hear you in my sleep.
Inspired, as usual, by Keri.
Eleven years after the fact, Mrs. McManus gets a package in the mail from her sister living in Philadelphia. An old cookie tin, washed out and sealed with packing tape. Wrapped with brown paper, labelled for Colleen McManus of Flat 3B, and containing a letter, some photographs of the family vacation in Orlando. A birthday card for Connor and Murphy, a pair of Mickey-Mouse shaped lollipops the size of their heads as a present for them, and a silver spoon with the Epcot center on the handle for their Mum.
Also, with no word of explanation anywhere in the package, a cassette tape. Terribly poor and scratchy quality, probably converted over from microtape, and Mrs. McManus only needs to hear the first sentence out of it before she pulls the plug on the player out of the wall and hides the tape and vigorously discourages any questions about the package with the back of her hand.
In 1985, the boys are thirteen. The boys may have been too young to remember when their father tells their mother that they'll do right and make him proud yet, but in eleven years, they're not too young to go rummaging through the cupboards on a rainy afternoon, looking for their birthday presents.
The fact that their mother listens to the first sentence of it, then hides it at the bottom of her sewing basket underneath her armchair just means that the first words boys just hear are " -- for thee."
***
Their father never calls. Twenty five years, and there's the cassette, eleven years in, and a letter, folded over twice and sent over in the sleeve of one of the matching Philadelphia Eagles pullovers that the same Aunt Margaret sends over three years later when the boys are sixteen. It's a single sheet of paper, with a few words written on it in a shaky sort of pen.
***
In the cassette, he sends them his love. He doesn't ask after the boys; he doesn't ask any questions as to how his wife is making ends meet, and after having been drafted in the idea that the proper way to write any letter or conduct any conversation is to ask after the health of the other persons, Connor thinks that this is odd until he realizes that his father isn't expecting any sort of reply back. Mrs. McManus calls her sister up and threatens and storms and begs to try and get more details, like where her boys' father is, but this sister just sort of affects this artfully bewildered tone with the faintest quaver of fear in it when she says that she doesn't know about any cassette, she has no idea where that cassette came from.
Later, it comes out that she never approved of her younger sister marrying a wild man like Daniel McManus, that she wanted her sister to marry someone who would stay around and provide for his children and watch them grow, not someone whose communications would be delivered by men with heavy Italian accents and ziplock bags full of neatly bound cash who are sitting in her kitchen when she comes home from the grocery store and have a gun and a cassette laid out on the kitchen table next to them.
***
In the letter that comes three years after the cassette, their father apologizes for the lack of phone calls. Maximum security prisons don't allow them very often: in fact, he isn't allowed any until he tells them his name, and it's only when they're twenty-seven that the boys learn that he killed a man in the mess hall to get the microcassette out, and that he stabbed a man to death with a knife carefully fashioned out of the inside struts of his metal cot in order to get the letter out.
At the end of that, he explains there will be no more letters. They're moving him to a -- there's a pause, a space here, as if he's measuring out his words, as if he hasn't spent the last three years dreaming of this letter every night and every morning -- they're moving him to a higher security facility where he won't have as many chances.
***
"He could bring down the whole East-Coast operation," Yakavetta says to DiStefano some twenty-six years after the fact. "If he goes to the feds, he could take us apart, brick by brick."
Yakavetta has this idea that his crime family is the end-all, is the be-all. It stretches from Maine to Philadelphia and all the way down to the suburbs of Virginia, with outposts burgeoning in Atlanta and Raleigh, and all of this is tied together with phone lines, with interstate, with drug couriers and with numbers runners. What Yakavetta doesn't realize, though, when he asks about Il Duce and when he turns his back on the brothers in the basement of his own house -- what he doesn't realize, though, is that these phone lines and highways and shipping lines and army of soldiers means nothing.
In 1985, the sister's voice is borne across the Atlantic by a phone line, yes, and it's shaking with fear, definitely, but the fear in her voice is not for her life or her safety or the safety of the valuables in her house. Rather, it's fear for the hard life that her sister will be leading, fear for what her two wild-headed sons will do when they hear the cassette. She met Murphy and Connor when they were six years old apiece; she hasn't seen them since then, but she can guess the words that are on their lips after the Lord's Prayer before they lie down at night when they're thirteen, and she can guess the words that are singing in their minds as they climb out of their bedroom window to sneak off to meetings in alleyways and with guns when they're sixteen. Across the Atlantic, when her sister, the twins' mother, closes her eyes and listens to the boys try to climb back in as stealthy as they can manage with shoulders that are growing broader by the day and voices that are growing deeper by the week, she knows the words that make their hearts beat faster and the words that tie their souls together into one bundle and link that the life of a man they don't even remember seeing.
She wonders if they know the prayer in all the languages that they know; she suspects they do.
Yakavetta's East Coast operations have nothing on the operations that can transcend both time and space. For all that he's heard the old McManus family prayer once before, as a six year old boy when his father reviewed the microcassette tape that they smuggled out of the prison in payment for the murder of a jailhouse snitch, and even though he goes to church as regularly as any McManus and professes to affection and adoration of Christ, Yakavetta doesn't quite understand what the words mean.
"-- for thee."
Yakavetta's operations mean nothing compared to the operation of love.
So, yeah, this is the result of a little mystery that Keri and I have been thinking about for a long time: if the McManus family prayer is passed on from father to son, and if McManus senior has been in jail for twenty-some years yet has twenty-seven year old sons, how the hell did Connor and Murph learn it?
Eleven years after the fact, Mrs. McManus gets a package in the mail from her sister living in Philadelphia. An old cookie tin, washed out and sealed with packing tape. Wrapped with brown paper, labelled for Colleen McManus of Flat 3B, and containing a letter, some photographs of the family vacation in Orlando. A birthday card for Connor and Murphy, a pair of Mickey-Mouse shaped lollipops the size of their heads as a present for them, and a silver spoon with the Epcot center on the handle for their Mum.
Also, with no word of explanation anywhere in the package, a cassette tape. Terribly poor and scratchy quality, probably converted over from microtape, and Mrs. McManus only needs to hear the first sentence out of it before she pulls the plug on the player out of the wall and hides the tape and vigorously discourages any questions about the package with the back of her hand.
In 1985, the boys are thirteen. The boys may have been too young to remember when their father tells their mother that they'll do right and make him proud yet, but in eleven years, they're not too young to go rummaging through the cupboards on a rainy afternoon, looking for their birthday presents.
The fact that their mother listens to the first sentence of it, then hides it at the bottom of her sewing basket underneath her armchair just means that the first words boys just hear are " -- for thee."
***
Their father never calls. Twenty five years, and there's the cassette, eleven years in, and a letter, folded over twice and sent over in the sleeve of one of the matching Philadelphia Eagles pullovers that the same Aunt Margaret sends over three years later when the boys are sixteen. It's a single sheet of paper, with a few words written on it in a shaky sort of pen.
***
In the cassette, he sends them his love. He doesn't ask after the boys; he doesn't ask any questions as to how his wife is making ends meet, and after having been drafted in the idea that the proper way to write any letter or conduct any conversation is to ask after the health of the other persons, Connor thinks that this is odd until he realizes that his father isn't expecting any sort of reply back. Mrs. McManus calls her sister up and threatens and storms and begs to try and get more details, like where her boys' father is, but this sister just sort of affects this artfully bewildered tone with the faintest quaver of fear in it when she says that she doesn't know about any cassette, she has no idea where that cassette came from.
Later, it comes out that she never approved of her younger sister marrying a wild man like Daniel McManus, that she wanted her sister to marry someone who would stay around and provide for his children and watch them grow, not someone whose communications would be delivered by men with heavy Italian accents and ziplock bags full of neatly bound cash who are sitting in her kitchen when she comes home from the grocery store and have a gun and a cassette laid out on the kitchen table next to them.
***
In the letter that comes three years after the cassette, their father apologizes for the lack of phone calls. Maximum security prisons don't allow them very often: in fact, he isn't allowed any until he tells them his name, and it's only when they're twenty-seven that the boys learn that he killed a man in the mess hall to get the microcassette out, and that he stabbed a man to death with a knife carefully fashioned out of the inside struts of his metal cot in order to get the letter out.
At the end of that, he explains there will be no more letters. They're moving him to a -- there's a pause, a space here, as if he's measuring out his words, as if he hasn't spent the last three years dreaming of this letter every night and every morning -- they're moving him to a higher security facility where he won't have as many chances.
***
"He could bring down the whole East-Coast operation," Yakavetta says to DiStefano some twenty-six years after the fact. "If he goes to the feds, he could take us apart, brick by brick."
Yakavetta has this idea that his crime family is the end-all, is the be-all. It stretches from Maine to Philadelphia and all the way down to the suburbs of Virginia, with outposts burgeoning in Atlanta and Raleigh, and all of this is tied together with phone lines, with interstate, with drug couriers and with numbers runners. What Yakavetta doesn't realize, though, when he asks about Il Duce and when he turns his back on the brothers in the basement of his own house -- what he doesn't realize, though, is that these phone lines and highways and shipping lines and army of soldiers means nothing.
In 1985, the sister's voice is borne across the Atlantic by a phone line, yes, and it's shaking with fear, definitely, but the fear in her voice is not for her life or her safety or the safety of the valuables in her house. Rather, it's fear for the hard life that her sister will be leading, fear for what her two wild-headed sons will do when they hear the cassette. She met Murphy and Connor when they were six years old apiece; she hasn't seen them since then, but she can guess the words that are on their lips after the Lord's Prayer before they lie down at night when they're thirteen, and she can guess the words that are singing in their minds as they climb out of their bedroom window to sneak off to meetings in alleyways and with guns when they're sixteen. Across the Atlantic, when her sister, the twins' mother, closes her eyes and listens to the boys try to climb back in as stealthy as they can manage with shoulders that are growing broader by the day and voices that are growing deeper by the week, she knows the words that make their hearts beat faster and the words that tie their souls together into one bundle and link that the life of a man they don't even remember seeing.
She wonders if they know the prayer in all the languages that they know; she suspects they do.
Yakavetta's East Coast operations have nothing on the operations that can transcend both time and space. For all that he's heard the old McManus family prayer once before, as a six year old boy when his father reviewed the microcassette tape that they smuggled out of the prison in payment for the murder of a jailhouse snitch, and even though he goes to church as regularly as any McManus and professes to affection and adoration of Christ, Yakavetta doesn't quite understand what the words mean.
"-- for thee."
Yakavetta's operations mean nothing compared to the operation of love.
So, yeah, this is the result of a little mystery that Keri and I have been thinking about for a long time: if the McManus family prayer is passed on from father to son, and if McManus senior has been in jail for twenty-some years yet has twenty-seven year old sons, how the hell did Connor and Murph learn it?