Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  The big man laughed and said no more.

  “Well, that’s taken the song from my lips,” Feeny said. “Let us then keep hope before us instead. Make no prediction of your own doom, Joseph. Walk bold and tall into whatever soldier’s hell is ahead for us, and come out alive on the other end. Perhaps both of us will come out together.”

  “Aye, perhaps. But I cannot presume upon providence when my conviction is so strong. So I ask you to bear this letter on your body through the fight ahead. I have another copy of the same inside my own jacket, in case you should be taken away in battle along with me. Sometimes those letters are found and sent on to the families after the dead are carried from the field.”

  “All this woeful talk falls far shy of prudence, Joseph Kerrigan. My sainted old grandmother told me that the things we speak go to God’s ear, and He sometimes causes them to come to pass. So talk of life, not death.”

  “Very well. If God is kind to both of us, we will rejoice. But if I should die and you live, then I ask you to go, as first opportunity allows, to Nashville and present it to my beloved and tell her my spirit will watch over her all her days. I don’t trust the army to get the letter to her. You, I do trust.”

  Feeny was ready to argue further with Kerrigan. He did not, though, instead merely laying his hand briefly on the other’s shoulder. “I give you my promise, good Joe. I expect never to be called on to fulfill it, but if fate brings ill to you and I survive, I pledge to you that your wife will receive from my own hand what you’ve given me. I vow it on the grave of my sainted mother.”

  Kerrigan turned to his companion, shifting his rifle sling as he did so.

  “Your mother is alive and well, Mike.”

  “And so she is, hale and hearty and as fond of the gin as ever. But her grave, or the place it will be, exists somewhere, empty for now, and it is that grave on which I vowed.”

  “You are an odd old crow, Mike. An odd crow, or the devil take me.”

  “I am odd, and know it. But also trustworthy. You can count on me to carry that letter to Nashville if it falls to me to do it.”

  “I know it will not be easy, my friend. The federals took Nashville in February. Travel in these times is no Sunday stroll.”

  “Aye. Even so, Joe. Even so.”

  Joseph Kerrigan nodded and blinked fast, hard-fought emotion struggling inside him. He managed to choke it back and respond with a simple: “Thank you, Mike.”

  “Think nothing of it. There will be nothing for me to do, because we will live through this fight, you and I. Let me hear you say it, Joseph.”

  “We will . . . will live through this fight. Both of us.”

  “Aye indeed, and come out the other end heroes, with a gold medal on our chests.”

  “That’s how it will be, Michael, lay to that.” But there was no conviction in Kerrigan’s voice.

  All Joseph Kerrigan would experience of the famed Battle of Shiloh, which commenced early the next morning, was a series of events that entered his consciousness in a troubling jumble, running together, bleeding one into the other in a welter of confusion it would require much time to untangle.

  No such time would be given him.

  In the brief period he had left to know anything at all, Joe Kerrigan would be immediately conscious of only a few things, beginning with the feeling of his own heart pounding as if trying to exit his chest when the call came from the orderly sergeant to check armaments and prepare to advance.

  Kerrigan would be aware, in a distant, numbed way, of standing and advancing into a rising crackle and blast of rifle fire and artillery beyond the cannon-blasted forest ahead of him. The foe had awakened and was beginning to resist the advancing Bonnie Blue Flag.

  Mike Feeny was still at Kerrigan’s side, and said, “Joe, I’m going to make another vow to you. One day you and I will return to this very bit of woods and enjoy a picnic here with our wives and children. These are pretty woods, except for what is happening here. It would be an ideal place for children to play, don’t you think?”

  “It would, Mike, of a truth. But I will make no plans until I know if what the banshee fated for me is truth or deception.”

  “Live, my friend. Live. Let death take others, but us live.”

  They advanced, drawing closer to gunfire unseen but loudly heard ahead of them.

  Even now Kerrigan could see nothing he could make sense of, though the sound of the fight heightened and the screams of dying men grew louder.

  Then he heard a puzzling rustling and rattling in the trees, a repeated tick-tick-tick sound, followed by a shower of leaves and small twigs.

  The ticking, like the sound of rain dripping from eaves after a summer thunderstorm, came from soft lead Minie balls striking trees, the clattering and crackling and downfall of greenery from bullets clipping branches and twigs, denuding trees already struggling to fight off the barrenness of the winter past and clothe themselves for spring.

  A man walking to Kerrigan’s left grunted and fell, blood streaming down the front of his leg, pouring from a fresh wound. A big grizzled Englishman, he collapsed, groaning, and made only one effort to rise. A second Minie ball caught him in the chest and sent him flat to the ground, a red rose blossoming in the middle of his butternut shirt.

  “Holy Mother Mary bless us and save us!” Feeny said, horrified, as he watched the corporal fall.

  Kerrigan glanced at Feeny as two other men near them dropped, one wounded in the shoulder, the other shot through the chest and dead.

  “This is hot work, Michael,” he said. “But such a fire cannot last for long.”

  But the hail of gunfire sheeting toward the advancing Confederate line increased.

  The thumping of lead hitting trees and men was now so steady as to drown out the sound of twigs and branches being clipped, though they drifted to the ground in an unceasing shower.

  A command from somewhere just behind the line then ordered the soldiers to take shelter from the fire.

  “They’re killing us, boys!” the officer yelled. “Down on your bellies.”

  Kerrigan recognized the fine Irish voice of Captain O’Neil, but it was hoarse and broken by shouting, inhuman stress and fear.

  He, Feeny, and several others around them took cover behind the white, skeletal trunk of a fallen oak and there breathed the gasps of terrified men.

  But at least they could still breathe, and for that Kerrigan voiced a silent prayer of thanks.

  He turned on his back and reloaded his rifle; surprised the hand working powder, ball and ramrod was steady.

  “This ain’t really safe,” said a deeply southern voice on the far side of Feeny. “This here log humps up on the bottom side so there’s a space between it and the ground, see? Get down low enough and you can look right under. A bullet hits that gap and it’s going to sail right through and—”

  The man said no more.

  His words about the protective deficiency of the warped log had been prophetic. He took a bullet through the face, its destructive course angling down from his forehead through sinuses and throat, lodging finally somewhere in his chest.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Feeny wailed. “Will you look at poor Anderson all shot through and through?”

  He fingered a black rosary, blessed by a cardinal, and sounded like a man about to burst into tears.

  “You were right, Joe . . . we will die here,” he said.

  Kerrigan’s earlier morbid convictions about death had been all but forgotten after the first shots were fired.

  He was scared, no question, but above and beyond that he was angry, filled with a biting fury at the very idea that men he did not know, and against whom he had done no violence, were trying to kill him.

  A vision of his beautiful wife, Kate, rose in his mind and he vowed to her image that, dire premonitions be damned, he would fight to live, and return to her side.

  Feeny, battling terror, proved that he had sand. And besides, as he was well aware, did not his name mean
“brave soldier” in the ancient Gaelic?

  He moved upward a little, leveled his rifle across the top of the log, and took aim in the general direction of the federals.

  The action inspired Kerrigan to do the same, though neither of them had a precise target sighted.

  Kerrigan defied fate and lifted his head above the protective height the log provided, readying to fire.

  Then, in a single instant of time . . . there was nothing.

  In darkness and without pain, Kerrigan collapsed partially on top of Feeny, the Minie ball that had shattered his skull lodged deep inside his brain.

  He had not heard the blast of his own rifle or known whether he had even managed to fire it.

  Nor did he feel himself die.

  There had been no time to feel or know anything.

  Joseph Kerrigan had merely stepped through a doorway into eternity.

  “Joseph? Can you hear me?” Feeny said.

  He knew there would be no answer.

  More alone in the midst of a roaring battlefield than he had ever felt in his most solitary moments, Feeny was used up. Every man has a limit, and he’d reached his.

  His panic became mindless and he pushed Kerrigan’s mutilated corpse away from him.

  Against all the dictates of logic and common sense, Feeny turned to run as if he could outpace the flying bullets chasing him.

  He could not, of course.

  Feeny felt something like a sledgehammer crash into the small of his back, and he pitched forward, momentum slamming his face hard into the bloodstained earth. He groaned, tried to stand, and felt a searing pain in his right leg. Looking down, he saw a nightmare of blood and shattered bone before he collapsed onto the ground.

  Then all went quiet and still and he neither saw nor heard.

  For Michael Feeny, late of County Mayo, Ireland, the Battle of Shiloh, just aborning into history, was over.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Kate Kerrigan rose from her chair and returned her husband’s letter to her writing desk.

  It had been brought, no, the word was smuggled, to her by Michael Feeny, who arrived in Nashville more dead than alive from a wound received at Shiloh.

  She’d been poor then, and all the poorer for her husband’s death, but Kate had a family to care for and playing the weeping widow and living off the charity of others had never entered her thinking.

  Still, it had been a long, long time since she’d filled a bucket with water, soap, and a scrubbing brush.

  The blood of the dead robber and would-be rapist still stained her bedroom rug and she could not abide the thought of it remaining there.

  She was at the foot of the grand staircase, bucket in hand, when someone slammed the brass doorknocker hard . . . once, twice, three times.

  Kate’s revolver was in the parlor and she retrieved it, then returned to the door as a man’s hand—for surely a woman would not have knocked so loudly?—hammered the knocker again.

  “Who is it?” Kate said, her voice steady. The triple click of her Colt was loud in the quiet. “I warn you I put my faith in forty-fives.”

  A moment’s pause, then, “Miz Kerrigan, it’s me, Ma’am, Hiram Street, as ever was.”

  Kate recognized the voice of one of her top hands and unlocked the door.

  “Come inside, Hiram,” she said.

  Street was a short, stocky man with sandy hair and bright hazel eyes.

  He was a good, steady hand with a weakness for whiskey and whores, but Kate did not hold that against him.

  “I was on my way back from town and met Sheriff Martin on the trail and he told me what happened,” Street said. “I rode here as fast as I could to see if you needed help.”

  Kate pretended to be annoyed.

  “Running my horses again, Hiram?”

  “Well, I figgered this was an emergency, Miz Kerrigan, begging your pardon.”

  The cowboy wore a mackinaw and a wool muffler over his hat, tied in a huge knot under his chin.

  He looked frozen stiff.

  “Were you drinking at the Happy Reb again?” Kate said.

  “I can tell you no lie, Ma’am. I sure was, but I only had but two dollars and that don’t go far at Dan Pardee’s prices.”

  “Come in and I’ll get you a drink, Hiram. You look as cold as a bar owner’s heart.”

  “Dan Pardee’s anyway,” Street said as he stepped inside.

  He looked around at the marble, gold and red velvet of Ciarogan’s vast receiving hall and said, “I ain’t never been in the big house before, Ma’am. Takes a man’s breath away.”

  Kate smiled.

  “It wasn’t always like this, Hiram, back in the day.”

  “You mean when you fit Comanches, Miz Kerrigan. I heard that.”

  Kate nodded.

  “Comanches, Apaches, rustlers, claim jumpers, gunmen of all kinds and ambitions, even Mexican bandits raiding across the Rio Grande. Yes, I fought them all and killing one never troubled my sleep at night.”

  “Maybe that’s why I’m a mite uneasy about that there iron you got in your hand, Ma’am,” Street said.

  “Oh, sorry, Hiram.” Kate smiled and let the revolver hang by her side. “Please come into the parlor.”

  Street, with that solemn politeness punchers have around respectable women, and with many a Beggin’ your pardon, Ma’am asked if he could remove his hat and coat.

  “And should I take off my spurs, Miz Kerrigan?” he said. “I don’t want to scratch your furniture, like.”

  “My sons don’t take them off, so I don’t see why you should,” Kate said.

  “Ciarogan is sure quiet tonight, Ma’am,” Street said, accepting a chair and then a bourbon. “That’s why that no-good saddle tramp came here.”

  “As you know, my sons are out on the range and Misses Ivy and Shannon are helping Lucy Cobb give birth. I also gave the servants the night off.”

  “Got fences down everywhere, but Mr. Trace told me to stay to home on account you’d be here alone,” Street said. “I’m real sorry I left, Miz Kerrigan.”

  “How were you to know what would happen this evening, Hiram? Though I’ll make no fuss about your lapse this time, don’t do it again.”

  “Never, Ma’am, I swear it.”

  “Then we’ll let the matter drop. I’ll tell Trace that I sent you into town on an errand.”

  “I appreciate that, Ma’am. He has a temper, has Mr. Trace.”

  “Ah, he takes after me,” Kate said.

  Street hurriedly took a sip of his whiskey and said nothing.

  Then, “Miz Kerrigan, I haven’t been riding for Ciarogan long, but I’d like to hear about how it all started.” Street smiled. “You got the only four pillar plantation house in Texas, I reckon.”

  “I doubt that,” Kate said. “But I started with a small cabin and a thousand acres of scrub,” Kate said.

  Street spoke into the silence that followed.

  “Ma’am, I’d like to hear the story of how you got here.”

  “Really, Hiram? Do you want to hear my story or do you like being close to the Old Crow bottle and warm fire?”

  Street’s smile was bright and genuine.

  “Truth to tell, both,” he said. “But I’m a man who loves a good story. I figger to get educated some day and become one of them dime novel authors.”

  “A very laudable ambition, Hiram,” Kate said.

  She thought for a few moments, then said, “Very well, I won’t sleep tonight after what happened and the servants won’t be back until late, so I’ll tell you the story of Ciarogan and what went before.”

  Kate smiled. “But you have to sing for your supper, Hiram.”

  “Ma’ am?”

  “There’s a bucket of water and scrubbing brush at the foot of the stairs and I have a rug in my bedroom that needs cleaning.”

  Street had the puncher’s deep-seated dread of work he couldn’t do off the back of a horse, but Miz Kerrigan was not a woman to be denied.

  “Fol
low me,” she said.

  Street grabbed the soapy, slopping bucket and followed Kate up the staircase, his face grim, like a man climbing the steps to the gallows.

  Wide-eyed, the cowboy stared at the bloodstained rug.

  “Him?” he said.

  “Him.”

  “Gut shot, Ma’am?”

  “I didn’t take time to see where my bullet hit.”

  “But look at the rug, Miz Kerrigan.”

  “I see it, Hiram. That’s why you’re here.”

  “But Ma’am, it looks like Miles Martin and his deputies tramped blood everywhere. The tracks of big policeman feet are all over the rug.”

  “Then you have your work cut out for you, Hiram. Have you not?”

  Street made a long-suffering face, like a repentant sinner.

  “This is because I rode off and left you alone, Miz Kerrigan. Ain’t it?”

  Kate smiled.

  “Why Hiram, whatever gave you that idea?”

  After an hour, many buckets of water, and a good deal of muttered cursing, Hiram Street threw the last bucketful of pink-tinted water outside and returned to the parlor.

  “All done, Miz Kerrigan,” he said.

  Kate put aside the volume of Mr. Dickens she’d been reading and rose to her feet.

  “I’ll take a look,” she said.

  Kate cast a critical eye over the wet rug and said, “There, Hiram, in the corner. You missed a spot.”

  “Sorry Ma’am,” Street said.

  He got down on his knees and industrially scrubbed the offending stain with the heel of his hand. The spot was only the size of a dime, but Kate’s eagle eyes missed nothing.

  “Very well, Hiram,” she said. “Now, we’ll let the rug dry. I’ll use one of the guestrooms for a few days.”

  Once the chastened cowboy was again sitting by the fire, a glass of whiskey in hand, Kate smiled at him.

  “Do you still wish to hear the story of Kate Kerrigan, her life and times?”

  Street settled his shoulders into the leather and nodded.

  “I sure do, Ma’am.”

  “I’ll tell you of my early days, when just staying alive was a struggle. To relate all that’s passed in the last forty years would be too long in the telling.”