Bold Sons of Erin (14 page)

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.”

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, frankly, 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.

I pondered the war in the East, as well, where things were a wicked muddle. While I had been in London and Glasgow, McClellan had made a mess down on the Peninsula. I do not
wish to be unfair, but I have come to a great dislike of the fellow. Not because of our skirmishes over young Fowler and such like, but because McClellan killed men to no purpose. He lacked the stomach to make an end of a battle, to dare all. He kept reserves long after they were needed, withdrew whenever he feared for his reputation, and lacked the strength of heart that makes a leader. All bluster he was, and pomp, and organization. He built the Union’s armies, to be sure, but lacked the fire to win the Union’s war. I had my fill, and more, of Little Mac.

Then, in the green and gold of the waning summer, General Pope failed our soldiers at Bull Run, on fields where we had been bested the year before. By the end of August 1862, the problem was not our troops, for they were game. Ill-led they were, and such men deserved better. When General Lee moved north and McClellan resumed command, the poor lads cheered him, for they did not understand that a lion in the camp is not the same as a lion in the field. Little Mac fed men and clothed them and trained them. For that much he deserved the nation’s thanks. But I damn him for the bloodbath of Antietam.

I saw much of the campaign, for I had been sent by Mr. Nicolay to keep an eye on a fellow on Little Mac’s staff who was suspected of the gravest disloyalties, all tangled with the disgrace at Harper’s Ferry, as it proved. I must confess I entered the business reluctantly, for I do not like the mantle of the spy. And I had been most content in my work, for upon my return from Britain, with a new scar on my cheek and my new ward, Fanny, sent home to my Mary Myfanwy, Mr. Seward and Mr. Lincoln had let me go back to my work in the War Department, inspecting the books and the quality of supplies.

Lovely work it was, all numbers and ledgers and ink and correspondence. Better-suited I was for that than for the young man’s spectacle of war. I will not claim I was happy in Washington that summer, for I lived still separate from my wife and son—and bonnie Fanny, on whom I fear I dote—but I was content,
and even pleased, to do my part in the supply offices. The wonderful thing about the keeping of books is that a fellow knows what he has done at the end of the day. And numbers do not lie, except when liars tally up the sums. Oh, there are few things finer than honest ledgers.

Washington stank like a pig dead a week, for summer in our capital is monstrous. But I had old friends and got my newspaper every evening from Fine Jim, who worried me with his talk of becoming a drummer boy. I had
Frau
Schutzengel’s cooking for my supper, and I fear I was a terror to the clerks whose work I was given to oversee. But every man must do his duty proper, and a Welshman will not tolerate things otherwise.

But contentment is not to be our mortal lot. When Mr. Nicolay called at the summer’s end, out I went to join our hastening armies, with all the world believing I had been sent to investigate irregularities in matters of beeves and bedding, when the irregularities lay in a traitor’s heart. Perhaps I will tell you of that affair one day. That is how I found myself in high Maryland, visiting with the boys from Schuylkill County itself, the fellows of the good, old 96th, as they marched through the dust west of Frederick. Twas grisly hot as they neared the pass on South Mountain, only to find the Rebels primed for a fight. Our boys did the Union proud, as Colonel Cake barked, “Now, Pennsylvania! Do your duty!” He added something else, I fear, but the newspapers did not report it, so I will keep it mum.