Three Irish brothers took a walk together in Cape Town, South Africa, in July 1939. They had not seen each other in forty three years. They would never see each other again.
The brothers had grown up with six other siblings in a one-room stone cottage in Killeen, a townland of Newport, Tipperary.
An Irish townland was not found on a map. It did not have a church steeple, main street, or any other marker of village life, and its dwellings invisible, nestled behind hedgerows so tall that roads turned into tunnels. From Killeen, where everyone went places on foot, the brothers had scattered to three separate continents. Their father let them go. One could say he sent them away- he was a farm laborer with no land of his own.
Denis was not the oldest, but he was the first to leave, one Sunday evening in 1896. The Pallotine Fathers had come to the Caseys’ parish church to preach and talk about their missionary work in foreign lands. Denis told his parents that he wanted to become a missionary and see the world. His bag was packed that night, and Denis was soon bumping along a country road to the Pallotine mission in nearby Thurles. He was fourteen.
Denis did indeed see the world. He was ordained in Rome, and sent to Mercedes, Argentina, traveling to remote places in the Argentine Littoral by horse and buggy to minister to shepherds and ranchers. He taught the local men the Irish game of hurling, and they named their club after their beloved Padre Dionisio. Years in Argentina were followed by more years in Rome, before returning to Ireland twenty six years later, in time to bury his parents.
The eldest brother, Tom, was the next to leave. Tom had left school at the age of ten to work. In those days elder children were often sacrificed to educate the younger. After years of working while living at home in Killeen, Tom saved enough money to leave for Canada in 1898. He settled in Montreal, where he worked for the Canadian National Railway, first as a porter, then as Baggage Master at Windsor Station.
Patrick was the next to leave, on a ship bound for Australia, but when the boat docked in Cape Town he cashed in the rest of the ticket and stayed. Patrick became a policeman, married a girl from County Clare and had seven childen. He opened a pub at the train station and kept a kennel of racing greyhounds.
The pull of home was strong for Tom. Because he was an employee of the railway, he could travel anywhere for free. He made several trips back to Killeen to see his family. His sisters Birdie and Lizzie, and the two youngest brothers, Dan and Bill, were then still living at home. The boys had been children when Tom set out for Canada. Each time he came home Tom knew he had to return to work in Montreal to pay for the education of his younger brothers. Only then could Tom call his life his own.
Dan read voraciously and started writing for local newspapers as a teenager. He had the luxury of school, going to Dublin to study at All Hallows College. He began writing poems under the pen name “Columba” after St. Columba, the 6th century Irish abbot who converted the Scots. There is a prayer of Saint Columba: Alone with none but you, my God I journey on my way. Dan left for Canada in 1909.
Dan was ordained in 1910 in Peterborough, Ontario, with Tom in attendance. In Canada, Dan was both a priest and a journalist, serving as the editor of the Canadian Freeman and later the Catholic Register. He published his first book of poems At the Gates of the Temple, in 1914. His second collection, Leaves on the Wind, was published in 1919.
The pull of home was strong for Dan, too. His poems expressed deep longing for Killeen, and for his mother. In “Homecoming of the Priest Son,” he writes:
The bitter chalice of the scalding tears
The aching hunger of the lonely years
Are now requited with a rich reward
She gave him freely; freely gives the Lord.
Two remaining Casey brothers, Mick and Jack, stayed in Ireland, working on farms belonging to their cousins, the Coffeys, who owned land. Mick married a woman much older than himself named Alice, and her family set him up with a grocery store in Newport. Alice died in 1925. They had no children.
Jack lived at home, and later with Mick. No one knew exactly what was wrong with Jack. If anyone asked, the answer was just say a prayer for him.
The sisters Birdie and Lizzie also stayed in Ireland. Lizzie married a local boy named Martin Rainsford. Birdie entered a convent at Saint Maries of the Isle, in Cork, in 1903. The convent was called a house of mercy, but sat on Sharman Crawford Street like a fortress. Birdie took her vows in 1906 and never emerged from behind the red sandstone walls. As Sister Rita, she worked at an orphanage on its grounds.
* * *
Bill, the youngest, joined his older brothers in Canada. He completed art school and started working as a commercial artist in Montreal. Finally freed of family obligations, Tom began looking around for a wife. There was an Irishwoman named Annie who made sit down hot lunches for Windsor station employees. At Annie’s, Tom met her sister, Jane, who had just returned from Missouri, where she had spent years working for a family. The children had grown up, and Jane, now forty and out of a job, had gone to live with her sister, planning her next move.
Jane and Tom married in 1910. The following year they had a boy they named Patrick, after Tom’s father. Dan wrote a poem in his honor called “October’s Child.” Jane had plans for Patrick, into whom she would funnel all her thwarted ambition.
In the summer of 1914, Tom made one more trip back to Killeen, accompanied by Jane and little Patrick. “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” was a hit song that year, and Jane taught it to Patrick, who sang It’s a long, long way to Tipperary, but my grandpa’s right there. They returned to Canada in August, on the last passenger ship out of Europe before war was declared.
Then, in 1915, Lizzie died suddenly, tragically, in childbirth at the age of thirty two. Dan expressed his grief in poetry:
But now you’ve left me lonely,
And I am fearful grown
Of the long road and dark road
That I must walk alone.
The violence of the Irish Civil War reached even little towns like Newport, but for the Caseys those years were marked by more personal loss and grief. Their parents, Patrick and Mary, died at home, one after the other. In June 1922, Denis was the celebrant at his mother’s funeral Mass. The Nenagh Guardian reported: Thus was laid to rest a kindly Irish mother and a member of one of our old typical Irish families.
In 1924, Dan became the chaplain of Kingston Penitentiary, a dungeon-like prison where inmates were put to work in a quarry to break stone for the city's finest buildings. He was also named Rector of the Church of the Good Thief, built from limestone quarried, cut, and carried by convict gangs.
Is it the wind that cries by the window pane?
Do I list to the tears of the dead or the drip of the rain?
Is it the tortured dream of a heart full sore?
Or did somebody call my name out there by the bolted door?
Dan started drinking in Kingston. As a young man in Ireland, Dan had campaigned for temperance and wrote a poem called "Away with Whiskey.” Whiskey found him anyway. He published no more poetry.
In 1925, Tom bought a house in Montreal, in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, beyond the last stop of the streetcar line. The street ended at a chainlink fence, beyond which lay the CNR train tracks. Tom retired not long after, but whenever he heard the whistle of the train, he would pull out his pocket watch to make sure it was on time.
In 1931, Denis retired from leadership of the order to become a parish priest in Hastings, England, at a Pallotine church called Saint Mary Star of the Sea. He would stay at this church in the High Weald the rest of his life.
At Jane’s prodding, Tom and Jane’s son Patrick went to university and became an accountant. He married a French girl named Edna in 1937. Their first child, Patsy, was born the following year. Dan officiated the baptism. By this time he was in the final stages of alcoholism, with delirium tremens so severe that the parents worried he would drop the baby.
In spring of 1939, Dan made the journey to Hastings to see Denis. Before spending the summer with their brothers in Newport, they travelled to South Africa to visit Patrick. At the time the photo was taken, did the brothers know Patrick had only two months left to live?
I smiled in your face as I said goodbye
(May God in His mercy forgive the lie)
I would not add to your load of grief,
Though one salt tear would have meant relief
* * *
In 1949, Bill went back to Newport for the first time in thirty eight years. The Limerick Leader gave him an entire page of the paper to document his impressions. Bill praised the beauty of the Irish countryside, admired the new bridges and sidewalks around Newport, and noted he could not get a decent cup of coffee anywhere. Bill treasured the memory of his visit. I came to pick up the heart I left behind in Newport, he wrote. But I guess I must have forgotten. It’s still over there.
Jane died and Tom went to live with Patrick and his family. With nothing to do, he would walk to Girouard Park and spend the day sitting with the other old men on the benches with a clear view of the Clarke funeral home. In 1950, Tom decided to take one final trip to Ireland to see his brothers. At the dinner table one evening, Edna suggested that Patsy accompany him. Tom turned to her and asked D’you want to come along? and, to his surprise, she said yes. Patsy was eleven.
The journey by ship took a week. Denis met them in London, bringing for Patsy a rough hunk of chocolate wrapped in newsprint. Patsy was repelled by the gift. She was used to flat candy bars in shiny foil and did not know that the chocolate had been acquired at great cost on the black market. When Tom saw Mick and Jack for the first time in 36 years, they shook hands.
In Newport, Mick and Jack lived together like the elderly bachelors they were. Alice had been gone for twenty five years, and some people did not remember Mick had ever been married. They did all their cooking in a cauldron over an open fire. In the cauldron they boiled potatoes, bacon, and water for tea. When Patsy arrived at their house they asked do you cook, girl? Oh yes, I can make lemon squares she said, looking around the room for the kitchen.
Jack ate boiled potatoes three times a day. His teeth did not allow him more solid food. He wore undershirts with three vests layered one on top of another, work trousers, and unlaced hobnail boots. He kept a suit on the back of his bedroom door which he brushed once a week. He said it was the suit for his funeral.
All summer, a steady stream of people came to Mick’s house to get a look at the Americans. Patsy tried to correct them, but for the entire summer she remained the American. Her sandals drew comments in a town where many people went barefoot in the summer so as to not waste shoe leather. Elderly men stopped by and sat with the brothers in silence, smoking. When a new arrival appeared at the door, he said God bless all here.
At the end of each day, Mick would shuffle down the main street of Newport from the shop to the bank, holding the contents of the cash drawer out in front of him, like a priest carrying the Host. People said to Patsy Surely he’ll leave ya all his money! When Mick got too old to manage the shop he went to live with his wife’s people in Castleconnell, and they cared for him when he could not look after himself. He left his money to them.
Denis stayed in Newport that summer. He borrowed a car from the brothers in Thurles, and drove Tom and Patsy to Cork to see Sister Rita for tea. The tea table was laid end to end with crystal, china, and silver inherited by members of the order. The nuns had baked for days before their arrival, and the table was covered with every kind of cake, cookie, and scone. Patsy was afraid to eat them, since the sisters keenly observed every mouthful. The nuns also shot disapproving looks at her sandals, saying she would catch her death. Patsy nibbled a single cookie, and sat with her feet tucked behind the legs of her chair, trying to conceal the sandals.
Tom asked for one more excursion in the car, closer to home. Denis drove Tom and Patsy to an abandoned one room stone cottage in the middle of a field. Tom turned to Patsy and said that is the house where I was born. He stood looking at it silently for a long time before finally turning to go.
In memory of the Caseys of Newport:
Thomas (1871-1956)
Michael (1873-1961)
Bridget (1875-1955)
Patrick (1877-1939)
John (1880-1954)
Denis (1881- 1969)
Elizabeth (1883-1915)
Daniel (1886-1965)
William (1888-1963)
Great thanks to cousin Matthew Casey for his diligent research on the Casey family.
Captivating story, you bring life to the legends.
Fascinating story, beautifully written. Did Patsy write about her trip to Ireland?