Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  Kate flashed her dazzling smile and continued to do so.

  “I’m sure there’s enough material in the story of my younger days for a hundred dime novels,” she said.

  “Beggin’ your pardon, Ma’am, but I’m eager to hear the tale of Kate Kerrigan,” Street said.

  “Then, Hiram, you shall at least hear some of it.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A heavy pounding at the door woke Kate Kerrigan from sleep.

  Beside her on the bed, Shannon, her youngest child, stirred and Kate whispered, “Shush, my little darling, go back to sleep.”

  The girl smiled, revealing dimples on her cheeks—where the angels had kissed her as a baby, Kate had told her—and was instantly asleep again.

  The door rattled in its frame under further pounding and Kate rose and threw a threadbare pink robe over her equally worn nightgown.

  So as not to disturb the children, she opened the door and, barefoot, stepped into the cold of the Nashville morning.

  Big Fin Gannon, his huge, red, whiskey face bookended by frizzy, muttonchop side-whiskers, stood on the sidewalk, the enamel jug Kate had left outside her door in his hand.

  “This will be the last milk you’ll get from me, Kate Kerrigan, until you pay my score,” Gannon said.

  “You and the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker will all get paid when I have the money, Fin Gannon, and you know it. Kate Kerrigan always pays her due.”

  Behind the dairyman, blurred by mist, the huge blond Percheron in the traces of the milk cart snorted, as though he put little faith in Kate’s promises.

  “Look at you Kate, as beautiful a woman as ever walked the streets of this city, yet you’re content to live in a hovel and let your children go hungry,” Gannon said.

  “I go hungry, that is true, but my children . . . never,” Kate said.

  Gannon sighed and rolled his eyes.

  “Kate Kerrigan, how many times have I offered to take you to wife?”

  “Every time you deliver the milk.”

  “I’m not a rich man, but I can offer you a brick house and a maid to take care of your needs.”

  “And my children?”

  “Yes, and them, too, if you’ll only consent to my proposal of marriage.”

  “I’ll add you to my list of suitors, Fin Gannon.”

  “Then put me to the top of the list, Kate, where I belong.”

  Gannon handed over the jug, then reached into his pocket and brought out a paper bag.

  “Here, take your milk, and some molasses candy for the little ones. And don’t forget my score now.”

  The big man turned and stepped toward his wagon.

  “Fin,” Kate said.

  Gannon stopped, his face expectant.

  “Thank you,” Kate said. “And if you ever pound like an avenging angel on my door again, I’ll take a stick to you.”

  The big man laughed.

  “God strike me, but you’re a woman any man could be proud of, Kate Kerrigan. Unless I miss my guess, you’ll tread a wide path some day.”

  Kate Kerrigan added fresh coffee, and not much of that, to the three-day-old grounds already in the pot. She added water she’d pumped from the communal well the day before and set the pot on the stove to boil.

  The girls were still asleep, as was Ivy’s twin brother Niall, but Trace and Quinn had left earlier to go to work.

  Her sons prided themselves that when they rose and dressed, they never wakened their mother or the young ’uns.

  But Kate always woke, and worried, though she never told that to her sons.

  She stepped to the single window that overlooked Barnes Street, a narrow lane in the impoverished warren of tenements that made up Nashville’s Sixth Ward Black Bottom slum district.

  As the poor struggled to survive, Black Bottom filled up with saloons, whorehouses, and gambling joints, adding to the violent crime and nightly murders that made the area a living hell.

  Despite stinking outdoor toilets and coal stoves and fireplaces that covered everything in soot, Kate Kerrigan rose above the squalor and, with the optimism of the Irish, kept her eyes fixed on ONE DAY... the day she and the children would leave this poverty behind and move on to a better life.

  Kate stared out at the mist that moved through the street like a gray ghost.

  The studded working boots of a passerby clattered on the cobbles, but the man himself was lost in the fog.

  As she often did, Kate Kerrigan wondered if God had taken a dislike to her and that the Blessed Virgin had turned her back on she and her family.

  But a frown gathered between her beautiful eyes as she told herself she was blasphemous for allowing such thoughts to enter her head.

  God was God, after all, surely under no obligation to answer to a simple young Irishwoman who, when she thought about it, had to admit she had received some fine blessings along with lots of intolerable difficulties.

  Now one of those blessings, Shannon, sat up in bed and knuckled her eyes.

  “Has the bad man gone, Mama?” she said.

  Kate smiled and sat on the bed beside the child.

  “He’s gone. It was only Fin Gannon bringing the milk.” She tickled Shannon and made her giggle. “And he brought candy for you and Ivy.”

  “Can I have it?” the child said, her little face eager.

  “After breakfast. Rye bread and fresh milk to dip it in. Now isn’t that your very best favorite?”

  Shannon nodded.

  “Good. Then that’s settled. Breakfast first and candy afterward.”

  The little girl scrambled out of bed, smiling, the child’s innocent embrace of a new aborning day and of the great adventures to come.

  Kate glanced at the bed and the pillows where her husband had once laid his head and thought it looked like such a lonely place.

  He would never sleep there again.

  Kate had lost him five years before, the same year that Shannon had been born.

  Joseph Kerrigan now lay in a grave known only to God and Kate’s youngest daughter was the last part of himself he’d left her before he went off to die.

  It struck Kate how tragic it was that little Shannon was so associated with death, even in her very name.

  She’d been named after Kate’s younger sister, Shannon Marie Cotter, whose tragic fate had caused Kate’s heartbroken father to move his family from the slums of New York to the slums of Nashville.

  Shannon’s death had happened years ago, before the war and the death of her own husband, but the memory of it still tore at Kate’s heart . . .

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Like many working Irish of the day, the Cotter family had lived in a crowded, stinking tenement in Five Points, an urban crossroad slum rife with squalor, stench, poverty, and crime.

  The great novelist Charles Dickens visited the terrible place in 1842, and wrote:

  What place is this to which the squalid street conducts us? A kind of square of leprous houses, some of which are attainable only by crazy wooden stairs without. What lies behind this tottering flight of steps? Let us go on again, and plunge into the Five Points.

  This is the place; these narrow ways diverging to the right and left, and reeking everywhere with dirt and filth. Such lives as are led here, bear the same fruit as elsewhere. The coarse and bloated faces at the doors have counterparts at home and all the world over.

  Debauchery has made the very houses prematurely old. See how the rotten beams are tumbling down, and how the patched and broken windows seem to scowl dimly, like eyes that have been hurt in drunken forays. Many of these pigs live here. Do they ever wonder why their masters walk upright instead of going on all fours, and why they talk instead of grunting?

  Dickens’ visit made it the fashionable for upper crust New Yorkers, or tourists who wanted to emulate them, to take guided and protected tours of the world’s most infamous slum, its only competition for filth, poverty, and wretchedness London’s East End.

  And it was here the Irish p
redominated, along with Germans, free blacks, Jews, Italians, and various other groups and nationalities.

  Well-dressed and often accompanied by off-duty policemen or hired thugs, the lofty dandies and their satin and lace belles pranced along the dung-crusted and often bloodstained streets of the Points like visitors to a human zoo.

  The rich ogled the poor, the wretched unwashed around them, as though they believed that such human animals were incapable of realizing that they were both loathed and feared.

  It was then that Kate, just sixteen and already a stunning beauty, was introduced to the true meaning of poverty. The deep wound it caused would stay with her the rest of her long life.

  When parties of society “slummers” came through, the Cotters, a proud family descended from both Viking lords and Irish kings, generally found a way to vanish.

  They’d usually duck behind a building, a cluster of people, or a parked wagon where they could avoid the shame of seeing the contempt in the eyes of their betters.

  One fine spring day that Kate would always remember, she wore a patched but pretty gingham dress and a white straw hat with little pink flowers that her mother had bought her from a used clothing stall.

  Kate Cotter looked at her smiling reflection in a store window and thought she looked like the Queen of the May.

  But her happiness was not to last.

  A pack of aristocratic slummers, children in tow, strolled past her with perfumed kerchiefs to their faces and their heads tilted back, so they literally were looking down their noses at the miserable ones around them.

  A girl about the same age as Kate broke away from her parents and stared her with round, insolent brown eyes.

  “Why are you such a raggedy doll?” the girl said. “Does your papa not have enough money to buy you pretty clothes?”

  “I’m wearing pretty clothes,” Kate said.

  “No, you’re not. You’re raggedy and you don’t smell nice.”

  Kate had first thought the girl, who was rather plain, her blond hair in pigtails, was merely curious. But now it seemed she was determined to be mean.

  “My mama says you ragged, smelly people are not people at all, but some kind of wild animals,” the girl said. “Is that true?”

  Kate moved to walk on.

  But, much to the amusement of the girl’s wealthy parents, their daughter blocked her path and glanced to her fond mama and papa for approval.

  Their silence and smiles granted it.

  “Where do you live, dirty Raggedy?” the girl said. Her smile was nasty. “In a coal cellar?”

  Kate’s temper was always an uncertain thing and her pride had been cut to the quick.

  She slammed her strong right hand into her tormentor’s face and pushed . . . hard.

  The girl shrieked and fell on her back, conveniently, Kate would later recall with glee, on a pile of steaming dung recently deposited by a passing draft horse.

  The result was quick and inevitable.

  One of the slummers’ guardian thugs grabbed Kate by the back of her coat collar as the girl screamed and a gawping crowd gathered.

  Within a couple of minutes, a very large and red-faced policeman appeared and the dung-covered girl’s outraged mother shrieked at him, “She tried to kill my Alice! Hang her! Hang her straight away!”

  Her anger flaring red-hot, Kate struggled with the thug and kicked at his shins.

  She got a slap across the face for her pains that momentarily stunned her. The thug, a vicious brute with a knife-scarred face, drew back his fist for a crushing backhand but the copper’s voice stopped him.

  “Strike that child again, James McCoy, and you’ll see the inside of a cell this day.”

  “She’s a murderess!” Alice’s mother yelled, holding her reeking, bawling daughter at arm’s length.

  “I’ll be the judge of who’s a murderer and who is not,” the cop said.

  The jostling crowd had little love for the police, but they’d far less for slummers, and now there were ominous mutters among them as they saw one of their own abused by their common enemies.

  The cop’s name was Sam Sullivan, a drinker and sometime bare-knuckle prizefighter, and he was as Irish as the pigs o’ Docherty.

  He’d walked a Five Points beat these twenty years and had learned to tune into the mad, menacing music of an angry crowd.

  He took Kate by the arm and said to McCoy, “For God’s sake get your charges out of here or they’ll be torn to pieces.”

  McCoy could read the mood of a mob as well as Sullivan.

  Working for despised outsiders, he’d struck a slum girl—and men had been strung up from lampposts for less.

  The thug urged the slummers to leave, quietly and with no more fuss.

  But the mother wasn’t finished with the big, broken-nosed policeman just yet.

  “Constable, my husband is a friend of the police commissioner, and if that murderous girl isn’t hanged at short notice I’ll see you lose your job and your pension,” she said.

  “You go to hell, you stuck-up sow!” Kate yelled at the woman.

  But Sullivan only bowed and smiled.

  “Indeed, Ma’am? And where would his honor the commissioner find another Irishman crazy enough to walk this beat?”

  That last remark tickled the crowd, and they cheered and laughed, then directed jeers in the direction of the Alice and her parents.

  Angry Mother opened her mouth to speak again, but a handful of thrown horse dung splattered across her face and shut her up quick.

  McCoy, his face ashen, grabbed the woman by the arm and yelled, “Run!”

  The woman saw the writing on the wall as backs bent to pick up more manure . . . and rocks.

  Alarmed and thoroughly scared, she and her husband grabbed their daughter and fled, the mother’s white petticoats fluttering as she hiked up her skirts and her high-heeled boots kettle-drummed over the cobbles.

  Only the good humor of the crowd and Sam Sullivan’s significant, six-foot-four presence saved the slummers from further harm, though some young ragamuffins, hooting and hollering, gave chase for a block or two.

  “Now, young lady, you’ll come along with me,” Sullivan said.

  “And you’ll hang me, is that it?” Kate said. “Then my blood will be on your hands, Sam Sullivan.”

  “If you were a lad, I’d tell you hanging was too good for you, so I’d kick your arse,” the cop said.

  “You’d kick a girl, would you?” Kate said. “Just like a Sullivan, sheep-stealers and wife-beaters the lot of you. Just let go of my arm and I’ll give you a fistfight to remember.”

  “I’ll do no such thing, Kate Cotter,” the big cop said. “I’ll let your father deal with you. Such an honorable, law-abiding gentleman to have such a hellion of a daughter.”

  “No, throw me in a cold damp cell with the rats and the murderers,” Kate said.

  “Ah, then you’re afraid you’re father will take a stick to you,” Sullivan said as he forced his way through the teeming streets, using Kate as a battering ram.

  Bouncing off shoulders, poked by tattered parasols, Kate was incensed, boiling mad.

  “I swear, Sam Sullivan, you’ve not heard the end of this,” she said. “The next time I see you I’ll beat you within an inch of your life for treating me so!”

  The cop laughed, then said, “And here we are at your door, girl, and it’s glad I’ll be when I see the last of you.”

  Patrick Cotter was a mild-mannered man with the long, sensitive face of a martyred saint on the wall of a Gothic cathedral. He had failed at everything he’d tried, but was a poet by inclination, though none of his verses had ever found their way to print.

  Now, after he’d listened to Sam Sullivan’s story and had bid the big constable a cordial good day, he stared at his daughter and read the defiance in her eyes.

  “She called me dirty and raggedy,” Kate said. “I should have socked her, not pushed her.”

  “Dirty you’re not, raggedy, well, we co
uld argue that point,” Cotter said. “But it’s a fine thing for the police to come to my very door with my oldest daughter’s arms clamped to her side like a common criminal.”

  “Sam Sullivan refused to fight me, Pa,” Kate said. “I would have shown him a thing or two.”

  “Young ladies don’t fistfight with policemen,” her father said. “They get married, have children, and become dutiful wives and mothers. That is the natural order of things, Kate.”

  Cotter glanced out the window into the squalid street.

  “Though, I’ll admit, there’s little natural order in Five Points.”

  “Then why do we stay in this place?” Kate said.

  “Because for now it’s our home. We’ll leave one day, Kate, when I’m offered a better situation than warehouse clerk. I swear it on your sainted mother.”

  “It can’t come soon enough for me, Pa,” Kate said. “I want to look out my bedroom window and see trees.”

  “And so do I, my dear, so do I.”

  Pat Cotter’s face took on a serious expression.

  “You won’t go out again unless I am with you, Kate. Do you understand?”

  Kate nodded and touched her father’s, slender, ink-stained hand.

  “Pa, I wouldn’t hurt you or bring disgrace to you for all the world.”

  “Nor I you,” her father said.

  That day neither father nor daughter could foresee the dark cloud that gathered on their horizon, and the horrific events that would end Kate’s childhood in a tempest of rape, vengeance, and death.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Shannon Cotter, Kate’s fourteen-year-old sister, was a willful, intelligent girl with a love of the fiddle music she often heard spilling from the saloons and the works of Sir Walter Scott, represented by a couple of volumes her father had not as yet consigned to a pawnbroker.

  Not as beautiful as Kate, she was pretty nonetheless with the bright blue eyes and blond hair of a Nordic ancestor.