Bold Sons of Erin

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  I saw at once who made the decisions for the Heckschersville shaft and colliery. It was not Mr. Oliver.

  “You’ve already made the acquaintance of Mr. Kehoe,” he went on. “This gentleman here is Mr. Swankie Cooley. Mr. Cooley’s been good enough to come up to us from Primrose, to discuss our efforts for the poor relief. But could it be you aren’t familiar with our association, Major Jones? The Ancient Order of Hibernians? We’re pledged to make good Americans of the Irish. And a terrible labor it is.” He grinned. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Cooley?”

  Now, Mr. Cooley was another small man, with a look as unkind as Mr. Donnelly’s was merry. His face was pitted, like dust struck by the first raindrops. He was of middle years, with a workman’s hands, but a paymaster’s eyes. While Mr. Donnelly was shaven, but for his whiskers, Cooley wore a narrow beard the color of barley broth.

  Cooley was a blade of a man, set up for cutting others.

  “That’s right you are, Mr. Donnelly,” was all the fellow said. He sounded as Irish as tinkers in the wood. He did not offer his hand.

  “Now, Major Jones, I’d be pleased to stand you a drink to start off our friendship,” Mr. Donnelly said. “But it’s whispered to me that you’re strong against that temptation.” He shook his head. “Ah, isn’t the jar the very bane of the Irish! A curse and a comfort at once, the old poteen! Yet, here I am honored to sit with a famous hero of the war, the pride of all the county, and I find myself at a loss for a proper welcome.” His smile diminished. “But what could it be brings you back to us, on such a night as this? After such a bothersome day? And you as wet as a silkie!”

  Now, I am Welsh, not Irish, and not one to be fooled by all their blarney.

  “I am looking for Daniel Boland,” I told him, “who confessed to the murder of Brigadier General Carl Stone.”

  Kehoe and Cooley took on aspects even stonier than before, but old Donnelly made a great show of his surprise.

  “But Danny Boland’s dead of the cholera this long week! Didn’t you hear the black news, Major?”

  “Boland is no more dead than you or I am. He is in hiding. And I will find out where.”

  Mr. Donnelly threw up his hands to the Heavens. “Sure, and I’m glad to hear it! For Danny was ever a lovely boy, though headstrong.” He put on a quizzical mask. “But Father Wilde claims he died of the cholera. And I’ve never known a priest to tell a lie.” He smiled again. “Why, haven’t you met Father Wilde yourself, this very afternoon?” The slightest twist come up at the side of his mouth. “Then you know what a splendid gentleman he is, in addition to the blessed vocation he’s called to. Ah, he’s out to give the lot of us our letters, you know, in the cause of our advancement! It’s a fine, fine fellow he is, our Father Wilde.” Donnelly leaned toward me. “But where is it you’ve run into our Danny? Surely you’ve seen him, to be so certain the poor lad’s still among us?”

  “You know I have not seen him, Mr. Donnelly. For he is hidden away. After succumbing to guilt at his deed and confessing to Mr. Oliver. He either ran out of fear . . . or was persuaded to run.”

  Mr. Donnelly chewed that over and found the flavor wanting. “Now, wouldn’t that have been a foolish thing? To confess to a murder? And to our Mr. Oliver, of all people, who was bound to report the matter to the magistrate? I’ve never heard the likes in all me life.”

  He held up a finger. “Now, I will tell you a thing, if you will listen, Major Jones. For I find I’ve taken a most unusual liking to you.” His eyes glowed like fires of peat set into his skull. “Danny Boland no more killed your general than Napper Tandy was tsar of all the Rooshians.” He held me with his eyes, as strong men will. “And mark what I say, if there’s any bit of sense in you: No man among us killed your General Stone. And if we’d had a mind for killing generals, twould not have been that one we would have chosen for the doing of it, that I can tell you.” He tamped down the fire of his stare—hotter than the red-bellied stove it had been—and sat back. “Now, is there anything else you’re after knowing, to satisfy your official curiosity?”

  “I would like to speak to Mrs. Boland.”

  His eyes narrowed. “And why would you want to do a thing like that?”

  “Because she knows her husband isn’t dead, see. Because she’s looking for him as hard as I am.”

  Oh, that got a reaction from the lot of them. Each man stiffened, in his different way. Kehoe grew yet stiller, while Cooley tensed like a terrier sniffing a rat. Mr. Donnelly drew into himself and his skin stretched tighter over the bones of his face.

  “And how would you know what Mrs. Boland’s doing?” the old man asked me. “Have you been after seeing our Mary, then?”

  “Yes. I have seen her.”

  “And where might that have been, pray tell?”

  “It does not signify.”

  “Oh, doesn’t it now?” he asked. “When no man in this town has seen her this week? Not since her Danny was taken by the cholera?”

  The publican approached with a plate of food for me, but Donnelly waved it away. “Keep it warm, now, Michael. We still have a bit of business to conduct.” And as the barkeep faded away, he said to me, “Perhaps you had something to do with her disappearance yourself, Major Jones?”

  I ignored that last remark, for it meant to provoke. “I saw her on the hillside. Two nights ago.” I almost added: “Below the priest’s house.” But a sudden light blazed upon my thoughts. I wonder they did not mark the change upon my face.

  Clear enough it was that the priest warned no one I had claimed to see Mrs. Boland. But something far more interesting come to me: She had been lurking in the trees between the boneyard and the priest’s house. Given mine own preoccupation that night, I had assumed her interest lay in our doings with the coffin. But what if she had been keeping watch on the priest, more interested in the living than the dead? That would explain why she did not scream when we first disturbed the grave. She did not want to be found any more than we did. And if her interest had been in the priest and not the coffin, that also explained the alarm he betrayed when I told him I had seen her near his dwelling.

  Did Mary Boland mean the priest some harm?

  I saw at once that Father Wilde’s role in the affair was even greater than I had suspected. Although I could not yet begin to say how or why. I could not even say if he had been blackmailed into certifying the false cholera death, or if that had come about of his own volition. Curious I was about the trace of mockery in the tone Donnelly had used when speaking of the priest. Was there a contest of wills in the village? A conflict over murder, confessions and fugitives?

  My thoughts were all a rush and a muddle, but I will tell you this: When there is trouble between the Irish and their priest, there is trouble, indeed.

  Donnelly canted his head, slow of reply. Even he had needed time to regain his composure after the revelation of my encounter with Mary Boland. And I had not even told them we had conversed. To say nothing of the grim thing she had done.

  “Ah, and would that be the terrible night when the grave-robbers took Danny’s body?” Mr. Donnelly said at last. “And left a cat in his place?”

  “No one left a cat. They left a young woman.”

  “Not Mrs. Boland? Surely? And I do believe I heard tell of a cat found in the poor boy’s grave this afternoon. A terrible scene it was, or so they tell me. We’ll have all the grandmothers talking of curses and spells.”

  “Who was the young woman in the grave?”

  “Is it Mrs. Boland you’re referring to, Major? Was she down in the grave? I’d be sorry to hear it.” He leaned in close again, skin tight as a drum. And with all the smile quit of his round, pink face. “Do you know what the womenfolk say about Mary Boland and where she’s gone off to? They say she’s been taken by fairies, that she’s gone over to the Good People, once and for all.” He shook his head. “She always was the queer one, Mary Boland.” He smiled again, a hard, small, wicked smile. “Of course, no man among us believes in fairies. Or in bans
hees and little people under the hill. Not here in America.”

  I thought of that old woman on the high road.

  “No, Major Jones,” he continued, “on that I would agree with Father Wilde. The old ways and the odd ways only shame us. They mark us as backward and foolish to all the world. Such carryings-on are a gift to Ireland’s enemies. Whoever they may be.” The cottage-master’s twinkle returned to his eye. “But how can you get that into a woman’s head, I ask you? Ah, the things a woman will get herself on to believing! They’re a different race, Major, a different race from the likes of you and me.”

  “Well, I saw one of a different race this evening,” I told him. “Coming down the hill on the Thomaston Turnpike. As old as the hills she looked. And Bedlam mad.” Twas my turn to shake my head. “She put me in mind of lepers I saw in India.”

  All the noise of the room caved in to a silence. At times, my voice is louder than I wish. It comes of the report of many a musket and the blast of guns rolled too close to my ear.

  Mr. Donnelly struggled to call up a smile. But even his lifetime of practice was insufficient.

  “I take it she wasn’t a fairy queen, then, Major? Beauteous to dazzle and lead good men astray? Why, now that I think of it, I’ll wager you met the madwoman talked of by the Dutchmen over the mountain. They say she lives in the crags on Gammon Hill, but wanders about.” He forced that mechanical smile wider still. “The digging Dutchmen—the farmers—claim she’s a witch. Oh, they’re worse than the whole pack of us, those poor, superstitious Germans. Grown men talking of witches and hexes and spells.” He reached across the table to tap me, three sharp times, upon the wrist. “We don’t have witches in Ireland, not a one, did you know?” He laughed. “Oh, fairies and leprechauns. Spirits and ghosts galore. But not witches, Major. Not a one. Maybe Saint Patrick drove them out with the serpents?”

  His transplanted countrymen did their best to laugh with him. But Irish gaiety is a fragile thing.

  When next Mr. Donnelly spoke, his voice was steely.

  “We’ll have no witches, nor any other such nonsense. No fairies, or changelings, or any such carryings-on. Danny Boland’s dead, and his wife is gone from us. No one knows where. And if some other girl is dead, no man among us had a hand in the business. And no man among us harmed your General Stone. That I will swear to you.”

  He leaned across the table, so fierce of visage I thought he would grasp my coat.

  “Now, hear me well, Major Jones, and mark what I tell you: We want no part of your war to free the nigger.” He nodded, slightly, to himself, as a judge will passing sentence. “We want no part of any war at all.” He held up his hands. Bruised and gnarled by decades of labor they were. “We want honest work. And honest wages. And you’ll find that we will settle for no less.”

  He stared at me, ablaze with a thousand hatreds. “Leave us alone, and we’ll dig your filthy coal. So you can fuel your country and your war. But we’ll not be conscripted to feed your guns, while the high and mighty go prancing about like lords. And we’ll not be blamed for crimes that are not our doing. The sons of Erin will work for their wages, so long as there is no cheating in the tallies. But we’re done with bowing our heads to any man.”

  Donnelly sat back. Ever so slowly, he smiled again. “But you’ll be wanting your dinner and a rest.”

  SIX

  MY SLEEP WAS MARRED. I DREAMED, AT FIRST, OF INDIA, and of the torrents of war that bloodied my youth. Yet, India was here, and now, and cruelly so. Men in blue and gray fought in its fields. I saw them go forward, toward fate, and ached to warn them. The Irish Brigade it was, surging up that hillside at Antietam, blithe as if set off for the county races. Eager for the scrap and the slaughter they were, a wild tribe all valor and no sense, shouting, teeth bared, eyes bulging with the terrible fever of battle. Meagher led them on. “Meagher of the Sword,” the Irish called him.

  Thomas Francis Meagher. Handsome and no older than myself, his life was a legend told over cups of whisky. I saw him advance in my dream as I did that day. Careless he was of the danger hissing past him. He stayed upon his horse as his lines moved up, although the other officers had dismounted. Waving his saber and having a holiday lark, he chided their green flag forward with a grin. He barked commands I could not hear from my spot down in the hollow, where I had thought to find General McClellan and met only the waste of battle. The wounded men around me writhed like snakes.

  Meagher’s horse was shot in the snout. It splashed blood for ten yards on every side, coating men still whole with equine gore.

  When a wall of Rebel musketry stopped them cold, the Irish refused to give an inch they had taken, but stood exchanging fire, firm as the Guards. Falling with sudden contortions, the wounded and dead made way for those ranked behind. Some men looked heated almost to a madness, while others fired off-handedly, as if a battle were no more than a sheep-shearing. I never had seen braver men in a fight.

  How real it was, precise as the painted miniatures we stole from the ranee’s palace and sold to a chaplain. Yet twas not the Rebels on that ridge, after all, but brown-skinned sepoys, mutineers to a man. They, too, were as real as a doorknob in the hand, as true as noon.

  Then General Meagher come telescoping toward me, his progress impossibly swift, and he was cackling. His face was that of the hag met on the hill, a monstrous sight. Racing toward me with unearthly smoothness. Carried by winds. Until I smelled the sulfur of the pit.

  Twas not the face of that leprous old woman that woke me. Not that at all. A thing far worse followed after, though worse in a different way. India will not leave me alone, see. Although the mortal distance could be no greater between us. Memory chews upon me like a maggot. Then, sometimes, it perfumes my sleep with loss. I thought of the woman. Not of my wife, I do not mean, may God forgive me. But of the woman in India. The one I loved unreasonably. Ameera. A pagan she was, and of another race. I will not lie, I loved her so much that when the cholera took her I could have put my fist into God’s face. That is a blasphemy. I know it. And it shames me. But how else can I tell you what I felt?

  She comes to me in dreams, although I love my dear wife without stinting. Nor do I wish my present happiness elsewise. But in the corners of night, Ameera comes to me. So queer it is. She is never unhappy with me, the sweet child, but ever intent on stroking my hair, the way she used to do, and telling me in nigger talk how she loved me. I feel that touch. That, too, is real as death. More real than much of the waking life I know. She comforts me, as if she were the elder. As if I needed succor and protection. She was a dainty thing, the child who had my child. She laughed and claimed her family were all conjurors, although she had been sold to a procuress, then to me. She said she cast a spell to keep me safe, that I was favored of her god, her Allah. I let her prattle, just to hear her voice. Her laughter was all music, see, her slightest smile a dance. And her heart was true. She died unscarred by time, while I was marching. They burned her in a pile of heathen corpses.

  I woke up in a rush of tears, my hands outstretched to grasp her in the dark. Oh, do not think me faithless to my wife. Fidelity has never been in question. Our marriage is a fortress against the world, and our four years together have been blessed. We have a son, our John. I lack for nothing. It is only when dreams play tricks on me that I stray.

  I am a happy man. And still that brown child comes to stroke my hair.

  Why are we made so? Why are we cursed forever, if once we open our hearts? I would not wish to think the Lord spiteful or jealous. Not of our meager, mortal loves, not of the rags of happiness that never cover our loneliness entirely. It must be Satan’s work, this torment of memory. Surely, Jesus wills us to forget, to look forward to our great reward, not backward to our losses.

  I longed to read the Gospels, for reassurance. This world is more than I can understand.

  When I woke my back hurt like a wound. For I had made my bed upon the floor. My room, though cleaner than I had expected, was barren of curtains and, fran
kly, I feared an assassin’s shot through the window’s glass. I had blocked the door as best I could, with a dresser and a chair, but could not cover the window. So I shaped a bit of a dolly in the bed to give them a target, then laid me down in a corner with the blanket, ready to fight the devil who attacked me.

  But the only intruders arrived in dreams, and my flesh is not as young as it once was. My old bones hurt.

  Confounded, I sat against the wall, in the space between sleep and waking. I huddled in the dark, listening to the buckshot of the rain. While ghosts of my own making filled the room.

  Now, you will laugh, but I wanted to cry out. A dream is nothing, I know. But I wanted to shout my pain for the world to hear. And if pain is too dignified a word, then let us say I wished to shout my confusion.

  And you will laugh again, but I will tell you: I think that there are cubbyholes in time, little nooks behind the ticking clock. That is where we find ourselves when we are not yet free of our dreams and not yet returned to the world.

  I thought of a swirling stew of matters as I sat there on those planks, wrapped in a blanket as thin as an old excuse. Pondering the truculent ways of the Irish I was, only to wander into the Gospel of Luke. I thought next of business matters and of railroads, then made myself remember the war for a bit, to banish the impropriety of my dreams. For there was more to my dreaming than I dare tell you. I thought of the war, and of Mick Tyrone, my friend, whose letters apprised me of events out in the West, where matters were undetermined. Names like Corinth and Iuka pretended to mark the progress of our armies, but betrayed a lack of resolve to any veteran. The important thing was that my surgeon friend was hale and hearty, which I could tell by the bitter complaints in his letters.

  He is a great Socialist, Mick Tyrone, and so expects the perfections of Heaven on earth. His is a creed designed for disappointment. I mean no disrespect to Mick, who is a good man, but find such folk a bit silly, with their notions of a Godless Garden of Eden. The Christian’s strength is that he knows that Man began with a Fall and the lot of us have been tumbling ever since. The most resolute man is a leaf upon the wind. But the Socialist expects better of his neighbor than of himself, believing mankind born to generosity and that he alone thinks hard and selfish thoughts. Myself, I think on Joseph and his brothers.