Home Town

by Tracy Kidder

  It is almost certain that no Catholic had ever preached in Northampton before. A Protestant minister was hired to deliver the customary sermon to the prisoners. But Cheverus insisted on his duty. On the morning of the hanging he mounted the pulpit in the Old Church and began to speak in what one witness remembered as “a stern voice.” Apparently, some windows had been removed, “so that a crowded house and a vast multitude outside could hear him.” A huge and, one assumes, mostly hostile audience surrounded the priest. The text of his sermon has been preserved. He said, in part:

  Orators are usually flattered by having a numerous audience, but I am ashamed of the one now before me. Are there men to whom the death of their fellow-beings is a spectacle of pleasure, an object of curiosity? But especially you women, what has induced you to come to this place? Is it to wipe away the cold damps of death? Is it to experience the painful emotions which this scene ought to inspire in every feeling heart? No, it is to behold the prisoners’ anguish, to look upon it with tearless, eager and longing eyes. I blush for you, your eyes are full of murder. You boast of sensibility, and you say it is the highest virtue in a woman: but if the sufferings of others afford you pleasure, and the death of a man is entertainment for your curiosity, then I can no longer believe in your virtue. You forget your sex, you are a dishonor and reproach to it.

  Some accounts say that most of the women on hand decided not to go to the hanging after all. One wealthy woman of the town, who did not attend the priest’s sermon or the execution, wrote in her diary that Cheverus was “a remarkable Mild Man.” He got some other good reviews and was actually invited to preach a few more times. A prominent citizen named Joseph Clark entertained Cheverus in his own home. But one history has it that when Clark’s wife died prematurely a few years later and lightning struck his house and burned it down, all of Northampton knew that God had punished him for putting up a papist.

  After church, the hanging. A rumor may have spread that Irishmen were coming to liberate the prisoners. In any case, the sheriff took precautions. “The high sheriff came over in the morning on his parade horse, with his aids, [sic] all armed with pistols hanging by their saddles, and presented a very imposing appearance,” wrote one of the men who’d been a boy back then. Probably the prisoners walked on the dirt roads in front of the sheriff and his men. A company of artillery and a detachment of the militia, all in uniform, followed, raising dust. The parade went uphill from the Old Church, up Main Street and out on what was then called Welch End Way, now West Street, and finally up to the top of Hospital Hill, then known as Gallows Plain or Gallows Hill. There must have been a military band, because one witness remembered there was music and that it was the Death March.

  Much of the crowd ran on ahead, vying for vantage points. The spectators covered all of Gallows Plain. “An immense multitude had already congregated on the Plain,” wrote one of the witnesses. Men and boys climbed trees to get a better view. “The pines on the west side of it were filled with spectators.… The writer has seldom seen such a mass of human beings together since that day, all the events of which he perfectly remembers. The infantry were drawn up around the gallows, the poor condemned culprits were allowed to say their last words.”

  Daley had written out a short speech. He read it aloud to the multitude.

  At this awful moment of appearing before the tribunal of the ALMIGHTY; and knowing that telling a falshood, would be eternal perdition to our poor souls,

  We solemnly declare, we are perfectly Inocent of the Crime for which we suffer, or any other Murder or Robbery; never saw, to our knowledge, Marcus Lyon in our lives; and as unaccountable as it may appear, the boy never saw one of us, looking at him, at, or near a fence; or any of us either leading, driving, or riding a Horse, and we never went off the high road. We blame no one, we forgive every one; we submit to our fate as being the will of the Almighty; and beg of him to be merciful to us, through the merits of his divine Son, our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ.

  Our sincere thanks to the Rev. John Chevers, for his long and kind attention to us, as likewise every other friend, that served us, and comforted us during our long Confinement.

  When Daley finished, according to one account, he handed the written speech to the high sheriff, who then leaned from his saddle and “with a heavy knife or hatchet” cut the rope that held the drop. “… And as the platform fell, one fell much below the other having been allowed more rope according to his request, that his neck might be broken so that he might have a speedy death. His body was dissected a short distance from the present residence of this writer.”

  The town seems to have quieted down by the following day. Probably it just cleaned up, as after a party, and went back to life as usual. But the story survived through many generations, and, as Irish immigrants acquired local standing, it grew and changed, from a story that two killers got what they deserved to a story that two young Irishmen were in essence murdered here.

  One hundred and seventy-six years after the event—in 1982—a crowd much smaller than the one that watched the two men die gathered around the monument on Hospital Hill. The little party included a retired fireman of Irish descent who was trying to get the governor to pardon Halligan and Daley. Bill O’Connor was there too, still county treasurer then. And also one Popcorn O’Donnell, who got his nickname as a youth when his date at the Calvin movie theater slipped away while he was fetching popcorn.

  For decades Bill O’Connor’s generation of Northampton Irish had dominated local politics. They had routed the Yankee Republicans, and were on the way out now themselves. Popcorn had been both an ally and an enemy of Bill’s. But the attempt to exonerate Halligan and Daley was one of the last great acts of the old tribe, and Popcorn belonged in the picture. He was fat, florid, and doddering now. Looking at him, Bill O’Connor thought, “Popcorn’s had a few.” Bill told him to get a grip on the stone and hold on tight. Then he turned to the local TV anchorperson. “Take the picture quick,” said Bill. “Because he won’t last long.”

  Bill had arranged the publicity so that Popcorn and the retired fireman would get the limelight, and so that certain others wouldn’t. Some of the new Democrats in town were Irish, among them Mike Ryan, who was the district attorney back then. Ryan had wanted to be part of the ceremony. He’d wanted to have his picture taken at it, Bill figured. Bill was afraid that Ryan and another Young Turk would try to hog the credit. So he told them that the TV cameras would arrive at noon. In fact, he’d arranged the ceremony for eleven. The picture-taking was all over when Ryan and the other young Irish politician came running up the hill from their cars. “Oh, Jesus, you’re late,” Bill told them, sorrowfully. He gestured at the TV crew, who were packing up their gear. “They came early.”

  Actually, Judge Ryan had a legitimate claim to a part in the ceremony. As a young man, he’d written a play about the trial, dramatizing its egregiousness. Moreover, up in the attic of his house, among his dead father’s papers, he had found correspondence and research notes on the case. According to one version of the old story, Halligan and Daley weren’t just tried unfairly but certainly were innocent. No actual evidence of that had ever surfaced. Ryan’s father, Judge Ryan the elder, had spent a lot of time and effort trying in vain to find some.

  Odd how an episode like that hanging can become a source of satisfaction. Distance is the crucial thing. It allows you to look back with horror, and to forget that if you had actually been there, you might have climbed a pine tree, too, to watch with eager eyes. At the right distance, injustice looks thrilling.

  So much of American history, and particularly New England history, gets absorbed in a storybook sense of colonial days and of the early years of the Republic that modern times can seem like little more than a falling off. The world seems to have been better then, in ecology, landscape, architecture, manners, moral staunchness. Travelers praised the Connecticut River Valley of the early 1800s for its bucolic calm and the levelness of its communities. In 1789, George Washington himsel
f described the region this way: “There is equality in the People of this State—Few or no oppulent Men and no poor—great similatude in their buildings.” And yet less than two decades after Washington rode through the valley, a court as prejudiced as any modern-day totalitarian tribunal summarily condemned two human beings, and a huge percentage of the people of the region flocked into town to watch them die. A comparable act of communal barbarism was never impossible, of course, but it did seem unimaginable just now in Northampton.

  These days Main Street saw only mild eruptions, times of demonstration and speeches. Once in a while the issues were local. Most of them would have seemed small in a big, angry city. Northampton afforded its residents many luxuries, and one was the chance to exercise their moral faculties in calm surroundings. Some events looked like sessions of moral jogging. Last August, for instance, seventy-five women and children had gathered in front of the old courthouse. A number of the women sat on the steps breast-feeding their babies. They were angry, and tenderly protesting the actions of a local court officer. He’d ejected a woman from a district courtroom because she was breast-feeding her baby there, but he was no enemy of breast-feeding. “They don’t know me,” the court officer said afterward, of the people who denounced him. “I’m not against that. My mother did that for me. No way I’m gonna be against that.”

  Judge Ryan quietly intervened. The officer thought he’d been carrying out the judges’ wishes. Ryan made sure that the man didn’t get punished, and no harm was done all around.

  Sometimes when Judge Ryan was supposed to preside in the local District Court he was called away at the last moment, and another judge would appear from chambers. If you were sitting among the defense attorneys then, you might hear a few groans, pitched low enough so that the replacement judge couldn’t hear them. One of the defense lawyers might mutter very softly, “This isn’t the judge we want.” And, conversely, if it was Judge Ryan who came out and mounted the bench, wearing his small, crooked smile, only partly concealed in his beard, you’d see the defense attorneys smiling, too. Especially some of the female ones, one of whom on one occasion kept up a running commentary on the judge’s performance—whispering words like “compassion” and phrases such as, “He’s so kind.”

  On the wall, to the right of the elevated bench where Judge Ryan usually sat, hung a photograph of his father, the former presiding District Court judge Luke Ryan—“Luke Hang ’Em High Ryan,” as he’d been admiringly called in law-enforcement circles. In the photo, the elderly judge looked unpleasantly surprised at what his son was up to. Perhaps, for all his expressions of filial piety, Judge Ryan liked to express the philosophical differences between himself and his dead father.

  Judge Ryan the younger was beloved by courthouse workers, and generally disliked by police. He’d made some intemperate remarks in the past. Speaking disapprovingly of the state police uniforms, he’d once told a reporter, “If you dress ’em like Nazis, they’ll behave like Nazis.” Mainly, though, the police objected to the judge’s leniency and his out-of-court behavior. “The drinking judge,” one waggish lawyer called him. Both slanders contained some truth.

  He stopped being a judge when he left court. If a stranger on a nearby bar stool asked him what he did for a living, Ryan would say, “Oh, I have a government job, cleaning up small messes at the courthouse.”

  As for his leniency, a friend once accused him of harboring great compassion for many defendants, and the judge replied, “I think it’s something stronger. I think it’s more like identification.”

  He didn’t like sending people to jail, because he didn’t like jails. He thought they disimproved most people. He often felt he could invent better punishments, like the one he once imposed on a troubled boy who had stolen scratch tickets from his employer, a stationer in Florence. The store owner confronted the boy in court, saying, “I treated you like a son!” He had bought the boy a New England Patriots cap before he’d discovered the crime. Now he held it out and said, “Take it!” The boy cowered at the sight of the cap. Seeing this, Judge Ryan felt inspired. He ordered the boy to pay restitution and to wear that New England Patriots hat whenever he went outdoors. The sentence was derided in several newspapers, including one as far away as Philadelphia. But it was a serious sentence. If you understood Ryan, you understood that he imagined the boy would think of his crime whenever he put on his cap. Ryan was trying to turn that homely object into an agent of remorse. He was trying to sentence the boy to penance.

  He had a theory that every group of people, every society that had occupied Northampton from the Puritans on down, created boundaries in law that invariably excluded about 10 percent of its members. Thus each society identified itself by identifying the enemies within. From an early age, he had been mindful of the excluded. He once wrote a poem about two of Northampton’s castoffs whom he’d seen as a boy from his childhood home. It was the 1950s. The siren at the state mental hospital across the Mill River had sounded; as usual, his parents had ordered him and his siblings indoors. Mike stood at a window, gazing out at his family’s backyard, and in a moment a woman in a hospital gown appeared. She began picking dandelions. From behind her, walking stealthily toward her, came a couple of men in chino pants, with keys dangling from their belts.

  He remembered as vividly gazing out a front window at another lone figure, the locally infamous Smith College professor Newton Arvin, harried and denounced for being a homosexual. Mike’s father had arraigned Arvin on that charge of possessing indecent pictures. The professor wasn’t violent or likely to flee. Many judges would have released him on his own recognizance. Old Luke had demanded that Arvin post bail. He had told Mike that the professor was dangerous. Gazing out the window, watching the professor walk by, Mike felt puzzled. The man was reading a book as he walked. He didn’t look dangerous to Mike.

  Judge Ryan the younger had a temper. It flared up occasionally in barrooms. In court, he sometimes shouted at lawyers who didn’t listen to his advice. He said he thought of his court as a classroom, and he wanted everyone to leave his classroom better. He believed in progress, and as a student of Northampton history, mindful of episodes like the hanging of Halligan and Daley, he believed that his town had made some. In the community center in Florence one evening, a group of residents had gathered to hear about plans for a statue of Sojourner Truth, the famous black abolitionist, who had lived in Florence for a while. The meeting began with high rhetoric; a member of the statue committee said: “A statue to someone ignored and neglected by history can mean everything, to your entire community, to American history.” One of the audience dared object to the whole idea, and then angry words flew. Hearing an account of the contretemps the next day, Judge Ryan grew thoughtful. “I think I’m one of the few Northampton natives who would be in favor of the statue,” he said. “A lot of people are upset about newcomers coming in and taking over, about national magazines calling Northampton the lesbian capital of the world. But I think there’s something wonderful about a community where a thing like a statue gets people excited. Not drive-by shootings or gangs, but whether a statue of Sojourner Truth should be put in a little park in Florence.”

  It would have been hard for anyone to disagree. What a far better place Northampton was, where babies were nursed as expressions of outrage, than the town that had made a holiday out of hanging two immigrants. A place can’t function or improve through compassion alone, but it can’t become a good place without it. Over the years many people had added to the sum of kindness in Northampton. Judge Ryan, a student of human frailty, was one.

  When she first entered Northampton, Laura sensed she’d landed in a historic place, and this had been another way in which she’d felt that the town reproached her. Downtown and the campus made her feel that she had lived with scarcely any history at all. The old buildings reminded her that no one could even find her mother’s parents when she died.

  On a winter night soon after she got her reprieve from Mrs. Rothman, Laura went walki
ng on the campus. The students were still gone for the holidays. The air was cold, the place as empty as the limbs of its exotic trees. Laura found herself standing in front of Seelye Hall, the site of the past fall’s worst disaster. Even while she’d sat inside one of its classrooms, silently flunking her course in Irish drama, Laura had liked the innards of this tall brick building—the way the stairs creaked and especially, as the weather grew colder, the irreverent knocking sounds the old steam radiators made, in the midst of her professor’s lectures. When the radiators had started knocking, like rude sounds of indigestion, she’d wanted to laugh, but hadn’t dared even to smile. How droll, she thought now, looking up at Seelye Hall, that a building should have its own, ancient sounds.