by Darryl Brock
At last a trace of humor, a very good sign.
“Last night,” she said tentatively, “as you went smashing forward, I thought I saw something … someone.”
I didn’t need to ask who.
“He wasn’t clear, as in the portrait of us,” she said, referring to the time we’d sat for a photographer, only to find Colm in the results. “This time he seemed to be ahead of you and around you somehow. I saw the side of his face only for an instant, but I’m positive it was him.” She set her teacup on the table. “Samuel, are you Colm?”
It was the second time she had asked me that. The first came after a seance in which the medium claimed Colm’s spirit was in the room with us. I wondered how Cait would react if this time I said yes, I was indeed her soldier boy returned. Was that what she wanted?
“Same answer as before,” I said. “I don’t think so. Except that sometimes it almost feels like he’s inside me.”
She swallowed and nodded, a small movement, as if in confirmation. “And you believe it was Colm who saved you from the bullets last night?”
“You should be telling me—you saw him and I didn’t.”
“Indeed, I saw … something.” She rose and poured water from a pitcher into her cup and rinsed it, her arms working briskly. When she turned back to me she seemed more resolute, as if she’d reached some decision. “Well, then,” she said, a humorous lilt now unmistakable, “given your special closeness to Colm, I suppose it makes sense that his uncle speaks so well of you.”
Bless you, John O’Neill, I thought.
“Is Andy’s family proper and nice?” she asked abruptly, drying her hands on a towel.
“I haven’t met them. Andy just said he was married and had a newborn boy.”
She considered that. “I’ve asked my brother for only one thing in this life,” she said at length, “which was to bury Mother in the Old Country. He accomplished it—although ’twas done with your money.”
I shook my head. “The family’s money.”
“I have something to ask of Andy now,” she went on, “and of you, Samuel.”
I waited, thinking it improbable that I could deny her anything.
“I want you to take Tim to live with Andy.” Her voice was flat and quiet.
I frowned in disbelief. “Take him away from you?”
“I’m tired, Samuel.” She brushed a wisp of hair from her cheek. “Tired of fighting against everything opposing us here—including my son.” She hesitated as if trying to find the right words. “Yesterday I saw plainly how Tim wants to be one of your kind of paid athlete. Perhaps your coming back is meant as instruction to me.”
“Instruction?” I leaned forward. “Is that all my presence here means, Cait?”
She folded her hands in her lap and shifted her gaze to an indeterminate point past my shoulder, as if seeking refuge there. I saw that her breathing had quickened. After several long moments it became clear that she would not respond.
“Tim’s a good kid,” I said finally. “He’s probably just going through a phase.”
“ ‘Phase?’ ” She twisted the defiant strand of curly hair between her fingers. “You see his ‘good’ side, Samuel, but it’s defiance I receive. And little else. I’ve reached the end of my endurance. Tim is nearing manhood and desires to be on his own. So be it.”
Her nervous fingers belied the firm words. Wondering darkly if part of her intention was to get rid of me, I said, “Why not go see Andy yourself?”
“I’m needed here,” she replied. “The colony faces terrible problems. John has put his trust in the wrong men. When he goes off to raise money and recruit new settlers, who will watch over things if I leave?”
I shrugged, which caused her to frown.
“You cannot know how it destroys people to lose their land!” she said fervently. “Here, on this rich soil, all who care to work will be squireens!”
“Excuse me,” I said. “What’s a squireen?”
“A person with title to property,” she said. “His own and not a landlord’s!”
How odd, I thought, that although I’d never much cared for zealots, part of my attraction to Cait was her fierce devotion to the Irish cause.
“I know it’s asking a great deal,” she said. “But I’ve talked to John, who is willing to use part of yesterday’s winnings to pay for Tim’s fare and lodging—as I understand yours will be paid also.”
“You know about that?”
“Yes, and I wish you success. We desperately need the money that was swindled from us. John believes you to be our best hope.”
I waited in vain for more. “What do you believe?”
“In truth, I can’t say if I even believe you’ll return here,” she replied. “Still, there’s no denying that without you the means for this attempt would not exist. I’d rather Tim didn’t start out alone, and so—”
“Cait, do you want me to leave?”
She took a breath and did not answer at first. “This trouble with Tim was coming sooner or later,” she said finally, avoiding my question. “He never wanted to be here. All he talked about was returning to the cities, where the ballists are. Your arriving rekindled all of that and made handling him even more impossible. Imagine turning to thievery to escape!” Shaking her head in disbelief, she sounded defeated.
“Like you said, you’re asking a lot.” I took her hands in mine. “I need something too, Cait. Aren’t you even the slightest bit glad that I came back here and stayed on?”
She didn’t exactly pull back physically, but became very still. “For a certainty,” she said, “you have labored as hard as any colonist and done your full share—”
“Dammit, Cait, don’t you have feelings for me?”
“I’ll not answer that.” Her voice was strained as she freed her hands. “Please don’t ask me.”
“Okay.” I stood up, trying not to sound dejected. “I’ll get Tim safely to Andy.” My head felt overloaded with conflicting thoughts. But my hear, well, no conflict resided there. I wanted to tell her that I understood what Tim was going through, what it was like to live without a father, to be always searching for something.
“I’d like Tim to have more schooling,” she said after a moment. “Will you tell Andy that?”
I promised that I would and that I’d try to influence Tim in that direction myself.
“He worships you.” She smiled a bit sadly. “And I know that you truly care for him.”
“However it works out with Tim and Andy,” I said firmly, “I’m coming back here.”
She looked up, nephrite eyes meeting mine, and nodded slowly, her hair moving in a mass of dark curls.
I wanted to take the gesture as encouragement. More than that: as an affirmation.
In Grand Central, John O’Neill handed me a letter that had just arrived. It was a confidential report from an Eastern informant who had traced the share certificates issued on the O’Neill colony to the Merchants Trust Bank in Albany. He’d also determined that McDermott was employed at John Morrissey’s gambling house in Saratoga Springs.
“Boston isn’t too far from there,” I said. “After I drop Tim off, I think I’ll pay Red Jim a little visit.”
“Be cautious,” O’Neill said. “He’s treacherous as a weasel. And Morrissey’s worse—the very devil’s spawn.” He moved to a small safe in one corner, withdrew a sheaf of paper money, and counted out a hundred dollars. Thinking to pay back part of Twain’s loan, I asked for fifty more.
“I’ll use it well,” I promised.
He handed me the bills. “I believe you will.”
Two matters remained. One was to talk Tim into apologizing to John O’Neill. “If you want to be treated like a man,” I told him, “you need to act like one. Set things right before you go.”
Reluctantly, he accompanied me to Grand Central and told his great-uncle he was sorry.
“We’ll miss you, lad.” O’Neill embraced him. “Have you made peace yet with your mother?”
Tim st
iffened and shook his head.
I knew that he and Cait had said things to each other that needed healing.
“In the fullness of time, then,” O’Neill said. “Good luck, son.” We watched Tim walk away. “My father died before I was born,” he told me. “Just like Caitlin’s boy. Did you know that?”
“No,” I said, wondering if it ran in the family.
“It’s a harder road to walk, but Tim will come through—he’s got the spirit of Colm in him.”
While I pondered that, O’Neill added, “I hope you’ll be a father to him.”
I sensed that he meant it for more than this trip. Why he favored me over ultra-Irish Tip McKee was anybody’s guess, but I’d do my damndest not to let him down.
The other thing was to tell Cait goodbye. She looked hollow-eyed and dismal when she answered my knock. “I’ll take care of Tim,” I promised her. “And I’ll make sure Andy communicates with us afterward.”
She looked at me questioningly.
“I’m coming back,” I told her again, and handed her the pendant with two doves. “This is yours.”
Together we looked at the silver figures in her palm. God knows what she was thinking. Maybe that not only did “Colm” mean “dove,” but that in me she was dealing with a man with two aspects—one of them ghostly. From that perspective, the facing birds formed a Janus. Whatever her thoughts, her fingers closed over it. The gesture gave me more pleasure than anything in a long while.
“Oh, I nearly forgot,” I said. “I might be bringing a widow and her daughter back to settle here.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “Another widow?”
“This one’s Irish,” I said, then, at a loss for further words, “Good-bye for now.”
“Good-bye, Samuel.” She sounded carefully controlled.
After several steps I wheeled around, the words bursting from me. “Cait, I love you.”
She looked at me silently.
I waited.
“I know,” she said finally, and reached out a tentative hand to touch my arm, the pressure of her fingers there only briefly, but the sensation lingering like a caress.
SEVENTEEN
“Good luck, Tim!” Linc twisted in his saddle as he started back with our horses in tow. “Don’t forget us when you’re an ace—we’ll still need a shortstop!”
The boy brightened momentarily. We stood on the dock of the Wisner station, waiting for the eastbound train. I’d expected Tim to be elated now that he was free to chase his dream, but he’d been oddly subdued. We watched Linc disappear beyond a distant rise.
“Something on your mind?” I asked.
It took him a while to spill it. Despite his brave talk of becoming a ballplayer, he felt uncertain and a bit lonely; it turned out that he’d never been away from Cait.
“She’ll be fine,” I told him. “Without you to worry over, she can get on with her own life now.” I watched him chew on that difficult notion. “Anyway, nothing’s permanent. You can always come back.”
He shook his head sorrowfully. “All they think about in O’Neill City is stuff like plowing for buckwheat in June and rye in September,” he said. “I want more.”
“Fortunately,” I said, “your mother recognizes that.”
He looked up at me. “You’ll go back to her, won’t you?”
I assured him that I would.
“She was happy in Cincinnati when you courted her, but it hurt her awful bad when you didn’t come back. You can’t do it again, Sam.”
“I don’t intend to.” Even as I said it I felt a tiny icicle of doubt. Could I really prevent myself from being thrust back into the future?
A lark’s sweet whistle came from a clump of grasses near the dock; it was the only sound besides a murmur of breeze.
“By the way,” I said, mock accusingly, “why didn’t you tell me about going to San Francisco?”
“Ma ordered me not to.”
“Some pal you are,” I teased, mussing his hair. He squirmed away.
“After we couldn’t find you,” he said, “Ma was so busy with the Fenians that I got to stay a lot with Andy.” He picked up a small stone and with one graceful motion threw it and clipped the head from a tall thistle twenty feet away. “Andy took me to the Union Grounds and taught me ball playing. Those were my best times ever, Sam.”
And now he was trying to recapture them. Well, there were worse things. At his age I’d been consumed by sports. Why put a damper on his dreams? But Tim was deluded if he believed he was ready for pro ball. The best he could hope for would be to join a junior team in Boston, meanwhile finding a way to support himself. A tall order. But kids in these times were thrust early into the world and they had to be tough.
Wumpf! Tim’s fist thudded into the cushion in my left hand. Wumpf! Wumpf! He delivered a fast one-two to my right-hand cushion.
“Good.” I backed up slowly. “Remember to breathe.”
Wumpf! He lunged and socked a cushion.
“Stop,” I said. “Look at your feet.”
Breathing heavily, he looked and shifted into proper position.
“You’ve got to keep them under you,” I said. “Otherwise, you’re out of balance.”
“You keep telling me to breathe, Sam,” he complained, “and it messes me up.”
“Oxygen feeds your cells. You’re fighting with all your body, not just your hands.” I lowered the cushions I’d bought from a train vendor. “That’s enough for this time.”
Tim’s coordination was excellent, his reflexes extremely fast. We’d had only a few sessions but already his footwork was shaping up. If he set his mind to it, he could be a fine boxer. And Cait would kill me.
“That kid’s gonna be somebody!” a voice yelled from one of the train windows where a row of heads had watched us while the locomotive took on coal and water. Station platforms usually provided enough space for brief workouts. When we didn’t spar, we threw a baseball.
Smiling, I shouted back, “He already is somebody!”
I set aside the dog-eared copy of The Innocents Abroad I’d been reading aloud. It helped pass the long train hours, and Tim loved Twain’s irreverent slant on the world. “My grandpa read me almost everything he ever wrote,” I told him.
Tim looked at me oddly. “Isn’t he still writing?”
Oops. “What he’d written up to then, I mean.” It sounded lame even to me. “Anyway, I’m planning for you to meet him.” I’d already wired ahead to let Twain know I was bringing half of his money.
Heeding Cait’s concern about schooling, I picked up newspapers each day and we duly discussed national and international events. But both of us took more interest in news of the National Base Ball Association, where Boston had taken a comfortable lead although the powerful Athletics were still in striking distance. Seeing the names of those he knew from Cincinnati—Wright, McVey, Leonard—made Tim impatient to rejoin them, and I began to worry that his expectations were impossibly high.
Tim’s private reading taste ran to nickel novels readily available on trains. Two of them had especially unlikely titles: Frank Reade, the Inventor, Chasing the James Boys with His Steam Team and The Man on the Black Horse! or The James Boys’ First Ride in Missouri.
“Did you know that Jesse hid out in caves by the Niobrara River?” Tim asked, when he could pull himself away from the lurid text. “Everybody in O’Neill City heard about that! And how Jesse’s gang boarded the UP outside Ogallala and robbed a Wells Fargo car?”
A vision of the hazel-eyed psycho and his Bible-quoting brother came to mind. The Jameses hadn’t been famous back then, but now every armed robbery in the country was attributed to them, and writers worked overtime to dream up fanciful tales.
“When Jesse was just a boy,” Tim went on avidly, “he pinched off a fingertip cleaning his gun, and yelled at his ‘dodd-dingus pistol.’ That’s how he got nicknamed Dingus.”
“So that’s where it comes from.”
“Huh?”
I explai
ned that my path once crossed the Jameses’, and that Frank had referred to his brother as Dingus.”
“Wow!” Tim sounded like the eight-year-old I’d known before. “You know the James boys!”
“I wouldn’t say that, but we rode in a compartment together. They didn’t advertise who they were, of course; I only put it together later.”
“I wish I’d been there!”
“No, you don’t.”
In Chicago I insisted that he write to Cait and tell her that he was well. I looked around to buy stationery from a train butch.
“Why not pick up a penny postcard at the next station?” Tim said. “Wouldn’t cost so much.”
“I didn’t think they’d been invented yet.”
“Sam, where you been?”
If the trains had moved faster and we’d made our connections, we might have seen the Dark Blues play the visiting New York Mutuals on July 8. Instead, we arrived the day after to find that Twain had just returned from Lexington and Concord, where he’d attended the gala centennial of the Revolution’s outbreak and been put off by thick crowds.
“The infernal things are dotting the landscape like moldering plums,” he said sourly. “Next year in Philadelphia it’s the whole nation’s birthday party, and they’ve started on it already!”
His mood brightened at Tim’s presence, and even more when Tim asked, as I’d suggested, how Tom Sawyer was coming.
“Finished!” He clapped his hands and looked at me. “I took your advice and stuck to Tom’s boyhood—which cleared a whole lot of tangles out of my course. Want to hear a section?”
We adjourned to the library, where he fired up a cigar, picked up a sheaf of manuscript pages and adjusted his spectacles. “Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush,” he read in his drawling tones. “He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high.…”
Leaning forward, engrossed, Tim sat on Mark Twain’s divan and listened. Light through the curtains highlighted gray streaks in Twain’s hair as his head rolled with the rhythms of the sentences. If nothing else, I’d provided the boy a memory to last his lifetime. I wished that Cait were there. And my daughters, too. Why couldn’t the few people on this planet that I loved ever be together?