Kerrigans: A Texas Dynasty

by Johnstone, William W.

  He welcomed the Cotter family warmly, took stock of both Shannon’s belly and Kate’s beauty but said nothing of the former and praised the latter.

  “And I have a place for you to live, Patrick,” Shamus said. “It’s not a palace but it’s a roof over your heads.”

  “It’s beholden I am to you, my brother,” Patrick said.

  “And there’s a clerk’s stool reserved for you in me office,” Shamus said. “And don’t object now, but I’ll pay you no less than five dollars a week, less two dollars for rent.”

  “That is handsome of you, Shamus,” Patrick said.

  Kate thought it somewhat less than handsome, but then, beggars can’t be choosers.

  The house was small and rough, the ground floor of a tenement, but compared to their hovel in Five Points, Kate decided it was a step up, albeit a small one.

  There were, at least, narrow windows that could be opened to let in light and fresh air and the house itself was free of the rats and other vermin that had so plagued them in New York, making each day such a misery.

  In 1852, Nashville was a growing city with almost twenty thousand inhabitants.

  It was still very much a river port town, but did have a single railroad line. Clustered around the rail yard were four machine shops that employed more than four hundred people.

  But in Kate’s day, most of the city’s manufacturers were traditional craftsmen, tinsmiths, carriage builders, and boot and shoemakers.

  “Everyone needs a saw doctor,” Joseph Kerrigan said, as he and Kate strolled along the bank of the Cumberland River close to the bustling port. “I can make a good living when we’re wed.”

  Kate nodded but said nothing.

  “It seems that since we arrived in Nashville two weeks ago you’re constantly lost in thought, but I fear not thoughts of me,” Joseph said.

  “I am thinking of you, Joe,” Kate said. “I’m worried that the secret I hide might harm you, harm us.”

  The young man smiled.

  “And what great secret can you possibly have, Kate?” he frowned. “Unless there’s someone else.”

  “There’s no one else, Joe, only you. Now and forever.”

  “Then tell me, Kate.”

  The day was warm, bright with sun, the only sound the distant clang and clatter of the dockyard. Jays quarreled in a nearby beech tree and sent down a shower of leaves and twigs. A man walking his dog stopped, and they both stared at a passing flatboat loaded with timber.

  “Joe, let us sit under the tree and I’ll tell you what is weighing so heavily on me,” Kate said.

  Once they were both settled and Kate had arranged the skirts of her morning dress, a pale blue hand-me-down from Shamus’s wife that fit quite well, for unlike her husband, she was a slender woman.

  “Well, then, Kate,” Joseph said. “Tell me what’s troubling you so. Is it your poor sister’s sorry plight?”

  “Yes, it is, but more than that.”

  Joseph Kerrigan waited. An errant breeze tossed a raven’s wing of hair over his handsome forehead and he impatiently brushed it back.

  “Three men attacked Shannon and—” Kate said.

  “I know. Your father told me.”

  “The names of those men will be branded on my heart forever.”

  Kate stared up at small white clouds gliding across the sky like lilies on a pond.

  “Bill Wooten, Tom Van Meter, and Chauncey Upsell,” she said.

  She turned and looked into Joseph’s eyes.

  “Do you wonder that I remember them so well?”

  The young man seemed to be at a loss for words, but Kate filled the silence.

  “I remember them so well because I killed all three of them. I shot them down in a warehouse stairwell and then spit on them.”

  Joseph was taken aback and his lean jaw dropped.

  “With a gun?” he said.

  “No, Joe.” She made a barrel of her forefinger. “Bang! I did it with this.”

  “But . . . but how did you get such a thing as a gun?”

  “It was a .31 caliber Colt revolver I borrowed from a friend and have since returned. At close range, it was a good enough weapon.”

  “And all three are dead?”

  “Dead as they’re ever going to be.”

  The young man was quiet for a moment.

  Then he said, “Well, Kate, may the devil make a ladder of their backbones when he’s picking apples in the gardens of hell.”

  “Then you do not blame me?”

  “Blame you? No, they got what they deserved and I admire you, Kate. What a fine, strong, brave woman you are. It’s proud I am that you’ve accepted me to be your husband, unworthy as I may be.”

  Joseph kissed Kate on the cheek.

  “I will call you Aoifa, the Irish warrior princess who slaughtered a hundred Viking warriors in a longhouse to avenge the murder of her liege lord, the noble High King Fergal MacNeil.”

  “You will do no such thing. You will call me Kate and Mrs. Kerrigan and nothing else.”

  “Then it will be so and we will never talk of dead men in a stairwell again.”

  “Up, and then give me your hand, Joe,” Kate said. “It will be time for supper soon.”

  Joseph helped Kate to her feet.

  “Joe, I was thinking when we were on the journey from Five Points that I love being outdoors in all kinds of weather, living rough and just making do.”

  “It’s a fine life if a person is cut out for such a thing, Kate.”

  “Would it not be wonderful if we had land that we could crop and graze and on which raise our children? We’d set store by our kinfolk and when trouble appeared we’d stand against it as a family.”

  “And fight, by God.”

  “Yes, we’d fight, you and I, Joe, shoulder to shoulder.”

  The young man tipped back his head and laughed.

  “It is a warrior princess you are, Kate Cotter, and no mistake. But that life is not for us. You’ll be a saw doctor’s wife and we’ll make our home right here in Nashville, not on the wild frontier among wild animals and savages.”

  “But it’s a dream, Joe, is it not?”

  “Yes, it is, Kate, but not one to hold on to for overlong.”

  “One more thing, Joe, before we can wed,” Kate said. “I have committed a grievous mortal sin three times over. We can’t stand at the altar until I go to confession and a priest has said God has forgiven me.”

  “Then we must go and talk with Father John MacDonald,” Joseph said. “He is not Irish like us, but a Scotsman born to a clan that well understands the ways of revenge. We will heed his counsel or not, Kate, but either way, it’s husband and wife we’ll be.”

  Three weeks later Kate and Joseph Kerrigan were married with the blessings of Holy Mother Church.

  It seemed that in the matter of vengeance killings, Father MacDonald was prepared to grant a little leeway.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It was agreed that Kate and her husband should move in with Patrick Cotter until they found a suitable home, Joseph steadfastly refusing any monetary help from his father.

  Weeks, then months passed and then, as Kate’s first child quickened in her belly, Shannon’s baby was born dead. A day later, Shannon lost her battle with life and passed into the darkness she had long considered a blessing.

  Patrick Cotter was devastated. The slap he’d given his daughter, never forgotten nor forgiven, racked his conscience, and he withdrew even more into himself. He no longer penned the poems that had earlier prevented him from slipping away into despair.

  On a cold, rainy fall morning, Shannon was buried in a dank, deep, and rectangular grave in the cemetery of the local Catholic Church.

  Dressed in black mourning, Kate stood by the graveside and wondered what sin her sister had committed to be born under such a dark star.

  The answer was none, of course. A child was born with original sin, washed away at birth, and no other.

  As though reading her though
ts, Joseph put his arm around Kate’s growing waist and whispered, “She’s in a far better place now.”

  Kate nodded and said, “Surely she could be in no worse.”

  Her father glanced over at her, his face empty, as though incapable of dealing with the pain that was now inflicted on him.

  As the priest finished his prayers for the dead, the sky erupted. Thunder blasted and lightning scrawled across the sky like the signature of a demented god.

  The rain grew heavier, and one of the grave diggers, a thin man with a sad, timeless face, said to Joseph, “Perhaps the ladies should withdraw.”

  The priest, soaked to the skin and late for breakfast, made a sign of the cross above the grave and then hurried into the church.

  Kate, her Uncle Shamus, and his wife followed him.

  Patrick remained at the graveside as the diggers threw down shovelfuls of dirt that drummed on the coffin lid. He stayed there for an hour and let the rain soak him and the thunder, with little respect for the grieving, bluster and threaten.

  Two weeks later he died.

  Of pneumonia, the doctor said.

  But Kate knew her father had died of a broken heart.

  Joseph Kerrigan said a prayer at Patrick’s grave side that managed to purge the worst of Kate’s grief.

  Neither of them knew that a few years later, he, too, would be dead.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Now Kate Kerrigan worried over a different Shannon, her frail little girl who ate her rye bread and milk so daintily and smiled as she did so.

  Shannon had a cough that came and went and often ran a fever that alarmed Kate.

  The child also had night sweats and needed to be seen by a doctor.

  But how to pay for one?

  Well, she would just have to find a way.

  Marry Fin Gannon? The dairyman had plenty of money.

  Kate smiled and dismissed the idea.

  After Joe, there could be no other man for her.

  “Ma, is there any more?” Shannon said, holding her up her empty milk bowl.

  Kate fancied that she looked like Mr. Dickens’ Oliver Twist.

  She poured milk into Shannon’s bowl, then the child said, “Can I have more bread, Ma?”

  “Of course you can,” Kate said, smiling. “There’s plenty.”

  But of course there was not.

  Kate gave her daughter her own meager portion and didn’t think twice about it.

  Across town, an hour’s walk away, Kate’s oldest son Trace worked in a store that had a carved wooden sign hanging above the door that proudly proclaimed:

  ARTHUR LUNDY

  GUNSMITH

  Shotgun repairs a specialty

  Picture a kindly old craftsman with spectacles perched at the end of his nose, a white beard, and twinkling blue eyes . . . and you don’t have Arthur Lundy.

  He was a cantankerous, cranky, old curmudgeon who hated children, dogs, and humanity in general and went out of his way to stamp on wildflowers. His thin nose was curved like a hook, his blue eyes were flinty and avaricious, and his skin was the color of wood ash.

  Lundy talked little and after every utterance his thin mouth snapped shut again like a steel purse.

  Yet, for some reason known only to himself and God, he liked young Trace Kerrigan.

  Lundy had been going through hard times since the war ended but not from a lack of quality in his work. No better gunsmith could be found for two hundred miles in any direction.

  The excellence of his craftsmanship had helped see Lundy through the war years, when he had labored hard for the Confederacy, repairing battle-damaged weapons, and converting old flintlock rifles and muskets, still abundant in the South, into more modern and effective percussion cap weapons.

  “I helped keep the South shooting,” he once told Trace. “Kept us in the fight. Why, Jefferson Davis his ownself sat right where you’re sitting and said, ‘Thank’ee kindly, Mr. Lundy, for all your efforts. When this war ends in victory for the Confederate States of America I’ll personally pin a gold medal on your chest.’”

  The war ended in defeat and Lundy never got his medal. To make matters worse, the Yankees didn’t care for him that much.

  Arthur Lundy was sixty-eight years old when Trace first went to work for him, but looked many years older. His shoulders, stooped from years working bent over on gun actions, were as curved as an old dowager at her knitting. His eyesight was failing and arthritis caused walnut-sized knuckles on both hands.

  Trace Kerrigan had a love for all things mechanical, but once introduced to the sculpture in steel that was a fine rifle, he wished to be nothing else but a gunsmith.

  “Remember this, Trace,” Lundy told him. “All a man needs for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife. You can do without the last, but hang on to the other two.”

  Lundy took on Trace as an informal paid apprentice. . . paid sporadically, anyway. A dozen times in the past seven months, Lundy was forced to ask Trace to allow him to record what he was owed in a ledger, to be paid when things improved.

  “Hard times coming down, Trace,” he’d say. “We have to tighten our belts, boy.”

  But those occasions brought hardship to the Kerrigan family.

  Trace kept almost none of the meager pay he received and passed the bulk of it on to his widowed mother to help with the care of the children.

  He had the Kerrigan pride and never let Lundy see the disappointment he felt at those times when the old gunsmith had not earned the money to pay him.

  But the privation cut deep and his mother felt it more keenly that anyone, though she never let it show in front of the youngsters.

  One aspect of his job, though, infuriated Trace.

  It had nothing to do with old Lundy himself, who was honest in his way, but with Lundy’s son, Alec, a mean-looking youth with the cold, calculating eyes of a carrion-eater.

  Alec was a chronic drinker and when his father was out, Trace had caught him more than once dipping his hand into the gun shop cashbox to steal whiskey money.

  The stolen dollars took the bread out of the mouths of the Kerrigan family and Trace’s dislike for the young man grew.

  Now, on the morning that Fin Gannon dunned his mother for milk money and on a week that Trace had gone into the ledger, Alec Lundy looked up from the cashbox, saw the apprentice’s eyes on him and sneered.

  “You keep your damned mouth shut, you Irish brat. I’m only taking my due.”

  “You’re stealing, Alec,” Trace said.

  “Yes, and it’s none of your damned business.”

  “Put the money back,” Trace said.

  Alec was already half-drunk and his fists bunched.

  He took a step closer to Trace and said, “Suppose I shut your mouth for you?”

  Alec was thirty years old, not as tall as Trace, but he outweighed him by thirty pounds, all of it in his chest and shoulders.

  It was rumored that Alec had once beaten a man so badly he’d almost died, and old Arthur had to pay a considerable amount of money to smooth things over.

  “Suppose you step over here and try to shut my mouth,” Trace said.

  By comparison with Lundy, Trace Kerrigan was slender, but every ounce of him was hard bone and whipcord muscle. He was young, tough with quick hands and a fighting heart.

  He’d learned his fistfighting in the hard school of the Five Points streets and though many tried, none of the boys of his age, and older, had ever cut him down to size.

  Now Trace faced up to a much bigger opponent, but had met guys like Alec before.

  Alec Lundy welcomed the fight.

  His face was livid with anger and his eyes glittered with the savage lust to smash and destroy.

  His lips bared back from yellow, prominent teeth, he said, “I’ll beat the Irish pig stink out of you, boyo.”

  Lundy was big boned and weighed two hundred pounds. He was full of raw power, untrained but brutal.

  Trace was set, his fists up and read
y, but Lundy’s right hand hardly traveled six inches before it crashed into Trace’s chin and set him reeling across the room as his flailing feet fought for balance.

  Trace’s back crashed into the front door as he fell and set its bell jangling.

  Grinning, Lundy was on him in a flash.

  The man’s booted foot crashed into Trace’s left side, trying to break ribs and drive them into his lungs.

  Gasping from pain, Trace rolled away from a second kick, grabbed the top of a workbench and dragged himself to his feet.

  Fireworks exploding in his head, Trace sucked air into his lungs and pain spiked at him with every tormented breath.

  Then Lundy came at him again.

  But slowly this time, his eager grin anticipating the kill.

  Trace moved away from Lundy’s first punch and jabbed a hard straight right into the man’s mouth. splitting his bottom lip wide open.

  Lundy took a wary step back and his eyes were wild, as though the taste of his own blood shocked him.

  Trace slipped a wild, looping right and hammered two quick punches into Lundy’s face. Lundy staggered back a step and Trace hit him again with a driving uppercut that slammed into the man’s chin and snapped his head back.

  Lundy went down on one knee, spitting blood and a tooth. He groaned and his open hand went up in a gesture of surrender.

  But there was no mercy in Trace.

  Five Points had taught him how to fight to win, not to prove himself a gentleman and allow an opponent to rise who was still capable of fight.

  Trace hit Lundy hard with a right hand hook that crashed into the side of Lundy’s face with the sound of a sledgehammer hitting a hollow log.

  This time the man fell on his right side and then rolled over onto his belly. He tried to push up with his hands, but Lundy was done. He collapsed onto his belly again and lay still.

  Trace knew the fight was over and he’d won.

  He dropped his hands and at that moment the door chimed open and Arthur Lundy stepped inside.