A Passionate Girl (37 page)

That night, as darkness fell, I slipped from my room and descended a back stairs to the alley behind the hotel. I found Pickens and Mike Hanrahan waiting in a chaise. We went briskly through the twilight to the docks. As we arrived, we saw the Fenians in column formation heading toward the water. There, to the shouted orders of Dan McCaffrey, they performed various evolutions and drills. Beside me, I heard Pickens mutter, “By God, they're real soldiers.”

Dan dismissed them with a stentorian bellow. They split into groups of fifty and vanished into the side streets to the north. We followed them at a discreet distance for two miles and reached the suburb of Buffalo known as Black Rock. There were more docks along the swift-flowing Niagara. Puffing quietly at one wharf were two steam tugs. Behind them were four long, narrow Erie Canal boats. The men formed in ranks once more, and John O'Neil stood on a box to give them a brief talk.

“We will soon be in enemy territory. We must remember that it is peopled largely by our friends, and by people whom we hope to make our friends. The man who steals from a civilian or abuses a woman will be shot on the spot. Our only enemies are men wearing the uniform of the tyrant who has despoiled our homeland.”

Dan McCaffrey now took charge. He called out a half dozen companies by their captain's names—“Hennessy of the 17th, Murphy of the 13th”—and they moved swiftly down the wharf to the lead canal boats. Other companies were ordered to unload seven or eight wagons of ammunition and carry it aboard one of the canal boats. The tug at the head of the wharf, towing the canal boat with the picked troops, moved into the darkness. It took an hour for the working parties to load the other canal boats. Dan came over to our carriage as the task neared completion. “We're takin' an extra thousand rifles with us,” he said to Mike Hanrahan. “It'll make it easier for the reinforcements to reach us tomorrow.”

“You expect more than a thousand tomorrow, do you not?” Mike asked.

Dan nodded. “Send over the ones who seem most rested. They should all have a day's rest after ridin' those trains.”

I sprang from the cab and flung my arms around him. “All will be well,” I said. “We'll celebrate in Toronto.”

“Sure,” he said, and kissed me perfunctorily.

“Good luck, soldier,” Mike called.

The tug was getting up steam as Dan walked slowly down the wharf. He stepped aboard the last canal boat as they untied it from the piling. I thought he raised his arm in farewell. Then he was swallowed by the darkness on the river.
God be on the road with you,
I prayed.

We waited there beside the black rushing river for another two hours. There was not a single sound of war from the Canadian shore, not a gunshot or a battle cry. We thought it was strange. There was supposed to be a detachment of Canadian volunteers on guard in the village of Fort Erie. At last the tugs chugged out of the night. We rushed down the wharf to greet them. The captains and deckhands were all Irish, with thick Connemara brogues. They told us Fort Erie was ours. The Canadian volunteers had been totally surprised and surrendered without a shot.

“Sure there wasn't a peep from a soul,” one captain told us. “Except some lads fishin'. They sprang from the bank like the very devil was after them and leaped into their wagons. We could hear them yellin' and drummin' on their wagon boxes goin' up the road. No doubt they're arousin' the countryside.”

“That's not good news,” Mike growled. “We're depending on getting enough horses to mount half the men.”

“I doubt they'll get it now. 'Twon't be a farmer that hasn't got his best horses into the woods before morning.”

“The railyard. Did they alarm them, too?”

“I don't know,” said the tug captain, lighting his pipe. “The whole thing's daft, if you want my opinion. When we come down from the harbor this evenin', the word was out that the Englishman, the new captain of the
Michigan
, and that Federal general was tryin' to hire tugs to close the river. What do we do then?”

“What new captain of what
Michigan
?” Mike asked.

“The revenue cutter
Michigan
. Come down from Erie last night. They took the captain off her last week. A good Irish-American named Malone. Put an Englishman in command. Captain Bryson. Should hear the bugger talk. Straight from St. James, so help me.”

We rode back to the hotel in a state of shock. “An Englishman,” I said. “Why didn't someone tell us?”

“The Buffalonians think all can be managed by local politics. They don't know the stakes,” Mike said.

“I'll put it in my dispatch,” said Pickens. “It may help if they print it.”

There was no sleep that night. The next morning, feeling more dead than alive, I opened the press office and released to the newspapers the proclamation to the Canadian people. It was written by William Roberts in his most oratorical style. The main points of our policy were clear enough within the soaring rhetoric. We tried to assure the Canadians that we were not trying to steal their country. “Our work for Ireland accomplished, we leave to your own free ballots to determine your natural and political standing.” But we intimated strongly that we were anxious to “make these limitless colonies spring from the foot of a foreign throne, independent and as proud as New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois.”

The heart of the proclamation and the heart of our hopes was the appeal to the Irish within Canada.

The thought that those noble words, all that passion and hope, might be wasted made me heartsick. It could not happen! By pure force, I willed myself to believe in victory. That made it no easier to endure the press office, the stupid questions of smirking reporters like Colby.

“How many leprechauns did you bring with you?”

“What will the boyos do for whiskey over there?

“When was the last time the Irish won a battle—the year 1200?”

“Go to hell, the lot of you,” I said, and left them there drinking our whiskey. I rushed to my room, put on an old worn traveling dress, and took a hack to Black Rock. There I found Red Mike Hanrahan, Patrick O'Day, and other Buffalo Fenians before the wharf from which the army had departed the night before. It was, I saw by daylight, the dock for a steam ferry, which ran from the village of Black Rock to the village of Fort Erie, directly opposite it on the Canadian shore. The ferry was at the dock as I joined Mike. Just offshore, at anchor, was another vessel, flying the American flag. It was a small, squat craft with a single smokestack and sidewheels. Ugly black cannon peered from gunports on the side. It was close enough to read its name on the bow: U.S.S.
Michigan
.

All but knowing the worst before I asked the question, I rushed to Mike. “Have they cut us off?”

“From here,” he said grimly. “But we have hopes of getting something across from other points. They can't cover the whole river with that pipsqueak boat. There's a lower ferry where people cross by rowboat. We've sent over a good hundred men that way.”

“When you need two thousand. Where are our tugs?”

He pointed down the river. “At Pratt's Wharf. Watch now. We'll see what our lime-juicer captain does.”

Following his finger; I saw the tugs, with wisps of steam coming from their stacks, beside this wharf, a half mile down the river. The four canal boats were beside them. Suddenly one of the tugs swung into the river and men appeared on the lead canal boat to heave a fat tow-line to seamen on the stern of the tug. Two canal boats left the dock and followed the tug toward the Canadian side.

A tremendous shriek burst from the
Michigan
's stack. Seamen raced along its decks to haul in the anchor. The Fenian tug ignored the warning and continued to plow straight for the opposite shore. “Are there men aboard them?” I asked.

“No. Just ammunition and food. The farmers have stripped the countryside of their cattle for miles around,” Mike said.

“Where are the reinforcements?”

“In the fields behind the village,” Mike said, gesturing to the houses of Black Rock.

Premonitions of disaster began to grow strong in me again. “Has Margaret O'Neil gone over there yet?”

“No. John sent word forbidding it. But there's two doctors going on this ferry.”

“I'm going with them,” I said.

“Why, for God's sake?”

“If they're going to die over there, I want to die with them. With Dan.”

“Jesus God.” Mike turned away from me and walked ten steps and back again. “Do you want to break my heart entirely?” he said, wiping his eyes.

The
Michigan
's anchor was up. Its sidewheels thrashed the river furiously as it headed downstream after the Fenian tug and her two barges. It was clear that the tug would be more than halfway over before the
Michigan
got close to her. Bells clanged aboard the revenue cutter, and her forward progress came to an abrupt halt. The captain had changed his mind.

“There's some tricky shoals on that side of the river,” Mike said. “He doesn't have a pilot on board. Couldn't hire one in the whole damned harbor. The Buffalonians have done what they could to help us. The ferry captain, for instance. Not a drop of Irish blood in him, but he said he'll take as many of us over without guns as he can manage with them looking down his throat. Says he wants to teach the Canadians a lesson in patriotism.”

The
Michigan
drifted with the swift current for a few minutes as the captain thought things over. Then he gave two hoots of his whistle and headed up the river toward Buffalo. In a moment we saw why. Forging toward him were three tugs, each flying the American flag. In a few minutes they clustered around the
Michigan
in the center of the river, and we could see sailors from the cutter boarding the tugs. Next, gleaming brass cannon were set up on the bow of each tug. In ten minutes the tugs were ready to operate as men-of-war. The U.S. government now had a flotilla to patrol the river.

The steam ferry at the dock gave a warning hoot. Blind fatality consumed me. I ran for it. I had sent Dan, I had sent them all, into this monstrous trap. I would fight and die beside them. Behind me I heard Mike cry, “Bess—don't.” I stepped aboard the ferry as it left the dock.

In the cabin I found four or five reporters and two serious-looking men carrying black bags. “You must be the doctors,” I said, and introduced myself to them. The older of the two, a tall, dignified man with a short black beard, was Edward Donnelly. The shorter man, who had dark red hair and a rakish, reckless smile, was Thomas Gallaher.

“I hope I might be of some help as a nurse,” I said.

“A girl as pretty as you? said Dr. Gallaher. “I'll be sawing off the wrong leg half the time.”

“We may need all the help we can find,” said Dr. Donnelly, who I saw was as solemn as Dr. Gallaher was wild.

“My fellow sawbones here was in the war. The heroes in his regiment let him get captured, and he did a tour in Richmond's Libby Prison,” Dr. Gallaher said. “I was too busy making money in Brooklyn. I didn't have that much enthusiasm for sewing up abolitionists, anyway.”

“What attracted you to the Fenians?” I asked. “It can't be making money.”

“Pure impulse. I went to headquarters and volunteered when I heard about the invasion. Every man must do something idealistic at least once in his life. It's good for the digestion. My father starved to death in the famine of '47, but that has nothing to do with why I'm here.”

“Of course,” I said.

“Hungering for revenge is bad for the digestion. Taking it when it comes your way is best, I assure you.”

He began discoursing on his philosophy of life. He did not believe in God, Jesus, the Virgin, or the Blessed Trinity. He was a man of science. He had his own blessed trinity—pain, pleasure, and digestion. It was necessary for a thinking man to maintain a proper balance between pain and pleasure and do nothing that might disturb his digestion. Once that was disturbed, he became morbid and lost his ability to balance pain and pleasure in nice proportion.

“At least the weather is in our favor,” Dr. Donnelly said, looking out at the sunny river. “This reminds me of the day before Antietam.”

“Wasn't that the bloodiest battle of the war?” I asked.

“Oh, some say so,” Dr. Gallaher said. “There were more killed at Gettysburg but more engaged. More wounded at Chickamauga and fewer killed. It's the sort of thing people love to argue about. The world's mad, don't you know that?”

“I'm beginning to think so,” I said.

“It's got to be. Here I am, sailing into the cannon's mouth, talking to a pretty woman about the statistics of death, on my way to saw off mangled legs and arms, which she's volunteered to dispose—”

“Please,” I said, and bolted away from him, out on the open deck. I was trembling and half sick at the images and thoughts he had thrust in my face. Dr. Gallaher followed me.

“Never been a nurse before, have you?”

I shook my head.

“There's someone over there you love.”

I nodded.

“Damnation. I always meet a girl like you five minutes after she's gone head and heels in love with someone else.”

“Get on with you,” I said. “You're just trying to make me feel better.”

“And what's wrong with that? Isn't it a doctor's job?”

I gazed out at the Canadian shore, which was fast approaching. It looked utterly peaceful. Well-tilled fields and white farmhouses and groves of trees filled the landscape west of the village of Fort Erie. The village consisted of about a hundred frame houses, most of them facing the river on the west side of the road that paralleled the shore. A half dozen streets ran down at right angles to the main street. Behind the village rose a clay bluff about forty feet in height with a fine brick house on it. On the north side of the village, a railway embankment extended along the river for about a half mile. Railyards and a round house lay nearby. At the water's edge was a dock, where a huge ferry, capable of carrying twenty railroad cars at a time, was moored.

“We were supposed to have the use of that,” said Dr. Donnelly, joining us at the rail and pointing to the railroad ferry. “It could have put the whole army over in two trips. But they tied it up and shut down the boilers yesterday at sundown. Someone over there knew something.”

I began to wonder if we had been teased into a trap, like so many mice. What better way to ruin the Fenians than to lure a detachment of them to Canada, slaughter them, and then laugh the rest of them out of existence?

The ferry thumped against the wharf, and we debarked. The first man I saw was my young red-headed friend, Captain Hennessy. He was in command of a detachment of men guarding the riverfront. “General” O'Neil, as Hennessy called him, and the rest of the army were at a farm west of the village. “When are the rest of the lads coming over?” he asked.

“Soon,” I said, and left them hastily before they could ask more questions.

Twenty minutes of hard walking carried us to the farm, which was owned by a justice of the peace named Newbigging. The men were camped in the fields around the neat white house. Inside we found Dan and John O'Neil and the colonels of the other regiments studying maps spread on the dining room table.

Dan was aghast at the sight of me. “What in hell are you doin' here?” he growled.