Sean

july 5, 1996

“Read this,” my father said as he tossed a leather-bound journal at my chest, trying to catch me by surprise. He did. Not because he woke me up at 6 a.m. but because he was actually giving me something. Aidan Corrigan wasn’t exactly a hands-on, doting father. He believed children learned survival skills by surviving. Surviving him, mostly. I looked at the book with its yellow dog-eared pages. It smelled musty.

“What is this?” I was still half asleep, and I was asking the question in a general sense, meaning: “What the hell are you doing in my bedroom before the sun is up with a musty-smelling piece-of-shit book?” He took it literally, as always.
“Wha’s it look like? You never seen a book before? It’s a feckin’ birthday present. What’d you expect, hookers and tequila?” He snarled, always the sentimental old man. I hated the way he slipped into a bogus brogue when he cursed. The only brogue he’d ever heard was secondhand, from his father, Jim Corrigan. And even my grandfather did his best to lose his accent as soon as he got to America. They all did. Back then, speaking with a brogue wasn’t sexy or cute, and it didn’t win you the hearts of women. If you spoke with a brogue, people assumed you lacked an education, money, and common sense. Most of the time they were right on all three counts.

Unfortunately, my grandfather’s brother Sean (whom I was named after and who my grandfather came over to join as a partner in the creatively named Corrigan’s Tavern) never lost his brogue. It may have cost him his life. Great-uncle Sean arrived here in 1921 when he was just sixteen, running from the original Troubles, I suppose. He never quite outran them, because on March 18, 1946, the morning after St. Patrick’s Day, my father found him in the alley next to Corrigan’s Tavern, the victim of an apparent mugging that turned violent. He was barely alive when they found him and only said one thing in Irish before he died. “Ni dhiolann dearmad fiacha,” which translates as “A debt is still unpaid, even if forgotten.” No one knew what it meant, but the police thought he probably owed the bookies some money. It was definitely possible.

The assumption was that after he locked up the bar, either the bookies showed up for something he owed them or someone pegged him as the owner by his brogue and tried to take the night’s receipts. The strange part is that he had the cash in his pocket when they found him, a flask of whiskey by his hand, and his head propped on his coat. You would have thought he was peacefully sleeping off a “bout with the stout” if not for the hole in the back of his head. Maybe whoever tried to mug him was remorseful afterward, but it never made any sense to me.

Right now, neither did my father. He was still staring at me, waiting for me to say something about his sudden awareness of my birthday --- a birthday I had forgotten myself. Well, maybe I hadn’t quite forgotten it, but I certainly hadn’t remembered it yet. Like I said, it was early, and last night’s birthday celebration had only ended a couple of hours ago. My body’s alcohol content was probably still over the legal limit, since I had been drinking to celebrate both being legal and to forget that my girlfriend, Sarah, had dumped me two weeks before. She was already dating some guy from Princeton, and I had seen her sticking her tongue in his ear at Conti’s Pizza the night before. That’s when the drinking started. Not that I ever liked her tongue in my ear --- I just liked the idea of it in someone else’s ear even less.

The way my father was staring at me was giving me a headache. To avoid the look, I opened the book, glancing through it as he lit his cigarette and flicked ashes on the floor, just like he always did right before he made an excuse to leave in order to avoid talking about anything real.

The pages of the book were worn and water-stained. The first page was headed “Notes for Dr. Sorenson,” but Dr. Sorenson’s name was crossed out, and next to it, someone had written “the Next Time” so that it now read “Notes for the Next Time.” Every few pages was a dated entry. Inside the front cover was a name: Mike Corrigan.

“It’s a journal,” I muttered.

“Really? And your mother thinks you’re stupid . . .”

“Who’s Mike Corrigan?”

He shrugged before I even finished asking, taking a long drag on his cigarette, as if he couldn’t speak without smoke coating his vocal cords.

“You were named after him and your great-uncle. He was Michael Sean, and your great-uncle was Sean Michael. Names don’t come from nowhere, boyo. He was my brother.” As he said this, he stood up and was out the door before I could ask the question that kept repeating itself in my head: “What the fuck are you talking about?” I had no Uncle Mike. My father had no brother.

Shows you how much I knew. Shows you how easy it is to hide the past and change history when people refuse to remember. As I opened the journal once more, a newspaper clipping fluttered out. Dated December 10, 1973, it was a terse report concerning an American fugitive, Michael Corrigan, who was killed by MI5, the British Security Service. They thought he was working with the Provos, the Provisional IRA.

I felt like I was reading fiction as I went on, trying to focus on the faded type: “a former New York City police detective assigned to a joint federal task force investigating subversive groups up until the time he was arrested, accused of murdering a Negro civil rights worker in rural Pennsylvania. He fled from prosecution to Ireland earlier this year.”

So. I had an uncle. I had an uncle who was an NYPD detective and killed by the British while working with the IRA, after he killed a black civil rights worker and fled the United States to hide in Ireland. And I had his journal in my hands. Fuck.
I started to read.

Excerpted from Until the Next Time © Copyright 2012 by Kevin Fox. Reprinted with permission by Algonquin Books. All rights reserved.