The short story “Wake” is inspired by Bridget Muller-Sampson’s grandfather who left Tuam, Galway, as a young man to join the British Army as a teenager. Later, he emigrated to the United States.
Muller-Sampson earned her M.F.A. in Fiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars in Vermont and her B.A. in English Literature from the University of Virginia.
Bridget Muller-Sampson lives on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts with her husband and her rescue border collie, Pearl. They run an inn and a restaurant in West Tisbury, up island on the Vineyard.
Her short stories and essays have been published in the American journals CutLeaf Journal, Northern New England Review and Consequence. Her stories have also been published and recognized by Ruminate magazine as the winner of the 2022 Waking Flash Prose Prize and by Dappled Things as the winner of the 2018 J.F. Powers Short Story Award.
Wake
By Bridget Muller-Sampson
Thomas had opened the winter window because he was on the drink again, and this godforsaken, rattly house in Utica, New York, though as cold as the rooms he’d known as a child in Tuam Galway, gave him a headache with its nowhere pasture or sea or rocky wall.
And the endless snow.
His wife would be saying the rosary and telling him to shut it.
Herself and him, all the closer to dying, in the nighttime he felt it.
He shut the window.
He’d always be telling her, heartless harpy she was, how much he’d once loved life, oh the laughs back then with all the lads before the Great War, lads who probably thought of him seldom.
Whatever her past, back in England, always claiming the fellows were after her, were ready to die for her; this is maybe what she thought of as she silently fingered her beads, lips shaping words, or that she’d be in paradise watching the rest of them rot in hell, while—lonely beyond geography—he dreamed of a grandchild (his own five children still needing him too much) who might grasp what he’d been trying to say now for some time: that he no longer cared to live.
A child who might meet, rather than judge, him in that sorrow.
In the other room, he heard the twin, Bernard, cry out from his sleep.
Not love like what he felt for the children, ever, or for the woman he would eventually lie down beside, but she brought him predictability and the surprise that, cold as she was, she could greet him in the love-making, long and soft and full of children, but in the mornings, always, the laughter was gone.
Was it the drink making him weepy, seeing himself red-eyed and swaying in the black-spotted mirror? He held up the sketch Navvy Hopkins, who could draw and recite any verse from memory, had penned of Tom’s mother at the pub. It was one of the drinking games. Recite every feature of one you left behind in Ireland and Navvy would draw the person you longed for. Beside his own face, Tom held a picture of his round-featured mother and saw himself not as who he’d become: a janitor at the elementary school who was ashamed, but as the boy his mother saw when he left Ireland, laughing with what remained of the twelve brothers and sisters, the field spreading out around them: young, smoking—blue-eyed-charming—dreaming his escape. He touched the mirror and stepped into the thin place, where the dead cross over and call your name. Oh, sure, he felt them all, but it was like grasping at mist, and his youngest—the twins—only twelve.
The wife, snoring gracefully now.
A tap on the window became more pronounced, and he went to it; it if wasn’t Navvy Hopkins tossing rocks from the cemetery next door, saying, Come on out now, Thomas, for one more.
The snow blowing nearly sideways. It seemed he’d never seen so many snowflakes, God wasn’t it gorgeous and Navvy down there holding up the green bottle.
They’d only just have the one and tell a few stories in the Irish section of the graveyard; Navvy was yelling some lines from a story or a play like he always did when he got on the drink; Navvy like Romeo and, he—Thomas O’Donnell—at the window like some whiskey-loving Juliet.
Sometimes upstate New York was pure miraculous—you’d be snowed in for nearly the whole winter—feet and feet of the stuff until you were gray as the sky yourself, when back in Ireland, the snow being everywhere came once in a lifetime—if ever—which Navvy was reciting, going on about it being general all over Ireland, the snow.
Won’t be but a minute, Navvy. He put his jacket back on and stepped out the door into the snow that gently blanketed the sidewalk. Through the night, this storm would head north and west to New York’s North Country. It would gently blanket Watertown, where his granddaughter (whom he would never meet) would be born in twenty-three years at Mercy Hospital, a building that, in seventy-five years, would be demolished. All night, the snow would fall unseen, seeding itself in the dark, all across the lonely Saint Lawrence River.
Good man, Tom said to Navvy and took the bottle.
What about that filthy joker, Joyce? Navvy said. I’ve been reading his stories from the library. Sick man, I’d say. Then he continued to quote some lovely lines.
The snow covered the pointed little hood on Navvy’s jacket, while my grandfather let it paint his jacket sleeves and spatter his eyeglasses.
Oh, I’ve heard enough about the dead for one night, my grandfather said, though he hadn’t and the snow drifted lightly upon their shoulders and over the chiseled names of the Irish who’d come to America and upon whose graves they leaned and drank.
The Galway Review 