CAVANAGH EXTRAS
Cavanagh, a History
Mickey Cavanagh came from County Cork, in Ireland, fleeing from a rouge article call Riley O’Sheen. The rogue, as many of the folk who knew the dirty business that unfolded were want to call him, was a burley sort, fond of drink and women of loose morals. He was a menace to the good folk of County Cork, stealing as it suited him, and disrupting the peace whenever the mood took him, both he and the small congregation of roguish blokes that lived by his leave. It was, of course, the loose morals bit that had landed Mickey in the mess in which he found himself.
It had been a Friday afternoon, wage day and like his brothers and their father before them, Saints, Mary and the Jesus rest him, wage evening began with whiskey and tempting his pub mates on who would be the first to spew wage day drink.
Mickey always won, would pocket more of his mate’s pay than they could afford and then staggered home, piss drunk, belly full and no sense about his head a’tall.
Until, it seemed the rogue came upon him.
O’Sheen, you see, had an eye for Mickey’s sister Bridgett, a fair girl of only eighteen. But Bridgett had a heart for the Lord and wanted to be in His service, wanted most passionately to become a Sister of the Church and not some fretful bride worrying when her husband came back from the pubs or how she’d go about feeding her children should she have any.
Mickey’s temper flared then, when he came upon O’Sheen doing his best to sway Bridgett from her chores, to keep her from her duties of minding the laundry as it hung out to dry.
“I’ll thank you to leave me be,” Bridgett said to O’Sheen when he saw fit to grab her about the waist and pull her close. Night was coming and she’d been late for her duties, having taken too long at confession, though Mickey couldn’t say what his sweet sister would ever have to confess.
“Come now, darlin’,” O’Sheen went on, smelling of drink far worse than Mickey did. It was enough that he’d come upon Bridgett when she was alone. That in itself was inappropriate, but when the rouge tried to kiss her, to touch her in place no man ever would, when he wouldn’t see fit to keep his fat fingers from her round breasts, both Bridgett and Mickey’s blood went to boiling.
“I’ll thank you, Riley O’Sheen to leave off my sister.” Mickey’s addled brained had gone dead sober upon seeing how Bridgett struggled to break free from the man.
But O’Sheen would do nothing of the sort, in fact, the fiendish rake laughed at Mickey who was so much smaller than himself, with wiry arms and lanky legs. Riley stood between Bridgett and her brother, blocking either from view, digging in his coat for a pistol, which he went on waving about at Mickey’s head, then his chest, laughing all the while.
“You’ll leave off, won’t you Mickey Cavanagh, while I court your sister.” This point he illustrated by centering the barrel of the pistol right between Mickey’s eyes. “Now be a good lad and run inside. I’ve business to attend…” and when O’Sheen the rake cocked back the hammer and the whole of Mickey’s life flashed in the seconds that came then, there came a quick whoosh of air from Riley O’Sheen and his eyes went wide, the blue irises going dull when sweet, virtuous Bridgett, took the blade their father had given her and shoved in the side of his neck.
Then Riley O’Sheen was no more.
The night had gone dark and eerily quiet, but at the sight of what she’d done, Bridgett wailed something fierce, dropping the blade in a fit. “Oh, sweet Jaysus, he would have killed ya, Mickey.”
“Aye, he would have.”
Then Mickey, who had never done much that was clever or virtuous and remotely selfless, lifted his chin, pulling his sister to his chest and let her weep. “Hush, darlin, hush now.” He thought desperate thoughts then, wild things that seemed impossible. There were no factories with great furnaces to burn up the rouge’s body. There was no time to pull him away from view before his brothers returned from the pub or the neighbors caught site of the blood and the fat article leaking it on the Cavanagh front garden.
“Don’t you worry,” he told his sister. “I’ll say it was me. I’ll take the blame…”
“You’ll do no such thing!” Bridgett could fuss and worry her brothers as though she’d already taken her vows. “I’ll not add lying to my sins, Mickey. I’ll not…”
“Tis the only way…”
And on they went, for hours it seemed, until finally it was decided, but not by them alone.
“You’ll go off,” their eldest brother Matthew said.
“Yes, it’s the only way,” the younger brother Willie agreed.
And so it was that the Cavanagh brothers took the rouge’s body away from their home, to the edge of County Cork, right to Blackwater river. Against an Alder tree they placed the body, the knife along with it, for there was no disguising such a deep knife wound.
Matthew and Willie would pass around the rumor of seeing the rouge courting trouble with a married woman; something to do with her husband, a man neither one could say they knew. As for Mickey and Bridgett, the folk would believe that both would make for parts unknown. Mickey, to find adventure and work and things he could not in County Cork and Bridgett to win souls for Jesus.
Lesser known was that the siblings made for the train station, then off on a grand ship that would bringing them to the states, from New York and then far from it, to a place that was lovely, as Bridgett had suggestion. “A place to begin again.”
And so, they did, did Mickey and Bridgett Cavanagh, to flee from the home they so dearly loved, to hide from the rouge’s mates and the magistrate and all those folk that would not take kindly to the business done to O’Sheen.
It was a long journey, the fleeing, but after some months the Cavanagh siblings came to the great mountains of Tennessee, most of which was young and covered well with trees and forests and all manner of great, wonderful things they had never seen.
It was there, in Tennessee, that Mickey Cavanagh made good use of his charm. He learned trades, became friendly with men of questionable morality in the town of Cameron. Hooch runners, so they were called, selling whiskey not fit for public distribution, or the county laws, until it was that Mickey himself, improvised and adjusted those long-held recipes.
In time, Mickey sent Bridgett off to New Orleans, to the convent she’d long admired to become a sister and seek forgiveness for the great sin that sent the Cavanagh siblings from their home.
But Mickey, so lonesome for Ireland and now, quite wealthy from his endeavors, sought to grow his family, a wife now and three sons, and to build from his memories a place that would dim that homesick ache.
At some great age, Mickey acquired three hundred acres and had constructed pathways and buildings of a small town, so like County Cork. First came his home, a large, brilliant thing of fine wood floors and a large porch that ran the length of the home. Here he and his wife, a creole woman called Lisette from New Orleans, would sit and watch the mountains and the ridges below, were their land grew and prospered.
Soon, there came storefronts, brightly colored buildings with bowed storefronts, fine buildings of learning, libraries and churches of cut stone with shamrocks in the stained-glass to remind the folk, some of whom followed Mickey from Ireland, of their homes and the memories gained there. Pitches and fields were built to house Mickey’s great love of rugby as were lovely parks filled with flowers of varying colors to perfume the town with their sweet scent.
Bridgett returned as Sister Mary Catherine some years later, given the task of starting an orphanage funded from the generosity of her beloved brother Mickey and every Sunday afternoon, after mass, the siblings would sit on Mickey’s front porch, looking down on the town below, marveling how so like the home of their birth it had become and how well-favored they’d been despite their long-committed sins.
Cavanagh grew into a small, quaint place with reminders of home and the land that still took up the greatest bits of their hearts. It stands today, nestled between the lush mountain cabins in Gatlinburg and the quietness of Maryville as a reminder of the past and the sweet hope of the future.