Maryellen, cocooned, had ridden her makeshift bed to a crashing halt against the wall. It had all happened so fast, she hadn’t time to scream.
In the eerie silence of the aftermath – its edges trimmed by the car’s ominous creaks and groans – they gathered their wits. The lantern, having slipped the constraints of its sconce, swung like a pendulum, extruding grotesque shadows from the scene and splashing them on the walls in staccato tableaus. “Regan? Are you all right?” Maryellen whispered.
Carefully, to the accompaniment of tinkling glass, Regan extracted himself from the window. “I think so.” His hand went to his head and came away covered with something warm and sticky. “I cut myself.”
“Is it bad?”
Regan pulled himself as upright as possible, given the car’s unnatural angle, affording Maryellen a better look.
“Oh good Lord!” she cried in response to her own question, her hand reflexively covering her mouth.
“That bad?” he asked, smiling weakly.
“Well, it’s . . . it’s . . . I’m sure it’s worse than it looks.” She corrected herself immediately. “I mean . . . doesn’t look as bad as . . . ”
“I know what you mean,” he said. “I hope.”
She tore the antimacassar from the back of her chair and, approaching him gingerly, began to dab at his forehead. She sighed with relief. “A lot of little cuts,” she said. “I don’t think any of them is too deep.”
He was glad to hear it. And, though startled by the amount of blood on the white fabric, he was enjoying the gentle coolness of her hand on his brow and the look of concern in her eyes. Pretty eyes. Green? Brown? It was hard to tell in the fluctuations of the light. Her cheeks were flushed.
“Will I pull through, doc?”
She smiled. Nice smile. “Speaking as a school teacher, I’m sure of it.”
All at once a grating metallic squeal separated itself from the fabric of background noises, and the chimney, unable to retain the weight of the tilting stove any longer, split apart at one of the joints. Ash, soot, and a black cloud of smoke poured into the compartment. The stove – like a mad genie set free – fell off its pedestal, rolled across the floor, and careened into the wall where its door burst open. Fire, adorned by a scintillating shower of coals, spilled into the corner.
A sudden gush of wind tore at the jumbled nest of papers Regan had let fall to the floor, and several pages of Thomas’s journal blew out the window.
Boston, Massachusetts
Monday, October 18th, 1879
Thomas had no difficulty finding the man who had handed him the railroad bill. Even had he not been standing on a soap box in the middle of the Haymarket haranguing passersby – most of them, like Thomas, recent arrivals shuffling vainly from place to place in search of somewhere to go and something to set their hands to – he possessed, or was possessed by, the most alarming walrus moustache ever to overtake the face of man. There was, in that hirsute appendage, both a terror and a comicality that Thomas couldn’t reconcile. The man’s spittle saturated it as he preached his message. It wafted out on the air of his words like a curtain in a stiff breeze and returned to him on the inhale.
“The paper ye have in y’er hands is covered with words!” he cried, shaking one of the handouts in emphasis. “But what sort of messengers are these poor scratchings to convey the wonders the Good Lord has flung about the west with an open hand? Does one describe diamonds with dust?” He had taken a fistful of ashes from his vest pocket and now sprinkled them on the wind. “Plenty with want?” This remark he punctuated, to the amazement of all, with a magic trick, opening his once-empty hands to reveal a loaf of bread. This he passed over with a kerchief, and in a shaved instant, it was gone. The crowd ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’. Some drooled. “Or the majesty of an untamed acre with a hogs-bristle brush? Fie!” He placed his hand theatrically upon his breast and lowered his head. “Ach, me tongue fails me.” He raised his head suddenly as if inflicted with a sudden, uncontainable inspiration, and spoke, the tails of his mustache standing nearly horizontal in the blast of his passion. “I have seen Colorado with these eyes! I have seen Kansas! I have seen New Mexico! A thousand images stuff my brain and inhabit me heart, but I can get none of ‘em to me tongue, f’r it’s too poor and leaky to hold ‘em.”
He lowered his voice to a whisper. “It’s all true,” he said, running his forefinger across the paper as reverently as if it were Scripture. “If I could, I’d take ye all by the hand, like me own dear children, an’ lead you to the Boston & Albany departin’ at 7:00 in the mornin’ from platform 6 of the Summer Street station over yonder. I say like me own dear children I’d lift ye aboard as sure as St. Peter helps a repentant sinner through the Pearly Gates and wrap you in prayers and wishes f’r a safe journey to the Promised Land.” He dropped his head and his hands. “But I can’t.” Some sympathetic soul among his hearers asked him why. “Why? Why, you say? Why? she asks, bless ‘er heart. Because, dear lady, I haven’t the fare f’r so many children!”
“Why not?” said a skeptic at the back of the crowd. “If you’ve been there, was you too proud to bend over a bit an’ fill y’er pockets with all that gold that lies about?”
Some others in the crowd made a tittering chorus of laughter that grew louder for a space – but not so loud as to break the spell, for they all wanted desperately to believe – until the man with the moustache held up his hand. Eventually the crowd quieted, waiting for his reply.
“A good question, neighbor. An’ one I’d’ve asked meself in y’er place,” said the man. “The truth is, I’m a pilgrim. Aye, a pilgrim. The treasures of this world ‘old no fascination f’r me, f’r I make me own by guidin’ others to ‘em. It’s that simple.” In response to a sudden flood of skepticism, he punched the air with the flat of his hand. “‘Which of you, if ‘is son asked f’r bread, would give ‘im a stone? Or f’r a piece of meat, would give ‘im a snake?’”
However irrelevant to the issue at hand, this paraphrase of Scripture seemed to pacify the little throng. “I’ve come back with bread and meat!” With a single, sweeping gesture he produced a loaf of bread in one hand and a joint of lamb in the other. The crowd erupted with applause. “Those ‘oo cannot ‘ear the Word cannot enter the Promised Land. But fer those ‘oo can!” He tossed the bread and meat into the crowd, many of whom fell upon it hungrily. “Be on platform 6, with all you own, by 6:00 in the morning. Sharp.”
Delivered of his message, he leapt down and strode through the crowd parting before him, seeming somehow to dissolve from view before he reached its farthest edges.
Sadie tugged Thomas aside. “Did you see wot ‘e done? Wi’ that bread? Poof! It was there, an’ poof it were gone! E’s magic.”
Thomas, like his namesake, doubted. But it was a still-voiced little doubt that was being sat upon by a heavy load of wonder. After all, he’d seen it with his own eyes, and from no more than ten feet away. Somehow, in his mind, that magic spilled over into the mental image of the wild west the mustachioed man had conjured, suggesting a future in which nothing was impossible. A tingle tripped up his spine.
That night Thomas converted his ten-pound note to the local currency and, laboriously scratching a note on the back of the Cowboys, Indians, Outlaws handout, enclosed it with all but ten dollars to ‘Eliner Saltinstal fer care of Katy.’ In the dead of night, he dropped the crumpled little packet through the brass letterbox in the front door of the Saltinstahl house.
The following morning, after a night spent rough under the tree in front of the house on Beacon Hill (where, for some reason, the constable had let them lie), Thomas and Sadie gathered their meager goods into bundles, which they slung over their shoulders. Sadie, reading his mind in the intensity with which he watched the house – starting at the scullery maid, milk man, and boot boy – put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s best this way, Tom. She’s got ‘erself a place in America.”
“But she ain’t got family.”
Sadie loo
ked at the big, fine house, surrounded by other big, fine houses with their green lawns of soft grass, canopied by great multi-colored elms, oaks, and maples. She’d noticed how, in these privileged precincts, tradesmen swaddled the hooves of their horses in rags so as not to make too much noise upon the cobblestones. How battalions of servants, black and white, went silently about their tasks with clockwork precision, unseen by those they served. And, ruling over it all, in her imagination, was Eleanor Saltonstall, whose image was burned into her brain, the vision against which, subconsciously, all other women would be compared for the rest of her life. “She’ll know wot clean knickers is.”
The comment held a world of meaning for Sadie. Thomas merely looked at her askance. “Anyway, we know where she is, like you say.” His voice was soft and sad and distant. He was leaving more than a five-year-old girl behind. Bound up in that inconsequential female package were the living remains of everything he knew and loved. The last tangible connection to home and country and flesh and blood.
“Mus’ be gettin’ on,” said Sadie, interrupting his reverie. “We don’t want to miss that ‘ere train, ‘ey?”
The louvered shutters were still closed over the windows of the Saltonstall’s house and would stay that way until the servants opened them at nine when the family awoke. But that didn’t keep him from staring holes in the crown glass roundels. Sadie started down the hill, her little bundle bouncing against her back in keeping with the rhythm of her footsteps. Knowing he would never look back once his feet were committed to the road that led away, Thomas was doubly reluctant to go. What if Katy happened to wake, to walk to the window and open it? She mustn’t see him, of course, but shielded by the trees as he was, he might catch a glimpse of her.
“Comin’?” Sadie called, spinning briefly toward him and walking backward on her bare feet.
“I’ll be back one day, Pinch,” Thomas swore to the crisp autumn air. “I promise.” The words sounded hollow. Since leaving Ireland, he’d been leaving a trail of promises he’d be hard pressed to put ‘paid’ to even in the best of circumstances. If he survived the winter, it would be a miracle.
He turned away and followed. Sadie turned around and led, singing softly to herself.
They arrived on the platform just after six by the Summer Street station clock, and already the line of hopefuls twisted back on itself three times in the confines of the granite piers. The man with the mustache was nowhere in evidence. At the head of the line at a sturdy oaken table sat a large man under a bowler hat, with a burly man standing on either side, like gargoyles to a plaster saint. This imposing individual interviewed one supplicant or family group at a time, and as his voice could be clearly heard above the sheep-like silence of the line, was requiring whatever valuables they might possess – be it script, coin, or candelabra – for safe-keeping. Presently a male head of household, at his wife’s urging, insisted on maintaining possession of their little hoard. They were at once shoved out of the line by the gargoyles. The man at the table raised his head and his voice. “Listen to me, you people! This ‘ere we’re doin’ is fer y’er own protection. There’s thieves amongst the best folk, an’ there are thieves amongst you right now – men and women oo’d as soon slit y’er throat fer a candlestick as whistle up a tree. We knows, see? We been doin’ this years now. So as to proteck your prop’ty, we take an’ put it in this rear boxcar ‘ere, which is locked with iron padlocks an’ guarded all the way t’ New York City by Herm and Bill ‘ere.” In turn, the gargoyles stepped forward, screwed a painful grimace that was meant to be a smile on their lips, waved, and stepped back.
The family that had been evicted from the line – mother, father, and five children, from a nursing whelp to a buxom girl of some sixteen summers – attempted by begging for forgiveness to be reinstated, but were sharply forbidden. “Out wi’ ye!” growled one of the gargoyles. “We don’t take folk what hain’t trustin’!”
The doomed family shuffled toward oblivion – fated, no doubt, to wander the cruel streets of Boston forever. Surrounded by plenty, forever in want.
“Stay here,” said Thomas, fingering a two-dollar piece in his pocket. “Hold our place.”
“Where you goin’?”
“I’ll be right back.”
Weaving his way through the clearing beyond the lines, he glimpsed the dejected family just as they rounded a corner. By the time he caught up to them, they had come to a stop in a little alley and formed a tiny circle. He thought they were about to pray, so he stopped his pursuit and concealed himself to give them their privacy.
The father removed his hat and dug around in it for a second or two. This struck Thomas as curious, but not surprising. Perhaps they were Protestants. Who knew what those people got up to with their godless innovations?
At once the little congregation, their arms upraised, began to jump up and down and clamor for whatever it was the man had removed from his hat. “‘ere, you thievin’ lot!” said the man, striking two of the smaller ones with a single blow, which deterred them not at all. “You’ll get what’s comin’. ‘ere, Maisy. ‘at’s yours.”
Maisy, the mother, took two coins and tucked them in her prodigious bosom where, thought Thomas, they might be beyond retrieval. Then she turned and left. “Be ‘ere Thursday, same time!” said the man. “You’re late again. I’ll ‘ave me another wife afore you can butter a crumpet!”
“You’ll never find another’ll ‘ave you, Puss,” the woman called over her shoulder. She swung her bustle suggestively. The man laughed.
“‘ere, now!” he snapped at the remaining brood. “In descendin’ order, like a’ways. You don’t learn, do ye, you ign’rant . . . ”
The adjective went begging or was lost amid the shrieks of the children as they took their pieces of silver and scampered off about their business, leaving the man alone to count the remaining coins back into his hat. As he placed it on his head, he caught sight of Thomas, watching. “What’re you lookin’ at?”
Thomas wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking at, but whatever it was, it was dishonest. Without a word, he put his pack on the ground and carefully withdrew his uncle’s gun. The effect was immediate and electric. The cockiness on the man’s face dissolved like sugar in hot water and kept dissolving until his jaw hung open, taking up all the excess skin on his face and pulling his eyes wide. “Now here! Look! This ain’t . . . you put that . . . What’re you gonna do? You want me money?” The man doffed his hat, scrounged out the coins, and rattled them in Thomas’s direction. “‘ere!” he said. “Take ‘em. They’re yourn!” he threw them to the pavement.
“I don’t want your money,” said Thomas. A strange, tantalizing thrill of power surged through him for the first time in his life. “I want to know what you’re up to.” He shook the gun barrel in the direction of the man’s recently departed family. “What’s all this about?”
The man laughed nervously. “Just a bit’ve theater, you might say. A little harmless play-actin’ is all.”
The resounding click when Thomas pulled back the hammer on the gun echoed from the stone and brick walls of the surrounding buildings.
“It’s what we always does!” said the man, the words squeezing each other in his throat so they broke into falsetto in their rush to get out. “Me an’ them . . . ”
“Your family?”
“They hain’t really fambly,” the man stammered. He was shaking visibly now. “They’s paid to play it like. We get at the ‘ead of the line every Tuesday an’ Thursday an’ says what we’re tol’ to say, an’ get kicked out.”
It didn’t make sense to Thomas. “Why?”
“Why?” said the man. He was going to add ‘are you daft?’ but the gun in Thomas’s hand suggested discretion. “‘cause if the rest see us gettin’ kicked off the line fer fussin’, they ain’t gonna fuss when their time comes, are they? It’s just to keep everyone quiet, like, so the line moves along nice an’ orderly wi’out Mr. Feathers havin’ to hexplain to every bleedin’ one
’ve ‘em is all. See?”
“Feathers?”
“Islip Feathers. ‘im wi’ the bowler ‘at.”
Thomas squeezed the trigger just enough to release the hammer, which he eased back into place. The man sighed and swiped his cloth hat at the sweat that had broken out on his forehead.
“You’d better go,” said Thomas.
“Aye. Aye.” Bending and scraping, the man made his way across the cobbles like a wounded crab, picking up his coins as he went and stuffing them in his hat. “I’m gone. See? Like a politician’s promise. You’ll never see me agin’.”
“You see I don’t.” There was a perverse logic to the man’s explanation. Still, Thomas couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.
Chapter Eleven
“Wot you been on about, then?”
As Thomas returned, Sadie made room for him in line.
“Somethin’s funny.”
Sadie studied his face. “Then why ain’t you laughin’?”
“I mean somethin’s wrong,” said Thomas.
By this time they were at the front of the line, and the large man to the right, whom Feathers referred to as “Frankie,” gestured them forward. Thomas put the paper he’d been given by the man with the moustache on the table. Feathers pushed it aside.
“Name?” said Feathers, poising his pen over another significant-looking document, fixed with seals and embossments.
“Thomas Conlan.”
“Two ll’s?”
As far as Thomas knew it had always been spelled with one l. But, figuring two might be more impressive – and wasn’t this America, after all, where everything was bigger? – he simply said “Yes.”
“Age?”
“17.”
Feathers poked his pen in Sadie’s direction. “Sister?”
Thomas nodded, which made it seem like less of a lie.
“What’s your name, missy?”
Silence the Dead Page 12
