Killing Down the Roman Line

by McGregor, Tim

  By the same author

  BAD WOLF

  Copyright © 2012 Tim McGregor

  All rights reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imaginationor are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photograph by Maximilian Jänicke (rawimage)

  For Monique

  I'm gonna make me a big sharp axe

  Shining steel tempered in the fire

  I'll chop you down like an old dead tree

  Dirty old town

  Dirty old town

  —The Pogues

  When God chose the cast, he made them

  spear carriers.

  —Ken Bruen

  1898

  The Corrigans are killed.

  News of the town, hollered up fever pitch by a boy running down Galway Road this day, this cold February day, 1898. Shop owners stepped onto their verandas to see what all the bellowing was about, women scraped the frost from parlour windows to see the lad running through the snow. Some of them had sniffed the bad business during the night. The smell of smoke, rich and angry, drifting through the town to find them in their beds. A few had even seen the glow of it, hazing over the treeline but none had gone to find its source. Closing the drapes and pulling the blankets tighter, the sign of the cross drawn quickly over brow and shoulders and no more.

  The Corrigans are killed.

  The boy screaming the news was young Tommy Purtell, a neighbour of the killed family. Hollering and carrying on all the way down the frozen road called the Roman Line, six miles to the constable’s cottage on Christie Street. The boy banged on the door, rattling the slat wood in its frame but no one answered his call. It was Sunday morning and the peace officer, Constable James Carroll, was known to sleep late on the Sabbath, having spent most of the night keeping the peace of a Saturday night. It was tiring work. When the brawlers and the braggarts refused to settle down, a hard crack of the truncheon was required to restore order and swinging that mace would exhaust a man. So the boy went on, screaming his news to the frozen streets.

  The town was small, tucked away in a southwestern pocket of Ontario, Dominion of Canada. Pennyluck by name but Irish by blood. Waves of them, fleeing the great hunger and dumped ashore like broken sacks of dirt. Those bedraggled few too stubborn to die on the coffin ships and too exasperated to give in to the sickhouses. Wandering west from the ports of New Brunswick and Montreal, they settled here in this thicket of pine and weeping willows. This thorny Elysium that some fool had named Pennyluck.

  Within the hour, every house had disgorged its occupants and off they marched, trampling the snow down the queen’s road. Some in buggies, their horses steaming in the cold, a few turned out smartly in sleighs. Most of them on foot, a deranged pilgrimage crunching the ice-crusted ground up the Clapton Road to the Roman Line to see the awful truth with their own eyes.

  To make sure the hated Corrigans were well and truly dead.

  The house stood oddly untouched but the barn was razed. A great tepee of cindered beams and grey ash. The bones of the family visible in the latticework of blackened timber, smoke still boiling from the eye sockets of the charred skulls. The bones of a horse too, the massive barrelribs like a grim cage within the wreckage. Someone counted the remains and they tallied six bodies in all. A trail of blood, now quickfrozen, led from the barn to the house, where great pools of it lay in dark rinks at the back steps.

  The door had been left open, the morning sun slanting into the kitchen. John Ripley, the sole undertaker of Pennyluck, was the only one who ventured inside the house. He found nowhere inside the kitchen to avoid standing in the spilled blood, the floors thick with the stuff, gelled and partially frozen. More of it sprayed up against the walls, red handprints here and there. The killers had left an axe sunk into the floorboards. Something crunched under Mr. Ripley’s boot heels and he bent low to see, thinking it shelled corn. It was teeth. He quit the house immediately and no one else ventured inside.

  Pennyluckians of every age crowded the Corrigan farm, stamping their feet in the cold and traipsing back and forth through the ashes. They gazed in wonder at the blackened bones, some brazenly prodding them loose with the toes of their boots. Some shook their heads at the horror of it and others crossed themselves and turned away but no one wondered aloud who had done it, who had killed the family. The Corrigans were despised and their enemies were many. Milling over the remains, they spoke in whispers and each man jack flitted his gaze about to avoid meeting the eye of his neighbour.

  Thomas Keefe, eldest son of the blacksmith Keefe, found a pocketwatch in the cinders, its face fused to the glass piece. He dangled it on the chain for his friend to see then dropped it into the pocket of his waistcoat. It didn’t take long before they were all doing it, pocketing little trinkets and macabre souvenirs of buttons, horseshoes, pins. Talismans of the dead meant to bring on good luck or ward off the bad.

  When these artefacts were gone, Fergus Connelly sifted a finger bone from the ash, blew the soot away and slipped it into a pocket. Those around him watched him do it but said nothing, not even a tisk, and then they too were reaching down snatching up splinters of ribs and phalanges and knotty buckles of vertebrae. The grit of the carbonized bones left black smears on their hands. Orton Murdy took up a jawbone, a small thing, a child’s bone, until his wife shamed him into putting the godforsaken thing back.

  Constable James Carroll did not arrive until half past eleven that morning, head vapoured from drink. By then the remains of six skeletons had been picked over and scattered about like straw on a loft floor. Aside from the six skulls, Constable Carroll could not discern one set of remains from the next, kicked about as they were and lost even among the bones of the horse. A grim task, he scuttled them all into burlap sacks and laid them at the feet of the undertaker Ripley.

  Come nightfall, word of a survivor drifted through town like a bad smell. The Corrigan clan were seven in all, living there on the old homestead and only six remains were found. The younger Corrigan lad, Robert, was rumoured to have escaped the slaughter and was now hidden away by a family who feared the boy would be next. The people of Pennyluck took to peering under their beds and searching their barns, thinking the boy was hiding there but no one saw hide nor hair of the lad. Conjecture in the taverns concluded that the boy had been dragged off and killed somewhere else. His bones would be found for sure come spring when the snow melted.

  Three days later, Robert Corrigan marched into the police house to give his statement. He was accompanied by the Finn family, also of the Roman Line, who had hidden the boy since that awful night. Constable Carroll shuttered the windows and locked the door. Robert Corrigan was pale, his eyes dim and blasted raw from what he had witnessed. More than a dozen men, he said, had attacked the house and killed his family. Their faces were blackened with soot, their clothes dark. Robert told how his father had raced for his pistol but was too slow, shot down with a rifle and then run through with a pitchfork. His mother was bludgeoned with a shillelagh, her teeth knocked loose upon the kitchen floor. His older brothers were also shot and laid low with axes, his sister strangled with a rope.

  Despite their sootblack faces, Robert Corrigan named the assassins. He recognized their voices, saw through their flimsy disguise and heard them address one another by name. Hiding in the root cellar with hands clamped over his mouth as the blood sluiced through the floorboards and dribbled through his hair. He remained there until he heard the vigilantes stomp out of the house to the barn. When he saw the barn go up in flames, he bolted from the house. Barefoot through the snow withou
t ever looking back, the whole two miles to the Finn’s farmhouse further up the road.

  The constable scratched his pen across the paper and then leaned back in his chair. The boy was twelve years old but his eyes seemed dead, without fire or intelligence. Carroll commended the boy for his bravery, not only surviving such an awful business but coming forth to tell his tale. Robert made no reaction, gape-mouthed like he didn’t understand. Constable Carroll spoke slowly, advising the lad to remain here in custody for his own protection.

  Young Robert Corrigan nodded his head and said that he understood but he quickly made other plans. Left alone in the constable’s cottage, he slipped out the back door. Presumably to the Finns who had sheltered him since that awful night.

  News of the survivor leaked quickly through town, reaching the tavern first and the faces of men grew grim under the greasy lamplight. In the darker corner of the public house, three men rose and went out the back, leaving their ale on the table.

  However the Corrigan boy did not return to the Finn’s farm. He simply vanished and was never seen again. Later that night, the Finn’s barn was burned to the ground. Punishment for having sheltered the devil’s child in the first place.

  The Corrigans are killed.

  Thanks Be To Christ.

  1

  THE TURKEY VULTURES had been circling the southern acreage all morning, descending in lazy loops and drawing closer to the ground with each pass. Whatever they were eyeballing in the bunchgrass below was about to give up the ghost.

  Jim Hawkshaw hated turkey vultures, always had. They looked beautiful and almost noble from afar, high in the sky as they rode the thermals in slow arcs without ever flapping a wing, but up close they were monsters. Their bald heads looked boiled and reptilian and the damn things stank to high heaven of rotten flesh.

  And he had a bad feeling about what they were stalking.

  At last count Jim had four barn cats, all friendly but still part feral as barn cats will be. The wildest of the bunch was a slim calico he had nicknamed Killer for his skill in catching field mice. Killer was a scrapper who refused to back down no matter how big the other animal was. Jim had seen the damn cat tear hell after raccoons, possums and once, even a fox. He admired Killer’s spunk but knew that sooner or later the calico would cross an animal that wouldn’t back down and then there would be trouble. It finally happened two days ago. Early Sunday morning, Jim came out to the barn and spotted Killer slinking awkwardly out the door, limping badly and bleeding from its hind leg. He’d called to it, trying to coax it back inside the barn but there are few things as skittish as an injured cat. Killer looked back at him once before slipping into the briars and vanishing completely.

  When he spied the vultures circling his field early this morning, he knew the calico was out there and in very bad shape.

  He’d be damned if he let those red-headed monsters have his cat. Jim climbed up into the tractor, knowing the evil birds would clear off if he roared up in the noisy old Massey Ferguson but when he turned the ignition, the damned thing wouldn’t start. The Massey was old and the timing was off and the starter often shrieked loud enough to bleed your ears. He adjusted the choke and tried again. The engine rolled over but refused to catch.

  He looked up. The vultures swooped down, dropping fifty feet. Closing in for the kill. Or after-kill. Turkey vultures were scavengers, garbage-pickers that waited for things to die, never killing their own prey. All the more reason to hate them and get the goddamn tractor started.

  It finally caught and Jim dropped it into gear and roared off alongside the old fieldstone fence, hammering hard for the back forty. A plume of dirty diesel exhaust roiled behind the Massey and Jim wished he had brought the shotgun. A scattershot would drive the ugly birds away, maybe even bringing one or two down, but the shotgun was back at the house, locked in a cabinet in the basement. No time to go back for it now.

  He gunned the engine and jostled along in the hard seat. The vultures flapped to the ground. Three of the damned things, pouncing after whatever lay on the ground.

  The Massey sputtered and popped towards them and the vultures backed off. They hissed and spread their wings in a span of defiance. Jim popped the handbrake and jumped down, already smelling their stench from here. He scrounged up a good sized stone and flung it at the birds. They hopped about in the peculiar way of those birds and snapped out their wings but didn’t fly off.

  Killer lay in a row of freshly tilled earth, dead but still warm to the touch. His fur was matted and wet, the tongue lolling between the teeth and peppered with grit. At least the monsters hadn’t gotten to him yet. Small mercies. The scavengers withdrew, hissing and spanning their wings to scare him off. Bold as brass, waiting for him to leave so they could get at it. For a second time Jim wished he had brought the shotgun.

  He scooped up the dead cat, limbs flopping loose as a sock puppet in his hands and carried it to the tractor. The vultures hopped and screeched in protest, cheated out of their breakfast. There was a spade mounted onto the back of the Massey Ferguson and Jim pulled it down and crossed to the stone fence that demarcated the property line of the Hawkshaw farm. The stones had been cleared from these fields two hundred years ago and stacked up to form a low wall, like some defensive barricade against an army of dwarves. On the other side was more acreage, untouched for generations and left to seed. Nature had made small forays to reclaim these neglected fields, creeping up from the creek at the southern end but most of the untended acres remained clear, with stalks of timothy and barley that grew and died and grew again each season.

  Jim chose a spot next to the ancient fieldstone, a small pocket in the fence. He laid the cat in the weeds and started digging. Ten minutes in and his shirt clung with sweat as he dug the little grave under the hot sun. It was silly, going to this much trouble for an old barn cat but Jim didn’t care. His hatred for the foul birds was that strong.

  Truth was he felt an affinity for the poor cat, wounded as it was with those grotesque birds waiting for it to die. Vultures were circling over Jim’s head too, waiting for him to croak so they could swoop in and gobble it all up. Banks and creditors, all eyeballing the Hawkshaw farm, clacking their beaks in anticipation of an easy meal.

  He wasn’t going to last another season, of that he was sure. He would lose it all; the farm, the land, the house. Five generations of Hawkshaws had farmed this land down here on the Roman Line and he would be the fool to lose it. He’d be the one to betray the family, betray all those who had come before him and broken their backs on this hard clay soil.

  The debts had snowballed into a dead weight he couldn’t hold up anymore. Each season yielding worse returns than the last, no matter how many times he alternated crops. He stopped lying to himself about the “one good crop, the one good year” that would balance the books and set them on the climb out of debt. He’d maintained this lie to his wife and by proxy, his son but now there were simply no more lies to tell.

  Jim tossed the spade into the bunchgrass and looked down into the hole he had dug. Deep enough. He gathered up Killer and nestled him into the bottom of the hole. He smoothed his hand down the calico fur and then took up the spade and backfilled the little grave.

  The vultures screeched and flapped around him.

  To hell with them. To hell with himself too.

  “Go on,” he said, looking for another rock to throw. “Find something else to tear apart.”

  ~

  Smokey refused to cooperate.

  The bay mare stood on the flagstone floor of the barn, tethered between the stalls and refused to budge. Emma Hawkshaw wagged her finger at the horse. Smokey was a beautiful horse to ride but oddly temperamental. Spookily so, the way she would nip at Emma out of the blue, like payback for some slight she had suffered. Other times, like now, the horse simply refused to do anything. Just swing her head up and look at her and then turn away. It was almost a challenge.

  “Okay,” Emma said, blowing the bangs from her eyes. “Le
t’s try this again.”

  She leaned into the horse’s shoulder and tapped the foreleg until Smokey relented and lifted the leg. Emma scraped dirt away from the hoof but when the pick touched the frog, Smokey winced and swung her head down.

  “Okay, okay,” Emma cooed, leaning harder into the horse to keep Smokey from dropping her leg. She gently plucked away the straw and dirt to get a better look at the hoof. Thrush was common enough and the mare had it when Emma bought her three years ago. She had treated the hoof then but every spring it would flare up again. This season was no different. She let the bay drop her leg and smoothed her palm down its withers, talking softly into her ear until the horse settled. She’d have to mix up some more sugardine and treat it.

  There used to be two horses in the barn. Both quarter horses, bay Smokey and a young pinto that Emma had fawned over. Skittish and harder to control than the older bay, the pinto had been untrained and barely broken. Emma suspected the animal had been badly used. She spent hours with the pinto, just walking him around the paddock to gain its trust, easing him into a saddle. She had only sat him a dozen times, each time a struggle to keep the horse from bolting or bucking. It would take time and Emma was patient but reality had bitten down and knew she couldn’t keep him. Arguments with Jim over the expense and Emma crunching numbers but to no avail. She sold the pinto in the fall and still regretted it. There was simply no way to justify the expense to keep the little pinto. It was sold off, the money dumped into the black hole of debt and Emma had bought two goats on the cheap from Norman Meyerside down the road, companion animals for lonely Smokey. They were odd looking animals and Jim hated them but she didn’t care. Smokey seemed calmer with the nannering things around and that was all that mattered.