Stories from Down Cellar

Abstract

When was a boy, my father sometimes told me family secrets: how his older brother had eloped with his high school English teacher, how one of my uncles had had his first marriage annulled, which of my mother's sisters had been preg nant when they reached the altar, and the uncle who led the charge to drop the from McNerney in the early 1920s. My father would mimic his uncle's brogue?I don't want to be a cop on the beat all of me life, and then add sar donically, dropped the Mc and sure enough he became chief of police. Looking back, realize that many of these stories, like those of other Irish American families, had become secrets only in my generation. They were com mon knowledge to our parents or grandparents. don t know if Irish people keep more secrets than others; it feels as if they do. do know that smiled in agreement when, a few years ago, read a line in a novel that said, in Ireland, no family worth the name is without its secret. The first time my father told me the family murder story we were in the basement of our Dutch Colonial home built by my father's parents?Grampa Joe and Gramma Ellen?in the industrial town of Attleboro, Massachusetts. The basement, or what we called cellar, was dry and the concrete walls and floor were painted blue-gray. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, could see my mother's laundry, the black-and-white octopus furnace, my father's workbench, some old wooden shelves loaded with canned goods, two rows of bookshelves and, next to them, a locked white metal cabinet where my father kept our guns. Whenever my father unlocked the gun cabinet, he stood by it like a guard, con trolling the movement of each rifle or pistol as if it were a precious gem. One Saturday afternoon when was eleven, and we were supposed to be out raking leaves, my father and were down cellar with the gun cabinet open. spotted a shiny revolver with a black handle that he had never shown me. What's that pistol on the top shelf? asked. It's nickel-plated, .38-caliber, Dad said. I bought it from Ted White up the street when was eighteen. He held its tan leather holster in his right hand and slipped the gun out with his left, and, as was his habit when removing or replac ing a gun from the cabinet, he pushed the cylinder open with his index finger