A letter from Maeve McCausland of 17 Hannaher Street, Little Ireland, Port Hume, to her son Thomas McCausland at the Port Hume Clarion. Two sheets, brown ink, in Maeve's hand. The letter was not posted. It was put into the lower drawer of Maeve's chest, where she keeps the flour-tin of her husband's papers. Found there by Thomas, in November 1936, when he came home to settle her affairs after her funeral.
Tom,
I am writing this to give you tomorrow. I have written it eight times since the spring of 1913 and I have put each draft in the stove. I do not know why this one will go in the drawer instead. Perhaps because I am sixty-three and I have begun to dream of your father again, and because I read your column on the Blackwell men in October and I sat at this kitchen table for an hour after, holding the paper, and I thought to myself: that boy is his father's son and he does not know what is under his mother's flour.
You were eighteen years old when the tin came home from Pt. Arliss. You came in from the Clarion's stoop, where you were running copy then for ten cents a column, and I had the tin on the kitchen table and I did not let you near it. I told you it was a packet of old letters from your aunt in Sligo. I said the man in the carriage had brought them up from the harbor. You believed me because you had no reason not to.
What was in the tin was your father's mate-book, Tom. The book he wrote in every watch of every voyage of the Iphigenia from 1898 to the night she went down. The last entries are in his hand, the hand you remember from the kitchen wall where he marked your heights, the hand you have in your own column-pencil now without knowing it. He wrote the truth of the night, Tom. He wrote that Captain Hume was drunk on the bridge. He wrote that he asked the Captain to lay north, and that the Captain refused. He wrote God forgive me for not relieving him.
He used his own shorthand. I cannot read it. I never could. He kept it for himself, the same way some men keep a journal. The mate-book was his honest book and the deck-log was the Company's book. He told me once, after a quarrel — I had asked him why he wrote two books — and he said, Maeve, the deck-log goes to the Company. The mate-book goes to me. When the two agree, I keep them both. When the two disagree, I keep the mate-book. He did not say what he would do if a day came when they disagreed. I think now that he did not know.
I have wanted to give you the tin many times, Tom. I have wanted it the most in the seasons when you were eight and twelve and sixteen, when you would have given anything to have one more thing of your father's in your hand. I did not give it to you then because I could not bear to give you the thing it would make of you. A boy who reads his father's last watch is no longer a boy. A young man who reads it is no longer a young man either. He is a man with a thing he must do, and the thing he must do is the thing that killed the man who wrote it.
I have wanted to give you the tin more in these last five years than in the twenty before, because you have begun to ask questions of your own. You came home in 1922 after the Blackwell men were shot and you sat at this table and you said to me, Mother, the Beacon lies and the Clarion has not yet finished telling the truth. And I said to you, Tom, the Beacon lied in 1913 also. And you said, I know it did, mother, I have read what was printed and I have read what was not printed and I know it did. And we did not speak of it further that night. I went to bed and I lay awake and I thought: I should tell him. And in the morning I made breakfast and I did not tell him.
Mr. Dannemeyer of the Beacon was kind to me in 1914. He did not stay kind to me long. He was put out of the paper in 1917 for what they called German sympathies but which was, as I now know from the columns you have not written but I have heard you tell at this table after a beer, the Iphigenia matter that he would not let alone. Mr. Dannemeyer is alive in this city and he is poor and he writes for whichever paper will print him when the matter is small enough. I have wondered whether to write to him also. I have not.
What stops me from giving you the tin, Tom, is this. Your father died because Captain Hume was drunk. Captain Hume's drunkenness is the Company's secret, and the Company is Edmund Hume, and Edmund Hume is a man whose money paid the Coroner's clerk and the Beacon's publisher and the harbor's chief of police, and who paid Mr. Timmons the cabin steward to leave for San Francisco in 1913 and who paid Mrs. Malinowski a sum that I will not write here to take her petition out of circulation. I lost your father to that man. I do not propose to lose you to him.
You are twenty-nine years old, Tom. You are a cub no longer. You are Miss Harriss's most useful reporter and she has told me so to my face at the church fair last summer. You have your father's stubbornness about a story and your father's eye for what a manifest does not say. You have, perhaps, what it takes to read the book and to do what reading the book requires. I am the one who is afraid you have it, and I am the one who is afraid you do not. I will not decide for you.
I will leave the tin where it is, in the bottom drawer with the calico. I will leave this letter with it. I have not addressed the envelope; I have not stamped it; I have not put it in your hand. I will not put it in your hand while I am living, Tom. I will not be the mother who put you on that road. If you find this after I am dead — and I think you will, because you are a thorough boy and you will go through your mother's drawers as a proper son does — then you will be free to do what you choose. You will be a man whose mother did not choose for him. That is what I can give you, instead of the thing I cannot give.
The book is shorthand, Tom. You will need a man who can read it. Mr. Dannemeyer can, I think. So can the woman at the Beacon, Miss Pellman, who has been kind to me at Sunday Mass; she keeps a cabinet of stories the Beacon would not print, and I have heard her speak of it. They are both alive and they are both still in Port Hume as I write this. They may be alive when you read this; they may not. The book will be alive. The book is alive in the tin while I write.
I have prayed for you every night since you were born, Tom. I prayed harder after your father was killed. I have prayed especially in the year since you wrote the Vasko piece. I will pray until I cannot. I have asked the Lord for many things. The thing I have asked Him most often is to keep you alive long enough to be a man who chooses, and not a man chosen for. That prayer is, I think, near its end. The rest is not mine to ask.
Be a good son, Tom. Be a good reporter. Do not be both at the same time about this one matter, until you have decided that the cost is yours to pay.
Your mother loves you. Your father, wherever the sea has taken him, loved you also.
— Maeve McCausland [no date]