“Thank you,” I said. The men slipped away, not even passing a look to the other. I went back to Tillie, who sat, politely, listening to Gertie speak. I wanted to find a hole to crawl down.
“Your sister was just telling me that you two returned to New Sligo around the same time,” Gertie said. “Isn’t that wonderfully ironic?”
“How so?”
“She’s confusing irony and coincidence,” Tillie said. “Because she’s a masterpiece of inbreeding.”
“No one likes a shrew,” Gertie said. “It’s unchristian.”
I smiled at Gertie and pointed to the stage, where Seamus looked like he was ready to begin.
“I’m not staying for the festivities,” Gertie said. “Fixed fights are dull.”
She kissed me on the cheek. I was simply grateful that she’d decided St. Nicholas’ wasn’t an appropriate place for a lick. “I’ll be going, but I’m sure we’ll see each other soon.”
I hid in my hands.
“I’m done for.”
“You have no idea,” Tillie said.
“What do you mean?”
Tillie put her finger over her lips. “Shush.”
Seamus stood at the podium, a strand of gray hair falling along his long forehead. He smoothed out his coat and cleared his throat, before hitting the gavel three times. Like an old Dickensian schoolmaster, he expected his wards’ silence, attention.
“Thank you,” Seamus said. “According to the bylaws of our constitution, we’ll commence now.”
Forest stepped to the podium, raising his hands in his best Jennings Bryan impression.
“Unite.”
Like a magician who’d hypnotized the crowd, half the audience stood and repeated Forest’s call. The Generals of France and England should have been so lucky.
Forest leaned back, coughing a coal miner’s hack, a deep sodden expulsion of wet soot, which made the genteel cover their ears. No miner took notice.
“There are few times”—Forest paused, then hit his chest. “There are few times in a man’s life when he sees the change. When he realizes a fork is ahead and the path he picks is his last. Fifteen years ago, my brothers, I saw that change. I had a friend. A brother. A man I loved like kin. His name was Henry O’Leary and he took me in and taught me that the world is a whole lot bigger than my own home, that the future was greater than my own needs. Big Hank believed we’d once been men, but had lost our way, our freedom sold away like Negroes, but one day we’d take it back. We would once again look upon our sons without shame.
“He believed those words. He died for those words. When I shoveled dirt upon his coffin, I saw that fork. Two paths were ahead of me. The first was the slave path, the Rahill path. I wanted that path. Thought hard on it. I had a wife who wanted a home without being scared of the Pinkerton man coming through the window. But the second path, Big Hank’s path, held greater riches than any I’d seen before. Those riches weren’t of gold or silver or emeralds or rubies. No, it was riches only a free man can enjoy. We only ask for what is ours and what is right. We ain’t out for greed, only justice. I ain’t no machine, no spinner, no plow and let me tell you, my brothers, I will not die that way and you shan’t either because tomorrow we stand as men and take back what is ours.”
Forest raised his hands and the soot-stained and the coughing, the crippled and the ill, the widowed and the orphaned, rose and cheered. Seamus took back the podium. “That’s enough of that.”
“It’s so dramatic,” Tillie said. “It’s just like his people.”
“Leave him alone,” I said.
It was Seamus’ turn. He put on his spectacles then unrolled his handwritten speech like a Caesar. The crowd turned to their hands and feet, as scared folks will, and they let Seamus’ words drift past them.
“We have gathered here today in the hall my father erected, in the great metropolis he founded two and one-half score ago to speak of the evils infecting our Christian society. The lies of communism. The ills of socialism. The violence of anarchy. You, ladies and gentlemen, are descendants of a great race and it is in you our legacy shall either live or die. My family hath bequeathed to you a noble world, an honorable legacy, but I fear that you shall destroy it from your fear of faith. I stand before you steadfast in my belief that our greatest battle lies before us. A battle so grave, so perilous that our entire nation is at stake. It is upon your shoulders that our nation lives and dies, on your adjudication. And that is why I so fear it. You have been shameful progeny. Our great land has been invaded by men intent on destroying the economic and political system we hold dear. I shall not stand for it and will give my last dying breath to protect it.”
I was bored and couldn’t stand another sentence and had no reason to be there since I’d already taken my picture.
“I’m leaving,” I whispered to Tillie.
“Enjoy your drink.”
When my uncle paused for a sip of water, I slunk through the shadows of the church and dashed out the back door and into the dim autumn light.
Outside, I found Alma Lind seemingly standing guard on the staircase, once again appearing like some sort of knife-scarred guardian angel. She looked out at the square with a calm, easy expression as if she were waiting on a familiar man. I put on my hat and stepped down beside her.
“Good evening, soprano?”
“What are you doing?” she said. “Shouldn’t you be inside? The speech is still going on.”
“It’s dull.”
“Yes, but he’s your uncle and you can’t expect family to entertain, otherwise who would we have to pit ourselves against? Everyone needs a nemesis. I think Montaigne said that.”
“What are you doing out here? I’d think you’d have—”
“You want to get a drink? I’ll buy.”
I thought about it, but there was always the chance some sort of melee might break out, and while it was too dark for Miss Constance to be of any use, my pen, at the very least, might be needed.
“So you’re staying right here?”
“Yep,” I said. “Got to be able to hear through the door.”
She searched my face for, I think, honesty. I figured this was her first strike and the first time is always the worst.
“You’re awful serious today. Don’t get so wound up. It’ll all be over soon enough.”
“I’m just old,” she said. “And it’s not getting any better.”
“Go get your drink. Tell lies to some stranger you’ll never see again.”
After she walked away, I listened to the intermittent howls of my uncle through the shut doors, while gazing at the near empty square. The dark wind blew west from the mountains and out on to the prairie. Across the street a Pinkerton wearing a porkpie hat waited beside the courthouse, and I figured there must be a dozen of them lurking around town. I lit a cigarette and took out a flask, figuring that this would all be over soon.
Seamus pounded his fist into the podium. “Have I not given you work? Have I not given you shelter? Have I not given you food?”
A flock of geese squawked overhead, passing from north to south, abandoning the coming cold, toward Denver, toward Santa Fe, toward Juarez. When I looked back at the courthouse, Pinkerton Porkpie was gone.
The wind shuffled my coat and I heard the miners’ sighs and my uncle’s howls. “There will be no toleration for disobedience. There will be no forgiveness for sedition. You are my children and I love you.”
A squirrel, fattened from the fall harvest, stopped at the bottom stairs and chewed an acorn. Its gnawing teeth uttered a screech that made me shiver. The wind blew dirt up from the flowerbed and I covered my eyes.
“From the bottom of my soul,” Seamus bellowed. “I tell you that I will destroy every last one of you in order to save the whole, in order to preserve the greater good.”
When the wind abated, I hea
rd heavy loafers slapping pavement. A man with long blonde hair and wearing a brown suit ran in front of me, his head turned away, toward the statue. While his suit was well tailored, his boots were ratty, like he’d walked from New York in them. I didn’t know the man, but the way he dashed, the manner he swung his arms, the way his boots landed seemed familiar. He disappeared behind the Mayor’s office.
I took another drink and saw the squirrel had vanished, abandoning his acorn to the street. I leaned over the banister, but he wasn’t beneath the stairs either.
“There will be consequences. Swift and severe.”
Something made the air feel rotten. I searched the square for people, but I didn’t see any, and it was then that I realized I was nervous, like those moments just before the sergeant blew the whistle. The wind returned and I lowered my hat, and saw, out of the side of my eye, Pinkerton Porkpie walking across the street, toward the statue.
“Like a gangrenous limb, I will amputate the sick to save the healthy.”
A gust sent Porkpie after his hat, which tumbled toward the pedestal. I stepped onto the sidewalk to watch the Chaplin reel play out. When his hat came to rest against the pedestal, Porkpie picked it up and paused, a strange look of surprise, then recognition passing over his face. He stepped back, then took out his gun.
I stopped in the street, Miss Constance by my side.
“Like the Lord did to Sodom and to Gomorrah, I shall do unto you.”
More footsteps.
“Duck, Cowboy. Duck.”
Like a magician’s dove, Gerard Rahill vanished. From his void a light materialized as bright as any I’d seen in Belgium, propelling into the square like an exploding star. My voice disappeared, my breath sucked from my lungs, my cry muted.
I shut my eyes thinking that this was how death arrived.
—11—
When the light bored through my eyelids, I rolled over, unable to hear the feet running past me, just a high drumming in my ears. A woman with short red hair crouched above, her mouth moving eerie and false like a mime. She laid her head against my chest. I hollered, but she couldn’t hear me. The light dissolved, again, and when it returned it seemed like every dog in New Sligo howled.
I screamed.
The woman pushed me to the ground and I felt another pair of hands holding my shoulders. The Pinkertons coming for me I figured, so I pushed the woman to the ground, but the other hands, the mystery hands, were too strong for me, so I abandoned the fight.
“Calm,” said the woman, who only then I recognized as Tillie. The mystery hands relaxed and I saw Jacob.
“Miss Constance,” I said. “Miss Constance.”
“Right here,” Jacob said. “She’s safe.”
I cradled the camera case, and then looked inside it and saw she hadn’t been damaged and everything would be fine.
“What happened?” Jacob’s voice cloudy like the pauses between stutters. “Who did this?”
Who? I rubbed my eyes. They felt dry and burned. I shook my head, thinking that if I shook long enough, the howls might go away. I felt sick because it smelled like Belgium, like nitroglycerin and burnt flesh.
One of the thick union men from Pennsylvania came over, holding a hat. “Here you go,” he said. “Found it over there.”
I took the hat, which was crimped and burnt at the top, and then returned it to the union man. “It’s not mine,” I said. “It was the Pinkerton’s. He died.”
“We know,” Jacob said.
A deputy went to Jacob, and then said, “That lady over there with the flowers says she saw Jesse Stephens.”
Jacob spit. “Course she did.”
Sometimes, when I walked out into the prairie, miles from cars and lights, and I stood still on those plains while the grass bent around me, I could hear the wind whispering my name over and over again like a lover haunting you from beyond the grave. In that dark square surrounded by a crowd of miners and managers all looking like they were ready to brawl, I heard that same whisper, but it wasn’t calling out to me.
Jesse Stephens. Jesse Stephens. Jesse Stephens.
“I didn’t see anybody,” I said. “Just the Pinkerton, but I don’t think he did it.”
“It’s alright.”
I looked past Tillie and Jacob, past the crowd of miners and saw the hole in the earth where there once had been an image of myself carved in stone. I still felt foggy, dizzy, like the light was intermittent, like my eyes were failing, but then I realized my uncle was standing above, his body eclipsing the sunset.
He took my hand. “He tried to kill you, Neal. He’ll pay.”
I now know that he was talking about my father, but in the square, my ears keening like a widow, I didn’t understand whom he was talking about.
Tillie touched my shoulder. “Lay down,” she said. “Trust me, Neal.”
—12—
I walked home.
The night smelled like coal fires. Snow began to fall and my feet felt cold and I realized I hadn’t done a wash in weeks and my suit smelled like dead Pinkerton and McGuffey’s. I thought maybe I’d buy a new suit tomorrow, some socks. As I thought on this, I came upon my house, stopping at the gate to examine the front window. The lights were on.
I went to the porch and picked up a large rock I’d used as a doorstop. I figured it was probably Gertie, but if it wasn’t, if it was another Pinkerton or a union goon upset with my articles, I didn’t like my chances: if I couldn’t land a punch against a fat man like Matheson, what were my odds against someone much younger and better armed? I leaned against the door. My burglar was playing my piano and playing it well. It was a familiar song, a slave tune, one where the master is overthrown and redemption is just around the corner. It was a song from before the war, one played by a schoolteacher. No, it wasn’t a schoolteacher. It was someone else.
When I swung open the door, I raised the rock, hesitating, because at the table sat the man with the brown suit I’d seen before the explosion, and it was, as you’ve already figured out, my father, the old anarchist, and next to his feet rested my own severed head. I dropped the rock on my boot.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
Off on the prairie, the Admiral’s Express rolled along her tracks, blaring her long horn into the night. Cups clattered in the cupboards. I sat on the floor.
“It’s been a long time, Cowboy,” my father said. On the wall, behind my father, hung a reproduction of The Trench Angel, the copy from Miss Ida’s gallery. “You didn’t really figure I’d never come back, did you?”
No, I hadn’t.
“You got anything to drink here? And not them damn soft drinks everyone’s been peddling.” The old anarchist looked up at my kitchen cabinets. “I know you haven’t gone dry like the rest of this fool state. I leave for a couple of years and look what happens.”
It felt like I’d been asleep for years, a western Rip Van Winkle. Jesse Stephens was in my home, and no amount of rationalization could undo that.
“Fifteen years,” I said. “You’ve been gone fifteen years, since Chester Arthur was president.”
“You got shit brains for chronology, Cowboy. You weren’t even alive during the Arthur years.”
“Who cares?”
“Well, a lot of people did. He was a bad man. Real bad, Cowboy,” he said. “Did awful things to the Negro and Chinaman. He had this sort of abominable depravity that only despots possess. Crimes that make a man ashamed of his country.”
My father’s hands rested on the piano keys. His long, blonde hair curled down his nape, and, beneath his coat, inside a shoulder holster, slept a silver revolver. His boots were covered in mud and he’d tracked filth all over my home. I pointed at the severed head resting against his boots.
“Oh, this.” He held up the head, and then stuck his tongue out like a child. “After the explosion, it just rolled over to
me. I got to tell you Cowboy, I screamed like a little girl thinking it was real, thinking it was you, but then I saw that it was old Gerard’s likeness, that reptilian industrial dog, and I thought, wouldn’t it be a damn shame to let such a priceless piece of memorabilia go to waste in the scrapheap of history.”
“You killed a Pinkerton.”
“Not my fault, Cowboy. I got him to chase me before I set it off, keep him out of the way because I’m no murderer, but he wasn’t no good as a man or detective. Got himself lost and ended up pointing his gun at the dynamite. Still can’t figure that one out. Not as if a bullet going to stop a bomb, but they never did give no reading test at Pinkerton school. Besides, why are you angry at me? I told you to duck, but you didn’t listen. You’ve never listened, not even as a child.”
I pulled Miss Constance’s bag to my chest. “You didn’t have to set it off in the first place. What do you think is going to happen now?”
“Probably get a shovel out there. Scrape dead Pinkerton off the street. You know, the usual works of a soulless bureaucracy.”
“No, you, you damned jackass.”
“Oh, you mean why did I blow it up in the first place? That’s easy. It was dishonest art, Cowboy. The worst kind. Can corrupt a man’s soul. Figured no art was better than art of the mendacious kind. Besides, why are you so worked up? Pinkertons aren’t real people. They’re minions for Satan, you know, if I believed in that hokum. I probably saved a dozen lives by ending that man’s. He was a despotic tool.”
The Trench Angel Page 9
