Bold Sons of Erin (10 page)

Curious, how the killer had been so anxious to confess, and how his countrymen had so urged Oliver to report the confession—if the tale I had been told was correct in its facts. Of course, a general’s murder was a dreadful deed and it might have been that the Irish feared the draft would be imposed with bayonets in retaliation. Perhaps young Boland truly was the murderer and the actions of the Irish common sense. But the entire affair smacked of a scheme to me, with Boland the sacrificial lamb who was not quite sacrificed in the end. Perhaps he had done the crime and the Irish had pressed him to confess as the price for helping him escape thereafter. But why had the priest abetted them, pledging his word that Boland had been “taken by the cholera,” before the law could make itself felt from Pottsville—which was not ten miles away? Was Father Wilde such a champion of the Irish? Or was there more to his doings than he suggested?

And why were so many educated men in Pottsville willing to credit the story just as presented? Who was the girl in the coffin? Who put her in the grave while Boland ran? Again, the role of the priest suggested collusion. And why had the general been murdered in the first place, when all that he had sought were volunteers? Had the Irish thought it a ruse and believed him a spy, come to collect information for the draft? Why had Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Nicolay been so reticent?

And where was Mrs. Boland this fine day? The woman who had run away, only to appear to me by the graveside in the
night? The woman the priest said clung to the old, pagan ways of Erin’s past? The woman of whom he seemed to be afraid?

I did not know where the trails would lead, but I did not think our journey would end nicely.

Puffing from his haste, the bald man in the long, brown coat approached me, drawn, no doubt, by my uniform, which was the only Union blue in evidence. He did not speak until he stood spit-close. And then he kept on glancing at the Irish. As they watched the two of us.

“Good God, what are you doing? Good Lord, what’s going on?”

“I am Major Abel Jones,” I said, by way of introduction, holding out my hand, which he ignored. “And what is being done is plain to see.”

“You can’t dig up that grave.”

“Not that one, but another, then?”

“You can’t dig up
any
grave.” He cast another fearful look at the Irish. His voice was that of a native-born American, but he had the ill-nourished look of a Manchester man.

“I have a writ from the district attorney, and papers from a judge,” I told him.

“That’s not what I mean. I don’t care about your legal papers.” The wind snatched at his hat and he barely caught it. Despite the cold, his scalp shone bright with sweat. “Look what you’ve done here, man! Everybody knows how these people are about their dead. You’ve gone and shut down the mine and the colliery both. They didn’t even leave a man on the pumps. The shaft’s going to flood. There’s going to be Hell to pay.”

“And you would be Mr. Oliver, the superintendent of these works, I take it?”

“My name’s Oliver, all right. But that doesn’t matter one bit.” His eyes were as unsteady as his nerves, and his skin was colorless. Convinced I was that his line come out of Manchester, for such have a pinched and nasty and nervous look. “What matters is that you’ve shut everything down. We’re losing money by the minute, hand over fist. Mr. Heckscher’s just going to have himself a fit.”

I sneaked a look up at the priest. His interests lay elsewhere, confirming my judgement that Mr. Oliver was not viewed as a serious fellow. He might have approved their pay slips, but he did not rule the Irish or their lives.

“Well, I am sorry for the loss to your business,” I told him. “But the law must have its way, and there is true.”

He drew himself up, as if he meant to threaten. Perhaps he thought I might be made to fear him, since, slight though he was, he stood the taller of us.

Ah, if size were all that mattered to mortal strength, elephants would rule over the world.

“Well, you’re on company property,” he declared, most rude and abrupt.

“Company property is it? The boneyard? And the church, too?”

“It all belongs to the company.”

“And the bodies?”

“This parcel of land has been lent to their church in sufferance.” He fired off the last word like a cannon. “As a matter of Mr. Heckscher’s generosity.”

I sighed. “Mr. Oliver, there have been two murders here. I do not think your company stands above the law where such crimes are concerned.”

“Two?
Hold on there. Nobody’s said anything about two murders. Who said any such thing?”

“Wait, then, and you will see.”

He chewed his lip and tried me a final time. “You’re trespassing on private property. You’ve interfered with the pursuit of honest business. You—”

“I do not think I have interrupted your work, Mr. Oliver. It seems to me your miners did that themselves.”

“And they’ll pay for it. It’ll all come out of their wages, don’t think it won’t. And don’t think they won’t hear about this in Pottsville.”

Twas then I heard a too-familiar sound. Of an iron shovel striking wood gone damp.

The digging stopped. The whispers of the crowd swelled to a warning.

I excused myself from Mr. Oliver and strode to where the navvies had paused in their labors. They stared up at me in that special terror of drunkards deprived of liquor. When Temperance comes by law, as it surely will, such fellows will be spared their lives of misery.

“Keep to your work, like honest men,” I told them. Although not one looked an honest man to me. A black-toothed, black-hearted lot they were, and ashamed I am to say one fellow was Welsh. But even we are not a perfect race.

The deputies looked more fearful than the navvies. As if the Irish had the law and the pistols, and we were in the wrong and weak besides.

Well, weak we were. But at such times a fellow must not flinch. For men smell fear as wild animals do.

“Take yerselves off, ye darty English bastards,” a first voice called.

“The little one there in the soldier suit’s a Taffy. That little sod in nigger-lover blue.”

“Lord Kiss-me-arse, that’s what I’d call the likes o’ that one there.”

“Tis na wonder they’re calling their terry-bull draft down upon us,” a whisky-ravaged grampus declaimed, “for if their Lincoln’s brought down to recruitin’ crippled dwarves, the Rebel’s will all go marching high into Canadee.”

Laugh they did, as nasty children will. And then that black-bearded fellow stepped to the fore, the young one who drew the eye. Trouble now, I thought to myself. But he only glared about him, with lips still frozen hard and eyes of fire. He hardly made a gesture beyond the turning of his head.

The crowd quieted. And the black-bearded man faded into it again.

I looked to the priest and saw that he had been watching the business, too. With a face that said Old Rome was on its guard, and not only against Welshmen.

I realized the priest had decided to let me learn my lesson. But I was not yet certain what the lesson would be.

I had the navvies heave up the coffin and slide it onto a bed of leaves and grass. Twas a struggle for them, for their bodies had been poisoned by liquor and were not worth their wages. But I wanted the coffin up above ground. I did not want the poor fellows trapped in the hole, if the Irish took a mind to interfere. And I thought I would let the miners see my purpose. Let them feel the shame of a young girl’s murder. Let them explain such doings, if they could.

I felt a surge of anger toward the priest. No man of the cloth should have had his hand in such matters. He should have taken his stand on the side of the law.

The coffin come up in tatters, with the lid barely fixed to the sides. But I marked that it had been nailed shut, a thing my invalid soldiers and I had not been able to do. Of course, we had been forced by Mrs. Boland’s cries to leave without filling in the grave, and the Irish had been confronted with our doings. They were the ones who closed the box again, the men who knew full well of the murdered girl. I wondered how many of those in the crowd had blood and guilt on their hands.

To be honest, the box looked a ruin. Many’s the woman who gasped at the battered sight of it.

Something was wrong.
I realized that much in a moment. And a brace of seconds later I knew what it was.

With the coffin split and splintered, the navvies should have been gasping at the stench. But there had been no change in their postures of defeat, not even a grimace beyond those already settled over their faces.

I forgot all else and rushed toward the coffin, grasping a pick from a workman on my way. I went at the lid with something near to a rage, for I already understood what they had done.

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.