Bold Sons of Erin

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  “Well, I wish you luck with your investigations,” he said, with frank relief. “And I really shall pray for—”

  “Ah, that reminds me,” I told him, turning back again. “I’m terribly forgetful, Father Wilde. I did have a few questions, see.”

  He stood there, miffed to the mashers, and folded his arms across his chest, with his hands tucked into his armpits.

  “The queerest thing happened to me yesterday,” I began. “I was walking back along the turnpike in the rain—wasn’t that a rain of all rains, Father Wilde?—and the strangest old woman come out of the trees to meet me. A sorry creature she was. Disfigured like a leper from the Gospels. And mad, I do believe. She seemed all fears and spells and incantations.”

  The subject seemed a relief to him. “Ah, that would be the old German widow, no doubt. Quite an unpleasant creature, I’m told. Mad, indeed. One of God’s poor, whatever the specific nature of her affliction. It’s shameful that the Lutherans don’t look after her, I must say. She’s said to be something of a hermit. I believe she lives in a shanty on Gammon Hill.”

  He seemed nearly affable of a sudden. “I believe I may have spotted her once myself, you know. From a distance. In the summer. I was picking blackberries. We have lovely blackberries on the hillsides.”

  “I would have thought there was danger of contagion,” I said. “She appeared severely diseased.” And that she had done. As bad as the worst beggar in India.

  He shrugged. “I can’t say, of course. But she hasn’t bothered anyone here. On the contrary, I believe she flees when spotted.” He shrugged. “But she has nothing to do with us. She belongs to the German farmers in the next valley, if she belongs to anyone. I’ve heard they go to her for spells, when their cows take ill. Odd, that she should be down as far as this.”

  “And speaking of spells,” I said, “Mr. Donnelly said that the women of your parish believe Mary Boland to be a changeling, that her soul was robbed by fairies.”

  His face darkened. The morning might have been bright as gold, but his mood turned black as tar. For all that, the young priest was a handsome man, and the more so because of that white hair, not despite it. He commanded the eye, and might have been a great lion among the ladies, had his vocation been otherwise.

  “No matter what Donnelly may have told you, the women of this parish believe in Jesus Christ, Our Savior. And in God, the Father. They believe in the Holy Trinity. In Mary, the Blessed Mother of God. And in the Christian saints and martyrs. All this drivel about fairies and hauntings belongs, if anywhere, to folk tales told by the fireside. You simply cannot take it seriously.”

  His expression turned to business, as surely as a merchant’s might have done were trade the subject. “Of course, there are pagan vestiges among them, little practices and ridiculous superstitions. The Church condemns all of it. But it takes time to eliminate the traces. Time and education. But I won’t allow you to believe for a moment that anyone in this parish puts faith in that sort of thing.” He took a deep, determined breath. “They put their faith and trust in Jesus Christ.”

  “And in you, Father Wilde?”

  “I think you’re being insolent.”

  “But you will not deny there are certain superstitions among—”

  “Jones, be fair.” He looked away, disgusted with me and the world. “The correct word for all this is ‘folklore.’ Yes, it has pagan roots. And yes, the Church properly forbids all such practices and the naïve credulity associated with them. But why, I ask you, are the Irish chosen to be mocked when they repeat their old legends? At a time when the English are writing works of literature about their own countryside beliefs, their ghosts and fairies? Why, the Germans have made something of an industry of collecting such tales and publishing them with the full approbation of their finest universities. Why is it, then, that the Irish alone are considered backward, if ever they make the least mention of rural traditions?”

  “Did Mary Boland believe in ‘rural traditions,’ Father Wilde?” It was something of a blind attempt and forward, but I wanted to know more about Mrs. Boland. And of one thing I was convinced: The priest knew a great deal more than he was telling.

  “Mary Boland . . .” he said, with an almost pained reluctance, “ . . . was an unusual woman.”

  “Was she, then? How so?”

  “Jones, must we? Really?”

  “Father Wilde, there is a matter of murder. Of two—”

  “Oh, yes. I know. And you suspect me of telling lies about death certificates. I know all that.”

  “I saw her, you know.”

  “You told me that.”

  “I saw her clearly. And close. Closer than you are to me. I had her in my grip.”

  His pale looks grew far paler with each word. And his voice abandoned him.

  “She is a beautiful woman, if moonlight did not deceive me,” I continued. “With a wild beauty . . . all that long, black hair . . . and a saucy mouth on her . . . her language . . .”

  He had closed his eyes. I let him think for a moment. At war with himself, he was. Twas plain to see. But I had no inkling how deep his battles went.

  “Mary Boland’s beauty is a curse,” he said.

  “A curse, is it? That is an odd word to use, Father Wilde. For a priest, I mean. A ‘curse.’”

  “An affliction, then. I regret my intemperate language.”

  “An affliction to whom? To her husband, Daniel Boland?” I had a sudden intuition, see, and thought I might solve at least one murder on the spot.

  “To him, certainly. And to herself, I think.”

  “You heard their confessions, of course.”

  He reared up. Becoming fully the priest again. “I’m sure you know we cannot discuss such matters.”

  I ignored that point, for my interest lay elsewhere.

  “But Daniel Boland did not come to you with his hasty confession of murder, Father Wilde. He went to Mr. Oliver, at the colliery office. Why was that, do you think? The Irish do not love mine superintendents.”

  “Had Daniel Boland come to me to confess, I couldn’t have told anyone. And he wanted his guilt to be known. Evidently, he felt remorse.”

  “Perhaps I am wrong, but I believe that the rule among you is such: Had he made his confession to you in that closet you have in your church, you could not have reported his doings to anyone. But if he had come to you outside the church, simply as a figure of some authority, then—”

  “He didn’t.”

  “But why? Why Oliver? Whom I believe the people here despise? Why didn’t he come to you? It seems to me you were the natural choice. For advice and comfort. For help.”

  “Only Daniel Boland knows the answer. And he’s dead.”

  “Yes. Of cholera, I’m told. But might Mrs. Boland not know, as well? And your Mr. Donnelly? And half the village? Or all of it?”

  “You would need to ask them.”

  Twas then I took my plunge. Into the wrong pool. I thought I had the business figured out, see.

  “Did Daniel Boland commit murder out of jealousy, because General Stone made advances to Boland’s beautiful wife? During the general’s stay here, did he meet Mary Boland and try to—”

  I did not even finish. Nor did I need an answer in words. I saw by the smirk on the priest’s face that I had gotten it thoroughly wrong.

  “Perhaps you should pursue that line of reasoning,” the priest told me. He nodded his head, a dishonest man, hiding crimes when he should have been saving souls.

  Of a sudden, I sensed an untoward bitterness in me.

  “Really,” he went on, “that does sound like a plausible explanation, Major Jones. Although I had not heard it. Quite plausible, I think. Jealousy, the green-eyed monster and all that.”

  “No,” I said. “You don’t believe it. Do you? You know better.”

  “Now, really, Jones!”

  “You know the truth. But you will not say. For reasons of your own.”

  “That’s unpardonable!”
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br />   “I hope that all your reasons for silence are good ones, Father Wilde. And that God will judge them so.”

  “I don’t think I need you to tell me about God.”

  Angry I was, and spiteful. “And why is Mary Boland watching your house at night? Why are you afraid of a mere woman?”

  “You’re mad yourself.” The priest turned to go, stalking off.

  Mad I was, though not in the sense he meant. I have a temper. And sometimes it gets the best of me. Especially when my own foolishness trips me up.

  That morning, my mood was positively wicked.

  “Father Wilde,” I called after him. “The blood’s soaking through your coat.

  It was a lie. But he turned. In alarm.

  The moment he saw the set of my face, he knew that I had tricked him.

  “You’re a bastard,” he said. Which was not priestly speech.

  I was a fool, but Father Wilde was a greater one. For he trudged inside and slammed his rickety door behind him, disappearing into the bowels of his shanty.

  I stepped up to the tub and lifted the canvas.

  The linens within were browned with streaks of blood.

  SEVEN

  IT IS FAR TOO EASY TO MISJUDGE THE MAN YOU DO not like, to think him vicious because he tilts his cap to the left, not to the right, as you do. I should have known better, as a man and as a Christian. But I was snared, as easily as a youth in the flush of temper. I did not like the priest, who was arrogant. I saw his fear, but failed to weigh it wisely, and all my calculations went amiss. As we rattled down the hill toward the village and its black castle of a colliery, I blamed the priest for a range of indefinite crimes, upon the evidence of his bloody shirt and linens. Events would prove me wrong and shame me for my errors, although his shame was greater than mine own. A sinner does not have to be a criminal.

  But let that bide.

  I was not finished with the people of Heckschersville. My darling wife was worried for my safety, as Sergeant Dietrich reminded me again. But duty must come first. I had another call to pay before we returned to Pottsville.

  As we descended toward the pall of the colliery, with its fumes and fires and noise, I savored what I could of the lovely morning. Despite the dust thrown up by the works below us, the sunlight seemed a foretaste of salvation, and the wind come fresh off the hills, ripe with the memory of rain and chilled to bracing. Even the barren trees shone bright and hopeful, and a wife at her washing seemed as splendid a figure as the statues of Michael Angelo, who is famous. Twas as if this earth held naught but beauty.

  I lifted up mine eyes. How can men fail to believe in God on such an autumn day?

  We entered the black vale of coal. Drawn by mules, full-laden cars come out of a tunnel’s mouth. Weighed, then hauled up the tipple track by cables, they emptied with a roar high overhead, feeding the maw of the great machine. Rock spewed from a breaker chute, worthless. On the other side of the blackened building, wet coal shimmered out of metal funnels and into the rail cars, bound for Pottsville, then for distant markets. Whenever a mule boy emerged from below, he masked his eyes from the glare of the day, which set even the dust clouds to shimmering. The mules shied their heads slightly and trudged along the track laid into the ground. The noise was near as ferocious as that of a battle.

  I marked Mr. Donnelly by the scales, as he marked me. He was the cleanest man upon the grounds, which is not high praise.

  Licked by the switch beyond the level of custom, a wronged mule brayed. Metal struck metal, while engines chugged and steam combined with dust. A gray miasma enveloped the breaker itself, near as thick as a dust storm in the Punjab. It is no wonder that miners die of their coughs.

  I got me down from the wagon in front of the glorified shanty that served as an office. Inside, amid the most unashamed human smells, a pair of clerks bent over their ledgers, with Mr. Oliver correcting the fellow nearest me. The room looked orderly enough for so rough a place, yet something there was that hinted at indulgence.

  For all the din of the colliery yards, Mr. Oliver had not heard our wagon approach. When he noticed me, he straightened his back and frowned in blunt dismay.

  “Jones,” he said, otherwise bankrupt of speech.

  “Good morning, Mr. Oliver. A word, if you please.”

  He glanced, almost fearfully, from one clerk to the other. One of those fellows bore a family resemblance to Mr. Cooley, Mr. Donnelly’s companion from the tavern. No doubt, the clerks spied upon poor Oliver, who seemed almost a creature kept for sport.

  “In here,” Mr. Oliver said. “Come on in the office. Let’s talk in there. Though I don’t know what on earth you could want to talk to me about.”

  Nervous he was as a corporal caught shirking his duties.

  His office was a collection of papers, maps and blueprints, many long untouched, their surfaces gray with coal dust. It smelled of cheap cigars and unchanged stockings. Mr. Oliver was so unsettled he seemed at first to want me to take his chair behind the desk. Then he gathered himself, sat down, half rose again, bid me sit, and finally lowered his leanness where it belonged. His chair, one of those newfangled sorts on a swivel, creaked and tilted him backward.

  Behind his crumpled shoulders, the window was smeared to a fog. Yet, the day was so rich its light would not be kept out. The stove was dead, a needless economy in a mine office. The room seemed colder than the world without.

  “What is it?” he asked, almost shouting, when I failed to begin my queries at once. His Adam’s apple bobbed. “I can’t tell you how busy I am. I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”

  “Well, I am sorry to interrupt your labors,” I responded. The shadow of a bird swept past the glass. “But there are questions I would have answered, Mr. Oliver.”

  “What sort of questions? I don’t know anything. Nothing but what I told the magistrate. I mind my own business.”

  “And Mr. Heckscher’s business, of course.”

  “It’s my business to mind his business.”

  “Why did Daniel Boland come to you to confess to murder?”

  He nearly jumped out of his chair. He was so nervous I decided he was not guilty of anything much himself, for it is the small misdeeds that leave men unsteady.

  “How should I know? Why would I know why?” He shook his head so vehemently his chair turned with his body. “I didn’t have a thing to do with Danny Boland and his troubles, not a thing. He should’ve gone to one of his own kind and kept me out of it.”

  “You serve as a figure of authority, Mr. Oliver.”

  “He should’ve gone to his priest.”

  “Now, I have thought that very thing myself. That I have. Why do you think he did not go to Father Wilde.”

  “How should I know?”

  “Was there any matter of contention between Boland and the priest?”

  He waved his entire torso in denial, with that chair unsteady beneath him. “I wouldn’t know anything about that. Not my business. They keep to themselves, the Irish.” He said it as though he were the only white man surrounded by all the heathen tribes of Africa.

  “Was Daniel Boland a good worker? He was a skilled miner, I believe? Not simply a laborer.”

  “Boland was a miner, all right. With papers. Paid by the ton. Same as every other miner.”

  “But was he a good worker?”

  Mr. Oliver shrugged, calming now that our talk had turned toward business matters. “Not bad. He wasn’t a big man, you know. Worked hard to make up for it. Sober, most of the time. Handsome, the way they are sometimes. The men used to tease him about his wife.”

  “What did they say of Mrs. Boland? The men?”

  He gave his head a slacker shake and the motion of his Adam’s apple lessened. “Well, she was one fine-looking woman, I’ll say that. Just a pearl. That’s what she was. A pearl. A pearl among swine. Though I don’t know how any man could stand the stink of her. Oh, I saw her myself enough times. She’d wait for Boland some days, just out past the yards. They us
ed to tease him something awful about it.” He lowered his eyes, thinking over some detail he might not wish to share. “Only times a miner’s wife waits by the yards is on pay-day, before her fella can sneak over to Ryan’s. Or when there’s trouble down below. Somebody hurt or killed. It’s no place for a woman, otherwise.”

  “It sounds as if they were very much in love.”

  He made a face that discounted the heart’s importance. “Hadn’t been married so long. Couple years maybe. He was no end of sweet on her, everybody knew that.” He tried a feeble smirk. “You’d think it’d wear out sooner, that a fella’d just get sick of it.”

  “So they were happy, then, the two of them? As best you know?”

  “That’s not the kind of thing I bother about. I just care if they work, or if they don’t.” He dipped his chin toward his chest a pair of times. “They always said she was strange, though. I remember there were voices raised against Boland marrying her in the first place.”

  “Strange in what way?”

  He wrinkled the corner of his mouth in distaste. “Oh, some Irish way. They get all sorts of things into their heads. I don’t even try to figure them out.” He looked about as if we might be spied upon, then leaned toward me—chair creaking—and lowered his voice. “The truth is they’re goddamned savages. You’ll never civilize a one of them. Not even that high and mighty priest of theirs. They’re worse than animals, and I’m the fella who should know.”

  Mr. Oliver lowered his chest almost to his desk top, bringing his weary face as close to mine as he could. His tone dropped to a whisper. “Listen, Jones. I know there was some trouble between the two of them a time back, between Boland and his wife. Now, I don’t know what it was about, and I don’t want to know. I don’t care a damn. None of my damned business. But Danny Boland went wild for a bit. Didn’t come to work regular. When he did show up, he wasn’t worth a peck of mule shit. I should’ve let him go, but Old Man Donnelly wouldn’t have it. If Mr. Heckscher’d found out, it would’ve been me out in the cold.”