Bold Sons of Erin (9 page)

He puffed, looking down at the bowl of his pipe, then lifted his eyes to me. “It would be all too convenient to accept their devotions, while ignoring the heathen practices that persist among them. But I, for one, believe that we who have given our lives to the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ must not abandon them to their ignorance. Modern faith is not about bogeymen and pitchforks, after all, but about the challenge of living a life that is pleasing in the eyes of God. And I should not think Him pleased by charms and incantations.”

Father Wilde feinted a smile. “Many of my fellow seminarians would disagree, Major Jones, but I am not convinced that the faith of the fool is a worthy faith. Nor am I convinced that ceremony without understanding is a valid form of devotion. You will find I differ with Cardinal Newman’s approach to the times as much as I do with your Dr. Pusey’s. Why, I’ve always felt rather sorry for the hounding that sort gave poor, old Colenso. I do believe the fellow meant well. Although I would not defend his mathematics. But you see, I’m hardly the Ultramontane sort your people prefer in a Catholic priest. Don’t you agree, after all, that Protestants rather enjoy a close-minded priest to whom they may condescend, but won’t quite like a fellow who believes God gave us brains so that we might exercise them? I prefer a thoughtful devotion, if you will.”

At last he managed a smile of some authenticity. “These are challenging days for us Catholics, but days of great spiritual renewal, as well. Especially, in the English-speaking lands. Newman has done us well, in that respect. He simply feels the diffidence before God of the newly converted. Rigor answers his doubts.”

Like you, I knew the name of Cardinal Newman. A fellow who left the Church of England, where the incense was not thick enough for his nostrils. He led young men astray who were confounded by the pain of modern times. But let that bide.

“You will do your flock no good by hiding a murder,” I told the priest. “Or two murders.”

“And do
you
mean to do them good, Major Jones?”

A colliery whistle blew, shrill enough to pierce the deepest grave. Twas not the hour for such a blowing. But I knew what it meant. Our period of uninterrupted digging was done. We had been noticed by someone in the valley.

I rose to my feet. For I was not confident the shabby fellows we had hired for the digging, or even the deputies placed over them, would stand up well against an Irish mob. They would need spine.

I looked down at the priest, who puffed his pipe and did not think to rise.

“Where will I find Mrs. Boland?” I asked him. “When the fuss is done, I want to talk to her.”

“I’m afraid you shan’t be able to do that.”

“Why not?”

“She’s disappeared. Hasn’t been seen since her husband died.” He gestured, lightly, toward the woods with his pipe. “We’re all very concerned about her. An unusual person, you know. Odd habits. One of those of whom I spoke, the sort who cling to the old, rural beliefs opposed by the Church.”

“You mean she’s mad?”

“I shouldn’t think so. Upset, of course. Show me the wife who wouldn’t be. No, my concern is that the poor woman’s run off in her grief and might come to harm. Personally, I rather fear she took the cholera from her husband. She may be lying dead out in the forest.”

“She is not dead. I saw her.”

For the first time, his composure failed him utterly. He reconquered himself with the swiftness of an Alexander, but not before a blush had spoiled his cheek.

“Oh? Where was that?” His voice had an unmistakable quiver in it. He stabbed his pipe back into his mouth, lips thinned to disappearing.

“Not a hundred yards from this house. In the night.”

He had to remove the pipe from his lips again, if only to stop it from shaking.

EVERY MINER was sullen as a Herod. A hundred of them there were, both men skilled in the ways of the pit and laborers whose tools were picks and shovels. Black-faced and black-handed, with all the color stolen from their clothes, they stood beneath a washwater sky and muttered. They reminded me of Afghanees from the hills, gathered to resist a foreign intruder. Such men never think outsiders good.

Their wives and children, gray the lot of them, stood by. When the colliery whistle blew, the miners had come up from their gangways and galleries to join the lesser men who worked the yards, marching all together through the patch of company shanties, collecting their families, and trudging on up to the graveyard. Quiet as death they come, and hard-faced. Some were black as minstrels in a show, with white eyes, while others—the men who tended the mules or machinery—were but smudged in comparison. Breaker boys with hands cut raw stood in little bands, defiant of all authority in that hour, and yearning for the excitement of disaster. The great pack of them gathered just beyond the piled-stone wall that separated their dead from the rest of the world.

We were encircled.

My hired navvies dug and did not talk. They would not even glance up at the mob. The deputies, unwilling to a man, looked at their boots or made excuses to move closer to the horses. Only our teamster, perched upon his wagon, looked as though the world was as it should be, no better and no worse. He watched us all, with an expression more of apathy than alarm.

As for my Christian self, I would not be daunted. A murmured threat is a cowardly thing, and a grim-set face is often an empty dare. A few of the Irish carried pick handles or sticks, but
they looked more troubled than confident to me. And duty must be done, no matter the cost. I met the eyes that searched me out from the tattered ranks of the crowd, returning every gaze until it weakened.

I knew those faces. I am not so hard as that white-haired priest would have me, and I know the Irish are human, if truculent and wanting a proper scrub. I do not mean to suggest the least indulgence. I am no friend to tumult and disorder. I know full well the Irish tend to vice, nor would I wish such neighbors for my family. But I wished the Irish no harm.

Their leanness and their rags make me uneasy, see. Speaking as a Christian, who has read his Bible through, and more than once. Simple enough it is to condemn, when a fellow knows his belly will be filled. We overlook our brother’s plight, so long as we may banish him from view. The priest was right about that much. Those miners and their families, pale to a wasting and coughing in the cold, might have liked to hang me from a tree. Yet, I could not hate them any more than fear them. The Irish are a burden we must shoulder, although you will agree they must behave.

I think my true emotion was “embarrassment” that day. Although I cannot explain the reason why. My thoughts were as confused as when I make an effort to read in Mr. Emerson, whose genius lies beyond my comprehension.

Oh, the Irish.

I thought of the green flag of their volunteers, climbing the slope across Antietam Creek. Those men fought for our Union like maddened tigers, peerless in the extravagance of their courage. Yet, they did not shout for Lincoln and liberty. They rushed forward with cries of “Fontenoy!” and
“Erin go brach!”
As if the Rebels wore coats of red, not gray. As if the Irish cared naught for the names of countries or the passage of centuries, but only for wreaking vengeance for old wrongs.

Whatever their flaws, those men were brave to a folly.

The Irish at home stood hard against the war, unlike their brethren under General Meagher. Quick with their hatreds, those miners knew only that everyone wished them ill who did
not share the sorrows of the Gael. I might have been a Chinaman, for all the human brotherhood they saw in me.

Twas in Black ’47 and thereafter that England let them starve to death on the roads and watched their children die at the poor-house gates, while grain ships left the Liffey and the Shannon, brimming full to enrich Britannia’s merchants. Parliament denied there was a problem, for many of its members were absentee landlords who found the Irish tenant an inconvenience. Millions died of neglect and blackened potatoes.

Some claim that half the population died. Of course, the Irish are given to exaggeration. But the landlords stayed in London, or idled in the country homes of their kind, far from the typhus, hunger and foreclosures. They let the Irish die and called it virtue, arguing that the poor must not be indulged. The blight upon their praties struck the Irish like the plagues of Egypt. It set the living to wander the great, wide world. And bitter they went.

I met them first in India. They came to fight and drink their soldiers’ pay, sweating in scarlet coats that smelled of voyages. They were savage with the Hindoo and the Seekh, as if those brown men had been Cromwell’s own. No soldiers were as careless of their lives as were the Irish, and their battle cries cut deep as bayonets. The niggers feared them worse than grape and canister. Yet, in the barracks the Irish were shiftless and docile, and had to be forced to their tasks by corporals and sergeants. Lions in their cups, they were meek in the morning, and most of their ailments were cured by a stint in the lock-house. They would have swallowed gin in the heathen sun, at noon, if we had let them. They sang, and cursed, and wept like little children. Laugh they would at a comrade’s grisly death, only to bawl and cry as they reminisced. In garrison, they were troublesome and untidy, but no man stood more stalwart in a fight. They feared their priests, held grudges, and told lies.

I had an Irish soldier whom I liked, young Jimmy Molloy, with whom you have made acquaintance. But he went wrong and spoiled his life for a trifle. Twas only his luck and a passage
to America that gave him a second chance and set him up proper.

Well, all of that was far away in India, where different rules apply and character fails us. Now I stood in the stubble of a graveyard, above the elms and below the silver birches, in the autumn chill that pricks.

I marked a well-hewn Irishman who stood out from the rest, as some men do. Black as polished coal he seemed, although his flesh was white as mine or yours. He did not have the smeared face of a miner—not that day—but wore a beard like a pirate’s in a book. Handsome in a stern and manly fashion, he looked as if his mouth had never smiled. At first, I thought him in the prime of life, perhaps of mine own age of thirty-four, but beards deceive. At a second glance I judged him ten years younger. What he possessed was that special thing for which we lack a word, but which sets a man apart as born to lead, despite his age or family antecedents. He did not give commands or say one word. Yet, I sensed that men would follow him into peril.

I would not have chosen that fellow for mine enemy.

My navvies dug slowly and should have been finished long since, given that the grave had been turned time and again. Part of their slowness was fear and sloth, but part come of their payment by the hour. Hired from the waster class of Pottsville, they were men of the streets, whose appetites killed pride. We had brought them in a wagon, under guard. For many’s the man will accept a task, only to change his mind as the work approaches.

The guards themselves, a dull confusion of deputies, fingered ill-kept Colts and looked all nerves. They thinned ranks without permission, until only a sturdy pair were left beside me, while the others stood ready to flee, over by the horses. I meant to do all I could to avoid a fight, because I knew a fight would bring no good, but also because I did not trust my men. A coward with a pistol is no match for a man of courage with his fists. And I did not believe the Irish were afraid of us.

They let us dig, the Irish did. Watching all the while. Somber as Pushtoons lurking in the Khyber. Even the children kept
their peace, but their eyes were avid and anxious, for they had caught the spirit from their parents. The wind pulled hair from shawls, blew shawls from shoulders. And a great, swollen miner’s paw would catch the fabric, replacing it on a slump-shouldered wife with a delicacy that would have shamed a lacemaker. Great ones for the family they are, the Irish. Although not half so responsible as the Welsh. For the Irish love and squander, as if they think tomorrow is a myth, while the Welshman saves, and mends, and minds his business.

The wind keened. Its force drove copper leaves across the hillside. Overhead, the clouds were dark and slack-bellied, and the air moistened our faces. All smelled of earth and rot and approaching rain.

Father Wilde come down at last, with his skirts blowing black behind him and a little cap clutched to his head. The Irish marked his appearance and kept their distance. Yet, somehow, they paid him less deference than I expected. As if he were a player unsuited to the day’s match. He took his stance apart from the pack and folded his arms over his chest, reaching up now and then to secure his cap. He wore that expression which priests and such are taught for times when the world is not to rights. Impassive to a blankness he was.

I could not see his eyes from where I stood.

One more fellow joined us for the finale. A gentleman in a long, brown coat come stumbling up the hill, his anxiety too urgent for his legs. As he rushed up I saw the look of a man who was frightened every day of his life, the face of a man born to be blamed for the heedlessness of others. He wore a Derby hat that tempted the wind, and when he reached to snatch it back he showed the world the bald crown of his head.

I decided the fellow must be Mr. Oliver, the superintendent of the works, to whom young Boland had confessed his crime. I had not had time to visit him before we began our digging, since calling on the priest seemed more important, given the power such folk hold over the Irish. But I had meant to call on him when we finished.

His aspect matched the report that I possessed of him. When Daniel Boland approached him, wild with the need to confess his crime, Mr. Oliver had done his best to avoid the business, putting young Boland off as best he could. As the superintendent of the mines and the colliery, Mr. Oliver bore the responsibility for good order and obedience to the law. But he had gone down to Minersville to see the magistrate only under protest, after the Irish had pressed him to it and given their promise that he would not be slain for his troubles.