Bold Sons of Erin (44 page)

His final judgement on those tales was that nothing much had changed, that people were people. He did not seem to be edified in the least.

Mr. Donnelly come strolling by, when the weather broke for a brace of cold, blue days. He called a halloo from the roadway, standing there with an impish grin on his mug.

“Ah, an’t it lovely to see ye primed in your health,” he said, “and no trace of the black cholera anywhere near ye.”

“Not so far,” I allowed, though reluctantly. Cholera was the single thing I would not hear discussed. Nor would I think on it.

“Sure, and that’s a blessing,” he went on. “And there an’t been another case of it come amongst us, either, so I’m thinking we’re free of our troubles, the saints be praised.” His grin faded until his expression matched the chill of the afternoon. “Would
ye
say we’re free of our troubles, Major Jones?”

“I would say . . .” I called across the field of wintering weeds, “. . . that you are free of the troubles that concerned me. And of those which concerned the government in this matter. I wish you might keep yourselves free of future troubles, as well.”

He smiled again, but differently. “Wishes are tender things, are they not? And wounded by the world, in all its cruelty . . .” He waved away our discussion with his walking stick. “It’s a lucky man ye are, Major Jones. And not such a bad one, perhaps, though others mought argue it. Well, I was only having meself a stroll. I’ll be off, then.”

“Mr. Donnelly?”

He paused.

“Did you do as I asked? Did you bury them together? The priest and the girl?”

He shook his head, invoking a smile still colder than before. “That would have been against the laws of the Holy Mother Church.” His eyes turned stony hard. “And it an’t for the likes of us to interfere. Good health to ye, Major. If ever ye pass our way again, look in on us.”

He ambled off, whistling to fool the world, as the Irish do.

In our last week of confinement, nature showed her temper once again. Rain dripped through the cracks in the roof and the coal stove threw more smoke than it offered heat. We wrapped ourselves in blankets and waited for dawn, as we had done in the passes above Peshawar, when our regiment went hunting Afghan bandits. Oh, lucky we are that America is far away from that lot, for the Afghanee is a genius of discord.

On the holiday of Thanksgiving, the morning broke as clear as a young girl’s eyes. That pleased me. For I am fond of our holiday of thanks. I understand it began in the wilds of New England and has wandered southward over the years, although it still is muchly a Northern affair.

I thought to myself that Mr. Lincoln should make Thanksgiving a holiday for all our nation, and I resolved to suggest it to him, if ever I had the chance. For lovely it would be to set aside one day of the year for our families, to give the Good Lord thanks for our endless blessings. Look you. If it were made a holiday by decree, instead of merely by custom, as it is now, we might introduce a law demanding universal Temperance once a year. And that might be a noble beginning, leading one day to the banning of liquor outright.

Too many men grasp a holiday—even Christmas itself—to drink themselves to the Devil. The year before, I had witnessed our army’s antics, with immodesty in the Washington hotels. They made of Thanksgiving no more than a drunken frolic. The newspapers, which you have read yourself, attempted to exploit the day for their commerce, advertising champagne and oysters and such. No, Thanksgiving deserved a formal elevation and a return to its antique purpose, without the corruption imposed by modern fancies.

But let that bide.

My Mary brought us a basket filled abundantly. Although she could not join us in our shanty, her spirit was present as Jimmy and I shared our feast. There was turkey and ham and boiled beef and sausages. With a battalion of garnishes, washed down by innocent cider.

After our dinner, as we sat with the buttons loosened on our trousers, a matter crept up to nag me. Without thinking, I launched into a complaint.

“Jimmy, I have told you,” I said, “up and down and twice over, about the murders. But there is one small matter that devils me still, for I cannot see the bones of it.”

“What are ye going on about now? It seems to me that you’re well shut o’ the lot of them. And good riddance, says Jimmy Molloy.”

I nodded, agreeing. “Yes, but look you. I still do not see who it was that told Mary Boland that General Stone was set to take off her husband. What was the sense of it? The man had given up on recruiting in Heckschersville. He was going away when she murdered him. Why whisper that lie in her ear and incite a murder? I cannot see which party had the benefit. The Irish had no cause to wish him dead. Why bring trouble down upon themselves?”

Jimmy made a series of faces that explored the entire Irish repertoire of amazement. He pulled his jaw, and rolled his eyes, and swept back his hair, and shook his head, and muttered and sputtered and clicked his tongue, then smiled to show me the remnants of his dinner.

“Jaysus, Mary and Joseph!” he cried. “Are ye telling me that ye can’t see something so simple?” He shook his head with all the drama that lurks between Dingle and Derry. And he sighed enormously. “Abel, me darling man, ye were ever a terrible fool for a man so crafty. Is that the way they make the Welsh, or are ye just short of your pint? Why, it’s clear as an empty glass who wanted him dead. Clear as an empty glass, and just as sorry!”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He pulled another face, then leaned toward me, settling his elbows just above his knees. Twas a posture I remembered from our barracks days.

“Now, if ye’d only think, ye’d reach your conclusion. What was General Stone after doing, I ask ye?”

“Attempting to recruit troops for the Union. But he failed and—”

“He failed in Heckschersville,” Jimmy said, exasperated. “But that don’t mean he might not have succeeded where next he got up to persuading and preaching and promising.”

“I don’t see what you—”

“Don’t ye, man?” He waved his head and shoulders at my folly, smacking his knee with the palm of his hand and smacking his lips thereafter. “Now, if General Stone, God rest his soul—even though the bugger was a general—if he had succeeded in his recruitment efforts around your great and grandiose Schuylkill County, what with his letter from Meagher himself and all his radical speechifying, what would have been the results of that, I ask you? Will ye only tell me that?”

“Well . . . more Irish might have joined the army.” That seemed obvious enough. But I still did not see his point.

“And if more Irish joined the army, Abel, what is it ye’d have less of here at home?”

“Jimmy, if you mean to have a laugh at my ex—”

“Just answer me now, if ye want to solve your riddle. For the answer’s dancing in front of your very eyes, man. If more of the Irish joined the army, what would ye have less of here in this plague-ridden county of yours?”

“Well . . . I suppose . . . we’d have less drunkenness.”

Jimmy shook his head at my lack of sense. “You’re cramming the matter all full o’ complications, bloody-minded Welshman that ye are. Now listen to the question, would ye only do that, if it please your royal majesty? If the Irish were to take themselves off to the army, what would ye have less of here at home?”

“Less Irishmen?”

He clapped his hands and affected a near swoon. “Now he’s after the fox and ahead of the hounds! If ye had less Irishmen here in your kingdom of coal, what kind of Irishmen might ye have less of, pray tell?”

“Well, most of them are miners or colliery laborers, of course. A few are respectable trades—”

“And if ye lacked miners and didn’t have labor in excess, if there was barely enough to go scratching your coal from the ground, instead of a hundred poor bogtrotters begging for every cruel job that comes open, what would happen to wages, if ye don’t mind telling me?”

My God. I saw it. Jimmy was right. The answer
had
been in front of my face all the while. It was ugly as sin in a chapel. The coal men, the colliery lords, had commissioned one of their agents to tell Mary Boland—a known or suspected murderess—that General Stone was about to take her husband away. In the hope—the expectation—that she would kill him. Because they feared Stone might succeed with the Irish and raise up regiments of miners and colliery lads. Because the present glut of workers kept wages down and profits as high as possible. Because patriotism stopped at the door of the bank. The priest had declared it was all about love. But this was only about the love of money.

Perhaps the same lips had whispered to the murderess that I kept her husband from her, and that was why she took her knife to me?

But who could have known enough about Mary Boland’s doings to recommend her as the perfect instrument? Given the care the Irish took to conceal their community’s secrets? Unless there was an informer and traitor among them, I did not see who might have known of her madness. Who could have approached her, for that matter? Unless we speak of the Irish themselves, who might she have been willing to believe? Certainly not a stranger. Who could have gone among the Irish without arousing suspicion? And who in that valley answered to the powerful?

I saw the man before me. As clearly as you do.

ON THE DAY that Jimmy and I were deemed free of infection, I did not take me home to Pottsville at once. I had a final call to pay in the valley.

“Now, I just don’t know why you’d want to go back there,” Mr. Downs said. “Ain’t you had enough of them damned Irish?” He paused to insure his nose was thoroughly scoured. “Don’t mind my saying, I think you Welshman are all crazy. Comes from all that hymn-howling. And you a rich man now, I hear tell. Get on, mules.”

“Take me to the colliery office, please,” I told him. “It will not be a lengthy matter, and we will all be home in time for supper.”

Grumbling, he steered his wagon back toward Heckschersville.

When we pulled into the yards, the workers took pains to ignore us, although a few gave Jimmy dirty looks. For Jimmy was Irish as boiled potatoes, and the Irish do not like to see one of their own consort with their enemies. And the Irish see enemies everywhere. Perhaps that is their gravest superstition. I wished them no harm and even might claim that I had done them good, yet they could not help but view me with hostility. Twas not only the matter of the uniform that I had put on to celebrate my release. The Irish nurse old grudges, stewed in blood, forbidding them to like the Welsh or English. I might have been the reincarnation of Mr. Cromwell himself, for all the welcome I had.

I got me down from the wagon and told Mr. Downs and Jimmy Molloy to wait. Looking around at the vale of blackness surrounding the shaft and the colliery, with an ear cocked to the racket of the works, Jimmy declared, “Jaysus, I’d rather be a soldier half-dead than a miner.”

In I went and along I went, ignoring the protestations of the clerks. I threw open the door to Mr. Oliver’s office and found him hunched over a ledger. The window behind his shoulders had been repaired.

I drew out my Colt and put a bullet through the glass.

The window exploded outward this time. Mr. Oliver dropped to the floor, where I left him for a moment while I assured the clerks that I had only been saying hello.

“Mind your business now,” I told them, “or I will have a talk with Mr. Donnelly.”

Then I stepped into Mr. Oliver’s room and shut the door.

“Get you up now, Mr. Oliver. For we must have a talk.”

“Don’t shoot me!” he mewled from behind the desk. “For the love of Christ, don’t shoot me!”

“I do not intend to shoot you,” I assured him. “But I do intend to resolve a simple matter.”

He clambered up, clumsy and frightened. Craven he was. And greedy, perhaps. But certainly not brave.

“Sit you down,” I pointed at his chair with my revolver.

He sat down. “You’ve got no business here,” he said, with fragile truculence. “You’re on company property.”

“And were
you
on company property,” I asked him, “when you told Mary Boland that General Stone had enlisted her husband and meant to return to take Daniel Boland away?”

He was as guilty as Cain. His face all but shouted it.

“That’s crazy,” he said, without the least conviction. “That’s the craziest thing I heard.”

“Who put you up to it? Gowen? The lot of them?”

“You’re a madman. You’re crazy. I’ve never been within a hundred feet of Mary Boland. I only ever saw her across the yard.”

“That is a lie, Mr. Oliver. You have told me differently yourself.”

He was frightened and confused, which was precisely the condition I wished to have him in.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never told you anything.”

“Don’t you remember? You told me what a splendid-looking woman she was.”

“A body could see that from here. I didn’t need to get close.”

“But you also told me that you found her stinking. Now, I don’t believe you could smell her from here, Mr. Oliver. Although I will admit she wanted a wash.”

“You’re trying to trick me.”

“No, Mr. Oliver. You have tricked yourself. You whispered in Mary Boland’s ear, knowing that your words would cost the general his life. I believe you set her to murder me, as well. But let that bide. You are an accomplice to murder. That is enough. And now we are speaking of your life and no one else’s.”

“You can’t prove one damned thing.”

I smiled. “Mr. Oliver, I do not intend to prove it, see. Although an accomplice to murder deserves the gallows. What I intend to do is to tell your little secret to the Irish. And you can square the matter with Mr. Donnelly.”

White he went as the snows of distant Russia.

“Don’t,” he said. The word passed awkwardly from his mouth, as if his lips were frozen. “Don’t do that. Don’t . . .”

“Sorry I am, Mr. Oliver, but—”

“They’ll kill me. They’ll murder me.”

“—justice must take its course, one way or the other.”

“I have a wife and children . . .”

“As Mary Boland had a husband.”