Bold Sons of Erin (6 page)

He looked at me again, as if he had just remembered my existence. “As an upstanding citizen of this county, you should want to be part of it. All that money your wife’s minting with her dressmaking business—I hear she’s taken on a third seamstress—at least put that much in the Reading. We can all grow rich together.” He stared at me intently. “If we’re not afraid to do what must be done.”

I nodded, but only to pass the time and not in true agreement. “I did not know you were associated with the Reading Railroad,” I told Mr. Gowen.

He smiled. “I will be.”

AS I LEFT MR. GOWEN’S OFFICE AND CROSSED CHURCH Alley, I spotted Mr. Heckscher once again, entering the Pennsylvania Hall Hotel with his foreign companion. Doubtless, they had their midday meal in mind, for bells across the town pealed twelve o’clock, and mine own thoughts had turned from death to sustenance.

I would have liked to take my meal at home, but there is sorry. The stove would be cold, with nothing in the pot. For my Mary Myfanwy was at her dressmaking establishment, hard at work as if she were a man.

Now, I believe a woman must have her freedoms—we are not the Musselman captors of our brides—and proud I was of my darling’s commercial success. It kept her busy while I served our Cause. But a wife belongs at home when her husband needs her.

I will not deceive you. The first tensions of our married life had arisen between us. Sometimes I think the world has gone topsy-turvy. Our modern age runs like a wild horse, and war whips the beast to a fury. The days grow disordered, men mock the good, and liberties are taken without asking. At times, I fear the deepest bonds will break.

A brazier-boy sold chestnuts on the corner where I would have turned my steps, had my wife been at home. I bought a portion of the fruits, wrapped in a paper cone. They warmed my hand against the bite of the day. With age, I have grown to
like the meat of the chestnut, pungent and bittersweet. It confounds the tongue pleasantly, and the texture reminds me of certain foods of India, where I left my youth behind and more besides.

I had a muchness to ponder as I walked amid the horse smells and the rush of delivery boys. And my thoughts were not only of the insubordination of our modern ladies. I wondered at Mr. Gowen’s ill-matched concerns. He sought to shield the Irish from outsiders, yet argued that all virtues lay with capital. Twas clear enough he wanted no part of digging up the grave with the murdered girl. But he would play his part, indeed, or I would go directly to Judge Parry, who was a man impatient of all nonsense.

I peeled a chestnut, laid it warm on my tongue, and wondered if young Mr. Gowen knew his own mind.

Nor could I forget that murdered girl, whose fate seemed to concern no one but me. The sudden recollection of her rottenness was near enough to put me off my chestnuts. She had not seemed a gypsy or a beggar, as Mr. Gowen suggested she might have been. Of course, I cannot claim a thorough inspection. But something was rotten in Heckschersville, if not in the state of Denmark.

Have you ever noticed Mr. Shakespeare’s affinity for graves? He ponders death, as all good Christians should. I sucked the sweetness from another chestnut. And I thought of the living woman, Mrs. Boland, who was so queer, then of Macbeth’s witches and Cleopatra. I do think Mr. Shakespeare had Welsh blood. He had an eye for the oddities in mankind that would elude the sharpest eye in England.

It had come as a great surprise to me when Mr. Lincoln told me I was to go home to Pottsville to look into the murder of a general. Of course, I was the obvious choice, since I knew the place and the people. But our president had been cryptic, which was unlike him. Even Mr. Nicolay, his private secretary and, I thought, an honest friend to me, had been a very miser with his facts. I was told only that Brigadier General Carl Stone
had been jaunting about the coal fields in an attempt to raise a regiment of volunteers. He had nothing to do with the draft or its enforcement. Yet, they found him dead south of Heckschersville, atop a hill along the Thomaston Turnpike. Stabbed in the chest, but otherwise unmarked. He last had been seen alive in Ryan’s Hotel, a ramshackle house in Heckschersville itself.

Deep I was in my ruminations and chestnuts, when a tableau of the streets asked my attention.

A woman in a ragged shawl dragged a boy through the mud, crying, “Get-tup, or Oi’ll take the belt to ye, oncet we’re ta home. Oh, ye’ll be gettin’ the belt but good, Oi’m tellin’ ye truly.”

The child was willful, strong and unafraid.

“Oh, sir,” the woman called to me, a perfect stranger, “did ye ever see the likes o’ this one here?”

Now, children are fond of me, for I do not worry them, and I paused to see if I might lend assistance.

“Obey your mother, and you will have a chestnut,” I bid the lad.

He wiped a blot of mud from his brow and said, “Shove your dirty chestnut up your ass, Shorty.” But change his behavior he did. Of a sudden, he clutched his mother and begged, “You won’t go off with that one, will you, Ma?”

I thought it best to make my way along.

MR. LINCOLN AND MR. NICOLAY HAD made it clear they wanted no reports sent over the telegraph. Nor was I to discuss the least thing I found with anyone else, but only with one of those two. It seemed a fuss to me. Generals had been promoted in plenty—Washington fair stank with them, from the saloon bars to the lowest harlot’s alley—but there was a special matter to do with this fellow. They told me less than I would have told a bootblack.

I admit I was affronted by their secrecy, though self-regard is always out of place. I do believe that was the sin of vanity in me,
about which Mr. Wesley warned us, as surely as do the Testaments, Old and New. Yet, I had served my masters well and loyally. And now I was not trusted with full knowledge of a matter I was expected to explain.

I had set aside another business I was pursuing for Mr. Lincoln, an affair of folly, if not of treachery, at Harper’s Ferry earlier in the autumn. I took me up to Pottsville on the railways, only to find my old friend Hughes the Trains overseeing the loading of the general’s coffin—sealed with leads—onto a freight wagon in the yards. The box was to go to Washington, without the least delay, and a trio of armed soldiers would travel with it. Next, I had learned from the provost that the murderer had been found out, a miner named Daniel Boland, only to die of cholera the very same day. The authorities seemed relieved and disinclined to question the coincidence. But that was all too neat for Abel Jones. And so it was I went to digging up corpses. And found a girl who should have been a man.

Troubling none, I was on my way to Market Street, where my darling keeps her shop. If I could not eat her cooking at home, I might at least feast my eyes upon my beloved. For she is fair as Heaven on a Sunday. Strolling and tipping my hat I went, amid the noontide hubbub, wishing I had bought a double portion of chestnuts.

Footsteps rushed up behind me.

A hand dropped onto my shoulder.

A voice roared into my ear.

“Jones,
Jones!
Major Jones! I saw you going in and coming out! I saw you! Had to catch you, had to come out after you! Gowen can’t be trusted in the least! Don’t trust that man!”

A very storm of spittle and breath swept over me, nor was the breath as sweet as one might wish. Twas Mr. Bannon, the editor of our newspaper and commissioner of the draft, a man in the prime of life and well respected. The Republican Party looked to him for sagacity and the anthracite industry looked to his paper for figures, and he and his brothers owned at least half the town.

Mr. Bannon’s hands were smudged with ink, as was his cheek, and his shoulders jumped as he spoke. He had abandoned his office without his hat and his gray hair streamed down to his mighty beard. A drop of wet hung from his nose, and I was not certain its predecessors had not found rest in his whiskers.

“Waste of talent, waste of talent!” Mr. Bannon warned me. “Can’t believe he went over to the Irish. Can’t be trusted, in little things or big. Traitor to his class. I thought that you should know, you—”

I backed me up most delicately. I did not wish to offend his august personage, for even Mr. Lincoln paid him heed on political matters, while Governor Curtin viewed him as an equal. But a conversation should not resemble a rainstorm. And I fear his breath recalled the dead girl’s smell.

“—can’t believe a single thing he says. Democrat, you know. Traitor to his kind. You can’t believe a single thing Gowen says.”

Suddenly, he changed his tack and his tone. “What
did
he say, Jones? What did Gowen tell you? Anything for the pages of the
Miners’ Journal
? What did he say to you?”

“He said that I should buy railroad shares,” I told him. For newspapermen must be answered with a caution, no matter their political allegiances.

“But . . . but you’ve been buying railroad shares for the past year! Everyone knows that, everyone knows! Evans at the Miners’ Bank told me that you . . . I mean to say, why would Gowen tell
you
to buy railroad shares?”

“He told me to buy
more
railroad shares,” I responded. And I would need to speak to Evans the Bags at the bank, who was no relation to my Mary’s uncle, Mr. Evan Evans, and who should not have been telling the town my secrets.

“But what did he say about General Stone’s murder? What did he say?”

“We barely spoke of it.”

His eyes narrowed at that, and his shoulders jumped again, as if they were unhappy in his coat. “I know why you’re here,”
he informed me. “I know everything, know it all. I know you’ve been sent here straight from Washington. And I know why.”

He leaned in closer and shared his breath, while his latest nasal effusion found a pillow in his beard. Now, Mr. Bannon was a great, high fellow, with a house of some magnificence on a hill across the valley and brothers with houses still finer, including Cloud House, a wonder of our age. I did not wish to give the man offense. As a stout adherent of Methodism, I would not even slight a beggar’s feelings, for that matter. But Mr. Bannon’s breath stank like an open latrine on a summer day when the commissary has run out of quicklime. I do not mean that unkindly, you understand.

“So . . . what can you tell me about the general’s murder?” he asked. “What about it?”

Now, that is how these journalist folk are, see. First, they tell you they know all there is to know, then they beg for scraps of information. And though I think our free press is a glory, a journalist is a spy without a cause.

“He is certainly dead,” I answered. “I believe that has been confirmed.”

“But do you believe that nonsense about the Irishman, Brogan or whatever his name was? Don’t tell me you believe that Irishman murdered Stone, then dropped over dead with the cholera, just like that! Do you believe Brogan killed him and keeled over dead?”

“Cholera is a terrible disease,” I said.

“But do you believe
any
of it, Major Jones? Do you believe a single thing we’re hearing? Can we hope for any justice, now that the Democrats have taken over the county?” He stepped closer, to allow me to communicate any intimate confidence I intended. The gusts from his lungs recalled the dead piled high at the Siege of Delhi. After they had been sitting a number of days. “What do
you
believe, honest man to honest man?”

“I believe everything that has been proven, Mr. Bannon. The rest will be proved or disproved in good time.”

He drew out a pad and a stub of pencil that had been chewed upon like a schoolboy’s. His shoulders leapt and glistening beads of wet fell on the paper.

“So . . .”

“Look you, Mr. Bannon. I must go along, if you will excuse me. For things there are to do, and things aplenty.”

“But . . . but . . . I want to
help
you, to send out a clarion call for information . . . mobilize our readers . . . report the things they see . . . Irish terror . . . Mollie Maguires . . . White Boys . . . readers writing to me all the time, Jones . . . terrified, utterly terrified . . . the things they see, things they see . . . all over the county . . .”

I wonder if he saw me flinch at his mention of “White Boys.” I had encountered such words in cold New York, where a matter ended badly. But I had not yet heard of “Mollie Maguires,” although I would hear much in times to come.