by Jeff McMahon
Michael's mother let her tears fall. Two thoughts circled in her mind like darkness and daylight—that she would not see this son again, and that this son would survive. In those days, Irish women silently recited the names of the children they had buried.
Michael had lived 17 years to reach this day in 1911. He stood long-limbed and big-eared at the Tullamore railway depot, a building assembled from blocks of the gray stone that underlies the hills of central Ireland. Michael watched up the tracks for the train that would carry him to Dublin and the ship to New York.
His family surrounded him—not just the dozen living ones who had come to see him off, but thousands of others whose bones slumbered in the moist black soil for miles around the station.
***
Lozandro Polanco paced the dirt streets of a Nicaraguan resettlement camp in 1987, clutching a Kalishnikov rifle. All the other men had left the camp in uniform and gone into the jungle or into the earth. Even those too young to shave were old enough to march, but thin, toothless Polanco had too many years.
He remained among women and babies, patrolling the streets in an olive-drab shirt and cap. He kept the rifle's banana clip wedged in the waist of his trousers. The brass bullets at the top of the clip were the only bright objects he wore. His pant legs descended into black rubber boots, the kind worn by people who clean fish.
Polanco lived in the border village of Comwapa until 1983, when the Contras attacked. They killed his brother and 5-month-old niece. They kidnapped his daughter and her children. Polanco trailed them into Honduras before returning to Nicaragua alone and settling in the camp.
"I would like to stay here and take care of what we have," he told me.
***
"Little is more extraordinary than the decision to migrate," wrote John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a grandson of immigrants. "Little is more extraordinary than the accumulation of emotions and thoughts which finally leads a family to say farewell to a community where it has lived for centuries, to abandon old ties and familiar landmarks, and to sail across dark seas to a strange land."
***
Polanco would not be an immigrant. Those who are too old to fight also are too old to journey to a strange land that promises them two generations of new hardships.
He would die in Nicaragua, but he would reach the United States in another way. His image graced the front page of an American newspaper in 1987.
In the photo, Polanco holds the Kalishnikov in his right arm. In his left, he holds one of his surviving granddaughters, barefoot and wet-nosed in her pink dress. A skinny dog lies near his feet.
Polanco would not be an immigrant, but his image would testify to the alternative.
***
I visited the burying grounds of Tullamore 75 years after my grandfather boarded that train.
A single Celtic cross stands over the pauper's graveyard, carved of gray stone and frosted with the white lichen of perpetual moisture. The land around it rolls in furrows and hummocks from the tossing and turning of unnamed bodies in unmarked graves below.
Across town, another burying ground awaits those who can afford gray stones of their own. There I found chiseled the names of cousins I never knew had lived. I stood six feet above my newfound family—or at least the few who had died with enough money to buy stones—and I began to grasp what my grandfather had done.
Thanks to him, I have a home and a car and a refrigerator and a bank account. But thanks to him, I will never know the love of those lost relatives.
He made an extraodinary decision that I can forget. I can forget the poverty and hunger and war that drove him to migrate, although those conditions formed me as surely as the atoms of which I'm made.
Most Irish Americans have forgotten. Most children of immigrants have forgotten.
"Close the borders!" they shout. "Raise high the wall!"
Is it because they want to hoard the riches of the land they reached first? Or is it because they want no reminder of the extraordinary decision that brought them here?
When the children of immigrants look over their shoulders, they find a question trailing them like a hungry dog.
***
I followed Polanco into his home of sticks and palm fronds. The shadows inside were as dark and cool as the sun outside was bright and hot. Bare feet had polished the dirt floor smooth. Polanco had nothing, save for a clay stove in one corner, its belly full of gray ash, and a cloth pouch that hung from the ceiling.
The pouch was wet, and a drop fell when Polanco untied the strings that cinched its mouth. His fingers slipped inside and pulled out two chicken eggs. He held them out. They felt chilled as if they had been in a refrigerator.
"Take them for your journey," he said.
***
I stand at the western edge of the Americas, my path beaten fresh behind me. I have visited my grandfather's home to discover it is no longer my home. I have traced his steps across the world: Tullamore, Dublin, New York, Boston, Chicago... I have gone on into the west. I have gone as far as I can go without boarding another ship.
How will I know when I have found what he sought? With no gray stone to mark the place, how will I know when I'm home?
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When the children of immigrants look over their shoulders, they find a question trailing them like a hungry dog.
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