Two in the Field

by Darryl Brock

  I watched them for a while, pondering how to get Andy alone. Feeling eyes on me, I looked to the side and found myself staring at Harry Wright.

  “Congratulations, Harry,” I said. “Your club looked great—but I wish you were still out in center field.”

  He regarded me silently.

  “Remember me? Sam Fowler?”

  “You appeared among us suddenly on a train,” he said pointedly. “And disappeared quite as suddenly.”

  “Not by choice.” I thought about claiming I’d been laid up with terrible fever or somesuch, but Harry was good at detecting bullshit. His players had given him plenty of practice at it.

  “I see Acey and Fred aren’t with you,” I said, referring to Brainard and Waterman, star pitcher and third baseman, respectively, on the old club.

  “Asa wed a gentle woman who nursed him to health when he nearly died from tuberculosis—that was the winter after you left us, Mr. Fowler—and they had an infant son. Asa abandoned them both.”

  His eyes bored into mine, and I had the uncomfortable feeling that he was making a point. Did he think I’d abandoned not only my teammates but Cait?

  “I need to talk to Andy.”

  “Does he wish it?”

  “We were like brothers,” I said desperately. “I want to set things straight.”

  He looked at me for a long moment.

  “Please, Harry.”

  He rose and walked back to the players. Moments later Andy came up the aisle. His face was tight.

  “What do you want?”

  Up close I could see the worry lines that etched his forehead and bordered his eyes. With his red hair and freckles and wide-set green eyes, he still looked like the boy chosen Most Popular in his class. But it was also clear that this boy had become an adult.

  “Just to talk.” I tried not to show the hurt I felt. “To tell you I’m sorry it’s been such a long time.”

  “Grand,” he said tersely. “You said it.”

  “Why are you being this way?”

  He looked at me incredulously, his eyes red-rimmed; I remembered that he’d suffered from a chronic irritation in the past. Today he’d been one of the few Stockings to go hitless. But that couldn’t account for his reaction to me. I’d never seen this kind of anger in him.

  “Why?” he demanded. “You show up out of the blue after all this time, like your vanishing didn’t matter?”

  “If it does any good to say it,” I told him, “I missed you every day I was gone.”

  “In ’Frisco I asked for your promise to come back,” he said bitterly, “and you gave it to me.”

  I remembered: at Woodward’s Gardens, standing beside a little lake, feeling the milkiness building around me, sensing O’Donovan closing in. I’d told him that I would return to Cincinnati, and he’d taken it as a brother’s oath.

  “I have come back,” I said. “I’m here. I’m sorry it took so long. I never wanted to leave in the first place.

  You can’t imagine how hard it’s been for me to get back.”

  A noisy outburst came from the other end of the car, some of the players exulting, others groaning. I gathered that there had been side bets. Harry, who had been sitting close enough to overhear us, got up and moved rearward. He didn’t like some of his men running up large debts to others.

  Andy noted Harry’s departure, then said in low tones, “You want the cash, that’s all.”

  “What cash?”

  “The money that buried Ma.”

  “That was a gift,” I protested. “You called it a loan.”

  “And swore I’d pay it back,” he snapped. “But right now is …” He shook his head and his words trailed off.

  “Look, I didn’t come for that.”

  “Why then?” His scowl made me want to shake him until the old Andy emerged. “To get me in dutch with this club?”

  “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

  “What you want don’t hardly matter. Just your being here is plenty. You think folks don’t take notice when a killer shows up?”

  It stopped me cold. Killer …

  “Didn’t Johnny tell you what happened?” I managed to say.

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Remember? My partner in the concessions, the black man who raced bikes.”

  “Oh, yes, your pet velocipedist. He vanished, too. Your booth was taken over by a downtown restaurant.”

  Which answered one of my questions: Had Johnny stayed on in San Francisco? Apparently so. I’d hoped that he’d returned to Cincinnati and told everybody what happened on Russian Hill. Instead, all Andy knew was that O’Donovan met a violent end there. And that I’d disappeared.

  “You honestly believe I could kill somebody?”

  “You half finished Craver just with your fists,” he retorted. “The Fenians put it out that you murdered Fearghus and tried to pass it off as an accident. They claimed he was holding a gun, which shows he tried to defend himself.”

  My chest felt constricted by a sick hopelessness. Cait would have been hard pressed to deny that story if the Fenian Order stood behind it. I listened numbly as he told of reward notices for my capture posted in the Pilot, the official Catholic voice of the Boston Archdiocese, and duplicated in every other city with an Irish population. Odd to think I’d come back to find myself a wanted man.

  Two Hartford players entered from an adjoining car, saw Andy, and headed toward us. I inclined my head toward the door, and Andy followed. Outside, we stood on a small platform behind a safety railing. The rush of night air felt mild and fresh after the car’s closeness. A bright three-quarter moon lit Andy’s features.

  “Aren’t the Fenians washed up by now?” I asked.

  “New policies and leaders—but they never forget,” he said. “Red Jim still comes around every so often, askin’ if I’ve seen you.”

  “McDermott?” I’d last seen the red-haired gambler in a Utah jail, riddled with bullets. “He’s loose again?”

  “More than that, he claims that when he found out you were a paid informer and assassin, he set out to stop you from killing Fearghus.”

  “Jesus Christ.” To the Irish an informer was probably even lower than an assassin. The two combined could hardly be worse.

  “But you ambushed Fearghus first,” Andy finished.

  “That isn’t how it happened,” I said, and, leaving out the shadowy form I’d taken to be the ghost of Colm O’Neill, I told him what had transpired.

  As he listened, his face softened slightly, and when he said, “So why’d you hide out?” he sounded curious as well as accusatory.

  “I didn’t,” I said. “After all, it was O’Donovan who tried to kill me.”

  “Hide from the Fenians, I mean.”

  “I didn’t even know they blamed me.”

  He blinked and rubbed his eyes. “Okay, then, where have you been, Sam?”

  “Remember that night in Washington?” I said, deciding to push it all the way. “When I carried on about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and you said I was talking crazy?”

  He nodded.

  “I knew what would be standing in that spot in the next century because that’s where I’m from—the future.”

  I waited anxiously for his reaction.

  He blinked again and for the first time showed a trace of a smile. “When you first showed up,” he said, “and Champion caught us drinking and you passed out for three days …”

  “Right,” I said. “I woke up in Rochester with you staring at me.”

  “Well, while you slept I went through your billfold.” He paused to let that sink in. “I found a little chromo of you on a hard celluloid card that said, ‘California Driver License’ and gave you the right to operate a ‘motor vehicle.’ Another one said something about ‘airlines.’ There was queer-looking money, too, and everything had dates 130 years ahead.”

  My God, he’d known.

  “Did you tell anybody?”

  With a soft laugh he shook
his head. “They’d’ve put one or both of us in a lunatic refuge,” he said. “I felt drawn to you, like it was all supposed to happen. So I decided to play it out, see where it would go.”

  “I felt the same way.” I paused while the cars jolted and rattled over a rough section of track. “You never told Cait?”

  He shook his head. “After you didn’t come back, I couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t have forgiven me for knowing it all along and letting her fall in love.” He paused and studied me. “So that’s truly where you’ve been? Back in your own time?”

  I nodded. “It’s the last thing I wanted, though.”

  The compartment door opened behind us and Harry Wright’s head emerged. He looked relieved to see us.

  “It’s okay,” Andy told him. “We’re just talkin’ about my family.”

  He waited until Harry retreated again. “I’m married now,” he said quietly.

  “You are? Congratulations!”

  “We had Andy Jr. two months ago.”

  “That’s great!”

  “He’s sickly, Sam, which is why I can’t pay you back.”

  “Will you come off that!” I said heatedly. “Did I pay you for taking care of me when I didn’t know a soul? Or for jumping on Craver’s back when I was about to get stomped?”

  “No.” He looked troubled.

  “Andy, I’ve got to find Cait. I never want to leave her again. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.” He looked down at his feet. “Last time we were together she accused me of caring only about ball-playing. Said I was indifferent to the cause of Ireland, and shouldn’t be looking to see her again. Since then I haven’t had any word from her. Neither has our sister Bridget.”

  I felt unsteady, as if the floor were about to fall away. I’d been so sure that he would lead me to Cait. Now what the hell would I do?

  “Last year, the Reds and the Athletics went on a tour to England,” he went on. “I crossed over to County Cavan, to see where I’d come from. I saw the tiny plots of land—the pisspoor conacres—we’d rented, and heard all about The Starving, when the potatoes turned black and the stores of oats ran out. I’d thought our Da’ died just of drink, but I learned how the landlords broke him first. Cait was old enough to have seen some of it, but I was only a babe.”

  He described the ‘tumbling out’, when the sheriff and property agent showed up with crowbar-toting peasants and extra police at the ready. The neighborhood women keened and tore their hair and clutched at the sheriff’s knees, begging.

  My imagination filled in images as he told of peasants swarming over the house and breaking the roof beam, everything crashing down in clouds of dust. Andy’s face was stony, his voice bitter. “We were put out on the road with our main bed, a kettle, a tub, a chest, one or two stools—that was it.” A kindly neighbor had allowed them to share an outhouse with pigs and geese. They survived by eating the livestock’s feed and making soup from rushes used to weave roofs. This regimen weakened the infant Liam to the point that he died on the family’s ocean trip.

  “I send money back there regularly now,” he said. “I wish Cait knew about that.”

  I easily empathized with his feelings at being cut off from a part of his family. His pain mirrored mine. “I’ll tell her about it when I find her,” I promised. “You have no clue at all where she is?”

  He shook his head. “All I know is, three or four years ago she went with General O’Neill to recruit Irish boys out of the hard-coal mines in Pennsylvania.”

  “Recruit them for what?” I asked. “Invade Canada again?”

  “No, at least not directly. I think it had to do with settlements in the west.”

  When he said “west” I felt the pull again. It had to be the direction to Cait.

  “I guess I’ll be heading for coal country,” I told him.

  A troubled frown creased his forehead. “In that case, there’s something else you need to know. I heard a great deal on the subject in Cavan, where the societies originated.”

  “What societies?”

  The train began to slow as we approached a station.

  “Secret ones,” he said. “They came over here with the coal miners. In the old country they were called Whiteboys or Threshers.” He explained that they operated by terror, flaying the skin off enemies with wire carding brushes or houghing them—cutting the tendon above the heel—to leave them as living examples.

  Great, I thought.

  “They’re doing this where Cait went?”

  He nodded somberly. “They’ve likely moved up to guns and dynamite,” he said, “but I’ve heard they still give warning notes with black spots.”

  A suspicion dawned. “What name do they go by?”

  “Well, the one most used goes back to a time in Ireland when some of them hid themselves as women.”

  “And that is?”

  “Molly Maguires.”

  NINE

  The trip from Boston to the heart of Pennsylvania’s anthracite region covers three hundred miles, but spring storms had knocked out bridges, and it took me nearly five days to get there on a bewildering succession of railroad lines.

  The sodden weather matched the gloomy landscape: hills sawtoothed with man-made gorges; outcroppings and ridges standing black against the sky. At each successive stop the towns grew smaller and shabbier, the people poorer and more sickly. Their shacks emitted thin trails of smoke that mixed with the rainclouds and vapors in the valleys. The coal settlements were called “patches.” The majority were Irish, with pockets of Scottish and Welsh. The Irish looked the poorest.

  Besides what Andy had told me, most of what I knew about the Molly Maguires came from an old Sean Connery movie I’d seen in the 1970s. Led by Connery, the Mollies resisted the mine operators and the police. They were infiltrated by a Pinkerton (Richard Harris) who befriended them, sparked a romance with a beautiful Irish girl (Samantha Eggar) and even helped plan some of their actions. His court testimony got Connery and other leading Mollies hanged. Sweet guy. The only downside for him, as I recalled, had been a mild case of angst over not winding up with Eggar.

  In late afternoon I reached Pottsville, a tranquil pine-shaded town with a river coiling through its center. The spired churches and frame houses looked far too prosperous to harbor desperate strikers. The accents I heard at the train station were not Irish but German. I asked the ticketmaster how to find the striking miners.

  “Nearest patch would be Minersville,” he said. “You can take the cars to Schuylkill Haven and connect there or hire a mule wagon to take you over Sharp Mountain.”

  Given the weather, his second choice didn’t sound good. Resigning myself to yet more train time, I bought a ticket on the Carbon & Schuylkill, a branch of the Reading. I learned from the ticketmaster that it was owned by a bigwig named Gowen, who also controlled the anthracite fields. I seemed to recall that name from the movie.

  Outside Pottsville the rain stopped, but the sky remained laced with dark clouds. Ridges of black slag edged the swollen Schuylkill River. Minersville turned out to be basically one long mud-filled street between the heaps of slag and cinders. The foreboding look of the bunkers and winding towers and conveyers of the vacant collieries was heightened by a guard patrolling with a shotgun.

  McHay’s Tavern, a block from the station, offered a sullen welcome. I stepped over a pungent pool of mule piss in front and into a dark, ill-smelling room occupied by out-of-work miners. Early drinkers. I felt their stares as I set my valise down at the end of the “bar,” in this case two long planks resting on barrels. “Who are ye?” said the barkeep, a giant with arms like a pair of bellows.

  Not the warmest of welcomes.

  Since Fenians could be lurking anywhere, I’d given the matter of my identity some thought. “Hemingway,” I said, and ordered a whiskey to fight the chill. “Journalist.”

  “Another one of those, is it?” He set a smudged glass before me.

  “You’ve had others?”

&
nbsp; He thrust a recent Leslie’s Illustrated at me. It featured the striking miners with a picture titled “The Last Loaf” showing a ragged woman unable to feed her starving children. “Which paper ye from?” he demanded.

  The Chronicle didn’t seem viable here. “Atlantic Monthly,” I told him. “We’re thinking of doing a feature.”

  “Oh, are ye now,” he said. “Maybe for once ye’ll get it right. How about instead of ‘economic conditions’ ”—he jabbed a thick finger at the Leslie’s text—“putting the blame where it belongs—on Gowen and the other fine-haired fookers in charge of the mines?”

  I nodded judiciously, as if it sounded reasonable. “I’m on another assignment first,” I told him. “Namely, to catch up on General O’Neill’s current projects.”

  He stared at me.

  “John O’Neill,” I prompted. “The Fenian leader.”

  “To be sure,” he said.

  A man slouching at the bar sang in drunken slurs:

  “Jack O’Neill went up the hill,

  The bloody Canucks to slaughter,

  But Jack came back in a U.S. hack

  Much sooner than he oughter.”

  “Shut your sotted mouth!” the bartender roared, quieting the drunk and stifling laughter. “O’Neill took up arms for Irishmen! I’ll not have him lowered!”

  The room was silent.

  “I’m not looking to lower him,” I said. “I’m aware that many people regard the General as a hero.”

  “Damn square he is!”

  “That’s why our readers will be interested in what he’s doing now. My information is that he came here to recruit Irishmen.”

  He thrust his face close to mine, his breath foul. “Is it not the breaker ye really want to ask about?”

  I leaned away. “What’s that?”

  “Ye’re ignorant of it?” His eyes bored into mine and I realized that he was conducting a primitive lie detector test, watching my pupils for dilation. “Are ye?”

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

  “A breaker crushes coal.” As if talking to a lout, eyes fixed on mine, he described a high, sloping-roofed building where a steam elevator lifted lumps of anthracite weighing up to three hundred pounds each to the top and then dumped them into a big hopper or funnel that led to the crushing machinery, teeth-like grinders. The chunks fell to screens where they were sorted and then loaded on railway cars. “But ye see, except for the metal parts, the breaker’s made of wood.”