Bold Sons of Erin (18 page)

Released, the lad ran off like a hound at the horn.

“May I see the musket, Mr. Donnelly?”

He put on his little smile again, for he knew what I was about. Twas all a game, see, and he loved the sport of it. He handed me the weapon.

It had not been fired, of course. The bullet had come from another gun, fired by another hand. Twas all a show fit for the stage.

I played my role in it and sniffed the barrel. It smelled of ancient powder, not of any newly burned off, and I cocked the hammer back to find only rust in the mechanism.

“Ah, Major Jones,” Donnelly said to me, as if we were sharing a joke in an Irish saloon, “tis an age of miracles, is it not?”

“I’m certain his father will do the lad no great harm. When he comes off his shift,” I said, handing back the gun.

“Oh, nothing from which a fine, young lad won’t recover. He’ll get what he deserves. Now, I’ll be taking meself back to the work for which I draw me wages, by your gracious leave.”

“Just a moment,” I told him. “I
do
have a question for you, Mr. Donnelly.”

He turned with that ready smile of his. “Sure, and I thought you had fired up your whole, great volley of questions yesterday evening.”

“Did someone put Daniel Boland up to confessing to the murder of General Stone? The way someone put that boy up to claiming he fired the shot that broke Mr. Oliver’s window?”

I saw at once, from the satisfied shape of his smile, that I was wrong again.

“No,” he said. Just that. And then his smile dissolved into a hard-boy look I had not yet seen on him, an aspect fiercer than the worst of the night before. “But you’re after reminding me of a thing I wanted to tell to you meself. Tis only this: Danny Boland no more killed your general than Cromwell’s in Heaven with all the German Georges. Now, I’ve told you that nicely. And I’ve told you no man among us killed your general. If you wish to call me a liar, do it now and do it to my face.”

I thought he was done, for twas clear he was seething to a heat beyond all words. I expected him to turn and strut away. But he had a last message for me.

“And you’re wasting your time with that coward of a priest,” he said. “For he’s bound to be judged by a higher sort than you.”

PERHAPS YOU DO NOT KNOW the Irish well. But I will tell you: They do not speak ill of their priests. They may chafe under the yoke of the church, and feel it is unjust in its judgements and penalties, but they would no more slight a priest than spit at God. As we rode up the hill from Heckschersville, I pondered that. And time enough I had. For turnpike they may have called it, but the way was a mire and a swamp left by the rain. The mules struggled.

I found that only my left hand had cuts that asked minding, so I bound it in my handkerchief, an affectation upon which my dear wife insists. She seems to think the handkerchief the one and only test of true gentility. I keep one in my pocket, just to please her. That morning, I was glad to have it with me, for Mr. Downs, the teamster, attempted to supply me with his own rag, which had done veteran service.

Our going was slow. Twice I had to dismount to lighten the wagon for the mules. Twas a nasty muck to walk through, that I will tell you. Mr. Downs rattled on about Irish assassins and shots fired in broad daylight. He was not afraid, but delighted. He was the sort, I think, who rushes to see a man run over by a
runaway team or a locomotive. He had a mighty appetite for disaster, no less than all those journalist fellows do.

And yet, I would not call our journey unpleasant. I had a muchness to think about, but my weary mind went wandering. Late birds sang, instead of continuing their journeys of desertion to the Confederacy. When we left the vale of anthracite behind for a stretch, the sky was as pure and blue as the pools of Heaven must be. Except for the muddy roadway, the whole world seemed washed clean.

I recalled Mr. Donnelly’s voice as he spoke of the priest as a “coward,” and his insistence that young Boland had neither killed the general nor been put up to his confession. Mr. Oliver claimed the lad had been eager to confess. So where, then, was the sense in any of it? They knew by then I no longer believed their nonsense about cholera, but they would not offer the least hint things were otherwise. Twas clear as the day that Boland’s wife knew something worth the telling. She had not run off with the fairies, but what she knew worried the lot of them.

The priest took up a great deal of my thoughts, with his bloody shirts and lies. And then there was that girl dead in the coffin, butchered months before, then stolen away to be replaced by a cat. No one seemed to care a whit about her, and all of them denied the least knowledge of her existence. Except for Mary Boland, who had tasted the corruption of death on my fingers and said, “I know her now, the filthy slut.” Perhaps grief over her husband’s disappearance had driven Mrs. Boland into madness. But I believed she was telling the truth when she spoke. She, at least, knew the girl who had slept in the coffin. And I believed they all did. At least, all of the Irish.

They were as closed to me as the darkest secret cult of pagan India.

Deep in my thoughts, in the piercing blue of the day, I hardly noticed the fork in the road where the general had been murdered.

A horse shied under one of the soldiers riding ahead of us, and I realized where we were.

A sudden chill come over me. I feared that old hag would come spooking out of nowhere. But we met a different spirit entirely, if another dark one.

Black Jack Kehoe stepped out of the trees, with a hunting piece under his arm. He did not threaten or speak. He even tipped his cap as we rolled past. But his eyes were brazen and fixed upon mine own.

I understood his appearance as a message. But, for the life of me, I could not see what that message meant. Oh, yes, it announced that he had fired the shot that knocked out Mr. Oliver’s window. But why identify himself with such a crime? It did not seem the way the Irish did things. They were all silence and secrets, tricks and sneaking. Why would Kehoe wish to draw my attention? It seemed to me that my interest was the last thing he should desire.

I could not answer the riddle that day, for I had more facts than I could fit together. And facts joined wrongly make a greater lie. We did have a pleasant noontime meal in a drummer’s hotel in Minersville, where we interrupted our journey. The Dutchmen insisted on stopping, see. Though they are slow, they like their victuals regular. And truth be told, I had quite a hunger myself.

Mr. Downs did not join us for our luncheon. Given his habits, I counted that a blessing. He watered his mules, then rallied himself in a tavern along the street.

The hotel where we took our repast was run by a German woman, whom my Dutchmen seemed to know. Sometimes I think them more clannish than the Irish. But a proper
Frau
knows how to set a table, that I will tell you. Such folk are ever generous with their portions, though you will pay a fair price before you leave.

I enjoyed a helping of pea soup, thick with chunks of ham and served all steaming. I will admit I took a second bowl. With brown bread fresh from the oven, spread with fat. When the world goes awry, a good meal never hurts.

MY WIFE DID NOT EMBRACE ME UPON MY RETURN. NOT even when we were alone in the back room of her shop, amid the piles of cloth and half-made garments, with the smell of ammonia rising from the pot the seamstresses used through the day. Now, my Mary Myfanwy is not one to fuss in front of others, but I did expect a squeeze behind the closed door.

Instead she stood in a chin-up pout, as if I had said cruel things of her cooking. Which I never have done.

“Worried I was,” she told me, proud as a princess. “And you off with the Irish in your foolishness. When they have already killed themselves a high general.”

“Now, now,” I told my sulking beauty, “it was my duty, see. And nothing is come of it.”

She glanced down at her waist, although our expectations were hardly evident. And my darling’s eyes come back up hot and fierce.

“Duty? ‘Duty,’ he says! You listen to me, Abel Jones, and I will tell you what you shall hear. And do not make that face at me, for I am not a child who must be humored.” She put her hands on her hips, a sergeant dressing down a hapless guard. “ ‘Duty,’ is it? ‘
Du
ty?’ With one child born, and another to come, God bless us!” She turned to an invisible audience, posing and declaiming. You might have thought she had Irish blood herself, although she does not. “And with an orphan taken in, no less,
from the Lord knows where in the corners of Glasgow City!” She almost spit that last bit out, although her manners are those of a perfect lady. “ ‘
Duty
,’ the man says!”

“Mary, dearest, I—”

She plunged toward me as if wielding a bayonet. But a scolding finger was all the pride of her arsenal.

“You will listen to me, Abel Jones, and I will tell you where your duty lies. I will tell you what is—”

“Darling, the ladies in the shop, certain they are to—”

She made a great, popping
“pah”
sound with her mouth. The effect upon me was startling, for Mary is, by habit, most demure. She did lower her voice a tone, though. For even in anger, my wife respects propriety.

“Your duty is right here, Abel Jones! To your family! And I will not have any of your grand speeches.” Red in the face she was, although complected pale, as the best Welsh are. She folded her arms across her bosom and lifted her chin again. “I think the Irish are right, that is what I think. I think this war is a wicked bit of nonsense, and no good to anyone. Taking you away and—”

Then she wept, and adjourned her temper, and fit herself to my arms.

“Now, now,” I told her, petting her hair. Gathered back and shining it was, as black as a raven’s feather, though far lovelier. “I am a bad penny and will always turn up.”

“Oh, bad penny or good,” she sobbed, “I want you here with
me.
And now I have you. If only for a time. I understand it, I do.” Oh, how the lass wept. “I know that you will go away again. I know the hard ways of the world well enough. But I cannot bear you sleeping under a stranger’s roof when your own bed is near and waiting.”

She pulled away again, deciding between more tears or freshened anger. “Oh, why can’t they let us alone?” she demanded of the four walls, of the piled dresses and stacks of cut brown paper. “Why can’t they leave us to our lives and keep their war to themselves, if war they want?”

“Soon it will be over, soon enough,” I told her, although I admit that bordered on a lie. How is it, then, that we are quick to dissemble to those we love, but not to strangers? “And then we will be happy, you will see.”

She looked at me with a love-wrenched face that would have cracked a heart carved out of marble. “We
are
happy . . . when they leave us to ourselves.” She balled a tiny fist, and her eyes flamed green. “I hate them, I do. I
hate
them for the taking of you.”

“Mary . . .” I reached for her, but my darling eluded my grasp. “Now . . . you do not hate them. You know that. For hatred is not Christian, and—”

“Fiddlesticks!” she declared.

And then she wheeled her mood about as sharply as a crack regiment turns on parade. Her voice switched to her tone for daily things. “I made you a German pot pie for your supper yesterday. Now it will not be fresh. And that is what you deserve.”

“It is always better on the second night.”

“And you put an awful fright into your Fanny. The little thing believes you walk on water, with angels in attendance. But the lass has a mortal terror of the Irish.”

The Lord knows what the child saw or heard in the slums of Glasgow, where I found her. For Scotland though it was, the Irish were there in masses, living in daunting squalor. Or perhaps she had heard our local fears repeated. For the people of Pottsville like to give themselves a fright, with tales of Irish massacres and such.

“She is a good girl, Mary. You will see.”

My dearest picked at a bit of careless stitching that caught her eye. She pulled the threads right out, with a face gone sharp. One of the seamstresses was going to get a talking to, that much was clear. She will have no less than the finest work, my Mary.