Although I did not understand it precisely. Not yet.
Lord, I was a fool, though. I should have seen it clearly. Otherwise, they would not have let the digging proceed.
The top of the box come off with a creak and a crack.
All I found inside was a strangled cat.
The lot of them, the wicked heathen lot of them, exploded into mirth, as if Christmas had come early. Oh, they laughed. And snickered. And called me names, not least “the King of the Pussies,” as well as things that I dare not repeat. Someone even lurched up with a squeezebox, and the sorry lot of them began to jig.
They swarmed in over the wall, onto the holy ground. Dancing on the graves, they were. One bow-legged paddy, with a face as round as the moon, took up the cat and swung it over his head. He kicked up his legs and howled and grinned, with teeth as black as fresh-dug anthracite.
A brazen girl come skipping past me, dancing by herself, with her hands on her hips and an insolent grin on her face. Of a sudden, she hiked up her skirts to her knees, then dropped them again. “And that’s as close as ever ye’ll get to it,” she told me. Other girls, less bold, laughed at me, too.
They laughed and laughed.
Their revelry did not last. The priest come down the slope and put a stop to it. He strode in among them, his cassock a magical armor, calling, “Stop it, stop it this minute. Stop it, all of you.”
His voice was not all fineness now, but fired by earnest anger. He saw that things had gone too far, and knew their mockeries only spread their guilt.
Now, I know where to look, even when a battle has grown desperate. It is a gift. And I looked for that young, black-bearded man who ruled them with a grimace. But he had sneaked off, leaving the mob to the priest.
“Go home! All of you go home. Now!” Father Wilde commanded them. He raised one hand, in a gesture of anathema. And the Irish obeyed, for his tone was of the pulpit. “Get along with you. Go on . . .”
Go they did, slumped things, as we imagine lepers in the Bible. A few of the men paused defiantly, but their wives tugged them along. And the children seemed shrunken and crushed by their disappointment, for they had expected more violence and revelry, although I doubted a single one could say why.
The only remaining laughter come from the deputies and drunkards in my service, and from the superintendent, Mr. Oliver. All laughing at me they were.
Well, let them laugh, I thought. For I had been the butt of jokes before, and still come right in the end. I would see this through, and there would be more than strangled cats at the end of it.
Oh, I was sore. There is the truth of it.
I started in to barking, like the sergeant I had been in my India days, and got them in the wagon and onto their horses. Ready enough they were to go, and Oliver hurried off. But I was scorched with rue.
I could not leave until I had a last, bitter look at the coffin. Twas but a thing of splinters and raw boards. Emptied, stripped of death. And scrubbed clean of the dead girl’s waste and ruin. A nasty job that must have been.
I do not like to be shamed. I have my pride. The priest was right about that. I could not think clearly for the heat behind my forehead. I know a good soldier does not abandon the field to the enemy at the battle’s first crisis, but I did not see what step I might take next.
I sensed him and turned. The priest, I mean. He had taken off his little hat and the wind lofted his white hair.
“You knew,” I said. “You knew the box was empty.”
At first I thought he would not answer me. Then he said, “Graves are best left alone. I told you that.”
“No matter what is in them? Should there be no justice, then, but only . . . only . . .”
“True justice may be a separate thing from the law,” he said.
I looked at him. Angry as a disappointed child, I was. But the chill of the day and the wind stole the heat from my voice. “In Heaven, perhaps. But here on earth there is the law of men. And the law must be satisfied.”
“Even if the law is unjust?”
“The law is not unjust.”
“Isn’t it? And what about the men who impose it? Are they just and impartial?”
I saw that he would argue on forever, reducing evil to a lightness of language. I lacked the cleverness men such as he acquire from books and classrooms. For all my lamplit reading, I could not match his speech. But I could not let the matter go, despite myself.
“And the girl?” I asked him. “The dead girl? Whose body is taken off to the Good Lord knows where? Has she had justice, then?”
“I told you I know nothing about a girl.”
“And Boland? Where’s his body, then? The body you swore was rotten with the cholera?”
“I did not swear. Priests don’t, you know. As for Boland’s body, did you take it? The other night? You really should return it, you know. If only out of common decency.”
I did not think the fellow much of a churchman, with his smugness and dissembling. I thought he belonged in the common room of a club, with younger sons gone bad, not in a Christian church. Not even a Catholic one.
I had no inkling of it that day, but I faced a desperate man. Whose shame was so great even God must have turned away from him. That day he was my master, the father confessor too proud to confess. He was no murderer, that I do not mean. But I am not certain his crime was not the worse.
I must not go too quickly.
That day the priest nearly brought me to tears of rage. I fear I might have struck him, had he stood closer.
“And you do not care who is guilty, then?” I asked him, my voice a weakened thing.
“I care for repentance. If even a murderer repents, he may be forgiven. Through God’s Grace.”
“Any crime may be forgiven, then? Any sin?”
“Even Protestants believe that. Don’t they?”
I chuckled to myself, the peculiar way we do when we are broken in a fray. It is a form of laughter next to heartbreak. I had come to the end of my words.
Father Wilde looked at me with eyes as fierce as the sky, which had grown darker still, with running clouds.
“What do you know about guilt?” he said. He said it low, almost to himself.
Queer it was. I could not answer the fellow. Although I know as much of guilt as any man ever should.
He had no more spite to offer me. Yet, we could not take our leaves of one another. Something held us fixed to the boneyard earth. As if we both already saw that our fates had grown together like wild vines. I think we hated each other in that moment.
Down the slope, my companions of the day pronounced their restlessness, passing their impatience along to their horses. A blown leaf scratched the scar on my cheek, pursued by a scouting raindrop.
Abruptly, Father Wilde turned to go. And in that instant I found my voice again. I called to him, as his flapping cassock caught on a wooden cross.
He freed himself and swept round to me again. With mad rage on his face. As if he had let go of himself the moment he turned away.
“The young man who concerned you?” I called. “The one with the black beard? The one they all looked to? What was his name?”
He opened his mouth and I sensed what he would say. He was about to tell me he did not know the person of whom I spoke. But then he stopped, thought hard, and changed his mind. Although I could not say why.
“Doubtless, you mean Kehoe. John Kehoe. A Wicklow man. Not of this parish.”
“You know him, though?”
Face as cold as the day, he shook his head. “They call him ‘Black Jack,’ for what that may be worth to you.” He looked at me with a strange light in his eyes. “As for knowing him . . . I’m not certain the fellow knows himself. Something of a rabble-rouser, I don’t doubt.”
“And where might I find Mr. Kehoe from County Wicklow? If I wished to set a question or two before him?”
This time, a pair of raindrops struck my face.
“He’s not of St. Kiaran’s,” th
e priest said. “I believe he makes his home somewhere east of Pottsville. To the extent Kehoe has a home. He’s something of a rover. Always calling around on Irish business. That’s all I can tell you.”
He turned toward his parish house again.
I rushed up behind him, unwilling to let him go, now that he had told me at least one thing. The slope and the change in the weather gave my leg a nasty time. Strange it was, for my leg had grown much stronger. Twas as if my body sought to warn me, to tell me I should leave well enough alone.
The priest strode up the hill, determined to leave me behind him, and good riddance.
I stopped at a stab of pain and shouted after him. “And Mrs. Boland? What about her, Father Wilde?”
When he turned that final time, he had mastered his features, becoming again a priest and not a man.
“I pray for her each day,” he said. The wind was such I had to strain to hear him. “As I will pray for you, my son.”
And he showed me his back with a firmness beyond dispute. Stalking up the hill he went, toward his church and the ramshackle house full of books that sat beside it.
He left me alone on the hillside. The rain come up, and I turned me down toward the fidgeting deputies. On my way, I nearly stepped on the dead cat. Twas orange, as I recall.
FIVE
“NEVER SEEN NOTHING LIKE IT. NOPE, I AIN’T. WAY they cut that feller’s heart clean out.”
The speaker was one Mr. Lennie Downs, a teamster who drew on the county payroll and whose fingers had an affinity for his nose. The rain fell in veils and curtains as the afternoon yearned toward evening. I shared the driver’s bench at the front of the wagon, while the navvies huddled, wet to the bone, in the open bed behind us. Protected by India-rubber capes, the deputies slumped on their horses. Mr. Downs had been speaking without pause, even as his fingers conducted their meaty investigations of his nasal passages. It is a nasty habit. He was undeterred by the downpour that come over us and delighted by the doings back in Heckschersville. For Mr. Downs was a man who liked to talk, and now he had a fine, new tale to tell.
I feared I would be mocked back home in Pottsville.
Tucked into my cape, but sodden little the less, I had lent the teamster only half an ear. Most of what Mr. Downs recited was gossip or common complaints about the Irish miners. But when he spoke of a heart cut out, I leaned over toward him, struggling to hear clearly through the rain.
“What did you say, Mr. Downs? About a cutting up?”
He used his free hand to jick the reins and urge the mules along, for they were not enamored of our climb. We had taken the high road known as the Thomaston Turnpike, a muddy, rutted track no longer used for haulage. The coming of the railway spur had robbed the pike of its purpose, and now it was only a short way down to Minersville for those who could afford to risk an axle. We passed between the remaining trees and gashes where the coal had been stripped from out-croppings in the hillside. Our climb was slow and miserable, and the closer we got to the summit, the less inclined the mules were to cooperate. They shied, as animals do when they grow wary.
“Just saying as how I ain’t seen nothing like it. No, sir. They didn’t just kill that there general feller. Chopped him up between the teats like he was beef for a stew. Yes, sir. Just like beef for a stew. Wasn’t that feller just a sight to see! They cut him up like he swallied a goldpiece and they went to looking for it smack in the middle of his chest. Yes, sir. They hollowed him out like a bowl.”
“Who told you this, Mr. Downs?” A trickle of water had found the nape of my neck, which did not improve my spirits.
“Tole me? Nobody tole me, Major. I seen it. Yes, sir. Seen it myself. Who do you think come out to pick that feller up off the ground? Wouldn’t no Irish touch him, not likely. Constable puked every time he looked under the blanket. No, sir. Me and my mules and my wagon. That’s who come out to pick him up off the ground. Lying just up there, atop the hill. Mr. Gowen’s orders.”
“Mr. Gowen?”
“Yes, sir. You know Mr. Gowen, don’t you? New district attorney. Fat, handsome young feller. Say he’s going places. Tole me to go out and bring the general in.”
“And where do you mean by ‘just up there,’ Mr. Downs?
“Straight on ahead there. Can’t see yet, for the rain. That’s where they found him. Yes, sir. Raccoons or what have you got at him first. Made a terrible mess in my wagon. He was just atop the hill, there at the crossroads.”
Of a sudden, I shivered, although my thoughts were a nonsense. Perhaps it was the rain upon my neck. Or the gloom of the dying day. But I will tell you a thing, and hope you will not laugh at Welsh beliefs—not that I hold to any superstition. I merely report, as is the chronicler’s duty. Look you. If you go to Wales, in all her awful beauty, you will not find a crossroads atop a hill. At least not often. Not if the roads were laid in Christian times. For when two roads meet and cross atop a hill or on a mountain, that makes a devil’s cross, where witches gather to call upon Old Night. Not that I credit the existence of witches and such like. And not that I believe un-Christian things.
Perhaps it was but the haunts of childhood returned to me. The Reverend Mr. Griffiths, my guardian for a time, found it a joy to lock me in the cellar, and I was afraid of the dark as a little boy. He made noises at me and spoke through the door of ghosts. A vicar of the Established Church, he taught me of the Martyrs with his strap. But I must not be too hard, for he was a troubled man, and disappointed. He was the father of my darling wife, to whom his demeanor was ever generous and kind. A very model of a parent he was to Mary. But I was the son of the woman he wished to love, see, the one who would not have him, who chose a chapel preacher in his stead. In the years before the cholera come among us.
The Reverend Mr. Griffiths never liked me, but he took me in, and that is something worthy of a Christian. But I recall my terrors in that cellar. The Merthyr rats were real, but it was the unseen things that made me cry. I begged Mr. Griffiths to let me out of that place, as I have never begged another man.
The old fears linger in our adult hearts.
“There. See? Just up there.” Mr. Downs separated his hand from its intimate endeavors to point beyond a deputy’s rain-slicked horse. “Just atop the hill, where it’s all bare. That’s where they massacred the poor feller. Dead as Julius Caesar, that boy was. Yes, sir! Dead as John the Baptist, rest his soul. Had to scoop the half of him up with a shovel. With his face all still, like he was just sleeping one off. And do you know just how damnation stupid them Irish are? Cut him all up for plain meanness, then forgot to take the feller’s money out of his pockets. Now what’s the sense in that? No, sir. Hang a dozen Irishmen, and the rest’ll straighten up quick enough, I’ll tell you. That’s what Lennie Downs has got to say. Get on, now, mules. Get on.”
The crest was a swamp of mud, yet I was relieved. For all my childish fears had been but foolishness. There was no crossroads atop that hill, but only a fork in the way, which has no meaning in the old tales. A rough track led into rain-swept trees. We passed it by, remaining on the turnpike.
I chastised myself for my silliness. But that was just the start of my realizations. I saw at once that I had shown no fortitude, but had let myself be quashed by the corpse of a cat. The miners would likely be having the laugh of their lives, enjoying their beer and their whisky. They had made a fool of me and my authority. But worse, I had let them do it.
I like to think that I do not lack courage. But I had run away like a little boy.
“Stop the wagon, if you please. Let me down now, and thank you.”
“Yes, sir. Yes, indeed-ee. I need to empty some water myself about now.”
“That is not what I meant, see. I am going back to Heckschersville. For there is a business I have left unfinished.”
“You’re going back there? Alone? Christ awmighty!”
“No harm will come to me, Mr. Downs. But call for me in your wagon in the morning, or send another. I believe there is a hotel o
r such in the town. Apply for me there.”
“There’s two of them Irish flea-pits. But you don’t want to stay up there in Heckschersville, Major. They don’t like Welshies, and they don’t like soldiers, neither. To tell the truth, they didn’t seem to like you much at all.”
“Being liked is not my purpose, Mr. Downs.”
I got me down from the perch, which was a trick. For though I am most capable, I must be wary of my bothered leg.
A deputy’s horse loped up beside the wagon, almost nudging me. I do not like horses, you understand. I have ridden upon their backs, when such was a necessity, but a donkey was sufficient for Our Savior, and a good pair of boots is quite enough for me.
“Major says he’s going back to Heckschersville,” Mr. Downs called to the moderately curious deputy. “Tole him that weren’t smart.”
Streaked with rain and anxious for his hearth, the deputy leaned down toward me. “I wouldn’t do that, now,” he told me frankly. “That’s one bad idea, if you don’t mind me saying so.” He looked at Mr. Downs, then back at me—doubtless wondering if he would be held responsible for my straying from the fold. “Don’t mind me asking, why would a body do a thing like that?”
It was a reasonable question, I suppose. But I was not inclined to explain my decision.
Perhaps I knew how foolish it was myself.
“Go on with you now,” I told them. “For it is no good standing in the rain. And tell Mrs. Jones that I am well and will return tomorrow.”
“Want my horse, Major? She’ll go, if she has to.”
“I will walk, thank you.”
The deputy looked down at my leg and cane.
“I will walk,” I repeated. “Now get you home.” I turned to Mr. Downs. “Do not forget to send a wagon or such in the morning.”
And they obeyed me. But as they left, I heard the teamster muttering. Perhaps he spoke intending I should hear.
“I tole the damn fool, Ab, and you heard me when I tole him. Welsh don’t have a lick of sense, if it ain’t to do with money or singing hymns. Get on, mules. After I come out for that general feller, I had to sweep my wagon down with quicklime. Get on, now.”
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