Galway Bay (62 page)
I smiled. He wasn’t carrying his mother’s heart. But this was Amerikay, after all.
T
HE CHRISTMAS OF
1861 came and went with no sign of Patrick Kelly—disappointing for us all. Though I was a bit relieved. No near occasion of sin.
Paddy and the Irish Brigade stayed in Chicago. Jamesy and Máire’s boys had not enlisted. No fighting. Both armies in winter quarters. For the first time in my life, I hoped for a late spring.
I’d started going into the office every day and was glad that the work I did for Colonel Mulligan demanded such concentration. Kept my thoughts from going astray. I looked after the mail, sorting through the sack of letters Mickey Gilleran, our messenger boy, brought from the post office and giving each man his letters. Colonel Mulligan received the most. At first he had dictated the replies to me, word by word, a slow process. Then one day he said, “You know what I mean. Finish it.” The results pleased him, and now I read his letters and drafted the answers for routine matters. Not that Colonel Mulligan wasn’t a powerful man for words, but his brain raced ahead of his pen, and I recopied even secret communications to the War Department in Washington. Soon Alderman Comiskey and Mr. Onahan were asking for my help, too. Very busy, I was. Good.
“We’re both of us women in the know,” Máire said to me on this late March morning as we rode the horsecar downtown together.
Máire had moved up through the ranks to become an official with the United States Sanitary Commission. “Hygiene,” she’d say. “It’s hygiene that will save lives. More soldiers die from filth than from wounds,” she told anyone who would listen. Máire never forgot that her own Johnny Og might have been saved.
Today, she was going on about Camp Douglas. The Union army compound now contained a stockade for Confederate prisoners that was a disgrace, she said. Built so quickly, without drains or sewers, the place had been bad enough for regular soldiers, but now almost ten thousand sick men in rags were crowded into a space meant for half that number.
It was General Grant, Mrs. Nugent’s cousin, who’d filled Camp Douglas when he captured two forts in Tennessee called Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. No thought of any kind of parole. Unconditional surrender were the only terms he offered. “The gloves are off now,” Colonel Mulligan had said. Surprising, too, because General Buckner, the Confederate general Grant had beaten, had been his best friend at West Point. “Simon Buckner sent Grant money for his fare home from California when Grant had to resign from the army because of drunkenness,” the colonel said. The three men in the office had shaken their heads. Buckner was married to a Chicago girl.
In Chicago, a friend was a friend. Certain rules applied. “Defeat the fellow, but don’t rub his nose in it,” Mr. Comiskey had said. “Might need him again one day.”
The Confederate prisoners had arrived near the end of February, at the same time Colonel Mulligan finally got orders from Washington. He could reassemble the Irish Brigade, except—I flinched, remembering the colonel’s reaction—the Brigade was assigned to guard Camp Douglas, with Colonel Mulligan as commandant, right on the Lake at 33rd and Cottage Grove. Freezing out there with the March wind blowing in from the water and not a tree or bush to stop it. Paddy says there’s no heat at all inside the barracks. Prisoners’ fingers and toes get frostbite and have to be amputated. Some don’t survive the operation. “Poor devils,” Paddy had said to me. He hates guarding that prison. What awful duty for the proud Irish Brigade. And no way to get the orders changed.
“It’s hell, pure and simple,” Paddy had said.
Every day, the colonel sends another letter to some general or politician or government official, demanding the Irish Brigade be sent to the field “as a legally constituted combat force.” Paddy says it plainer: “Let us fight and get the damn war over.” I was only glad that he ate supper at home and slept in his own bed. However awful the place, it wasn’t a battlefield.
Máire kept giving out about Camp Douglas, but we were almost downtown, so I interrupted her to say that the colonel was trying to make conditions better. But he’d been given little money to run the camp, and whenever he made any improvements or allowed the prisoners to have visitors, the
Chicago Tribune
attacked him as a Copperhead, the name for fellows soft on the South, secessionist sympathizers. Irishmen are Democrats, the paper said, untrustworthy. Didn’t the colonel realize the prisoners were only waiting for a chance to escape and set Chicago on fire? the newspaper said. They are the enemy. No treatment is too harsh.
“A lot of powerful people in the government agree with the
Tribune
,” I said.
“And doesn’t the
Tribune
remember that our boys are in southern prisons? Those camps are even worse,” Máire said. “We’ve complained, written letters, but if our side is as bad as theirs . . . Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, isn’t war the most demented activity ever invented?”
I came into the office and went over to a table in the corner I used as my desk. Here I was out of the fray. Men were often meeting with the colonel or Alderman Comiskey or Mr. Onahan, or all three, dozens every day. Some of them were contributors to the Brigade, others were suppliers bidding for contracts to supply the camp. Then there were all manner of fellows looking to have a word on one thing or another, who then stayed to discuss war strategy, the incompetence in Washington.
Such a conference was going on now. From the look of the two fellows speaking to Alderman Comiskey, I’d say it was Chicago politics they were discussing. Fellow aldermen. I wonder, will James McKenna ever see Bridgeport part of Chicago and himself on the city council? “Next year,” he’d said. “In 1863 we’ll be incorporated into Chicago.”
I started opening the mail. All week I’d been reading sad pleas for information from the families of prisoners. Many, many Irish. The letters would begin:
I address you as a fellow Irishman, knowing your devotion to Ireland which we share. I implore you . . .
Their sons had fought with the 10th Tennessee Infantry, the Rebel Sons of Erin at Fort Donelson or Fort Henry. No word since. Killed? Captured?
Please God, captured, and with you in Camp Douglas
. The names—John O’Neill, Patrick O’Donnell, Anthony O’Brien, Murphys, McCarthys—were the same ones listed on the roster of the Irish Brigade. These southern boys weren’t fighting in support of slavery or secession, the letters would try to explain, but
because we live here in the Confederate part of Tennessee. Such a fever for war, and my son’s no coward, but an Irishman ready to prove himself. And don’t the Fenians say we’ll all get together to liberate Ireland after the war?
If we’d stayed in New Orleans, Paddy could be in the Confederate army, fighting against the Irish Brigade. What I’d feared had happened. Irish boys, saved from the Great Starvation at such cost, were marching off to murder one another.
Then I opened a letter from today’s pile:
My very dear and Respected Commander and Founder of the illustrious Irish Brigade
, I read.
I understand Your Honor must be inundated with imprecations from fellow Irishmen anxious and anguished. We who have been swept up into this cataclysm . . .
Sounds like Owen Mulloy, I thought, following the big words across the page. Owen Mulloy? I turned the page over:
Yours with immense gratitude, Eugene Mulloy
.
Dear God. Could it be?
“Colonel Mulligan!” I shouted. “What is American for ��Owen’?”
“Eugene, I believe.”
Owen Mulloy! Our Knocnacuradh neighbors! Nearly fifteen years since they’d left. Not a word from them, and now . . . Owen wrote that his son James, seventeen, one of the 10th Tennessee Rebel Sons of Erin, had been reported missing, presumed dead after the February 8 battle. Over a month now, but his wife in her great faith hoped against hope: Could it be possible his boy was with the colonel?
James, of course, the baby, about two years old when they left. James, who’d only just survived—Katie’s milk had been thin. The food Máire’d brought revived her, saved him. James.
“Colonel!” I shouted at him, waving the letter, trying to explain. The men were startled. I rushed across the room.
The quiet Mrs. Kelly had lost the run of herself. I grabbed his arm, and the colonel was so shocked that he let me propel him out of the office, down to the street, and into his carriage.
We drove south on Cottage Grove, with me urging his horse to go faster. Please God, let James Mulloy be there, alive. No way to know. No real muster rolls. All the prisoners in Camp Douglas were enlisted men. No officers. The Confederate sergeants had charge of the units of men.
When we finally reached the place, I jumped from the carriage and ran to the gate. “Open up!” I shouted at the sentry.
Colonel Mulligan came up next to me. He took my arm. “Mrs. Kelly,” he said, “there are ten thousand desperate men inside this stockade, many of them sick with dysentery and fever. Three died yesterday. You can’t go in there and risk yourself.”
“Think of my sister’s son—your own soldier—dying from a wound that needn’t have killed him. My neighbor’s boy might be in there, sick and suffering. I have to try to save him. You’re the commander, Colonel Mulligan. Order that fellow to open the gate.”
He did.
Long rows of prisoners’ barracks filled the enclosure. The colonel said we couldn’t go into the barracks alone; one of the inmate trustees would have to take us; talking on and on, when Owen and Katie’s son might be shut up in one of those forty or fifty sheds.
“Paddy Kelly!” I shouted. “Paddy, it’s your mother calling you!”
A Bridgeport fellow named Willie Doherty heard me. He was standing on the wall above us. “Mrs. Kelly? What?”
“Bring my Paddy to me
now
.”
Paddy was not pleased to see me. He saluted Colonel Mulligan and said to me very sternly that I shouldn’t be here.
“I’m looking for James Mulloy, Owen and Katie’s son. Take me to the Tennessee Irish boys.”
“The Rebel Sons? They’re wild men,” he said.
But I kept moving toward the barracks. Then I saw, nailed on one door, a scrap of dirty cloth with a harp drawn on it. “Faugh-a-Ballagh” and “Rebel Sons of Erin” were written on this frayed banner.
A group of soldiers stood near the door, cooking something on a stick over a bonfire. Scarecrows, with long beards. One held out the stick to me. “A bit of rat, lady?” he said.
The others shushed him but wouldn’t let us through. “You can’t go in there, missus,” one said.
I pushed past them.
A coffin ship. In the dim light, I could just make out plank bunks built one on top of the other, four high, with three or four men on each slab. The stench, the sound of coughing, and a kind of groaning pushed against me.
“James Mulloy! James Owen Mulloy, call out to me!”
Fellows sat up in their bunks to stare at us.
“James, James Mulloy,” said Paddy.
“Here I am. Here!”
Alive. Thank God, alive. I ran down an aisle and over to the bunk.
He was struggling to stand, his bedmates helping him to swing his legs out, get his feet on the ground.
“James, alanna, James,” I said, and reached for him.
James Mulloy pulled back. “Don’t touch me, missus. I’m covered with lice.” He used the edge of the bunk to stand up.
He looks like Owen Mulloy. The same nose, those deep-set blue eyes. But, oh, he’s skin and bones. He smiled. Dear God, Katie’s smile.
“I’m Honora Kelly. Your neighbor from home.”
“Home? From Nashville?” he asked.
“Home,” I said. “Ireland.”
“Galway Bay?” asked James Mulloy.
“Yes, yes,” I said. “Your father is Owen, your mother’s Katie.”
“You do know me,” he said.
“I remember the Mulloys,” said Paddy, excited, “I do.”
Colonel Mulligan stood beside us now.
“Colonel Mulligan,” I said, “this boy’s sick.”
“The hospital is overcrowded,” he said.
“A death sentence, to be put in that place,” Paddy said.
“I volunteer to take him home and nurse him.”
“Mrs. Kelly . . .”
“Parole him, Colonel. To me.”
One of the Confederate soldiers took James Mulloy’s arm and bellowed at him, “You’re pledged to the Confederate States of America. You’ll stay here with your comrades.”
James bent over, coughing out a stream of blood.
“Fever!” I shouted. “This fellow’s got the fever!” I put my arm around James Mulloy and started walking. “Stand back! Get away! Fever! Fever!”
That cleared the way. The Confederate soldier let go of James Mulloy and I was able to get him down the aisle and out the door, Paddy walking behind me. The colonel argued with the Confederate soldiers as we made our escape.
James Mulloy and I left the stockade, crossed through the army camp and out to Cottage Grove where the colonel’s carriage waited. I helped James into the back.
“Mam—you can’t!” Paddy was behind me.
“Get up on the box, Paddy!”
“Mam!”
“Jesus Christ, Paddy! Some blacksmith you’d be if you couldn’t drive a team of two horses.”
“But it’s—”
“A
parole d’honneur
, Paddy. Move!”
Máire was home, thank God. “We’ll put him in Johnny Og’s bed,” she said. We undressed and washed him. No fever, but that racking cough and the blood that he brought up worried us.
“Get Patrick Kelly’s salve,” Máire said.
Patrick kept us supplied with Indian remedies. I watched Máire rub James Mulloy’s sunken chest with the same tenderness she would have given to Johnny Og. My big sister has a generous heart.
Máire found a willing assistant in Gracie, and as the days passed, James recovered. Food and sleep and hygiene worked their cure.
I posted James Mulloy’s letter to Owen and Katie as soon as he could write. What a joy to add my note.
A miracle.
But now the matter of the parole. Colonel Mulligan couldn’t flaunt the law quite so blatantly. What if the
Tribune
found out? I knew that the War Department allowed Confederate soldiers to enlist in the Union army if they paid a thousand-dollar bond.
