, set the cup down again. She ran her hand through her hair. "Well, in town wouldn't have been like you think of a town nowadays. There weren't a lot of what you would call nice houses, just for the business owners. People from the farms nearby came here to the post office or general store, the meat market, the blacksmith, like that. I heard tell of a couple of hotels, but they were more like boarding houses. And of course, Sag Railroad Station and the Electric Railway stopped here. People still used horses back then, but it was easy to get around, to Chicago or to Joliet, on the train or the electric streetcar. It was cheaper and faster than now, in fact." Again, she was looking off toward some distant point, not engaging Cora's eyes, as she talked.
Once she got started, Bridey rambled freely. Cora smiled as she made notes.
My God, she's great! Doesn't know if she can help-baloney!
Encouraged by Cora's interest, Bridey rambled on, looking at Cora now, and smiling more confidently. "Behind that cluster of buildings, a block or two, there were a few blocks of shanties around the businesses, where the transient canal workers used to live. Most were deserted after the canal got finished. Then there were nearby farms. And the church up on the hill."
"How many people do you think lived here then?" Cora prompted.
"Oh, maybe a thousand. No more than that." Bridey pointed a finger. "Oh! I forgot to mention the saloons-all the old canal towns had saloons. Working men wanted their drink after the day was done, and there wasn't much else to do at night. We had a reputation for brothels too, but most of those closed after the second canal, long before I was born." She laughed after making this clarification.
"A thousand people-that was a lot in those days," Cora said. "Let's work backwards. You said the school closed in 1961. Why did it close?"
"After the town shut down, we still had a school district, but there weren't enough people that lived right here and wanted to go to a one-room school. The schools in Lemont were better, so the kids went there."
"So the population was declining then?"
"It had already declined, right after the canal was done." Bridey fidgeted with the cover over the arm of her chair. "It was easy for people to get around, to Lemont and other places, and the businesses at Sag, they were small anyway. Nobody came to Sag just to shop, and Sag people started going to Lemont and Joliet and Chicago too, so the Sag businesses closed. There was no business here even when I was a girl, just a scattering of homes and farms."
"Would you say the population of Sag was a thousand when you were a child?"
Bridey shook her head vehemently. "Oh, no, not then. Maybe three hundred were left, including the farms. When they built the last canal, much of the town was in the way and was torn down, and the forest preserve district had bought up a lot of remaining farms and turned them back to forests, even before that. Kind of silly after all that work to clear the land, don't you think?"
"How far back does your family go at Sag Bridge?"
"Oh, back to the very beginning," Bridey said, with a few quick little nods of her head. "The first canal, the I & M? My great-grand-dah worked on it. The canal contractors made a lot of promises but then they were always running out of money. Worked the poor Micks, they called them, real hard-backbreaking work. Then there was no money when it came time to pay the men. The contractors said they had no money, but they always seemed to make out okay themselves. They paid the workers with something they called land scrip instead, and the workers used the scrip to buy cheap farm land." She shook her head and frowned.
Cora scribbled for a while, and then asked, "So that's why there were so many Irish at Sag Bridge?"
"That's right," Bridey agreed, nodding. "They used to say, 'You want to build a canal? Well, all you need is a shovel, a wheelbarrow, and an Irishman.' " She laughed heartily, and Cora joined in, although she had used a version of the saying herself.
"So Great-Grand-dah came here to farm before the canal, back in the 1830s and 1840s," Bridey continued. She told about his struggles establishing his farm, encounters with the Indians along the river, and that when he died the farm was left to Bridey's Grandfather Nolan.
"The farm was just south of Sag apiece, in the valley where it wasn't so swampy, and Grand-dah and Grand-mah had sheep and pigs-the pigs liked to forage in the trees. They grew corn and of course potatoes. The Irish always had to have potatoes, didn't they?" She laughed again, enjoying her joke, and looked at Cora for encouragement.
Bridey talked at length about her grandparents and her life growing up on the family farm. "The farm was left to Dadaí, but he had no interest in farming-oh, I said that."
Cora looked up from her notes, chewed on the end of her pen, thinking, then asked, "You say your father worked on the railroad?"
"When Dadaí was young, he wanted to leave the Sag, like a lot of folks, 'cause there was nothing for people here, and he tried to find work in Chicago or just about anyplace else. He wound up back here though, on the railroad, and worked for it most of his life."
"What did he tell you about his life as a child in Sag?"
"Oh, Dadaí was quite the story-teller, he was!" Bridey chuckled in anticipation.
"Tell me some stories, if you don't mind." Cora knew Bridey wouldn't mind-she was having a great time.
"When he was a boy, about eight years old, he was already expected to work. He had to cut wood, weed the garden, go out to the fields and knock off potato bugs. But he hated it, and whenever he could run off, he would sneak to the river to fish."
"Go on."
She leaned forward. "When he got a little older he dreamed up schemes to make money to buy candy. He'd meet trains at the station and carry bags for a nickel. And he'd go to the quarries to find fossils, trilobites he called them, and sell them. He had a secret spot." Bridey reached for her tea, drained the cup, looked at it and frowned.
Cora didn't want Bridey to break the flow to run to the kitchen for tea. She asked quickly, "Did he go to school?"
"Yes, but in those days boys were expected to get a job and bring in some money for the family. Dadaí got a job at the aluminum factory in Lemont, made fifty cents a day." Enjoying her story, she lowered her voice as if telling a secret. "He hung around with a gang of boys after work, and got in trouble. They let boys in the saloons in those days, and Dadaí and his friends hung out to watch the goings-on."
She described the men sitting around pot-bellied stoves, drinking and chewing tobacco, spitting into spittoons or on the sawdust-covered floors. There were no bar stools-men stood around the rail. "Dadaí and his buddies waited until men got drunk, then played tricks on them for laughs until the owner chased them away.
"Dadaí met and married Máime, got a job on the railroad, and moved from job to job, water boy, brakeman, maintenance crew. They lived in the farmhouse."
"What happened to the farm? Is it still there?" Cora asked.
"No, there's subdivisions there now. Other farms sold, and Dadaí was never fond of it, as I said, so he sold our farm too."
"When was that?"
"Probably in the sixties, or thereabouts. It was after Jack and I married."
Cora caught up on her note taking. "You mentioned Saint James. Was that your church?"
"Surely was. Great-Grand-dah helped to build it, lugging stone up from the quarry. It was built with stone from Sag quarries, did you know?" Bridey said proudly. "The family always went there, four generations of us. The parish was mostly Irish, and even before it was a church it was a cemetery. And the church anniversary book says, before that it was a French fort, and before that an Indian village."
Bridey ran her hand through her hair again, and gazed out the window, picturing something in her mind. She began talking in a dreamy manner. "I remember what I wanted to show you now. Dadaí told us a story about the cemetery, something that happened when he was a boy, in the late 1890s. A man and woman were murdered there, along with a little just-born baby, a baby girl. Dadaí knew the dead man, who was a foreman in one of the quarries. The man had always been nice to him, gave him fossils to sell. Both the man and woman had their heads bashed in, and the little baby girl was in the woman's arms and dead too."
Cora stopped taking notes, caught up in the story.
"The priest at Saint James found the bodies when he was hunting early in the morning. There was a church meeting the night before, so the killings must have happened during the night. Strange thing, the priest said when he discovered them a wolf was lying there too, sleeping curled against the woman with its head on the little dead baby. When the wolf saw him at first it just laid there and glared at him, but when he tried to get closer the wolf started to snarl and come at him, and he had to shoot and kill it. There were wolves here back then, you know."
Bridey was lost in the tale, but she turned to look at Cora for her reaction. "The murders really happened, but the part about the wolf is a legend, of course, and not too many people believe it. I don't know how you feel about priests and all, but I think the fact a priest told that part of the story means it's probably true. What reason would he have to add to what was already an incredible story?"
Cora was stunned. A wolf again! Despite the tingle at her hairline, she managed to say calmly, "How strange! How did it happen?"
"No one knows. They never found out who killed them. It was in the papers, of course, as it caused quite a commotion for months." Bridey looked at Cora hopefully. "Would you like some more tea? I know I would. I can make more."
"Wait a minute," Cora pleaded, setting down her writing materials and placing both hands on the sofa cushion. "Can you tell me more about the woman first? Did your father know her too?"
Bridey looked pleased. "I can do better than that," she said with a small laugh. "That's my little surprise. I have her diary."
Cora could hardly contain her excitement. A diary!
"Oh! Do you know where it is? Could I see it?" she exclaimed, her eyes sparking with delight.
"Sure, Honey. It's right in this cabinet, with some old pictures too." Bridey walked across the room to a bookcase and reached for a box on a bottom shelf, drawing it out. "I haven't looked at this in years, but I'd enjoy doing it with you. Do you have time now?"
"Do I have time?" Cora beamed enthusiastically. "Absolutely I have time!" She jumped up. "Here," she said, reaching for the box, "let me help you carry that, it looks heavy. Can we sit at a table?" she asked, leading the way to Bridey's kitchen.