Bless us, O Lord, and these thy beans; a young girl's discovery becomes too much for her family to stomach.

My grandfather, Seamus Kelly, was born in Ireland 23 years after the Great Potato Famine. Although he didn't experience the disaster firsthand, his life was nonetheless affected by it.

Horrible tales of people driven by hunger to eat grass were Seamus' bedtime stories, for his parents counted themselves fortunate to be among the survivors, and found solace in the telling. Grimm's Fairy Tales were mild fare compared with the ghastly tales of Black '47.

Seamus related these stories whenever he caught any of us wasting food, and though my seven brothers and sisters and I were provided with enough to feed an army, his haunting concern that the supply might suddenly end prompted Seamus to insist we clean our plates and thank God for every morsel. "But this is America!" one of us would always remind him. "We can just go to a supermarket and buy more!" But nothing anyone said would convince my grandfather of the unlikelihood that hunger might once again turn its frightful face upon our family.

I was 9 when I found the beans. My brother, Matthew, was 10. He was with me that day, but I was the one who found them. It was the middle of summer, and Seamus had taken us to visit his good friend, Mr. Joseph Foley, who was the caretaker of our town's municipal dump.

While Seamus and Mr. Foley spent a relaxing few hours in each others' company, Matthew and I went scavenging through the acres of trash. We found stuff that only kids would consider treasures: pristine-conditioned Moxie bottle caps perfect for adorning the crated sides of homemade go-carts, a bicycle wheel whose spokes were only slightly dented, a perfectly good set of rabbit ear antennas to place atop our black and-white Motorola next to my mother's rhinestone-robed Infant of Prague, and a bunch of other smaller items which Matthew and I pocketed just for the sheer enjoyment of filling our pockets. I have long since forgotten what those small treasures were, but that day I placed value on them, and brought them home and secretly inspected their merits under the covers that night by the tubular beam of my Girl Scout flashlight.

I found the beans in the metal section of the dump. Matthew had disappeared behind a large, twisted sheet of corrugated aluminum, "to look for gold doubloons," he told me, when really he was just looking for a private place to pee. I knew this because a few seconds after he was out of sight I could hear a sound like rain on a tin roof. (My brother had a fondness for peeing outside, and did so whenever the opportunity arose. Throughout my childhood, I privately envied Matthew's anatomical ability to relieve himself while standing, and even tried to emulate him one time when I was on a Girl Scout hike. The outcome was pretty unsuccessful, and my sneakers remained soggy for the entire day.)

Waiting for Matthew to emerge, I sat on a rusted I beam and idly glanced around. It was almost noon. The sun beat down from a white-hot sky, and flocks of scavenging gulls soared and dove and screeched at each other territorially. One gull was especially large and raucous, and I watched him as he swooped to earth and perched himself atop of what looked to be a tall mound of dark pebbles.

The gull screeched at me as I walked toward it, and several of the pebbles slid to the ground as the bird took flight. I picked them up, and found that they weren't pebbles at all, but hard, redshelled kidney beans. My heart skipped a beat as I looked at the huge mound of them, standing untouched and uncooked, rising to the sky like the temple of Isis. Lining them across my opened palm, I studied them closely. They were shiny and hard and clean. Maybe they're inedible, I thought, otherwise why would anyone throw away a mountain of good food? I licked the hard coating of one to see if it tasted strange, but there was no taste to it. I took the experiment a step further and popped it into my mouth and rolled it around. It was bland at best, and I surmised that the lack of flavor in an uncooked kidney bean was normal, and that when cooked, the beans would be quite palatable and nutritious. My pulse raced and my mind's eye formed a picture of the joyous look on Seamus' face after being told I had found a substantial supply of free food! I had to share my good fortune with my brother.

"Matthew!" I yelled. "Come over here . . . quick!"

Matthew was still hidden behind the pile of scrap metal, but presently I heard the clanging and clanking of metal hitting metal as he quickly appeared, covered with dark orange rust smudges, and holding an iron pipe guardedly in his hand.

"Whatsamatter?" he asked breathlessly. "Did ya see a rat?"

"Look what I found!" I said, stepping aside to give him an unobstructed view of my treasure. I beamed with pride. Matthew impatiently threw down the pipe.

"Sheila," he said, "I thought you got bit! Don't call me again unless it's important!"

"But, Matthew," I said, realizing that he had failed to grasp the significance of the find, "we can cook 'em an' eat 'em! They're beans!" But he was unimpressed. He dismissed me with a wave and resumed his search for pieces of eight. I ran to get Seamus and Mr.Foley.

"Legumes! A hill o' legumes!" Seamus exclaimed.

He and Mr. Foley stood in front of the mound of beans, gazing in awe as if it were a priceless work of art.

"Now who do you suppose would discard all these fine legumes?" said Seamus. "'Tis a waste o' good food is what it is. D'ya think they're edible, Joe?"

Mr. Foley picked up a handful and cupped them in his fist, as if feeling the weight of them would determine their digestibility. "Don't see why not," he said. "Just have to rinse 'em off with a spray of water . . . sure, they're edible. I've got some big, empty burlap sacks back at the shed. We can fill 'em up. Hope your family likes beans, Seamus."

For the remainder of the to afternoon, the "Legume League"--as we began to call ourselves--gleaned and hauled the mountain of kidney beans back to our car and justly divided up the sacks. As Mr. Foley's family was much smaller than ours, he kept only two, and the seven remaining 25 pound sacks were the property of the Kelly family, to do with as we saw fit.

It was exhausting work, that legume lifting. I was tired, but extremely proud and secure in the knowledge that I was the one responsible for our liberally stocked larder of 175 pounds of free legumes.

It was supper time when we finally arrived home, and my mother was sitting on the porch waiting for us to return. Our frequent jaunts with Seamus often made my mother edgy, for the car that Seamus drove was considered an antique, and was known to act up on occasion. One time it broke down when we were out in the middle of nowhere, and we were towed home by a friendly truck driver who entertained us by showing off his tattooed arms. Matthew and I thought it was great fun, but Seamus was in the doghouse for days afterwards.

I could see my mother's chest heave a sigh of relief when we pulled in the driveway, and her questions as to where we spent the day were reduced to a minimum when Matthew and Seamus began unloading our cargo. Her attention was now firmly focused on the seven bulging sacks.

"Why in heaven's name would you buy so many potatoes, Seamus?" she asked, standing with her hands on her hips. "I'll have to make a ton of potato salad before they go bad," she said. Her mouth curved down in a slight frown as she thought about all the work ahead: boiling, peeling, slicing, and storing.

"Not potatoes, lass," Seamus informed her, ". . . legumes!" He placed a sack at her feet as proudly as if it were filled with diamonds. A look of relief and pleasure passed over my mother's face.

"Where are we to store all these sacks?" she wanted to know, crossing her arms over her apron front. My mother was a hard woman to please; even when it seemed as if fortune had shined on her she would "see the 'divil' 'round every corner," as Seamus would often say.

"I've given it much thought," Seamus assured her. "They won't be takin' up but a bit o' space if we stack 'em against the wall next to the stove."

My mother's face softened. "Well, then," she said, "Matthew and Sheila, help Seamus bring them in and clean yourselves up for dinner. We're all ready to sit down." She then turned on her heels and walked briskly into the house.

"I thought she'd like the beans more than that," I said to Seamus. The disappointment I felt with my mother's reaction was doubled now that I was again made to lift the heavy bean sacks. My treasure was beginning to wear on me.

"Sheila, please say the grace tonight," my father asked, once we were all assembled around the dinner table.

I bowed my head and, in my usual perfunctory fashion, rattled off the evening's prayer. "There are commas and pauses in that lovely prayer," my mother scolded. "Next time, Sheila, linger a bit over the words instead of thinking about the food."

"But everyone knows it," I said, "an' the faster I say it the faster everyone can eat." I smiled defiantly and dug into a pork chop. Seamus gave me a disapproving glance that conveyed an expectation for a swift and sincere apology. "Next time I'll do it slower," I promised. "Want me to do it again?" I asked, suddenly feeling agreeable.

"Once is enough," my mother said. "Your brothers are almost finished with their meals already."

My brothers were all marathon meal eaters. Each of them could wolf down a good-size dinner in ten seconds flat if it was put to them. My mother was forever scolding them for their habit of shoveling in their food and swallowing without the benefit of adequate chewing. "Masticate! Masticate!" she would say, one time prompting my oldest brother to reply, "But, Ma-Father Timothy says I'll go blind if I do!" (A remark for which he was sent to his room after receiving from my father a pretty good cuff on the side of his head.)

"We went to see Mister Foley today," Matthew announced, helping himself to a mound of mashed potatoes.

"And how might Joe be doin'?" my father asked.

"I'll tell you how he might be doing," my mother interjected. "He's as fruity as a rum cake in December, unless he's come to his senses, which I doubt he has."

My mother frankly disapproved of Mr. Foley, harboring no doubt in her mind that he was the most peculiar man on God's earth because he thoroughly enjoyed working at the dump. "Why would anyone," she would say, when speaking of Seamus' friend, "choose to work in such a filthy, rat-infested location?" She would then go on to say how polio germs breed in such places, and that she didn't want Seamus to be taking us there. But Seamus knew how much Matthew and I liked scrounging, and so his memory seemed to fail him when it came to carrying out my mother's wishes.

"Mister Foley's fit as a fiddle," I said to my father, ignoring my mother's tight-lipped look of disapproval. "He gave us some lemonade and cookies, and we found all sorts of neat stuff. We got bottle caps an' a bike tire, an' rabbit ears for the TV. We left all the stuff in the car 'cause Seamus says we have to wash 'em all before we briny 'em in the house. These pork chops are really good, Ma," I added, rambling in my attempts to defend Mr. Foley and restore Seamus' credibility. I knew that hell would freeze over before my mother would allow the set of germ-infested, dump-procured rabbit ears a place of honor next to her immaculate, store-bought Infant of Prague, but I was determined to make her see the utilitarian results of dump scrounging.

But she was not to be moved. She "humpfed," and handed a third napkin to my little brother, the messiest eater for miles around.

Then, in my frustration to make my mother see the light, I blurted out, "That's where I found all those beans, Ma . . . at Mister Foley's."

Seamus cleared his throat and rolled his eyes, but it was too late. I had said too much. The table was silent. Suspended in varying degrees of mastication, they all waited expectantly for my mother to take a conniption fit.

"You mean to tell me," she said, directing the question to Seamus, "that those beans were in Foley's dump?" She said "dump" with the heated inflection of an obscenity.

"They're clean An' perfectly edible," Seamus said, calmly cutting the silence and his second pork chop. "I wouldn't be bringin' home anything that would harm me family, now would I, Kathleen?" He looked at my mother squarely and waited for her response.

It wasn't the first time that Seamus and my mother had locked horns, and it wouldn't be the last. They loved each other dearly, I knew that, but they perceived life from different angles, and were both extremely stubborn in their opinions.

"But the dump, Seamus . . . of all places," she replied, clicking her tongue.

I quickly came to Seamus' defense, feeling mighty guilty for having put him in such a position to begin with. "Mister Foley says that all we have to do is wash 'em off an' cook 'em and they'll be just fine," I said. "I bet they'll be delicious."

My mother opened her mouth to say something, then closed it quickly with an exasperated huff. The table resumed chewing, and the topic was dismissed. We had won a small but decisive victory -- the beans could stay.

After her initial horror at discovering their origin wore off, my mother did a complete turnabout in her feelings toward the beans. A few days of seeing the sacks lined up idly next to the stove prompted her pragmatic, waste-not-want-not philosophy to take over. Although seldom seeing eye-to-eye on other matters, my mother and Seamus shared the same attitude regarding food, thinking it no less than a grave sin to waste any.

While his childhood bedtime stories had given Seamus a more personal, ancestral view of hunger, my mother considered it more of a global issue. "People all over the world have suffered from lack of food since time began," she would say, informing us of the present-day famine in China, which we already knew about from a visiting missionary who spoke at Mass one Sunday. I had given generously to the Chinese Relief Fund, plopping my last dime earmarked for peppermints into the collection basket. I had made this sacrifice for the lofty purpose of feeding the needy, but it came with an added perk. The missionary told us that our offerings also bought us jewels in our heavenly crowns--a pretty good deal, I reasoned, for only one thin dime.

Resignedly, my mother sat down at the kitchen table and opened her cookbook to the legume section and checked off several recipes that struck her fancy. That very evening she presented us with a toothsome kidney bean casserole, and everyone sang its praises. The beans were ambrosia to my palate; they were my first real contribution to the family, and a sense of pride and self-satisfaction welled up inside me with every tasty mouthful.

The next evening, my mother surpassed herself and prepared a delectable kidney bean pie, "The likes o' which is almost sinful in its flavor," as Seamus so eloquently phrased it. The beans--detestable only a few days before--were now an enormous success, and my mother basked in the compliments she received in preparing them.

On the third evening, she ladled out the beans from a large soup tureen, which sat in the middle of the table next to a turkey platter mounded with steaming brown bread and hot dogs. They were delicious even without a garnish, and I savored each bite of bean as if it were manna from heaven.

Ordinarily, my mother was not a haughty woman. She took pride in her family and in her Church--never in possessions. But the seven sacks of beans soon ignited in her a spark of pride that even she admitted to. "I don't know what it is about those beans," she said. "When I come into the kitchen each morning and see those seven fat sacks all lined up it makes me feel like a woman of means. It's extra food for the family that makes me proud and brings joy to my heart."

Word of my mother's beans spread like a brushfire throughout the neighborhood. My mother found herself serving tea each day to several female friends who just happened to drop by to see her, when all the while they had come expressly to see her beans. My mother wasn't stupid--she knew that her sacks of beans were the reason for her rising popularity. But she didn't mind. On the contrary, she seemed to take an oddly maternal pride in them, and would display to each admiring neighbor her bean sacks as if they were 25 pound septets swaddled in buntings of burlap. The women would dispense their "Ooo's" and "Ahh's," and touch the highly regarded sacks as if the mere laying on of hands would bring about a similar prosperity to their own families. My mother's status in the neighborhood grew with each passing day, and with it, her pride at owning the beans. But pride--according to an ancient sage experienced with the ways of bean obsession--cometh before the fall.

My mother's expertise at finding recipes for the beans was remarkable. But after two weeks of ingesting them with two meals every day, the family began to show signs of lethargy. Beans had become profoundly tiresome to the family's collective palate. No longer did we look forward to sitting down at the dinner table, and my brothers--usually the first to show up for any meal--now had to be summoned.

None of us asked anymore what was for supper. We knew that whatever would be served would be laced with a hearty helping of beans. My mother's nightly supper sermon concerning the poor, starving children in China ("Those little Chinese babies would thank the good Lord for such fine beans," she would say), and Seamus's additional reminder that blight could overnight turn spuds to black mush, would evoke in us such a profound wave of guilt for being well-fed that we had no other recourse but to eat the detestable things. I began to have extreme regrets in having found them, and would have gladly offered my entire wealth of beans to any little Chinese baby in trade for a single bowl of starchy rice.

On the 15th consecutive night of our monotonous bean diet, my little brother was asked to say grace. He bowed his head over his bean soup and recited:

Bless us, O Lord, an' these Thy beans

Which we are 'bout to receive

From Thy bean bounty

Through Christourlordamen.

The next evening showed not a bean in sight. But when the mashed potatoes were passed around, I noticed they possessed a suspicious, reddish-brown tinge. For an instant I suspected blight, but as I chewed, the unmistakable flavor of concealed kidney beans assaulted my taste buds. There was no let up.

From then on, my mother became adroit at mashing and camouflaging the beans within the folds of omelets and disguising them in slabs of otherwise innocent-looking meat loaves. She mashed them to a gummy pulp and buried them between layers of unsuspecting codfish cakes, and rolled them into tiny, glutinous globules surreptitiously concealed within the cores of mushy meatballs. But these subtle guises didn't fool us for a minute. We could all, by that time, sniff out a cooked kidney bean a mile away.

My mother's zeal was unflagging. She even went so far as to concoct recipes of her own. The one she took most pride in was her kidney bean bread--an insipid, pasty-tasting brown loaf of yeast, flour, and beans--which stuck to the roof of your mouth and sat in the pit of your stomach like an indigestible lead sinker.

Almost everything we ate contained a bean supplement, and the resulting flatulence from ten over-taxed digestive tracts would send each of us at various intervals running from the room holding our noses in disgust. Clearly, the wind-producing beans were a malodorous scourge upon our household.

"How long d'ya think they'll last?" I asked Seamus one morning. We were having breakfast, the only meal of the day not glutted with beans. He knew, of course, what I was referring to; the beans had taken full possession of every family member's thoughts and intestinal functions since the day they arrived. Even Seamus was sick of them.

"I'd be guessin' a little over two more months at the rate they're lastin'," he estimated, mumbling into his cereal bowl. By Seamus's reckoning, the beans would keep us far from famine's door, flatulent, and disgruntled well into the autumn. I glanced over at the sacks, broke a little silent wind, and groaned. There were five sacks left.

"Don't you be worryin' yourself, now," Seamus said to me. "An' this, too, shall pass . . . man shall not live by beans alone."

We had potluck that night: leftover bean salad and fricasseed chicken in a congealed bean sauce. It was better than a kick in the teeth, but not much.

Long after I had gone to bed that night I was awakened by the muffled rat-a-tat-tatting of my mother's treadle sewing machine. She must be mending, I thought, and turned over in my bed and fell back to sleep. I slept fitfully; I dreamed that my brothers and sisters were chasing me up and down the street, bombarding me with a fusillade of soggy kidney bean grenades.

When I entered the kitchen the next morning, everyone was there except for my mother. They were congregated around two large laundry baskets resting on the floor in front of the stove.

"What's goin' on?" I asked. Matthew turned to me, his face more contented than I had seen it in weeks.

"The beans are history," he said, with a subsequent, fiendish laugh. He reached into one of the baskets and pulled out what looked to be a tiny, lumpy pillow. He threw it to me.

"Bean bags!" my oldest brother declared, juggling three of them in the air.

"We won't have to eat any more beans!" my two sisters gleefully screamed in unison.

Everyone went nuts. No one, though, asked who was responsible for freeing us from the burden of the beans. No one asked because, frankly, no one cared. The main thing was that we were free, free, free!

"You all know," said my father, clamping a lid on our rejoicing, "that your mother might not be sharin' our jubilant feelings about this."

"About what?" my mother asked suspiciously. She stood at the kitchen threshold and scanned the scene with her green eyes. "Have you all taken leave of your senses? What in heaven's name is going on here?"

We stood frozen, shielding the laundry baskets from her view, attempting to prolong the inevitable. Then my little brother piped up, giving true meaning to the phrase "spilling the beans."

"Your beans are in little bags, Ma," he told her. "I can't see 'em no more."

At the mention of her precious beans, my mother's eyebrows shot up in alarm. She quickly approached us, and--like the parting of the Red Sea--we stepped aside and exposed the laundry baskets. She looked down at them, then walked over to the side of the stove where the bean sacks had previously been stored. They were gone. My mother's face drained of color, and for a minute she looked as if she might faint. My mother wasn't the fainting type, but as I have already pointed out, she had an emotional investment in the beans, and it wouldn't have surprised me if she had keeled over. But she managed to remain conscious. She was speechless, though, for a good two minutes, during which time it was so quiet in the kitchen that I fancied I could hear the trapped beans shifting to get comfortable in their snug little pouches. When my mother finally spoke, her voice was edged with steel.

So," she said, turning to us with her jaw set, "I see the way it is. You're all in this together, thick as thieves." She scooped up a bean bag from one of the baskets, sat down at the table, and examined it. "The sewing's too good for a child to have done it," she remarked, glancing immediately up at Seamus, who was suddenly enthralled with the ceiling's plaster job. "Seamus?" she said in an accusing tone.

Seamus cleared his throat. "Well--"

"I did it!" I said, stepping in front of my grandfather.

"No, you didn't--I did!" declared Matthew, wanting to help Seamus out of the soup.

"'Twas me who did the dastardly deed!" my oldest brother intoned.

"By my forcing you to," swore another.

"Men can't sew," said my sister, condescendingly, ". . . I did it!"

"I didn't do it, Ma--honest!" my little brother said, starting to cry. I wanted to swipe him.

My father suppressed a smile and joined my mother at the table. "Y'know, Kathleen," he said, putting a consoling arm around my mother's shoulders, "maybe it's for the best. Now we can make a bean bag toss for the children. You know how much you like to hear them all laughing."

But my mother didn't seem to hear. I suspect she was still under the heavy spell of the enchanted kidney beans. "I could always make a slit in each bag and pour the beans out, one bag at a time," she mused aloud, her face brightening at the idea.

We looked at each other with panic in our eyes at the thought of a possible bean resurrection. My little brother began to cry louder. I swear the kid could cry over anything.

"Let's give some to the neighbors!" my oldest brother yelled. "Grab the other side of the basket, Matthew--that's the way--let's go to the window!" Opening the window, he called out to some kids on the sidewalk below. "Want some bean bags, kids?" And before my mother could object, he and Matthew began tossing them out at a furious rate, and in no time at all the basket was empty.

"That leaves one basket full for our own amusement," said Seamus, glad at the turn of events. "I'll get busy with makin' a bean bag toss this very day, an' by dinnertime tonight it should be ready."

My mother sighed deeply and threw her hands in the air. She was a woman without a bean to her name.

"What is it, Kathleen?" my father gently asked her.

She lowered her head to his shoulder and dabbed her eyes with a corner of the bean bag. In a very small, plaintive voice she rhetorically asked, "What on earth will I make for dinner?"