by Tracy Kidder
So much past had collected in this place for him that it was always present, and often just up the street ahead. Near dark Tommy turned the supervisor’s cruiser into the parking lot of an apartment complex, and, scanning the landscape as usual, he spotted a middle-aged couple walking arm in arm toward one of the buildings. Tommy drove up beside them. “How are you?” he asked the man.
Tommy studied him—neatly dressed, clean-shaven, evidently sober—and thought, “A hundred and eighty degrees.” When this man used to get arrested in nearby towns, he’d tell the cops he was Tommy O’Connor’s brother. Three years ago, Tommy found him lying in a filthy sleeping bag in a corner of the abandoned grocery store on King Street, amid empty liquor bottles and used hypodermic needles. In a sleeping bag next to him lay a corpse, an elderly drunk who must have died several hours before. The man now standing in front of Tommy had lain with his back propped against the wall, as if sitting up in bed, chatting away to the corpse. Tommy took him to the diner across the street, got him halfway sobered up, then started in on him. “You’re gonna end up like that guy you were talking to.” Tommy went on and on. Finally, the man had started crying.
“Good, Tommy, good,” the man said now. His eyes moved away. He smiled toward his shoes. It might have been a grimace.
“Are you Tommy O’Connor?” asked the woman. She held on to the man’s arm, held on to it hard, it seemed.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“God bless you,” she said. “God bless you.”
Tommy smiled, but in a moment said good-bye. If he let her go on and started feeling too smug, he might regret it—if, a month or a year from now, a cop from Amherst or Hadley called and said once again, “We got your brother locked up here. What do ya want us to do with him?”
It snowed again, the skies cleared, and for an afternoon the city and the country roads looked freshly painted. By the next evening they were grimy, gray, and sandy, and the whole town looked to Tommy like a graveyard. Then it snowed again, another whistling near-blizzard. He decided to drive around the rural parts of town. The cruiser’s headlights bored into wind-driven, sharply angled snow. Frosted tree limbs hung low over two-lane country roads. Tommy drove hunched over, peering out into the swarming snow. “This is a good thing to do on a night like this. In case someone’s wife is stuck out here.”
He tuned one of his radios to the Holyoke police frequency. Maybe one of their car chases would end up in Northampton. They were always busy down there, too busy. He turned Holyoke off. “It’s too cold for crime,” he said again. Then his eyebrows darted up, slashes of color against pale winter skin, and his face opened up, and he cried, “But, hey! There’s always spring!”
It kept on snowing, though; every few days, it seemed. Tommy used to love a good snowstorm, just a while ago. He’d planned to ski on his days off this winter—the mountains to the north lay deep in snow, deeper than in any year he could remember—and yet he’d gone only a few times. He didn’t know exactly why. Only halfway to the vernal equinox, and already a general mood of exhaustion had seemed to settle over the town, the kind of exhaustion that comes from waiting for an end that looks too far away. Maybe, he thought, the mood was catching.
He was tired of snow, tired of wet floors, tired of reaching out his window and snapping ice off the cruiser’s windshield wipers, tired of listening to police calls in Holyoke as if he were no more than a wannabe scanner buff. He couldn’t remember a winter that made his town seem so gloomy. At the door of Dunkin’ Donuts one of the local undertakers told him, “Twenty funerals in a month and five suicides. I’m sick of it.”
“Me, too.” He drove away from D&Ds in silence. Then he said, “All right, I’m gonna get myself out of my hole.”
If only the chief would hurry up and install him as detective sergeant. The delay grew embarrassing. People kept asking him, “So when are you going back in the bureau?” Any day now rumors would start, saying that O’Connor must have done something wrong. He probably beat up a prisoner or stole some drugs. It was hard not to care what the town thought. Around here gossip could turn into something like an inquisition.
And a detective always had some cases to work on. “See, if I was back in the bureau, I could be doing something now, instead of driving around aimlessly in this shit. But I won’t let it bother me, so that I hate my job.”
Nothing much happened at the start of the shift, on a cold clear afternoon already sinking toward twilight when Tommy headed out from the station. He stopped a carful of boys who had obviously been smoking blunts, but found only stems and seeds of marijuana and a pipe, and sent them away with the usual advice about wasting their time on drugs, and with the usual parting words: “Stay out of trouble.” Then one of his old informants beeped him, to say that a certain woman was trying to sell him cocaine. The woman was another informant, who was actually trying to set up the informant who’d beeped him. Rats ratting on rats. It was amusing, also a good way of checking up on them.
Around dusk Tommy pulled into the lot outside Dunkin’ Donuts to get his coffee. He turned in his seat, reaching for the door handle, and there was Rick, standing at his window.
Tommy rolled it down. “How ya doin’?”
“As well as can be expected.”
Rick crouched down by the door, a graceful and athletic movement. “Guess what my wife did? All the presents I sent to the kids, she gave them to the D.A.’s office and they opened all of them. Who the hell do they think I am?”
“It’s like you grew a third eye or something,” Tommy said.
“It’s the nineties equivalent of leprosy,” said Rick.
Tommy looked away, and wet his lips. For a moment neither spoke.
“You gettin’ to the gym?” Tommy asked.
“Every day.”
“How are your parents?”
“My wife’s position is that there should be a child care person there when my kids visit my parents.”
“Jack was home,” said Tommy. “Did you see him?”
They talked awhile about their families. Then Rick said, “My wife’s having an affair.”
Tommy looked at him sharply. “How far has that gone?”
“She’s given him my computer, and our camcorder. I ran into him. I said, ‘I understand you have a camcorder of mine.’ He said, ‘You’re going to have to bring that up with your wife’s attorney.’ I said, ‘Fine. I just thought I could save my wife some money.’ ”
“I wouldn’t try to save her a penny,” said Tommy.
Silence came between them again.
“And it’s going to trial?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Rick. “They’re offering me anything I want if I plead out.” But Rick wasn’t going to do that. His voice was full of irony. “Oh, and the D.A.’s office has made a motion to intervene in my divorce.”
The pause was longer this time.
“I don’t know what to say, Rick. It’s a lot, huh.”
“Oh, well.”
Tommy laughed. “Keep up the exercise.”
“Hey, no body fat. Five months of sobriety.”
“Well, I gotta go up to that candlelight vigil, Rick. I’ll see you at the gym. I’ll be going there in the mornings again.”
Tommy drove back toward the station, without coffee. “What do you say to him? That’s why I don’t call him too often. What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, that’s too bad’?… Well, maybe he didn’t do it.” That line about the leprosy of the nineties. What was Rick saying? That Tommy was avoiding him, that he’d noticed?
He drove the rest of the way to the station in silence, went inside, put on his round policeman’s hat, then walked up Center Street to the front of the First Church. A small crowd had gathered there, a crowd in heavy coats, all holding candles. Their collective breath rose in the air beneath the streetlights, far below the great stone spire and the city clock. Tommy took a candle. When the TV cameras arrived, they all went inside.
The grand nave of the old church had a yellowish tint, l
ike golden twilight. Up on a table by the pulpit stood a studio-type photograph of the victims in the Seabrooks case, a young woman and a smiling little boy, their faces side by side.
Tommy glanced at it. It was on this night three years ago that he had found their bodies. He didn’t feel upset. He remembered feeling upset. He believed in ceremonies like tonight’s memorial service. The family and the town were trying to make something good out of something evil. They should try to keep the memory alive. But personally, he wouldn’t mind forgetting the whole thing. The other day, anticipating this ceremony, he’d said, “There’s a lot of things you can do with a beautiful little kid like that. Besides kill it.”
Tommy sat down in a pew. The minister and Chief Sienkiewicz and the district attorney and a glamorous-looking female TV anchorperson from Springfield all came up to the pulpit and gave speeches. The woman from the TV station started out by saying it was so cold outside her lips felt frozen. Tommy smiled. “And wouldn’t a lot of guys here like to warm ’em up,” he murmured. Then he composed his face. This was a Protestant church, but a church nonetheless. The speeches were all on the same theme. The anniversary of these two deaths must become the beginning of an end to domestic violence. Good would triumph over evil. No new recipes for pulling off that feat were offered. But they were worthy, hopeful speeches, saying all the things that should be said. They weren’t hard to listen to, except for the last one.
The dead woman’s sister ascended the pulpit. “How could a father do those things to his wife and a son?” she said. “I wonder if I can explain to my son. If I can understand. I can’t! What screams they must have endured the last moments of their life.” There was an undercurrent in her voice, like sobbing in the background. “We can’t carve a pumpkin face, can’t remove a knife from a dishwasher, can’t watch certain TV shows, and can’t take the air out of a blow-up toy, without thinking of them.” Tommy lowered his head a little, and raised his thumbnail to his teeth. He scraped it, looking up at the woman from the tops of his eyes. She was tall and thin, and looked taller than she was, from where Tommy sat, down below the pulpit in his pew. She looked like someone who would ordinarily keep you at a friendly distance, and now it was as if she were opening the door to her boudoir. Inside, she and her dead sister were getting dressed: “When we collected her belongings, there was a single pearl barrette. I thought, ‘Oh, my God, she just put her hair up.’ Who knew it would be for the last time? I cannot put on a barrette without thinking of her. The smell of soap brings her back, the act of shaving my legs and giving myself a facial, acts we did together.”
The service ended. Mayor Ford bustled past Tommy, wiping her eyes with a tissue. She patted Tommy’s arm. He headed back toward the station. His voice echoed off the tall stone wall of the church, at the top of Center Street. “Well, this has been a banner evening so far.” Then the sour look departed, and Father O’Connor returned. “But the sister did a good job, huh?”
In the household of Tommy’s youth, everything was tinted green. You absorbed Irish history just by living there. Looking back, Tommy had the impression that even his Polish mother had come to feel she was Irish. He felt impatient with the current tendency for ethnic labeling. “I think we’ve put too much into names,” he said. But it wasn’t as if ethnicity didn’t matter to him. “I think it’s great that someone’s proud of their heritage. I certainly am. But don’t kill it with names.”
About halfway up Hospital Hill, a huge oblong stone stands upright on a pedestal, like a big tombstone. No one in town seemed to remember who put it there, or when, or why. Some local people assumed it marked the site of Northampton’s gallows. Eleven years earlier, at any rate, it had become a memorial to the town’s most notorious hanging. One day Tommy parked his cruiser and climbed up to the stone. A plaque was fastened to it. The inscription read:
DOMINIC DALEY
JAMES HALLIGAN
EXECUTED 1806
EXONERATED 1984
“One of the arguments against the death penalty,” said Tommy, looking at the plaque. He didn’t agree with most of those arguments. Reminded that execution was not a deterrent to murder, he’d reply, “It is for the person who gets executed.” But this was a place for longer thoughts. “Like I say, in 1806 being Irish was a crime. Just like today—whoever’s on the bottom of the totem pole gets blamed.” He stood there for a few minutes, the old buildings of the defunct state mental hospital behind him, the town’s favorite sledding hill off to his left. He looked downhill to the east, over the Smith playing fields and riding stables. “I don’t know if this is where they were hanged or not. Nice place to hang somebody, if it was.”
On November 10, 1805, a young traveler named Marcus Lyon was found murdered, a bullet in his chest, his skull caved in, some miles south of Northampton. The body lay in the shallows of the Chicopee River near Wilbraham, then part of Hampshire County. Northampton was the county seat, so the case became in part Northampton’s. Caleb Strong, the governor of Massachusetts and a favorite son of the town, was running for another term. He posted a reward of $500 for the murderer of Lyon, an extraordinary sum back then. A posse rode out of Northampton, and on the twelfth arrested two Irish Catholics, James Halligan and Dominic Daley, who were about to board a boat for New York City. The suspects claimed they were innocent. They languished for about five months in the county jail downtown. The transcript of the trial, informally compiled by an anonymous “member of the bar,” describes a vigorous prosecution. The state’s attorney general came from Boston to perform it. He was running for governor against Strong.
The old courthouse was too small for the occasion. So the authorities repaired to the town’s largest public theater, the Old Church on Meeting House Hill. The crowd filled every seat. The overflow peered in the windows. The judges and the lawyers sat on a stage hastily erected in front of the pulpit. None of the chroniclers describes the defendants’ location. Halligan was twenty-seven. A witness to the events remembered him as short and “robust,” and claimed he was illiterate. Daley, thirty-four, was “well-educated,” and of a more refined appearance—“rather tall, a well formed athletic man.” Daley also had a little child and a “fine looking” wife.
The town had erected this church in 1737, after the upper gallery of the previous one had fallen down during Sunday services. No one had been injured, but seventy years later the town’s faith in balconies remained shaken. One eye-witness to the trial of Halligan and Daley wrote: “In the afternoon, just as the writer, then a small boy, with his father, reached the top of the gallery stairs, a cry was raised that the galleries were falling.” A number of people jumped out the windows. “But the alarm soon subsided, when it was seen that it was false, and the trial proceeded.”
The prosecution proved that Halligan and Daley had traveled swiftly after they passed the murder site. They showed the jury that pockets had been sewn inside the Irishmen’s long overcoats, pockets that would have nicely accommodated pistols, such as the one they must have left behind in pieces near the body. The prosecution offered no proof that the pistol was theirs and no other evidence worth mentioning, except for the testimony of a boy from around Wilbraham. He identified the two Irishmen. He said he’d seen one of them put the victim’s horse in a pasture, and that the other Irishman had stared at him, giving him a dirty look.
The trial lasted all one day and well into the night. The judges—there were two—had given the defense attorneys only a few days to prepare. The defense produced no evidence or witnesses. The court would not allow Halligan and Daley to testify: until 1866, criminal defendants in Massachusetts had only the right to remain silent. There were four defense attorneys. Three don’t seem to have tried very hard; maybe they were worried about the future of their practices. But one of them, a young lawyer named Francis Blake, made a long and eloquent closing argument. Eighty years later, when they were old men, boys whose fathers took them to the trial still remembered Blake’s address.
“That the prisoners have
been tried, convicted, and condemned, in almost every bar-room, and barber’s-shop, and in every other place of public resort in the county, is a fact which will not be contested,” he told the jurors—all men, of course, sturdy burghers, solemn-faced. Blake reviewed the evidence, pointing out that Halligan and Daley might indeed have murdered Marcus Lyon—and so might many others on that dangerous public highway. Blake’s oration makes it clear that in Northampton anti–Irish Catholic bias was not so thoroughly ingrained that it was invisible. He told the jury: “There is yet another species of prejudice, against the influence of which it is my duty to warn you. I allude to the inveterate hostility against the people of that wretched country, from which the Prisoners have emigrated, for which the people of New-England are particularly distinguished.”
Blake spoke until around ten o’clock that night. Then the presiding judge addressed the jury. He told them that if they believed the boy from Wilbraham, they must convict the prisoners, even though, on the face of it, his testimony didn’t prove much. The judge also described the boy’s testimony as “consistent,” even though the record shows it wasn’t. Then he sent the jury off to deliberate. According to one contemporary newspaper account, it took them “a few moments” to find Halligan and Daley guilty. Several days later, before another packed house, the presiding justice addressed the convicted men. He spoke to them about the wickedness of their crime, “a crime so horrid and so abhorred by every pure and virtuous mind.” He remarked on “the humane indulgence of our laws.” Then he said, “It now only remains that we … pronounce against you the sentence of the law, which is, that you Dominic Daley, be taken … to the place of execution, and that you there be hung by the neck until you are dead, and that your body be dissected and anatomized.” He said the same to Halligan. Then the judge raised his voice, apparently: “And may God Almighty have mercy on your souls!”
The convicts languished in the jail again, for months. The high sheriff, General Mattoon of Amherst, made preparations. He spent, in all, $92.80. Hezekiah Russell built the gallows. The cost for that and for “ropes and cords” was $9.17. Daley’s wife had come to Northampton. She suffered what one chronicler called “convulsions” the night before the hanging. And in the region anticipation mounted. Northampton was a town of only twenty-five hundred then. A crowd of men, women, and children, which may have numbered fifteen thousand—about half of Boston’s population at the time—crammed itself into downtown. It was a fine June day. The atmosphere was festive. Daley, the literate one, had written to a Catholic priest, pleading that he come and give them their last rites. The priest was John Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, later bishop of Boston and later still cardinal archbishop of Bordeaux. He cut an exotic figure in that dirt-street Yankee town. Northampton was still a very religious place, with a single church. Its citizens grew up believing that the pope was an agent of Satan. The keeper of the local inn, Asahel Pomeroy, refused Cheverus a room. Pomeroy’s wife later said that she “would not have been able to sleep a wink under the same roof with a Catholic priest.” Cheverus appears to have stayed with the prisoners in the jail for several days.