THE PLOT IS LOCATED ON A PROMINENT CORNER in Holy Cross Cemetery in Malden, surrounded by a low concrete berm approximately ten feet square and marked by a granite stone engraved with Celtic crosses and an intaglio of the Virgin Mary holding her grown, dead son. Late in April, the sky is heavy and gray, tinged with the last cold front of a pretty bad winter. At Joe McCain's grave, the toughest guy in Somerville shifts from one side of the berm to the other, knotting and unknotting his thick, rough hands and finally looking away, his gaze skimming over the monuments and minarets that occupy the lot to the horizon.

“It's hard to come here,” says Brian O'Donovan, exhaling a long, slow breath.

Like Mark Donahue and countless other two-fisted kids who haunted Foss Park and the MDC rink, O'Donovan, now thirty-nine and a lieutenant on the Somerville Fire Department, came under Joe McCain's influence at a young age. He grew up on Rogers Avenue off Ball Square, in a large, rambling house overseen by his father, James, a lawyer, and his mother, Pauline, who owned an answering service and “took shit from no one.” The middle son among five boys, Brian learned to get his shots in at a tender age as he and his brothers Jim, Kevin, Mike, and Sean followed a pretty set schedule from the time he began to walk until he graduated from Somerville High.

“There was a battle royal every day after school, and then it would be street hockey time,” says O'Donovan, laughing at the recollection.

The fights in the O'Donovan household were not the ordinary tussles associated with having five healthy boys under one roof: they were prolonged and sometimes bloody free-for-alls, like the old turf battles of the Irish chieftains. “We did some serious damage to that house,” says Brian.

Standing by Joe's grave, Brian O'Donovan is wearing a long-sleeved Black Dog T-shirt, blue track pants, and sneakers. He has the heavy, muscled hands and shoulders of a stonemason and an Irish pug's face: wide, flat nose, stubby ears and close-cropped black hair under a sun-faded baseball cap. When he smiles, little crescents of scar tissue rise on his cheekbones and above his eyes, the remembrances of a habit that began at home and was raised to the level of a talent in the back alleys and ball fields around Rogers Avenue.

With his father at work, sometimes Brian and his siblings became so furious with one another that his mother would catch a punch on the jaw while trying to break them up. “A couple of times she went down,” he says. And there was a period after high school when Brian drifted away from his warring brothers and began to find trouble on his own. “We thought as teenagers we'd never be close when we got older, because we fought so hard,” he says.

Then Joe McCain came into the picture. O'Donovan had known the big man since he was twelve, when he and Joey and Mark Donahue played peewee hockey together. In those early days, Mr. McCain was just another dad at the rink, albeit a friendly one, with hands the size of baseball gloves and an easy way with his son's young friends.

“He'd tell you stories like you were one of the guys,” says O'Donovan.

Joe McCain the cop and Jim O'Donovan the lawyer became good buddies in those chilly old rinks, and over time it just seemed natural when big Joe became another member of the family. Brian and Joe McCain, Sr., became friends and shared a passion for ice hockey and then golf. When Brian was eighteen, Joe gave him a little MDC police sticker that said “Erin Society” and instructed him to affix it to his car. And if he ever got into any trouble, he was to say that Joe McCain was his uncle.

Late one night, a few pints under his belt, Brian was weaving down Revere Beach Parkway more occupied with the bagful of roast beef sandwiches from Kelly's than he was with his driving, and a huge, bald-headed Met cop threw on his lights and siren and pulled O'Donovan over.

“Who do you know?” the cop asked, gesturing toward the Erin Society sticker.

O'Donovan replied that he was Joe McCain's nephew and was amazed at the cop's reaction. “Go home,” the cop said. “And please tell your uncle that I was asking for him.”

Brian O'Donovan was twenty-four years old when Joe got shot in 1988, and after the big fellow recovered from his injuries, the two friends often played golf together at the Charles River Country Club in Newton Centre. After years of duffing, big Joe was able to put a pretty solid game together, especially for a guy who had topped out at over three hundred pounds and spent more of his youth swinging a hammer than a nine-iron. O'Donovan, by contrast, was a six handicap and had once considered joining the pro tour. To throw the younger man off his game, Joe would stand by the tee and open up his shirt. “Gee, look at this,” he would say, indicating the surgical staples that crisscrossed his massive torso. “I'm bleeding all over the place.”

“Go to hell, Joe,” O'Donovan would respond, and the two would laugh.

One day in the fall of 2001, Brian O'D's cell phone rang when he was driving his two boys to tae kwon do. It was Helen McCain, and she was worried about Joe; his diabetes was kicking up and he refused to go to the hospital.

Brian asked Helen to put her husband on the phone. “How you doin', Joe?” he asked.

McCain's voice was weak and hollow. “Not good, Brian,” he said. “Not good.”

Alarmed by this, O'Donovan left his two boys at karate, called his wife, Denise, to pick them up and sped over to the McCains'. When he jumped the stairs and burst into the foyer, there was Joe, sitting on the window bench, hands grasping his knees, as yellow as lemon peel with jaundice and struggling for breath.

Joe refused to go in an ambulance, so Brian slung his arm across the big man's shoulders and helped him down the stairs into the front seat of his car while the neighbors looked on. They drove straight to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where Joe was admitted, and over the next few days O'Donovan spent every free minute by Joe's bedside. One evening he brought his five-year-old, Seamus Patrick, who drew a picture of Joe and sat in his lap watching the Eagles beat the Giants on Monday Night Football.

Joe was quiet and thoughtful that evening, but the force of his personality had returned, and when O'Donovan and his young son left the Mount Auburn at halftime, they joked and said good-bye like it was any one of a thousand other nights they had taken leave of each other.

Joe has been dead for a year and a half now. Hands at his sides, Brian O'D stands gazing at the headstone amidst the crowded expanse of Holy Cross Cemetery.

Little strips of muscle appear along O'Donovan's cheekbone as he works to keep his jaw together. “He was so concerned about his grandkids— what they were going to do without him,” he says.

He starts to say something else but clips his teeth together, for a moment gazing at the clouds overhead. At five-thirty in the morning after Brian and Seamus Patrick's visit to the Mount Auburn, Joe Jr. called the O'Donovans, waking them from a sound sleep.

“He said his father was gone,” says O'Donovan. And then the toughest guy in Somerville begins to weep.

ON THE MORNING OF JOE MCCAIN'S FUNERAL, retired Met superintendent Al Seghezzi and his wife, Mary, left their modest home on Sealund Road in Quincy and drove to the foot of the Neponset Bridge to pick up Joe's old partner Leo Papile. Al, Leo, and Joe McCain went all the way back to the Old Colony district in the late fifties, when the three patrolmen worked out of the same building. Even then, McCain was impressive, a big, rangy fellow, very outgoing, already making a name for himself among the wiseguys on Revere Beach. Leo Papile was a colorful figure in his own right, with his slicked back hair, profane wit, and the kind of swagger that moved him out of patrol into the detective bureau in short order. Al was the quiet, steady one, staying up late to cram for the sergeant's exam, polishing his brass, looking after McCain and Papile like they were his wild younger brothers.

So it was that Al Seghezzi was dispatched to Leo's house before the funeral. Hearty, fit, and white-haired at seventy-seven, with his rough cement worker's hands and straight white teeth, Seghezzi looked like a grandfather in a magazine advertisement, the square, handsome face, pink-cheeked and freshly shaven, trousers pressed, shoes shined. But he had a wife to look after him and had always kept the cop job in perspective; Leo Papile was a widower, lived alone, and according to Joe McCain, Jr., had been struggling with the news of big Joe's death.

Al honked the horn in the driveway, and Leo came out dressed in a neat blue suit and climbed into the rear seat. Sitting beside Al, Mary Seghezzi wore a simple black dress and had her hair swept up in a new perm. There were a few pleasantries, but within minutes, the two old Mets were bickering like a couple of fishwives as Al drove up the Expressway toward Doherty Funeral Home in Somerville.

“Al, you're in the wrong lane,” said Leo, hanging over the front seat.

“What do you mean, Leo?” asked Al. It was a cold Tuesday morning in October, with clouds scudding overhead, and commuter traffic was light heading toward the tunnel; they were making good time in the far-left lane.

“Al, you've got to get in the right lane,” Leo said.

Al glanced over at his wife and then turned his head and looked Leo in the eye for a moment. “I like to ride in the left lane,” he said.

“Great, but if something happens up there you'll never be able to get off.”

“Leo, who's driving this thing?” Al asked.

Joe's old partner thrust himself back against the seat. “I always drive in the right lane,” said Leo.

After their little debate, the Seghezzis and Leo rode north in silence. As they turned off, skirted Medford, and drove into Powder House Square, they were not prepared for the scene they encountered.

Doherty Funeral Home has been a fixture in Somerville since 1906, and the large white Colonial with the green awnings and immaculate lawn has buried such local notables as the mayors Dr. G. Edward Bradley and William Brennan, a firefighter killed in the Hotel Vendome fire in 1972, and a young Marine killed in Beirut in the 1982 bombing. On the day of Joe McCain's funeral, cars lined every street radiating from the traffic circle, and the sidewalks were roiling with cops, dignitaries from the state house, a host of Joe's old cronies and retired Mets, wiseguys from Winter Hill, and dozens of women, young and old, wearing black and sobbing into their handkerchiefs. By Doherty's front door, state trooper Mark Lemieux, a wiry, intense man who had worked undercover for Joe, paced up and down in his dress blue uniform and shiny boots, getting up the nerve to go inside.

“No tears in here,” Leo said to Al. “Joe wouldn't go for any of that.”

Clutching each other, Al and Mary Seghezzi mounted the front steps and followed Leo Papile into the funeral home. A dense crowd filled the hallway amidst the stench of too many flowers, and red-eyed men in ill-fitting sport jackets, staring down at their feet or gazing at the thin silver brocade of the wallpaper, occupied several rows of chairs.

Halfway along the main room, two large easels contained photographs of Joe's grandchildren, Joseph, Liam, and Lucas, posing on their beloved dirt bikes or grinning from beneath Somerville Little League caps. At the entrance to the odd-shaped chapel where Joe lay in state, wearing his double-breasted Met uniform and flanked by two state troopers, additional photographs of Joe McCain, Sr., at work occupied two more pinboards: Joe accepting yet another award from the police commissioner; Joe and Leo smiling at newspaper photographers as they led a manacled prisoner up the courthouse steps; Joe back in '45, tall and lean and straight in his Navy whites.

For three days Leo Papile had been telling anyone who would listen that there would be “no bullshit” at Joe's funeral; from his days growing up as “Little Hash” on Marshall Street in Winter Hill to the last, agonizing stay at Mount Auburn Hospital, big Joe had prized his own inner strength and stoicism as much as anything else. He wouldn't have wanted any crying or gnashing of teeth, Leo insisted, demanding of those closest to him what he demanded of himself. Certainly Helen was hanging tough, standing beside the coffin in a tailored black pantsuit, her blonde hair just so, greeting visitors with a dry eye and a steady hand.

Joe McCain's round, visored Met cap was on a little table beside the coffin, and as Leo approached the bier, he picked up the cap and put it on his own head. Kneeling beside the coffin with Al and Mary Seghezzi right behind him, Leo began mumbling to Joe like his old partner was listening to him. Then he reached over and smoothed Joe's lapel, patting his chest and weeping.

Al Seghezzi was stunned. He leaned to his wife's ear and whispered, “Let's go sit down.”

While Al steered his wife through the crowd of mourners, Joey's wife, Maureen, came through the side entrance feeling like she was in a movie. A city kid who had grown up in a tiny clapboard house over the bridge in Charlestown, the former Maureen Taylor had endured somewhat of a love-dislike relationship with her old-school father-in-law, sharing an address but few of the same opinions with a man who had grown up during the Depression and served in the Great War. The two of them knew how to get under each other's skin, and the brash, outspoken kid from the 'town had eventually come to a détente with the tough old Irish cop for three reasons: Joseph, Liam, and Lucas, the tousle-haired, freckle-faced princes who wielded the most power in the McCain household.

One time, when the boys were very young, big Joe said he would buy a bicycle for Joseph. Despite never earning more than a patrolman's salary and what he could get from moonlighting, Joe had always been generous with a buck. That night, after a few constitutionals at the Fatted Calf on Beacon Hill, he returned home with brand-new full-sized bicycles for all the boys stowed in the backseat of his Caddy. While Maureen protested that the bikes were too big, Joe watched shiny-eyed as the boys pedaled up and down the street.

Maureen had skipped the front entrance of Doherty's to avoid seeing her father-in-law in his present state. He wouldn't really be dead, and their arguments over the kids and the house and local politics would not be at an end (nor would their conciliatory cups of tea, shared in Maureen's second-floor kitchen) if she didn't have to see him there, too big for the largest-sized coffin Doherty had squeezed him into.

Thirty-six-year-old Maureen McCain had never seen so many grown men crying in all her life; especially given that most of them came from places where men never cried; the O'Donovans of Ball Square and Stew Henry from White Plains and Dennis Febles of the Spanish Harlem Febleses and Mark Lemieux and Mark Donahue and Gene Kee and Biff McLean and Al DiSalvo, weeping openly, like children, like nobody ever wept in Stoneham or Mattapan or up in Haverhill.

Finally Maureen angled through the shifting mass of people and knelt at Joe's side. In their battles over the years, she'd tried never to lose control of her emotions in front of him; her father-in-law wouldn't have respected that. But now she let it all go; looking at him with his tie knotted up to his neck and brass shining, she let out a long, low wail that cracked over into blubbering, and her knees gave out and she slumped against the bier.

Helen came straight over and placed a hand on Maureen's shoulder. “Stop crying,” she said, in a quiet voice.

After forty-two years of marriage, Helen McCain knew that her husband would've been honored but embarrassed by a funeral more suited to a United States president than a tired old cop from Marshall Street. Somebody had told Helen that there were four sitting judges inside Doherty's, and all that kind of fuss was never Joe's style. A few hours before Joe died, when Helen was sitting with him at Mount Auburn, a resident came in and asked how he was feeling.

Joe McCain sat up in bed, crossed his arms over his chest, and glared at the young doctor. “How am I feeling? I can't breathe,” he said in a strong voice. “The air in this room is just terrible. I should be out on the sidewalk, walking around.”

That was the old Joe. And today, just like in 1988 when Joe got shot, Helen had rushed out to get her hair done and her clothes pressed and had spent a full day cleaning her house because that's what the old Joe would've wanted her to do. Then she had come down to Doherty's and thanked all these people for their sympathy, had actually comforted them, and would go over to St. Clement's and up to Holy Cross in possession of herself, in the midst of a deep and secret knowledge of what she and Joe had meant to each other, and keeping all that private, honoring it in that way.

Shortly before 10:00 A.M. Joe's coffin was rolled out to the hearse and the procession started at the bottom of the Powder House Square rotary, wound its way counterclockwise, and began emptying into Warner Street. St. Clement's Roman Catholic Church is less than half a mile from the funeral home, and even after the hearse arrived in front of the wooden doors, with an army of white-gloved policemen blocking all the side streets and the kilted members of the Boston Police Gaelic Column playing “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes and drums, cars with little magnetic “funeral” markers continued out from Doherty's for the next twenty minutes.

Onlookers stood on their porches, in driveways, and on street corners, mouths agape, watching in silence as eight rough-looking men accompanied the cherrywood coffin up the stairs and into the church.

Over a thousand mourners packed the nave of St. Clement's, a massive stone church in the style of the basilicas, with an ornate, hand-carved ceiling and a curved half cylinder of boxed glass forming the backdrop to the apse. Standing in front of the altar was Father John McLaughlin, a former collegiate wrestler and friend of the McCains who had returned to St. Clement's from his new parish in Foxboro to say Joe's funeral Mass.

Father John said, “Please rise,” and the weight of all those people unburdened the pews in a great harrumph and the sound of their knees clicking was like a myriad of crickets.

In his adult life Joe McCain was never a churchgoing man, but the nuns of St. Ann's had made a lasting impression on him. After he got shot in '88, the former altar boy developed a habit that intrigued his daughter-in-law. Maureen noticed that every morning when Joe walked the dog, or climbed into his car for the drive to the P.I. office, he would stop at a neighbor's house several doors down and stare up the driveway. One day Maureen just couldn't take it anymore, and when Joe and the dog returned to the house she met them at the bottom of the stairs. “What do you do up there?” she asked.

A sly Irish grin appeared on Joe's face. “Go look,” he said.

Maureen left the porch and walked up the street and looked into the neighbor's driveway. At the top of the pitch was a statue of the Virgin Mary encased in an upright bathtub and surrounded by little yellow flowers. Maureen turned and walked back to where her father-in-law had unleashed the dog and shooed him into the house.

“I sit and pray to Mary and give thanks that I'm still here, and for my grandchildren and Helen and all of you,” Joe said. “I'm not even supposed to be alive. Every day since the shooting has been a ‘gravy day.'”

Halfway through his father's funeral, Joey got up from the front pew, made the sign of the cross as he passed the tabernacle, and mounted the altar. Dressed in a kilt, high stockings, and his long-sleeved, blue Somerville P.D. uniform shirt, young Joe stood at the lectern and removed a piece of folded paper from his pocket. He read:

“This is a fitting tribute to my father, a packed church, considering that if today were any of your funerals and it was a beautiful day, he wouldn't have come or he would have been late because he would have been chasing the little white ball around. It's what he loved doing most.

“When Maureen and I renewed our wedding vows after ten years of marriage in this church with Father John, in front of my family and Maureen's family, there was one person who was not here that day. Can anyone guess who it was? He was playing at Charles River. He had told us a month before that he wouldn't be at the church because it was ‘the most important tournament of the year.' We thought he was kidding; we should have known better.”

The congregation laughed, their feet stirred, and then they settled down again. At the rostrum, Joey turned the wrinkled piece of paper over.

“I would like to read a poem by William Canton that I think describes my father best.

Here Joey began to falter, and Brian O'Donovan, sitting right in front of him among the pallbearers, mouthed, “You're doing good. Stay strong.” And Joey continued, his voice breaking over the church.

“I chose that poem because for many of us in this room, Joe McCain was our hero. I say our hero because although I was his only son, big Joe had many sons.”

At this, Stew Henry dropped his face into his hands, Mark Lemieux rubbed his eye sockets, and the sound of men weeping came from several places among the congregation.

“Those men young and old who came to him in time of trouble or confusion or indecision. His door was never closed. The question that was asked most often was ‘Joe, what should I do?' You always left with an answer, whether you liked it or not. In the end, it was usually right.

“My father was from the greatest generation to ever live. He understood what duty, honor, and courage meant. He was courageous, he had faith, he was, in the words of a close friend, ‘the most honest man I ever met.' He was proud and unbending when he knew he was right. He taught many of us do what was right regardless of the consequences. He taught us to live every day as if it were our last and to be thankful for each day.

“In closing:

“When you tee up a ball and hit it straight up the fairway, remember the old man.

“When you walk down a fairway in the bright sunshine or as he would in the pouring rain, remember Joe McCain.

“When you scratch your dog's ears while watching television, remember Joe McCain.

“When you tee up a ball and hit it two fairways over, remember Joe McCain.

“When you have a one-foot putt and hit it six inches short, remember what the old man would have said: ‘You gotta hit the ball, Mary.'

“When you sip a cold beer or a good Scotch with a close friend, think of ‘the big guy.'

“When you are afraid because you have to do something you know in your heart is right, think of Joe McCain, he'll give you the strength.

“When you think all is lost and there is no answer to your problem, look to the heavens and think of my father, he may give you an answer.

“Live every day to the fullest, remember the love he had for all his friends, remember his inspiration, remember his integrity, but most of all, remember the love he had for life, the joy he brought to all of us, his infectious laugh and his smile.”

Joey folded up his paper and left the altar to an encompassing silence. A short while later, Father John dismissed the congregation and then a friend of Joey's named Cheryl Arruda sang “Amazing Grace” from the choir loft and the pallbearers walked abreast of Joe's coffin as it rolled down the aisle. The doors to St. Clement's were thrust open on the first note of the second chorus and Arruda's sweet clear voice was joined by the piping of the Gaelic Column lined up on the sidewalk.

Content, as he always had been, to loiter on the sidelines, Joe's old partner Jack Crowley was surprised to see Mark Cronin standing in front of him when he and his wife, Ellen, rose from their pew. The taciturn old Met shook Crowley's hand and then struggled to compose himself, looking down at the tessellated floor of the church.

“The lion is dead,” said Cronin.

Helen and Maureen and the three grandchildren followed the coffin outside, blinking in the sunlight, and waited in one of Doherty's gleaming black limousines as the congregation poured out of the church; Maureen McCain had never seen so many cops in her life, their grim, honest faces made that much more poignant by a single member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, dressed in his colors, there to pay his respects.

Maureen watched the Seghezzis go by, then Leo Papile walked past the limo, clutching his brow. On an impulse Maureen got out of the car and embraced him. “How you doing, Leo?” she asked.

His forearms crossed over Maureen's upper back, the retired Met cop squeezed her tight. “I'm okay, kid,” he said.

They separated, and Maureen turned to open the limousine door. But Leo had not yet followed Al and Mary Seghezzi back to their car. He stood leaning against the elongated rear quarter of the limo, his hands jammed into his trouser pockets, staring at his shoe tops. While the other mourners streamed past on all sides, Maureen felt like she and Leo were alone in some remote location despite the throng that crowded Harvard Street.

Leo turned to profile, his face strained but his voice calm and quiet. “My friend is gone,” he said, and he leaned up and walked away.

With the hearse leading the procession, a line of cars a mile long began rolling toward the cemetery. They crossed beneath Route 93 along the tidal estuary in Medford, passed the Wellington T station and turned onto 16 East, alongside the Everett gasworks and the old Charleston Chew building hard by the railroad tracks.

When they reached Holy Cross Cemetery, the McCains disembarked from the limousine and watched as car after car drove through the gates. A wind had come up, and by the time the funeral director had arranged Joe's coffin on the canvas straps over the grave, and Father John stood opposite the headstone with his vestments flapping, a large group of mourners encircled the plot. Helen and Joey and Maureen and the children were off to one side, and Brian O'Donovan stood near them as three white-gloved state policemen fired a trio of synchronized volleys into the air.

Before the sharp, sudden noise had died away, Cheryl Arruda's brother Scott and a former Met cop and trumpeter named Jimmy Cullinane played “Taps” from one end of the cemetery to the other, the notes echoing back and forth in plaintive succession.

As the reality of Joe's death fixed itself in his heart, Brian O'Donovan felt his jaw convulsing, and then the tears came. It was uncomfortable for him to show such a depth of emotion, in part because his own father was just a few feet away and here he was crying over the death of a man that wasn't even a relation. But Jim O'Donovan walked over and wrapped his arms around his son and held him like he had when Brian was a child.

“It's all right,” he said.

Just as Father John reached the lines “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” an armada of clouds passed overhead and the wind increased, stiffening the flags and making them crackle all at once across the cemetery.

Right at that moment Leo Papile, who had been crying and trembling, yelled out “Joe!” and several good-sized men rushed forward and caught him before he fell. In the midst of his own grief, Brian O'Donovan remembered thinking how sad and beautiful it was that someone could love a man that much, and how Leo wouldn't be around for long now that Joe McCain was dead.